There are many ways to investigate mythology, and when I heard that the History Channel planned to look for the “truth” behind myths and legends, I had some hope that they might try exploring the actual way stories grow and change over time, tracing them back to their origins. Unfortunately, it’s cheaper and easier to take stories at face value and assume that the psychological purposes for which they are used are synonymous with the reason they sprang into being. True Monsters, airing after Ancient Aliens on Friday nights, takes the latter approach, and doesn’t even do it well. It’s a sloppy, superficial show that plays like a bunch of old white men (nearly everyone on the show is middle aged, white, and male) bullshitting their way through a pop quiz they aren’t prepared for.
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The title of tonight’s episode of Ancient Aliens is “Forbidden Zones,” and I must confess that it gave me a twinge of nostalgia, which is a nice change of pace from the usual feelings Ancient Aliens induces. In the early 1990s, when I was young, the Discovery Channel imported a German documentary series called Terra X (German run: 1982-2007), modeled on In Search of…, and dubbed the episodes into English. It was the very first series on ancient mysteries and occult secrets that I had ever watched, and I can recall the dubbed title sequence almost verbatim: “Sift through the ruins of the past, and the theories of the present. Enter forbidden zones. Investigate history’s enduring puzzles next… on Terra X.” (Don’t quote me on it; it’s been 25 years, and I may have a few words wrong.) Sometime in the mid-1990s, Discovery dropped the opening credits and the famous voice over artist who had narrated the show (Hal Douglas, who died last year, and who had become the promo announcer for the rival History Channel around the time Discovery dropped him), and episodes roughly dubbed with German voice artists moved to earlier time slots and then vanished entirely.
Graham Hancock appeared on the Mysterious Universe podcast today (S14E15, October 9, 2015) to discuss his new book Magicians of the Gods, but in so doing he spent far more time on a subject apparently much more dear to him: himself. Hancock is feeling sorry that his wildly profitable books have only earned him millions of dollars, the opportunity to travel the world, and a gigantic mansion because “academics” just don’t like him. “We all want to be liked,” Hancock said in explaining why he is so deeply hurt by attacks on his work.
It amazes me that every time there is a sensational “discovery” of giants, the trail back to the original sources quickly runs into a wall. Today Ancient Origins published a piece claiming that a set of skeletons measuring nearly eight feet tall were found 70 miles from Cuenca, Ecuador by a British anthropologist named Russell Dement. Their source is an article from Monday by Liam Higgins in the Cuenca High Life magazine, an expatriate publication aimed primarily at British retirees who have made Cuenca their home. That article added the detail that Dement was working with Berlin’s Freie Universität to study the remains. Naturally, attempts to check this information ran into a wall. I can find no record of Russell Dement anywhere outside the two articles linked, and Freie Universität has no publicly available information about Dement or the supposed Shuar settlement near Cuenca where the giants were unearthed, despite Dement’s claims that the university is funding his research.
Myths of the Runestone / David M. Kruger
University of Minnesota Press | 2015 | 224 pages | $36.99 paperback / $130.99 cloth Since the 1830s, scholars have accepted that the Norse were likely the first Europeans to have reached North America, around 1000 CE, and after the discovery of a Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Canada, this conclusion was all but certain. This fact has appeared in American textbooks since the mid-1800s, and yet this hasn’t been good enough for generations who sought a grander role for America’s Nordic explorers. In his new book Myths of the Rune Stone: Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), scholar of religion David M. Krueger explores why so many have become so devoted to the Kensington Rune Stone (KRS), an alleged record of a Norse expedition to Minnesota in 1362, which, if genuine, would change very little about our understanding of the tides of history. Tuesday Round Up: Occult Senate Candidate, Catholic Rune Stone Supporters, and an "Alien" Idol10/6/2015 I have a few odds and ends to discuss today beginning with the weird story that a libertarian senate candidate in Florida is a follower of the Thelema religion of Aleister Crowley and sacrificed a goat and drank its blood. The 32-year-old lawyer legally changed his name to Augustus Sol Invictus, Latin for “the majestic unconquered sun,” and claims to be a worshipper of the “wild god of the wilderness.” Thelema is a neo-pagan religion based on early twentieth century occult understandings of ancient Egyptian religion. Its founding myth involves Crowley’s alleged communication with a spirit entity in the Great Pyramid, an event ancient astronaut theorists later claimed as an alien visitation.
I’ve mentioned before that a website called Ancient Code is a crappy, buggy, ad-laden load of clickbait written by an author with limited command of English, but it’s also a prominent source of frequently updated ancient astronaut claims. On Friday, the site published an article on a topic I wasn’t familiar with, despite it being 15 years old. The recycled clickbait summarizes a claim that’s apparently been cycling through the fringe community since late spring, and in so doing the author manages to mangle the original material out of sheer ignorance, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. But I get ahead of myself.
Andrew Collins Offers Passive-Aggressive Praise of Graham Hancock, Self-Described Martyr to Truth10/4/2015 Graham Hancock’s Magicians of the Gods reached number 3 on the Sunday Times nonfiction bestseller list (it’s currently number 8), making it the most widely distributed fringe archaeology book in more than a decade in Great Britain, though one that strangely has failed to receive many reviews from people not directly acquainted with Graham Hancock. The exceptions are my review (which is currently the top Google match for a search for “Magicians of the Gods review”) and Kirkus Reviews, which called the book “risible” and “shameless.” However, if you look at the book’s press materials, Coronet (the publisher) has excerpted one word from Kirkus to market the book: “Ingenious,” taken from a passage that compares Hancock to L. Ron Hubbard before stating “Hancock’s tale is clunky but ingenious” in its use of “ersatz” discovery in “a mashup of Ignatius Donnelly and Dan Brown.” Kirkus and I are in almost complete agreement, except that their reviewer found the book’s prose more entertaining at a mechanical level than I did.
Star Wars is undoubtedly an inspiration for Ancient Aliens, which frequently uses the movies as an aesthetic touchstone for the graphics they design to depict aliens, so why not actually do an episode on aliens fighting star wars and relate it to ancient myth, just like the movie? That’s the premise of S08E09 “Alien Wars,” though the end result is mostly paranoia and conspiracy rather than grand mythic narrative.
Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck Want You to Give Them $42,000 to Revise "Wonders in the Sky"10/2/2015
When I launched my campaign to raise money to help me afford to keep my website running, I received a great deal of pushback, largely from fringe believers, who found it déclassé to speak of money or who took the capitalist line that any project that isn’t profitable is necessarily worthless. Since then, Scott Roberts and John Ward have launched a crowdfunding campaign asking for $50,000 to fund their fringe history business startup, and now the latest entry in the field is the team of Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck, who launched an IndieGoGo campaign looking for $42,000 to publish 500 copies of a revised deluxe edition of Wonders in the Sky (2009), their demonstrably false and generally quite unreliable anthology of badly translated and frequently fictitious documents recording premodern UFO sightings.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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