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Tom DeLonge Appears on Joe Rogan's Podcast to Talk UFO Truth, But Instead Admits His "Secret" Knowledge Comes from Old Paperback UFO Books

10/31/2017

Last Thursday musician and UFO enthusiast Tom DeLonge appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience in order to promote To the Stars, Inc., his for-profit technology and entertainment company currently soliciting investment from the public to pay back the company’s massive financial obligations to DeLonge and to fund its explorations into science fiction and fringe science. Basically, it amounted to DeLonge telling Rogan that he knows all sorts of cool stuff but won’t tell anyone until he gets paid.

35 Comments

Micah Hanks Bungles Search for Pre-Columbian Elephants, Accidentally Leads Me to Fascinating Mexican Investigation of a "Giant's" Bones

10/28/2017

4 Comments

This week offers us a second round of Micah Hanks’s efforts to imitate what I do in investigating ancient mysteries. Earlier this week we saw him try and fail to explore the “telescopes” of the ancient world, and now we can watch him try to examine whether there were elephants in pre-Columbian America. If the latter claim sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a very old one, born hundreds of years ago, popularized in the Victorian period, and copied by innumerable fringe historians, creationists, and Mormon apologists ever since. His evidence, as you would expect, is somewhat disappointing. However, in his lazy reliance on secondary material, he accidentally uncovered a fascinating case study in how science is distorted by the media and new proof that “giants” are often misidentified megafauna fossils. Of course Hanks completely missed the real story in his simplistic pursuit of typical fringe material.

4 Comments

David Wilcock Blames Aliens, Freemasons, and the Illuminati for Las Vegas Shooting

10/27/2017

42 Comments

Yesterday the PR flak for a small press publisher asked me to criticize one of their new books, a conspiracy tome alleging that the Gospels are medieval fakes. I’m not going to give them publicity by naming the book or the author, but I was rather taken aback by the invitation to trash a text. I guess that falls into the category of any publicity be good publicity.

42 Comments

Review of the Finale of Expedition Unknown: Hunt for Extraterrestrials

10/26/2017

30 Comments

Last night Josh Gates unveiled the final episode in his four-part effort to find extraterrestrials, and it involved him marking the seventieth anniversary of the Roswell Incident with a visit to the New Mexico site. It also tied together the previous episodes by providing a scientific analysis of the so-called evidence collected and teased in previous episodes but saved for this, the finale. As with previous episodes, it was more talk than action, and like every cable show, it had about 10 minutes of content in an hour-long episode.

30 Comments

Micah Hanks Tries to Write About Ancient Mirrors and Lenses, Botches Job

10/25/2017

20 Comments

Yesterday our old friend Micah Hanks published an article at Ancient Origins in which he attempted to discuss whether ancient people made use of telescopes. He did so without citing any ancient sources to support his claims, nor did he manage to make a strong case for telescopic technology in the ancient world. Instead, he recycled bad sources without understanding their origin and led readers astray.

20 Comments

Review of "Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy at Mayerling and the End of the Habsburgs" by Greg King and Penny Wilson

10/24/2017

20 Comments

On a cold winter’s night at the end of January 1889, the heir to Europe’s most illustrious throne murdered his teenaged mistress, sat for hours with her naked corpse, and then put a bullet through his own head. The shock caused by the death of Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was so great that nearly 130 years later, many still cannot believe that Rudolf would take his own life, despite his repeated and professed desire to do so. Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy at Mayerling and the End of the Habsburgs, the new book by Greg King and Penny Wilson set to be released on November 14, explores Rudolf’s actions at his hunting lodge of Mayerling and reconstructs the end of the young prince’s tragic life. However, the authors ultimately exhume Rudolf’s corpse in a literary reenactment of the infamous Cadaver Synod, in which Pope Stephen VII propped up the rotten bulk of Pope Formosus’s dead body for a parody of a trial. They spin a conspiracy that is logically inconsistent, and driven more by a visceral dislike of Rudolf than a clear-eyed evaluation of facts.

20 Comments

The Predynastic Sphinx: How Gaston Maspero Launched an Article of Fringe Faith

10/21/2017

8 Comments

I usually like to end the week on a high note, but today I can report a bit of a disappointment. Yesterday, I discussed a French text by Assyriologist Francois Lenormant that is the obvious source for most fringe writers’ claims that the Sphinx predates dynastic Egypt and that the Valley Temple is a primeval construction by a wandering tribe of mystics known as the Followers of Horus. Lenormant attributed his information to the eminent Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, in his 1875 book The Ancient History of the Peoples of the East. Taking Lenormant at his word, I believed that Maspero must have made the same claims as Lenormant, presumably with more detail. I was quite disappointed to see that he had only very briefly alluded to the claims in the book Lenormant cited. The bottom line therefore seems to be that Lenormant is the origin point for the specific formulation of the myth that the Shemsu Hor built the Sphinx and the Valley Temple thousands of years before dynastic Egypt.

8 Comments

The Pre-Dynastic Sphinx: Victorian Speculation That Became Fringe Fact

10/20/2017

9 Comments

I came across a fascinating little book put out by the Theosophical Society’s publishing arm in 1913. Entitled The Faith of Ancient Egypt, it surprised me by presenting in précis most of the arguments about precession, astrology, and Egyptian wisdom that we would see come to fruition under R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz (Temple of Man, 1949) and the authors of Hamlet’s Mill, and those influenced by them such as John Anthony West, Graham Hancock, etc. Basically, Golden Dawn member Sidney G. P. Coryn suggested that the Sphinx predated dynastic Egypt, that the precession of the equinoxes governs the shape and symbolism of world religions in each astrological “age,” and that Egypt was possessed of fabulous wisdom and technology that could only have come from a superior civilization.

9 Comments

Josh Gates Walks Back Endorsement of Ancient Astronaut Theory, But Claims Ancient Achievements Cannot Be Explained

10/19/2017

29 Comments

This week’s episode of Expedition Unknown: Hunt for Extraterrestrials was really boring. It involved host Josh Gates listening to a group of Zimbabweans describe a mass UFO sighting that occurred in 1994, followed by a trip to Rendlesham Forest to listen to yet another iteration of the same routine set of mystery-mongering interviews with the UFO profiteers who have made a thirty-year career out of an alleged encounter with a spacecraft that has been debunked over and over again. We saw this a few months ago on Ancient Aliens (not to mention several times before), and the Science Channel, and Destination America, and some online articles, and practically everywhere UFOs are sold. Gates added nothing to the discussion except to give far too much credence to some fairly dubious claims, to the exclusion of reasonable explanations.

29 Comments

The Sphinx as Leo: The Long History of an Astrological Claim

10/18/2017

14 Comments

As almost everyone reading this knows, Robert Bauval, Graham Hancock, Robert Schoch, and their friends have made a career out of claiming that the Great Sphinx of Giza was carved in the time of Atlantis, around 10,500 BCE. This number derives, ultimately, from a combination of a belief in the existence of Plato’s Atlantis prior to 9600 BCE, the dating of the end of the last Ice Age, and, above all, to the idea that the Sphinx’s leonine form was meant to gaze at the constellation Leo on the spring equinox, something which would only have happened during the so-called “Age of Leo,” when the slow drifting of the stars placed Leo in that position from 10,500 BCE to 8,000 BCE.

14 Comments

<<Previous

Tom DeLonge Appears on Joe Rogan's Podcast to Talk UFO Truth, But Instead Admits His "Secret" Knowledge Comes from Old Paperback UFO Books

Micah Hanks Bungles Search for Pre-Columbian Elephants, Accidentally Leads Me to Fascinating Mexican Investigation of a "Giant's" Bones

David Wilcock Blames Aliens, Freemasons, and the Illuminati for Las Vegas Shooting

Review of the Finale of Expedition Unknown: Hunt for Extraterrestrials

Micah Hanks Tries to Write About Ancient Mirrors and Lenses, Botches Job

Review of "Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy at Mayerling and the End of the Habsburgs" by Greg King and Penny Wilson

The Predynastic Sphinx: How Gaston Maspero Launched an Article of Fringe Faith

The Pre-Dynastic Sphinx: Victorian Speculation That Became Fringe Fact

Josh Gates Walks Back Endorsement of Ancient Astronaut Theory, But Claims Ancient Achievements Cannot Be Explained

The Sphinx as Leo: The Long History of an Astrological Claim

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