Blog Archives

Review of Unsealed: Alien Files "Aliens and Civilizations"

11/11/2013

Because I’m busy today, I prepared a blog post ahead of time. I’m going to review another episode of Destination America’s Unsealed: Alien Files, this time on “Aliens and Civilizations.” I can hardly wait to see what this stock footage spectacular has to say about ancient buildings!

(Once again, full disclosure: Destination America once interviewed me for a position hosting an America Unearthed-style program, but after determining that I wasn’t willing to claim aliens were responsible for Native American artifacts and constructions, the project was discontinued for being too similar to America Unearthed.)

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Review of Unsealed: Alien Files "Aliens and the Vatican"

11/10/2013

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Unsealed: Alien Files is a syndicated television show that, so far as I can tell, never aired in my local market during its first run last year. Earlier this year, Destination America purchased the rights to the show and now broadcasts its UFO and ancient astronaut conspiracies amidst its other programs aimed primarily at men 25-54. I’ve never seen the show, so I thought I’d given an episode a try to see this program’s take on the ancient astronaut idea.

(Full disclosure: Destination America once interviewed me for a position hosting an America Unearthed-style program, but after determining that I wasn’t willing to claim aliens were responsible for Native American artifacts and constructions, the project was discontinued for being too similar to America Unearthed.)

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Review of Ancient Aliens S06E07 "Emperors, Kings and Pharaohs"

11/9/2013

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In this episode, Ancient Aliens crosses over into the Holy Bloodline of Jesus territory by looking at the way royal and imperial claims of descent from a god (read: alien) produce a divine right to rule. Since Laurence Gardner was both a dedicated advocate of the secret Holy Bloodline of Jesus that he thought led to all European rulers sharing genes with the children of Christ and Mary Magdalene and was also an ancient astronaut theorist who thought Jesus was the fruit of an extraterrestrial lineage, I imagine that makes him the spiritual godfather of S06E07 “Emperors, Kings and Pharaohs.”

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Alan Butler: Moon Built by Time-Traveling Humans, Washington Monument Signals Mithras Worship

11/8/2013

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I thought about holding this for Sunday, but I think it is important to get a debunking of this nonsense into the public record. Alan Butler, that faithful friend of Scott Wolter who once tried to sue me for reviewing one his books, has taken on a new persona. According to his Facebook page, he is now “Alan Butler, Time Messenger,” and he aims to tell us that time travelers built the moon and invented the conspiracy guarded by the Freemasons.

Butler and Scott Wolter, with whom he is working on the Freemason part of his new ideas, assert that the Washington Monument was deliberately positioned in downtown D.C. by Freemasons to produce two remarkable effects. First, it is designed to have its shadow reach the U.S. Capitol on September 17—Constitution Day—to celebrate the Constitution. It is also designed to repeat the feat on March 25, to celebrate Mithras and Attis, the secret gods of their hidden star-goddess cult.

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Doug Woodward Says I Am Wrong Because Nephilim Infected Our Y Chromosomes with Evil Angel DNA

11/8/2013

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A self-proclaimed member of the “Christian community,” Doug Woodward, author of a book on the coming threat of the Antichrist to America, has challenged my recent discussion of the Nephilim and the ancient astronaut theory, particularly as presented by L.A. Marzulli. Before reading Wooward’s discussion, it’s probably a good idea to review my original blog post, which examined Marzulli’s upset and outrage at Ancient Aliens’ recent episode arguing that Satan was a cosmic defender of humanity against nefarious aliens masquerading as Yahweh.

The crux of Woodward’s claim is that I am insufficiently deferential to biblical infallibility, which is not a critique so much as a philosophy. Woodward maintains that the Nephilim are real angel-human hybrids who continue to pose a threat to humanity today. On the other hand, he views me as “pseudo-sophisticated” and says I am employing distortions and falsehoods to deny these creatures’ existence. He also makes a very serious legal claim that I committed “defamation” in my remarks about Marzulli by suggesting that his views were not intellectually sound.

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The Politics of Alternative History

11/7/2013

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A frequent complaint I’ve received over the past nine months or so is that it is inappropriate of me to mix into my discussion of ancient astronauts and alternative history anything smacking of either politics or contemporary implications for the claims alternative history proponents make. On one hand, I understand the desire to isolate historical studies from modern political controversies, but on the other hand I find it impossible to divorce the two since alternative history is born of politics and speaks to political discontent. I believe that restricting discussion to purely mechanical issues of what facts alternative historians faked, or which quotations they got wrong, or how ancient sites could really have been built impoverishes our understanding of the underlying meanings and motives behind fabricated history.

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Searching for the Winged Iron Chariot in the Mahabharata

11/6/2013

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I have a fun one for you today. You probably saw Sen. Rand Paul’s claim that “haters” were conspiring to expose plagiarism in his work, and he vowed to take corrective action by requiring his staff to provide better footnotes and citations in material they provide for work published in his name. In the wake of Sen. Paul’s plagiarism scandal, I was inspired to go back to finally investigate a case of century-long copying that has baffled me until this week, when I finally stumbled across the original source.

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Travel Channel Has Fox News Pundit and Ancient Astronaut Theorist Investigate JFK Conspiracies

11/5/2013

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In the news today, the internet is salivating over a mysterious box containing drawings of extraterrestrials as ancient mythological figures. The drawings by Daniel Christiansen date from the 1930s to the 1980s and are obviously influenced by pulp science fiction illustrations. Christiansen illustrates material related to Chariots of the Gods and The Spaceship of Ezekiel and yet somehow we are meant to see this as independent confirmation of ancient astronauts, according to internet posters, because Christiansen claimed to have encountered an alien and… believed really hard in ancient astronauts? Frankly, I can’t fathom why the art, made largely after Chariots (1968), almost entirely after the Bible-UFO movement of the 1950s, and absolutely after “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) should be evidence of anything.

But let’s talk instead about the latest cable television attack on the concept of credibility.

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New Book Claims Celtic Settlements Followed Solar Paths

11/4/2013

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Although I have not yet read Graham Robb’s new book The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts, which was published in the U.K. as The Ancient Paths, the book’s major claims straddle the border of alternative history and deserve a mention, even if it might take me a while before I get to reading the book. The information below comes from a number of reviews of the books published recently.

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Sunday Grab-Bag: H2 Racism and the Sexual Politics of Horror Movies

11/3/2013

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I have two completely unrelated thoughts for today.

Racism and America Unearthed
It’s frankly bizarre that nearly a year after the first America Unearthed broadcasts debuted on the H2 channel, it is still the case that whenever episodes of the show are rerun anywhere on the face of the earth, my reviews of those episodes light up with new comments from new viewers searching for information on the show. It happened again last night, and if I may offer some unsolicited advice to H2: You are missing a tremendous opportunity to sell merchandise to the credulous by having such a piss-poor web presence that searches for America Unearthed lead people directly to me rather than you.

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