Blog Archives

Scott Wolter: Masonic Expert Says "Sinclair Journals" Not Consistent with the Latin and English of Their Alleged Time Period

11/30/2018

Having satisfied myself that Diana Muir’s so-called “Sinclair Journals” are unlikely to be genuine medieval records of minor noble Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney’s secret voyages to America in the late 1300s on behalf of the defunct Knights Templar, I have largely stayed away from reading onetime History Channel and H2 TV personality Scott Wolter’s continuing discussion of his role in attempting to prove the texts authentic in the comments section of his blog. However, since he did choose to address last week one of the key questions that I raised in doubting the authenticity of the texts, I thought it worthwhile to highlight Wolter’s response to the question of whether any expert in medieval Latin or Middle English had examined the alleged pages of the journal to offer thoughts on whether the text is in fact accurate for the late fourteenth century date of its alleged composition. Here is what he said:

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Peruvian Congressman Brings Ufologist and Fringe Scientists to Congress to Promote Nazca "Alien" Mummies

11/29/2018

25 Comments

Do you remember the story about the supposed “alien” mummies in Peru that ate up so much air time over at Gaia TV last year? The ones that were chalk-white and had weird, long-fingered hands? Well, it turns out that the three-fingered corpses, which scientific investigation determined to be crudely manipulated human bodies altered to appear extraterrestrial, aren’t done causing trouble. According to Spanish-language media accounts, Mexican ufologist Jaime Maussen traveled to Peru to make a case at the country’s federal legislature on November 19 that the Peruvian government both protect the mummies and investigate their “mysterious” origins. A report by Victor Roman in N+1 this past week gives the following account:

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Marvel's Apocalypse and the Fascination with Ancient Egypt's Dark Side

11/28/2018

31 Comments

The other day, archaeologist David S. Anderson posted an article on Adventures in Poor Taste discussing the Marvel Comics villain Apocalypse and why he is associated with ancient Egypt. In the piece, Anderson traces back fascination and fear of all things Egyptian to the 1922 opening of the tomb of Tutankhamen and the resulting media frenzy surrounding both the tomb opening and the subsequent allegations that a pharaonic “curse” had felled several of the participants in the excavation. I know Anderson slightly from Twitter, so I hope he will forgive me if I dissent a bit from his analysis.

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David Childress: Aliens Living in the Hollow Moon Created Bigfoot to Serve as Missing Link Between Humans and Apes

11/27/2018

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I had to laugh when I read Inverse magazine’s admission that in a 21-minute interview with Ancient Aliens star David Childress, Childress spoke for 21 straight minutes, barely letting the interviewer get a word in edgewise and making it impossible, as Inverse writer Jake Kleinman said, to create a “coherent” story from his verbal ramblings. Clearly, ancient mysteries are the type of pet topic that allows Childress to monologue in unbroken streams, regardless of whether his listeners are interested, and one might speculate as to the reasons for that, but I would never offer an armchair diagnosis. Instead, I think it serves as a fair warning to future interviewers to be less open-ended in questioning him. In the interview, Childress made a number of statements that lacked the usual qualifiers that the producers of Ancient Aliens routinely force their talking heads to include to provide legal and ethical fig leaves.

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Review of "The Curse of Oak Island" by Randall Sullivan

11/24/2018

89 Comments

Sometime during the course of the twentieth century, Canada’s Oak Island, located off the coast of Nova Scotia, became the locus of an industry of conspiracy theorists, treasure-hunters, and historical speculators who sought to probe its supposed mysteries in the name of a bewildering array of pretended adventurers to the island. These have included pirates, Inca, Romans, Vikings, Israelites, and of course Knights Templar. For more than two centuries men have dug holes in the ground trying to prove that Oak Island conceals some fabulous treasure of myriad faces, everything from Spanish gold to Shakespeare’s lost plays to the Ark of the Covenant. All of these adventurers have had one thing in common: failure. The only real treasure ever recovered from Oak Island was the advertising revenue generated by the History Channel series The Curse of Oak Island (2014-present), which is looking to pad its profits with the volume under consideration here, from the pen of journalist Randall Sullivan, formerly OWN-TV’s “Miracle Detective,” and recently a Curse of Oak Island guest who promoted a mega-conspiracy (originated by David Childress, synthesizing earlier claims), that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays and that the proof is hidden on Oak Island along with the Jewish Temple treasure and the secrets of alchemy.

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David Wilcock Tries to Link Q-Anon Conspiracy, Space Aliens, and "Hamlet's Mill" While Promoting New Documentary

11/21/2018

71 Comments

With the Thanksgiving holiday upon us, my plan is to take off Thursday and Friday for the holiday. I will return this weekend with a new blog post. Depending on how fast I read, it may be my review of the new Curse of Oak Island tie-in book by Randall Sullivan, but to be entirely honest, I twice fell asleep reading it, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it through. The only thing duller than watching old men dig pointless holes is reading about old men digging pointless holes!

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Erich von Däniken Says He Is "Not Happy" with Some "Ancient Aliens" Claims

11/20/2018

21 Comments

Today you are getting a shorter blog post since I ran out of writing time yesterday when my scheduled eye doctor appointment ran ridiculously far behind schedule, and I spent three hours there only to be told that my prescription hadn’t changed. It was my first time seeing this doctor, and I was surprised to find that he was a believer in the ancient astronaut theory and that he was delighted to learn that I was familiar with Mu and had appeared in a documentary with Erich von Däniken.

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Newspaper Roundup: The "Daily Mail" Seeks Atlantis in Spain, While the "Boston Globe" Hunts the Westford Knight

11/17/2018

51 Comments

On the edges of history, fanciful stories never really die. They pass into pop culture folklore, endlessly recycled from one article to the next. Why? That’s a great question. As the recent Chapman University survey showed, one reason is that anywhere from a plurality to a majority of Americans believe in false history like Atlantis, ancient astronauts, and their ilk. The other reason is that these stories become the equivalent of the “bus-plunge” story—a familiar narrative that can be used reliably to fill time and space with a minimum of effort. The “bus-plunge” story is named for a distressingly frequent feature in newspapers of the twentieth century, which would fill blank spaces on their pages with small stories about buses plunging off of cliffs and bridges, usually in South America and India. As morbid as it sounds, these events happened (and continue to happen) with such frequency that editors could guarantee that they will always have one on hand to fill in any blank spaces, changing only the dateline and the number of victims. Atlantis, aliens, etc. are similarly easy features that require little effort.

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Erich von Däniken Promotes New Swiss-Based Ancient Astronaut Research Group

11/16/2018

24 Comments

By now, most of you have probably heard about the recent paper published in Science identifying a circular depression under the Greenland ice sheet as a crater, likely from a cosmic impact. It was the subject of a lengthy profile on the Science website. Supporters of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis have seized upon this as evidence of the impact of a comet at the start of the Younger Dryas and the impetus for the massive climate change seen at that time. Critics note that the crater has not been securely dated and cannot be definitively tied to the Younger Dryas. They also suggest that it is too small to have been the remains of a climate-changing impact, to which supporters counter that it may be one of many craters from a multi-impact event. No other craters of the right age have been associated with the event.

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Acting Attorney General's Bigfoot and Time Travel Claims; Plus: Kentucky's Governor Blames Zombie TV for Mass Shootings

11/15/2018

48 Comments

Despite the fact that the History Channel and I don’t have the best of relationships, it seems that their publishing partners at the Atlantic Monthly Press didn’t get the message. The publisher just sent me an advance copy of the History-branded The Curse of Oak Island tie-in book by journalist Randall Sullivan, due out just in time for Christmas. I only received the book Tuesday night, so I haven’t had time to read much, but I have to say that the introduction and opening chapter left me baffled. I suppose this must be a book for super-fans of Curse, since my general but not particularly deep knowledge of the “mystery” of Oak Island was not enough to make sense of the barrage of names and dates, or the convoluted history thrust upon me with little authorial guidance.

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<<Previous

Scott Wolter: Masonic Expert Says "Sinclair Journals" Not Consistent with the Latin and English of Their Alleged Time Period

Peruvian Congressman Brings Ufologist and Fringe Scientists to Congress to Promote Nazca "Alien" Mummies

Marvel's Apocalypse and the Fascination with Ancient Egypt's Dark Side

David Childress: Aliens Living in the Hollow Moon Created Bigfoot to Serve as Missing Link Between Humans and Apes

Review of "The Curse of Oak Island" by Randall Sullivan

David Wilcock Tries to Link Q-Anon Conspiracy, Space Aliens, and "Hamlet's Mill" While Promoting New Documentary

Erich von Däniken Says He Is "Not Happy" with Some "Ancient Aliens" Claims

Newspaper Roundup: The "Daily Mail" Seeks Atlantis in Spain, While the "Boston Globe" Hunts the Westford Knight

Erich von Däniken Promotes New Swiss-Based Ancient Astronaut Research Group

Acting Attorney General's Bigfoot and Time Travel Claims; Plus: Kentucky's Governor Blames Zombie TV for Mass Shootings

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