In advanced of the season 5 premiere of Ancient Aliens, the History channel has released a two minute preview of the first episode, “The Secrets of the Pyramids,” which premieres December 21. In it, Giorgio Tsoukalos and alleged “investigative mythologist” William Henry offer a mind-boggling array of deceptive, fraudulent, and just plain false claims. To save myself time later on, I’ll “pre-critique” these claims now and repeat them again later when I review the entire episode and can place these out-of-context clips in greater context.
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Sonja Brentjes has taken great offense to the post I made back in October about an article she and Taner Edis wrote in Skeptical Inquirer about the shortcomings in the 1001 Inventions traveling exhibit on the Golden Age of Islamic science. After Aaron Adair wrote a thoughtful discussion of the degree to which Arab science was dependent upon the Greeks and Romans that preceded them, Brentjes weighed in last week with additional criticism of me.
In the interest of (finally) putting this issue to rest, I’m going to review Brentjes’s criticism. I will explain the points where she is correct about mistakes I made, and I will explain again where she is misrepresenting what I wrote. Hypocrisy of the Gods: Ancient Aliens Returns 12/21 after Promising the World Would End by Then12/9/2012 Sadly, the carpal tunnel syndrome I’ve been suffering from off and on for years now has flared up again thanks to too much typing, so I’m going to have to try to keep my blog posts on the short side for the next few days while my wrist heals.
The H2 channel has announced the topic for the first episode of Ancient Aliens’ fifth season: “The Secrets of the Pyramids.” It seems like I picked a good time to have translated Al-Maqrizi’s Al-Khitat passages on the pyramids, seeing as they are ancient astronaut pundits’ (inappropriate) source for claims of alien involvement in the pyramids. As we approach December 21, it is increasingly evident that a significant minority believe the world is about to come to an end, thanks to the mistaken interpretations of the Maya calendar and its alleged apocalyptic significance. NASA astrobiologist David Morrison sadly noted that children as young as eleven were regularly writing to him expressing sometimes suicidal thoughts that the world would soon end. “It happens often enough to disturb me … to hear that children are considering ending their lives,” Morrison told ABC News earlier this month.
I’ll be honest: Sometimes there is simply so much pseudoscience that I just can’t keep up with it all. I had no idea, for example, that Brad Steiger was still actively producing pseudoscientific claims about reptilian species, lost civilizations, and other unproven things. I remembered him from Mysteries of Time and Space (1974) but apparently he’s been churning out variations on his 1970s books for the past forty years, leading up to his newest, an anthology called Legacy of the Sky People, which claims Adam and Eve were of extraterrestrial origin, following the speculations of William Le Poer Trench, the British MP who believed impossible things with improbable conviction. Specifically, it's about the Reptilian race of serpent-people most famously promoted by David Icke.
On December 18, the Discovery Channel plans to air a documentary about the alleged zombie apocalypse, and they plan to profile a group of parents that are not only true believers in the coming plague of the risen dead but are training their children to hunt and kill zombies. Elsewhere, a 26-year-old man shot his girlfriend when she refused to believe The Walking Dead was a prophecy of a zombie uprising to come. This makes me indescribably sad. Of course it’s true that Victorian people hunted “vampires,” but Dracula didn’t make them do it; the vampires came first. Zombies, by contrast, are a Hollywood creation, and so-called “zombie culture” is directly responsible for a fictional creation being mistaken for reality.
Rummaging through Hamlet’s Mill to seek out information about the mill itself, I ran into a weird little claim that I had forgotten. The book’s authors, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, endorse the claim of Robert Eisler (1921), citing Arthur Drews (1910) and Charles François Dupuis (1795), that John the Baptist was originally the Oannes of Babylonian myth. This story is a giant mess, and I can only sketch the outline of the problems involved in this silly identification.
Alternative thinkers put great weight on the subject of the precession of the equinoxes, the slow drift of the apparent position of the stars relative to a fixed point on earth caused by the wobble of the earth’s axis. This nearly imperceptible movement—1.4 degrees per century, or, as alternative theorists prefer to state it, 1 degree per 71.6 years—supposedly has great astrological significance for defining the World Age, based on the astrological sign in which the sun rises on the spring equinox. But most alternative thinkers do very little thinking about this.
We are less than three weeks from the so-called Maya Apocalypse, and I for one would like believers to put their money where their mouth is and send me cash. You won't be needing it after Bolon Yokte and his green turkeys come to carry you off in a spaceship, or whatever. So, send it to me. There's a button to your right to make it easy.
Kevin A. Whitesides and John W. Hoopes have a fascinating article in Zeitschrift für Anomalistik (vol. 12, 2012) called "Seventies Dreams and 21st Century Realities: The Emergence of 2012 Mythology," in which they explore how the 1970s alternative culture helped spread a myth with little grounding in fact. Alternative writers are maddeningly illogical in their wild speculation. One odd claim I keep running across is the assertion that beneath South America is an interconnected network of underground tunnels stretching into the thousands of miles and of such workmanship that primitive Natives could never have built them. In Ancient American (issue 53, 2003), Warren Smith claimed that proof that the tunnel system existed was the fact that the Inca did not discuss it; specifically, he believes that when the Inca told the Spanish they had secreted away their gold where none might find it, this therefore proves the existence of thousands of miles of underground tunnels spanning the continent.
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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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