Blog Archives

Author Claims Noah's Ark is in Iran

12/10/2015

Adventurers have been climbing mountains in the Middle East looking for Noah’s Ark ever since Jacob of Nisibis decided to climb Mt. Judi in order to reach it in the fourth century CE (Faustus of Byzantium, History of the Armenians 3.10). The Ark’s alleged remains had been a tourist attraction for centuries before, going back even before there were people to believe in Noah, back to the time when the Babylonians imagined that their Flood hero’s ark stood on the same mountain (Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.93; Eusebius, Chronicle 37; Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 9.12; George Syncellus, Chronicle 32; texts here). But whether the adventurers looked on Mt. Judi, the traditional location, or the mountain now called Mt. Ararat in Turkey (formerly Mt. Masis), which superseded Mt. Judi in the medieval period, one thing remains true: No one has actually found the imaginary vessel atop either peak.

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Scott Wolter Apparently Solves Mystery of Hooked X, But Not the Way He Thinks He Did

12/9/2015

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It seems that Scott Wolter accidentally solved the “mystery” of the Hooked X® in his latest blog post, but not for the reason he thinks. It certainly does not “rock the skeptics, debunkers, and disbelievers of the five North American rune stones with the Hooked X, to their core” as he claims. In a posting on his blog last night, Wolter claims to have discovered many new examples of Hooked X® symbolism in an old Icelandic manuscript. According to Wolter, the symbol that he associates with the Holy Bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene appears as the letter aleph in an Icelandic document giving the Hebrew alphabet as well as in “secret” coded alphabets from documents dated to the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century.

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Did an Ancient Indian Sage Record a Recipe for Making a Battery? A Forgotten Chapter in Fringe History

12/8/2015

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Note: The post was edited to include additional information.

Many of you likely saw news reports this week that Stonehenge is a “secondhand monument” that was stolen from Wales, where it was originally set up 500 years before moving to Salisbury Plain. As usual, the media bungled an archaeology story that’s much less dramatic. The new claim by Mike Parker Pearson, based on the well-known fact that the small inner horseshoe of so-called “bluestones” at Stonehenge had be quarried in Wales, suggests that these smaller stones were originally part of a Welsh circle before being recycled at Stonehenge. Pearson and his team found the site where they believe the stones were quarried and dated organic material at the site to 3400 BCE, earlier than the 2900 BCE date for the stones’ erection on Salisbury plain. (No evidence of the proposed original monument has been found, and other explanations are possible.) The original Guardian story correctly identified these stones as the smaller inner horseshoe ring of stones at Stonehenge, though they did not emphasize this point. Other media accounts were much less clear about the fact that the large, famous stones of Stonehenge were not “stolen” from Wales.

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Did a Medieval Persian Astronomer Have Secret Knowledge of Brazil's Coastline?

12/7/2015

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Today’s story is a strange one, and I don’t think I have all of the parts to know exactly what happened or why. It begins with a passage I read in fringe writer Andrew Tomas’s mystery-mongering We Are Not the First (1971) concerning the work of the thirteenth century Persian astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Here is how he gives the story:

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Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Indian Nationalism, and the Interglacial Polar Origins of the Aryan Race

12/6/2015

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The other day I mentioned the tendency of nationalists to glorify their own homeland as the centerpiece of civilization, and today I have another example of this drawn from the historical archives. This was a story I didn’t know, and it was interesting to learn about a close connection between fringe history and nationalism in India long before the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, promoted a nationalist revision of Indian history that involved Vedic airplanes, Ganesh’s plastic surgery, and other evidence-free assertions. Our story for today concerns Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the first Indian independence leader, and an opponent of Gandhi’s non-violent approach.

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Are Prehistoric Giants Waiting in a Stasis Chamber in Iran?

12/5/2015

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A few days ago, a pair of YouTube videos started making the fringe history rounds, alleging to depict the discovery of two incorruptible bodies in Iran in 2008, bodies that date back more than ten thousand years. Depending on which version of the videos you happened to encounter, you might see the bodies referred to as those of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, or those of the Anunnaki, specifically Enki. This is weird, but not for the usual reasons.

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Atlantis and the Nephilim in the Work of Denis Saurat

12/4/2015

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I admit that from time to time I’m a bit too lazy to follow every claim through all of its weird permutations. When Graham Hancock claimed in Magicians of the Gods that extinct Ice Age megafauna (specifically mammoths and toxodons) supposedly appear on the Gateway of the Sun at Tiwanaku (Tiahuanaco) in Bolivia, it was enough for me to remember that he had made that claim in Fingerprints of the Gods twenty years earlier and had based it on Arthur Posnansky’s 1945 book on Tiahuanaco: Cradle of American Man to show how little originality goes into a Hancock book. What I didn’t know is that Posnansky’s observation apparently led to a famous French scholar to adduce that the Gateway of the Sun is evidence for Nephilim in Atlantis!

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Micah Hanks Explores the World of Horror and Has Nothing to Say About It

12/3/2015

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A decade ago, I published The Cult of Alien Gods and began to explore the strange interplay between science, pseudoscience, and horror fiction by examining the origins of pseudoscientific archaeological claims, a theme I explored from the fictional side in my 2008 book Knowing Fear. In a series of recent (and often poorly written) articles on Mysterious Universe, it seems that our old friend Micah Hanks decided to go exploring in the same waters but doesn’t have much of anything to say about topics ranging from H. P. Lovecraft to cannibalism. I tend to wonder what purpose articles serve when they lack substance, but I imagine that in the brave new world of online media, simply clicking on an article justifies its existence. I know this sounds very negative toward Hanks, but my negativity come not from any particular animus at Hanks but disappointment that so many writers fail to put into their work a fraction of the research and analysis I try to put into each of mine.

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Romanian Author Claims Romania Is the Purest Racial and Linguistic Outpost of Atlantis

12/2/2015

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Yesterday I discussed a weird local Romanian fringe claim about Black Knights and the Force of Neutrality that seems to have originated with Romanian politician Codrin Ştefănescu, who attributes it to a medieval text that no one has yet proved exists. This got me curious about some of the finer points of the fringe claim, and in turn this led me to a self-published book by a Romanian author writing under the name Raven Alb. J. The book is called Why and How the Ice Age Ended & the True History of the Pontic (White) Race (2012). The title pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the weird racism underscoring the text, but it’s particularly interesting in the way that more mainstream American fringe theories have been overhauled to help place the Romanian people at the center of world history.

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The Strange Case of "Il Separatio" and the Codex Lugubrum

12/1/2015

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There is just so much terrible information on the internet that it becomes depressing wading through it all. This past week, for example, Ancient Origins ran a crappy article claiming that the mythic founder of Rome, Romulus, was a real person and thus speculating on how he really died. There is no evidence that Romulus ever lived, so the recounting of various ancient explanations for his death offer no proof of life, only testimony to the ancients’ penchant for inventing details to flesh out the lives of fictional characters.

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Forward>>

Author Claims Noah's Ark is in Iran

Scott Wolter Apparently Solves Mystery of Hooked X, But Not the Way He Thinks He Did

Did an Ancient Indian Sage Record a Recipe for Making a Battery? A Forgotten Chapter in Fringe History

Did a Medieval Persian Astronomer Have Secret Knowledge of Brazil's Coastline?

Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Indian Nationalism, and the Interglacial Polar Origins of the Aryan Race

Are Prehistoric Giants Waiting in a Stasis Chamber in Iran?

Atlantis and the Nephilim in the Work of Denis Saurat

Micah Hanks Explores the World of Horror and Has Nothing to Say About It

Romanian Author Claims Romania Is the Purest Racial and Linguistic Outpost of Atlantis

The Strange Case of "Il Separatio" and the Codex Lugubrum

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