As we approach the New Year, it’s time to take a final look back at 2017 in fringe history. This was a year when political news overshadowed almost everything else, but 2017 still managed to find new ways to use and abuse history, rivalling the historic low of 2016. This year in fringe history might not have been more extreme than last year, but it was certainly darker. It was the year when fringe historians rejoiced that they had an ally in the White House whose courtiers proudly flew the banner of “alternative facts,” but more than anything, it was the year of Tom DeLonge, the musician turned ufologist who published an ancient astronaut book, launched a UFO research company, was crowned UFO researcher of the year, and took credit for the year’s biggest UFO research flap. Let’s look back at what happened over the past twelve months.
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As 2017 comes to an end, Ancient Aliens star David Wilcock dumped one last steaming load to cap off a crappy year. On his Divine Cosmos blog, Wilcock alleged that evil aliens, liberal Democrats, and career civil servants in the U.S. government are finally receiving their comeuppance thanks to a coalition of good space aliens, conservative Republicans, and Donald Trump, though he did not name the president specifically. Wilcock alleges that the Trump Justice Department has placed more than 4,000 so-called Deep State actors under house arrest in anticipation of a massive purge of space alien collaborators. The 4,289 sealed indictments represent the total number of sealed indictments filed in America’s 94 federal courts in November. The number became fodder for right-wingers after Robert Mueller used sealed indictments in his Trump-Russia probe, and Wilcock has parroted the talking point.
Yesterday I received an interesting letter from a professor in Croatia who wanted me to hear about his pet theory that Homer’s Troy is actually located in Croatia. Vedran Sinožić is a professor specializing in Istrian history, and wouldn’t you know that he determined that the Trojan War took place in Istria. According to the description of the expanded second edition of his book Our Troy, “Istrian historian Vedran Sinožić presents his knowledge of the true location of ancient Troy. After many years of research and exhaustive work on collecting all available information and knowledge, Sinožić provides numerous arguments that prove that the legendary Homeric Troy is not located in Hisarlik in Turkey, but is located in the Republic of Croatia—in today’s town of Motovun in Istria.”
Regular readers will remember Donald Zygutis as the man who wrote a book last year claiming that the government was suppressing Carl Sagan’s ancient astronaut beliefs, even though it had done no such thing and Sagan himself rejected his own hypothesis after learning about the mistakes he had made in understanding ancient history, and more or less how he had been duped by Russian propaganda. My review of The Sagan Conspiracy can be found here: Part 1 and Part 2. Well, Zygutis returned this year with a promise that he would prove alien contact in ancient times with information posted to a website on Christmas. His evidence was … underwhelming.
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With the Christmas holiday now behind us, the last few days of the year bring thoughts of the past and the future. At the end of this week, I’ll post my annual year in review going over some of the lowlights from 2017 in fringe history and ancient astronautics. But in the meantime, I thought I would discuss a couple of sidelights that emerged this past week in regard to the recent media reports detailing Sen. Harry Reid’s appropriation of $22 million in taxpayer money to fund a Pentagon office dedicated to giving money to billionaire Robert Bigelow to study UFOs.
Since this is the weekend before Christmas, I trust you will forgive me if I have nothing particular to discuss today. In a week where the Pentagon’s UFO research dominated fringe news, and where holiday preparations saw even the biggest mouths in fringe history going silent, this weekend is a time for a much-deserved rest. As I prepare to celebrate the holiday, however, I thought I would share with all of you that a British history magazine has commissioned me to write an article on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories surrounding the Rothschild banking family. So, if over the next few weeks my blog posts are shorter than normal or perhaps more sparse, it will be because I am busy working on my Rothschild article for publication. In the meantime, I wish all of you who are celebrating Christmas a very merry holiday, and a festive solstice season to everyone else.
And remember: There is still time to donate this weekend to my end of the year fundraiser to help keep this site up and running. I am rather amazed at the cognitive dissonance that dominates the discussion of the Pentagon’s UFO kickback scheme that saw $22 million in federal dollars mostly given to Robert Bigelow, a wealthy friend of former U.S. Senator Harry Reid, who funded the program at Bigelow’s behest. Many ufologists are ecstatic over the revelation that the government shoveled money into private hands, declaring it evidence that “disclosure” is upon us, but these are the same ufologists who have spent decades concocting elaborate conspiracies casting the government as an evil agent suppressing the truth and actively working to assassinate anyone who dared to reveal too much.
It can be easy to laugh at people who imagine that the ancient wonders of the world were built by space aliens or Atlanteans, but I find it interesting to see how these modern beliefs connect to earlier religious claims that the same structures were actually the work of the Nephilim in the days of old. The line of connection is quite clear: Ancient astronaut theories emerge from layering space aliens (or, earlier, Theosophical space spirits) onto mid-Victorian claims about a lost race from Atlantis, assigning to aliens stories previously told of Atlanteans. These in turn were explicitly linked to still earlier tales of giants, as Ignatius Donnelly testifies in identifying Atlantis with the “antediluvian” world of the pre-Flood giants, writing of the Atlanteans that “their mental superiority and command of the arts gave them the character of giants who arrived from the East.”
:Yesterday morning my hot water heater burst, and I had to spend most of the day dealing with the fallout and the cleanup. Worse, when the new heater was being installed, the plumber found that the pipe leading to the heater had cracked around a joint and was leaking. It was ready to burst. So, the pipe had to be replaced, too. Wasn’t that a merry Christmas present? The upshot is that I had very little time to complete work or prepare a blog post for today. So, I did what I usually do when I need a quick hit of something absolutely mind-blowingly stupid. I turned to a talking head from Ancient Aliens.
Of course, it’s also a great time to contribute to my annual fundraising campaign:
As of December 2017, the world population is estimated to be 7.6 billion people. The United States has a population of 323 million people, of whom surveys find that a majority believe that space aliens have visited Earth. And yet, somehow, the same few dozen people are perpetually in charge of contaminating popular culture with ufology narratives. It is difficult to explain how this is even possible, and yet somehow it is. Let’s take a look at how the UFO believers worked together to deliver this past weekend’s dramatic but overblown revelation that the Pentagon spent millions on UFO research from 2007 to 2012. This story broke during my weekend break, but the intervening days have made much clearer the secret connections that help keep the river of UFO money flowing.
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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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