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A Medieval Italian Chronicle Might Offer Insight into the Zeno Hoax

10/10/2021

Over the summer, Paolo Chiesa published an article in Terrae Incognitae describing a passage in a medieval Italian chronicle briefly mentioning the land west of Greenland which the Norse had named Markland, and it made the rounds of online news sources a couple of weeks ago. Chiesa said that this passage, from around 1340 CE, is the oldest mention of North America known from the Mediterranean region. On its own, this is not earth-shattering news since the northern European peoples had been speaking of these lands since Adam of Bremen described Vinland around 1035 CE. But it does have interesting implications for the notorious Zeno Narrative and its role in fringe history’s elaborate narrative about Henry Sinclair learning of and visiting North America.

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Diana Muir Plans Multi-Season Templar TV Show with Scott Wolter

9/15/2021

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Diana Muir has spent the past few years unsuccessfully promoting a line of self-published books claiming to be the personal journals of Henry I Sinclair, 1st Earl of Orkney, a minor medieval figure that an accident of Victorian pseudo-scholarship has led thousands to believe secretly transported Templar secrets to the Americas long before Columbus. In a recent Facebook posting, Muir announced that she is working with former America Unearthed host Scott F. Wolter on a potential television series about the journals that the pair hopes will run for five to ten seasons in the style of Curse of Oak Island.

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New Research Reconfirms the Vinland Map is a Forgery

9/3/2021

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More than three years after Yale University announced that it would put the infamous Vinland Map through a through a series of high-tech tests to determine once and for all whether the allegedly medieval depiction of Greenland and the Canadian coast was in fact a fake, the results are in. It is, in fact, a fake, as has long been suspected. New analysis of the ink used to draw the map found that, as earlier researchers has concluded, the ink is modern. It dates no earlier than the 1920s. While the identity of the forger is not known, and the exact time of forgery hasn't been determined, the new evidence should (but probably cannot) put to rest claims that the map is the oldest cartographic depiction of part of North America in European history.

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Erich von Däniken Blasts Cable TV Shows for Pilfering Claims He Stole First

8/5/2021

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Last week, viewers fled Hunting Atlantis, with the show's ratings falling even as its lead in, Expedition Unknown, gained viewers. Last Wednesday's episode drew just 605,000 live plus same-day viewers, down 45,000 from the week before. The demo collapse was worse. Only 90,000 adults 18-49 watched. By contrast, Expedition Unknown rose significantly, to nearly a million viewers. It's clear: Viewers aren't into Atlantis.

Another discontented viewer of cable pseudo-documentaries was none other than Erich von Däniken, the Chariots of the Gods author who is feeling a little ignored these days, as his protégé Giorgio Tsoukalos reported:

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Discovery Recycles the "Curse of Akakor"

5/28/2021

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This week, Discovery launched a new series called Curse of Akakor, in which a team traveled to South America in search of a supposed underground lost city and the explorers who died in the 1980s in quest of it. I was surprised to learn that this “new” show was in fact originally produced in 2019 for Facebook Watch and is now being recycled for Discovery. I have not seen the original 2019 broadcast to know what, if any, changes were made, but the titles, cast list, and episode storylines are the same. The “lost city” of Akakor is quite patently a fake, and it’s rather annoying that the show plans an entire series to get to a point that can be made in a couple of paragraphs.

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Graham Hancock and Brian Muraresku Hunt Ancient Psychedelics on Joe Rogan's Podcast

10/1/2020

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This week, Graham Hancock appeared alongside his self-described protege, author Brian Muraresku, on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss spirituality, archaeology, and psychedelic topics. Truthfully, I don’t really have a lot to complain about in the general thesis that ancient people were aware of and used mind-altering substances, or that such substances may have impacted their experiences of the divine. However, I feel like Muraresku overstates the case, particularly when he argues that scholarship has forbidden any discussion of the subject since a damnatio memoriae pronounced on the 1978 book The Road to Eleusis and its argument about psychedelics in Greece. For decades, dozens of books have covered the subject, so it is not a forbidden topic, or at least hasn’t been in thirty years.

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Review of Forbidden History S06E10 "The Secret Life of Moses"

6/9/2020

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Over the years, legends have arisen to describe and discuss the history of Moses in order to fill in gaps in the Biblical narrative. Modern cable TV parasites routinely link him to the pharaoh Akhenaten or to space aliens. But the stories go back much farther, and are much weirder. Jewish legends claimed he was a giant who battled other giants in superhuman feats of strength. Contrary to what Forbidden History claims in this episode, there is a long historiographic tradition in Greco-Roman literature of discussing Moses as a historical figure (though they were undoubtedly reporting Jewish claims), and there is even bizarre figure, Osarseph, in Manetho’s famous Egyptian history who was a renegade Egyptian priest who led all the lepers out of Egypt and changed his name to Moses—and that story, more than Moses’s, was likely inspired in part by Akhenaten, according to Jan Assmann. Naturally, Forbidden History knows nothing of this and devotes its time to the same tired old arguments we’ve heard a hundred times before on countless bottom-scraping cable shows.

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Janet Wolter and Alan Butler Make False Claims about Templars, Pyramids, Gothic Architecture, and More in Podcast Interview

5/29/2020

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Not long ago, The Freemasons podcast interviewed former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter at length and ended with a promise to give his wife a platform to expand on her goddess-tinged vision of ancient America. So now we have a 90-minute podcast featuring Janet Wolter and her writing partner Alan Butler—the guy who once wrote that moon had been built by time-travelers from the future—in which the pair expound on their book America: Nation of the Goddess, with very little that isn’t already in the book. You can read my review here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. I feel like I should say something about the podcast, but it’s hard to find much new to say about the dull repetition of years-old, debunked claims. Therefore, I’ll focus on the material that isn’t quite so familiar.

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Review of Forbidden History S06E07: "Hitler's Occult Conspiracy"

5/20/2020

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If you can believe it, this is my 3,000th blog post. What better way to mark this milestone than with an episode of a cable TV pseudohistory show featuring ancient astronauts, lost civilizations, Nephilim, the occult, and glowing descriptions of Nazis? It’s everything we have criticized and debunked over the past ten years in capsule form.

“For the Nazis, the occult was like oxygen,” pseudohistorical gasbag Andrew Gough intones at the beginning of the season finale of Forbidden History. Occult conspiracy theorist Lynn Picknett excuses the entire political process of systemic failure in Depression-era Germany by adding that the Nazification of Germany wasn’t the result of human failings but was an “occult process” that turned men into monsters. This isn’t true, of course: People are capable for becoming evil on their own, as soon as they no longer recognize other people as fully human and can justify hate and killing. We don’t want to believe that, though. We want to imagine that human evil isn’t their fault, or ours, so we imagine demons and aliens to take the blame. That is fairly common in fringe history circles, but what is less common is the almost lustful way Forbidden History worships that dark power as but a step removed from communion with the divine.

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Scott Wolter: Ancient Freemasons from Göbekli Tepe May Have Built U.S. Mounds

5/15/2020

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As is his wont, former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter made another of his regular and baffling podcast appearances, this time on the Masonic Unknown Philosophers online broadcast, which apparently took the form of a Zoom call last Friday before being posted online this week. The production values were poor, the background music distracting, and the hosts somewhere between amateurish and incompetent. It was, in other words, a perfect platform for Wolter to spout a new torrent of bizarre claims about the so-called Cremona Documents, a set of almost certainly fake medieval texts from Italy that Wolter firmly believes relate the secret history of Western civilization from the dawn of time down to the Knights Templar. Even Wolter himself recognizes that these texts are “almost too good to be true,” but he has convinced himself that the doubts about their authenticity are nothing compared to the truest he places in the personal relationships he has with the dubious figures who promote this nonsense.

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