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Discovery Recycles the "Curse of Akakor"

5/28/2021

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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Did the Vikings Bring Danish Dogs to the Inca Empire in the Middle Ages?

5/14/2020

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During the nineteenth century, a craze emerged for claiming the medieval Norse as the first Europeans to visit the Americas, long before Columbus. The core of the claim turned out to be true. Vikings reached eastern Canada around 1000 CE, though the Victorians had no real physical evidence of this, only a few medieval texts and some hoaxed stones. But advocates soon expanded the claim beyond the evidence and beyond logic, turning the Vikings into an early version of European imperialists, imagining them colonizing both North and South America and bequeathing European culture to the natives. The French writer Eugène Beauvois was perhaps the most extreme advocate, imagining the entire civilization of ancient Mexico the work of the Norse. In South America, the twentieth century Nazi sympathizer and Peronist collaborator Jacques de Mahieu pushed a narrative that Vikings were the first Aryan colonizers of South America, and their early efforts paved the way for the Knights Templar.

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Review of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator S01E05: "The Mysterious Disappearance of the Lost Legion"

4/17/2020

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Do you ever get bored watching middle aged men fruitlessly hunt for treasures and secrets they’ll never find? I know I do. I couldn’t help but contrast the slow, dull slog of cable TV treasure hunts with this week’s new Netflix series, The Outer Banks, which coincidentally enough also told the story of a generations-long treasure hunt. The Outer Banks is fiction, of course, but we could just as easily describe cable reality pseudo-documentaries as badly staged fiction, too. In both, the actual treasure is a MacGuffin, an engine to hang another story on. Rob Riggle: Global Investigator uses it as a frame for Riggle’s ego and some very poor improvised insult comedy. The Outer Banks uses it for some The O.C.-style class-based teen drama and an aesthetic that even Vanity Fair noted seems unusually centered on teenage boys who are allergic to shirts.

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Review of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator S01E04: "The Mystery of the O.K. Corral"

4/9/2020

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After three episodes in which Rob Riggle confidently misinformed his viewers that fake history was real and fictitious places and artifacts actually existed, are any members of the show’s dwindling audience actually surprised that this episode featured yet another case where Riggle wastes an hour of our lives wandering around in search of a fictitious historical mystery? Does it make you feel better to know that this episode basically remakes a 1990 episode of Unsolved Mysteries? No? Well, that’s OK. Since the supposed treasure of the Skeleton Canyon never existed, there’s no reason to get too worked up about Riggle pretending to think he stands a chance of finding it.

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Review of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator S01E02: "The Holiest of Grails"

3/16/2020

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The Holy Grail is a medieval myth whose very form changes in protean fashion as the story passed from one medieval bard to the next. The Grail doesn’t have any role in myth and legend before 1190 CE, and it had only a tenuous connection to the Knights Templar until Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall developed a conspiracy theory in 1818. (Previously, the Grail guardians in medieval poems had been modeled on the Templars, but were not explicitly the knights.) Typically, I’d give a detailed background on the history of the Holy Grail, but there is really no point here, since Rob Riggle: Global Investigator doesn’t have any interest in proving its conspiracy theories. Instead, it simply begins with the premise that fringe history conspiracy theories about the Grail are legitimate history, and it proceeds from there, with no attempt to explain or justify its reasons for adopting these bad ideas.

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