Category: Atlantis

Review of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator S01E06: "The Atlantis Case"

3/9/2020

Actor and comedian Rob Riggle is an acquired taste, and not one I have ever acquired. You probably know him from The Hangover or his time on The Daily Show, but I have never enjoyed his brand of alpha male aggressive idiocy. He can be effective when cast as a bullying antagonist, a role he has perfected in numerous guest stints on sitcoms like Modern Family, New Girl, and so on. But when he needs to be a sympathetic and likeable presence, as in Rob Riggle: Global Investigator, where he must anchor the series and connect directly with viewers, he fails miserably. Not even an Indiana Jones hat, or liberal application of the Indiana Jones typeface, can save him.

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Keystone "University" Claims Ireland Was Atlantis to Sell You $1,100 Seminar Tickets

1/30/2020

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Before we begin today, a quick note about Ancient Aliens: Moving the show to Saturday to get away from heavy competition in the “stuff old guys like” category paid off for the History Channel. The show’s ratings recovered from their 2019 slump, rising by around 200,000 viewers to 1.08 million this past week. However, ratings growth was largely from viewers 55+, a less favored demographic among TV channels and their advertisers.

Meanwhile, a YouTube video claiming that the famous Neolithic Irish tomb at Newgrange is really the temple of Poseidon that Plato alleged stood at the center of Atlantis is making waves in the media. Keystone University of Ireland posted the video, and Irish media picked up the story because of its obvious connection to Ireland. The video utilizes a number of long-debunked claims to allege that Ireland was the legendary continent of Atlantis, but the real story is who posted it and why.

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Tom DeLonge on Instagram: Angels Might Be Aliens from Atlantis

1/23/2020

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This week, To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science founder and interim leader Tom DeLonge shared a bizarre Instagram post in which he seemed to endorse a number of controversial ancient astronaut and Theosophy-style beliefs about the imagined connection between space aliens, Atlantis and Lemuria, and Biblical angels. DeLonge discussed midcentury ideas favored by Theosophy-inspired “contactees” and UFO preachers, and it appeared that he favors the idea that Biblical angels and space aliens are the same. Here is what he had to say:

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Scott Wolter Embraces Atlantis, Claims Newly Translated Papers Document "Templar" Construction of the Newport Tower

1/22/2020

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Last week, former America Unearthed host Scott F. Wolter appeared on Jimmy Church’s Fade to Black radio show. The first half of the discussion was mainly recaps of Wolter’s usual spiel about the Kensington Rune Stone and Templars, but I was particularly taken by Wolter’s new line that he is moving away from hard science after claiming to discover that there is an “intuitive spiritual aspect” to ancient history that that defies the laws of science. Wolter said that he was not comfortable with this discovery at first but has come to accept and embrace a supernatural aspect to history. Things got weirder and worse from there.

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Weekend Odds and Ends

12/7/2019

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Last week saw the last new episode of Ancient Aliens for 2019. The episode trended down from the previous week, bringing in 897,000 viewers, compared to 925,000 for the Tucker Carlson episode the week before. The numbers suggest that at least some of the previous week’s viewer spike was attributable to Carlson fans tuning in, but the numbers are so small that the greater part is probably due to random fluctuation. In Search Of had 963,000 viewers for its final episode of the season. Meanwhile, the Science Channel conspiracy fringe history series Unexplained + Unexplored trended up to 441,000 viewers for its episode hunting the alleged killer of Meriwether Lewis.

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Ashley Cowie Appropriates Minoan Archaeology for Atlantis

11/8/2019

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Later tonight, Ancient Aliens will explore the profound question of whether aliens invented tattoos. In the meantime, we might as well pile on Ashley Cowie some more since he published yet another crappy article this week trying to spin mystery out of discovery in the belief that ancient history needs to be sexed up with fakery and myths to attract the attention of the public. Today’s subject is Atlantis, which Cowie understands at about the Wikipedia level of research, citing as sources Atlantipedia and an article in National Geographic. It makes me wonder why I bother researching primary sources when, apparently, one can get paid to surf the web and summarize the results like a high school book report.

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Godzilla in Atlantis; Plus: 1.3 Million Watch History's Friday UFO Shows

6/4/2019

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Let’s start today with the ratings for Friday’s UFO programming. Ancient Aliens was close to its week-to-week and year-to-year average. The first new episode of the fourteenth season drew 1.3 million people, with a 0.26 rating among the advertiser-covered demographic of adults 18-49. It ranked seventh in the cable ratings for Friday. Unidentified, the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science UFO series, debuted with 1.286 million viewers and a 0.22 rating among adults 18-49, retaining most of its lead-in’s audience and outperforming most of the other shows that have followed Ancient Aliens over the past ten years in that regard. It ranked eleventh among all cable shows airing on Friday. But don’t despair! Both were outdrawn by HGTV’s My Lottery Dream Home, which had 1.6 million viewers and a 0.29 rating among adults 18-49. So, in the hierarchy of American life, lottery fantasies easily outdraw mind- and soul-shattering “truths” about time, space, and reality.

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Andrew Collins Suggests Denisovans Built "Monuments" Associated with Atlantis

4/6/2019

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At the American Association of Physical Anthropology Conference in Cleveland last week, a team of researchers presented evidence that humans in Papua New Guinea may have interbred with a population of Denisovans as recently as 15,000 years ago, citing genetic evidence that genomes they tested contained evidence of two separate infusions of Denisovan DNA. The first came around 50,000 years ago. The second occurred sometime after, and the researchers suspect it occurred around 15,000 years ago. The scientists, led by Murray Cox of the Massey University in New Zealand, also said that the Denisovans living on the mainland in southeast Asia were as genetically different from the better-known Siberian Denisovans as they were from Neanderthals.

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A Blast from the Past: "America Before" vs. "Atlantis: The Antediluvian World"

4/4/2019

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As I work my way through Graham Hancock’s America Before this week, I can’t help but share with you some thoughts I had in reading a long chapter comparing Native American spiritual beliefs to those of ancient Egypt. The Old Kingdom of Egyptian history flourished around 2500 BCE, while the Native American practices Hancock cites range from archaeological evidence dating back thousands of years BCE all the way down to nineteenth century oral accounts recorded by ethnologists. The similarities are, to my mind, unconvincing: bird iconography, an interest in the belt stars of Orion, monuments in geometric shapes, a concept of life after death, and fashion trends for astronomers involving clothes marked with stars. Hancock concedes that Native Americans and Egyptians were never in direct contact with one another, but this gives him the license to suggest that a lost civilization like Atlantis gave this spiritual knowledge to both.

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Atlantis Found Yet Again, This Time at Mt. Girnar in India

3/28/2019

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Ancient Origins published yet another entry in the endless list of places alleged to be the lost continent of Atlantis. Today’s candidate comes from the pen of Italian expatriate E. B. Ralbadisole, who now lives in Asia, claims to worship nature, and said that he became interested in Atlantis after receiving a supernatural vision of a lost Ice Age civilization. He places the fictitious lost city in the Kathiawar peninsula, in western India, specifically atop Mt. Girnar, and alleges that Atlantis did not sink into the ocean but was buried in a giant mudslide that inspired the Biblical Flood. Really.

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