Category: Atlantis

Discovery's "Atlantis" Series Sinks; Plus: Lue Elizondo Joins Pricey UFO Conference

6/2/2021

Today was to have been the premiere date for Hunting Atlantis, a new series from Morgan Freeman’s Revelations Entertainment in which volcanologist Jess Phoenix and genre novelist Stel Pavlou were to have explored various hypotheses for the location of Atlantis before deciding that Pavlou was right to tie Plato’s allegory to the alleged flooding of the Black Sea around 5000 BCE, despite matching none of the details of Plato’s fictitious story. The Discovery channel, fresh off purchasing Warner Media, pulled the show without explanation and replaced it with an extended episode of Expedition Unknown.

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Roundup: Pharaohs' Curse on "Today," Greek Myths in the Bronze Age, and More

4/5/2021

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The following was cross-posted in my Substack newsletter.

This week, I am experimenting with a newsletter format, featuring a longer piece of writing divided into shorter articles rather than separate posts. In this issue, we’ll look at the Today show’s promotion of the curse of the pharaohs, a new article about ancient Greek mythology’s connection to the Bronze Age, and we’ll review a historical piece by a famous writer linking American mounds to Atlantis.

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Review of The UnXplained S02E10 "The Search for Atlantis"

1/23/2021

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William Shatner’s The UnXplained comes from the same producers that gave us Ancient Aliens, In Search of Aliens, Curse of Oak Island, and The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. Bad ideas, poor research, and lies are original sin indivisible from the program’s halfhearted attempts to be slightly less outrageous than its loudmouthed sister shows. Shatner himself is a longtime enthusiast for the paranormal, lending his voice to programs about the extraterrestrial and supernatural since the 1970s. I don’t regularly watch The UnXplained because it rarely covers topics of interest to me. This episode, however, explored Atlantis, an I was disappointed to see that Prometheus Entertainment, the company behind so many bad shows, simply pasted this together from spare parts of other bad shows—citing them as evidence that “some” believe extreme idea that Prometheus’s own shows promoted!

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Weekend Omnibus: Younger Dryas Volcano, Elon Musk's Ancient Astronaut Tweet, Steve Quayle's Plagiarism, and More!

8/1/2020

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Yesterday was an extraordinary day for news of interest to my readers. Let’s take a brief survey of just some of the things that happened.

I’ll put the science first. A new study in Science Advances concludes that the global cooling triggered during the Younger Dryas was not the work of a comet or meteor but was instead brought on by volcanic activity. From the press release announcing the study late yesterday:

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The Ireland-as-Atlantis Crew Are Back, Now with Alleged Egyptian "Evidence"

7/9/2020

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Could you imagine what pseudoarchaeology and pseudohistory would have been like had Plato never written of Atlantis? It’s an interesting thought experiment, since so much of modern “alternative” history derives directly or indirectly from efforts to investigate Plato’s allegorical ancient civilization. Without Atlantis, there would be many fewer crazy ideas about “white” rulers in ancient Mesoamerica, no “pole-shift” speculation, and no Fingerprints of the Gods. And since Atlantis ideas also fed into ancient astronaut claims, we’d probably have a lot less space alien nonsense, too. But, you live with what people actually did, not what you with they had done.

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British Tabloid and "Ancient Origins" Recycle Atlantis-in-America Claim

7/1/2020

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Finding Atlantis is such a staple of internet click-bait that it’s hardly a surprise when a new claim arises. If you believe the British tabloids, Atlantis has been found every three months for decades now. Today’s claim comes to us from The Express, summarizing a video lecture Christos A. Djonis made on Ancient Origins. It should sound familiar, though, because it’s the same claim that Djonis made in 2016 and also the same claim that appeared on America Unearthed before that. According to the Express article, Djonis has picked up a few things from America Unearthed, too, now claiming that the Minoans stole copper from America, as Scott Wolter rather ridiculously argued years ago. He also has added a claim picked up from Gavin Menzies that an American tobacco beetle was found in Minoan remains at Santorini, though it was actually an indigenous beetle from the Bronze Age. Rather than rewrite my analysis of Djonis’s poor evidence, let me repeat my 2016 article debunking his nonsense:

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Review of Forbidden History S06E09 "Mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle"

6/2/2020

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The Bermuda Triangle is a hoax invented by George Sand in Fate magazine in 1952. This fact, however, is the forbidden history that Forbidden History forbids its viewers from learning. I will, however, say that I did not expect this episode to descend into the hellish depths of Ancient Aliens or for one of the stars of that show to make a guest appearance like visiting head of state. This show was always the fringe history and conspiracy theory show, not the alien one. It rarely invoked aliens and instead preferred giants, Templars, and Illuminati. I had expected a dry discussion of famous disappearances, maybe a visit to a stretch of ocean—the kind of stuff all the other Bermuda Triangle shows do all the time. But now, we went full Ancient Aliens. Suddenly, it’s like all of cable fake history is collapsing in on itself toward either a black hole or a singularity where everything becomes Ancient Aliens.

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White Bear's Ancient Astronaut Theories Return in the Guise of Hopi Mythology

4/30/2020

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Over on Graham Hancock’s website, Hancock has published the latest in a series of articles by Shawn Hamilton making some extreme claims about the Hopi. Hamilton is nothing special as far as fringe history believers go. Forty years ago, he worked with Oswald “White Bear” Fredericks, a Hopi who was heavily influenced by postwar pop culture and New Age ideas when he told an idiosyncratic version of Hopi mythology to Frank Waters in the 1960s. I have discussed White Bear’s ideas many times, but the issue, as I wrote previously, is that his version of Hopi mythology does not correlate with versions recorded prior to the 1960s, but does correlate with pseudohistory books of the preceding years. He talks about Atlantis by name, for Pete’s sake, so it’s fairly clear that he wasn’t drawing on unadulterated ancestral truths. His mythology, I wrote in 2016, was:

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

3/9/2020

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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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