Category: Giants

The Jerusalem Post Recycles Old Claims about Goliath's Skull at Golgotha

11/2/2022

The Jerusalem Post ran a story this week claiming that the Bible giant Goliath’s skull is located under the land occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre because its biblical name, Golgotha, sort of sounds like “Goliath of Gath.” The Post did not clearly explain to readers that its article was a near-verbatim copy of a 2017 tabloid story from Britain’s Daily Star, itself recycling Evangelical chatter from the early 2000s, nor did the Post disclose that the “author” of their story, “Walla! Tourism,” had apparently produced the piece to draw Christian tourists to Israel.

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Demi Lovato Joins Gaia TV, Begins Promoting Noxious Reptilian Conspiracies

11/9/2021

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A few months ago, NBC's Peacock streaming service gave Demi Lovato a UFO series in which the streamer presented Lovato as a goofy, cuddly conspiracy theorist gawking in wonder at lights in the sky. Gaia TV saw the publicity that Lovato gained and appointed them a brand ambassador, and Lovato began telling their 118 million social media followers to watch hand-picked promoting extreme fringe history ideas, including lizard people conspiracies.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E04 "The Mystery of Mount Shasta"

9/17/2021

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been eight years since Ancient Aliens devoted a significant segment to Mt. Shasta in California, a New Age hotspot that has long been associated with supernatural, antediluvian, and extraterrestrial phenomena. While there had been stories about mystical mountain mysteries associated with Mt. Shasta, the modern conspiracy theory version comes directly from A Dweller on Two Planets by Frederick Spencer Oliver, a late nineteenth century book inspired by Theosophy that identified Mt. Shasta as a secret base for Atlanteans who had a base in tunnels beneath the mountain:

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E05 "The Forbidden Bible"

12/18/2020

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This week, the former director of the CIA from 2013 to 2017, John Brennan, appeared on a podcast to say that he was intrigued by the Navy UFO videos promoted by To the Star Academy of Arts and Science. He said that we cannot exclude the possibility that flying saucers are vehicles driven by beings from other worlds and that we must keep an open mind. He wasn’t speaking from official knowledge, only from his personal speculation about otherworldly life, conflating the scientific probability of life somewhere in the universe with the improbable idea that large numbers of such beings are visiting us to pose for blurry selfies and sodomize the unwary. This depressing speculation from a former high official helps explain why cable TV thinks the 927,000 weekly Ancient Aliens viewers are a desirable and powerful demographic of senior citizens (the vast majority of viewers are over 50) worth catering to.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E04: Giants of the Mediterranean

12/11/2020

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More than two hundred years ago, the naturalist Georges Cuvier published his Memoir Upon Living and Fossil Elephants in which he correctly explained that the skeletons reported around the Mediterranean region as those of a lost race of giants had, in fact, belonged to fossilized elephants. Nearly a century earlier, Sir Hans Sloane had drawn the same conclusion in a paper read before the Royal Society. In 1835, Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville examined the skeleton of the famed giant Teutobochus and discovered that it belonged to a mastodon, a truth that confirmed an assessment by Jean Riolan the Younger a century before. Hell, in 1827 Edmond Temple even watched a “giant” being excavated in Bolivia in the presence of men of science, and he gawked in wonder as they completely refused to believe it an Ice Age elephant, despite having tusks. I could list dozens of similar accounts and analyses. In fact, I have. The truth about “giants” has been known for centuries, but here we are watching Ancient Aliens party like it’s 1699.

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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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Ken Ham Complains PBS Documentary Focuses Too Much on Stupid Parts of Ark Encounter and Creationism

2/20/2020

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This week, creationist Ken Ham threw a fit over a 2019 documentary, We Believe in Dinosaurs, which aired this month on PBS as part of the Independent Lens series. He accused the documentary of being biased against creationism because it depicted, accurately, the appearance of dinosaurs in Ham’s “Ark Encounter” recreation of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky. “It turned out to be an agenda-driven propaganda piece focusing on dinosaurs and the Ark Encounter, where dinosaurs represent only a tiny fraction of the exhibits at the Ark,” Ham wrote. That’s a bit like complaining that histories of Germany always mention that Hitler fellow even though he was only in power for 12 years.

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New Zealand Giant Hunters Spend Four Years Digging for Giants, Find Moa Bone

2/19/2020

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With the launch of my new book, The Mound Builder Myth, yesterday, I have much to do and too little time to do it. I had rather little time for writing thanks to book launch work, but I wanted to give notice of the disturbing situation unfolding in New Zealand, where believers in a lost race of giants are coming under fire for the very real damage that their efforts to excavate what they believe to be giants’ bones may be doing.

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Faking a Massachusetts Nephilim Giant: A Case of Deceptive Editing

1/29/2020

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Today I’d like to direct you to Rebecca Bradley’s excellent blog post dissecting Ancient Aliens talking head Andrew Collins’s fanciful claims about the Densiovans as civilization-bestowing Bible giants. Her analysis is clear and compelling and shows just how badly Collins misrepresents scientific data in order to develop a fake narrative of a prehistoric empire of overgrown wizard-sages. “Every source that Collins referenced in this paper was either misrepresented, misunderstood, or mangled at the outset,” Bradley concludes, and she has the evidence to prove it.

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The Year in Review: 2019 in Pseudohistory, Space Aliens, and Conspiracy Theories

12/28/2019

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Perhaps more than any year in recent memory, 2019 was the year in which fringe history stopped being fringe and went completely mainstream. This year, we saw pseudohistory and conspiracy theories top the literary bestseller lists, multiply across cable channels like mushrooms on a rotten log, and attract record crowds to traveling carnivals masquerading as pseudohistory “fan” conventions. It perfectly captures the tenor of the times for the post-truth era that the very notions of fact and fiction ceased to have meaning. This was a long, hard year, both for the world and also for me personally. After dealing with family health problems, buying and selling a house (and still not being able to close on selling the old one until early 2020, nearly half a year after the sale), writing two books, and a knot of lawyers for many different developments, I am ready for this unpleasant year to end. Let’s look back in anger:

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