Category: Giants

Review of Code of the Wild S01E03 "Lost Race of Giants"

8/15/2019

This episode airs August 20.

On Tuesday, the Travel Channel aired the second episode of its series Code of the Wild, in which ex-hunting show hosts Casey and Chris Keefer investigate “mysteries” of history and the supernatural by running around outside and finding no proof. Tuesday’s episode ticked up a notch, scoring 437,000 viewers, but it still lost nearly 100,000 viewers from the Expedition Unknown rerun that preceded it. I did not review the second episode, which focused on a plane crash in Alaska, because it has little to do with my areas of interest, but next week’s episode is much more relevant. In “Lost Race of Giants” the interchangeable Keefer brothers travel to Ecuador to hunt what they hope is a lost colony of giants, though the legend of giants in South America comes to us from a biblically influenced Peruvian story of cannibal giants who had homosexual beach orgies, a story recorded in early colonial Spanish accounts. Most of the claims for giants in the Americas were influenced by European myths and beliefs.

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L. A. Marzulli and Fritz Zimmerman Hunt Giants in the Grave Creek Mound

5/2/2019

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It’s been a while since we checked in with Nephilim theorist L. A. Marzulli, who has spent much of the past few months promoting radical right-wing conspiracy theories about politics. But he’s back with a new DVD in his series On the Trail of the Nephilim. This video, billed as Episode 2, covers the “Mathematical Mysteries of the Moundbuilders.” Coming on the heels of Graham Hancock’s new book America Before, which covers much of the same material, it’s like looking to a funhouse mirror version of Hancock, where all of Hancock’s efforts to give credit to Native Americans for at least building on the inheritance of Atlantis have been replaced with an unalloyed Victorian insistence that barbarous Natives couldn’t possibly have piled dirt into earthworks without help from fallen angels and giants.

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British Tabloid Uses Year-Old Interview with Nephilim Theorist to Claim Atlantis Was Located in the Golan Heights

3/6/2019

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The British Express tabloid recently offered up yet another in the endless list of places where the lost continent of Atlantis is alleged to be. Discussing as though it were new a March 16, 2018 appearance on Coast to Coast AM by Ryan Pitterson, an evangelical Christian Nephilim theorist, the Express quoted Pitterson as saying that Atlantis was located in the Holy Land and that its people were identical with the antediluvian giants fathered by the Sons of God in the sixth chapter of Genesis.

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Everything New in Gigantology This Month Is Recycled Victorian Trash

3/1/2019

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Have you seen that Jim Vieira and Hugh Newman are running a tour of Egypt later this year? For $4,400, you, too, can spend twelve days investigating “earth energies,” “esoteric mysteries,” and “strange accounts of giants being found in prehistoric tombs.” Vieira and Newman advertise the trip as a chance to hobnob with “the stars of History Channel’s Ancient Aliens & Search for the Lost Giants,” but I am more interested in the fact that they plan to frame their adventure around following the footsteps of the “Followers of Horus.”

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Andrew Collins Claims Native Americans Were Ruled by Hybrid Denisovan Giants Who Masterminded Mound Building

1/18/2019

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Andrew Collins has made something of a career out of rewriting the same book over and over again, with slightly different material keyed to whatever was the most recent archaeological controversy or discovery at the time of writing. It was not too long ago that Collins delivered a book on Göbelki Tepe (my review: Part 1 and Part 2), in which he suggested that the Denisovans, a different species in the genus Homo known from only a few bone fragments, are the mysterious Nephilim of the Bible and the civilizing god-kings who bequeathed the arts and sciences to a benighted line of Homo sapiens. Apparently delighted by this claim, Collins has rewritten the same material into a new book called Denisovan Dawn, coauthored by gigantologist and Edgar Cayce acolyte Greg Little, and due out from publishing dumpster fire Inner Traditions in September. Collins first published his new claims in August on Ancient Origins and is currently promoting a presentation he plans to give on the subject later this spring.

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Review of "Secrets and Mysteries of Ancient History" by Jennifer S. Dawson

1/2/2019

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Secrets and Riddles of Ancient History: Great Powers of Forgotten Worlds
Jennifer S. Dawson | Camea Publishing | December 2018 | $2.99 eBook

In some respects, self-publishing has been a boon in terms of providing a path for voices outside the mainstream to share their points of view. But mostly online eBook self-publishing has resulted in tens of thousands of half-assed click-bait titles of middling to low quality. The author Jennifer S. Dawson—apparently a pen name for a non-English-speaking author—churns out a remarkable number of books in the “ancient mysteries” genre, covering topics familiar to readers of 1970s volumes on similar subjects. I’d try to address the books by theme, but they are a hodgepodge of short articles on unrelated topics united only in their general connection to lost civilizations, ancient astronauts, and other such threadbare “mysteries.” Secrets and Riddles of Ancient History: Great Powers of Forgotten Worlds, recently published, is representative of both the author’s handling of mysteries and the carelessness that characterizes so many attempts to exploit the ancient mysteries genre.

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Review of Legends of the Lost S01E03: "America's Lost Civilization"

12/18/2018

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With Legends of the Lost tanking in the ratings—attracting just over 300,000 viewers—there is some good news that only a small audience is buying what host Megan Fox is selling. However, that doesn’t mean that I approached tonight’s episode with anything less that dread. “America’s Lost Civilization” explores all of the worst claims about North American prehistory, many of which I wrote about in great depth in my forthcoming book on the racist and fictitious myth of the Mound Builders. Tonight’s episode draws on a number of interrelated themes, many of which trace back to eighteenth and nineteenth century pseudo-history, in order to examine a very modern take on these old ideas. The argument of the episode revolves around the ridiculous claim that at least 48,000 years ago giant humanoids colonized the Americas, a claim that derives from a number of interrelated but competing pseudo-historical ideas.

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L. A. Marzulli Resurrects Myth of the Mound Builders for New "Nephilim" Video

12/8/2018

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I don’t usually cover the same fringe theorist twice in the same week, but I am making an exception because of the shocking new release from L. A. Marzulli that the Nephilim theorist announced yesterday. It also happens to coincide with the subject of my (other) forthcoming new book, tentatively titled Monuments of an Unknown People, which will be published a little more than a year from now. I can’t give more details until the contract comes through, probably next week. Anyway, Marzulli announced his newest DVD, On the Trail of the Nephilim: The Mysterious Moundbuilders. Yes, those Mound Builders—the imaginary lost race of (a) Jews, (b) cannibal giants, (c) ancient Aryans, or (d) Solutreans who were alleged to have been the true builders of the Native American mounds of North America back in the days when white Americans were too racist to admit that Native Americans could make large earthworks out of piles of dirt, a skill they believed only the white race had mastered.

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Review of "Lost Amazon: Project Z," a Racist Travel Channel Exploitation of Peru

10/21/2018

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Ever since Expedition Unknown departed the Travel Channel for the Discovery Channel mothership, I can’t say I’ve paid much attention to the network, except to note that the parent company has gradually transformed it into a clone of its Destination American channel, peppered with paranormal and monster programs for the sake of appealing to the majority of Americans who believe in fantasies without evidence. Lost Amazon: Project Z debuted last week on Travel to little fanfare, but its first (and apparently only) episode encapsulates many of the tropes that remain so distressing in cable TV’s continued exploitation of indigenous and non-Western history as grist for colonialist and Christianist narratives. Naturally, the first episode is about hunting for Giants in South America.

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The Claim of Flash-Frozen Mammoths Is Older Than I Thought

10/13/2018

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A publisher has asked me to assemble a proposal for a short book on the myths and legends associated with the Giza Pyramids, notably the medieval legends of the Muslim world, so I am going to be taking some time today to work on this. In the meantime, I wanted to share something interesting I ran across in reading about Graham Hancock’s new book, America Before. Do you remember the popular claim that there were wooly mammoths flash-frozen in the Arctic as a result of a catastrophic change in climate, perhaps due to a shifting of the poles? It turns out that this claim is much older than I had imagined.

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