This past weekend the History Channel announced a spinoff series for The Curse of Oak Island, to be called The Curse of Civil War Gold. The new show, which follows the adventures of Oak Island bit players Kevin Dykstra and Gary Drayton as they search for Confederate gold at the bottom of Lake Michigan, is set to premiere in the plum slot following Oak Island’s March 6 season finale. The new series will feature Marty Lagina from Oak Island, whose day job is running a business based in the same area of Michigan where the hunt took place during filming in October. Civil War gold is not a subject of my interest or expertise, so I will consign this show to the dustbin of other treasure-hunting programs I have ignored over the past few years. However, I do want to note that the new show is from Oak Island and Ancient Aliens powerhouse producers Prometheus Entertainment, and, it is the fifth or sixth attempt from History to attempt to clone the success of Oak Island, its highest rated unscripted series.
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ANCIENT GIANTS: HISTORY, MYTH, AND SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FROM AROUND THE WORLD Xaviant Haze | 192 pages | Bear & Company | 2018 | ISBN: 9781591432937 | $16.00 OK, so here we go again. There is yet another new book about the lost race of giants, and it’s… wait for it… more of the same. Regular readers will remember Xaviant Haze, a DJ and “giant” researcher who has expressed anti-Semitic views about the Rothschilds. Well, Inner Traditions, a company that has never met a bigot or lunatic they wouldn’t give a book deal to, is proudly publishing his new opus, Ancient Giants: History, Myth, and Scientific Evidence from around the World through their Bear & Company imprint. The book, a semi-sequel to his 2016 volume Ancient Giants in the Americas, is due out in June, and this is an early review.
As we approach the New Year, it’s time to take a final look back at 2017 in fringe history. This was a year when political news overshadowed almost everything else, but 2017 still managed to find new ways to use and abuse history, rivalling the historic low of 2016. This year in fringe history might not have been more extreme than last year, but it was certainly darker. It was the year when fringe historians rejoiced that they had an ally in the White House whose courtiers proudly flew the banner of “alternative facts,” but more than anything, it was the year of Tom DeLonge, the musician turned ufologist who published an ancient astronaut book, launched a UFO research company, was crowned UFO researcher of the year, and took credit for the year’s biggest UFO research flap. Let’s look back at what happened over the past twelve months.
It can be easy to laugh at people who imagine that the ancient wonders of the world were built by space aliens or Atlanteans, but I find it interesting to see how these modern beliefs connect to earlier religious claims that the same structures were actually the work of the Nephilim in the days of old. The line of connection is quite clear: Ancient astronaut theories emerge from layering space aliens (or, earlier, Theosophical space spirits) onto mid-Victorian claims about a lost race from Atlantis, assigning to aliens stories previously told of Atlanteans. These in turn were explicitly linked to still earlier tales of giants, as Ignatius Donnelly testifies in identifying Atlantis with the “antediluvian” world of the pre-Flood giants, writing of the Atlanteans that “their mental superiority and command of the arts gave them the character of giants who arrived from the East.”
DISCOVERING THE MAMMOTH: A TALE OF GIANTS, UNICORNS, IVORY, AND THE BIRTH OF A NEW SCIENCE John J. McKay | 256 pages | Pegasus | 2017 | ISBN 978-1-68177-424-4 | $27.95 More than a century ago, every educated person understood that the bones of giants were actually the remains of fossilized elephant species, including the woolly mammoth, the mastodon, the dwarf elephant, and their various cousins. This information was readily available in most books of natural history, and even churchmen, who considered giants to be an article of faith, felt the need to acknowledge the obviousness of the fact before trying to argue why their particular giant was the exception to the general rule. Yet after the Second World War, this connection between fossils evidence and mythological fantasy no longer seemed obvious, and when Adrienne Mayor reintroduced it around 2000, the suggestion that fossils had a relationship to mythology was greeted as fresh and new.
This week offers us a second round of Micah Hanks’s efforts to imitate what I do in investigating ancient mysteries. Earlier this week we saw him try and fail to explore the “telescopes” of the ancient world, and now we can watch him try to examine whether there were elephants in pre-Columbian America. If the latter claim sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a very old one, born hundreds of years ago, popularized in the Victorian period, and copied by innumerable fringe historians, creationists, and Mormon apologists ever since. His evidence, as you would expect, is somewhat disappointing. However, in his lazy reliance on secondary material, he accidentally uncovered a fascinating case study in how science is distorted by the media and new proof that “giants” are often misidentified megafauna fossils. Of course Hanks completely missed the real story in his simplistic pursuit of typical fringe material.
Earlier this week, the Express reported the exclusive news that Gaia.com has been making a ton of money off a fake mystery concocted from the mutilation of human corpses to feed the internet’s and cable TV’s obsession with ancient astronauts. Or, to be more exact, the Express reported that DNA tests on the so-called three-fingered Nazca mummies promoted on Gaia.com as evidence of alien contact with Earth confirmed that the bodies are human, or at least started out as real human corpses before they were manipulated to appear like stereotypical space aliens.
This week eSkeptic and Skeptic published the final version of Mark J. Defant’s review of Graham Hancock’s Magicians of the Gods, an earlier draft version of which stoked Hancock’s ire in a radio debate featuring Hancock, Defant, and Sketpic publisher Michael Shermer on Joe Rogan’s podcast earlier this year. The review, while very good, represents one of the major problems I have had with skeptical activism: Graham Hancock published Magicians of the Gods almost exactly two years ago, and at this point the criticisms and the arguments lack a certain impact, largely because fringe history has already moved on (Hancock is working on a new book about North American “mysteries”) and anyone who might have stood to gain from reading the review has already read Magicians (or never will), and the damage has been done. That’s one reason that I worked my ass off to review the book in time for its initial release. Two years on, it has almost become moot. Almost.
Since I know that this post will only be at the top of the blog for a few hours until I review Ancient Aliens tonight (provided my son cooperates), instead of writing something long and complex that no one will read, I instead devoted my time to translating an interesting passage that illustrates the power of the myth of the giants in European scholarship
To briefly follow up on yesterday’s post: Ancient Origins has now posted the second part of Hugh Newman’s article on giants in Egypt, and it is worse than the first. The thrust of the article is his belief that hieratic scale in art—in which the artist depicts more important people as larger than less important ones—proves that the pharaohs were giants. This makes about as much sense as arguing that Abraham Lincoln was an ogre because his statue in the Lincoln Memorial is 19 feet tall, representing a man who would stand 28 feet in height. Clearly the artist meant to imply that Lincoln was bigger than a barn. The real Lincoln stood six foot four inches—tall but not Nephilim tall.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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