Friday Roundup: What's Making News in the Blogosphere

According to a recent blog post, Nephilim conspiracy theorist L. A. Marzulli is now taking preorders for his newest entry in his documentary series about the Nephilim. Watchers 10 is currently in production, and Marzulli is asking fans for money to produce the film. However, I was more interested in the fact that after ten documentaries searching of the Nephilim and the Enochian Watchers, the best Marzulli can do is this: “All I can say is, We’re on the Trail!” You’d think after years of research and twenty hours of documentaries he’d have more than that. 

I was similarly disappointed in a National Geographic blog post by Nadia Drake criticizing Hillary Clinton for expressing her belief that witnesses to UFO sightings aren’t simply making up their stories. “There’s enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up,” Clinton told The New York Times. Drake wrote that

It’s disappointing that influential people are helping fan the flames of conspiracy theories that refuse to wilt beneath the weight of truth. One hopes it’s just a campaign stunt, meant to increase Clinton’s popularity among a group of people who might be inclined to vote somewhat more conservatively. Yet given Podesta’s and Clinton’s track records on the topic, it seems more likely the pair really believes there might be something to expose.

Drake devoted the majority of her article to criticizing reliance on eyewitness testimony. While I share Drake’s disappointment that Clinton seems to actually believe the Earth has been visited by space aliens, I do want to point out that Clinton’s statement isn’t necessarily as false as Drake portrays it to be. To wit, eyewitnesses usually have actual experiences, which they aren’t explain. That doesn’t, however, mean that they encountered alien spacecraft. We can’t confuse the lack of evidence for aliens with the fact that people are choosing to interpret ambiguous experiences as mystical mysteries. In short, they aren’t “making them up” and there is something to investigate, if only the mental processes that turn random sensory inputs into extraterrestrial narratives.
 
Meanwhile, over on his blog, former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter is using Donald Trump style logic to deny that America Unearthed was canceled alongside all of the other discontinued programming from the defunct H2 network: “A show that gets canceled is due to poor ratings. Our final two shows were the highest rated of all three seasons.” Cancellation simply means that a network will no longer be airing a program, and it is not tied to ratings but to the network’s overall business decision. A cancelled series may not actually cease production, as when Fox’s The Mindy Project was cancelled but moved to Hulu to continue its run. Wolter added that he has found “a new venue” for his television series, though it is unclear whether it will continue under the same title.
 
Finally, on his blog Graham Hancock announced his participation in the upcoming Contact in the Desert ancient astronaut symposium next month. Hancock says that the ancient astronaut enthusiasts are planning to attack him for apostasy because he questioned the accuracy of Zecharia Sitchin’s semi-fictional translations of Mesopotamian literature. Hancock uses the language of victimization to explain his appearance: “So, although I hear rumours that I am to be lynched at Contact for not buying into the whole ancient astronaut package, and particularly for disputing Zecharia Sitchin’s ‘translations’ of cuneiform texts and the whole Anunnaki/Nephilim meme, I will be there to speak my truth.”
 
That phrase—“speak my truth”—is a strange one, drawn from the self-help industry and is often used in contexts of self-actualization and self-empowerment. In other words, it reflects the speaker’s sense of himself as a victim. It is most common in New Age contexts.
 
Hancock plans to explain that “All of the anomalies of history and prehistory pointed to as evidence for their case by Ancient Alien enthusiasts are — in my view — better explained as the traces of a lost human civilization of pre-historic antiquity.” The fact that the same set of “evidence” supports two wildly different conclusions—not to mention Nephilim, interdimensional Ascended Masters, etc.—ought to give believers pause that they are missing something in their search for an explanation.