Graham Hancock Says Trees Are Spying on Us; Plus: Masonic Journal Editor Says Wolter Wrong on Peer Review

I wrote a lot yesterday, and I’m feeling a bit lazy today. I have three small items to share.
 
The first comes to us courtesy of Graham Hancock, who posted a completely bizarre captioned photo to his blog after visiting California. There Hancock saw very old trees, some of which are thousands of years old. “What if they are the antennae of vast cosmic beings who are watching humanity and the earth?” he said in the caption to a photo of one such tree taken by his wife. Is Hancock back on pot again? Some New Age types have been floating the idea that trees serve as antennae to focus earth energy, but Hancock seems to be making them into sentient beings linked to Old Ones from beyond our ken. He even titled his post “The Watchers,” invoking intentionally or not the Fallen Angels and the forbidden wisdom of the antediluvian era. 

Second, you might have seen the strange new article on Ancient Origins claiming that cyclopean style ancient architecture is actually a secret written language communicating decipherable written messages through the angles of the polygons used to build it. This comes to us from Dr. Derek Cunningham, who argues that the specific angles used in each stone correspond to astronomical events. One angle he believes he finds regularly is 5.1°, which is the offset of the moon’s orbital plane relative to the Earth. He finds such angles everywhere, from rocks to walls to whole buildings. How he can measure angles to a tolerance of a thousandth of a degree, as his visual aids suggest that he did, is beyond me.
 
There might be something to the idea that some ancient stones had carved lines intended to use for sighting astronomical phenomena, but the idea that cyclopean walls the world over are packed with such angles as a calling card of a globe-spanning prehistoric lost culture goes beyond belief. Imagine the sheer amount of planning it would take to carve every rock to a specific angle—to a thousandth of a degree!—rather than simply making best-fit adjustments.
 
And what is the message? The article doesn’t say. The only message it suggests is akin to “Kilroy was here.”
 
Finally today I have a follow up to share about Scott Wolter’s claim that he recently had a speculative article about a secret code he discovered on the Kensington Rune Stone published in a “peer reviewed” Masonic journal. You will recall that on July 2, Wolter announced that his paper had been published in the Rocky Mountain Mason, which he described as a “peer reviewed Masonic journal.” The editor of that publication confirmed that the journal is, as most of us already knew, not peer reviewed in the academic sense, or really any sense.
 
Several interested parties (though not me) contacted Rocky Mountain Mason editor Ben Williams about Wolter’s claim. I have received permission to share this statement from Williams:
 
“The Mason is not a scholarly journal, but a quarterly periodical for Freemasons.  Although submissions are subject to an editorial review board, I cannot claim the publication meets the standards of peer review or academic journals particular to a specialty or subject area.”
 
Williams, however, said that Wolter’s article was interesting and to his mind a well-documented discussion of history.
 
And there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth: The Rocky Mountain Mason disputes Wolter’s description of it as a “peer-reviewed” journal.