Yesterday J. Hutton Pulitzer, newly minted “forensic historian,” posted a blog explaining why forensics is to henceforth be the gold standard in investigating history. Scott Wolter tried to support his XpLrR partner with a blog post of his own explaining what “forensic geology” is, but like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, they managed to be on different pages and failed to link to one another’s blog posts, or to post their joint responses to their XpLrR.tv website, resulting in an off-brand, off-message rollout for the pair’s corporate partnership.
Wolter’s blog post was a simple recitation of his work history, familiar from several earlier accounts, but it was interesting for him to realize that his audience doesn’t understand what “forensic geology” is despite three seasons of America Unearthed and various media products and appearances where he trumpets his expertise in concrete stability as his qualification for investigating history. He shouldn’t feel bad, though: Audiences have many, many people in them who exhibit surprising lack of attention to detail. Just yesterday a librarian contacted me because a prisoner was looking for my address. Why might that be, I inquired. Oh, oops! The librarian had confused me for Giorgio Tsoukalos.
Pulitzer’s blog post is the stupider of the two, though it repeats most of the same material in lionizing Wolter as a forensic science “superstar” and (ridiculously) as the man who investigated “more archaeological sites in America than any one (sic) else.” (I could name a dozen people who could run laps around him!) It starts with an uncredited borrowing of the U.S. Commerce Department’s logo for forensic science, followed by Wikipedia’s definition of forensics as referring to the “application of science to criminal and civil laws.” Indeed, the word “forensic” refers specifically to the application of a field to criminal investigation, from the earlier use of the Latin forensis to refer to that applicable to places of assembly (the forum), where trials were held. What does this have to do with history? Not much, but Pulitzer thinks it is extremely relevant. Pulitzer said the connection comes through the documentary series Forensic Files. “For me it is a way to understand the various Forensic Sciences and then understand how those same tests can be used in my world of History Hunting,” he writes. Pulitzer confuses “science” with “forensics” and doesn’t understand that the tests he lionizes are the science, and the use of them for criminal investigation is the forensic part. Using them for another purpose negates the forensic aspect, rendering his self-bestowed title of “forensic historian” faintly ridiculous for a man who has never testified as a forensic expert in a court of law. (Wolter has testified occasionally as a forensic expert.) Unfortunately, while Pulitzer reiterates his love for Forensic Files he fails to make a case that forensics—i.e., criminal law and investigation—has anything to do with ancient history; rather, Pulitzer comes across as a man who thinks “forensic” means generically “scientific” and that TV is also reality. The other definition of “forensic,” referring to rhetoric and public speaking, might well be accurate for him, however. I’d also recommend that Pulitzer reconsider his “forensic historian” label. While there are a couple of guys who uses the term to describe investigating historic crimes like Jack the Ripper or (sigh) Kennedy assassination conspiracies, it’s most prominently used by (and trademarked by) Holocaust deniers to “investigate” why Nazi war crimes never occurred. My guess is that Pulitzer borrowed the title from a book by Robert C. Williams: The Forensic Historian: Using Science to Reexamine the Past (2013), which describes how scientists applied techniques developed for investigating crime to evaluate more ancient human remains, as well as crimes just old enough to be historical. In service of my evaluation of Pulitzer as ignorant of the history he claims to investigate, I also want to take a moment to point out that Pulitzer proudly posted to Instagram a macro claiming his pride that his German-American ancestors assimilated into American culture and making ahistorical claims about Italian-American immigrants. Pulitzer, who said “I made this meme. This is me. This IS my statement” in taking credit for it, writes in the macro that “Legal Italian immigrants did not wave Italian flags coming into America. They did not riot and try to stop the legal election process. They did not try to make America speak Italian. They learned English.”
As an Italian-American (and 1/8 German-American), I can tell Mr. Pulitzer that he is a bullshit artist and that his cheap point-scoring deeply disregards the challenges, difficulties, and outright discrimination Italians like my ancestors faced in coming to America. My great-grandparents spoke Italian until the day they died. My grandparents spoke both Italian and English, while their children spoke English only. Assimilation was not a simple process, or an easy one. Italian-Americans lived in segregated neighborhoods at the start of the twentieth century and were excluded from much of public life for decades, largely based on then-prevalent scientific racism, which held that they were an inferior race. (Don’t believe me? Read fringe historian Thomas Sinclair’s statements about Italians in his 1893 “forensic history” of Henry Sinclair.) They were stereotyped as criminals, as lazy, and as lecherous. Police would sometimes decline to investigate the murder of Italians if they thought a white person might have done it.
Pulitzer facetiously compares this to his own postwar experience as the son of immigrants from Germany, but German-Americans rarely faced similar challenges because they were always considered “white” and entered much more easily into American society. Italians only became “white” (or “white” enough) in the middle twentieth century, when scientific racism started to falter and Anglo-Saxons worried that without more provisional whites they’d lose their ethnic majority. All of that was sufficiently depressing that I almost didn’t want to go into the topic I originally planned to write about today, but it’s worth a brief mention. Over at the Daily Grail Jack Hunter of Paranthropology magazine has an article excerpted from a new anthology of Fortean writings he assembled. (Disclosure: Hunter published my article on the ultra-terrestrial UFO hypothesis several years ago.) In his article, Hunter lionizes Charles Fort and argues that there can be a “Fortean” approach to the study of religion. In a nutshell, then, what I am suggesting is that we extend Fortean agnosticism into the domains of ontology, and question the very foundations of what we understand as ‘real.’ In other words, we should not assume that we already know what is really real. Fort’s intermediatist philosophy goes some way towards achieving this kind of ontological destabilisation. According to this perspective nothing can be said to be wholly real, just as nothing can be said to be wholly unreal. This opens up the ontological flood barriers, a process I have referred to elsewhere as ‘ontological flooding.
To cut it short, he would like religious studies departments to adopt the Fortean postmodern view that there is no such thing as objective reality (or at least that we are unable to understand such a reality) and therefore study anomalies, the miraculous, and the supernatural as inherent components of a reality that humans experience. How that differs from studying the belief in such supernatural events, regardless of their objective reality, I am not certain, other than Hunter would like to believe in the magical and therefore would like to force epistemology to accommodate it.
But what I wanted to talk about is the same kind of overconfidence that Hutton Pulitzer represents, where personal interest and belief run roughshod over sober appraisal. Consider Hunter’s overwhelmingly positive—and inaccurate—summary of the glories of Charles Fort: Over the course of four groundbreaking books published between 1919-1932, Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932) meticulously presented thousands of accounts of anomalous events that he found documented in scientific journals, newspapers and books at the New York Public Library and the British Museum. In conducting his wide-ranging textual excavations, Fort uncovered impossible numbers of extraordinary reports of fish and frogs falling from the sky, poltergeists wreaking havoc on unexpecting (sic) families, spontaneous human combustion, unidentified flying objects, levitations of people and things, mysterious disappearances, apparitions, and so on.
Clearly, Hunter thinks Fort was up to something good. (He also praises Jacques Vallée for similar “accomplishments.”) But as I have discovered in reviewing Fort’s research, he is vastly overrated as a researcher, and even as a copyist. In many instances, his version doesn’t quite match his sources, and he rarely traced material back to primary sources, or attempted to confirm the accuracy of articles he cited. At times, he seemed to almost willfully misread sources. Anyone who wishes to hold Fort up as an example needs to deal with the fact that so much of his material isn’t “mysterious” or “anomalistic” at all but rather part of the failure of human perception, in this case Fort’s own.
Recognizing this would, ironically, support the idea that it is very hard for humans to recognize reality while blinded by ideology, so there is an upside to it for Fortean researchers! Lastly, I do want to mention one small production note: Hunter’s anthology, Damned Facts, is decorated with public domain images from the British Library, the same place where I get the images that decorate my website. The copy of Hunter’s book I reviewed did not color-correct the yellowed scans from old books, nor did it rotate the scans to straighten them. It was a bit distracting.
32 Comments
Time Machine
5/24/2016 11:26:12 am
>>ontological flooding
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Clete
5/24/2016 11:56:12 am
The Pulitzer-Wolter "partnership" doesn't sound like a marriage made in heaven, each of them seems to be going their own way, with only lip service to the other.
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Shane Sullivan
5/24/2016 02:21:51 pm
Reciprocal lip service is the cornerstone of any good marriage.
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Jonathan Feinstein
5/25/2016 09:55:45 am
Re the use of "Forensic" by Wolter/Pulitzer:
Pop Goes the Reason
5/24/2016 02:54:49 pm
I wonder if his parents were German at all Philyaw isn't a German name. Ancestry.com says "Americanized spelling of French Filiault; probably a Huguenot name."
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5/24/2016 02:55:24 pm
From Wolter's blog post in question:
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David Bradbury
5/24/2016 05:29:46 pm
It appears the purpose of APS's work on the Pentagon concrete was first to determine whether load-bearing structures needed to be repaired or replaced (answer- replaced), and second to suggest ways of making concrete less vulnerable to high temperatures (for which they supplied several suggestions).
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Joe Scales
5/24/2016 05:59:47 pm
I had read the NatGeo article and all of it's declared content came from Wolter and his APS associate themselves. You can only hope and assume NatGeo vetted it. However, if you read what I posted above and further read the BPS report accordingly, you'll see that they addressed the concerns that Wolter contends he contributed to and they did so apparently without his contribution. Also, if you read the NatGeo report, Wolter claims his contributions ended in December of '01, whereas those who did the work for the BPS report continued their studies up till April of '02. So whether or not Wolter's work amounted to anything, we don't really know. Obviously, the BPS report became the official statement and they had their own petrographic examination of the concrete done by ECS; which specifically contradicts Wolter's recent blog post where he claimed that he and his firm did all of the examination of the concrete from the Pentagon site. So at best with this recent post, you have a misstatement of fact that needs to be corrected by Wolter. At worst, you have an outright lie... which we know he'll never correct.
David Bradbury
5/25/2016 07:35:16 am
This is a classic example of the importance of seeking the Third Way. Wolter's firm was sub-contracted for the Pentagon concrete testing by ECS:
Joe Scales
5/25/2016 10:24:27 am
Thank you Mr. Bradbury. If that press release is accurate, I stand corrected.
Only Me
5/24/2016 05:42:30 pm
C'mon, Joe. This is the same guy who claimed to have an honorary Master's degree for twenty years. Embellishment is not unfamiliar territory.
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Joe Scales
5/24/2016 06:05:01 pm
This time he's embellishing at the expense of ECS, Inc., which I'm sure is a no-no when such a professional, licensed geologist makes a false claim that affects another. Probably not a wise thing to do either, claiming a confidential report to the government unless one actually exists.
Only Me
5/24/2016 05:40:41 pm
Unless they get their act together, I have the impression both Pulitzer and Wolter are partners only in the sense they both are trying to produce content for online streaming. I don't get the impression they will actually be working together *on* that content and will most likely continue on their individual paths.
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tm
5/24/2016 11:35:07 pm
But if they work together, think of the possibilities. With their combined experience and intellect they could locate the legendary Seven Cities of Lead. ;)
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Only Me
5/25/2016 01:42:53 am
I think you're right. Following Pulitzer's treasure hunting guides, Wolter could confirm they're on the right path by looking for old rocks with scratches, which would line up based on archaeoastronomy and his phone app. Why, it will rewrite history!
tm
5/25/2016 09:15:37 am
Yes! I see it!. Alan Butler can handle the pack sheep (who says these guys can't innovate?). Steve St Clair can hang around not doing much of anything except making the others look like geniuses in comparison. Heck, he makes Wolter look almost lifelike.
Clete
5/25/2016 09:42:30 am
Yes, it has always amazed me. When Steve St. Clair speaks, Scott's Wolters mouth hardly moves at all.
Kal
5/24/2016 06:22:30 pm
That picture with the flags most certainly does NOT include French born fake German Mister P. It's from an old Time Life magazine in the archives. Is he being rhetorical, or is he over 80 years old? Anyway.
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Will
5/24/2016 06:22:55 pm
The attention-seeking behavior by these two is hitting levels that should not even be possible.
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5/24/2016 06:29:23 pm
Thanks for taking the time to read and review the book Jason, much appreciated. I think, if it has any applicability at all, Fortean intermediatism and 'ontological flooding' are useful tools for engaginf with the 'paranormal'/'religion'/etc. ethnographically, for immersing yourself as a researcher, and experiencing from the inside. Just a thought, keep up the good work. J.
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Peter Geuzen
5/24/2016 07:51:01 pm
JHP has used all of the following titles over the last year or two - all still visible on or associated with pictures of himself as posted by himself, that still exist like bits of shrapnel on the web:
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Mike Morgan
5/25/2016 10:14:57 am
Peter, you forgot he also claims the occupation of the man whose name he stole, publisher.
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Peter Geuzen
5/25/2016 12:54:55 pm
Mike, you beat me to documenting that period, LOL. I also found the following variations of my list: Expedition Leader / Mission Pilot / Mythochronologist (I’m not sure this is even a real word) / Mission Strategist / Helicopter Recon / Archaelogical (sic) Liason (sic). Between CueCat days and modern times he has also appeared in uniform (a couple variations) wearing insignia of the 22nd Military Airlift Squadron, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, Special Forces Ranger Airborne (stuck on upside down), commercial air first officer insignia, i.e. the co-pilot, not the pilot in command, Secret Squirrel morale patch for covert/intel missions (somewhat generic to military branches and even police), collar rank for U.S. Army Major, and last but not least, the Punisher logo of the Marvel comics character (also used by Navy SEALs and 24th Infantry Regiment).
E.P. Grondine
5/24/2016 08:47:26 pm
Hi Jason -
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tm
5/25/2016 03:29:04 am
It's always nice to be reminded that I made the right decision many years ago when I stopped giving unsolicited advice to others.
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Mike Morgan
5/25/2016 12:17:22 pm
SLAAAAP! A virtual high 5 to you TM.
Rose McDonald
5/25/2016 01:48:18 am
The Wolter-Pulitzer joint (?) venture is like a circular firing squad of two.
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Karl
5/25/2016 09:16:38 am
I seem to recall reading German POWs in America were not only amazingly well treated but actually treated better and given more freedom than black US soldiers guarding them.
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Graffitibird
5/25/2016 09:36:25 am
Well, THAT was awkward.
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Only Me
5/25/2016 06:53:44 pm
Don't mind me. I'm just contacting the nearest burn treatment center on W&P's behalf.
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Graffitibird
5/25/2016 11:19:41 pm
🔥💃🏻 The issue Jason noted about Forensics is more telling than the rest of his article discusses and his subject matter dictates. However, I did note his struggle and private personal contribution in his article as a response to "ontology" once it was "forensically" decentered from the customary solitude of legal "privacy". Please do continue my dear to keep us informed about these matters. Protection from "gendered discourse" terrorism both from the dirty uncivilized masses and the ivory towers deserves a wink and a smile.
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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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