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Review of "Mysteries of the Tayos Caves" by Alex Chionetti

1/21/2020

27 Comments

 
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Mysteries of the Tayos Caves: Lost Civilizations Where the Andes Meet the Amazon
Alex Chionetti | Bear & Company | Dec. 2019 | 272 pages | ISBN: 9781591433569 | $20
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Publishers don’t share all of their new books with me, so I don’t always get to read all of the books that might be relevant to this blog before they are published. Ever since Andrew Collins complained that I gave one of his books a negative review prior to publication, Inner Traditions, one of the biggest purveyors of pseudohistory and New Age claptrap in the publishing industry, has stopped making available for review their books on themes related to archaeology and ancient history prior to publication, presumably to stop me from reviewing them. Therefore, I had to wait to read a new book published last month by Bear & Company, a division of Inner Traditions. The book is called Mysteries of the Tayos Caves by Alex Chionetti, and it deserves notice for two reasons: First, because of who Chionetti is and second, because of who endorsed his book. The actual content of the book is nothing you haven’t seen before on Ancient Aliens and Expedition Unknown, and for good reason, as we shall see.
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Regular readers will remember Ecuador’s Tayos Caves because of their close connection with a collection of false claims, fake legends, and lies popularized by ancient astronaut theorist Erich von Däniken in his 1973 book The Gold of the Gods. In that book, von Däniken falsely claimed to have descended into the cave system under the guidance of Juan Moricz and visited a golden library of books and statues created by space aliens. The befuddled priest Father Crespi, who collected hoax copper and tin art that he wrongly believed to be ancient Old World artifacts from the Tayos Cave is, sadly, another fraudulent part of the story thanks to Von Däniken. Von Däniken later confessed to Playboy magazine that he had never actually visited the caves, and Moricz admitted to making up the story of the golden library. Nevertheless, a dedicated group of believers have tried for the past four decades to find the golden library, with no success. Neil Armstrong led an expedition that concluded nothing mysterious lay within the caves, and even the team from Ancient Origins was forced into the same conclusion after their explorations of the cave system turned up nothing but rocks.
 
Here is how Bear & Company describes the book, a summary good enough to save me typing:

Sharing his more than 30 years of research into the Tayos Caves as well as his own explorations, Alex Chionetti examines the legends and mysteries associated with this site and the explorers who have ventured within. He details the discovery of the Tayos Cave complex by Hungarian explorer Janos Juan Moricz in the 1960s, including Moricz’s claims of finding a metal library with books of gold. Exploring the oral tradition of the Shuar, he explains how this region was the possible origin of Incan culture and the legend of El Dorado. The author shares his own dangerous explorations within the Tayos Caves, and, drawing on unpublished interviews with speleologist Julio Goyén Aguado, he reconstructs the expeditions of the 1960s and ’70s, revealing the Mormon Church’s search for lost tablets, a British army incursion, and sightings of paintings, gold statues and skeletons, copper plates, and a quartz sarcophagus--treasures akin to the Crespi treasure. The author also shares details from Stanley Hall’s suspicious expedition in 1976, which included astronaut Neil Armstrong.

Investigating the lost civilizations behind the Tayos treasures, Chionetti explores the possible connections to Atlantis, aliens, Ancient Astronauts, and the Hollow Earth theory; the caves’ links with hermetic societies; and claims of tunnel networks that extend thousands of miles through both American continents, from the Rocky Mountains to Patagonia. Sharing a real-life adventure story wilder than an Indiana Jones plot, the author shows that Earth’s ancient past has many secrets waiting to be uncovered.
The book carries an endorsement from Douglas Preston, the author of The Lost City of the Monkey God, a global bestseller that perpetuated some mid-twentieth-century fictions about the so-called White City of Honduras, a fictitious ancient site. Preston called Mysteries of the Tayos Caves “a gripping read,” and “fascinating,” though in the strictest sense that doesn’t imply anything about the quality of the content or its conclusions.
 
This is astonishing, though, since the author of the book, Alex Chionetti, is a longtime ufologist and ancient astronaut theorist from Ancient Aliens who believes in bug-shaped space aliens, as the Los Angeles Times documented a quarter-century ago. Good to know the company Preston keeps, or at least will lend his name to.
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The author, cosplaying Indiana Jones, in a 2010 "Ancient Aliens" episode.
In addition to appearing on camera, Chionetti is a former producer or researcher on Ancient Aliens, Expedition Unknown, and Destination Truth. He bills himself as an “award-winning journalist” because an essay he wrote won an award in 1978, according to the Explorers Club, where he has lectured on the Tayos Caves at least twice. The Argentina-born Chionetti has written about the Tayos Caves, primarily in Spanish, for decades. His former program, Expedition Unknown, ventured to the Tayos Caves in 2018 and correctly determined that nothing artificial lay within. Apparently, Chionetti disagrees with former colleague Josh Gates on this point, although Chionetti credits himself on his LinkedIn page as the researcher for the episode and the person who proposed the concept to Gates, the executive producer.
 
But what is astonishing is that, if you believe his boasts, Chionetti is a secret sauce connecting every crazy-quilt brand of pseudohistorical idiocy masquerading as science for four decades. Chionetti has appeared on Ancient Aliens as a talking head. He claims to be a disciple of J. Allen Hynek. He claims to be the discoverer of the pre-Inca sites featured a decade later on Expedition Unknown as Josh Gates’s “discovery.” He claims to be an “expert” on both UFOs and apparitions of the Virgin Mary. He wrote books about lost civilizations and parallel worlds. He claims in his new book to pray to Father Crespi’s ghost for guidance, holding him to be a Catholic folk saint.
 
And here’s the kicker: He produces news for Univision.
 
It goes without saying that the guy who wrote the forward to the book describes Chionetti as a “flesh-and-blood Indiana Jones.” Chionetti dresses the part in public.
  
I have to say, discovering that Expedition Unknown and Ancient Aliens share a producer and that the producer is a looney tune who believes in bug-shaped space aliens shouldn’t surprise me. And yet, it kind of does. I keep hoping that their idiocy and ignorance are due to cynical audience exploitation, but I keep finding a firewall of true believers who have cast a weird spell over large corporations and, intentionally or not, have created a self-perpetuating machine where pseudoscience belief begets pseudoscience series whose existence then justifies believing both in the false claims and that audiences, trained by decades of similar shows, won’t accept anything other than myths and lies. Alan Landsburg of In Search of Ancient Astronauts and In Search of… was perhaps the first, and Chionetti is an unheralded follower in those footsteps. Kevin Burns of Ancient Aliens and Curse of Oak Island is a more famous follower.

So, let’s be clear: Through Chionetti, there is no more than a degree or two of separation between properties and figures as diverse as To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, Erich von Däniken and his spinoff Ancient Aliens, Josh Gates (twice!), the Skinwalker Ranch crew, and now Douglas Preston and the White City myth. And the most important connection of all isn’t Chionetti himself (being more symptom than cause) but rather the ecosystem he represents—cable TV. Everything he has touched has been part of or promoted by a handful of big companies: A+E Networks and NatGeo (both parts of the Disney empire), Comcast, and Discovery Communications.
 
I must say, though, that I found it hilarious that Chionetti says he decided to write this book after all of his former TV employers, including A+E Networks, NatGeo, and Discovery, passed on his plans for a documentary about the Tayos Caves. They had, after all, already produced multiple shows featuring the caves, many as part of shows he worked on.
 
So, what about the book itself? Well, I’m not sure how Preston could describe it as “gripping.” (To be fair, book blurbs are often written by celebrities who have never read the book, which is not an excuse.) It is not an adventure book. It is not a coherent narrative. It is not fun to read. It is very obviously not originally written in English, and the prose is awkward in places and in dire need of a more fluid rewrite. (Its original Spanish composition and subsequent and apparently quite literal translation are only acknowledged on the copyright page.) It is not always easy to tell when Chionetti is stating a bizarre belief he actually holds and when he is speaking metaphorically. For example, he seems to believe that Percy Fawcett attained immortality and lives in an underground city in the Amazon, but he might be speaking about his spirit. It’s not written clearly enough to tell whether he believes the stories he claims to relate from local lore. The same goes for the speculative claims offered for the Tayos Caves, including Phoenician, Israelite, and other Old World connections. He seems to speak as though he believes them plausible, but at the same time never commits to it, following the roundabout style more popular in Latin America and Continental Europe than in the U.S. and U.K. of indirect analysis and saying very little with a large number of words.
 
It’s also not a good sign that he praises Theosophy for its special insights.
 
Neither is the book a narrative of adventure in the manner of Lost City of the Monkey God. Parts tell stories, briefly, of the author getting chase by hostile natives, but they are interrupted by pasted-in articles from the 1960s and 1970s, long interviews that go nowhere, and asides not relevant to the story. There isn’t much of a through line so much as the book is a collection of somewhat-related essays about fifty-year-old controversies that have never led to anything other than a paycheck for ancient astronaut theorists.
 
Much of the book is dedicated to telling the story of the men who have hunted for the cave’s treasures, starting with Juan Moricz, a Hungarian expatriate who initially wanted to find (sigh) a lost white race that he believed were the true indigenous Americans. He became enthusiastic about Mormonism for a while due to the Mormons’ belief that the Americas’ first peoples were a lost white race. That, in the end, is why Moricz believed that the caves were the home of a superior and vanished race called the Taltos and had connections to the Great Flood of Noah and (of course) ancient Magyars, i.e. Hungarians like Moricz, whom he felt were the descendants of the superior race. Chionetti even notes that Moricz was repeating Nazi claims about Andean cultures and their imagined connection to the Aryan race, but stops short of seeing this as problematic. Similarly, he reports suspicion that Father Crespi was a Nazi and had a trove of art stolen by Nazis and again offers no concern.
 
Chionetti, of course, doesn’t think there is anything weird or unsavory about any of this but instead puzzles over why there were no written documents of the grand ancient civilization.
 
At one point, he almost seems to stumble onto a relevant question when looking for evidence of the “metal library”: “How is it possible that a collection of Salesians, revisionists, journalists, and profiteers conspired to make known the story of the plates, especially when these resurfaced after Moricz and Aguado’s death? Are these plates really from the metallic library in the Tayos Cave?” But Chionetti can’t overcome the fault at the heart of most fringe types: He believes in people rather than evidence. Unable to believe that someone could lie to him, he claims to get “goosebumps” imagining that the various fraudsters, profiteers, and Nazi-adjacent types are telling “nothing but the truth.” The ambiguity of Chionetti’s position is best summed up by his oddly phrased admission that “My doubts go back and forth.” By the end of the book, he states that he has come to no conclusion about the fake legend of the caves invented in 1969. He states with seeming seriousness that he thinks the caves contain a portal to another dimension, so that some visitors enter a golden library and others find only rocks—but in the same section he also dismisses such portals as hallucinations! It’s maddeningly incoherent.
 
The end of the book sees Chionetti hire a remote viewer (in the manner of Hal Puthoff’s “research”) to “investigate” the caves psychically. Then he talks about a “curse” now imagined to affect those who explore the cave. Having explored magical thinking for two chapters, he ends by deciding that the complete lack of evidence for space aliens or lost Atlantis-like civilizations proves only that “the truth is still down there,” a truth he alleges can never be known.
 
Chionetti is no scholar, and his analysis rarely stretches beyond the superficial. He overstates his case regularly, falsely claiming, for example, that Gold of the Gods “made von Däniken a star,” when it was his Chariots of the Gods and the subsequent TV special and media tour that did so. His research rarely goes beyond common published sources and a few personal interviews. There is no bibliography. His critical thinking is entirely absent. But he forestalls my criticism in an epilogue condemning the “negativity” of skeptics, alleging that such criticism “obstruct[s] human progress,” unlike, say, Ancient Aliens, which is of course responsible for dozens of innovations such as … Oh, right. None.
 
On the plus side, the book is a complete collection of the relevant facts, documents, and actors involved in the Tayos Caves phenomenon, something not fully explored in other sources. It also provides an unintentional portrait of the fringe history industry, with its grifters, deluded true believers, and the ever-present force of the publishing and cable television industries. Mysteries of the Tayos Caves teaches us a bit about the secret cabal of true believers that push cable TV toward the intellectually dishonest, and it also removed whatever residual respect I had for Douglas Preston’s literary judgment. So, I guess that made it worth the couple of hours it took me to read through this very short book.
27 Comments
Carl Feagans link
1/21/2020 10:03:48 am

Thanks for the review! I'll probably actually purchase the book based on it, though probably not for the reasons the author would like :)

Reply
Joe Scales
1/21/2020 10:35:09 am

"Publishers don’t share all of their new books with me, so I don’t always get to read all of the books that might be relevant to this blog before they are published. Ever since Andrew Collins complained that I gave one of his books a negative review prior to publication, Inner Traditions, one of the biggest purveyors of pseudohistory and New Age claptrap in the publishing industry, has stopped making available for review their books on themes relate to archaeology and ancient history prior to publication, presumably to stop me from reviewing them."

Why attempt to position yourself so heroically, when you know the real reason you no longer receive books from certain publishers to review is due to your penchant for ignoring review embargos.

Reply
Brooksie
1/21/2020 12:25:05 pm

When did Jason ignore an embargo in the past?

Reply
Jason Colavito link
1/21/2020 12:37:55 pm

Inner Traditions isn't targeting me, Joe. After Collins complained, they pulled all their archaeology/ancient history galleys from their media site for all users. No one except specially selected critics can review them. This didn't affect their other categories.

Reply
Joe Scales
1/21/2020 02:35:18 pm

"... presumably to stop me from reviewing them."

That sure sounds like targeting to me.

Jason Colavito link
1/21/2020 02:46:56 pm

Well, Collins did complain about me specifically.

Joe Scales
1/21/2020 03:04:36 pm

Then we're back to Inner Traditions targeting you specifically because of Collins, and in doing so revised their policy in general. This is all assumption on your part either way... with a side of vanity. Might also be what rubs some the wrong way.

Jr. Time Lord
1/21/2020 04:21:38 pm

jOE SCALES
1/21/2020 03:04:36 pm

"Then we're back to Inner Traditions targeting you specifically because of Collins, and in doing so revised their policy in general. This is all assumption on your part either way... with a side of vanity. Might also be what rubs some the wrong way."

WOW!!! A lecture on rubbing people the wrong way from the joe Scales character. What's this world coming to?

Lieutenant Colonel Obvious
1/21/2020 03:21:47 pm

Colavito is a widely acknowledged thorn in the side of fringe authors. Acknowledging this has rational people thinking in terms of reality instead of vanity when it comes to pondering the policy of fringe presses regarding the release of materials. Of course Joe Kent will sink his teeth into this issue like a pit bull rather than discussing the actual review of the book. Another hijack play.

Reply
Jim
1/21/2020 03:35:06 pm

https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/presumably

presumably

used to convey that what is asserted is very likely though not known for certain.

Reply
An Anonymous Nerd
1/21/2020 06:59:23 pm

So....On one side there's a fellow who believes that bug-shaped aliens live on Earth, dresses like Indiana Jones, appears on Ancient Aliens, has authored a book asserting belief in the reality of what amounts to a fictional spirit cave with stuffs from dem aliens in it, and so forth. On the other side is Jason Colavito.

Personally of those two it'd seem that it's Mr. Colavito that greater-deserves the benefit of the doubt.

-An Anonymous Nerd

Reply
Bertha
1/21/2020 11:19:36 am

_that the producer is a looney tune who believes in bug-shaped space aliens-

On zillions of planets there can be no such life? Who is the looney here?

Reply
Jason Colavito link
1/21/2020 12:38:52 pm

He believes that bug-shaped aliens are active on the Earth, not that there might be some somewhere in the depths of space.

Reply
Mogimbo
1/21/2020 12:53:10 pm

I am a long-time occasional reader of this blog. And even though I don't follow any of the shows reviewed or will most likely never read any of the books reviewed either I often find something interesting to read, and I appreciate the effort put into researching the history of kooky claims and also the larger context of many fringe beliefs (lost civilizations, racism, etc). I wish the comment section contained a little less shit-flinging but hey, I admit to enjoying some of it. I wish you the best of luck with recent house related breakages and am looking forward to a resolution to the unnameable, sword-peddling charlatan's shenanigans, preferably with a big ol' SLAPP on the wrist. Be well.

Reply
Machala
1/21/2020 02:51:57 pm

Jason said: " ...It is not a coherent narrative. It is not fun to read. It is very obviously not originally written in English, and the prose is awkward in places and in dire need of a more fluid rewrite. (Its original Spanish composition and subsequent and apparently quite literal translation are only acknowledged on the copyright page.)..."

Jason, I read this "book" in the Spanish language galley proof and believe me, it is NOT any better in Spanish. Chionetti fancies himself as a writer ... unfortunately his aspirations and conceits fall far short of reality - in any language.

The English translation is a result of the publisher and author being too cheap to hire a decent translator and instead resort to using Google Translate.

I'm not going to even comment on the crap-for-content in the book. You've done an excellent job of reviewing that "stuff". You've saved your readers the time and expense of wading through Chionetti's disjointed ramblings.

Reply
Pat Jeffries
1/23/2020 09:22:09 pm

I have a legal background and I work for Alex Chionetti and I would like to know how you got that Spanish galley proof from the publisher?

Reply
Homer Sextown
1/23/2020 09:49:09 pm

He got it from your mom. It was an all-inclusive package.

FIFY
1/21/2020 05:07:03 pm

"presumably to stop me from reviewing them."

"presumably to stop me from publishing reviews before the embargo date."

Reply
JasonColavito link
1/21/2020 05:27:24 pm

There is no embargo on their books. They are publicly available on their official Scribd account. You can read them yourself.

Reply
FIFY
1/21/2020 09:54:54 pm

Embargoes are on reviews, not books. You are basically saying that when books are for sale you can buy them. That's been the system forever.

Jason Colavito link
1/21/2020 10:49:44 pm

No, that's not what I said. They make the galley proofs of their books available about 4 or 5 months ahead of publication. They post the galleys publicly on their Scribd account. There is no embargo on reviews. They stopped doing that only for the archaeology/ancient mysteries titles. All the others are still offered for prepublication review.

Graham
1/22/2020 08:34:47 am

Thanks for the review, definitely will not be asking for that book anytime in the future.

Your observations about the 'closed shop' in fringe TV remind my of Jeb Card's comments about how the same names keep turning up in UFO related fringe topics.

Reply
Kal
1/22/2020 07:17:50 pm

Just how is this site even a threat to the ancient aliens people's bottom line? It sounds more like the book reviews people banned all unsolicited blog critics, not just this one. The only reason this one happens to come up a lot is because bot traffic to search engines. It doesn't make an impact on ratings. No way can it do that. He is just one blogger, a rather prolific one, but just one, and the 'fan base' here is about a dozen people, with the rest being copies. It is more likely the authors and publishers of fringe books are paranoid about everyone, regardless of whether or not they'd lose book sales also.

Reply
Alex E.Chionetti link
1/23/2020 11:56:40 am

Jason :Your debauching review is not really objective at all, but subjective and we could call personal frustration.

First at all the best authors who reviewed and endorsed my book were objective when they means what they quote, as I verified before blurbs were published.

I will not denied I was and still an ufologist , but if you really read the book I separated both fields ,may be you were so confused. But before been ufologist, and explorer or outer and inner worlds, physical and non physical.

Seems you browse my contributions and lectures for a longtime,and that one you quote is from Los Angeles Times (1990's) one I was looking to sue the author as he was also vicious ,racist and personalized against as he was a film industry reviewer with subjetive and hidden inuendos on my presentation.

You don't remember but years ago I wrote recommended also by a researcher of the "Intraterrestrial Worlds" and expert on Tayos , who praised your work. My letter then was looking solace in the deserted crazy pampas of documentary television.
But when I saw that most of your followers were nastier than both of us together, I didn't comment or was interested in your site.

I'm glad you mentioned that Gates did a program based in my recommendation and association with his previous show "Destination Truth: were I supposed to bring him to the caves. Unfortunately I pitched to Travel before his times, and now is in Discovery Channel, network who always ignored me--as you mentioned --when I brought the topic several decades ago, but now the are cashing with the bias episode of "Expedition: Unknown", by the way I don't have any association with them, neither with Univision. For your info I have been news producer all my life, but also with this I don't mix the oil with the carving waters of the caves...
Yes, I brought the topic when consultant for Ancient Aliens", and after the disaster of the pro anglo and conspiratory side of the story ,I rarely back to that show who continue hack themselves and my contributions from previous seasons, used or unused. It was not easy to convince the executive producers to cover this topic, and was not their fear to expose the darkest corner of Daniken 's repertoire.

Also my book have a bibliography if you really read it again,and this translated version is abridged of a 400 pages in an span of ten years. I never said I m an scholar, but I have been researching Tayos all my life, and I have been the first to published many of the "essays" you mentioned. I brought the subject with me ,and I regret I introduced to the American public,in lectures and I hoped better media than the ones you trash.
Is true I was disciple of Dr.Allen Hynek when I was student overseas before migrating to this country,,and I was the one who originally brought the concept of a series on him and Project Blue Book in 2015 to History/A&E (you could see many articles I wrote about, and may be was the reason I tried to do a comment in your swampy treads of comments.

Let me know if I forgot something to comment.

Thanks for reading.
Alex

Reply
Joe Scales
1/23/2020 03:21:11 pm

Dude, I really dig the hat.

Reply
Jr. Time Lord
1/23/2020 11:37:51 pm

At first glance the photo looks like Jack Black in Jumanji.

Reply
Warren Anthony Warren
1/24/2020 10:46:18 pm

At first jack I jack to anyone Jack or anyone black because I'm a hack.

I ate the plums in the refrigerator.

Reply

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