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Some Random Thoughts on the Persistence of Fringe Ideas

2/16/2016

15 Comments

 
One of the recurring themes in fringe history is the way that ideas echo down the generations, repeating over time. In an article this morning, Nick Redfern illustrated the way fringe beliefs transfer from one generation to the next, with an assist from the media. Redfern describes how, when he was 13 in 1978, he and his father went to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which prompted the elder Redfern to describe an alleged UFO incident he experienced in 1952. The younger Redfern attributed to this combination of a powerful movie and a personal story his own interest in UFOs and his subsequent career in writing about aliens and monsters.
I didn’t have quite the same experience, but my introduction to the world of the weird was similarly due to the way old ideas echo down the years. My father was a big fan of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery as a young man in the early 1970s and subsequently watched Serling’s In Search of Ancient Astronauts, the 1973 NBC-TV special that introduced the ancient astronaut theory to a mass TV audience. As a result, he joined a book club that sent him a copy of Erich von Däniken’s Gold of the Gods (1973), which I imagine he must have read and thought enough of to pack up and take with him when moving into the house where I grew up. There it sat on the shelf for most of two decades, untouched, until I happened to pick it up. It sits on my bookshelf now, a bit dusty, alongside my collection of other ancient astronaut books.
 
But I wouldn’t have picked that book out of the shelf of them if it weren’t for cable TV and its crazy quilt of kooky claims. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it was the survival of bad ideas, transmitted from one generation to the next that ended up interesting me in ancient astronauts. Rod Serling accidentally was to blame, along with the persistence of paper. I wonder how things will be different in the future when all the “old” things are eBooks that have resolved themselves into an unreadable digital dew.
 
This isn’t really related, but I found this interesting couple of paragraphs in a Victorian book about American archaeology written by the politician, minister, and popular writer John Denison Baldwin, who treated some of the questions of diffusionism with respect to the Phoenicians in America. It’s amazing how little the arguments have changed in 150 years, right down to the whiteness of the civilizers:
The known enterprise of the Phoenician race, and this ancient knowledge of America, so variously expressed, strongly encourage the hypothesis that the people called Phoenicians came to this continent, established colonies in the region where ruined cities are found, and filled it with civilized life. It is argued that they made voyages on the "great exterior ocean," and that such navigators must have crossed the Atlantic; and it is added that symbolic devices similar to those of the Phoenicians are found in the American ruins, and that an old tradition of the native Mexicans and Central Americans described the first civilizers as "bearded white men," who "came from the East in ships." Therefore, it is urged, the people described in the native books and traditions as "Colhuas" must have been Phoenicians.
 
But if it were true that the civilization found in Mexico and Central America came from people of the Phoenician race, it would be true also that they built in America as they never built any where else, that they established a language here radically unlike their own, and that they used a style of writing totally different from that which they carried into every other region occupied by their colonies. All the forms of alphabetical writing used at present in Europe and Southwestern Asia came directly or indirectly from that anciently invented by the race to which the Phoenicians belonged, and they have traces of a common relationship which can easily be detected. Now the writing of the inscriptions at Palenque, Copan, and elsewhere in the ruins has no more relatedness to the Phoenician than to the Chinese writing. It has not a single characteristic that can be called Phoenician any more than the language of the inscriptions or the style of architecture with which it is associated; therefore we can not reasonably suppose this American civilization was originated by people of the Phoenician race, whatever may be thought relative to the supposed ancient communication between the two continents and its probable influence on civilized communities already existing here.
Baldwin wasn’t too far ahead of his time, though: He thought the Mound Builders represented a lost race unrelated to “wild” and savage Native Americans. “Those who seek to identify the Mound-Builders with the barbarous Indians find nothing that will support their hypothesis,” he wrongly wrote. He denied, for example, that the Europeans witnessed Natives building true mounds. He also thought that the Chinese had explored ancient America and called it Fusang.
 
Baldwin also wasn’t a big fan of the Atlantis theory. He said that he had a “smile of incredulity” when reading that the Egyptians were allegedly the children of Atlantis, a claim we’ve seen recycled as recently as last fall’s Magicians of the Gods by Graham Hancock. He went on to detail the reasons that only “imaginative minds” would find the Atlantis theory plausible, most notably he emphasized the distinctive differences between Egyptian and Mexican pyramids. It’s all the more amazing that Baldwin wrote in 1872 against all of the arguments Ignatius Donnelly used in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882—a full decade later! This is not as shocking as it at first seems; Baldwin was critiquing Brasseur de Bourbourg, and Donnelly owes no small debt to rewriting the French author’s arguments in English, just as Graham Hancock owes no small debt to Donnelly in rewriting that author’s two most important books as the starting point for his own Fingerprints of the Gods and Magicians of the Gods.
 
The same claims and the same evidence keep repeating, ricocheting down the centuries. It’s particularly galling how little they’ve changed.
15 Comments
Only Me
2/16/2016 01:29:08 pm

Interesting dichotomy of thought from Baldwin. The Atlantis theory was shot down, but Native Americans were dismissed in favor of the lost white race of mound builders.

Did it never occur to him the same arguments he uses to declare Mesoamerican culture as separate from the Phoenicians would also apply to the Native Americans? Or did he truly think Native Americans were unique in their incapacity to form their own civilization?

Reply
Jason Colavito link
2/16/2016 01:54:41 pm

He believed the Mound Builders were Toltecs, so he was ahead of his time to an extent since he didn't think they were a lost white race. On the other hand, he was of his time in hating on Native Americans and wanting to take all their land because they were interlopers.

Reply
Time Machine
2/16/2016 03:01:05 pm

Spielberg made "Close Encounters" because he was genuinely interested in UFOs (Hynek the originator of that phrase got a cameo appearance) just like Spielberg made "Raiders of the lost Ark" because he was genuinely interested in that.

Spielberg must have a strong interest in fringe material because the last Indiana Jones film about the crystal skull strongly reflected the claims of Anna Mitchell-Hedges.



Reply
E,P. Grondine
2/16/2016 03:56:47 pm

Theosophist cult archaeology materials have been mined by fiction writers for a long time. Consider Clive Cussler's books for example.

Reply
Time Machine
2/16/2016 06:33:39 pm

UFOs and Flying Saucers became really popular in 1977 upon the release of "Close Encounters of The Third Kind". I know, I was there.

Reply
Clete
2/16/2016 03:23:41 pm

I to used a movie to fuel an interest in the legend of King Arthur. The movie was "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". I am convinced that Arthur, King of all the Britons, was not elected to be King, but given the sword, Excaliber, by the Lady of the Lake. A soggy tart, lying about in a Pond determined that Arthur should rule.

Reply
Uncle Ron
2/16/2016 03:51:07 pm

I fart in your general direction!

Reply
Ken
2/16/2016 04:06:32 pm

Years ago I read somewhere on the internets that Phoneticians circumnavigated Africa (which I think may be true) but while sailing north up the eastern shore of Africa, several ships blew off course and ended up in the Amazon region of S.A. According to the story, Phonetician artifacts and/or writing were discovered (which probably is not true).
It seemed like cool pseudohistory, but I never see anything about it in my extensive "study" of alternative theories. What ever happened to that 'theory'? I never see anything about it on AA.

Reply
Ken
2/16/2016 04:09:46 pm

Correction - western shore of Africa

Reply
David Bradbury
2/17/2016 08:24:59 am

That a Phoenician/Egyptian expedition circumnavigated Africa, as reported in Herodotus' "Histories", is pretty much unquestionable:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0016,001:4:42
-but note that the voyage took them over two years, so it's unlikely to have been something the Phoenicians undertook on a routine basis.

Reply
David Bradbury
2/17/2016 08:30:27 am

Indeed, in the next chapter, Herodotus tells of a man who gave up on a repeat voyage in the opposite direction, despite being threatened with a painful death if he failed:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0126%3Abook%3D4%3Achapter%3D43
These reports make no mention of any ships being blown out into the Ocean.

Ysne58
2/16/2016 08:44:56 pm

My favorite scene in that 3rd encounters movie was when Richard Dreyfus was shoveling his back yard into the house through the kitchen window. That is a very graphic depiction of how insane this all is.

Reply
Tony
2/17/2016 12:53:04 am

Agreed, it's a terrific scene.

Reply
Mark L
2/23/2016 08:53:48 pm

And yet, in the end HE WAS RIGHT!
(I fart in your general direction)

Reply
El Cid
2/17/2016 12:14:15 am

Crap. I had no idea the Phoenicians were part of these crazy pseudoscience tales.

Reply

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