Tucker Carlson and A. J. Gentile Spread Rehashed Archaeological Conspiracies

​This week, UFO-curious right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson, a former guest on Ancient Aliens, devoted a ninety-minute episode of his eponymous streaming show to the threadbare “mysteries” of giants, pyramids, psychic spies, lost civilizations and the other detritus of History channel pseudo-documentaries. Carlson interviewed A. J. Gentile of The Why Files and the two began the discussion by complaining about the “extreme hostility against alternate (sic) archaeology,” with Gentile expressing outrage at archaeologists for opposing the claims of Graham Hancock, “whose work I admire.” The two men defended Hancock against charges that his work supports white supremacy and then claimed that the accusation was a “slur” designed to “destroy” Hancock as part of a “sinister” effort by archaeologists. This set the tone for the rest of the discussion.

​(As regular readers know, I agree that Graham Hancock is not personally racist and have pointed out that his most recent claims have centered Native Americans as the supposed Atlanteans. However, Hancock has relied heavily on outdated, highly racist sources for his work, introducing racist ideas to new generations.)
 
Gentile, a failed actor turned YouTuber, began his Why Files by attempting to examine conspiracy theories from a rational perspective, but as his channel grew in popularity, he gave up the pretense and now frequently pushes conspiracy theories and Ancient Aliens-style nonsense. This version of Gentile was on full display.

Gentile spun a series of incorrect claims about the Egyptian pyramids, falsely arguing that the first pyramids were “more perfect” than later ones so therefore the first pyramids were the work of a lost civilization. (In reality, pyramids developed in clear phases of progression from mastabas to a step-pyramid to the famous Giza pyramids before entering a long phase of declining quality.) We then hear that we “are not allowed to see” most of the “billion” artifacts held in the Smithsonian, though these are of course cataloged. (The Smithsonian has 155 million items, and 18.5 million items are digitized and available online; the remainder are cataloged on paper at the holding museums. 94% of the items are natural history specimens.) This leads to a discussion of the false conspiracy that the Smithsonian seized and hid the bones of Bible giants, a conspiracy spawned by local yokels sending in their “giant” bones in the nineteenth century, only for the museum to correctly classify them as the bones of mastodons and mammoths upon receipt and send them to the natural history archives. (Others were mismeasured human bones or collections of bones from multiple individuals mistaken for a single body.)
 
A discussion of Bible giants follows, with both men expressing their belief that nefarious atheistic elites are hiding the bodies of Nephilim to prevent the public from witnessing the truth of the Bible.
 
A commercial for a Bible study app follows.
 
After the commercial, we get into the conspiracy theory that the Smithsonian is hiding a lost ancient Egypto-Tibetan (!) civilization in the Grand Canyon, a claim that came from the Arizona Gazette in 1909 and even people of the time recognized was a hoax. Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, knowing the story mostly secondhand, seem unaware of the clear indications that the story is a hoax.
 
The conspiracy theories and wild claims come at such a pace that it’s difficult even to list them, let alone explain all the ways these two chuckleheads ignore facts, evidence, and reason in favor of the most outlandish material from Ancient Aliens and what used to be the lucrative paperback ancient mysteries book market, but is now just other YouTube videos.
 
Listening to Gentile swerve from one outlandish idea to the next is like speed-running an entire season of Ancient Aliens on fast forward. Here’s a rundown in rough order of presentation of the topics Gentile and Carlson discussed:

• Gentile claims that Native American cultures have Far Eastern cultural traits and art styles, a claim originating in the nineteenth century and occasionally floated in academic circles as recently as the middle twentieth century.
• They both discuss whether Easter Island birdmen are fallen angels from the Book of Enoch.
• Gentile claim that ancient Vedic texts describe working plans for airplanes, a false idea from a century ago, originating in a hoax text from the 1920s.
• They spend a long time discussing conspiracy theories about the Great Pyramid, many of which were old when Charles Piazzi Smyth used them in the 1860s.
• Gentile claims that a “legend” from Herodotus states that the Egyptian Labyrinth at Hawara dates back “before the Zep Tepi,” the first time. This is not quite what Herodotus said and seems to fuse Graham Hancock with Herodotus, who in Histories 2.147-148 said that the Egyptians refused to tell him who built the Labyrinth, being the tomb of ancient kings, but since he found it to be of more than human greatness, he heard secondhand from “other nations” that it was built by the twelve kings who followed Hephaestus. This would be in the mythical period of the gods after the founding of Egypt tens of thousands of years prior. Gentile claims “we” are “not allowed down there” because there is a 150-foot metallic ring that archaeologists are trying to hide. (In 2008, a scan suggested that a 40-meter-long lozenge-shaped metallic object sits below Hawara , but archaeologists consider that interpretation of the data speculative.)
• Gentile falsely claims that the Egyptians are “incurious” about their monuments (Egyptians love their cultural heritage and actively manage it), and Carlson adds that the U.S. government provides large amounts of aid to Egypt in order to control access to ancient material and forbid alternative researchers from exploring.
• The two men express shock that the Epic of Gilgamesh contains a version of the Flood narrative similar to that of Noah, a fact known for 150 years. Instead of concluding that this was a widespread Near Eastern myth with many variants, they instead see it, as the Victorians did, as proof Noah’s Flood really happened.
• They next discuss Göbekli Tepe, Stonehenge, and other ancient stone structures and purport to find it impossible that humans could cut and carve stone without modern technology. Gentile falsely claims that the polish on stones inside various ancient structures is so “immaculate” that “they’re like mirrors.” Arguing that it would simply be too much effort for humans to bother working in teams to cut, lift, and move stones, Gentile claims it is much more likely that they chanted Buddhist frequencies to fly the stones with sonic levitation. (Later, this gets walked back as attractive but unproven.) I get that Gentile and Carlson are lazy folk who have never done a day of hard work and can’t imagine anyone willingly doing so (except, of course, all those unfortunates Carlson wants deported), but this is a very stupid argument. Laziness is not a disproof of effort.
• Gentile then links various ancient structures to Atlantis, following the arguments of Graham Hancock and Ignatius Donnelly, with very little insight beyond those authors’ more extravagant nonsense. In places, he is delivering Hancock’s arguments almost word-for-word, including his infamous popularization of the Yonaguni formation.
• Gentile falsely claims that scholars view history as a “linear progression” from caves to the moonshot, repeating Victorian-era ideas about the evolution of culture that have been out of date for nearly a century. He uses this falsehood to claim scholars are blind to Atlantis and other lost super-civilizations.
• Dear God, we are only halfway through.
• In the second half of the conversation, Gentile moves on to psychic investigations of ancient Egypt, including Edgar Cayce’s “prophecies” (which were really just Theosophical and Rosicrucian material lightly rewritten) and Dorothy Eady’s claimed visions.
• The men weirdly argue that if an ancient stone artifact (here they are discussing the Sabu disc without remembering what it is or what it is called) looks similar to a modern machine part, then ancient cultures—which they both imply are primitive and stupid—could not have made it and it must be part of an Atlantean machine. (While unique in shape, the Sabu disc is too fragile to have served as a machine part.)
• Gentile claims no one knows how Nan Madol was constructed, though he neglects to say that it was built in the Middle Ages when Europeans were building cathedrals. Somehow, he doesn’t think cathedrals are impossible, despite the architectural challenges.
• The conversation then turns to conspiracy theories about the U.S. government suppressing “energy” technologies to benefit the fossil fuel industry, rehashing old stories about fantastical carburetors that the oil industry wanted suppressed and asserting that the U.S. government forces any energy innovation that is more than “20% efficient” to be classified as a “state secret.” The segment on conspiracies about suppressed energy technologies goes on for a very long time and drifts into conspiracies about Nikola Tesla—because, of course it does. (One of these conspiracies involves Donald Trump’s uncle, John Trump, receiving Tesla’s papers after the U.S. government seized them, and thus sharing super-science secrets with … Donald Trump. In reality, in 1943, the military asked John Trump, an MIT physicist, to review Tesla’s papers to see if they contained anything useful for the war effort, and Trump concluded that the inventions in them were unworkable and of no value.)
• Carlson tries to connect Trump’s Tesla papers review to UFOs because the paper review took place at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, where Project Bluebook was later headquartered, but even Gentile won’t go that far.
• Instead, they turn to remote viewing, which the government researched in the 1970s and 1980s to no good effect. Gentile presents stories of remote viewing that fall somewhere between dubious and fake, depicting remarkable success stories that don’t really find support in the CIA’s own conclusions, which found little to no utility to remote viewing, even assuming the phenomenon is real.
• The discussion of psychic powers goes on for much of the final half-hour of the show. If actual remote viewing were half as successful as Gentile depicts it, we would have remote viewers in every law enforcement agency in the country. But, as I mentioned, it isn’t.
• Gentile brings up a conspiracy theory that the Apollo 11 astronauts saw an alien spaceship on the way to the moon, and the two men discuss whether the moon landing was a fabrication, with Gentile reluctant to go as far as Carlson in that direction.
• The two men conclude that the astronauts did go to the moon but that the government faked much of the public evidence to cover up the discovery of “something”—i.e. alien artifacts, bases, or vehicles—on the moon.
• Gentile and Carlson conclude by agreeing that their interest in conspiracies is driven by their disappointment with the U.S. government and the dishonesty they see coming out of the warmongering elite power structures. They come within a hair’s breadth of understanding that these conspiracy theories are expressions of believers’ feelings of helplessness before large-scale, systemic injustices but never quite get there, instead believing that the conspiracies are justifiable beliefs because everything governments say is a lie. “Whether you’re on the right or the left, really, it’s all kind of a puppet show. It's really about people versus power. And anything that the powerful tell you, don't trust it,” Gentile said.

 
Gentile’s spiel is almost shockingly unoriginal, and his sources, which he repeats with uncanny fidelity, are disconcertingly obvious. Carlson’s comments betray a deeper interest in conspiracy theories and Ancient Aliens-style claims than even his previous commentaries over the past few years displayed.
 
The bigger problem is that Carlson is patronizing this kind of content and spreading it to his millions of viewers, whom he has already primed through his political commentary to believe that liberal elites in government and universities are conspiring to keep them down.