Weekend Odds and Ends

Last week saw the last new episode of Ancient Aliens for 2019. The episode trended down from the previous week, bringing in 897,000 viewers, compared to 925,000 for the Tucker Carlson episode the week before. The numbers suggest that at least some of the previous week’s viewer spike was attributable to Carlson fans tuning in, but the numbers are so small that the greater part is probably due to random fluctuation. In Search Of had 963,000 viewers for its final episode of the season. Meanwhile, the Science Channel conspiracy fringe history series Unexplained + Unexplored trended up to 441,000 viewers for its episode hunting the alleged killer of Meriwether Lewis.

Meanwhile, a British-based producer for the series Relic Hunters (not to be confused with Tia Carrere’s old Relic Hunter action drama) contacted me for information about Jean de Châlons and the conspiracy theory that the Knights Templar escaped from France with galleys full of treasure. Regular readers will remember that Jean was a Templar whom the pope had tortured in order to get dirt on the Order, and Jean told them a bunch of fantastical stories, including one about several galleys of treasure leaving France. Oh, the joy. Yet another Templar conspiracy show.

It’s been a very long week for me, starting with more than two feet of snow falling and ending with a backlog of work that needs to be done. Therefore, I will leave you with this video from catastrophist Randall Carlson, a colleague of Graham Hancock’s, that was shot in May and released online last week. There is little to comment on here that hasn’t been said before, but see how many logic errors you can find in the twelve-minute clip. Just for starters, he begins by accepting Plato’s allegory of Atlantis as factual history (but not Panchaea—for shame!) and then proceeds to ask why there is “no history” from the time before written records, except for oral stories and myths. (Gee, I wonder.) He alleges that catastrophes have wiped out every trace of prior cycles of advanced civilization, though he declines to explain the infrastructure of said civilization and how comets and volcanoes could eliminate every nut, bolt, and screw; destroy every domesticated animal; and burn away all traces, even the very pollen, of the domesticated plant species they would have had to farm to feed such a civilization. Where are the alterations in the record of the environment from their agriculture and industry? In other words, beyond temples and fortresses, there should be many other traces of a lost global Atlantis-like civilization, and no disaster could both destroy all of them and leave enough humans to carry on in its aftermath.   
 
But it is interesting that the “magic disaster” hypothesis—so similar to God’s promise in Genesis 6 to wipe clean the face of the Earth—is having a moment in the fringe history world. I guess the lack of evidence is wearing on advocates of Atlantis and they are casting about for ways to lose a continent without having to provide proof that it ever was.