Today I’d like to direct you to Rebecca Bradley’s excellent blog post dissecting Ancient Aliens talking head Andrew Collins’s fanciful claims about the Densiovans as civilization-bestowing Bible giants. Her analysis is clear and compelling and shows just how badly Collins misrepresents scientific data in order to develop a fake narrative of a prehistoric empire of overgrown wizard-sages. “Every source that Collins referenced in this paper was either misrepresented, misunderstood, or mangled at the outset,” Bradley concludes, and she has the evidence to prove it.
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Perhaps more than any year in recent memory, 2019 was the year in which fringe history stopped being fringe and went completely mainstream. This year, we saw pseudohistory and conspiracy theories top the literary bestseller lists, multiply across cable channels like mushrooms on a rotten log, and attract record crowds to traveling carnivals masquerading as pseudohistory “fan” conventions. It perfectly captures the tenor of the times for the post-truth era that the very notions of fact and fiction ceased to have meaning. This was a long, hard year, both for the world and also for me personally. After dealing with family health problems, buying and selling a house (and still not being able to close on selling the old one until early 2020, nearly half a year after the sale), writing two books, and a knot of lawyers for many different developments, I am ready for this unpleasant year to end. Let’s look back in anger:
Andrew Collins has a new article at Ancient Origins speculating about Denisovans and their alleged influence on ancient Homo sapiens. The news peg revolves around a new study published last week in Nature in which the authors performed a genetic study concluding that the non-Indo-European inhabitants of south and southeast Asia have significantly more Denisovan DNA than the Indo-European populations that entered those areas later in history, and the two populations also differ in terms of the branch of Denisovan DNA they include in their genome. In short, the study reflects earlier assumptions and conclusions about Indo-European incursions onto Asia and their relatively higher sociocultural status. Collins summarizes the Nature piece and then decides that it proves Indian myths are actually about Denisovan Nephilim-style cannibal giants.
This week, Nephilim hunter and Christian bigot Steve Quayle visited the Evangelical extremist broadcaster SkyWatch.tv to discuss UFOs, cataclysms, and giants, as well as the True Legends conference he held in America’s conservative entertainment capital, Branson, Mo., a few weeks ago. The True Legends conference builds on Quayle’s True Legends brand of Christian Ancient Aliens knockoff products, which like much of the Christian entertainment market involves copying something secular, adding sanctimony and hypocrisy, and reducing the quality by 40-50%. Things got off to a great start when Quayle told viewers that he believes that we live in a holographic universe dominated by demons who have created a “hell-ographic” world, and that UFO disclosure is imminent because Satan is using demon-driven flying saucers to undermine believe in Nephilim giants.
It’s been a while since we checked in with Nephilim theorist L. A. Marzulli, who has spent much of the past few months promoting radical right-wing conspiracy theories about politics. But he’s back with a new DVD in his series On the Trail of the Nephilim. This video, billed as Episode 2, covers the “Mathematical Mysteries of the Moundbuilders.” Coming on the heels of Graham Hancock’s new book America Before, which covers much of the same material, it’s like looking to a funhouse mirror version of Hancock, where all of Hancock’s efforts to give credit to Native Americans for at least building on the inheritance of Atlantis have been replaced with an unalloyed Victorian insistence that barbarous Natives couldn’t possibly have piled dirt into earthworks without help from fallen angels and giants.
The British Express tabloid recently offered up yet another in the endless list of places where the lost continent of Atlantis is alleged to be. Discussing as though it were new a March 16, 2018 appearance on Coast to Coast AM by Ryan Pitterson, an evangelical Christian Nephilim theorist, the Express quoted Pitterson as saying that Atlantis was located in the Holy Land and that its people were identical with the antediluvian giants fathered by the Sons of God in the sixth chapter of Genesis.
Have you seen that Jim Vieira and Hugh Newman are running a tour of Egypt later this year? For $4,400, you, too, can spend twelve days investigating “earth energies,” “esoteric mysteries,” and “strange accounts of giants being found in prehistoric tombs.” Vieira and Newman advertise the trip as a chance to hobnob with “the stars of History Channel’s Ancient Aliens & Search for the Lost Giants,” but I am more interested in the fact that they plan to frame their adventure around following the footsteps of the “Followers of Horus.”
Andrew Collins has made something of a career out of rewriting the same book over and over again, with slightly different material keyed to whatever was the most recent archaeological controversy or discovery at the time of writing. It was not too long ago that Collins delivered a book on Göbelki Tepe (my review: Part 1 and Part 2), in which he suggested that the Denisovans, a different species in the genus Homo known from only a few bone fragments, are the mysterious Nephilim of the Bible and the civilizing god-kings who bequeathed the arts and sciences to a benighted line of Homo sapiens. Apparently delighted by this claim, Collins has rewritten the same material into a new book called Denisovan Dawn, coauthored by gigantologist and Edgar Cayce acolyte Greg Little, and due out from publishing dumpster fire Inner Traditions in September. Collins first published his new claims in August on Ancient Origins and is currently promoting a presentation he plans to give on the subject later this spring.
Secrets and Riddles of Ancient History: Great Powers of Forgotten Worlds Jennifer S. Dawson | Camea Publishing | December 2018 | $2.99 eBook In some respects, self-publishing has been a boon in terms of providing a path for voices outside the mainstream to share their points of view. But mostly online eBook self-publishing has resulted in tens of thousands of half-assed click-bait titles of middling to low quality. The author Jennifer S. Dawson—apparently a pen name for a non-English-speaking author—churns out a remarkable number of books in the “ancient mysteries” genre, covering topics familiar to readers of 1970s volumes on similar subjects. I’d try to address the books by theme, but they are a hodgepodge of short articles on unrelated topics united only in their general connection to lost civilizations, ancient astronauts, and other such threadbare “mysteries.” Secrets and Riddles of Ancient History: Great Powers of Forgotten Worlds, recently published, is representative of both the author’s handling of mysteries and the carelessness that characterizes so many attempts to exploit the ancient mysteries genre.
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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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