Faking History Read online

  FAKING HISTORY

  Essays on Aliens, Atlantis, Monsters, and More

  by

  Jason Colavito

  Albany

  JasonColavito.com Books

  2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Jason Colavito

  Published by Jason Colavito, Albany, New York

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, in any form whatsoever (except for copying permitted by U.S. copyright law or by reviewers for the public press), without the express written permission of the author.

  Versions of the material included in this book first appeared on JasonColavito.com except as noted below:

  “Who Really Discovered America?”, “Who Lost the Middle Ages?”, “Golden Fleeced,” and “Did Native Americans Discover Europe in 60 BCE” first appeared in Skeptic magazine; “Of Atlantis and Aliens” first appeared in Swans magazine.

  www.JasonColavito.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Of Atlantis and Aliens: Alternatives to History as Cultural Mirror

  2. The Origin of the Space Gods

  3. Pauwels, Bergier, and Lovecraft

  4. Cthulhu vs. Xenu: The Case of H. P. Lovecraft and Scientology’s Cosmology

  5. Was Cthulhu a King of Atlantis?

  6. How Rod Serling’s Night Gallery Gave Us Ancient Aliens

  7. The Green Children of Banjos

  8. Getting It Wrong: When Myths and Legends Lie

  9. The Greek Mythic Memory

  10. How Alternative History Methods Destroy Knowledge

  11. Ancient Aliens and Atlantis

  12. The Ancients and Outer Space; or, Aliens Are Bad Teachers

  13. Ancient Atom Bombs?

  14. The Case of the False Quotations

  15. The Naacal Tablets and Theosophy

  16. Neil Armstrong’s Brush with Ancient Astronauts

  17. Santa Is an Alien Robot!

  18. Stonehenge: The Day Spa of the Gods

  19. Are There Platinum Coffins Off Nan Madol?

  20. The Believer Who Almost Became President

  21. The Search for Soviet Ancient Astronauts

  22. Ancient Astronauts, Soviet Geopolitics, and the Spitsbergen UFO Hoax

  23. Taking Aliens and Ancient Texts Literally

  24. What Was the Scholomance?

  25. Oannes: The Best Evidence for Ancient Astronauts?

  26. Was Oannes John the Baptist or a Sleeping King?

  27. Was the Golden Fleece an Airplane?

  28. Were Bible Characters Worshiped as Gods?

  29. Who Were the Nephilim?

  30. Did Aliens Design the Pyramids?

  31. The Pyramids and the Flood

  32. The Strange Case of Proclus and the Pyramid

  33. Scholars’ Three-Century Mistake about Myth

  34. Afrocentrism, Ancient Astronauts, and the Black Sea Africans

  35. Afrocentrism and the Aztec Calendar

  36. Egyptian Dog Chariots in Mexico?

  37. The Pineapple of Pompeii

  38. A Dinosaur in the Congo?

  39. The Secret Prehistory of El Chupacabra

  40. Investigating Graham Hancock’s 7,000-Year-Old Mexican Pyramid

  41. Atlantis, the Bible, and High Technology

  42. Golden Fleeced

  43. Who Lost the Middle Ages?

  44. Did the Hopi Predict the End of the World?

  45. Who Really Discovered America?

  46. The Zeno Brothers’ Voyage of Discovery

  47. Did Native Americans Discover Europe in 60 BCE?

  48. Did Pagans Worship Noah’s Ark?

  49. Forks: The Devil’s Flatware

  50. Final Thoughts: The Sameness of It All

  Introduction

  I’ve been interested in fringe idea—ancient aliens, Atlantis, monsters—since I was a kid. In my first book, The Cult of Alien Gods (2005) I told the story of how my childhood discovery of the ancient astronaut books of Erich von Däniken prompted a teenage belief in alternative history that lasted until the house of cards came crashing down in my collegiate years. The Sirius Mystery author Robert Temple had claimed that an African tribe called the Dogon possessed anomalous knowledge of the Sirius star system, knowledge only aliens could provide. But I learned that anthropologists had found no such evidence, and the Sirius mystery crumbled. More research revealed still more distortions, omissions, and lies until nothing remained.

  In early 2001, I began writing about what I had learned, just before I turned twenty. I published my thoughts about alternative history on my first website, Lost Civilizations Uncovered. In 2003, I made my most important discovery: that much of today’s alternative history could be traced to the influence of the horror and science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, which I reported in my first professionally published article, “Charioteer of the Gods” (2004). It ran in Skeptic magazine, and I later expanded and updated it for Dark Lore 7 (2012). I have included it in this anthology as Chapter 2. This article led to a book deal for The Cult of Alien Gods, which I thought would be my last word on ancient astronauts and alternative history. I continued writing articles for Skeptic magazine after this, but I turned my focus to my other love, horror fiction, producing a well-received study of the relationship between horror fiction and science as well as a critically acclaimed anthology of early horror criticism.

  Then things changed. In 2009, the History Channel screened Ancient Aliens, a two-hour special intended as a pilot for a future series. I didn’t watch it the night it debuted. Instead, I got a phone call from my father telling me that a friend of his had watched the show and saw my name in it. I turned on the show in a subsequent showing, and there I was, or rather a full-screen image of my “Charioteer of the Gods” with my name prominently displayed. The narrator was discussing von Däniken’s 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? “But in spite of the book’s enormous popularity—or perhaps because of it, von Däniken’s theories were scorned by scientists, and jeered at by theologians.” As scare quotes I never said scrolled across my name, the image inverted to deep black, and my name burst into an evil blood red—implying without words that the show took a negative view of my work.

  Well, that wasn’t good.

  Ancient Aliens rekindled my passion for truth, and in the intervening years, I have investigated hundreds of claims made by every manner of alternative historian, from ancient astronaut writers to Atlantis believers, from pyramid mystics to mystery-mongers. I have published these investigations in the pages of Skeptic magazine, the eSkeptic online newsletter, as well as my website, JasonColavito.com, both as feature articles and among my daily blog posts. What you are about to read is a collection of fifty of my best essays on fake history and false claims, covering everything from Atlantis to Chupacabra to Stonehenge to UFOs, and even the demonic power of the humble dinner fork. All of these essays have been newly revised and updated for this edition, including full references.

  Mark Twain once said, “Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain’t so.” I hope that the following essays make at least a tentative step toward giving the truth a fighting chance.

  1. Of Atlantis and Aliens: Alternatives to History as Cultural Mirror

  Sometime in the early history of ancient Greece, the Greeks came into contact with the Medes, an Iranian people living in Western Anatolia and the Caucasus. These people worshiped in holy places that they called yazona (= Persian ayadana), and the Greeks were greatly confused by this strange word. To them it sound very much like Iasonion, which they interpreted as altars sacred to the hero Jason (Iaso
n in Greek), of Argonautic fame. From this “discovery” of a landscape studded with temples to Jason, the Greeks concluded that the Argonauts had conquered the Near East, and that the Medes were, by the same similarity of sound, the descendants of Jason’s son Medus, by his wife, the sorceress Medea.[1] (The Persians, they thought, were descendants of Perseus.) The Greeks believed so strongly in this story that the Macedonian general Parmenio destroyed the sacred yazona wherever he found them to raise up his boss, Alexander the Great, over the mythic Jason, though he later atoned by restoring the Jason temple at Abdera.[2]

  This object lesson in ancient hubris is a useful case study in how cultural assumptions and ethnocentric desires color the way even the most educated individuals interpret and understand the world around them. It also leads us to a deeper understanding of how the ad hoc explanations proposed for historical and cultural facts can open a window on the cultural expectations and values that popular theorists, especially those in the New Age and “alternative” archaeology movements, unconsciously foist onto history in their quest to rewrite the past to make it more palatable to the present.

  Nowhere, perhaps, is this more obvious in the various theories proposed to explain the peopling of the Americas. Since the eighteenth century, mainstream scholars have understood that the Americas were populated from Asia, by peoples whose origins could be traced back to Siberia. But this fact, well-attested by archaeology, has been under near-constant assault almost from the first. Early opponents, almost all in the United States, stressed potential visitors from the high cultures of the Old World, including the peoples of Vedic India, the Phoenicians, and above all the Hebrews. An entire religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons), was established on the belief that the Hebrews were the founding population of the Americas. Such theories were, in retrospect, designed to provide a suitably historic foundational myth for the United States, a country in search of an identity to replace the British history it had shed. The upshot of this myth was the Trail of Tears, which President Andrew Jackson specifically justified with appeal to lost founders who predated the Native Americans: “In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the west, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared, to make room for the existing savage tribes.”[3] This massacre, he said, was why removal of the Native Americans was not merely right but would restore America to its rightful heirs.

  The growth pangs of the new nation soon gave way to imperial ambitions; the era of Manifest Destiny and America’s entry onto the world stage required a suitably imperial mythology as precedent. In place of the Hebrews, former Minnesota congressman Ignatius Donnelly proposed the longest-lasting of American myths: the global empire of Atlantis, an expansionist power spreading civilization around the world, an almost transparent analogy for America’s self-conception.[4] There was precedent for this, of course. The Spanish had previously claimed Atlantis as the founding population of America: “The Indies are either the island and firm land of Plato or the remnant of the same,”[5] Francisco López de Gómara had written in 1552, associating the new owners of the Americas, Spain, with a grand, mythic imperial predecessor. Atlantis recurred in Spanish writings for the next two centuries. It was, as always, the myth of the conquerors, beloved also in the British Empire and Imperial Germany, but of very little importance to the conquered.

  The Atlantis theme, under another name, made its latest resurgence in the boom years of the 1990s, when the West celebrated the defeat of communism and stood astride the world like a colossus. In the last days of what George Will called the “holiday from history,” British journalist Graham Hancock[6] capitalized on Western triumphalism by reviving the myth of an earlier, equally great, pre-Western civilization, which he declined to name but obviously meant as an analogue for Atlantis. His lost civilization was global, deeply spiritual, intellectually advanced, and composed of, it must be said, “lean, bearded white men” (specifically a “distinctively non-Indian ethnic type”) who traveled to all the places where non-white people lived and gave them science, technology, and culture.[7] It is very difficult to read this theory—for which there is virtually no supporting evidence—as anything other than a reflection of the self-image of the “white” nations (America, Britain, Canada, Australia, etc.) in the moment of their shared Anglo-American cultural dominance.

  Today, things are a little different. Western Civilization is plagued with a sense of decadence and decline diagnosed by Jacques Barzun in 2000[8] and exacerbated by 9/11, inconclusive warfare, and the economic crises of the past decade. The biggest economic story of the past twenty years has been the rise of China, and it is little wonder then that a few years ago in England, the fallen remnant of Empire, a retired submariner named Gavin Menzies[9] revived a forgotten claim by the German scholar Karl Friedrich Neumann (himself citing a 1761 French original) that an imperialist China had discovered and colonized America. When Neumann made this claim in the 1860s,[10] China was a colonial backwater, and the idea was seen as ridiculous and promptly forgotten, despite occasional revivals. It was no competitor for the glories of imperial Atlantis. Menzies’ evidence differs from Neumann’s (he favors a medieval date to Neumann’s fifth-century one), though not in its low quality, but Menzies wrote in a different time, and his celebration of a resurgent China turned him into a celebrity and his claim into both a book and a multi-part PBS documentary. Atlantis has been all but forgotten in the zeitgeist (though not among various fringe communities, for whom no obscure idea is ever entirely forgotten[11]), a fatuous relic of imperial times, unfit for the current mood.

  Instead, today we are experiencing a revival of a different kind of pseudoscience: the ancient astronaut theory, the claim that extraterrestrials arrived on the prehistoric earth and interacted with early humans, providing them with advanced culture. The government of China actively endorses this theory,[12] as did the Soviet government before it. In fact, the Soviets felt that the Chinese purposely supported the ancient astronaut theory as a way of channeling China’s growing intellectual energy away from political reform.[13] The Soviets knew something about this; the Communist government endorsed the ancient astronaut theory from 1959 to 1970 as a secular alternative to religion because it provided a seemingly “scientific” explanation for angels, religious miracles, and the Bible that could be used for ideological purposes to undermine the religious ideas of the West.[14] To that end, the Soviet government allowed its scientists to fabricate evidence for ancient astronauts and disseminate that false evidence to the West, where it later appeared in the bestselling works of writers like Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin. Even the Russian-born French writer Jacques Bergier, a staunch believer in ancient astronauts, lamented in the 1970s that the Soviets “accept such evidence a little too easily, and it is not always very convincing.”[15]

  In 1970, the Soviet Academy of Physics put a stop to the nonsense and disclaimed the existence of ancient astronauts after a decade spent selling them to the West. This change of policy had been brewing since 1968, when the American embassy in Moscow noted that the country’s media had suddenly turned on UFOs and ancient astronauts. New media reports debunking UFOs, the embassy wrote with great interest, made “no attempt to square this belief with previously published Soviet articles.”[16] Perhaps one reason for the Soviet change of heart was the failure of ancient astronauts to displace religion in the West.

  Right after the Soviets dropped them, ancient astronauts began a decade of unrivaled popularity in America, largely on the back of Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling’s 1973 TV adaptation of an Academy Award-nominated German documentary about the theories of Swiss hotelier (and convicted embezzler) Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods (1968). In Search of Ancient Astronauts was a cultural touchstone in the economically depressed decade of Watergate, oil shock, and fears of American decline. In the wake of Time’s famous question of whether God was dead, a sizable po
rtion of the public embraced the idea of a superior race of saviors who could serve to restore traditional faith in God and His angels under another name.[17] But the idea wasn’t new. Helena Blavatsky, the opportunistic founder of Theosophy, had imagined angels as extraterrestrial visitors from Venus in the nineteenth century, and the American preachers John Miller and George Van Tassel spent the 1950s and 1960s asking the public to worship aliens. Miller claimed God spoke through flying saucers like those in the Book of Ezekiel and Miller that Venusians were the true God of the Bible. For their troubles, both were monitored by the FBI as threats to national security and never achieved widespread popularity.

  Not so Erich von Däniken. His theories, liberally borrowed (often verbatim) from Jacques Bergier, Louis Pauwels, and Robert Charroux (all of whom von Däniken eventually credited in a later edition of Chariots to stave off plagiarism charges), found him interviewed in Playboy, appearing with Johnny Carson on the Tonight show, and taking every opportunity to not just promote aliens but to advance his conservative political agenda. He took pains to stress that the ancient astronaut theory was fully compatible with traditional Christian religion[18] (despite his original contention that Jesus was an alien, deleted by his publisher[19]) and he lobbied then-president Gerald Ford to pander to UFO believers to secure re-election in 1976 and thus advance the conservative agenda for another four years. He urged the president to combat what he called “socialist dreamers” worldwide and to militarize space to protect Mars from communists.[20] Ford ignored the advice and lost the election, but von Däniken went on to become increasingly conservative, recently adopting the mantle of a prophet and promising that the aliens would return to judge the living and the dead for their “sins,” including genetic engineering. He now claims the aliens will help us refute the liberal theories of global warming and human evolution.[21] The irony is that the ancient astronaut theory in Europe had been the tool of socialist New Agers like Jacques Bergier but in the U.S. had, through the agency of a Swiss, become a conservative counterweight to the New Age.