No surprise, but it doesn’t go well. Carl Feagans, “The Pseudoarchaeology of America Before: A Review,” April 22, 2019 As in biblical studies, where a lot of research can impress amateur readers, so it is with books like those of Hancock, which...
Graham Hancock
PEERANORMAL Episode 14: The Piri Reis Map
Discovered in 1929, the Piri Reis map, dated to 1513, was virtually unknown except by those who may have seen it displayed in its current home, the Topkapi Palace Museum in Instanbul. That all changed when Erich von Däniken made it part of his ancient astronaut theory...
Naked Bible Podcast Episode 158: The Fate of the Ark of the Covenant
The Ark of the Covenant is well-known because of the popular Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. That pop culture film offers just one of over a dozen theories on what happened to the Ark of the Covenant. The question arises because the ark is not one of the...
Graham Hancock’s Magicians of the Gods: A Review
I encourage all of you to read Jason Colavito’s lengthy review of Hancock’s latest tome devoted to alternative history. But if you want the short version, Colavito offers this summary thought: Speaking as someone who found Fingerprints of the Gods to be...
Jason Colavito on “The Emerald Tablets of Thoth”
The emerald tablets of the Egyptian god Thoth have an honored place in paleobabble about ancient Egypt. Purported to be secret wisdom from Egypt (i.e., the kind of think Graham Hancock substitutes for real historical records), they’re just occult (theosophy)...
The Alleged Alignment of the Giza Pyramids with the Constellation Orion
This past weekend I spent some time revisiting Stuart Robbins’ excellent Exposing PseudoAstronomy podcast. On of his May 2012 episodes was on the alleged “Orion Correlation” promoted in print and online by Robert Bauval. The basic idea is that the...
Graham Hancock and Bad Archaeology
Professional archaeologist Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, the force behind the Bad Archaeology blog, recently posted a series of articles detailing the (poor) research techniques and (flawed) argumentation of Graham Hancock. Here are the links to the series: Hancock’s...
What To Do With Christian UFO Researchers Who Ape Ancient Astronaut Thinking
[Addendum: 10/22/2013Â – I have been in correspondence with one of the researchers mentioned in Jason Colavito’s post. That individual tells me that research is underway in regard to some of the claims Jason criticized, and that I will receive a copy of the...
Why the Piri Reis Map is Neither an Enigma Nor Evidence for Ancient Aliens
This recent post on the Bad Archaeology blog provides a much-needed antidote against the Piri Reis paleobabble contagion. As author Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews notes at the outset: Maps of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries are a favourite source of information for...
Modern Mythology of the Precession of the Equinoxes
I’d like to alert PaleoBabble readers to Jason Colavito’s series on the modern myth of precession. Â Here are the first and second posts. For those to whom the term “precession” is new, as Jason notes, it is the idea that our lives are...
Unknown Pyramid Complexes Discovered Using Google Earth
Pretty neat; check this link (with pictures). The interesting thing is that they seem to have the same diagonal arrangement as the pyramids of Giza. Â I can hardly wait to see what Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval come up with as to how that would fit in the Orion...
Ark of the Covenant to be Revealed in Ethiopia — Really?
So says this news report from World Net Daily. My opinion? Prepare for disappointment. Now, I'm not saying that the "Ethiopian view" of what happened to the ark of the covenant is complete PaleoBabble. It actually has some circumstantial evidentiary power (key word...