Ancient Aliens is a ridiculous pack of lies

I've been meaning to write a longer post about the farcical "History" Channel show called Ancient Aliens. For now, though, I'll just post this brief note. I recently watched one of its most-viewed episodes, "Unexplained Structures", and having seen it, I want to make one thing perfectly clear:

Do not believe a single thing the people on that show say. They're lying.

While it's possible that some of them mean well and are just misguided, the overwhelming majority of them are deliberately misrepresenting the truth in order to sell you stuff. The genuine scientists on the show probably aren't lying, but frankly, I question the judgement of anyone who appears on that show and isn't a kook trying to sell you a magic healing stone.

Let's just take a few examples from that particular episode. Firstly, Göbekli Tepe, the prehistoric megalithic site in Turkey. It's a pretty impressive, even revolutionary archeological find, but that doesn't stop Alien Hair Guy and his buddies lying about it. For crying out loud, the Wikipedia page I just linked tells us that even though the show says the opposite, both flint stone-working tools and the quarry the rocks were cut from have been found at the site. So there's no mystery whatsoever to how it was constructed. By people. With tools. No extraterrestrials necessary for assembly.

Much of the rest of the episode is set firmly in woo-land, with the usual wild narrative hopscotch ("if so...") and straight-up nonsense like the vimana dude walking among the Carnac stones and talking about their mystical auras. The bit set in the Americas does contain one of my favorite Ancient Aliens lines ever, when one of the "experts" explains that some of the Inca stonework has been exposed to large amounts of "thermal heat". The best kind, really.

By the way, they seem to mean vitrified stone. In both this and a previous episode, Ancient Aliens seems to treat vitrification as something that happens when an alien shoots a ray gun at a stone block. In reality, it just means the stones were exposed to fire. It may have been done deliberately, although it actually weakens the stone. Now, stone age people might not know that, but surely the aliens would. In my mind, their suggestion that the Inca built using alien rock-melting technology is completely ridiculous. If you have what basically amounts to concrete and want to build a wall, certainly you'd build a mould of the wall and pour in the concrete, as opposed to molding thousands of different-sized stone blocks and fashioning a wall out of them. But never mind that, here's an Inca shaman with a censer, and he says woo.

But it's the already mentioned Carnac stones that bring us to the most fantastically stupid claim in the whole episode: Alien Hair Guy tells us they're one of only three objects on Earth that are visible from space. He lists the Carnac stones, the Nazca lines (a perennial Ancient Aliens favorite) and, of course, the Great Wall of China.

Now, once again, there's a Wikipedia page: Man-made structures visible from space. It will tell you, if you don't know already, that from any altitude where the Great Wall is visible, so are a whole bunch of other things. The same goes for the Nazca lines, and as for Carnac, well, look at them:

The individual stones are really quite small, and if they're that evanescent in an aerial photo, do you really think they're uniquely visible from space? The claim is totally absurd. Then again, that information and the picture are from Wikipedia, and if you're liable to believe Alien Hair Guy, you probably think Wikipedia is a reptilian disinformation operation. Like this blog. Boo!

In fact, I couldn't find any source for the notion that the Carnac stones are visible from space... except Alien Hair Guy. Mostly the claim appears in the exact same "one of only three objects" form he made it in. So he literally made that up. And that's really what this show is about: making stuff up. Specifically, inventing totally implausible claims with no regard for observable reality or even Wikipedia-level research. Since just about everything I've ever fact-checked from that show has turned out to be just lies, I frankly recommend no-one believe a thing that's said on it without double-checking it. Even better, don't watch the damn thing at all. Nothing they've ever presented has any merit, and the joke gets kinda old pretty quick. Real history is much more interesting, exciting and even, at times, mysterious than puerile "lol aliens" TV.

Ancient Aliens does take your mind to another dimension. Unfortunately, it's made up, and it sucks.

2012: Nostradamus

Have we been watching 2012 "documentaries" on the History Channel? Yes.

Are we going to do a series of posts on "the 2012 phenomenon"? Yes.

So, did Nostradamus predict the events of 2012? No.

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Seriously, he didn't. Not a single Nostradamus scholar said or wrote anything about this whole 2012 thing until it was invented a couple of years back. It's only lately that they've jumped on the 2012 bandwagon, cheerfully helped along by the (pseudo-)History channel, who keep running rubbish "documentaries" on the topic.

However, there's one thing we're thoroughly convinced Nostradamus did make several astonishing predictions about, all of which have come true: the National Hockey League.

Take, for instance, the very first quatrain of them all. Century I, quatrain 1:

Tripod seated at night in secret study
Only resting on the aerian saddle:
Tiny flame leaving the solitude
Make prosper what is not vain to believe.

It's clear that "tiny flame" refers to that diminutive Calgary legend, Theo Fleury.

He recently tried to make a comeback to the NHL, or in other words, "leave the solitude". On September 10, 2009, he was reinstated and allowed to make a return in a meeting with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly, and league doctors. Notice that's three; Bettman, Daly and the doctors: a tripod has three legs.

They must have done some thinking and research before this meeting, but they couldn't reveal their conclusions beforehand: hence, secret study. I'll bet they didn't get much sleep, apart from what they caught on a plane trip, or, as Nostradamus would put it, "on the aerian saddle".

Fleury's comeback didn't pan out, but he was made to prosper, as his autobiography, published at the same time, did sell quite nicely. A mystery remains, though: is Nostradamus saying that it was vain to believe in his comeback, or is he saying that the allegations Fleury made in his book are "vain to believe"? We don't know. He did.

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Even more momentous is the third quatrain.

When the litters are overturned by the whirlwind
and faces are covered by cloaks,
the new republic will be troubled by its people.
At this time the reds and the whites will rule wrongly.

Can he be any more plain? When the litters are overturned by the whirlwind; like maybe a hurricane? This clearly refers to the Carolina Hurricanes winning the Stanley Cup; their jerseys were, at the time, red and white. Seriously, he couldn't make this more explicit without just coming right out and saying that the Canes will win the Cup, and as we all know, prophets just don't do that.

The "new republic" here is Canada, which became a (quasi-)independent state later than the United States, and many Canadians were quite upset when the Oilers lost to the Canes in the final! Astonishingly, Nostradamus knew the Hurricanes were going to win the Stanley Cup over 400 years before it happened.

Again, Nostradamus is telling us something we didn't know beforehand, too: the reference to "ruling wrongly" seems to suggest that the Canes shouldn't have won the Cup! Was there some terrible officiating mistake that cost the Oilers the Cup? Should some other team have represented the Eastern Conference in the finals? Frankly, we don't know. He did.

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In quatrains 12 and 13, Nostradamus predicted the vicissitudes that the NHL Players' Association would face in the 2000's:

12

There will soon be talk of a treacherous man, who rules a short time,
quickly raised from low to high estate.
He will suddenly turn disloyal and volatile.
This man will govern Verona.

13

Through anger and internal hatreds, the exiles
will hatch a great plot against the king.
Secretly they will place enemies as a threat,
and his own old (adherents) will find sedition against them.

The "treacherous man" is clearly Ted Saskin, who became executive director of the NHLPA after Bob Goodenow's resignation ("quickly raised from low to high estate"). He was fired after the NHLPA members found he had masterminded a campaign to hack into players' e-mail accounts. So instead of representing the players, he had "suddenly turned disloyal and volatile".

We remember Verona from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a city riven by factional strife; not a bad description of the NHLPA at any time! Quatrain 13 details Chris Chelios's campaign to dethrone Saskin, who was forced to resign in 2007.

But wait, there's more! Quatrain 23:

In the third month, at sunrise,
the Boar and the Leopard meet on the battlefield.
The fatigued Leopard looks up to heaven
and sees an eagle playing around the sun.

In the 1995-96 season, the Florida Panthers made it to the Stanley Cup finals. To make a long story short, as is common in prophecy interpretation, the Latin name for the leopard species is panthera pardus, a panther. The Panthers were pretty fatigued by the time they got to the final, where they lost to the Colorado Avalanche. The Avs are based in Denver, Colorado, and the seal of the city of Denver has a bird and the rays of the sun on it. Coincidence? We think not.

What about the boar? Well, wild boars are mostly found in Europe. The Cup-winning goal was scored by Uwe Krupp, who's from Europe. So this time around, Nostradamus knew that the Panthers would make the finals, but lose to Colorado! Over 400 years before it happened!

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Nostradamus also predicted some unpleasant things. Quatrain 26:

The great man will be struck down in the day by a thunderbolt.
An evil deed, foretold by the beare of a petition.
According to the prediction another falls at night time.
Conflict at Reims, London, and pestilence in Tuscany.

It's obvious to us that this quatrain refers to Matt Cooke's hit on Marc Savard. Savard was Boston's number one center, a "great man". He was blindsided by Matt Cooke, which is to say he took a hit that he didn't see coming, like a thunderbolt. You don't see those coming, either. Our Penguin Dictionary of Symbols identifies the thunderbolt in Celtic mythology with the hammer of Sucellus, the "hard hitter"; how unambiguous is that?

This hit was definitely an evil deed, and it was foretold by a petition. In fact, there have been numerous petitions to ban head shots in the NHL for years, but nothing has been done. To cap it off, the Bruins-Pens game on that day was at 3 P.M.; in the day.

Cooke wasn't penalized, and that weekend, on Hockey Night in Canada, it was predicted that more players would be injured unless the headshot rule was implemented immediately. And according to the prediction, another reckless hit left Brian Campbell injured just days later. The NHL may not have known that another player would be injured if they didn't react; Nostradamus did.

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These examples are more or less randomly selected from just the first century of Nostradamus's prophecies. We believe that they are entirely convincing PROOF that Nostradamus was a true prophet, who could indeed foretell the future. Here is evidence enough to convince even the most hardened skeptic.

Most excitingly, it stands to reason that the remaining quatrains contain many more of hockey's secrets. More likely than not, locked away in his prophecies is this year's Stanley Cup winner! We leave the search for this answer up to you. Don't read it here first; read it there yourself. The Prophecies are available on Wikisource: the future is in your hands.