Conspiratorial Topics – Part 19
Ancient technologically advanced civilizations
As a child, I eagerly read Ripley’s Believe It or Not books and Frank Edwards’s Strange books. But I also read the tabloids that my mother brought home, the Guinness Book of World Records, the family encyclopedia, all of the paleontology books in my elementary school’s library, and so on. I was an inveterate bookworm from the time that I could walk. I was raised to be a scientist, however, and by my summer in Europe right after I turned 16, and my first energy dreams were around the same time, I began to take a no-nonsense approach to fringe stuff (although I knew that the diet of Americans is what killed most of them and still does), until I had my dramatic mystical awakening at the end of that year. I did not know it at the time, but I was ruined as a mainstream scientist before I began. Brian O’Leary had his career ruined five years later while performing the same exercise that gave me my mystical awakening.
I became quite the spiritual student after that experience, and in my early college years, I studied math and science by day and spirituality by night, including what is today called channeled literature. But while I still have those Edwards and Ripley books, I did not read them much after my early teenage years. But I still sometimes bought esoteric books on Atlantis and such. A channel once told me that I helped melt down Atlantis and that my soul had been in penance ever since, and it does, in a strange way, seem to help explain my preposterous life.
When I met Brian in 1991 I had no idea who he was, and did not have contact again with him until early 1996, when he published Miracle in the Void and I became his biggest fan. Our collaborations began then. Back in the 1980s, my father told me about Carl Sagan and the “skeptics,” and how they were obtuse warriors for materialism, trapped in their paradigm, unable to see beyond it, and would defend it to their deaths. In the early 1990s, I began to study organized skepticism and bought a stack of Skeptical Inquirers, and was quickly appalled. Ridicule regularly poured from its pages. I bought books by Sagan and James Randi, and reading them was a dismaying experience. They were poor representatives for the scientific method, but while Randi was a magician, not a scientist, I suppose that it is understandable. Sagan’s work was shockingly bad. In those years of study in the first half of the 1990s, I did not know that Carl was Brian’s colleague. Even more ironic is that Carl and Brian came to represent the two poles of science. They were on opposite ends of the Face on Mars issue. Sagan likely won, but he did not play fair. Steven Greer’s sources said that the Face was artificial, which makes me wonder about Greer’s sources.
A year before Brian’s Miracle in the Void was published, Charles Ginenthal published a book on Sagan’s debunking of Immanuel Velikovsky‘s work. I interacted with several of the key players in the Velikovsky controversy over the next several years and got into the catastrophic milieu. In the end, Velikovsky’s work did not hold up with me, but Sagan’s shabby debunking work made Velikovsky’s work more prominent than it should have been. Velikovsky’s ideas that Venus is only a few thousand years old and that Venus and Mars had recent near-misses with Earth, which supported the literal truth of the tall tales in the Old Testament, is way out there. Velikovsky’s thesis was a wide-ranging interdisciplinary work, and the world needs more interdisciplinary works, but Velikovsky’s work is a weak example of interdisciplinary rigor. Starting with Bible stories and then hunting for wild scientific theories to support them is not the way to go about it. I also encountered similar literalist exercises such as Zecharia Sitchin’s on Sumer and the Anunnaki.
In those years, lasting to about 2000, when I began working on my writings in earnest, those fringe academic reconstructions were a study of mine, and practically none of it held up. But that is the rightful fate of most such efforts. Einstein took Velikovsky’s work somewhat seriously, largely because he was a fellow Jew at Princeton. Einstein even endorsed Charles Hapgood’s work on pole shifts. But to be fair to Einstein, plate tectonic theory had yet to be developed when Einstein died. If Einstein had lived for another decade, he would have repented his endorsement of pole-shift theory.
Another body of work was Graham Hancock’s on ancient civilizations that may have been technologically advanced. A central contention of one of his books was that Antarctica was ice-free in historical times, and he was far from alone with that argument, with works such as Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings in circulation. When I finished my website largely as it stands today in 2002, I resumed my science studies in earnest. The idea that Antarctica was ice-free in historical times, even only a few centuries ago, is about as ludicrous an idea as I have encountered on the fringes, and Hancock cited scientific evidence to bolster his contentions, but Hancock had no idea what he was doing, to put it kindly. If nothing else, there is no record of the sea level’s falling 200 feet in the past thousand years, which would have happened if Antarctica was ice-free several centuries ago.
The Antarctic ice sheets began growing over 30 million years ago, after Antarctica was largely ice-free for 200 million years, as Earth cooled down to our ice age. There is not a scientist alive with all of his marbles who will argue against that. The evidence is simply overwhelming, from numerous sources, including sediment studies and the dropstones from icebergs. Hancock cherry-picked evidence that he did not understand to make his arguments. The Antarctic ice was just one area of many that I encountered as I resumed my science studies, and when I eventually compared the scientific findings against Hancock’s evidence and interpretation, his work lost all credibility with me, but I continue to see him cited as some kind of authority. I was reading a book just this past week that quoted him several times, and it was not a fringe-science book
No professional astronomer gives any credence to Velikovsky’s planetary-billiards scenarios, for good reason. Such Biblical reconstructions are not the least bit credible. While I became familiar with catastrophic theory, and some of it is valid (such as the bolide that wiped out the dinosaurs), the idea of global catastrophes in the Holocene (the past 12,000 years) has no credible evidence to support it that I have seen. Because Velikovsky’s hypothesis is so wide-ranging, nobody can become an expert in all of the subjects that Velikovsky’s work touches on, but there was one aspect of his work that I studied a fair amount: the megafauna extinctions.
A book that I am currently reading has a chapter on the megafauna extinctions, which is titled: “Humanity in the dock.” I have used the same phrase before, to highlight the motivation of scientists who argue that climate change drove the megafauna to extinction. That is an invalid idea, and one example of many that I could provide was the extinction of the elephant family in the Americas. The elephant family evolved in Africa, and about 20 million years ago, Africa began colliding with Eurasia and the elephant family and apes migrated to Eurasia and thrived. By 16.5 million years ago, the elephant family made it to North America. The elephant family made a home in virtually every biome that it could get to. It was smart, huge, with prehensile trunks, and adults effectively had no predators. That family was the most successful mammal ever, before the rise of humans. Cats evolved sabre teeth to puncture the hides of baby members of the elephant family, but they didn’t stand a chance with adults. As the grasslands grew with global cooling, mammoths evolved to graze the grasses, but the elephant family is notoriously opportunistic in its feeding practices.
When South America began connecting with North America about three million years ago, the elephant family soon migrated to South America and flourished. About 20,000 years ago, at the height of the recent glacial interval, there were at least five elephant-family species that lived in the Americas (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and they were doing just fine. Then the ice sheets began melting right on schedule, and it was good times again in the interglacial interval. Well, good times unless you were a megafauna in the Americas. By 10,000 years ago, the elephant-family in the Americas, which had prospered for over 16 million years, was 100% extinct. And to this day, some scientists argue, with a straight face, that climate change drove the elephant family in the Americas to extinction. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about the climate changes of the past 100,000 years, as the glacial cycle had been operating like clockwork for the past million years.
Those scientists give science a bad name as they defend humanity. The arrival of the greatest predator in Earth’s history – humanity – drove those elephant-family members to extinction, just like Homo erectus did to elephant-family members in Africa and Eurasia over a million years previously. It didn’t matter what the climate did; the easy meat was doomed. Perhaps the first casualties of the rise of humans were giant tortoises, which had a global distribution until the rise of rock-wielding apes around three million years ago. By the time that behaviorally modern humans invaded the Americas, nothing on Earth could stand in their way and they made short work of the elephant family in the Americas. There is no other contender for that feat.
I bring this up because Velikovsky proposed that those celestial events drove woolly mammoths and other megafauna to extinction, but that is even more fanciful than the climate-change explanation. I have a recent book by a scientist who dabbled outside of his field of expertise and tried to put a new spin on hypotheses such as Velikovsky’s, and his agent of destruction was a comet, which wiped out the elephant family in the Americas but miraculously spared Africa. Velikovsky’s work has no validity that I can see, and neither do recent works that try to resurrect a celestial explanation for the megafauna extinctions in the Americas, as the ancestors of today’s Native Americans are in the dock.
Velikovsky was just one of a long line of amateurs who proposed such ideas, including the notion that there is an inhabited planet with an orbit of more than 3,000 years (where the Anunnaki live), that do not have a shred of credible evidence to support them. Velikovsky’s and Sitchin’s hypotheses are literalist interpretations of mythological tales. It is as if people interpreted Grimm’s Fairy Tales as the history of Europe.
The pyramids of Giza are another focus of conspiracists and those amateur anthropologists (and even psychics such as Edgar Cayce), who argue that the pyramids were built with exotic (Atlantean, ET, etc.) technology. Those speculations spawned an entire cottage industry that argues that most or all of the megalithic architecture on Earth had an origin in exotic technology. What all such speculations ignore is that ancient peoples were very good at working in stone (many were in their Stone Age, after all). I consider that entire cottage industry to be populated by scientifically illiterate enthusiasts, conspiracists of various stripes, New Age conmen, and the like.
I think that if there really were technologically advanced civilizations in Earth’s past, we would have found some artifactual evidence, but I have never heard of any credible accounts of it, much less the physical evidence. The conspiracist explanation that the world’s governments are hiding all of the archeological evidence is hard to credit. Digging in the ground is not rocket science, and I have seen many instances of evidence that supports arguments against such civilizations, especially if it had a global reach (hard to imagine that one wouldn’t), such as how New Zealand’s bird-dominated ecosystem was apparently untouched for millions of years until the Maori invaded less than a millennium ago. Humans wiped it out nearly completely in less than a century. Instead of the 500-pound moa, all that is left are kiwis that weight less than 10 pounds. If tiny boneless organisms have been preserved in the Burgess Shale for over 500 million years, I doubt that it is too much to ask for one piece of credible artifact from an ancient, technologically advanced civilization.
I do not have a problem with the idea of technologically advanced civilizations in the not-so-distant past, but I have never seen the least bit of credible evidence for the idea. Every time that I looked, the so-called evidence was thin, with highly fanciful interpretations. Science is not supposed to work that way. When I have gone back to Edwards’s books and others like them, what seemed strange when I was 12 is no longer so strange, such as the Nazca lines. They can be seen from neighboring vistas. The idea that they were made for/by ETs is a huge stretch.
For those who want to look to mythical civilizations for evidence of advanced technology that we could use, I have news for them: world-changing technologies are on the planet today, and are older than I am. That is something worth pursuing, not digging for ancient artifacts that may well not exist.
I don’t have a problem with the idea of ET visitations to Earth, not with what I have seen, or their manipulating the human genome, or even their seeding the first life on Earth. But I want to see the evidence and what the most-tested interpretations are. Over and over again, I have seen evidence and enigmas that scientists investigated, where it was DNA, various artifacts, geological oddities, and the like. The fringe/conspiracist crowd could be counted on to leap to the most fantastic interpretations of the evidence, as their imaginations and speculation ran wild, in something akin to spinning folk tales. This is a universal human failing (or is it a feature?), and partly why science is so hard. Brian was a prominent advocate of the scientific investigation of paranormal phenomena. That is the approach to use, in my opinion.
If I had not already heard about my friend’s underground technology show, I am not sure how much credence I would have given to Greer’s Disclosure Project witnesses, but when they began describing what my friend saw, Greer’s work began to gain credibility with me. However his mini-alien obsession, of what is almost certainly a human fetus, has been embarrassing to witness, as were his naïve forays into the free-energy field. Maybe he has learned his lessons well enough by now to make some headway.
This post is a little sample to support my statement that the fringes are filled with chaff. There is some wheat there, for those who do their homework, but it is comparatively rare. The conspiracist approach is rarely helpful, in my experience.