Mysteries of the Gods

http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/763/4bc982fe017a3c57fe03c763/mysteries-of-the-gods-poster.jpg

The legendary William Shatner hosts/narrates Mysteries of the Gods, a 1976 ancient astronaut theory documentary based heavily on the work of Erich von Däniken. No shat, I’m serious. I think William Shatner is fantastic as a narrator for something like this with such lines as “…giant …suns!” However, after the novelty wears off, the same old problematic space god theories are quickly revealed and dominate the film. Aside from the usual bad ideas, there are some glaring inaccuracies in the film. Early on, the “Glen Rose River” in north Texas is referenced along with “human tracks” which were “found” next to actual dinosaur tracks. This is actually a reference to the Paluxy River, a tributary of the Brazos River, which is located near the small town of Glen Rose, Texas. My father grew up in Glen Rose and used to go fishing in the Paluxy as a kid. I have personally gone camping in nearby Dinosaur Valley State Park where the dinosaur tracks are located several times… Trust me there is no Glen Rose River by name, not even in the local vernacular. More than likely there has never been a Glen Rose River in name since the Paluxy name has been prominent in the area since at least 100 years before this film was produced. The mention of these supposed man tracks have been long debunked and later were admittedly carved for money and attention by creationists in the 1930s to challenge the geologic time scale and make the argument for a young earth. This tidbit in the film has nothing to do with ancient astronaut theory and why it is even mentioned is beyond me. Now, alien tracks… that would be something worth mentioning.

There are also a few examples of very dated ethnocentrism when dealing with so-called primitive societies with their “simple lives.” Just because a cultural group has a different level of technology than us they must be primitive and simple? The only thing that really can be considered simple in such societies is perhaps their economies because of a limited variety of jobs, and even that is debatable depending on numerous factors. Computers, airplanes and companies do not make a society, even ours. The cave art, traditional practices, masks and details of these “primitive” cultures’ religions are used as weak lines of evidence to support the claims of ancient astronaut theory in this film and in general. The Hopi are also misrepresented as the Anasazi (cliff dwellers) of the Southwestern United States when in fact, they are two separate groups separated by a substantial span of time not to mention various cultural differences. Other examples bad research display commonly held misconceptions such as the Mayans could have not learned the laws of astronomy without an alien intervention. Years of observation and practice, that’s how the Maya came to understand the cosmos. Could such things as the laws of nature be fundamental to the human experience with the ability to be interpreted by different people in different places in different times? Exactly, time and location has little to do with many concepts which were independently developed in various parts of the world such as the bow and arrow. In another example of ethnocentrism, Shatner, or his writer to be more exact, cannot believe Australian Aborigines invented something as “complex” as the boomerang. This thinly veiled racism never asks a similar question of how Rome was able to invent something as complex as the aqueduct system.  Ancient alien researchers never demean the Western world as being too dumb to accomplish great things.

The rest of the movie bounces around from one debunked idea to another from crystal skulls to UFO sightings to crop circles to Jeane Dixon and ESP to finally to an interview with the (exo)sociologist, Richard Yinger. If not for William Shatner this film would be unbearable and for many of you and all the more unbearable for the same reason. Check it out on Google Videos while you can because Google may eventually close the site in favor of YouTube as announced earlier in the year.

References and Links (All on-line information retrieved July 27, 2011)

http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/763/4bc982fe017a3c57fe03c763/mysteries-of-the-gods-poster.jpg

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074233/

http://ancientaliensinmassmedia.wordpress.com/erich-von-daniken-the-man-his-myths-and-his-legend/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paluxy_River

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Rose,_Texas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_Valley_State_Park

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/paluxy.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_people

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anasazi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aborigines

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeane_Dixon

http://exosociology.blogspot.com/

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6113175402315678182

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/25/google-video-shutdown-halted-for-now-google-slinging-content-ov/

Retro Review: The Chariots of the Gods Movie

Holy shit, the film version of Erich von Däniken’s classic “novel” (as the film’s opening credits presented it) is downright godawful! Thanks to Netflix’s endless supply of every DVD ever made, I rented the 1970 film adaptation of Chariots of the Gods. As much as I like cheesy bongo music and stock footage of rocket launches and A-bomb detonations, even I could not get into it. I think my girlfriend, Lieu, said it best about fifteen minutes in, “This is HORRIBLE… wake me up when it’s over!” I swear, she is still asleep as I write this. Of course, I will always be biased toward this type of slanted misinformation bull crap, but this so-called movie takes the proverbial cake! However, I do take comfort in the fact that I unwittingly discovered the the cure for insomnia with this movie’s terrible narration, bad music and ultra-boring bible page turning scenes.

I don’t want to dwell on the bad music, but it has that certain type of 60s-70s trippy electrified orchestration quality that makes your stomach turn while making you feel stoned and bored at the same time. As a child of the 1980s, this movie reminded me of the old earth science film strips (basically a slide show with a separate scratchy mono cassette tape for audio) I was made to watch in school mixed in with some jet setting stranger’s crappy vacation movies of Central and South America.

Okay, this movie much like the book, circles the globe misinterpreting and ignoring the slow and gradual development of humanity’s great ancient civilizations. The common misconception of ancient astronaut theorists is that the decision to build a something like the Giza pyramids suddenly developed overnight and could not be the result of hundreds of years of building similar developmental structures like the earlier step pyramid in Egypt for example.

I was comforted to see the recycling of so many concepts in more modern documentaries such as the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, leading me to conclude that if pseudoarcheology was indeed a science: it would be a dead science! The Nazca lines, the stone heads of Easter Island, etc. are all present in this movie made thirty years before our current wave of misinformation courtesy of the History Channel. I found it exceptionally amusing that the currently snappier titled “Baghdad Battery” is simply referred to as “a primitive electric cell” in this movie.

To borrow a line from noise rock legends Sonic Youth, I would have to rate Chariots of the Gods as “experimental jet set, trash and no star.”

References and Links (All on-line information retrieved June 1, 2010)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods_%28film%29

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/pyramids/djoser.html

Transforming Ancient Astronaut Theory

Devastator using grappling hooks to climb a pyramid. (http://www.transformers2.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/transformers_2_pyramid_2.jpg)

I recently ordered Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen on OnDemand from my cable company.  If this movie had come out 25 years ago, when I actually played with transformers I would have loved it.  Truthfully, I was more focused on Megan Fox than any of Michael Bay’s over-the-top special effects or the transformers themselves.  Shia LaBeouf is back in this sequel and also appeared in last year’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Is he on track to be to ancient astronaut theory movies what Kevin Costner is to baseball movies?  Only time will tell.

Revenge of the Fallen has an ancient angle to it.  At the first of the movie, it is revealed that transformers have visited Earth as early as 17,000 years ago.   Later on archaeologists are said to have found the strange transformer “Cybertronian” hieroglyphs all over the world at various sites.  A transformer in the form of a Blackbird bomber has even been on display in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum suggesting that transformers have been blending in on Earth for quite a while.  Apparently, the Decepticons (the bad guys) built a machine long ago to destroy the earth’s sun for an energy source, not below an ancient Egyptian pyramid, but inside of one.  There are a lot of scenes of robots destroying ancient pillars in their battle with one another as well as one climbing a pyramid to activate the sun-eating machine inside of it.  One of the best parts was when John Tuturro’s character of Simmons, looks at a pyramid and simply says, “I believe aliens built that…”

This is not a great movie and not really a good example of ancient astronaut theory being represented in science fiction.  The transformers did not jump start humanity and are not really credited with building the pyramids or any other archaeological sites.  There language supposedly is present in these places, but why?  I guess I will just have to accept that there is much to be known about this new and exciting sub-field of ancient alien robot theory.

References and Links (All on-line information retrieved December 2, 2009)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers_2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Kingdom_of_the_Crystal_Skull

The Predator’s Pyramids

The Predator's pyramids from the Alien vs. Predator movie (from http://ancientcosmonauts.blogspot.com/2008/02/pyramids.html)

In the 2004 film Alien vs. Predator, the characters from two successful science fiction franchises face-off similarly as in the even worse film, Freddy vs. Jason. The concept of Alien vs. Predator was born out of the comic book series Aliens versus Predator from Dark Horse comics.  About eight minutes into the movie, what seems to be Mesoamerican pyramid is found 2,000 ft. below the ice of the Antarctica island of Bouvetøya. This is where the majority of the movie is set.  There are a lot of phony looking statues of Predators, artwork and hieroglyphics depicting Predators and Predators fighting Aliens that serve as the backdrop for a pretty weak story.  It is revealed later that the pyramid was constructed by the Predators for the purpose of incubating the Alien race in humans to create the ultimate prey (the Aliens) for the Predators to hunt.  Apparently, these ancient humans worshiped the Predators as gods who taught them how to construct the pyramids and being chosen for incubation was a great honor.  It is also implied that the Predators have used their small personal nuclear bombs in the past to leave no trace of their activities if the Aliens get too close to escaping from the prison-like Predator pyramids.

Many of the ideas of Erich von Däniken are present in the story according to the creators of the comic book.  The handling of these borrowed ideas is almost as ridiculous as the actual concepts of ancient astronaut theory.  First, the physical evidence depicted in the film does not represent anything even close to anything found at Mesoamerican pyramids in reality.  There are no extraterrestrial inspired hieroglyphics, artwork or remains of any Predator or Alien creatures at Mesoamerican sites.  The writers of the movie hang a lantern by having a character mention the mini-nuke option to contain an outbreak… and the evidence.  That’s why none of the above has or will ever be found.  The Antarctic pyramid is thought to be the last and only place that can still serve its original function.  There is never an explanation of how Antarctica is related to Central or South America other than the mention that the continent has not always been covered by ice.

This movie is a disappointing vehicle for two classic sci-fi monsters and an even worse treatment of ancient astronaut theory.  There is little evidence mentioned to support that the Predators in this case have ever been involved with the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica.  The film itself did more harm than good for the theory, maybe causing some to think that the components of ancient astronaut theory are as silly as the unholy Predalien combination creature that appears at the end of the movie to hint at the 2007 sequel Alien vs. Predator: Requiem.

References and Links (All on-line information retrieved November 8, 2009)

http://www.amazon.com/AVP-Alien-Vs-Predator-Widescreen/dp/B00005JMZK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1257718141&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Freddy-vs-Jason-Line-Platinum/dp/B0000VCZMK/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1257718198&sr=1-2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_%28franchise%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_%28film_series%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliens_vs._Predator_%28comics%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouvet_Island

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampshade_hanging

http://www.predalien.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Aliens-vs-Predator-Requiem-Unrated/dp/B001451HX4/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1257720237&sr=8-2

The von Däniken-Stargate Link

This post is to let you know that the Erich von Däniken and Stargate side pages are now up to your right. The link below is for a short film “Is There A Stargate?” featuring Erich von Däniken that was included on the ultimate edition DVD of the original Stargate feature film.

Here is the link to the video, please excuse the tasteless videos offered to the right of the player.  This was the only place online I could find this clip and I am having difficultly embedding just the video.
http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/educational/watch/v63054399Tf8cHAd

Speaking of Stargate, the new show Stargate Universe premiers on the SyFy channel 10/2/09.  Ancient alien theory in popular culture continues!

References and Links (All on-line information retrieved September 30, 2009)

http://www.amazon.com/Stargate-Ultimate-Kurt-Russell/dp/B0000844I8/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1254463073&sr=1-3

http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/educational/watch/v63054399Tf8cHAd

http://www.syfy.com/universe/index.php

http://www.gateworld.net/universe/