WEBVTT - From the Vault: Dendera Lights and Ancient Egyptian Pseudohistory 0:00:06.200 --> 0:00:08.560 Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. It is 0:00:08.760 --> 0:00:11.160 once more Saturday, so it is once more time to 0:00:11.160 --> 0:00:12.920 go into the vault. This is going to be the 0:00:12.960 --> 0:00:17.320 episode Dindara Lights and Ancient Egyptians Pseudohistory. This one originally 0:00:17.360 --> 0:00:20.560 published eight seventeen, twenty twenty three. This was the third 0:00:20.600 --> 0:00:24.759 part in our look at how low resolution images have 0:00:24.880 --> 0:00:29.280 provoked paranormal and fringe explanations over time, despite convincing an 0:00:29.280 --> 0:00:33.600 even conclusive expert analysis. And this is once more a 0:00:33.640 --> 0:00:38.920 good excuse to dive into ancient Egyptian concepts. So without 0:00:38.960 --> 0:00:40.199 further ado, here we go. 0:00:43.560 --> 0:00:47.440 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. 0:00:53.240 --> 0:00:55.320 Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name 0:00:55.360 --> 0:00:55.920 is Robert. 0:00:55.760 --> 0:00:59.760 Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. In the past to 0:01:00.280 --> 0:01:03.520 episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we've been talking 0:01:03.560 --> 0:01:08.560 about a couple of famous, supposedly anomalous underwater images, weird, 0:01:09.040 --> 0:01:13.640 spooky looking photographs and images produced by sonar of objects 0:01:13.760 --> 0:01:18.399 on the ocean floor, which to observers with the right predisposition, 0:01:18.760 --> 0:01:22.679 seemed like compelling evidence of alien visitation of Earth, or 0:01:22.880 --> 0:01:27.400 ancient technology of lost civilizations, or something else. In that 0:01:27.520 --> 0:01:29.800 narrative space, and in a way, I think it's kind 0:01:29.840 --> 0:01:32.720 of telling that you look at an object and say, well, 0:01:32.720 --> 0:01:35.760 this could be aliens, or it could be atlantis. It's 0:01:35.760 --> 0:01:38.160 one of the two or both. 0:01:38.240 --> 0:01:40.119 You can have both sometimes, yeah, I. 0:01:40.080 --> 0:01:43.520 Guess you could. But anyway, explanation referring to explanations that 0:01:43.600 --> 0:01:48.840 are big, exciting, mind rending explanations that would change everything 0:01:48.880 --> 0:01:51.280 we think we know about the world and about the 0:01:51.360 --> 0:01:54.560 history of life on Earth. Today's episode is not a 0:01:54.680 --> 0:01:57.120 strict like Part three or anything, but we are going 0:01:57.160 --> 0:01:59.480 to be continuing the theme, so I thought it would 0:01:59.520 --> 0:02:03.800 be good to start off with a recap of what 0:02:03.880 --> 0:02:05.880 we've talked about in the last couple of episodes, though 0:02:05.920 --> 0:02:08.320 today we're going to be taking it in a different direction. 0:02:08.800 --> 0:02:11.680 So what's the theme. Well, to start with, I'll do 0:02:11.720 --> 0:02:14.000 a brief review of the things we talked about in 0:02:14.040 --> 0:02:17.680 the last two episodes. One object was something that was 0:02:17.720 --> 0:02:22.160 photographed in the nineteen sixties and known in the UFO 0:02:22.280 --> 0:02:27.480 literature as the Eltanan antenna. It looks to the untrained 0:02:27.520 --> 0:02:31.359 observer like some kind of antenna, some kind of receiver, 0:02:31.639 --> 0:02:33.800 you know. They called it, I think a microwave, aerial 0:02:33.960 --> 0:02:36.560 or something in some of the early articles on it, 0:02:36.919 --> 0:02:40.240 but actually once people with the right background of marine 0:02:40.240 --> 0:02:44.320 biology knowledge looked at this photo, they identified it with 0:02:44.400 --> 0:02:48.040 near certainty as a species of carnivorous sponge that lives 0:02:48.080 --> 0:02:50.639 on the bottom of the ocean. The other object that 0:02:50.680 --> 0:02:53.000 we talked about in the second of those two episodes 0:02:53.240 --> 0:02:58.400 was captured on fuzzy sonar images by treasure hunters and 0:02:58.480 --> 0:03:01.720 salvage divers in two thousand and eleven, and it has 0:03:01.760 --> 0:03:04.440 been referred to in the media as the Baltic Sea 0:03:04.639 --> 0:03:07.600 anomaly because it was supposedly somewhere on the floor of 0:03:07.600 --> 0:03:11.720 the Northern Baltic Sea, and hidden knowledge enthusiasts called it 0:03:11.760 --> 0:03:15.520 everything from a crashed flying saucer to a monument built 0:03:15.560 --> 0:03:18.720 by the civilization of Atlantis, and in this case a 0:03:18.919 --> 0:03:22.160 positive idea is slightly more difficult than it is in 0:03:22.160 --> 0:03:25.079 the case of the Eltanan antenna, which is almost definitely 0:03:25.120 --> 0:03:29.320 the sponge. But numerous experts have commented that this is 0:03:29.440 --> 0:03:33.280 most likely just an interesting looking geologic formation, in other words, 0:03:33.360 --> 0:03:36.360 a big mass of rock that may be a result 0:03:36.440 --> 0:03:39.320 of the freezing and thawing of glaciers, but ultimately we 0:03:39.320 --> 0:03:42.160 don't know for sure, and so it's kind of interesting 0:03:42.240 --> 0:03:46.360 that in both cases, the story goes that someone captured 0:03:46.480 --> 0:03:50.520 a fuzzy or low resolution image of something that looked 0:03:50.600 --> 0:03:55.560 weird and to some extent looked intuitively unnatural or out 0:03:55.560 --> 0:03:59.200 of place. That image was then published to a lay 0:03:59.240 --> 0:04:02.960 audience that had no background knowledge to help them understand 0:04:03.040 --> 0:04:06.320 what they were looking at, and then some observers concluded 0:04:06.360 --> 0:04:10.560 that since the object looked unusual, unnatural, or out of place, 0:04:11.240 --> 0:04:14.680 it must be a piece of anomalist technology deposited by 0:04:14.720 --> 0:04:19.080 aliens or time travelers, or a past human civilization about 0:04:19.080 --> 0:04:22.880 which all knowledge has been erased. However, in both cases, 0:04:23.240 --> 0:04:27.800 the more information entered into the picture, the more it 0:04:27.839 --> 0:04:30.640 seemed like these anomalies were probably just weird looking natural 0:04:30.680 --> 0:04:35.200 phenomena like animals or rocks. And so, while it's always 0:04:35.240 --> 0:04:37.320 important to keep an open mind, you want to keep 0:04:37.320 --> 0:04:40.240 your mind open to good evidence if it were to 0:04:40.320 --> 0:04:44.640 emerge of big and worldview changing discoveries, it is at 0:04:44.640 --> 0:04:48.720 the same time important not to let emotional excitement guide 0:04:48.760 --> 0:04:53.240 your reasoning. And one reason to be skeptical about putting 0:04:53.279 --> 0:04:56.320 something that looks weird and out of place into the 0:04:56.400 --> 0:05:00.200 aliens or atlantis column is that If you've if all 0:05:00.240 --> 0:05:02.680 of these kinds of stories long enough, you really start 0:05:02.720 --> 0:05:05.680 to see a trend. And that trend is the more 0:05:05.800 --> 0:05:09.400 information we have to inform our judgment, the less it 0:05:09.440 --> 0:05:13.560 seems like aliens. So the cases where a piece of evidence, 0:05:13.640 --> 0:05:17.760 like a photograph or a video, remains unexplainable and thus 0:05:18.000 --> 0:05:21.839 still possibly aliens, those tend to be the cases where 0:05:21.880 --> 0:05:25.680 there are notable deficits of information, and these could be 0:05:25.720 --> 0:05:29.120 deficits within the evidence itself, like the picture or the 0:05:29.200 --> 0:05:32.839 video is very grainy and low resolution, so it's hard 0:05:32.839 --> 0:05:34.960 to tell exactly what you're looking at, and you kind 0:05:34.960 --> 0:05:36.400 of just have to shrug and say, I don't know, 0:05:36.440 --> 0:05:39.080 it looks weird, hard to say what it is. Or 0:05:39.160 --> 0:05:42.960 the information deficit could be in the person or community 0:05:43.160 --> 0:05:45.839 that is assessing the evidence. It could be in us. 0:05:45.920 --> 0:05:48.960 For example, most of us have a lack of background 0:05:49.000 --> 0:05:52.080 knowledge about what sponges on the ocean floor look like, 0:05:52.640 --> 0:05:55.120 or about what kinds of patterns can be found in 0:05:55.200 --> 0:06:00.280 natural rock formations, and so information deficits kind of keep 0:06:00.279 --> 0:06:04.960 the mystery alive. Meanwhile, the converse also seems true. The 0:06:04.960 --> 0:06:08.440 more information there is, the more likely it becomes that 0:06:08.520 --> 0:06:12.320 the object gets pinned down to an explanation from within 0:06:12.400 --> 0:06:15.320 the range of known causes. So you get a higher 0:06:15.360 --> 0:06:19.160 resolution video, or you get new videos of the same thing, 0:06:19.360 --> 0:06:24.120 maybe an additional angle, better light conditions, more experience or 0:06:24.200 --> 0:06:27.640 background knowledge with which to judge the video or photo, 0:06:27.760 --> 0:06:31.400 and oh, okay, in these cases it's a milar balloon 0:06:31.760 --> 0:06:35.400 or oh I see that's a star, or that's an airplane. 0:06:36.440 --> 0:06:39.520 Rob Actually, another excellent example that you brought up in 0:06:39.560 --> 0:06:42.800 the last episode was the so called face on Mars. 0:06:42.920 --> 0:06:45.080 You know, this was it's a wonderful photo, Like I 0:06:45.160 --> 0:06:48.200 love the face on Mars, but this was done in 0:06:48.279 --> 0:06:50.880 by higher resolution photography. 0:06:51.200 --> 0:06:54.159 Done in to a certain extent. But like some of 0:06:54.160 --> 0:06:57.280 these other images, the face of Mars still remains this 0:06:57.520 --> 0:07:00.000 image that's kind of an article of faith to sign, 0:07:00.160 --> 0:07:03.600 you know, or at least this kind of totem of 0:07:03.640 --> 0:07:08.560 the paranormal and the potentially cosmic. And I guess it 0:07:08.640 --> 0:07:12.440 is still certainly a testament to our ability to see 0:07:12.480 --> 0:07:14.840 ourselves in anything well exactly. 0:07:14.880 --> 0:07:17.040 And I wouldn't wish, by the way, that we could 0:07:17.040 --> 0:07:20.800 not read beauty and meaning into I don't know, things 0:07:20.840 --> 0:07:24.200 that might on their own merits not necessarily shout out 0:07:24.680 --> 0:07:28.600 to be meaningful, like a rock doesn't necessarily say that 0:07:28.640 --> 0:07:30.720 it has meaning, but you can see faces in it, 0:07:30.760 --> 0:07:32.520 and it can make you feel all kinds of things. 0:07:32.720 --> 0:07:36.160 This is like the basis of all art. Yeah, But 0:07:36.320 --> 0:07:39.280 when it comes to looking for explanations of things in 0:07:39.320 --> 0:07:42.440 the world, this pattern just pops up again and again 0:07:42.480 --> 0:07:46.040 and again. If the picture stays fuzzy, it still might 0:07:46.080 --> 0:07:49.120 be aliens, or it still might be atlantis. But if 0:07:49.160 --> 0:07:52.040 you're able to sharpen the focus or to have more 0:07:52.080 --> 0:07:56.320 background knowledge when you're assessing it, it's almost definitely not aliens, 0:07:56.720 --> 0:07:59.200 then that's when you realize it's a balloon. And this 0:07:59.320 --> 0:08:03.239 doesn't mean we will never discover good evidence of alien 0:08:03.280 --> 0:08:06.920 visitation of Earth or anything, or of you know, maybe 0:08:06.920 --> 0:08:10.600 some big discovery about something previously unknown about the ancient world. 0:08:10.600 --> 0:08:14.520 That's always possible. But I think if you follow these stories, 0:08:14.880 --> 0:08:19.600 it's sort of impossible not to notice the trend, and 0:08:19.880 --> 0:08:23.680 awareness of the trend should put us on guard when 0:08:23.760 --> 0:08:27.040 new pieces of evidence bubble up from the low information 0:08:27.280 --> 0:08:30.800 or low resolution zone. So today we wanted to look 0:08:30.840 --> 0:08:35.040 at some similar trends, not in underwater imagery, but in 0:08:35.200 --> 0:08:38.920 imagery related to another domain that can often appear in 0:08:39.080 --> 0:08:43.000 degraded or low resolution form and be kind of put 0:08:43.160 --> 0:08:46.720 cold in front of people who don't have contextual background 0:08:46.760 --> 0:08:49.880 knowledge to understand what we're looking at, and this is 0:08:50.120 --> 0:08:51.600 artifacts from ancient history. 0:08:52.080 --> 0:08:55.720 Yeah, I think examples like this can be at times 0:08:55.760 --> 0:08:58.320 a little harder for us to wrap our heads around, 0:08:58.720 --> 0:09:01.360 especially if we are more we're inclined to sort of 0:09:01.480 --> 0:09:07.040 rally behind an outside idea about what we're looking at, 0:09:07.720 --> 0:09:11.640 because in some of these other examples of anomalist data, 0:09:12.000 --> 0:09:16.040 anomalist photography, et cetera, there's there's often maybe a sense 0:09:16.040 --> 0:09:22.120 of kind of like a a rabbit duck illusion scenario, 0:09:22.240 --> 0:09:24.000 you know, or or one of these, you know, one 0:09:24.040 --> 0:09:26.439 of these optical illusions where someone shows it to you 0:09:26.480 --> 0:09:28.240 and they say, hey, do you see a duck or 0:09:28.240 --> 0:09:29.360 a rabbit? And you say, well, I see a rabbit. 0:09:29.360 --> 0:09:31.720 I don't see a duck at all. And then someone says, well, look, 0:09:31.880 --> 0:09:33.800 i'll show you, and you show show them the parts 0:09:33.840 --> 0:09:35.800 of the duck and they're like, okay, now I can 0:09:35.800 --> 0:09:39.120 see it both ways. It can maybe be a little 0:09:39.120 --> 0:09:42.560 bit harder if in order to truly see it both ways, 0:09:43.000 --> 0:09:47.400 you have to say, understand ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. So like 0:09:47.440 --> 0:09:49.600 one of the examples I'm gonna I'm gonna touch on 0:09:49.640 --> 0:09:52.400 here is one where we absolutely know what it is, 0:09:52.760 --> 0:09:56.280 and we absolutely know what it's not. And yet even 0:09:56.400 --> 0:09:59.880 you know, reading the explanation, you know, hearing from experts, 0:10:00.640 --> 0:10:02.320 you know, it can still be difficult. It's difficult for 0:10:02.360 --> 0:10:05.360 me to see exactly what we're talking about there, and 0:10:05.440 --> 0:10:08.240 it's actually easier for me to sort of lean in 0:10:08.240 --> 0:10:12.960 to the ridiculous explanation for what appears to be in 0:10:12.960 --> 0:10:15.440 front of us. So we'll get to this in a second, 0:10:15.440 --> 0:10:18.280 but first I just want to talk in general about 0:10:18.440 --> 0:10:25.520 the overarching theme of Egyptomania. Now, Egyptomania is more often 0:10:25.600 --> 0:10:30.160 used to refer specifically to nineteenth century European fascination with 0:10:30.200 --> 0:10:34.600 all things Egypt during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, but it can 0:10:34.640 --> 0:10:38.840 also generally be leveled at various points in time when 0:10:38.920 --> 0:10:43.520 various cultures have pursued an interest in ancient Egyptian civilization 0:10:44.000 --> 0:10:47.520 and culture. And of course this general interest is irresistible 0:10:47.559 --> 0:10:50.000 because we've touched on many times in the show. I'm 0:10:50.160 --> 0:10:55.959 ancient Egyptian civilization, ancient Egyptian culture, and mythology. These are fascinating. 0:10:55.360 --> 0:10:59.240 Topics, absolutely, yeah, a beautiful entrancing and not just to 0:10:59.320 --> 0:11:01.880 people in the mind. I mean, something I've read before 0:11:01.960 --> 0:11:05.559 is that people in the world that still appears as 0:11:05.600 --> 0:11:08.400 the ancient world to us looked back to the even 0:11:08.480 --> 0:11:12.280 more ancient Egyptian civilization and they were fascinated by it. 0:11:12.400 --> 0:11:17.040 There were ancient Greco Romans who had a kind of Egyptomania. 0:11:17.840 --> 0:11:20.760 Yeah, absolutely, I think we've we've mentioned the sort of 0:11:21.440 --> 0:11:24.320 mind blowing fact before. You know that the ancient Romans 0:11:24.960 --> 0:11:28.640 were greatly intrigued by ancient Egypt, which was already as 0:11:28.640 --> 0:11:30.600 ancient to them as the Romans are to us. 0:11:31.160 --> 0:11:35.200 Right, So at the time of Caesar Augustus, ancient Egyptian 0:11:35.240 --> 0:11:37.319 civilization was thousands of years old. 0:11:38.000 --> 0:11:41.240 Yeah. Yeah. And of course we've touched before on the 0:11:41.280 --> 0:11:43.880 ancient wonders of the world. You know, the Pyramids, the 0:11:43.880 --> 0:11:47.160 Great Pyramids were certainly on that list, and those still 0:11:47.240 --> 0:11:49.840 remain some of the most enigmatic man made structures on 0:11:49.880 --> 0:11:52.680 the planet, and we still don't know everything there is 0:11:52.720 --> 0:11:57.400 to know about them. So Egyptology remains a living field 0:11:57.480 --> 0:11:58.000 of study. 0:11:58.360 --> 0:11:58.600 Now. 0:11:58.960 --> 0:12:01.280 I was looking at a really really good book about 0:12:01.320 --> 0:12:04.720 this that I highly recommend. It's from Ronald H. Fritz, 0:12:04.800 --> 0:12:09.199 titled Egyptomania, and in the book, the author discusses various 0:12:09.280 --> 0:12:13.720 forms of Egyptomania over the ages, from the ancient Hebrews, 0:12:13.760 --> 0:12:17.080 from Greeks and Romans to European models. There's a whole 0:12:17.120 --> 0:12:20.760 section on like fiction and gets into movies. He also 0:12:20.800 --> 0:12:26.480 has a great chapter on Afrocentrist movements that engage in Egyptomania, 0:12:26.960 --> 0:12:30.520 and he drives home that just many different peoples across 0:12:30.600 --> 0:12:35.440 different times have attempted to imagine and even remake the 0:12:35.520 --> 0:12:39.600 ancient Egyptians in their own image to enhance their own worldview, 0:12:39.920 --> 0:12:43.880 their own interests, their own ideology, etc. And the energy 0:12:43.920 --> 0:12:48.239 of this exercise ranges from just merely attempting to understand 0:12:48.280 --> 0:12:50.199 a fascinating time in people. I mean, that's one of 0:12:50.240 --> 0:12:55.360 our main tools is to think about even people from 0:12:55.559 --> 0:12:58.240 the distant past in different lands, to try and imagine 0:12:58.240 --> 0:13:00.720 what it would be like to be them. But on 0:13:00.760 --> 0:13:02.680 the other end of the spectrum you get into just 0:13:02.760 --> 0:13:07.600 outright pseudohistory, pseudoscience, and just everything else you might expect 0:13:07.600 --> 0:13:09.320 to encounter on the fringes. 0:13:09.920 --> 0:13:14.120 Well, yeah, there's an interesting duality that comes from trying 0:13:14.160 --> 0:13:18.800 to see yourself and imagine people like you and other 0:13:18.920 --> 0:13:22.560 times and other civilizations, because of course, there probably is 0:13:22.600 --> 0:13:24.960 something that all people at all times kind of have 0:13:25.040 --> 0:13:27.440 in common. There is a common human experience, and you 0:13:27.480 --> 0:13:29.480 can try to imagine what it would have been like 0:13:29.920 --> 0:13:34.960 to live in ancient Egypt. But there's a possibility that 0:13:35.080 --> 0:13:38.160 in doing so, you kind of lull yourself into the 0:13:38.200 --> 0:13:41.560 false belief that you can say, look at ancient Egyptian 0:13:41.640 --> 0:13:45.400 art or look at ancient Egyptian artifacts and just intuitively 0:13:45.440 --> 0:13:48.000 identify what you're looking at, when in fact, you would 0:13:48.000 --> 0:13:51.680 probably need some very specific cultural knowledge to understand what 0:13:51.720 --> 0:13:52.760 you're looking at. 0:13:52.960 --> 0:13:56.720 Yeah, and a lot of this imagery getting right into 0:13:56.720 --> 0:13:58.720 what we're talking about here is the kind of stuff 0:13:58.760 --> 0:14:02.040 that can be mysterious enough, that can seem cryptic enough 0:14:02.320 --> 0:14:05.640 to folks who don't know what they're looking at that 0:14:05.760 --> 0:14:09.120 you can apply other ideas, modern ideas to them. You know, 0:14:09.280 --> 0:14:11.719 like you just read a book about UFOs, Well, go 0:14:11.800 --> 0:14:15.560 look at these these images without any context, and you 0:14:15.679 --> 0:14:19.280 may see UFO related ideas there. Read a book about 0:14:19.800 --> 0:14:22.600 the bicameral mind and start looking at at some of 0:14:22.600 --> 0:14:26.080 these images, Well, you might have some alarming ideas and 0:14:25.520 --> 0:14:28.680 some interesting interpretations of what you see as well. 0:14:29.000 --> 0:14:31.680 Right, we read the world through the lenses that are 0:14:31.680 --> 0:14:34.520 available to us, and very often the lenses that are 0:14:34.560 --> 0:14:37.040 available to us sort of, what's the top lens on 0:14:37.080 --> 0:14:39.600 the stack is whatever you've recently been thinking about. 0:14:40.040 --> 0:14:41.800 Yeah, and not to say that, you know, fresh eyes 0:14:41.800 --> 0:14:46.360 and fresh perspectives are not potentially important in reevaluating what 0:14:46.400 --> 0:14:49.560 we know and what we think we know. But oftentimes 0:14:49.680 --> 0:14:53.440 when there is a particular preconceived notion in mind, you're 0:14:53.440 --> 0:14:56.120 not necessarily checking back in with the experts to see 0:14:56.120 --> 0:14:58.800 if this radical new theory matches up with the old 0:14:58.840 --> 0:15:11.800 school interpretation. Certainly when we get into fringe ideas. So anyway, 0:15:11.840 --> 0:15:15.280 there's a long history of Gyptomania in Western magic and 0:15:15.280 --> 0:15:20.040 occultism continues to play into modern ideas of magic and ocultism, 0:15:20.040 --> 0:15:25.120 but also modern branches of fringe ideas concerning UFOs, ancient 0:15:25.160 --> 0:15:28.160 alien discourse, which of course we've discussed on the show 0:15:28.200 --> 0:15:31.480 in the past, and other paranormal concepts and Yeah, so 0:15:31.480 --> 0:15:36.200 it's no surprise that various examples of iconography, archaeological remnants, 0:15:36.240 --> 0:15:38.440 and so forth that are not located on the bottom 0:15:38.480 --> 0:15:41.080 of the sea still end up speaking to us across 0:15:41.080 --> 0:15:44.440 time and culture in a way that too inexpert eyes 0:15:44.600 --> 0:15:48.480 or eyes seeking only confirmation of the paranormal examples of 0:15:48.840 --> 0:15:53.640 ancient technology and so forth. You know they're going to 0:15:53.680 --> 0:15:57.480 see that in these images. So in just a few 0:15:57.480 --> 0:15:59.800 minutes we'll get to a couple I think of interesting 0:16:00.080 --> 0:16:03.680 samples of this. But going back to the book Egyptomania, 0:16:04.280 --> 0:16:08.280 Fritz points out that there are other not necessarily alien 0:16:08.360 --> 0:16:15.200 fringe ideas that pre exists UFO fascination that already insisted 0:16:15.200 --> 0:16:19.160 that ancient Egypt was, for instance, much older than mainstream 0:16:19.280 --> 0:16:22.560 historians believe today. Some of these push back to like 0:16:22.600 --> 0:16:27.040 ten thousand BC or earlier, as opposed to the accepted 0:16:27.120 --> 0:16:30.440 view that the Archaic Age stretches five thousand to three 0:16:30.480 --> 0:16:33.600 thousand BC, with the Old Kingdom coming in at around 0:16:33.600 --> 0:16:36.520 three thousand BC. And then you have a number of 0:16:36.760 --> 0:16:41.040 fringe ideas that don't again don't concern aliens or anything 0:16:41.080 --> 0:16:44.520 like that, but they get into this idea that like, 0:16:44.640 --> 0:16:48.160 surely there is some ancient advanced civilization at the heart 0:16:48.160 --> 0:16:50.880 of all of this, And so Fritz discusses a few 0:16:50.880 --> 0:16:53.960 of these. There's this idea one ideas that the ancient 0:16:53.960 --> 0:16:58.960 ancient Egyptian civilization extends from civilization X or the Ice 0:16:59.000 --> 0:17:00.080 Age super civil. 0:17:00.760 --> 0:17:04.160 Oh, there are similar analogs to this that are still 0:17:04.200 --> 0:17:05.119 kicking around today. 0:17:05.400 --> 0:17:08.000 Yeah, And of course a big, big one is Atlantis, 0:17:08.040 --> 0:17:13.240 the idea that that like refugees from sunken Atlantis founded 0:17:13.440 --> 0:17:15.920 ancient Egypt that sort of thing. And then you also 0:17:16.000 --> 0:17:19.720 have the ancient alien discourse coming in ancient alien aliens 0:17:19.760 --> 0:17:24.280 teaching the ancient Egyptians how to do things, or ancient 0:17:24.320 --> 0:17:29.200 aliens interbreeding with the ancient Egyptians, supercharging human DNA, and 0:17:29.280 --> 0:17:31.679 basically anything else you want to happen. I don't know. 0:17:31.720 --> 0:17:34.280 I feel like a lot of alien discourses like wrong 0:17:34.440 --> 0:17:38.280 but fun. But like the alien supercharging DNA thing goes 0:17:38.560 --> 0:17:41.240 is not wrong and fun, it's like wrong and gross. 0:17:42.760 --> 0:17:45.479 Yeah, you get it. You, I mean so much of this. 0:17:45.680 --> 0:17:48.440 It can these ideas they can start in a place 0:17:48.440 --> 0:17:52.360 that feels just fun and escapist, but you follow them 0:17:52.359 --> 0:17:56.439 long enough, they can get into perhaps creepier territory. But 0:17:56.720 --> 0:17:59.000 there is still a lot of variety here to choose from. 0:17:59.080 --> 0:18:03.080 And Fritz writes the following quote, the outpouring and accumulation 0:18:03.240 --> 0:18:07.119 of the many theories that alternative historians advanced about ancient 0:18:07.160 --> 0:18:10.440 Egypt could be considered a cornucopia. But since so many 0:18:10.760 --> 0:18:14.199 of the theories clash with and contradict each other, a 0:18:14.200 --> 0:18:17.119 better description might be a cacophony. And I think we 0:18:17.160 --> 0:18:19.240 saw this in some of the discussion of our previous 0:18:19.440 --> 0:18:23.360 underwater examples as well, you know what is the anomaly? Well, 0:18:23.400 --> 0:18:27.160 there's never like this single paranormal explanation, but a whole 0:18:27.200 --> 0:18:31.040 host of them. Certainly the deeper you go into a 0:18:31.080 --> 0:18:34.119 theme like, Okay, it's an antenna, but is that is 0:18:34.160 --> 0:18:36.760 it the secret world government that built it, or is 0:18:36.800 --> 0:18:39.200 it the ancient lass civilization that built it? Or is 0:18:39.240 --> 0:18:42.919 it current UFO, current alien visitors that built it. And 0:18:43.080 --> 0:18:45.800 within a given person's body of work, they might have 0:18:45.840 --> 0:18:48.240 a specific idea, but it's going to be different from 0:18:48.240 --> 0:18:49.280 the next book on the shelf. 0:18:49.680 --> 0:18:52.280 Or as we mentioned directly earlier, if you look at 0:18:52.280 --> 0:18:54.280 an object on the ocean floor and you think, well, 0:18:54.320 --> 0:18:56.800 this could be a UFO, or it could be a 0:18:56.840 --> 0:18:59.560 temple built by the people of Atlantis, or it could 0:18:59.600 --> 0:19:02.960 be an Nazi bunker. In that case, like could it 0:19:03.160 --> 0:19:07.680 really possibly even suggest any of those like that? Those 0:19:07.720 --> 0:19:11.000 are so different. It sounds like you're just kind of 0:19:11.040 --> 0:19:14.320 like reaching around for whatever, not like saying, oh, it 0:19:14.480 --> 0:19:18.360 really has attributes that would make us conclude it is x. 0:19:18.920 --> 0:19:23.320 Yeah, exactly. Now. The Atlantis connection to ancient Egypt goes 0:19:23.359 --> 0:19:25.800 way back. Apparently goes back to the writings of Plato 0:19:25.800 --> 0:19:30.000 concerning the idea that the ancient Egyptians coexisted with Atlantis 0:19:30.440 --> 0:19:33.720 nine thousand years earlier. Fritz writes that while Plato was 0:19:33.840 --> 0:19:37.639 likely stating all this purely to make a philosophical point, 0:19:37.880 --> 0:19:40.320 the idea that Egypt was already a nine thousand year 0:19:40.359 --> 0:19:44.720 old civilization was probably what contemporary Greeks believed in the 0:19:44.760 --> 0:19:48.240 fourth and fifth centuries BCE, and to be clear, other 0:19:48.280 --> 0:19:52.200 civilizations of the day were cited with bloated timelines as well. 0:19:52.680 --> 0:19:55.720 Yeah. One big difference between like an ancient Greek historian 0:19:55.760 --> 0:19:58.159 and a modern historian is that modern historians have a 0:19:58.200 --> 0:20:01.720 wealth of physical scienceientific evidence that they can draw on 0:20:01.800 --> 0:20:05.000 to help inform, you know, how they should process the 0:20:05.119 --> 0:20:07.840 received stories told about the past. You know, you can, 0:20:07.960 --> 0:20:11.840 like you can do digs, and you can do radiometric dating, 0:20:11.880 --> 0:20:13.720 and you can do all kinds of things that give 0:20:13.800 --> 0:20:18.120 you physical clues to help you either confirm or disconfirm 0:20:18.240 --> 0:20:20.439 things that have been written down about what happened in 0:20:20.480 --> 0:20:20.879 the past. 0:20:21.400 --> 0:20:24.760 Absolutely. Now, of course, one of the things about Atlantis 0:20:24.920 --> 0:20:28.679 is that the concept never completely goes away, certainly in 0:20:28.720 --> 0:20:31.520 the West, but it comes and it goes. It's heightened 0:20:31.520 --> 0:20:34.840 by the discovery of an inhabited America's and then again 0:20:34.960 --> 0:20:38.720 in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with modern pseudohistory of 0:20:38.800 --> 0:20:43.119 Egypt and Atlantis emerging largely from the writings apparently of 0:20:43.160 --> 0:20:49.320 American politician Ignacious Donnelley in eighteen eighty two. Donnelly, if 0:20:49.480 --> 0:20:52.440 you're not familiar with him, represented Minnesota and the US 0:20:52.440 --> 0:20:56.000 House of Representatives from eighteen sixty three through eighteen sixty nine. 0:20:56.880 --> 0:21:01.479 He pushed a number of ideas concerning pseudoscience and pseudo history. 0:21:02.520 --> 0:21:06.600 So yeah, definitely one of the many characters that Fritz 0:21:06.640 --> 0:21:07.879 writes about in this section. 0:21:08.400 --> 0:21:09.960 Oh boy, Now. 0:21:09.960 --> 0:21:13.560 Another figure that Fritz touches on here and credits largely 0:21:13.600 --> 0:21:17.359 with this sort of modern idea that Egypt had advanced technology. 0:21:17.359 --> 0:21:20.919 Ancient Egypt had advanced technology. This goes back to the 0:21:21.000 --> 0:21:24.560 psychic readings of when Edgar Casey, who lived eighteen seventy 0:21:24.560 --> 0:21:29.160 seven through nineteen forty five, a self professed clairvoyant who 0:21:29.200 --> 0:21:32.440 carried out quote unquote life readings for people and revealed 0:21:32.480 --> 0:21:35.760 their past lives in ancient Atlantis, as well as the 0:21:36.080 --> 0:21:40.440 advanced technology that the Atlanteans supposedly had, such as advanced 0:21:40.440 --> 0:21:44.399 crystal laser weapons that they ultimately used to destroy Atlantis, 0:21:44.520 --> 0:21:46.440 with the survivors fleeing to Egypt. 0:21:46.840 --> 0:21:48.760 Crystal laser weapons. 0:21:49.080 --> 0:21:54.240 Yeah, I mean, it sounds remarkably like that old Atari 0:21:54.359 --> 0:21:57.200 twenty six hundred game Atlantis. I don't know if anyone 0:21:57.280 --> 0:21:59.679 out there actually played this, but I remember as a 0:21:59.720 --> 0:22:02.520 kid seeing the commercials for it online and it was 0:22:02.920 --> 0:22:05.800 kind of a scary commercial with a whole narrative structure 0:22:05.880 --> 0:22:07.919 going on how to do with that. I believe memory 0:22:07.920 --> 0:22:12.040 serves an ongoing war between the Gorgons and the people 0:22:12.040 --> 0:22:15.280 of Atlantis, and it was a great commercial. Look it 0:22:15.359 --> 0:22:16.280 up if you haven't seen. 0:22:16.119 --> 0:22:18.800 It, you know. I kind of can't help but think 0:22:18.840 --> 0:22:23.200 though all these ideas about ancient Egypt having advanced technology. 0:22:23.680 --> 0:22:26.680 In a way, they did have advanced technology, but they 0:22:26.680 --> 0:22:30.159 had advanced technology for the time in which they lived. 0:22:30.359 --> 0:22:32.919 Like you do not have to turn to bad standards 0:22:32.920 --> 0:22:37.600 of evidence. For examples of amazing technological achievements. In ancient Egypt, 0:22:37.880 --> 0:22:41.840 they built the Pyramids, among you million tons of other things. 0:22:42.200 --> 0:22:45.199 That was not ancient aliens. That was extremely smart and 0:22:45.280 --> 0:22:50.560 industrious people creating amazing technological achievements with a very limited 0:22:50.600 --> 0:22:53.480 set of tools compared to what's available to people today. 0:22:53.600 --> 0:22:56.880 That is an amazing technological feat. It was just an 0:22:56.880 --> 0:22:59.000 amazing technological feat for the time. 0:22:59.760 --> 0:23:01.720 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean that's one of the tragedies 0:23:01.720 --> 0:23:03.480 about all of this is like when you when you 0:23:03.480 --> 0:23:06.280 get wrapped up in say ancient alien discourse, you end 0:23:06.359 --> 0:23:11.520 up reducing the importance of of of what people were 0:23:11.520 --> 0:23:14.399 actually doing if you just attribute it to the gifts 0:23:14.400 --> 0:23:17.520 of the gods, the gifts of the alien visitors and 0:23:17.560 --> 0:23:20.119 so forth. Now, I want to stress that in this chapter, 0:23:20.160 --> 0:23:22.160 Fritz touches on a number of different names, and I'm 0:23:22.160 --> 0:23:23.960