Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. In the past two
Speaker 3: episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we've been talking
Speaker 3: about a couple of famous, supposedly anomalous underwater images, weird,
Speaker 3: spooky looking photographs and images produced by sonar of objects
Speaker 3: on the ocean floor, which, to observers with the right predisposition,
Speaker 3: seemed like compelling evidence of alien visitation of Earth, or
Speaker 3: ancient technology of lost civilizations, or something else in that
Speaker 3: narrative space. And in a way, I think it's kind
Speaker 3: of telling that you look at an object and say, well,
Speaker 3: this could be aliens, or it could be atlantis. It's
Speaker 3: one of the two or both.
Speaker 2: You can have both sometimes yeah.
Speaker 3: I guess you could. But anyway, explanation referring to explanations
Speaker 3: that are big, exciting, mind rending explanations that would change
Speaker 3: everything we think we know about the world and about
Speaker 3: the history of life on Earth. Today's episode is not
Speaker 3: a strict like Part three or anything, but we are
Speaker 3: going to be continuing the theme, so I thought it
Speaker 3: would be good to start off with a recap of
Speaker 3: what we've talked about in the last couple of episodes,
Speaker 3: though today we're going to be taking it in a
Speaker 3: different direction. So what's the theme. Well, to start with,
Speaker 3: I'll do a brief review of the things we talked
Speaker 3: about in the last two episodes. One object was something
Speaker 3: that was photographed in the nineteen sixties and known in
Speaker 3: the UFO literature as the el tanin antenna. It looks
Speaker 3: to the untrained observer like some kind of antenna, some
Speaker 3: kind of receiver, you know. They called it, I think
Speaker 3: a microwave aerial or something in some of the early
Speaker 3: articles on it. But actually once people with the right
Speaker 3: background of marine biolology knowledge looked at this photo, they
Speaker 3: identified it with near certainty as a species of carnivorous
Speaker 3: sponge that lives on the bottom of the ocean. The
Speaker 3: other object that we talked about in the second of
Speaker 3: those two episodes was captured on fuzzy sonar images by
Speaker 3: treasure hunters and salvage divers in twenty eleven, and it
Speaker 3: has been referred to in the media as the Baltic
Speaker 3: Sea anomaly because it was supposedly somewhere on the floor
Speaker 3: of the Northern Baltic Sea and hidden knowledge. Enthusiasts called
Speaker 3: it everything from a crashed flying saucer to a monument
Speaker 3: built by the civilization of Atlantis, and in this case
Speaker 3: a positive idea is slightly more difficult than it is
Speaker 3: in the case of the Eltanan antenna, which is almost
Speaker 3: definitely the sponge, But numerous experts have commented that this
Speaker 3: is most likely just an interesting looking geologic formation, in
Speaker 3: other words, a big mass of rock that may be
Speaker 3: a result of the freezing and thawing of glaciers. But
Speaker 3: ultimately we don't know for sure, and so it's kind
Speaker 3: of interesting that in both cases, the story goes that
Speaker 3: someone captured a fuzzy or low resolution image of something
Speaker 3: that looked weird and to some extent, looked intuitively unnatural
Speaker 3: or out of place. That image was then published to
Speaker 3: a lay audience that had no background knowledge to help
Speaker 3: them understand what they were looking at, and then some
Speaker 3: observers concluded that since the object looked unusual, unnatural, or
Speaker 3: out of place, it must be a piece of anomalist
Speaker 3: technology deposited by aliens or time travelers, or a past
Speaker 3: human civilization about which all knowledge has been erased. However,
Speaker 3: in both cases, the more information entered into the picture,
Speaker 3: the more it seemed like these anomalies were probably just
Speaker 3: weird looking natural phenomena like animals or rocks. And so,
Speaker 3: while it's always important to keep an open mind, you
Speaker 3: want to keep your mind open to good evidence if
Speaker 3: it were to age of big and worldview changing discoveries,
Speaker 3: it is at the same time important not to let
Speaker 3: emotional excitement guide your reasoning. And one reason to be
Speaker 3: skeptical about putting something that looks weird and out of
Speaker 3: place into the aliens or atlantis column is that if
Speaker 3: you follow these kinds of stories long enough, you really
Speaker 3: start to see a trend. And that trend is the
Speaker 3: more information we have to inform our judgment, the less
Speaker 3: it seems like aliens. So the cases where a piece
Speaker 3: of evidence like a photograph or a video, remains unexplainable
Speaker 3: and thus still possibly aliens, those tend to be the
Speaker 3: cases where there are notable deficits of information, and these
Speaker 3: could be deficits within the evidence itself, like the picture
Speaker 3: or the video is very grainy and low resolution, so
Speaker 3: it's hard to tell exactly what you're looking at, and
Speaker 3: you kind of just have to shrug and say, I
Speaker 3: don't know, it looks weird, hard to say what it is.
Speaker 3: Or the information deficit could be in the person or
Speaker 3: community that is assessing the evidence. It could be in us.
Speaker 3: For example, most of us have a lack of background
Speaker 3: knowledge about what sponges on the ocean floor look like,
Speaker 3: or about what kinds of patterns can be found in
Speaker 3: natural rock formations, and so information deficits kind of keep
Speaker 3: the mystery alive. Meanwhile, the converse also seems true. The
Speaker 3: more information there is, the more likely it becomes that
Speaker 3: the object gets pinned down to an explanation from within
Speaker 3: the range of known causes. So you get a higher
Speaker 3: resolution video, or you get new videos of the same thing,
Speaker 3: maybe an additional angle, better light conditions, more experience or
Speaker 3: background knowledge with which to judge the video or photo,
Speaker 3: and oh okay, in these cases it's a milar balloon
Speaker 3: or oh I see that's a star, or that's an airplane.
Speaker 3: Rob Actually, another excellent example that you brought up in
Speaker 3: the last episode was the so called face on Mars.
Speaker 3: You know this was it's a wonderful photo, like I
Speaker 3: love the face on Mars, but this was done in
Speaker 3: by higher resolution photography.
Speaker 2: Done in to a certain extent. But like some of
Speaker 2: these other images, the face of Mars still remains this
Speaker 2: image that's kind of an article of faith to some
Speaker 2: you know, or at least this kind of totem of
Speaker 2: the paranormal and the potentially you know, cosmic, And I
Speaker 2: guess it is still certainly a testament to our ability
Speaker 2: to see ourselves in anything.
Speaker 3: Well exactly. And I wouldn't wish, by the way, that
Speaker 3: we could not read beauty and meaning into I don't know,
Speaker 3: things that might on their own merits not necessarily shout
Speaker 3: out to be meaningful, like a rock doesn't necessarily say
Speaker 3: that it has meaning, but you can see faces in it,
Speaker 3: and it can make you feel all kinds of things.
Speaker 3: This is like the basis of all art. Yeah, But
Speaker 3: when it comes to looking for explanations of things in
Speaker 3: the world, this pattern just pops up again and again
Speaker 3: and again. If the picture stays fuzzy, it still might
Speaker 3: be aliens, or it still might be atlantis. But if
Speaker 3: you're able to sharpen the focus or to have more
Speaker 3: background knowledge when you're assessing it, it's almost definitely not aliens.
Speaker 3: Then that's when you realize it's a balloon. And this
Speaker 3: doesn't mean we will never discover good evidence of alien
Speaker 3: visitation of Earth or anything, or of you know, maybe
Speaker 3: some big discovery about something previously unknown about the ancient world.
Speaker 3: That's always possible. But I think if you follow these stories,
Speaker 3: it's sort of impossible not to notice the trend, and
Speaker 3: awareness of the trend should put us on guard when
Speaker 3: new pieces of evidence bubble up from the low information
Speaker 3: or low resolution zone. So today we wanted to look
Speaker 3: at some similar trends, not in underwater imagery, but in
Speaker 3: imagery related to another domain that can often appear in
Speaker 3: degraded or low resis form and be kind of put
Speaker 3: cold in front of people who don't have contextual background
Speaker 3: knowledge to understand what we're looking at. And this is
Speaker 3: artifacts from ancient history.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think examples like this can be at times
Speaker 2: a little harder for us to wrap our heads around,
Speaker 2: especially if we are more inclined to sort of rally
Speaker 2: behind an outside idea about what we're looking at, because
Speaker 2: in some of these other examples of n amalists, data,
Speaker 2: anomalist photography, et cetera, there's often maybe a sense of
Speaker 2: kind of like a a rabbit duck illusion scenario, you know,
Speaker 2: or one of these, you know, one of these optical
Speaker 2: illusions where someone shows it to you and they say, hey,
Speaker 2: do you see a duck or a rabbit and you say, well,
Speaker 2: I see a rabbit. I don't see a duck at all.
Speaker 2: And then someone says, well, look, i'll show you, and
Speaker 2: you show show them the parts of the duck, and
Speaker 2: they're like, okay, now I can see it both ways.
Speaker 2: It can maybe be a little bit harder if in
Speaker 2: order to truly see it both ways, you have to say,
Speaker 2: understand ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. So, like one of the examples
Speaker 2: I'm gonna touch on here is one where we absolutely
Speaker 2: know what it is and we absolutely know what it's not,
Speaker 2: and yet even you know, reading the explanation, you know,
Speaker 2: hearing from experts about it, you know, it can still
Speaker 2: be difficult. It's difficult for me to see exactly what
Speaker 2: we're talking about there, and it's actually easier for me
Speaker 2: to sort of lean in to the ridiculous explanation for
Speaker 2: what appears to be in front of us. So we'll
Speaker 2: get to this in a second, but first I just
Speaker 2: want to talk in general about the overarching theme of
Speaker 2: egypt Doomania. Now Egyptomania is more often used to refer
Speaker 2: specifically to nineteenth century European fascination with all things Egypt
Speaker 2: during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, but it can also generally be
Speaker 2: leveled at various points in time when various cultures have
Speaker 2: pursued sued an interest in ancient Egyptian civilization and culture.
Speaker 2: And of course this general interest is irresistible because we've
Speaker 2: touched on many times in the show. I'm ancient Egyptian civilization,
Speaker 2: ancient Egyptian culture and mythology. These are fascinating.
Speaker 3: Topics, absolutely, Yeah, a beautiful entrancing and not just to
Speaker 3: people in the modern world. I mean, something I've read
Speaker 3: before is that people in the world that still appears
Speaker 3: as the ancient world to us looked back to the
Speaker 3: even more ancient Egyptian civilization and they were fascinated by it.
Speaker 3: There were there were ancient Greco Romans who had a
Speaker 3: kind of Egyptomania.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, I think we've we've mentioned the sort of
Speaker 2: mind blowing fact before. You know that the ancient Romans
Speaker 2: were greatly intrigued by ancient Egypt, which was already as
Speaker 2: ancient to them as the Romans are to us.
Speaker 3: Right, So at the time of Caesar Augustus, ancient Egyptian
Speaker 3: civilization was thousands of years old.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And of course we've touched before on the
Speaker 2: ancient wonders of the world. You know, the Pyramids, the
Speaker 2: Great Pyramids were certainly on that list, and those still
Speaker 2: remain some of the most enigmatic man made structures on
Speaker 2: the planet, and we still don't know everything there is
Speaker 2: to know about them. So Egyptology remains a living field
Speaker 2: of study. Now. I was looking at a really, really
Speaker 2: good book about this that I highly recommend. It's from
Speaker 2: Ronald H. Fritz, titled Egyptomania, and in the book, the
Speaker 2: author discusses various forms of Egyptomania over the ages, from
Speaker 2: the ancient Hebrews, from Greeks and Romans to European models.
Speaker 2: There's a whole section on like fiction and gets into movies.
Speaker 2: He also has a great chapter on Afrocentrist movements that
Speaker 2: engage in Egyptomania, and he drives home that just many
Speaker 2: different peoples across different times have attempted to imagine and
Speaker 2: even remake the ancient Egyptians in their own image, to
Speaker 2: enhance their own worldview, their own their own ideology, etc.
Speaker 2: And the energy of this exercise ranges from just merely
Speaker 2: attempting to understand a fascinating time in people. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's one of our main tools is to think about
Speaker 2: even people from the distant past in different lands, to
Speaker 2: try and imagine what it would be like to be them.
Speaker 2: But on the other end of the spectrum you get
Speaker 2: into just outright pseudohistory, pseudoscience, and just everything else you
Speaker 2: might expect to encounter on the fringes.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, there's an interesting duality that comes from trying
Speaker 3: to see yourself and imagine people like you and other
Speaker 3: times and other civilizations, because of course there probably is
Speaker 3: something that all people at all times kind of have
Speaker 3: in common. There is a common human experience, and you
Speaker 3: can try to imagine what it would have been like
Speaker 3: to live in ancient Egypt. But there's a possibility that
Speaker 3: in doing so, you kind of lull yourself into the
Speaker 3: false belief that you can say, look at ancient Egyptian
Speaker 3: art or look at ancient Egyptian artifacts and just intuitively
Speaker 3: identify what you're looking at, when in fact, you would
Speaker 3: probably need some very specific cultural knowledge to understand what
Speaker 3: you're looking at.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and a lot of this imagery getting right into
Speaker 2: what we're talking about here is the kind of stuff
Speaker 2: that can be mysterious enough, that can seem cryptic enough
Speaker 2: to folks who don't know what they're looking at that
Speaker 2: you can apply other ideas modern ideas to them. You know,
Speaker 2: like you just read a book about UFOs. Well, go
Speaker 2: look at these these images without any context, and you
Speaker 2: may see UFO related ideas. There. Read a book about
Speaker 2: the bicameral mind and start looking at some of these images. Well,
Speaker 2: you might have some alarming ideas and some interesting interpretations
Speaker 2: of what you see as well.
Speaker 3: Right, we read the world through the lenses that are
Speaker 3: available to us, and very often the lenses that are
Speaker 3: available to us sort of, what's the top lens on
Speaker 3: the stack is whatever you've recently been thinking about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not to say that, you know, fresh eyes and
Speaker 2: fresh perspectives are not potentially important in reevaluating what we
Speaker 2: know and what we think we know. But oftentimes, when
Speaker 2: there is a particular preconceived notion in mind, you're not
Speaker 2: necessarily checking back in with the experts to see if
Speaker 2: this radical new theory matches up with the old school interpretation, etc.
Speaker 2: Certainly when we get into fringe ideas. So anyway, there's
Speaker 2: a long history of Gyptomania in Western magic and occultism
Speaker 2: continues to play into modern ideas of magic and ocultism,
Speaker 2: but also modern branches of fringe ideas concerning UFOs, ancient
Speaker 2: alien discourse, which of course we've discussed on the show
Speaker 2: in the past, and other paranormal concepts and yeah, so
Speaker 2: it's no surprise that various examples of iconography, archaeological remnants,
Speaker 2: and so forth that are not located on the bottom
Speaker 2: of the sea still end up speaking to us across
Speaker 2: time and culture in a way that to inexpert eyes
Speaker 2: or eyes seeking only confirmation of the paranormal examples of
Speaker 2: ancient technology and so forth, you know they're going to
Speaker 2: see that in these images. So in just a few
Speaker 2: minutes we'll get to a couple I think of interesting
Speaker 2: examples of this. But going back to the book Egyptomania,
Speaker 2: Fritz points out that there are other not necessarily alien
Speaker 2: fringe ideas that pre exists UFO fascination that already insisted
Speaker 2: that ancient Egypt was, for instance, much older than mainstream
Speaker 2: historians believe today some of these pushed back to like
Speaker 2: ten thousand BC or earlier, as opposed to the accepted
Speaker 2: view that the Archaic Age stretches five thousand to three
Speaker 2: thousand BC, with the Old Kingdom coming in at around
Speaker 2: three thousand BC. And then you have a number of
Speaker 2: fringe ideas that don't again don't concern alien or anything
Speaker 2: like that, but they they get into this idea that like,
Speaker 2: surely there is some ancient advanced civilization at the heart
Speaker 2: of all of this, and so Fritz discusses a few
Speaker 2: of these. There's this idea. One idea is that the
Speaker 2: ancient ancient Egyptian civilization extends from civilization X or the
Speaker 2: Ice Age supercivilization.
Speaker 3: Oh, there are similar analogs to this that are still
Speaker 3: kicking around today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of course a big, big one is Atlantis,
Speaker 2: the idea that like refugees from sunken Atlantis founded ancient Egypt,
Speaker 2: that sort of thing. And then you also have the
Speaker 2: ancient alien discourse coming in the ancient Aliens teaching the
Speaker 2: ancient Egyptians how to do things, or ancient Aliens interbreeding
Speaker 2: with the ancient Egyptians, supercharging human DNA and basically anything
Speaker 2: else you want to happen. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I feel like a lot of alien discourses like wrong
Speaker 3: but fun, But like the alien supercharging DNA thing goes
Speaker 3: is not wrong and fun, it's like wrong Engross.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you get it. You, I mean so much of this.
Speaker 2: It can these ideas, they can start in a place
Speaker 2: that feels just fun and escapist, but you follow them
Speaker 2: long enough, they can get into perhaps creepier territory. But
Speaker 2: there is still a lot of variety here to choose from.
Speaker 2: And Fritz writes the following quote. The outpouring and accumulation
Speaker 2: of the many theories that alternative historians advanced about ancient
Speaker 2: Egypt could be considered a cornucopia. But since so many
Speaker 2: of the theories clash with and contradict each other, a
Speaker 2: better description might be a cacophony. And I think we
Speaker 2: saw this in some of the discussion of our previous
Speaker 2: underwater examples as well. You know what is the anomaly? Well,
Speaker 2: there's never like this single paranormal explanation, but a whole
Speaker 2: host of them. Certainly, the deeper you go into a
Speaker 2: theme like okay, it's an antenna, but is that is it?
Speaker 2: The secret world? Government that built it, or is it
Speaker 2: the ancient loss civilization that built it, or is it
Speaker 2: current UFO, current alien visitors that built it. And within
Speaker 2: a given person's body of work, they might have a
Speaker 2: specific idea, but it's going to be different from the
Speaker 2: next book on the shelf.
Speaker 3: Or as we mentioned directly earlier, if you look at
Speaker 3: an object on the ocean floor and you think, well,
Speaker 3: this could be a UFO, or it could be a
Speaker 3: temple built by the people of Atlantis, or it could
Speaker 3: be a Nazi bunker. In that case, like, could it
Speaker 3: really possibly even suggest any of those like that? Those
Speaker 3: are so different it sounds like you're just kind of
Speaker 3: like reaching around for whatever, not like saying, oh, it
Speaker 3: really has attributes that would make us conclude it is
Speaker 3: x yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: Now. The Atlantis connection to ancient Egypt goes way back.
Speaker 2: Apparently goes back to the writings of Plato concerning the
Speaker 2: idea that the ancient Egyptians coexisted with Atlantis nine thousand
Speaker 2: years earlier. Fritz writes that while Plato was likely stating
Speaker 2: all this purely to make a philosophical point, the idea
Speaker 2: that Egypt was already a nine thousand year old civilization
Speaker 2: was probably what contemporary Greeks believed in the fourth and
Speaker 2: fifth centuries BCE, and to be clear, other civilizations of
Speaker 2: the day were cited with bloated timelines as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one big difference between like an ancient Greek historian
Speaker 3: and a modern historian is that modern historians have a
Speaker 3: wealth of physical scientific evidence that they can draw on
Speaker 3: to help inform you how they should process the received
Speaker 3: stories told about the past. You know, you can, like
Speaker 3: you can do digs, and you can do radiometric dating,
Speaker 3: and you can do all kinds of things that give
Speaker 3: you physical clues to help you either confirm or disconfirm
Speaker 3: things that have been written down about what happened in
Speaker 3: the past.
Speaker 2: Absolutely now, of course, one of the things about Atlantis
Speaker 2: is that the concept never completely goes away, certainly in
Speaker 2: the West, but it comes and it goes. It's heightened
Speaker 2: by the discovery of an inhabited America's and then again
Speaker 2: in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with modern pseudohistory of
Speaker 2: Egypt and Atlanta's emerging largely from the writings apparently of
Speaker 2: American politician Ignacious Donnelley in eighteen eighty two, Donnelly, if
Speaker 2: you're not familiar with him, represented Minnesota in the US
Speaker 2: House of Representatives from eighteen sixty three through eighteen sixty nine.
Speaker 2: He pushed a number of ideas concerning pseudoscience and pseudohistory. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: definitely one of the many characters that Fritz writes about
Speaker 2: in this section. Oh boy, Now another figure that Fritz
Speaker 2: touches on here and credits largely with this sort of
Speaker 2: modern idea that Egypt had advanced technology. Ancient Egypt had
Speaker 2: advanced technology. This goes back to the psychic readings of
Speaker 2: when Edgar Casey, who lived eighteen seventy seven through nineteen
Speaker 2: forty five, a self professed clairvoyant who carried out quote
Speaker 2: unquote life readings for people and revealed their past lives
Speaker 2: in ancient Atlantis, as well as the advanced technology that
Speaker 2: the Atlanteans supposedly had, such as advanced crystal laser weapons
Speaker 2: that they ultimately used to destroy Atlantis with the survivors
Speaker 2: fleeing to Egypt.
Speaker 3: Crystal laser weapons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it sounds remarkably like that old Atari
Speaker 2: twenty six hundred game Atlantis. I don't know if any
Speaker 2: went out there actually played this, but I remember as
Speaker 2: a kid seeing the commercials for it online and it
Speaker 2: was kind of a scary commercial with a whole narrative
Speaker 2: structure going on. Had to do with that. I believe
Speaker 2: Memory serves an ongoing war between the Gorgons and the
Speaker 2: people of Atlantis, and it was a great commercial. Look
Speaker 2: it up if you haven't seen.
Speaker 3: It, you know, I kind of can't help but think
Speaker 3: though all these ideas about ancient Egypt having advanced technology.
Speaker 3: In a way, they did have advanced technology, but they
Speaker 3: had advanced technology for the time in which they lived. Like,
Speaker 3: you do not have to turn to bad standards of
Speaker 3: evidence for examples of amazing technological achievements in ancient Egypt.
Speaker 3: They built the Pyramids, among tons of other things. That
Speaker 3: was not ancient aliens. That was extremely smart and industrious
Speaker 3: people creating amazing technological achievements with a very limited set
Speaker 3: of tools compared to what's available to people today. That
Speaker 3: is an amazing technological feat. It was just an amazing
Speaker 3: technological feat for the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, I mean that's one of the tragedies about
Speaker 2: all of this is like when you when you get
Speaker 2: wrapped up in say ancient alien discourse, you end up
Speaker 2: reducing the importance of of of what people were actually
Speaker 2: doing if you're if you just attribute it to the
Speaker 2: gifts of the gods, the gifts of the alien visitors,
Speaker 2: and so forth. Now, I want to stress that in
Speaker 2: this chapter, Fritz touches on a number of different names,
Speaker 2: and I'm not going to get into everybody here, but
Speaker 2: you know it's there there. There are various writers and
Speaker 2: occasional outright con men that are engaged in the sort
Speaker 2: of work, and there were kind of feeds off each other.
Speaker 2: One of the big ones, uh, One of the big names,
Speaker 2: certainly an ancient alien discourse, is the work of Eric Vondanikin,
Speaker 2: who we've talked about in the show before because he
Speaker 2: was the author of Chariots of the Gods in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight. I say it that way because the title
Speaker 2: does have a question mark at the end, always pronounced
Speaker 2: the question mark.
Speaker 3: Like he's like kind of getting you with the elbow
Speaker 3: and winking while he.
Speaker 2: Says, yeah, I think we mentioned and we went in
Speaker 2: and discussed this idea at length and the various criticisms
Speaker 2: to it. But even this idea like it was influenced
Speaker 2: by the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and other weird
Speaker 2: writers of the early twentieth century. Lovecraft and his contemporaries,
Speaker 2: by the way, also wrote about tales related to Egyptian
Speaker 2: motifs and Egyptian oriented occultism and so forth, So you
Speaker 2: have a lot of these sources feeding into each other.
Speaker 3: It's been years since we did the Eric Vondanikin episode,
Speaker 3: but am I remembering something about how he had like
Speaker 3: created the Chariots of the Gods theme park?
Speaker 2: Is that?
Speaker 3: Am I losing my mind?
Speaker 2: No? No, there was Slash is a theme park. I'm
Speaker 2: not sure off the top of my head what's going
Speaker 2: on with it right now, but like, that's how big
Speaker 2: this guy.
Speaker 3: I want to flat earth six flags.
Speaker 2: Now. Fritz points out, though that early ancient alien discourse folks,
Speaker 2: and even Vondanikin's original book don't actually reference Egypt all
Speaker 2: that much. So you have other individuals who kind of
Speaker 2: come in with the Egyptology alternative Egyptology view of everything,
Speaker 2: and that gets, you know, sucked into the whole concept.
Speaker 2: He points out one particular author, I believe this is
Speaker 2: a book from nineteen eighty four from one zechariash Si
Speaker 2: Chen who lived nineteen twenty through twenty ten. This is
Speaker 2: apparently one of the only serious competitors to Vondanikan because
Speaker 2: the Vondanakan's books generated a lot of discussion, and you know,
Speaker 2: they're pretty popular for the time period. So a lot
Speaker 2: of other authors came in to try and cash in
Speaker 2: on ancient alien discourse, but this particular individual sition seems
Speaker 2: to have been one of the more successful of those
Speaker 2: to come in and try and get cash in on
Speaker 2: everything here, and Fritz points out that he seems to
Speaker 2: have avoided a lot of the criticism that was reserved
Speaker 2: for von Dannakin. So Vontanagan got big enough to where
Speaker 2: like when people like Carl Sagan entered the chat, Vondanakin's
Speaker 2: ideas are the one or the ones that Carl Sagan
Speaker 2: is going to respond to. Carl Sagan doesn't have time
Speaker 2: to deal with everybody else in the genre.
Speaker 3: And to be clear, Carl Sagan was not saying that
Speaker 3: ancient aliens like were a viable explanation for the Pyramids
Speaker 3: or anything. He, as I recall, entered the discourse to
Speaker 3: kind of say, well, if we're going to entertain this possibility,
Speaker 3: we should have some standards of evidence, right, like we
Speaker 3: should lay out in advance what would we be looking
Speaker 3: for instead of just like looking at what's out there
Speaker 3: and saying like, eh, that could be aliens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I thought Sagan has some great responses to it.
Speaker 2: They were not like one hundred percent shut it down,
Speaker 2: dismissive of it as a concept, were but also reiterated
Speaker 2: that there are high standards for this, and if you
Speaker 2: were looking for evidence, you would be looking for very
Speaker 2: specific sorts of evidence and so forth. But again, when
Speaker 2: Sagin's entering the conversation, when other critics are coming in
Speaker 2: and dealing with what Vondnigan's written about, especially with that
Speaker 2: first book, they're not dealing with the Egyptian themed content.
Speaker 2: Individuals likes Sitchin apparently are the ones who were the
Speaker 2: ones to initially drag Egypt and ancient Egypt into the scenario,
Speaker 2: and perhaps a lot of that Fritz Rights seems to
Speaker 2: have maybe existed below the mainstream radar for a while,
Speaker 2: you know, being just a part of the stuff that's
Speaker 2: discussed in the fringe movements. And it's not until the
Speaker 2: nineteen nineties. He writes that we see quote, the penetration
Speaker 2: of highly speculative theories about ancient Egypt into mainstream popular culture.
Speaker 3: I think maybe the designation as highly speculative is a
Speaker 3: good one, because sometimes I'm looking for the right blanket
Speaker 3: terminology to describe all these different types of explanations that
Speaker 3: we're talking about. They're not all necessarily like conspiracy theories,
Speaker 3: they don't all necessarily have exactly the same content, But
Speaker 3: what they do seem to have in common is that
Speaker 3: they are highly speculative, meaning they are elaborating a lot
Speaker 3: of explanatory narrative on a very weak evidential basis.
Speaker 2: So to be clear here, what apparently is going on
Speaker 2: at this time leading into the nineteen nineties, according to
Speaker 2: the author here of Fritz, is that under the surface
Speaker 2: of all this other talk about ancient aliens and so
Speaker 2: forth and other paranormal ideas, there's this kind of growing
Speaker 2: swell of alternative Egyptology, and then during the nineteen nineties
Speaker 2: it begins to bubble up into the mainstream discourse. And
Speaker 2: Fritz cite's two main reasons for this. One is the
Speaker 2: approaching millennium and various ideas concerning the new millennium that's
Speaker 2: about to be here. The second reason he brings up
Speaker 2: is that there are just a number of new archaeological
Speaker 2: discoveries that were taking place in Egypt that were capturing
Speaker 2: mainstream attention, and we're inadvertently fueling the nonsense that, again
Speaker 2: was festering in the fringe.
Speaker 3: I see so like because for totally legitimate reasons, ancient
Speaker 3: Egypt might be popping up on the news, like you're
Speaker 3: seeing it on TV in ways that you probably didn't
Speaker 3: see it as much before. It's just sort of in
Speaker 3: the air, and it is one more thing you could
Speaker 3: attach highly speculative theories too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then you have other individuals that are writing
Speaker 2: more directly about it. It's popping up in the writings
Speaker 2: of Graham Hancock, for example. He also cites the X
Speaker 2: Files as being popular. Though you have more expertise for
Speaker 2: the X Files. I don't know the X Files that
Speaker 2: ever actually had any ancient Egypt themed content. I don't
Speaker 2: know if they ever went up against a mummy or anything.
Speaker 3: I recall very little about that except well, actually, now
Speaker 3: that I think about it, I think there may have
Speaker 3: been a mummy episode that is remembered as one of
Speaker 3: the worst episodes of the X Files ever, unless that's
Speaker 3: hold on, got to look it up now. Oh no,
Speaker 3: I see why my memory was confused here. Yeah, one
Speaker 3: of the worst X Files episodes ever does concern a mummy,
Speaker 3: but it's not an Egyptian mummy. It's a South American mummy.
Speaker 2: Okay. Well, even if the X Files are not directly
Speaker 2: contributing to alternative egyptology discourse, you can, I guess look
Speaker 2: at it as kind of like a sign that fringe
Speaker 2: ideas were entering into the mainstream, at the very least
Speaker 2: as entertainment. But then I guess sometimes entertainment has a
Speaker 2: way of bleeding over into other things.
Speaker 3: Don't drag the X Files into this. The X Files.
Speaker 3: The X Files are pure and holy they didn't do
Speaker 3: anything wrong. That's a fictional show. It's okay.
Speaker 2: But I guess the bigger thing that's going on here
Speaker 2: that Fitz points out is that at the time, academics
Speaker 2: had largely ignored these trends, like academics in egyptology and
Speaker 2: so forth, archaeologists and so forth. Yeah, they weren't venturing
Speaker 2: into arguments against ancient alien discourse folks and so forth.
Speaker 2: And that's sensible by and large because like, that's not
Speaker 2: what their work is, that's not what they have set
Speaker 2: out to do with their work and their careers to
Speaker 2: just respond to various highly speculative ideas about why things
Speaker 2: appear the way they are.
Speaker 3: Well, and it's often difficult to respond to highly speculative
Speaker 3: ideas from an informed point of view, because a lot
Speaker 3: of times all you can just say is like, there's
Speaker 3: no reason to think all that, you know, like, the
Speaker 3: claims of highly speculative theories are often not like the
Speaker 3: kinds of tight, pecific focused claims about specific pieces of
Speaker 3: evidence that you can that you would be used to addressing,
Speaker 3: say in an academic archaeology journal or something like that.
Speaker 3: They're like these elaborations. They spend these wild narratives that
Speaker 3: are kind of too big to even know where to
Speaker 3: get a toe hold in if you're trying to criticize them,
Speaker 3: other than to just kind of say, like, well, that
Speaker 3: just sounds all made.
Speaker 2: Up, yeah, Fritz Wright's quote. Academics generally avoid dealing with
Speaker 2: alternative scholars This attitude is justified by the excuse that
Speaker 2: debating alternative or fringe scholarship only gives it a false credibility.
Speaker 2: Some consider debating speculative scholars as a dialogue of the
Speaker 2: death since the speculative ideas tend to be treated by
Speaker 2: their adherents in a manner of religious faith rather than
Speaker 2: scientific inquiry, while some academics just hold speculative ideas in contempt,
Speaker 2: ignoring the alternative Egyptologists did not, however, serve the academic
Speaker 2: Egyptologists well. During the nineteen nineties, they found themselves marginalized
Speaker 2: in the popularne mind and put on the defense. So
Speaker 2: the argument here is yah, perhaps they did wait too
Speaker 2: long to respond to a lot of these ideas that
Speaker 2: were welling up into the mainstream, and he points out
Speaker 2: that it was apparently wasn't until a pair of BBC
Speaker 2: Horizon documentary specials titled Atlantis Uncovered in Atlantis Reborn weighed
Speaker 2: in and offered a scathing rebuke of these ideas in
Speaker 2: the mainstream, And this wasn't until nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 3: You know, I feel like this mirror is a pattern
Speaker 3: that's still a problem with like highly speculative alternative ideas
Speaker 3: of all sorts today, because usually people who have real
Speaker 3: expertise in the field are busy talking to each other
Speaker 3: and they're kind of in a contained conversation space. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: people who are offering highly speculative ideas go straight to
Speaker 3: the media into a popular audience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can understand too why I mean, thinking
Speaker 2: that the pyramids were built by aliens? Does that necessarily
Speaker 2: pose like a real threat to you know, at what
Speaker 2: point do you actually make the call? It's like, Okay,
Speaker 2: enough is enough. We need to say something about this,
Speaker 2: We need to put together a documentary to dismiss this nonsense,
Speaker 2: because it seems like for a long stretch of the
Speaker 2: build up you can say like, well, this is dumb,
Speaker 2: or this doesn't really match up with any actual work.
Speaker 2: But it's been conducted, any actual research or evidence. But
Speaker 2: it's not hurting anybody.
Speaker 3: You could say that. A lot of people do say that,
Speaker 3: But I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if these supposedly harmless,
Speaker 3: I mean, probably they are somewhat harmless in themselves. Highly
Speaker 3: speculative theories or conspiracy theories sort of engender a pattern
Speaker 3: of thinking that can easily be used to foster incredibly
Speaker 3: destructive and dangerous ideas that are violent.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I think I think at this point, certainly this
Speaker 2: day and age, I think most of us realize that
Speaker 2: like the realm of conspiracy thinking is not just a
Speaker 2: domain of like escapist ideas that are not hurting anybody.
Speaker 2: There are plenty of harmful ideologies that are that are
Speaker 2: woven throughout many of these these branches of conspiracy thought.
Speaker 3: Then again, I mean, I want to be realistic and
Speaker 3: say I don't I don't know if you can really
Speaker 3: say that if if we had done a better job
Speaker 3: of convincing people that aliens didn't build the pyramids, that
Speaker 3: they wouldn't end up thinking, you know, some kind of
Speaker 3: violent conspiracy theory. But you do have to wonder if
Speaker 3: just sort of like ignoring and letting it pass when
Speaker 3: people are engaging in conspiracy thinking and these other domains
Speaker 3: just sort of like, let's that style of thought fester.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, let's let's look at the evidence. And
Speaker 2: by look at the evidence, I mean let's look at
Speaker 2: a couple of examples. We are not setting out to
Speaker 2: look like at like all the evidence or alleged evidence
Speaker 2: for ancient Egyptian advanced technology and chariots of the gods
Speaker 2: and so forth. There's just a few a couple examples
Speaker 2: that I think match up with what we've been discussing
Speaker 2: about information, data, images, etc. That can be perplexing and
Speaker 2: that can certainly lead to an interpretation that is again
Speaker 2: not based in expertise and not based in like a
Speaker 2: wider body of evidence, but are based in confirmation bias
Speaker 2: and based in some sort of an alternative understanding of
Speaker 2: science and or history.
Speaker 3: Okay, what you got?
Speaker 2: So, did the ancient Egyptians have apache helicopters?
Speaker 3: Gotta be yes?
Speaker 2: Surely no, We're going to move forward with the spoiler
Speaker 2: in place that no, they did not. But there is
Speaker 2: an image that you will find, and you've probably seen online.
Speaker 2: You see some hieroglyphics, and there is an image or
Speaker 2: a character towards the top that, if we're being generous,
Speaker 2: kind of looks like a modern helicopter. And next to
Speaker 2: it is something that I guess kind of looks like
Speaker 2: a space tank.
Speaker 3: I mean, while we're doing this, let's not go all
Speaker 3: out under the helicopter. There is an R two D
Speaker 3: two and I don't know what you're saying, is a
Speaker 3: tank that looks to me kind of like a MiG
Speaker 3: fighter jet.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, we also got.
Speaker 3: A we get we have keeping up with the R
Speaker 3: two D two theme. We have Luke Skywalker's land Speeder.
Speaker 3: You see that one?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's That's what I was kind of
Speaker 2: seeing as a tank. It does look at the look
Speaker 2: at speeder as well. Yeah, and then of course we
Speaker 2: have a we have a bug of some sort as well.
Speaker 2: That's clearly a bug. But is it a giant bug? Right?
Speaker 2: You know, your your theory may vary. Now. One of
Speaker 2: the things about this image is a lot of the
Speaker 2: places where you see it, they're not going to be
Speaker 2: approaching it from a skeptical point of view, uh, and
Speaker 2: actually finding like good sources on this where someone's just
Speaker 2: gonna come in and and tell you exactly what you're
Speaker 2: looking at, are actually a little harder to come across.
Speaker 2: And I think this is where you get into the
Speaker 2: the problem of like, like experts in ancient Egypt and
Speaker 2: hieroglyphics are not necessarily wasting their time weighing in on
Speaker 2: whether ancient hieroglyphics show as a helicopter.
Speaker 3: Right, So, I haven't checked, but I would guess that like,
Speaker 3: is this hieroglyphic a helicopter? Is not like the subject
Speaker 3: of many Egyptology journal articles.
Speaker 2: Right, Right. But I was able to find, you know,
Speaker 2: a few different sources that discuss it in a way
Speaker 2: that I could I could get behind the image in question.
Speaker 2: I've seen in a couple of places it attributed to
Speaker 2: a nineteen eighty seven photo by an American who is
Speaker 2: visiting the Temple of Osiris in Abydos, Egypt. So it's
Speaker 2: a it's a real photo of a real object, of
Speaker 2: real you know, etchings, and it's pretty clear like there's
Speaker 2: it's one of these things where the photo quality and
Speaker 2: the reality of the thing that is photographed, these are
Speaker 2: not in question. But it's this interpretation of what you're
Speaker 2: looking at that's where you see these enormous leaps taken
Speaker 2: where people are seeing bits of advanced technology. But fortunately
Speaker 2: there is a very straightforward explanation for what we see here.
Speaker 2: I found a couple of different discussions of this, but
Speaker 2: the one I'm going to lean on mostly is this
Speaker 2: was from an article that Asian historian Richard C. Carrier
Speaker 2: wrote about back in nineteen ninety nine for The Skeptical
Speaker 2: Inquirer in an article titled flash Fox News reports that
Speaker 2: Aliens may have built the Pyramids of Egypt. As the
Speaker 2: title suggests, this is about coverage at the time on
Speaker 2: Fox News. Again, this is nineteen ninety nine about alternative
Speaker 2: Egyptology and the broadcast included images of the alleged helicopter
Speaker 2: and comparison images to modern Apache attack helicopters. So Carrier
Speaker 2: spoke to some Egyptologists for the article, and it seems
Speaker 2: to have seems to have been sort of new pseudohistory
Speaker 2: to some of them at the time. Again, this was
Speaker 2: daring that than the very end of the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 2: so it seems like, you know, the subculture was bubbling
Speaker 2: up into the mainstream quite a bit. He writes the
Speaker 2: following to sum it all up, But what do the
Speaker 2: experts say about this helicopter glyph? This will serve as
Speaker 2: an example for all the rest. The helicopter, in fact,
Speaker 2: is the abodos palimpsest. A palimpsest is what is created
Speaker 2: when new writing is inscribed over old. In the case
Speaker 2: of papyri, old ink is scraped off, but in the
Speaker 2: case of inscriptions, plaster is added over the old inscription
Speaker 2: and a new inscription is made. The image described as
Speaker 2: a helicopter is well known to be the names of
Speaker 2: Rameses inscribed over the names of his father, something Rameses
Speaker 2: was known to do quite frequently. A little bit of
Speaker 2: damage from time and weathering has furthered the illusion of
Speaker 2: a helicopter. It basically comes down to this basic fact though,
Speaker 2: that a previous image, a previous inscription, was plastered over
Speaker 2: and replaced with another one, and then when stuff starts
Speaker 2: wearing away, a sort of hybrid image emerges that doesn't
Speaker 2: mean anything, but that looks like something from our modern age.
Speaker 2: You know, I guess it would be like it'd be
Speaker 2: like if one billboard were plastered over another one and
Speaker 2: then there's a fierce storm and it tears part of
Speaker 2: the billboard away, and then so you have a mix
Speaker 2: of the old billboard and the new billboard, and what
Speaker 2: you're left with is just kind of confusing. But maybe
Speaker 2: it looks like a monster. Maybe it looks like you know,
Speaker 2: what have you. And by the way that the topic
Speaker 2: of palms is fascinating, there's a much older episode of
Speaker 2: stuff to blow your mind that goes into it. But yeah,
Speaker 2: you get into this whole realm of you know, erased
Speaker 2: books just under the surface of ancient tomes, and you know,
Speaker 2: sometimes they've been on earthed. Sometimes you have to use
Speaker 2: you know, modern technology to sort of see through the
Speaker 2: printed page and see what was originally there. And you
Speaker 2: see it in paintings and much more, and it can
Speaker 2: seem a bit foreign to us, given how just disposable
Speaker 2: paper is. And you know, you can rewrite files, you know,
Speaker 2: as many times as you want. You can just set
Speaker 2: around creating new documents and deleting them all day. But
Speaker 2: there was a time when in order to erase document
Speaker 2: and create new document while that meant grabbing the plaster.
Speaker 3: Okay, So this strikes me as a case that is
Speaker 3: in the low information category we've been talking about in
Speaker 3: multiple ways. So the original image is somewhat altered or
Speaker 3: degraded in the way that it's been photographed like it
Speaker 3: might be hard, especially if you're not familiar with ancient
Speaker 3: Egyptian inscriptions, to understand that what you're looking at is
Speaker 3: not even one single continuous drawing or piece of imagery,
Speaker 3: but is instead a couple of things sort of bleeding
Speaker 3: into each other. And then on top of that, there's
Speaker 3: the low information condition of us looking at it without
Speaker 3: being familiar with, say, the way the name Rameses is
Speaker 3: depicted in hieroglyphics.
Speaker 2: Yes, Now, the second example we're going to look at
Speaker 2: here is also really fascinating, and this one is a
Speaker 2: lot in a way. In a way, this one is
Speaker 2: a lot more clear, but is also even more cryptic
Speaker 2: and even harder to really understand. And you'll see what
Speaker 2: I'm talking about as we roll into the discussion here.
Speaker 2: But this concerns the so called Dindara Lights or the
Speaker 2: Dindara Light. So these are a series of stone release
Speaker 2: in the hawt Or temple in Dindera, Egypt. Now you
Speaker 2: can look up images of this, and I've included one
Speaker 2: of the images here for you to look at, Joe,
Speaker 2: and they are quite captivating. And I mean it's almost
Speaker 2: unfair to throw people at this with sort of alternative
Speaker 2: Egyptology in the back of their mind, because it's going
Speaker 2: to make you lean in too, perhaps seeing things again
Speaker 2: from not only a modern standboy point, which we can't
Speaker 2: help but do, but also from a standpoint of looking
Speaker 2: for some sort of crazy advanced technology in the past.
Speaker 2: So if you were looking at these just kind of
Speaker 2: out of context, but not with any specific expectations of
Speaker 2: the advanced technology, I think you might guess that we're
Speaker 2: looking at a couple of ancient Egyptian individuals who have
Speaker 2: giant eggplants, and those giant eggplants have giant snakes on them.
Speaker 2: This would this would of course be be incorrect. This
Speaker 2: is not exactly what we're looking at, but that's what
Speaker 2: it kind of looks like to me.
Speaker 3: I might have said, giant shields. I mean, they're holding
Speaker 3: some what looks like a really large flat object on
Speaker 3: which a sort of slithering snake is depicted. But of
Speaker 3: course the strange thing is that out of the bottoms
Speaker 3: of the shields there is coming some sort of line, which, again,
Speaker 3: if you're playing into ancient technology thinking, you could say,
Speaker 3: is that a power cord? Is that some kind of cable?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, so there's this sense of plant to it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's definitely a snake, there's no doubt about this snake.
Speaker 2: But then there's this this large sort of bulb or
Speaker 2: eggplant like shape to the thing. And so the the alternative,
Speaker 2: the highly speculative hypothesis here that once he's reflected and
Speaker 2: some of this you know, ancient alien discourse and and
Speaker 2: you know pseudohistories and pseudo scientific ideas concerning ancient Egypt,
Speaker 2: are that well, what they are holding here are filament
Speaker 2: light bulbs or representations of filament light bulbs.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, if you are familiar with incandescent light bulbs.
Speaker 3: You can absolutely see how somebody would make that comparison.
Speaker 3: There is the shield or the eggplant shape, looks like
Speaker 3: it could be a you know, a transparent glass tube.
Speaker 3: The snake depicted on it looks like it could be
Speaker 3: maybe looks like it could be the filament inside the bulb.
Speaker 3: And then the sort of line. There's like a sort
Speaker 3: of flower looking thing at the base of the bulb,
Speaker 3: and you could imagine that is the socket or not
Speaker 3: the socket, what would you call it, the uh, you know,
Speaker 3: the metal part at the base of an incandescent light bulb.
Speaker 3: And then the line extending away from the bottom. You
Speaker 3: could say, okay, that looks like a power line. It
Speaker 3: looks like, you know, whatever the electricity is going in through.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the radical idea here would be that the
Speaker 2: ancient Egyptians had mastery over electricity. They made light bulbs
Speaker 2: or I guess received light bulbs from someone. They got
Speaker 2: a you know, a monthly delivery from the aliens or something,
Speaker 2: and they wired up their various buildings with electric lights
Speaker 2: of one sort or the other.
Speaker 3: The aliens gave them highly inefficient incandescent light bulbs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, or I mean, when you get into the
Speaker 2: various arguments, they also they draw comparisons to you know,
Speaker 2: sort of like early different variations of artificial lighting. So
Speaker 2: I don't know, the exact model may vary, but the idea, yeah,
Speaker 2: is that the ancient Egyptians had light bulbs. Now, actual
Speaker 2: experts who weigh in on this will we'll say, well,
Speaker 2: these are these are not light bulbs. Obviously, what we're
Speaker 2: looking at is a symbolic motif. And another huge important
Speaker 2: fact here is that these are not illustrations or engravings
Speaker 2: that are occurring in isolation and out of context. Like,
Speaker 2: there's plenty of context, the most important being that this
Speaker 2: is a temple of Hatlar. This is a god of
Speaker 2: ancient Egypt who Geraldine Pinch in the book Egyptian Mythology
Speaker 2: describes as a golden goddess that aided in childbirth, the
Speaker 2: rebirth of the dead, and the renewal of the cosmos.
Speaker 2: She was seemingly a complex deity with both destructive and
Speaker 2: beneficial attributes, and she was commonly depicted as a beautiful
Speaker 2: woman with a red solar disc between a pair of
Speaker 2: cow horns. Now, she could be worshiped in a few
Speaker 2: different forms, but one of the main roles she has.
Speaker 2: Here is a mother, and she is the mother of Horace,
Speaker 2: Uniter of the Two Lands. Horace, of course, is a
Speaker 2: very important god in Egyptian mythology, the celestial falcon and
Speaker 2: the god of kings. So here Horace is Haarsmatus uniter
Speaker 2: of the two Lands, and apparently in these images we're
Speaker 2: seeing representation of him in the primeval form of a serpent.
Speaker 2: In rebirth. He is depicted emerging in the form of
Speaker 2: this serpent from the lotus flower, which is in turn
Speaker 2: inside a boat, lining up with the concept of the
Speaker 2: solar god rays solar barge.
Speaker 3: Ah, okay, this is starting to make sense.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, So like emerging from the lotus flower is
Speaker 2: the serpent, that is horse. Now you're probably wondering, what
Speaker 2: about that light bulb, what about that eggplant? Well, this
Speaker 2: is thought to be and I hope I'm pronouncing this
Speaker 2: right a hen that's h n And it may represent
Speaker 2: the womb of the sky goddess nut or note. And
Speaker 2: this is a goddess that was associated with the fig
Speaker 2: tree and also with cosmic motherhood. The image in question
Speaker 2: also entails the symbol as of the jed pillar with
Speaker 2: added arms coming out. So this this is I mean,
Speaker 2: to my eyes like, this is way weirder. This is
Speaker 2: the far weirder helmet. Is this strange pillar looking thing
Speaker 2: that's sort of holding up one of the eggplant shapes
Speaker 2: and has arms coming out like some sort of like
Speaker 2: bizarre psychedelic muppet. But this is also grounded in ancient
Speaker 2: Egyptian symbolism. You know, it's about stability and you know,
Speaker 2: and holding up the cosmos and so forth.
Speaker 3: You could argue that this looks like a baseball bat
Speaker 3: with several rings around it, and it has arms, it
Speaker 3: has two arms, and it's pushing on the so called
Speaker 3: light bulb.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So in the same way that if we look
Speaker 2: at hieroglyphics, we're looking at at language that we have
Speaker 2: no frame of reference for. It's similar with with the
Speaker 2: icons that we're seeing represented here. We have no unless
Speaker 2: we are trained in it. We have no frame of
Speaker 2: context for what these symbols are and what they represent.
Speaker 2: And all you can ultimately do is sort of like
Speaker 2: try and take them at I guess sort of base level,
Speaker 2: and then you can potentially lean into these elaborate explanations
Speaker 2: for what you're seeing and you know, you can imagine
Speaker 2: the what would occur if you were to take any
Speaker 2: form of highly symbolic art from the modern world and
Speaker 2: try and understand what you're looking at. So anyway, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's speaking of visual language that we probably are
Speaker 2: not going to pick up on in the modern age
Speaker 2: again unless we have the expertise and we've you know,
Speaker 2: we are an Egyptologist, et cetera, or it's been explained
Speaker 2: to us because at the end of the day, what
Speaker 2: we're likely looking at here is some representation of the
Speaker 2: rise of the sun and its journey through the night,
Speaker 2: though delivered through religious ideas and symbolism of the time
Speaker 2: and also the specific theology of this particular deity.
Speaker 3: Right, And it looks like a light bulb to us
Speaker 3: rather than this ancient Egypti artistic motif because we're used
Speaker 3: to seeing light bulbs, who were not used to seeing
Speaker 3: this artistic motif. And if you happen to be familiar
Speaker 3: with the right ancient Egyptian art, you recognize it as Oh,
Speaker 3: it's one of those.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, I've looked at a particular book by archaeologist
Speaker 2: and author Kenneth L. Fetter on this matter. The book
Speaker 2: is frauds, myths and mystery science and pseudoscience, and archaeology,
Speaker 2: and he points out that these quote unquote lights a
Speaker 2: factor into Eric von Doniican's nineteen ninety six book The
Speaker 2: Eyes of the Sphinx, in which von Donican argues that
Speaker 2: the only rational way that the Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians
Speaker 2: could have worked in the dark confines of the Pyramids
Speaker 2: and other locations other structures without leaving telltale lampblack from
Speaker 2: burning lamps. The only possible way this could be the
Speaker 2: case is if they were using electric lights.
Speaker 3: Air Tight.
Speaker 2: Now points out that Egyptologists have a far less imaginative
Speaker 2: explanation backed up by actual evidence, and that is that
Speaker 2: the ancient Egyptians used linen soaked in oil or animal
Speaker 2: fat and twisted into wicks. These wicks would have burned
Speaker 2: quite brightly, and then with salt applied, this would produce
Speaker 2: less smoke, which would produce less lamp black and they
Speaker 2: would have, yeah, they would have burned pretty brightly, bright
Speaker 2: enough to conduct their work. And they would also burn
Speaker 2: for a set amount of time that would apparently mark
Speaker 2: the length of an artisan where a worker's shift. And
Speaker 2: again this is something we have context, for we have
Speaker 2: physical evidence for it factors into our overall understanding of
Speaker 2: who the ancient Egyptians were and what their world was like.
Speaker 2: But if you go with a light bulb hypothesis, well
Speaker 2: you have no evidence because where are examples of the
Speaker 2: other light bulbs, the spent bulbs, Where's evidence of the
Speaker 2: bulb production facility, the power sources, the wiring, et cetera.
Speaker 2: I mean, it all just falls quickly apart. Instead, Von
Speaker 2: Donikin apparently leaned on the thoroughly discredited hypothesis of the
Speaker 2: Baghdad battery as proof.
Speaker 3: This is yet another artifact that has been interpreted by
Speaker 3: some as electrical technology in the ancient world, but probably
Speaker 3: was not.
Speaker 2: Right, and so the author here not Von Donican sums
Speaker 2: up quote because prehistoric pictorial depictions and even early written
Speaker 2: descriptions are sometimes indistinct or vague, and perhaps more important,
Speaker 2: because they are part of a different culture and have
Speaker 2: a context not immediately apparent to those who do not
Speaker 2: explore further. You can see or read anything you want
Speaker 2: into them, just as you can with ink blots. And
Speaker 2: so he refers to this elsewhere in the book as
Speaker 2: the ink block principle, which I think is a good
Speaker 2: way of thinking about avidence of this nature.
Speaker 3: Now, one way in which I would distinguish this example
Speaker 3: from many of the others is that this example does
Speaker 3: not seem as within the image itself as degraded in
Speaker 3: quality or vague to me, at least in the like
Speaker 3: the illustrations I see from books. It looks like, you know,
Speaker 3: we get a pretty clear picture of what the artwork,
Speaker 3: whether at least the outlines and the artwork we're supposed
Speaker 3: to be. But you're still, even though the picture is
Speaker 3: fairly sharp, in the low information zone, because you don't
Speaker 3: have the context, the background knowledge to place what you're
Speaker 3: looking at within its cultural milieu.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, we just don't have the symbolic language
Speaker 2: at our disposal to necessarily look at this and understand
Speaker 2: what's taking place. And again, I think this is not
Speaker 2: something that is unique to ancient Egyptian religious imagery. I
Speaker 2: think you could apply this to various other examples of
Speaker 2: even contemporary religious imagery, where if you if you don't
Speaker 2: know what you're looking at, yeah, you're not going to
Speaker 2: understand the message of it, like what is being theologically
Speaker 2: relayed in this image, and you have to fall back
Speaker 2: on either just like again, a very literal interpretation of
Speaker 2: what you're looking at, or dragging in some sort of
Speaker 2: other belief system or some sort of other mode of
Speaker 2: understanding which may or may not involve aliens.
Speaker 3: Another thing that I'm struck is sort of the general
Speaker 3: principle of thinking behind the Eric Vondanakan argument that Okay,
Speaker 3: they're working in the dark inside the pyramid chambers, and
Speaker 3: they wouldn't have been able to see what they were
Speaker 3: working on without leaving lampblack unless they had light bulbs.
Speaker 3: That seems to be a general style of argument used
Speaker 3: by like ancient aliens people. I mean, the same thing
Speaker 3: is said about the construction of the pyramids. More generally,
Speaker 3: it's like, I can't see how they could have done this,
Speaker 3: therefore it must have been aliens with advanced technology. That
Speaker 3: is a really poor way to reason. Instead, you could
Speaker 3: start by saying, like, well, what if instead of invoking
Speaker 3: entities that would radically reshape our way of thinking about
Speaker 3: the world and there is no independent evidence of what if?
Speaker 3: Instead of that, we think that maybe they figured out
Speaker 3: a solution that you haven't thought of or you don't
Speaker 3: have awareness of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I mean, you would it would be understandable
Speaker 2: if you didn't know about this whole adding salt to
Speaker 2: tortures or lights as a way to decrease lampblack There's
Speaker 2: so many things like that in life that would have
Speaker 2: been apparent or known to individuals who depended on lamp
Speaker 2: technology or fire based illumination technology as opposed to the
Speaker 2: mode we're familiar with and the mode that we then
Speaker 2: potentially read into these ancient images.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would just say be careful about making the
Speaker 3: move of I can't understand how someone could have done
Speaker 3: X two. Therefore they must have relied upon powers that
Speaker 3: are extraordinary and we have no other independent evidence of.
Speaker 2: I'm reminded of various time travel movies that we've discussed
Speaker 2: or looked at on weird House cinema where you have
Speaker 2: some sort of time traveler from the past going into
Speaker 2: the future and they are and they may not be
Speaker 2: time traveling, perhaps they're frozen, etc. You know. Well, a
Speaker 2: man out of time wakes up and they're trying to
Speaker 2: understand our advanced contemporary technology. They might look at a
Speaker 2: TV and they're like they shrunk a person down and
Speaker 2: put him in a tiny box, you know, And this
Speaker 2: is often played up for comedy. But it's not that
Speaker 2: different from the sort of you know, you know what
Speaker 2: you can consider ridiculous analysis of past technology, where instead
Speaker 2: of you know, leaning on you know, the actual context
Speaker 2: of the thing and what they're capable of, you're going
Speaker 2: to this extreme model that you can't possibly explain with
Speaker 2: any degree of accuracy.
Speaker 3: That's an amazing analogy. Actually, we are the unfrozen caveman
Speaker 3: lawyer in reverse when we look at the ancient world.
Speaker 3: You know, so he up and says, I am but
Speaker 3: a simple cave man. When I get into an airplane,
Speaker 3: I think is this some giant bird? But we are
Speaker 3: doing the same thing. We look at an ancient inscription
Speaker 3: and say, when I look at an inscription of a bird,
Speaker 3: I think is this an attack helicopter?
Speaker 2: Exactly? All right, well, that's perfect. I think we have
Speaker 2: to leave it at that. I think that that puts
Speaker 2: a nice cap on it. But you know, were perfectly
Speaker 2: happy to continue talking about this particular topic or this
Speaker 2: sort of thing in general, if nothing else in future
Speaker 2: listener Mail episodes. So write in let us know what
Speaker 2: your thoughts are on egyptology, alternative egyptology and so forth,
Speaker 2: or just in general, if there are other examples of
Speaker 2: this sort of data, this sort of imagery, etc. That
Speaker 2: you know is difficult for the average modern viewer to
Speaker 2: understand and then lends itself well to some sort of
Speaker 2: paranormal or alternative or conspiracy explanation. Just a reminder that
Speaker 2: Stuff to Will Your Mind's episodes published on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
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Speaker 2: concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird
Speaker 2: House Cinema.
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