September 21, 2024 • 59 mins
In recent vault episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discussed low-resolution images that have provoked paranormal and fringe explanations, despite convincing and even conclusive expert analysis. In this episode, they continue this line of inquiry through a discussion of Ancient Egyptian pseudohistories and fringe ideas regarding modern technology in ancient inscriptions. (originally published 08/17/2023)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. It is
once more Saturday, so it is once more time to
go into the vault. This is going to be the
episode Dindara Lights and Ancient Egyptians Pseudohistory. This one originally
published eight seventeen, twenty twenty three. This was the third
part in our look at how low resolution images have
provoked paranormal and fringe explanations over time, despite convincing an
(00:29):
even conclusive expert analysis. And this is once more a
good excuse to dive into ancient Egyptian concepts. So without
further ado, here we go.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. In the past to
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we've been talking
about a couple of famous, supposedly anomalous underwater images, weird,
spooky looking photographs and images produced by sonar of objects
on the ocean floor, which to observers with the right predisposition,
(01:18):
seemed like compelling evidence of alien visitation of Earth, or
ancient technology of lost civilizations, or something else. In that
narrative space, and in a way, I think it's kind
of telling that you look at an object and say, well,
this could be aliens, or it could be atlantis. It's
one of the two or both.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
You can have both sometimes, yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Guess you could. But anyway, explanation referring to explanations that
are big, exciting, mind rending explanations that would change everything
we think we know about the world and about the
history of life on Earth. Today's episode is not a
strict like Part three or anything, but we are going
to be continuing the theme, so I thought it would
be good to start off with a recap of what
(02:03):
we've talked about in the last couple of episodes, though
today we're going to be taking it in a different direction.
So what's the theme. Well, to start with, I'll do
a brief review of the things we talked about in
the last two episodes. One object was something that was
photographed in the nineteen sixties and known in the UFO
literature as the Eltanan antenna. It looks to the untrained
(02:27):
observer like some kind of antenna, some kind of receiver,
you know. They called it, I think a microwave, aerial
or something in some of the early articles on it,
but actually once people with the right background of marine
biology knowledge looked at this photo, they identified it with
near certainty as a species of carnivorous sponge that lives
(02:48):
on the bottom of the ocean. The other object that
we talked about in the second of those two episodes
was captured on fuzzy sonar images by treasure hunters and
salvage divers in two thousand and eleven, and it has
been referred to in the media as the Baltic Sea
anomaly because it was supposedly somewhere on the floor of
the Northern Baltic Sea, and hidden knowledge enthusiasts called it
(03:11):
everything from a crashed flying saucer to a monument built
by the civilization of Atlantis, and in this case a
positive idea is slightly more difficult than it is in
the case of the Eltanan antenna, which is almost definitely
the sponge. But numerous experts have commented that this is
most likely just an interesting looking geologic formation, in other words,
(03:33):
a big mass of rock that may be a result
of the freezing and thawing of glaciers, but ultimately we
don't know for sure, and so it's kind of interesting
that in both cases, the story goes that someone captured
a fuzzy or low resolution image of something that looked
weird and to some extent looked intuitively unnatural or out
(03:55):
of place. That image was then published to a lay
audience that had no background knowledge to help them understand
what they were looking at, and then some observers concluded
that since the object looked unusual, unnatural, or out of place,
it must be a piece of anomalist technology deposited by
aliens or time travelers, or a past human civilization about
(04:19):
which all knowledge has been erased. However, in both cases,
the more information entered into the picture, the more it
seemed like these anomalies were probably just weird looking natural
phenomena like animals or rocks. And so, while it's always
important to keep an open mind, you want to keep
your mind open to good evidence if it were to
(04:40):
emerge of big and worldview changing discoveries, it is at
the same time important not to let emotional excitement guide
your reasoning. And one reason to be skeptical about putting
something that looks weird and out of place into the
aliens or atlantis column is that If you've if all
of these kinds of stories long enough, you really start
(05:02):
to see a trend. And that trend is the more
information we have to inform our judgment, the less it
seems like aliens. So the cases where a piece of evidence,
like a photograph or a video, remains unexplainable and thus
still possibly aliens, those tend to be the cases where
there are notable deficits of information, and these could be
(05:25):
deficits within the evidence itself, like the picture or the
video is very grainy and low resolution, so it's hard
to tell exactly what you're looking at, and you kind
of just have to shrug and say, I don't know,
it looks weird, hard to say what it is. Or
the information deficit could be in the person or community
that is assessing the evidence. It could be in us.
(05:45):
For example, most of us have a lack of background
knowledge about what sponges on the ocean floor look like,
or about what kinds of patterns can be found in
natural rock formations, and so information deficits kind of keep
the mystery alive. Meanwhile, the converse also seems true. The
more information there is, the more likely it becomes that
(06:08):
the object gets pinned down to an explanation from within
the range of known causes. So you get a higher
resolution video, or you get new videos of the same thing,
maybe an additional angle, better light conditions, more experience or
background knowledge with which to judge the video or photo,
and oh, okay, in these cases it's a milar balloon
(06:31):
or oh I see that's a star, or that's an airplane.
Rob Actually, another excellent example that you brought up in
the last episode was the so called face on Mars.
You know, this was it's a wonderful photo, Like I
love the face on Mars, but this was done in
by higher resolution photography.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Done in to a certain extent. But like some of
these other images, the face of Mars still remains this
image that's kind of an article of faith to sign,
you know, or at least this kind of totem of
the paranormal and the potentially cosmic. And I guess it
is still certainly a testament to our ability to see
(07:12):
ourselves in anything well exactly.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
And I wouldn't wish, by the way, that we could
not read beauty and meaning into I don't know, things
that might on their own merits not necessarily shout out
to be meaningful, like a rock doesn't necessarily say that
it has meaning, but you can see faces in it,
and it can make you feel all kinds of things.
This is like the basis of all art. Yeah, But
(07:36):
when it comes to looking for explanations of things in
the world, this pattern just pops up again and again
and again. If the picture stays fuzzy, it still might
be aliens, or it still might be atlantis. But if
you're able to sharpen the focus or to have more
background knowledge when you're assessing it, it's almost definitely not aliens,
(07:56):
then that's when you realize it's a balloon. And this
doesn't mean we will never discover good evidence of alien
visitation of Earth or anything, or of you know, maybe
some big discovery about something previously unknown about the ancient world.
That's always possible. But I think if you follow these stories,
it's sort of impossible not to notice the trend, and
(08:19):
awareness of the trend should put us on guard when
new pieces of evidence bubble up from the low information
or low resolution zone. So today we wanted to look
at some similar trends, not in underwater imagery, but in
imagery related to another domain that can often appear in
degraded or low resolution form and be kind of put
(08:43):
cold in front of people who don't have contextual background
knowledge to understand what we're looking at, and this is
artifacts from ancient history.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Yeah, I think examples like this can be at times
a little harder for us to wrap our heads around,
especially if we are more we're inclined to sort of
rally behind an outside idea about what we're looking at,
because in some of these other examples of anomalist data,
anomalist photography, et cetera, there's there's often maybe a sense
(09:16):
of kind of like a a rabbit duck illusion scenario,
you know, or or one of these, you know, one
of these optical illusions where someone shows it to you
and they say, hey, do you see a duck or
a rabbit? And you say, well, I see a rabbit.
I don't see a duck at all. And then someone says, well, look,
i'll show you, and you show show them the parts
of the duck and they're like, okay, now I can
see it both ways. It can maybe be a little
(09:39):
bit harder if in order to truly see it both ways,
you have to say, understand ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. So like
one of the examples I'm gonna I'm gonna touch on
here is one where we absolutely know what it is,
and we absolutely know what it's not. And yet even
you know, reading the explanation, you know, hearing from experts,
(10:00):
you know, it can still be difficult. It's difficult for
me to see exactly what we're talking about there, and
it's actually easier for me to sort of lean in
to the ridiculous explanation for what appears to be in
front of us. So we'll get to this in a second,
but first I just want to talk in general about
the overarching theme of Egyptomania. Now, Egyptomania is more often
(10:25):
used to refer specifically to nineteenth century European fascination with
all things Egypt during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, but it can
also generally be leveled at various points in time when
various cultures have pursued an interest in ancient Egyptian civilization
and culture. And of course this general interest is irresistible
(10:47):
because we've touched on many times in the show. I'm
ancient Egyptian civilization, ancient Egyptian culture, and mythology. These are fascinating.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Topics, absolutely, yeah, a beautiful entrancing and not just to
people in the mind. I mean, something I've read before
is that people in the world that still appears as
the ancient world to us looked back to the even
more ancient Egyptian civilization and they were fascinated by it.
There were ancient Greco Romans who had a kind of Egyptomania.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Yeah, absolutely, I think we've we've mentioned the sort of
mind blowing fact before. You know that the ancient Romans
were greatly intrigued by ancient Egypt, which was already as
ancient to them as the Romans are to us.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Right, So at the time of Caesar Augustus, ancient Egyptian
civilization was thousands of years old.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah. Yeah. And of course we've touched before on the
ancient wonders of the world. You know, the Pyramids, the
Great Pyramids were certainly on that list, and those still
remain some of the most enigmatic man made structures on
the planet, and we still don't know everything there is
to know about them. So Egyptology remains a living field
of study.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Now.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
I was looking at a really really good book about
this that I highly recommend. It's from Ronald H. Fritz,
titled Egyptomania, and in the book, the author discusses various
forms of Egyptomania over the ages, from the ancient Hebrews,
from Greeks and Romans to European models. There's a whole
section on like fiction and gets into movies. He also
(12:20):
has a great chapter on Afrocentrist movements that engage in Egyptomania,
and he drives home that just many different peoples across
different times have attempted to imagine and even remake the
ancient Egyptians in their own image to enhance their own worldview,
their own interests, their own ideology, etc. And the energy
(12:43):
of this exercise ranges from just merely attempting to understand
a fascinating time in people. I mean, that's one of
our main tools is to think about even people from
the distant past in different lands, to try and imagine
what it would be like to be them. But on
the other end of the spectrum you get into just
outright pseudohistory, pseudoscience, and just everything else you might expect
(13:07):
to encounter on the fringes.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
Well, yeah, there's an interesting duality that comes from trying
to see yourself and imagine people like you and other
times and other civilizations, because of course, there probably is
something that all people at all times kind of have
in common. There is a common human experience, and you
can try to imagine what it would have been like
to live in ancient Egypt. But there's a possibility that
(13:35):
in doing so, you kind of lull yourself into the
false belief that you can say, look at ancient Egyptian
art or look at ancient Egyptian artifacts and just intuitively
identify what you're looking at, when in fact, you would
probably need some very specific cultural knowledge to understand what
you're looking at.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, and a lot of this imagery getting right into
what we're talking about here is the kind of stuff
that can be mysterious enough, that can seem cryptic enough
to folks who don't know what they're looking at that
you can apply other ideas, modern ideas to them. You know,
like you just read a book about UFOs, Well, go
look at these these images without any context, and you
(14:15):
may see UFO related ideas there. Read a book about
the bicameral mind and start looking at at some of
these images, Well, you might have some alarming ideas and
some interesting interpretations of what you see as well.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Right, we read the world through the lenses that are
available to us, and very often the lenses that are
available to us sort of, what's the top lens on
the stack is whatever you've recently been thinking about.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Yeah, and not to say that, you know, fresh eyes
and fresh perspectives are not potentially important in reevaluating what
we know and what we think we know. But oftentimes
when there is a particular preconceived notion in mind, you're
not necessarily checking back in with the experts to see
if this radical new theory matches up with the old
school interpretation. Certainly when we get into fringe ideas. So anyway,
(15:11):
there's a long history of Gyptomania in Western magic and
occultism continues to play into modern ideas of magic and ocultism,
but also modern branches of fringe ideas concerning UFOs, ancient
alien discourse, which of course we've discussed on the show
in the past, and other paranormal concepts and Yeah, so
it's no surprise that various examples of iconography, archaeological remnants,
(15:36):
and so forth that are not located on the bottom
of the sea still end up speaking to us across
time and culture in a way that too inexpert eyes
or eyes seeking only confirmation of the paranormal examples of
ancient technology and so forth. You know they're going to
see that in these images. So in just a few
(15:57):
minutes we'll get to a couple I think of interesting
samples of this. But going back to the book Egyptomania,
Fritz points out that there are other not necessarily alien
fringe ideas that pre exists UFO fascination that already insisted
that ancient Egypt was, for instance, much older than mainstream
(16:19):
historians believe today. Some of these push back to like
ten thousand BC or earlier, as opposed to the accepted
view that the Archaic Age stretches five thousand to three
thousand BC, with the Old Kingdom coming in at around
three thousand BC. And then you have a number of
fringe ideas that don't again don't concern aliens or anything
(16:41):
like that, but they get into this idea that like,
surely there is some ancient advanced civilization at the heart
of all of this, And so Fritz discusses a few
of these. There's this idea one ideas that the ancient
ancient Egyptian civilization extends from civilization X or the Ice
Age super civil.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Oh, there are similar analogs to this that are still
kicking around today.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Yeah, And of course a big, big one is Atlantis,
the idea that that like refugees from sunken Atlantis founded
ancient Egypt that sort of thing. And then you also
have the ancient alien discourse coming in ancient alien aliens
teaching the ancient Egyptians how to do things, or ancient
aliens interbreeding with the ancient Egyptians, supercharging human DNA, and
(17:29):
basically anything else you want to happen. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
I feel like a lot of alien discourses like wrong
but fun. But like the alien supercharging DNA thing goes
is not wrong and fun, it's like wrong and gross.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah, you get it. You, I mean so much of this.
It can these ideas they can start in a place
that feels just fun and escapist, but you follow them
long enough, they can get into perhaps creepier territory. But
there is still a lot of variety here to choose from.
And Fritz writes the following quote, the outpouring and accumulation
(18:03):
of the many theories that alternative historians advanced about ancient
Egypt could be considered a cornucopia. But since so many
of the theories clash with and contradict each other, a
better description might be a cacophony. And I think we
saw this in some of the discussion of our previous
underwater examples as well, you know what is the anomaly? Well,
(18:23):
there's never like this single paranormal explanation, but a whole
host of them. Certainly the deeper you go into a
theme like, Okay, it's an antenna, but is that is
it the secret world government that built it, or is
it the ancient lass civilization that built it? Or is
it current UFO, current alien visitors that built it. And
within a given person's body of work, they might have
(18:45):
a specific idea, but it's going to be different from
the next book on the shelf.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Or as we mentioned directly earlier, if you look at
an object on the ocean floor and you think, well,
this could be a UFO, or it could be a
temple built by the people of Atlantis, or it could
be an Nazi bunker. In that case, like could it
really possibly even suggest any of those like that? Those
are so different. It sounds like you're just kind of
(19:11):
like reaching around for whatever, not like saying, oh, it
really has attributes that would make us conclude it is x.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, exactly. Now. The Atlantis connection to ancient Egypt goes
way back. Apparently goes back to the writings of Plato
concerning the idea that the ancient Egyptians coexisted with Atlantis
nine thousand years earlier. Fritz writes that while Plato was
likely stating all this purely to make a philosophical point,
the idea that Egypt was already a nine thousand year
(19:40):
old civilization was probably what contemporary Greeks believed in the
fourth and fifth centuries BCE, and to be clear, other
civilizations of the day were cited with bloated timelines as well.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
Yeah. One big difference between like an ancient Greek historian
and a modern historian is that modern historians have a
wealth of physical scienceientific evidence that they can draw on
to help inform, you know, how they should process the
received stories told about the past. You know, you can,
like you can do digs, and you can do radiometric dating,
and you can do all kinds of things that give
(20:13):
you physical clues to help you either confirm or disconfirm
things that have been written down about what happened in
the past.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Absolutely. Now, of course, one of the things about Atlantis
is that the concept never completely goes away, certainly in
the West, but it comes and it goes. It's heightened
by the discovery of an inhabited America's and then again
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with modern pseudohistory of
Egypt and Atlantis emerging largely from the writings apparently of
(20:43):
American politician Ignacious Donnelley in eighteen eighty two. Donnelly, if
you're not familiar with him, represented Minnesota and the US
House of Representatives from eighteen sixty three through eighteen sixty nine.
He pushed a number of ideas concerning pseudoscience and pseudo history.
So yeah, definitely one of the many characters that Fritz
(21:06):
writes about in this section.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
Oh boy, Now.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Another figure that Fritz touches on here and credits largely
with this sort of modern idea that Egypt had advanced technology.
Ancient Egypt had advanced technology. This goes back to the
psychic readings of when Edgar Casey, who lived eighteen seventy
seven through nineteen forty five, a self professed clairvoyant who
carried out quote unquote life readings for people and revealed
(21:32):
their past lives in ancient Atlantis, as well as the
advanced technology that the Atlanteans supposedly had, such as advanced
crystal laser weapons that they ultimately used to destroy Atlantis,
with the survivors fleeing to Egypt.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Crystal laser weapons.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, I mean, it sounds remarkably like that old Atari
twenty six hundred game Atlantis. I don't know if anyone
out there actually played this, but I remember as a
kid seeing the commercials for it online and it was
kind of a scary commercial with a whole narrative structure
going on how to do with that. I believe memory
serves an ongoing war between the Gorgons and the people
(22:12):
of Atlantis, and it was a great commercial. Look it
up if you haven't seen.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
It, you know. I kind of can't help but think
though all these ideas about ancient Egypt having advanced technology.
In a way, they did have advanced technology, but they
had advanced technology for the time in which they lived.
Like you do not have to turn to bad standards
of evidence. For examples of amazing technological achievements. In ancient Egypt,
(22:37):
they built the Pyramids, among you million tons of other things.
That was not ancient aliens. That was extremely smart and
industrious people creating amazing technological achievements with a very limited
set of tools compared to what's available to people today.
That is an amazing technological feat. It was just an
amazing technological feat for the time.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean that's one of the tragedies
about all of this is like when you when you
get wrapped up in say ancient alien discourse, you end
up reducing the importance of of of what people were
actually doing if you just attribute it to the gifts
of the gods, the gifts of the alien visitors and
so forth. Now, I want to stress that in this chapter,
(23:20):
Fritz touches on a number of different names, and I'm
not going to get into everybody here, but you know
it's there. There are various writers and occasional outright con
men that are engaged in the sort of work, and
their work kind of feeds off each other. One of
the big ones, one of the big names, certainly an
ancient alien discourse is the work of Eric von Donakin,
(23:40):
who we've talked about on the show before because he
was the author of Chariots of the Gods in nineteen
sixty eight. I say it that way because the title
does have a question mark at the end. Always pronounce
the question mark.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Like he's like kind of getting you with the elbow
and winking while he says yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
I think we mentioned we went in and discussed this
idea at length and the various criticisms to it. But
even this idea like it was influenced by the writings
of HP Lovecraft and other weird writers of the early
twentieth century. Lovecraft and his contemporaries, by the way, also
wrote about tales related to Egyptian motifs and Egyptian oriented
(24:21):
occultism and so forth, so you have a lot of
these sources feeding into each other.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
It's been years since we did the Eric Vondanikin episode,
But am I remembering something about how he had like
created the Chariots of the Gods theme park? Is that?
Am I losing my mind?
Speaker 1 (24:37):
No? No, there was Slash is a theme park. I'm
not sure off the top of my head, what's going
on with it? Right? Now, but like, that's how big
this guy.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
I want to flat earth six flags.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Now. Fritz points out, though that early ancient alien discourse folks,
and even Vondnikin's original book don't actually reference Egypt all
that much. So other individuals who kind of come in
with the Egyptology alternative Egyptology view of everything, and that
gets you know, sucked into the whole concept. He points
(25:10):
out one particular author, I believe this is a book
from nineteen eighty four from one zechariash Si Chen who
lived nineteen twenty through twenty ten. This is apparently one
of the only serious competitors to von Danakan because the
Vondanakin's books generated a lot of discussion, and you know,
they're pretty popular for the time period. So a lot
of other authors came in to try and cash in
(25:33):
on ancient alien discourse. But this particular individual, Sich seems
to have been one of the more successful of those
to come in and try and get cash in on
everything here, and Fritz points out that he seems to
have avoided a lot of the criticism that was reserved
for von Dannakin. So Vontanagan got big enough to where
(25:55):
like when people like Carl Sagan entered the chat, Vonda
Anakin's ideas are the one are the ones that Carl
Sagan is going to respond to. Carl Sagan doesn't have
time to deal with everybody else in the genre.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
And to be clear, Carl Sagan was not saying that
ancient aliens like were a viable explanation for the Pyramids
or anything. He as I recall, entered the discourse to
kind of say, well, if we're going to entertain this possibility,
we should have some standards of evidence, right, Like we
should lay out in advance what would we be looking
for instead of just like looking at what's out there
(26:30):
and saying like, eh, that could be aliens.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Yeah, yeah, I thought Sagan has some great responses to it.
They were not like one hundred percent shut it down,
dismissive of it as a concept, but we're but also
reiterated that there are high standards for this, and if
you were looking for evidence, you would be looking for
very specific sorts of evidence and so forth. But again,
when Sagan's entering the conversation, when other critics are coming
(26:53):
in and dealing with what von Donigan's written about, especially
with that first book, they're not dealing with with the
themed content. Individuals like Sitchin apparently are ones who were
the ones to initially drag Egypt and ancient Egypt into
the scenario, and perhaps a lot of that Fritz Rights
seems to have maybe existed below the mainstream radar for
(27:16):
a while, you know, being just a part of the
stuff that is discussed in the fringe movements. And it's
not until the nineteen nineties. He writes that we see
quote the penetration of highly speculative theories about ancient Egypt
into mainstream popular culture.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
I think maybe the designation as highly speculative is a
good one, because sometimes I'm looking for the right blanket
terminology to describe all these different types of explanations that
we're talking about. They're not all necessarily like conspiracy theories.
They don't all necessarily have exactly the same content, But
what they do seem to have in common is that
(27:53):
they are highly speculative, meaning they are elaborating a lot
of explanatory narrative on on a very weak evidential basis.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
So to be clear here, what apparently is going on
at this time leading into the nineteen nineties, according to
the author here of Fritz is that under the surface
of all this other talk about ancient aliens and so
forth and other paranormal ideas, there's this kind of growing
swell of alternative Egyptology, and then during the nineteen nineties
(28:37):
it begins to bubble up into the mainstream discourse. And
Fritz cite's two main reasons for this. One is the
approaching millennium and various ideas concerning the new millennium that's
about to be here. The second reason he brings up
is that there are just a number of new archaeological
discoveries that were taking place in Egypt that we're capturing
(28:58):
mainstream attention and inadvertently fueling the nonsense that again was
festering in the fringe.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
I see so like because for totally legitimate reasons, ancient
Egypt might be popping up on the news, like you're
seeing it on TV in ways that you probably didn't
see it as much before. It's just sort of in
the air, and it is one more thing you could
attach highly speculative theories too.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Yeah, and then you have other individuals that are writing
more directly about it. It's popping up in the writings
of Graham Hancock, for example, He also cites the X
files as being popular, though you have more expertise for
the X files. I don't know the X files ever
actually had any ancient Egyptian themed content. I don't know
if they ever went up against a mummy or anything.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
I recall very little about that except well, actually, now
that I think about it, I think there may have
been a mummy episode that is remembered as one of
the worst episodes of the X Files ever. Unless that's
hold on, got to look it up now. Oh no,
I see why my memory was confused here. Yeah, one
of the worst X Files episodes ever does concern a mummy.
(30:07):
But it's not an Egyptian mummy. It's a South American mummy.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Okay. Well, even if the X Files are not directly
contributing to alternative egyptology discourse, you can, I guess, look
at it as kind of like a sign that fringe
ideas were entering into the mainstream, at the very least
as entertainment. But then I guess sometimes entertainment has a
(30:31):
way of bleeding over into other things.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Don't drag the X files into this. The x files.
The X files are pure and holy they didn't do
anything wrong. That's a fictional show. It's okay.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
But I guess the bigger thing that's going on here
that Fitz points out is that at the time academics
had largely ignored these trends, like academics in egyptology and
so forth, archaeologists and so forth. Yeah, they weren't venturing
into arguments against ancient alien discourse folks and so forth.
(31:06):
And that's sensible by and large because like, that's not
what their work is, that's not what they have set
out to do with their work and their careers to
just respond to various highly speculative ideas about why things
appear the way they are.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Well, and it's often difficult to respond to highly speculative
ideas from an informed point of view because a lot
of times all you can just say is, like, there's
no reason to think all that you know, Like, the
claims of highly speculative theories are often not like the
kinds of tight, specific focused claims about specific pieces of
(31:43):
evidence that you can that you would be used to addressing,
say in an academic archaeology journal or something like that.
They're like these elaborations. They spend these wild narratives that
are kind of too big to even know where to
get a toe hole if you're trying to criticize them,
other than to just kind of say, like, well that
(32:03):
just sounds all made.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Up, yeah, Fritz Wright's quote, Academics generally avoid dealing with
alternative scholars. This attitude is justified by the excuse that
debating alternative or fringe scholarship only gives it a false credibility.
Some consider debating speculative scholars as a dialogue of the death,
since the speculative ideas tend to be treated by their
adherents in a manner of religious faith rather than scientific inquiry,
(32:27):
while some academics just hold speculative ideas in contempt. Ignoring
the alternative Egyptologists did not, however, serve the academic Egyptologists well.
During the nineteen nineties, they found themselves marginalized in the
popular mind and put on the defense. So the argument
here is that perhaps they did wait too long to
respond to a lot of these ideas that were welling
(32:49):
up into the mainstream, and he points out that it
was apparently wasn't until a pair of BBC Horizon documentary
specials titled Atlantis uncovered in Atlantis. Reborn weighed in and
offered a scathing rebuke of these ideas in the mainstream,
and this wasn't until nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
You know, I feel like this mirror is a pattern
that's still a problem with like highly speculative alternative ideas
of all sorts today because usually people who have real
expertise in the field are busy talking to each other
and they're kind of in a contained conversation space. Meanwhile,
people who are offering highly speculative ideas go straight to
(33:30):
the media into a popular audience.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, and you can understand too why I mean, thinking
that the pyramids were built by aliens? Does that necessarily
pose like a real threat to you know, at what
point do you do you actually make the call. It's like, Okay,
enough is enough. We need to say something about this.
We need to put together a documentary to dismiss this nonsense,
because it seems like for a long stretch of the
(33:54):
build up you can say like, well, this is dumb,
or this doesn't really match up with any actual work,
but that it's been conducted, any actual research or evidence,
but it's not hurting anybody.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
You could say that and a lot of people do
say that, But I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if
these supposedly harmless I mean, probably they are somewhat harmless
in themselves. Highly speculative theories or conspiracy theories sort of
engender a pattern of thinking that can easily be used
(34:27):
to foster incredibly destructive and dangerous ideas that are violent.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Absolutely, I think I think at this point, certainly this
day and age, I think most of us realize that
like the realm of conspiracy thinking is not just a
domain of like escapist ideas that are not hurting anybody.
There are plenty of harmful ideologies that are woven throughout
many of these branches of conspiracy thought.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
Then again, I mean, I want to be realistic and
say I don't I don't know if you can really
say that if we had done a better job of
convincing people that aliens didn't build the pyramids, that they
wouldn't end up thinking, you know, some kind of violent
conspiracy theory. But you do have to wonder if just
sort of like ignoring and letting it pass when people
(35:15):
are engaging in conspiracy thinking and these other domains just
sort of like, let's that style of thought fester.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
All right, well, let's look at the evidence, And by
look at the evidence, I mean let's look at a
couple of examples. We are not setting out to look
at all the evidence or alleged evidence for ancient Egyptian
advanced technology and chariots of the gods and so forth.
They are just a couple of examples that I think
match up with what we've been discussing about information data, images, etc.
(35:47):
That can be perplexing and that can certainly lead to
an interpretation that is again not based in expertise and
not based in like a wider body of evidence, but
are based in confirmation bias, and based in some sort
of an alternative understanding of science and or history.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Okay, what you got?
Speaker 1 (36:10):
So, did the ancient Egyptians have Apache helicopters?
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Gotta be yes?
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Surely, No, We're we're gonna move forward with the spoilering
place that no, they did not. But there is an
image that you will find, and you've probably seen online.
You see some hieroglyphics, and there is an image or
a character towards the top that, if we're being generous,
kind of looks like a modern helicopter and next to
(36:38):
it is something that I guess kind of looks like
a space tank.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
I mean, while we're doing this, let's not go all
out under the helicopter. There is an R two D
two and I don't know what you're saying, is a
tank that looks to me kind of like a MiG
fighter jet.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Okay, all right.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
We also got a get we have keeping up with
the R two D two theme. We have of Luke
Skywalker's land speeder.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
You see that one, Yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's that's what
I was kind of seeing as a tank. It does
look at the speeder as well. Yeah. And then of
course we have a we have a bug of some
sort as well. That's clearly a bug. But is it
a giant bug?
Speaker 3 (37:13):
Right?
Speaker 1 (37:14):
You know, your your theory may vary.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Now.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
One of the things about this image is a lot
of the places where you see it, they're not going
to be approaching it from a skeptical point of view. Uh,
and actually finding like good sources on this where someone's
just gonna come in and and tell you exactly what
you're looking at, are actually a little harder to come across.
And I think this is where you get into the
the problem of like experts in ancient Egypt and hieroglyphics
(37:41):
are not necessarily wasting their time weighing in on whether
ancient hieroglyphics show as a helicopter.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Right, So, I haven't checked, but I would guess that, like,
is this hieroglyphic a helicopter is not like the subject
of many Egyptology Journal articles.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Right right. But I was able to find, you know,
a few different sources that discuss it in a way
that I could I could get behind the image in question.
I've seen in a couple of places. It attributed to
a nineteen eighty seven photo by an American who is
visiting the Temple of Osiris in Abydos, Egypt. So it's
(38:22):
a it's a real photo of a real object of
real you know, etchings, and it's pretty clear, like there's
it's one of these things where the photo quality and
the reality of the thing that is photographed these are
not in question. But it's this interpretation of what you're
looking at that's where you see these enormous leaps taken
(38:42):
where people are seeing bits of advanced technology. But fortunately
there is a very straightforward explanation for what we see here.
I found a couple of different discussions of this, but
the one I'm going to lean on mostly is this
was from an article that Asian historian Richard C. Carrier
wrote about back in nineteen ninety nine for The Skeptical
(39:05):
Inquirer in an article titled flash Fox News reports that
Aliens may have built the Pyramids of Egypt. As the
title suggests, this is about coverage at the time on
Fox News. Again, this is nineteen ninety nine about alternative Egyptology,
and the broadcast included images of the alleged helicopter and
(39:26):
comparison images to modern Apache attack helicopters. So Carrier spoke
to some Egyptologists for the article, and it seems to
have seems to have been sort of new pseudohistory to
some of them at the time. Again, this was daring
that the very end of the nineteen nineties, so it
seems like, you know, the subculture was bubbling up into
the mainstream quite a bit. He writes the following to
(39:48):
sum it all up, but what do the experts say
about this helicopter glyph? This will serve as an example
for all the rest. The helicopter, in fact, is the
Avados palimpsest. A palimpsest is what is created when new
writing is inscribed over old. In the case of papyri,
old inc is scraped off, but in the case of inscriptions,
plaster is added over the old inscription and a new
(40:10):
inscription is made. The image described as a helicopter is
well known to be the names of Rameses inscribed over
the names of his father, something Rameses was known to
do quite frequently. A little bit of damage from time
and weathering has furthered the illusion of a helicopter. It
basically comes down to this basic fact, though, that a
(40:33):
previous image, a previous inscription, was plastered over and replaced
with another one, and then when stuff starts wearing away,
a sort of hybrid image emerges that doesn't mean anything,
but that looks like something from our modern age, you know,
I guess it would be like it'd be like if
one billboard were plastered over another one, and then there's
(40:53):
a fierce storm and it tears part of the billboard away,
and then so you have a mix of the old
billboard and the new billboard, and what you're left with
is just kind of confusing. But maybe it looks like
a monster. Maybe it looks like you know, what have you.
And by the way that the topic of palms is fascinating,
there's a much older episode of Stuck to blow your
mind that goes into it. But yeah, you get into
(41:15):
this whole realm of you know, erased books just under
the surface of ancient tomes, and you know, sometimes they've
been on earthed. Sometimes you have to use you know,
modern technology to sort of see through the printed page
and see what was originally there. And you see it
in paintings and much more, and it can seem a
bit foreign to us, given how just disposable paper is.
(41:38):
And you know, you can rewrite files, you know, as
many times as you want. You can just set around
creating new documents and deleting them all day. But there
was a time when in order to erase document and
create new document, well that meant grabbing the plaster.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
Okay, So this strikes me as a case that is
in the low information category you've been talking about in
multiple ways. So the original image is somewhat altered or
degraded in the way that it's been photographed like it
might be hard, especially if you're not familiar with ancient
Egyptian inscriptions to understand that what you're looking at is
(42:16):
not even one single continuous drawing or piece of imagery,
but is instead a couple of things sort of bleeding
into each other. And then on top of that, there's
the low information condition of us looking at it without
being familiar with, say the way the name Rameses is
depicted in hieroglyphics.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
Yes, Now, the second example we're going to look at
here is also really fascinating, and this one is a
lot in a way. In a way, this one is
a lot more clear, but is also even more cryptic
and even harder to really understand. And you'll see what
I'm talking about as we roll into the discussion here.
But this concerns the so called Dindara Lights or the
(42:57):
Dindara Light. So these are a series of stone release
in the hawt Or temple in Dindera, Egypt. Now you
can look up images of this, and I've included one
of the images here for you to look at, Joe,
and they are quite captivating, and I mean, it's it's
almost unfair to throw people at this with sort of
(43:21):
alternative Egyptology in the back of their mind, because it's
going to make you lean into perhaps seeing things again
from not only a modern standboy point, which we can't
help but do, but also from a standpoint of looking
for some sort of crazy advanced technology in the past.
So if you were looking at these just kind of
out of context, but not with any specific expectations of
(43:43):
the advanced technology, I think you might guess that we're
looking at a couple of ancient Egyptian individuals who have
giant eggplants, and those giant eggplants have giant snakes on them.
Would this would of course be be incorrect. This is
not exactly what we're looking at, but that's what it
kind of looks like to me.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
I might have said, giant shields. I mean, they're holding
some of what looks like a really large flat object
on which a sort of slithering snake is depicted. But
of course the strange thing is that out of the
bottoms of the shields there is coming some sort of line, which, again,
if you're playing into ancient technology thinking, you could say,
(44:25):
is that a power cord? Is that some kind of cable?
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Yeah? Yeah, so there's this sense of plant to it. Yeah,
there's definitely a snake. There's no doubt about this snake.
But then there's this this large sort of bulb or
or eggplant like shape to the thing. And so the
the alternative, the highly speculative hypothesis here that that once
(44:49):
he's reflected in some of this you know, ancient alien
discourse and and and you know pseudohistories and pseudo scientific
ideas concerning ancient e are that well, what they are
holding here are filament light bulbs or representations of filament
light bulbs.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
Okay, well, if you are familiar with incandescent light bulbs,
you can absolutely see how somebody would make that comparison.
There is the shield or the eggplant shape looks like
it could be a you know, a transparent glass tube.
The snake depicted on it looks like it could be
maybe looks like it could be the filament inside the bulb.
(45:30):
And then the sort of line there's like a sort
of flower looking thing at the base of the bulb,
and you could imagine that is the socket or not
the socket, what would you call it, the you know,
the metal part at the base of an incandescent light bulb.
And then the line extending away from the bottom. You
could say, okay, that looks like a power line. It
looks like, you know, whatever the electricity is going in through.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
Yeah. So the radical idea here would be that the
ancient Egyptians had mastery over electricity. They made light bulbs
or I guess receive light bulbs from someone, They got
a you know, a monthly delivery from the aliens or something,
and they wired up their various buildings with electric lights
of one sort or the other.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
The aliens gave them highly inefficient incandescent light bulbs.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Yeah, yeah, or I mean, when you get into the
various arguments, they also they draw comparisons to you know,
sort of like early different variations of artificial lighting. So
I don't know, the exact model may vary, but the idea, yeah,
is that the ancient Egyptians had light bulbs. Now, actual
experts who weigh in on this will we'll say, well, there,
(46:37):
these are not light bulbs, obviously. What we're looking at
is a symbolic motif. And another huge important fact here
is that these are not illustrations or engravings that are
occurring in isolation and out of context. Like, there's plenty
of context, the most important being that this is a
temple of Hator. This is a god of ancient Egypt
(47:00):
who Geraldine Pinch in the book Egyptian Mythology describes as
a golden goddess that aided in childbirth, the rebirth of
the dead, and the renewal of the cosmos. She was
seemingly a complex deity with both destructive and beneficial attributes,
and she was commonly depicted as a beautiful woman with
a red solar disc between a pair of cow horns. Now,
(47:21):
she could be worshiped in a few different forms, but
one of the main roles she has here is a mother,
and she is the mother of Horace, Uniter of the
Two Lands. Horace, of course, is a very important god
in Egyptian mythology, the celestial falcon and the god of kings.
So here Horace is Harsmatus Uniter of the two Lands,
(47:47):
and apparently in these images we're seeing representation of him
in the primeval form of a serpent. In rebirth, he
is depicted emerging in the form of this serpent from
the lotus flower, which is in turn inside a boat,
lining up with the concept of the solar god rays
solar barge.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
Oh okay, this is starting to make sense.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
Yes, Yeah, so like emerging from the lotus flower is
the serpent that is horse. Now you're probably wondering, what
about that light bulb, what about that eggplant? Well, this
is thought to be and I hope I'm pronouncing this
right a hen that's h n. And it may represent
the womb of the sky goddess nut or note. And
(48:32):
this is a goddess that was associated with the fig
tree and also with cosmic motherhood. The image in question
also entails the symbolism of the jed pillar with added
arms coming out. So this is I mean, to my
eyes like, this is way weirder. This is the far
weirder helmet is this strange pillar looking thing that's sort
(48:53):
of holding up one of the eggplant shapes and has
arms coming out like some sort of like are psychedelic muppet.
But this is also grounded in ancient Egyptian symbolism. You know,
it's about stability and you know, and holding up the
cosmos and so forth.
Speaker 3 (49:13):
You could argue that this looks like a baseball bat
with several rings around it, and it has arms, it
has two arms, and it's pushing on the so called
light bulb.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
Yeah, so in the same way, that if we look
at hieroglyphics, we're looking at at language that we have
no frame of reference for. It's similar with with the
icons that we're seeing represented here. We have no unless
we are trained in it. We have no frame of
context for what these symbols are and what they represent.
(49:43):
And all you can ultimately do is sort of like
try and take them at I guess, sort of base level,
and then you can potentially lean into these elaborate explanations
for what you're seeing, and you know, you can imagine
the what would occur if you were to take any
form of highly some art from the modern world and
try and understand what you're looking at. So anyway, yeah,
(50:05):
it's speaking of visual language that we probably are not
going to pick up on in the modern age again
unless we have the expertise and we've you know, we
are an egyptologist, et cetera, or it's been explained to us.
Because at the end of the day, what we're likely
looking at here is some representation of the rise of
(50:26):
the sun and its journey through the night, though delivered
through religious ideas and symbolism of the time, and also
the specific theology of this particular deity.
Speaker 3 (50:35):
Right, and it looks like a light bulb to us
rather than this ancient Egyptian artistic motif because we're used
to seeing light bulbs, who were not used to seeing
this artistic motif. And if you happen to be familiar
with the right ancient Egyptian art you recognize it as Oh,
it's one of those.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
Yeah. Now, I've looked at particular book by archaeologist and
author Kenneth L. Fetter on this matter. The book is Frauds,
Myths and Mysteries, Science and Pseudoscience and Archaeology, and he
points out that these quote unquote lights a factor into
Eric von Donican's nineteen ninety six book The Eyes of
(51:14):
the Sphinx, in which Vondnican argues that the only rational
way that the Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians could have worked
in the dark confines of the Pyramids and other locations
other structures without leaving telltale lamp black from burning lamps.
The only possible way this could be the case is
if they were using electric lights.
Speaker 3 (51:37):
Air tight.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
Now, Feeder points out that Egyptologists have a far less
imaginative explanation backed up by actual evidence, and that is
that the ancient Egyptians used linen soaked in oil or
animal fat and twisted into wicks. These wicks would have
burned quite brightly, and then with salt applied, this would
produce less smoke, which would produce less lampblack and they
(52:04):
would have yeah, they would have burned pretty brightly, bright
enough to conduct their work, and they would also burn
for a set amount of time that would apparently mark
the length of an artisan where a worker's shift. And again,
this is something we have context for, we have physical
evidence for. It factors into our overall understanding of who
the ancient Egyptians were and what their world was like.
(52:27):
But if you go with a light bulb hypothesis, well
you have no evidence because where are the examples of
the other light bulbs, the spent bulbs, Where's evidence of
the bulb production facilities, the power sources, the wiring, et cetera.
I mean, it all just falls quickly apart. Instead, von
(52:48):
Donikin apparently leaned on the thoroughly discredited hypothesis of the
bagdad battery as proof.
Speaker 3 (52:55):
This is yet another artifact that has been interpreted by
some as electrical technology in the ancient world, but probably
was not.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
Right, and so the author here feter not von do Onic,
and sums up quote because prehistoric pictorial depictions and even
early written descriptions are sometimes indistinct or vague, and perhaps
more important, because they are part of a different culture
and have a context not immediately apparent to those who
(53:25):
do not explore further. You can see or read anything
you want into them, just as you can with ink blots.
And so he refers to this elsewhere in the book
as the ink block principle, which I think is a
good way of thinking about evidence of this nature.
Speaker 3 (53:42):
Now, one way in which I would distinguish this example
from many of the others is that this example does
not seem as within the image itself as degraded in
quality or vague to me, at least in the like
the illustrations I see from books. It looks like, you know,
we get a pretty clear picture of what the artwork,
(54:02):
whether at least the outlines and the artwork we're supposed
to be. But you're still, even though the picture is
fairly sharp, in the low information zone, because you don't
have the context, the background knowledge to place what you're
looking at within its cultural milieu.
Speaker 1 (54:18):
Yeah, I mean, we just don't have the symbolic language
at our disposal to necessarily look at this and understand
what's taking place. And again, I think this is this
is not something that's that that is unique to ancient
Egyptian religious imagery. I think you could apply this to
to various other examples of even contemporary religious imagery, where
(54:39):
if you if you don't know what you're looking at, you're, yeah,
you're not going to understand the message of it, like
what is being theologically relayed in this image, and you
have to fall back on either just like again, a
very literal interpretation of what you're looking at, or dragging
in some sort of other belief system or some sort
of other, you know, mode of understanding which may or
(55:00):
may not involve aliens.
Speaker 3 (55:02):
Another thing that I'm struck is sort of the general
principle of thinking behind the Eric Vondanakan argument that Okay,
they're working in the dark inside the pyramid chambers, and
they wouldn't have been able to see what they were
working on without leaving lampblack unless they had light bulbs.
That seems to be a general style of argument used
(55:24):
by like ancient aliens people. I mean the same thing
is said about the construction of the pyramids. More generally,
it's like, I can't see how they could have done this,
Therefore it must have been aliens with advanced technology. That
is a really poor way to reason. Instead, you could
start by saying, like, well, what if instead of invoking
entities that would radically reshape our way of thinking about
(55:46):
the world, and there is no independent evidence of what if?
Instead of that, we think that maybe they figured out
a solution that you haven't thought of or you don't
have awareness of.
Speaker 1 (55:57):
Yeah, like I mean you would It would be understand
if you didn't know about this whole adding salt to
torches or lights as a way to decrease lampblack There's
so many things like that in life that would have
been a parent or known to individuals who depended on
lamp technology or fire based illumination technology as opposed to
(56:19):
the mode we're familiar with and the mode that we
then potentially read into these ancient images.
Speaker 3 (56:26):
Yeah, I would just say be careful about making the
move of I can't understand how someone could have done
X two. Therefore they must have relied upon powers that
are extraordinary, and we have no other independent evidence.
Speaker 1 (56:38):
Of I'm reminded of various time travel movies that we've
discussed or looked at on weird house cinema, where you
have some sort of time traveler from the past going
into the future and they are and they may not
be time traveling, perhaps they're frozen, etc. You know. Well,
a man out of time wakes up and they're trying
to understand our advanced contemporary technology. They might look at
(57:01):
a TV and they're like, they shrunk a person down
and put him in a tiny box, and you know,
and this is often played up for comedy, but it's
not that different from the sort of you know, you
know what you can consider ridiculous analysis of past technology
where instead of you know, leaning on you know, the
(57:23):
actual context of the thing and what they're capable of,
you're going to this extreme model that you can't possibly
explain with any degree of accuracy.
Speaker 3 (57:32):
That's an amazing analogy. Actually, we are the unfrozen caveman
lawyer in reverse when we look at the ancient world.
Speaker 2 (57:39):
You know.
Speaker 3 (57:39):
So he comes up and says, I am but a
simple caveman. When I get into an airplane, I think,
is this some giant bird? But we are doing the
same thing. We look at an ancient inscription and say,
when I look at an inscription of a bird, I think,
is this an attack helicopter?
Speaker 1 (57:55):
Exactly? All right, Well, that's perfect. I think we have
to leave it at that. I think that that puts
a nice cap on it. But you know, were perfectly
happy to continue talking about this particular topic or this
sort of thing in general if nothing else in future
listener Mail episode. So write in let us know what
your thoughts are on egyptology, alternative egyptology and so forth,
(58:17):
or just in general, if there are other examples of
this sort of data, this sort of imagery, etc. That
you know is difficult for the average modern viewer to
understand and then lends itself well to some sort of
paranormal or alternative or conspiracy explanation. Just a reminder that
(58:39):
Stuff to Blow Your minds Core episodes published on Tuesdays
and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed.
We have listener Mail on Monday, short Form Artifactor, Monster
Effect on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (58:53):
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any there, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (59:14):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. It is
once more Saturday, so it is once more time to
go into the vault. This is going to be the
episode Dindara Lights and Ancient Egyptians Pseudohistory. This one originally
published eight seventeen, twenty twenty three. This was the third
part in our look at how low resolution images have
provoked paranormal and fringe explanations over time, despite convincing an
(00:29):
even conclusive expert analysis. And this is once more a
good excuse to dive into ancient Egyptian concepts. So without
further ado, here we go.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. In the past to
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we've been talking
about a couple of famous, supposedly anomalous underwater images, weird,
spooky looking photographs and images produced by sonar of objects
on the ocean floor, which to observers with the right predisposition,
(01:18):
seemed like compelling evidence of alien visitation of Earth, or
ancient technology of lost civilizations, or something else. In that
narrative space, and in a way, I think it's kind
of telling that you look at an object and say, well,
this could be aliens, or it could be atlantis. It's
one of the two or both.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
You can have both sometimes, yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Guess you could. But anyway, explanation referring to explanations that
are big, exciting, mind rending explanations that would change everything
we think we know about the world and about the
history of life on Earth. Today's episode is not a
strict like Part three or anything, but we are going
to be continuing the theme, so I thought it would
be good to start off with a recap of what
(02:03):
we've talked about in the last couple of episodes, though
today we're going to be taking it in a different direction.
So what's the theme. Well, to start with, I'll do
a brief review of the things we talked about in
the last two episodes. One object was something that was
photographed in the nineteen sixties and known in the UFO
literature as the Eltanan antenna. It looks to the untrained
(02:27):
observer like some kind of antenna, some kind of receiver,
you know. They called it, I think a microwave, aerial
or something in some of the early articles on it,
but actually once people with the right background of marine
biology knowledge looked at this photo, they identified it with
near certainty as a species of carnivorous sponge that lives
(02:48):
on the bottom of the ocean. The other object that
we talked about in the second of those two episodes
was captured on fuzzy sonar images by treasure hunters and
salvage divers in two thousand and eleven, and it has
been referred to in the media as the Baltic Sea
anomaly because it was supposedly somewhere on the floor of
the Northern Baltic Sea, and hidden knowledge enthusiasts called it
(03:11):
everything from a crashed flying saucer to a monument built
by the civilization of Atlantis, and in this case a
positive idea is slightly more difficult than it is in
the case of the Eltanan antenna, which is almost definitely
the sponge. But numerous experts have commented that this is
most likely just an interesting looking geologic formation, in other words,
(03:33):
a big mass of rock that may be a result
of the freezing and thawing of glaciers, but ultimately we
don't know for sure, and so it's kind of interesting
that in both cases, the story goes that someone captured
a fuzzy or low resolution image of something that looked
weird and to some extent looked intuitively unnatural or out
(03:55):
of place. That image was then published to a lay
audience that had no background knowledge to help them understand
what they were looking at, and then some observers concluded
that since the object looked unusual, unnatural, or out of place,
it must be a piece of anomalist technology deposited by
aliens or time travelers, or a past human civilization about
(04:19):
which all knowledge has been erased. However, in both cases,
the more information entered into the picture, the more it
seemed like these anomalies were probably just weird looking natural
phenomena like animals or rocks. And so, while it's always
important to keep an open mind, you want to keep
your mind open to good evidence if it were to
(04:40):
emerge of big and worldview changing discoveries, it is at
the same time important not to let emotional excitement guide
your reasoning. And one reason to be skeptical about putting
something that looks weird and out of place into the
aliens or atlantis column is that If you've if all
of these kinds of stories long enough, you really start
(05:02):
to see a trend. And that trend is the more
information we have to inform our judgment, the less it
seems like aliens. So the cases where a piece of evidence,
like a photograph or a video, remains unexplainable and thus
still possibly aliens, those tend to be the cases where
there are notable deficits of information, and these could be
(05:25):
deficits within the evidence itself, like the picture or the
video is very grainy and low resolution, so it's hard
to tell exactly what you're looking at, and you kind
of just have to shrug and say, I don't know,
it looks weird, hard to say what it is. Or
the information deficit could be in the person or community
that is assessing the evidence. It could be in us.
(05:45):
For example, most of us have a lack of background
knowledge about what sponges on the ocean floor look like,
or about what kinds of patterns can be found in
natural rock formations, and so information deficits kind of keep
the mystery alive. Meanwhile, the converse also seems true. The
more information there is, the more likely it becomes that
(06:08):
the object gets pinned down to an explanation from within
the range of known causes. So you get a higher
resolution video, or you get new videos of the same thing,
maybe an additional angle, better light conditions, more experience or
background knowledge with which to judge the video or photo,
and oh, okay, in these cases it's a milar balloon
(06:31):
or oh I see that's a star, or that's an airplane.
Rob Actually, another excellent example that you brought up in
the last episode was the so called face on Mars.
You know, this was it's a wonderful photo, Like I
love the face on Mars, but this was done in
by higher resolution photography.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Done in to a certain extent. But like some of
these other images, the face of Mars still remains this
image that's kind of an article of faith to sign,
you know, or at least this kind of totem of
the paranormal and the potentially cosmic. And I guess it
is still certainly a testament to our ability to see
(07:12):
ourselves in anything well exactly.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
And I wouldn't wish, by the way, that we could
not read beauty and meaning into I don't know, things
that might on their own merits not necessarily shout out
to be meaningful, like a rock doesn't necessarily say that
it has meaning, but you can see faces in it,
and it can make you feel all kinds of things.
This is like the basis of all art. Yeah, But
(07:36):
when it comes to looking for explanations of things in
the world, this pattern just pops up again and again
and again. If the picture stays fuzzy, it still might
be aliens, or it still might be atlantis. But if
you're able to sharpen the focus or to have more
background knowledge when you're assessing it, it's almost definitely not aliens,
(07:56):
then that's when you realize it's a balloon. And this
doesn't mean we will never discover good evidence of alien
visitation of Earth or anything, or of you know, maybe
some big discovery about something previously unknown about the ancient world.
That's always possible. But I think if you follow these stories,
it's sort of impossible not to notice the trend, and
(08:19):
awareness of the trend should put us on guard when
new pieces of evidence bubble up from the low information
or low resolution zone. So today we wanted to look
at some similar trends, not in underwater imagery, but in
imagery related to another domain that can often appear in
degraded or low resolution form and be kind of put
(08:43):
cold in front of people who don't have contextual background
knowledge to understand what we're looking at, and this is
artifacts from ancient history.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Yeah, I think examples like this can be at times
a little harder for us to wrap our heads around,
especially if we are more we're inclined to sort of
rally behind an outside idea about what we're looking at,
because in some of these other examples of anomalist data,
anomalist photography, et cetera, there's there's often maybe a sense
(09:16):
of kind of like a a rabbit duck illusion scenario,
you know, or or one of these, you know, one
of these optical illusions where someone shows it to you
and they say, hey, do you see a duck or
a rabbit? And you say, well, I see a rabbit.
I don't see a duck at all. And then someone says, well, look,
i'll show you, and you show show them the parts
of the duck and they're like, okay, now I can
see it both ways. It can maybe be a little
(09:39):
bit harder if in order to truly see it both ways,
you have to say, understand ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. So like
one of the examples I'm gonna I'm gonna touch on
here is one where we absolutely know what it is,
and we absolutely know what it's not. And yet even
you know, reading the explanation, you know, hearing from experts,
(10:00):
you know, it can still be difficult. It's difficult for
me to see exactly what we're talking about there, and
it's actually easier for me to sort of lean in
to the ridiculous explanation for what appears to be in
front of us. So we'll get to this in a second,
but first I just want to talk in general about
the overarching theme of Egyptomania. Now, Egyptomania is more often
(10:25):
used to refer specifically to nineteenth century European fascination with
all things Egypt during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, but it can
also generally be leveled at various points in time when
various cultures have pursued an interest in ancient Egyptian civilization
and culture. And of course this general interest is irresistible
(10:47):
because we've touched on many times in the show. I'm
ancient Egyptian civilization, ancient Egyptian culture, and mythology. These are fascinating.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Topics, absolutely, yeah, a beautiful entrancing and not just to
people in the mind. I mean, something I've read before
is that people in the world that still appears as
the ancient world to us looked back to the even
more ancient Egyptian civilization and they were fascinated by it.
There were ancient Greco Romans who had a kind of Egyptomania.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Yeah, absolutely, I think we've we've mentioned the sort of
mind blowing fact before. You know that the ancient Romans
were greatly intrigued by ancient Egypt, which was already as
ancient to them as the Romans are to us.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Right, So at the time of Caesar Augustus, ancient Egyptian
civilization was thousands of years old.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah. Yeah. And of course we've touched before on the
ancient wonders of the world. You know, the Pyramids, the
Great Pyramids were certainly on that list, and those still
remain some of the most enigmatic man made structures on
the planet, and we still don't know everything there is
to know about them. So Egyptology remains a living field
of study.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Now.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
I was looking at a really really good book about
this that I highly recommend. It's from Ronald H. Fritz,
titled Egyptomania, and in the book, the author discusses various
forms of Egyptomania over the ages, from the ancient Hebrews,
from Greeks and Romans to European models. There's a whole
section on like fiction and gets into movies. He also
(12:20):
has a great chapter on Afrocentrist movements that engage in Egyptomania,
and he drives home that just many different peoples across
different times have attempted to imagine and even remake the
ancient Egyptians in their own image to enhance their own worldview,
their own interests, their own ideology, etc. And the energy
(12:43):
of this exercise ranges from just merely attempting to understand
a fascinating time in people. I mean, that's one of
our main tools is to think about even people from
the distant past in different lands, to try and imagine
what it would be like to be them. But on
the other end of the spectrum you get into just
outright pseudohistory, pseudoscience, and just everything else you might expect
(13:07):
to encounter on the fringes.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
Well, yeah, there's an interesting duality that comes from trying
to see yourself and imagine people like you and other
times and other civilizations, because of course, there probably is
something that all people at all times kind of have
in common. There is a common human experience, and you
can try to imagine what it would have been like
to live in ancient Egypt. But there's a possibility that
(13:35):
in doing so, you kind of lull yourself into the
false belief that you can say, look at ancient Egyptian
art or look at ancient Egyptian artifacts and just intuitively
identify what you're looking at, when in fact, you would
probably need some very specific cultural knowledge to understand what
you're looking at.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, and a lot of this imagery getting right into
what we're talking about here is the kind of stuff
that can be mysterious enough, that can seem cryptic enough
to folks who don't know what they're looking at that
you can apply other ideas, modern ideas to them. You know,
like you just read a book about UFOs, Well, go
look at these these images without any context, and you
(14:15):
may see UFO related ideas there. Read a book about
the bicameral mind and start looking at at some of
these images, Well, you might have some alarming ideas and
some interesting interpretations of what you see as well.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Right, we read the world through the lenses that are
available to us, and very often the lenses that are
available to us sort of, what's the top lens on
the stack is whatever you've recently been thinking about.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Yeah, and not to say that, you know, fresh eyes
and fresh perspectives are not potentially important in reevaluating what
we know and what we think we know. But oftentimes
when there is a particular preconceived notion in mind, you're
not necessarily checking back in with the experts to see
if this radical new theory matches up with the old
school interpretation. Certainly when we get into fringe ideas. So anyway,
(15:11):
there's a long history of Gyptomania in Western magic and
occultism continues to play into modern ideas of magic and ocultism,
but also modern branches of fringe ideas concerning UFOs, ancient
alien discourse, which of course we've discussed on the show
in the past, and other paranormal concepts and Yeah, so
it's no surprise that various examples of iconography, archaeological remnants,
(15:36):
and so forth that are not located on the bottom
of the sea still end up speaking to us across
time and culture in a way that too inexpert eyes
or eyes seeking only confirmation of the paranormal examples of
ancient technology and so forth. You know they're going to
see that in these images. So in just a few
(15:57):
minutes we'll get to a couple I think of interesting
samples of this. But going back to the book Egyptomania,
Fritz points out that there are other not necessarily alien
fringe ideas that pre exists UFO fascination that already insisted
that ancient Egypt was, for instance, much older than mainstream
(16:19):
historians believe today. Some of these push back to like
ten thousand BC or earlier, as opposed to the accepted
view that the Archaic Age stretches five thousand to three
thousand BC, with the Old Kingdom coming in at around
three thousand BC. And then you have a number of
fringe ideas that don't again don't concern aliens or anything
(16:41):
like that, but they get into this idea that like,
surely there is some ancient advanced civilization at the heart
of all of this, And so Fritz discusses a few
of these. There's this idea one ideas that the ancient
ancient Egyptian civilization extends from civilization X or the Ice
Age super civil.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Oh, there are similar analogs to this that are still
kicking around today.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Yeah, And of course a big, big one is Atlantis,
the idea that that like refugees from sunken Atlantis founded
ancient Egypt that sort of thing. And then you also
have the ancient alien discourse coming in ancient alien aliens
teaching the ancient Egyptians how to do things, or ancient
aliens interbreeding with the ancient Egyptians, supercharging human DNA, and
(17:29):
basically anything else you want to happen. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
I feel like a lot of alien discourses like wrong
but fun. But like the alien supercharging DNA thing goes
is not wrong and fun, it's like wrong and gross.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah, you get it. You, I mean so much of this.
It can these ideas they can start in a place
that feels just fun and escapist, but you follow them
long enough, they can get into perhaps creepier territory. But
there is still a lot of variety here to choose from.
And Fritz writes the following quote, the outpouring and accumulation
(18:03):
of the many theories that alternative historians advanced about ancient
Egypt could be considered a cornucopia. But since so many
of the theories clash with and contradict each other, a
better description might be a cacophony. And I think we
saw this in some of the discussion of our previous
underwater examples as well, you know what is the anomaly? Well,
(18:23):
there's never like this single paranormal explanation, but a whole
host of them. Certainly the deeper you go into a
theme like, Okay, it's an antenna, but is that is
it the secret world government that built it, or is
it the ancient lass civilization that built it? Or is
it current UFO, current alien visitors that built it. And
within a given person's body of work, they might have
(18:45):
a specific idea, but it's going to be different from
the next book on the shelf.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Or as we mentioned directly earlier, if you look at
an object on the ocean floor and you think, well,
this could be a UFO, or it could be a
temple built by the people of Atlantis, or it could
be an Nazi bunker. In that case, like could it
really possibly even suggest any of those like that? Those
are so different. It sounds like you're just kind of
(19:11):
like reaching around for whatever, not like saying, oh, it
really has attributes that would make us conclude it is x.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, exactly. Now. The Atlantis connection to ancient Egypt goes
way back. Apparently goes back to the writings of Plato
concerning the idea that the ancient Egyptians coexisted with Atlantis
nine thousand years earlier. Fritz writes that while Plato was
likely stating all this purely to make a philosophical point,
the idea that Egypt was already a nine thousand year
(19:40):
old civilization was probably what contemporary Greeks believed in the
fourth and fifth centuries BCE, and to be clear, other
civilizations of the day were cited with bloated timelines as well.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
Yeah. One big difference between like an ancient Greek historian
and a modern historian is that modern historians have a
wealth of physical scienceientific evidence that they can draw on
to help inform, you know, how they should process the
received stories told about the past. You know, you can,
like you can do digs, and you can do radiometric dating,
and you can do all kinds of things that give
(20:13):
you physical clues to help you either confirm or disconfirm
things that have been written down about what happened in
the past.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Absolutely. Now, of course, one of the things about Atlantis
is that the concept never completely goes away, certainly in
the West, but it comes and it goes. It's heightened
by the discovery of an inhabited America's and then again
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with modern pseudohistory of
Egypt and Atlantis emerging largely from the writings apparently of
(20:43):
American politician Ignacious Donnelley in eighteen eighty two. Donnelly, if
you're not familiar with him, represented Minnesota and the US
House of Representatives from eighteen sixty three through eighteen sixty nine.
He pushed a number of ideas concerning pseudoscience and pseudo history.
So yeah, definitely one of the many characters that Fritz
(21:06):
writes about in this section.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
Oh boy, Now.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Another figure that Fritz touches on here and credits largely
with this sort of modern idea that Egypt had advanced technology.
Ancient Egypt had advanced technology. This goes back to the
psychic readings of when Edgar Casey, who lived eighteen seventy
seven through nineteen forty five, a self professed clairvoyant who
carried out quote unquote life readings for people and revealed
(21:32):
their past lives in ancient Atlantis, as well as the
advanced technology that the Atlanteans supposedly had, such as advanced
crystal laser weapons that they ultimately used to destroy Atlantis,
with the survivors fleeing to Egypt.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Crystal laser weapons.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, I mean, it sounds remarkably like that old Atari
twenty six hundred game Atlantis. I don't know if anyone
out there actually played this, but I remember as a
kid seeing the commercials for it online and it was
kind of a scary commercial with a whole narrative structure
going on how to do with that. I believe memory
serves an ongoing war between the Gorgons and the people
(22:12):
of Atlantis, and it was a great commercial. Look it
up if you haven't seen.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
It, you know. I kind of can't help but think
though all these ideas about ancient Egypt having advanced technology.
In a way, they did have advanced technology, but they
had advanced technology for the time in which they lived.
Like you do not have to turn to bad standards
of evidence. For examples of amazing technological achievements. In ancient Egypt,
(22:37):
they built the Pyramids, among you million tons of other things.
That was not ancient aliens. That was extremely smart and
industrious people creating amazing technological achievements with a very limited
set of tools compared to what's available to people today.
That is an amazing technological feat. It was just an
amazing technological feat for the time.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean that's one of the tragedies
about all of this is like when you when you
get wrapped up in say ancient alien discourse, you end
up reducing the importance of of of what people were
actually doing if you just attribute it to the gifts
of the gods, the gifts of the alien visitors and
so forth. Now, I want to stress that in this chapter,
(23:20):
Fritz touches on a number of different names, and I'm
not going to get into everybody here, but you know
it's there. There are various writers and occasional outright con
men that are engaged in the sort of work, and
their work kind of feeds off each other. One of
the big ones, one of the big names, certainly an
ancient alien discourse is the work of Eric von Donakin,
(23:40):
who we've talked about on the show before because he
was the author of Chariots of the Gods in nineteen
sixty eight. I say it that way because the title
does have a question mark at the end. Always pronounce
the question mark.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Like he's like kind of getting you with the elbow
and winking while he says yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
I think we mentioned we went in and discussed this
idea at length and the various criticisms to it. But
even this idea like it was influenced by the writings
of HP Lovecraft and other weird writers of the early
twentieth century. Lovecraft and his contemporaries, by the way, also
wrote about tales related to Egyptian motifs and Egyptian oriented
(24:21):
occultism and so forth, so you have a lot of
these sources feeding into each other.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
It's been years since we did the Eric Vondanikin episode,
But am I remembering something about how he had like
created the Chariots of the Gods theme park? Is that?
Am I losing my mind?
Speaker 1 (24:37):
No? No, there was Slash is a theme park. I'm
not sure off the top of my head, what's going
on with it? Right? Now, but like, that's how big
this guy.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
I want to flat earth six flags.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Now. Fritz points out, though that early ancient alien discourse folks,
and even Vondnikin's original book don't actually reference Egypt all
that much. So other individuals who kind of come in
with the Egyptology alternative Egyptology view of everything, and that
gets you know, sucked into the whole concept. He points
(25:10):
out one particular author, I believe this is a book
from nineteen eighty four from one zechariash Si Chen who
lived nineteen twenty through twenty ten. This is apparently one
of the only serious competitors to von Danakan because the
Vondanakin's books generated a lot of discussion, and you know,
they're pretty popular for the time period. So a lot
of other authors came in to try and cash in
(25:33):
on ancient alien discourse. But this particular individual, Sich seems
to have been one of the more successful of those
to come in and try and get cash in on
everything here, and Fritz points out that he seems to
have avoided a lot of the criticism that was reserved
for von Dannakin. So Vontanagan got big enough to where
(25:55):
like when people like Carl Sagan entered the chat, Vonda
Anakin's ideas are the one are the ones that Carl
Sagan is going to respond to. Carl Sagan doesn't have
time to deal with everybody else in the genre.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
And to be clear, Carl Sagan was not saying that
ancient aliens like were a viable explanation for the Pyramids
or anything. He as I recall, entered the discourse to
kind of say, well, if we're going to entertain this possibility,
we should have some standards of evidence, right, Like we
should lay out in advance what would we be looking
for instead of just like looking at what's out there
(26:30):
and saying like, eh, that could be aliens.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Yeah, yeah, I thought Sagan has some great responses to it.
They were not like one hundred percent shut it down,
dismissive of it as a concept, but we're but also
reiterated that there are high standards for this, and if
you were looking for evidence, you would be looking for
very specific sorts of evidence and so forth. But again,
when Sagan's entering the conversation, when other critics are coming
(26:53):
in and dealing with what von Donigan's written about, especially
with that first book, they're not dealing with with the
themed content. Individuals like Sitchin apparently are ones who were
the ones to initially drag Egypt and ancient Egypt into
the scenario, and perhaps a lot of that Fritz Rights
seems to have maybe existed below the mainstream radar for
(27:16):
a while, you know, being just a part of the
stuff that is discussed in the fringe movements. And it's
not until the nineteen nineties. He writes that we see
quote the penetration of highly speculative theories about ancient Egypt
into mainstream popular culture.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
I think maybe the designation as highly speculative is a
good one, because sometimes I'm looking for the right blanket
terminology to describe all these different types of explanations that
we're talking about. They're not all necessarily like conspiracy theories.
They don't all necessarily have exactly the same content, But
what they do seem to have in common is that
(27:53):
they are highly speculative, meaning they are elaborating a lot
of explanatory narrative on on a very weak evidential basis.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
So to be clear here, what apparently is going on
at this time leading into the nineteen nineties, according to
the author here of Fritz is that under the surface
of all this other talk about ancient aliens and so
forth and other paranormal ideas, there's this kind of growing
swell of alternative Egyptology, and then during the nineteen nineties
(28:37):
it begins to bubble up into the mainstream discourse. And
Fritz cite's two main reasons for this. One is the
approaching millennium and various ideas concerning the new millennium that's
about to be here. The second reason he brings up
is that there are just a number of new archaeological
discoveries that were taking place in Egypt that we're capturing
(28:58):
mainstream attention and inadvertently fueling the nonsense that again was
festering in the fringe.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
I see so like because for totally legitimate reasons, ancient
Egypt might be popping up on the news, like you're
seeing it on TV in ways that you probably didn't
see it as much before. It's just sort of in
the air, and it is one more thing you could
attach highly speculative theories too.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Yeah, and then you have other individuals that are writing
more directly about it. It's popping up in the writings
of Graham Hancock, for example, He also cites the X
files as being popular, though you have more expertise for
the X files. I don't know the X files ever
actually had any ancient Egyptian themed content. I don't know
if they ever went up against a mummy or anything.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
I recall very little about that except well, actually, now
that I think about it, I think there may have
been a mummy episode that is remembered as one of
the worst episodes of the X Files ever. Unless that's
hold on, got to look it up now. Oh no,
I see why my memory was confused here. Yeah, one
of the worst X Files episodes ever does concern a mummy.
(30:07):
But it's not an Egyptian mummy. It's a South American mummy.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Okay. Well, even if the X Files are not directly
contributing to alternative egyptology discourse, you can, I guess, look
at it as kind of like a sign that fringe
ideas were entering into the mainstream, at the very least
as entertainment. But then I guess sometimes entertainment has a
(30:31):
way of bleeding over into other things.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Don't drag the X files into this. The x files.
The X files are pure and holy they didn't do
anything wrong. That's a fictional show. It's okay.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
But I guess the bigger thing that's going on here
that Fitz points out is that at the time academics
had largely ignored these trends, like academics in egyptology and
so forth, archaeologists and so forth. Yeah, they weren't venturing
into arguments against ancient alien discourse folks and so forth.
(31:06):
And that's sensible by and large because like, that's not
what their work is, that's not what they have set
out to do with their work and their careers to
just respond to various highly speculative ideas about why things
appear the way they are.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Well, and it's often difficult to respond to highly speculative
ideas from an informed point of view because a lot
of times all you can just say is, like, there's
no reason to think all that you know, Like, the
claims of highly speculative theories are often not like the
kinds of tight, specific focused claims about specific pieces of
(31:43):
evidence that you can that you would be used to addressing,
say in an academic archaeology journal or something like that.
They're like these elaborations. They spend these wild narratives that
are kind of too big to even know where to
get a toe hole if you're trying to criticize them,
other than to just kind of say, like, well that
(32:03):
just sounds all made.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Up, yeah, Fritz Wright's quote, Academics generally avoid dealing with
alternative scholars. This attitude is justified by the excuse that
debating alternative or fringe scholarship only gives it a false credibility.
Some consider debating speculative scholars as a dialogue of the death,
since the speculative ideas tend to be treated by their
adherents in a manner of religious faith rather than scientific inquiry,
(32:27):
while some academics just hold speculative ideas in contempt. Ignoring
the alternative Egyptologists did not, however, serve the academic Egyptologists well.
During the nineteen nineties, they found themselves marginalized in the
popular mind and put on the defense. So the argument
here is that perhaps they did wait too long to
respond to a lot of these ideas that were welling
(32:49):
up into the mainstream, and he points out that it
was apparently wasn't until a pair of BBC Horizon documentary
specials titled Atlantis uncovered in Atlantis. Reborn weighed in and
offered a scathing rebuke of these ideas in the mainstream,
and this wasn't until nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
You know, I feel like this mirror is a pattern
that's still a problem with like highly speculative alternative ideas
of all sorts today because usually people who have real
expertise in the field are busy talking to each other
and they're kind of in a contained conversation space. Meanwhile,
people who are offering highly speculative ideas go straight to
(33:30):
the media into a popular audience.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, and you can understand too why I mean, thinking
that the pyramids were built by aliens? Does that necessarily
pose like a real threat to you know, at what
point do you do you actually make the call. It's like, Okay,
enough is enough. We need to say something about this.
We need to put together a documentary to dismiss this nonsense,
because it seems like for a long stretch of the
(33:54):
build up you can say like, well, this is dumb,
or this doesn't really match up with any actual work,
but that it's been conducted, any actual research or evidence,
but it's not hurting anybody.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
You could say that and a lot of people do
say that, But I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if
these supposedly harmless I mean, probably they are somewhat harmless
in themselves. Highly speculative theories or conspiracy theories sort of
engender a pattern of thinking that can easily be used
(34:27):
to foster incredibly destructive and dangerous ideas that are violent.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Absolutely, I think I think at this point, certainly this
day and age, I think most of us realize that
like the realm of conspiracy thinking is not just a
domain of like escapist ideas that are not hurting anybody.
There are plenty of harmful ideologies that are woven throughout
many of these branches of conspiracy thought.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
Then again, I mean, I want to be realistic and
say I don't I don't know if you can really
say that if we had done a better job of
convincing people that aliens didn't build the pyramids, that they
wouldn't end up thinking, you know, some kind of violent
conspiracy theory. But you do have to wonder if just
sort of like ignoring and letting it pass when people
(35:15):
are engaging in conspiracy thinking and these other domains just
sort of like, let's that style of thought fester.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
All right, well, let's look at the evidence, And by
look at the evidence, I mean let's look at a
couple of examples. We are not setting out to look
at all the evidence or alleged evidence for ancient Egyptian
advanced technology and chariots of the gods and so forth.
They are just a couple of examples that I think
match up with what we've been discussing about information data, images, etc.
(35:47):
That can be perplexing and that can certainly lead to
an interpretation that is again not based in expertise and
not based in like a wider body of evidence, but
are based in confirmation bias, and based in some sort
of an alternative understanding of science and or history.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Okay, what you got?
Speaker 1 (36:10):
So, did the ancient Egyptians have Apache helicopters?
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Gotta be yes?
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Surely, No, We're we're gonna move forward with the spoilering
place that no, they did not. But there is an
image that you will find, and you've probably seen online.
You see some hieroglyphics, and there is an image or
a character towards the top that, if we're being generous,
kind of looks like a modern helicopter and next to
(36:38):
it is something that I guess kind of looks like
a space tank.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
I mean, while we're doing this, let's not go all
out under the helicopter. There is an R two D
two and I don't know what you're saying, is a
tank that looks to me kind of like a MiG
fighter jet.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Okay, all right.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
We also got a get we have keeping up with
the R two D two theme. We have of Luke
Skywalker's land speeder.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
You see that one, Yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's that's what
I was kind of seeing as a tank. It does
look at the speeder as well. Yeah. And then of
course we have a we have a bug of some
sort as well. That's clearly a bug. But is it
a giant bug?
Speaker 3 (37:13):
Right?
Speaker 1 (37:14):
You know, your your theory may vary.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Now.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
One of the things about this image is a lot
of the places where you see it, they're not going
to be approaching it from a skeptical point of view. Uh,
and actually finding like good sources on this where someone's
just gonna come in and and tell you exactly what
you're looking at, are actually a little harder to come across.
And I think this is where you get into the
the problem of like experts in ancient Egypt and hieroglyphics
(37:41):
are not necessarily wasting their time weighing in on whether
ancient hieroglyphics show as a helicopter.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Right, So, I haven't checked, but I would guess that, like,
is this hieroglyphic a helicopter is not like the subject
of many Egyptology Journal articles.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Right right. But I was able to find, you know,
a few different sources that discuss it in a way
that I could I could get behind the image in question.
I've seen in a couple of places. It attributed to
a nineteen eighty seven photo by an American who is
visiting the Temple of Osiris in Abydos, Egypt. So it's
(38:22):
a it's a real photo of a real object of
real you know, etchings, and it's pretty clear, like there's
it's one of these things where the photo quality and
the reality of the thing that is photographed these are
not in question. But it's this interpretation of what you're
looking at that's where you see these enormous leaps taken
(38:42):
where people are seeing bits of advanced technology. But fortunately
there is a very straightforward explanation for what we see here.
I found a couple of different discussions of this, but
the one I'm going to lean on mostly is this
was from an article that Asian historian Richard C. Carrier
wrote about back in nineteen ninety nine for The Skeptical
(39:05):
Inquirer in an article titled flash Fox News reports that
Aliens may have built the Pyramids of Egypt. As the
title suggests, this is about coverage at the time on
Fox News. Again, this is nineteen ninety nine about alternative Egyptology,
and the broadcast included images of the alleged helicopter and
(39:26):
comparison images to modern Apache attack helicopters. So Carrier spoke
to some Egyptologists for the article, and it seems to
have seems to have been sort of new pseudohistory to
some of them at the time. Again, this was daring
that the very end of the nineteen nineties, so it
seems like, you know, the subculture was bubbling up into
the mainstream quite a bit. He writes the following to
(39:48):
sum it all up, but what do the experts say
about this helicopter glyph? This will serve as an example
for all the rest. The helicopter, in fact, is the
Avados palimpsest. A palimpsest is what is created when new
writing is inscribed over old. In the case of papyri,
old inc is scraped off, but in the case of inscriptions,
plaster is added over the old inscription and a new
(40:10):
inscription is made. The image described as a helicopter is
well known to be the names of Rameses inscribed over
the names of his father, something Rameses was known to
do quite frequently. A little bit of damage from time
and weathering has furthered the illusion of a helicopter. It
basically comes down to this basic fact, though, that a
(40:33):
previous image, a previous inscription, was plastered over and replaced
with another one, and then when stuff starts wearing away,
a sort of hybrid image emerges that doesn't mean anything,
but that looks like something from our modern age, you know,
I guess it would be like it'd be like if
one billboard were plastered over another one, and then there's
(40:53):
a fierce storm and it tears part of the billboard away,
and then so you have a mix of the old
billboard and the new billboard, and what you're left with
is just kind of confusing. But maybe it looks like
a monster. Maybe it looks like you know, what have you.
And by the way that the topic of palms is fascinating,
there's a much older episode of Stuck to blow your
mind that goes into it. But yeah, you get into
(41:15):
this whole realm of you know, erased books just under
the surface of ancient tomes, and you know, sometimes they've
been on earthed. Sometimes you have to use you know,
modern technology to sort of see through the printed page
and see what was originally there. And you see it
in paintings and much more, and it can seem a
bit foreign to us, given how just disposable paper is.
(41:38):
And you know, you can rewrite files, you know, as
many times as you want. You can just set around
creating new documents and deleting them all day. But there
was a time when in order to erase document and
create new document, well that meant grabbing the plaster.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
Okay, So this strikes me as a case that is
in the low information category you've been talking about in
multiple ways. So the original image is somewhat altered or
degraded in the way that it's been photographed like it
might be hard, especially if you're not familiar with ancient
Egyptian inscriptions to understand that what you're looking at is
(42:16):
not even one single continuous drawing or piece of imagery,
but is instead a couple of things sort of bleeding
into each other. And then on top of that, there's
the low information condition of us looking at it without
being familiar with, say the way the name Rameses is
depicted in hieroglyphics.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
Yes, Now, the second example we're going to look at
here is also really fascinating, and this one is a
lot in a way. In a way, this one is
a lot more clear, but is also even more cryptic
and even harder to really understand. And you'll see what
I'm talking about as we roll into the discussion here.
But this concerns the so called Dindara Lights or the
(42:57):
Dindara Light. So these are a series of stone release
in the hawt Or temple in Dindera, Egypt. Now you
can look up images of this, and I've included one
of the images here for you to look at, Joe,
and they are quite captivating, and I mean, it's it's
almost unfair to throw people at this with sort of
(43:21):
alternative Egyptology in the back of their mind, because it's
going to make you lean into perhaps seeing things again
from not only a modern standboy point, which we can't
help but do, but also from a standpoint of looking
for some sort of crazy advanced technology in the past.
So if you were looking at these just kind of
out of context, but not with any specific expectations of
(43:43):
the advanced technology, I think you might guess that we're
looking at a couple of ancient Egyptian individuals who have
giant eggplants, and those giant eggplants have giant snakes on them.
Would this would of course be be incorrect. This is
not exactly what we're looking at, but that's what it
kind of looks like to me.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
I might have said, giant shields. I mean, they're holding
some of what looks like a really large flat object
on which a sort of slithering snake is depicted. But
of course the strange thing is that out of the
bottoms of the shields there is coming some sort of line, which, again,
if you're playing into ancient technology thinking, you could say,
(44:25):
is that a power cord? Is that some kind of cable?
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Yeah? Yeah, so there's this sense of plant to it. Yeah,
there's definitely a snake. There's no doubt about this snake.
But then there's this this large sort of bulb or
or eggplant like shape to the thing. And so the
the alternative, the highly speculative hypothesis here that that once
(44:49):
he's reflected in some of this you know, ancient alien
discourse and and and you know pseudohistories and pseudo scientific
ideas concerning ancient e are that well, what they are
holding here are filament light bulbs or representations of filament
light bulbs.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
Okay, well, if you are familiar with incandescent light bulbs,
you can absolutely see how somebody would make that comparison.
There is the shield or the eggplant shape looks like
it could be a you know, a transparent glass tube.
The snake depicted on it looks like it could be
maybe looks like it could be the filament inside the bulb.
(45:30):
And then the sort of line there's like a sort
of flower looking thing at the base of the bulb,
and you could imagine that is the socket or not
the socket, what would you call it, the you know,
the metal part at the base of an incandescent light bulb.
And then the line extending away from the bottom. You
could say, okay, that looks like a power line. It
looks like, you know, whatever the electricity is going in through.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
Yeah. So the radical idea here would be that the
ancient Egyptians had mastery over electricity. They made light bulbs
or I guess receive light bulbs from someone, They got
a you know, a monthly delivery from the aliens or something,
and they wired up their various buildings with electric lights
of one sort or the other.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
The aliens gave them highly inefficient incandescent light bulbs.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Yeah, yeah, or I mean, when you get into the
various arguments, they also they draw comparisons to you know,
sort of like early different variations of artificial lighting. So
I don't know, the exact model may vary, but the idea, yeah,
is that the ancient Egyptians had light bulbs. Now, actual
experts who weigh in on this will we'll say, well, there,
(46:37):
these are not light bulbs, obviously. What we're looking at
is a symbolic motif. And another huge important fact here
is that these are not illustrations or engravings that are
occurring in isolation and out of context. Like, there's plenty
of context, the most important being that this is a
temple of Hator. This is a god of ancient Egypt
(47:00):
who Geraldine Pinch in the book Egyptian Mythology describes as
a golden goddess that aided in childbirth, the rebirth of
the dead, and the renewal of the cosmos. She was
seemingly a complex deity with both destructive and beneficial attributes,
and she was commonly depicted as a beautiful woman with
a red solar disc between a pair of cow horns. Now,
(47:21):
she could be worshiped in a few different forms, but
one of the main roles she has here is a mother,
and she is the mother of Horace, Uniter of the
Two Lands. Horace, of course, is a very important god
in Egyptian mythology, the celestial falcon and the god of kings.
So here Horace is Harsmatus Uniter of the two Lands,
(47:47):
and apparently in these images we're seeing representation of him
in the primeval form of a serpent. In rebirth, he
is depicted emerging in the form of this serpent from
the lotus flower, which is in turn inside a boat,
lining up with the concept of the solar god rays
solar barge.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
Oh okay, this is starting to make sense.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
Yes, Yeah, so like emerging from the lotus flower is
the serpent that is horse. Now you're probably wondering, what
about that light bulb, what about that eggplant? Well, this
is thought to be and I hope I'm pronouncing this
right a hen that's h n. And it may represent
the womb of the sky goddess nut or note. And
(48:32):
this is a goddess that was associated with the fig
tree and also with cosmic motherhood. The image in question
also entails the symbolism of the jed pillar with added
arms coming out. So this is I mean, to my
eyes like, this is way weirder. This is the far
weirder helmet is this strange pillar looking thing that's sort
(48:53):
of holding up one of the eggplant shapes and has
arms coming out like some sort of like are psychedelic muppet.
But this is also grounded in ancient Egyptian symbolism. You know,
it's about stability and you know, and holding up the
cosmos and so forth.
Speaker 3 (49:13):
You could argue that this looks like a baseball bat
with several rings around it, and it has arms, it
has two arms, and it's pushing on the so called
light bulb.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
Yeah, so in the same way, that if we look
at hieroglyphics, we're looking at at language that we have
no frame of reference for. It's similar with with the
icons that we're seeing represented here. We have no unless
we are trained in it. We have no frame of
context for what these symbols are and what they represent.
(49:43):
And all you can ultimately do is sort of like
try and take them at I guess, sort of base level,
and then you can potentially lean into these elaborate explanations
for what you're seeing, and you know, you can imagine
the what would occur if you were to take any
form of highly some art from the modern world and
try and understand what you're looking at. So anyway, yeah,
(50:05):
it's speaking of visual language that we probably are not
going to pick up on in the modern age again
unless we have the expertise and we've you know, we
are an egyptologist, et cetera, or it's been explained to us.
Because at the end of the day, what we're likely
looking at here is some representation of the rise of
(50:26):
the sun and its journey through the night, though delivered
through religious ideas and symbolism of the time, and also
the specific theology of this particular deity.
Speaker 3 (50:35):
Right, and it looks like a light bulb to us
rather than this ancient Egyptian artistic motif because we're used
to seeing light bulbs, who were not used to seeing
this artistic motif. And if you happen to be familiar
with the right ancient Egyptian art you recognize it as Oh,
it's one of those.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
Yeah. Now, I've looked at particular book by archaeologist and
author Kenneth L. Fetter on this matter. The book is Frauds,
Myths and Mysteries, Science and Pseudoscience and Archaeology, and he
points out that these quote unquote lights a factor into
Eric von Donican's nineteen ninety six book The Eyes of
(51:14):
the Sphinx, in which Vondnican argues that the only rational
way that the Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians could have worked
in the dark confines of the Pyramids and other locations
other structures without leaving telltale lamp black from burning lamps.
The only possible way this could be the case is
if they were using electric lights.
Speaker 3 (51:37):
Air tight.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
Now, Feeder points out that Egyptologists have a far less
imaginative explanation backed up by actual evidence, and that is
that the ancient Egyptians used linen soaked in oil or
animal fat and twisted into wicks. These wicks would have
burned quite brightly, and then with salt applied, this would
produce less smoke, which would produce less lampblack and they
(52:04):
would have yeah, they would have burned pretty brightly, bright
enough to conduct their work, and they would also burn
for a set amount of time that would apparently mark
the length of an artisan where a worker's shift. And again,
this is something we have context for, we have physical
evidence for. It factors into our overall understanding of who
the ancient Egyptians were and what their world was like.
(52:27):
But if you go with a light bulb hypothesis, well
you have no evidence because where are the examples of
the other light bulbs, the spent bulbs, Where's evidence of
the bulb production facilities, the power sources, the wiring, et cetera.
I mean, it all just falls quickly apart. Instead, von
(52:48):
Donikin apparently leaned on the thoroughly discredited hypothesis of the
bagdad battery as proof.
Speaker 3 (52:55):
This is yet another artifact that has been interpreted by
some as electrical technology in the ancient world, but probably
was not.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
Right, and so the author here feter not von do Onic,
and sums up quote because prehistoric pictorial depictions and even
early written descriptions are sometimes indistinct or vague, and perhaps
more important, because they are part of a different culture
and have a context not immediately apparent to those who
(53:25):
do not explore further. You can see or read anything
you want into them, just as you can with ink blots.
And so he refers to this elsewhere in the book
as the ink block principle, which I think is a
good way of thinking about evidence of this nature.
Speaker 3 (53:42):
Now, one way in which I would distinguish this example
from many of the others is that this example does
not seem as within the image itself as degraded in
quality or vague to me, at least in the like
the illustrations I see from books. It looks like, you know,
we get a pretty clear picture of what the artwork,
(54:02):
whether at least the outlines and the artwork we're supposed
to be. But you're still, even though the picture is
fairly sharp, in the low information zone, because you don't
have the context, the background knowledge to place what you're
looking at within its cultural milieu.
Speaker 1 (54:18):
Yeah, I mean, we just don't have the symbolic language
at our disposal to necessarily look at this and understand
what's taking place. And again, I think this is this
is not something that's that that is unique to ancient
Egyptian religious imagery. I think you could apply this to
to various other examples of even contemporary religious imagery, where
(54:39):
if you if you don't know what you're looking at, you're, yeah,
you're not going to understand the message of it, like
what is being theologically relayed in this image, and you
have to fall back on either just like again, a
very literal interpretation of what you're looking at, or dragging
in some sort of other belief system or some sort
of other, you know, mode of understanding which may or
(55:00):
may not involve aliens.
Speaker 3 (55:02):
Another thing that I'm struck is sort of the general
principle of thinking behind the Eric Vondanakan argument that Okay,
they're working in the dark inside the pyramid chambers, and
they wouldn't have been able to see what they were
working on without leaving lampblack unless they had light bulbs.
That seems to be a general style of argument used
(55:24):
by like ancient aliens people. I mean the same thing
is said about the construction of the pyramids. More generally,
it's like, I can't see how they could have done this,
Therefore it must have been aliens with advanced technology. That
is a really poor way to reason. Instead, you could
start by saying, like, well, what if instead of invoking
entities that would radically reshape our way of thinking about
(55:46):
the world, and there is no independent evidence of what if?
Instead of that, we think that maybe they figured out
a solution that you haven't thought of or you don't
have awareness of.
Speaker 1 (55:57):
Yeah, like I mean you would It would be understand
if you didn't know about this whole adding salt to
torches or lights as a way to decrease lampblack There's
so many things like that in life that would have
been a parent or known to individuals who depended on
lamp technology or fire based illumination technology as opposed to
(56:19):
the mode we're familiar with and the mode that we
then potentially read into these ancient images.
Speaker 3 (56:26):
Yeah, I would just say be careful about making the
move of I can't understand how someone could have done
X two. Therefore they must have relied upon powers that
are extraordinary, and we have no other independent evidence.
Speaker 1 (56:38):
Of I'm reminded of various time travel movies that we've
discussed or looked at on weird house cinema, where you
have some sort of time traveler from the past going
into the future and they are and they may not
be time traveling, perhaps they're frozen, etc. You know. Well,
a man out of time wakes up and they're trying
to understand our advanced contemporary technology. They might look at
(57:01):
a TV and they're like, they shrunk a person down
and put him in a tiny box, and you know,
and this is often played up for comedy, but it's
not that different from the sort of you know, you
know what you can consider ridiculous analysis of past technology
where instead of you know, leaning on you know, the
(57:23):
actual context of the thing and what they're capable of,
you're going to this extreme model that you can't possibly
explain with any degree of accuracy.
Speaker 3 (57:32):
That's an amazing analogy. Actually, we are the unfrozen caveman
lawyer in reverse when we look at the ancient world.
Speaker 2 (57:39):
You know.
Speaker 3 (57:39):
So he comes up and says, I am but a
simple caveman. When I get into an airplane, I think,
is this some giant bird? But we are doing the
same thing. We look at an ancient inscription and say,
when I look at an inscription of a bird, I think,
is this an attack helicopter?
Speaker 1 (57:55):
Exactly? All right, Well, that's perfect. I think we have
to leave it at that. I think that that puts
a nice cap on it. But you know, were perfectly
happy to continue talking about this particular topic or this
sort of thing in general if nothing else in future
listener Mail episode. So write in let us know what
your thoughts are on egyptology, alternative egyptology and so forth,
(58:17):
or just in general, if there are other examples of
this sort of data, this sort of imagery, etc. That
you know is difficult for the average modern viewer to
understand and then lends itself well to some sort of
paranormal or alternative or conspiracy explanation. Just a reminder that
(58:39):
Stuff to Blow Your minds Core episodes published on Tuesdays
and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed.
We have listener Mail on Monday, short Form Artifactor, Monster
Effect on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (58:53):
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any there, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (59:14):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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