NY Times take on AlienCon AKA Spookfest

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NY Times take on AlienCon AKA Spookfest

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Jul 25, 2018 3:13 pm

.

A spook rag covering a spook-infiltrated conference about a spook-managed TV show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/styl ... liens.html

Suspicious Minds
Mingling with wariness and wonder at a conference devoted to “Ancient Aliens.”

By Steven Kurutz
July 21, 2018

PASADENA, Calif. — It was barely two hours into Day 1 of AlienCon and 500 years of accepted history and science were already being tossed out. Three thousand people had gathered inside the Civic Auditorium here for a panel discussion featuring presenters from “Ancient Aliens,” a History Channel documentary series.

Everyone had questions: about whether we were alone in the universe; about what our government really knows; about humanity’s very origins.

One of the network’s most popular and longest-running shows (Season 13 resumed on July 20), “Ancient Aliens” is itself a series of questions. Many are posed rhetorically by an unseen narrator intoning over a wide shot of a rubbly archaeological site. According to the show’s talking heads, extraterrestrials may have had a role not only in the extermination of the dinosaurs, but also in the construction of the Egyptian pyramids.

Carl Sagan, the popular scientist who captivated television audiences of the 1970s and ’80s, once said: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

But Mr. Sagan has been dead for years, and many Americans of the internet age have been in a mood to challenge established ideas. There has been a resurgence of the flat-earth theory. More than a few believe that global warming is a hoax, that survivors of mass shootings are crisis actors.

Yet for many at the conference, and elsewhere, this is not simply a political divide. We now know that the history that had been taught for years excluded the experiences of so many (African-Americans, women, the working poor). What else had been left out? Trust in the government and leaders who could set it all straight is historically low.

And there are so many people ready to believe that aliens visited Earth before recorded history that some 10,000 attendees paid to visit this conference over three days.

Image
A full house in the Civic Auditorium for an event called “50 Years of Chariots of the Gods."

In the audience was Chris Bayley, a neatly dressed lawyer who had traveled from Arizona with his two adult sons. “Just because someone says the Egyptians made the temples with ropes and wooden rollers doesn’t make it true,” Mr. Bayley said. “We shouldn’t accept blindly things we’ve been taught by quote-unquote scientists.”

Earlier that morning, a woman had risen from the crowd and told the “Ancient Aliens” producers: “I’m indoctrinating my children in your show so they’ll ask questions and not believe everything they’re told.”

During the question-and-answer period, a wheelchair-bound man of about 60 was handed a microphone. He asked, “Do you believe we are indigenous to this planet?”

It was Giorgio who answered him, naturally: Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, 44, the show’s breakout star, the one they’d most come to see and get their picture with. He was dressed as he would be all weekend, in the khaki shirt and pants and sturdy leather boots of a field archaeologist, though in the strict academic sense, he has no such accreditation.

Before appearing on TV, he worked as a bodybuilding promoter while publishing “Legendary Times,” a newsletter about extraterrestrials. He is one of the show’s so-called Ancient Astronaut Theorists.

Image
Douglas Smythe, left, and Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, the host of "Ancient Aliens." Fans like Mr. Smythe paid an extra fee to be able to meet and take a picture with Mr. Tsoukalos.


It is not fancy credentials but the way he expresses gut beliefs that makes him compelling to viewers; that, and his hair. Perhaps no other figure in current American life besides the president is so vividly linked to a hairstyle. The do was as epic in person: a brown bushy bird’s nest sprayed up on all sides to achieve absurd height. It gave him a look of perpetual amazement, or of someone who had been electrocuted.

The man in the wheelchair waited along with the crowd to hear if Earth was in fact our ancestral home. Behind the speakers’ table, Mr. Tsoukalos leaned in and, as he so often does on TV, made an incredible claim with total confidence and a goofy grin.

“No.”

“Exactly,” the man said, and practically dropped the mic.

The primary pathway into “Ancient Aliens” and the ancient astronaut theory is a book called “Chariots of the Gods?” Rivaling “Led Zeppelin IV” as a mystical hippie-era artifact passed through the generations, it suggests that extraterrestrials gave technology and culture to the Egyptians, Mayans and other ancient civilizations — which sounds fringy, except it has sold more than seven million copies, with a 50th anniversary edition out from Berkley Books this summer. The 1970 documentary film of “Chariots” was nominated for an Academy Award.

The book’s Swiss author, Erich von Däniken, flew 12 hours from Zurich with his ponytailed young assistant, Ramon, to speak at AlienCon. Eighty-three and slightly stooped, he still works every day, he told me backstage on Day 1, crisscrossing the globe “like a missionary.”

With his severe Swiss-German accented English and tetchy impatience with critics, Mr. von Däniken is now, with the visibly amped Mr. Tsoukalos, one of the familiar personalities of “Ancient Aliens.”

There is also George Noory, the genial mustachioed host of the late-night radio show “Coast to Coast AM;” Linda Moulton Howe, who once made a documentary suggesting that flesh wounds on some Alabama cattle were alien markings; Nick Pope, an ex-British Ministry of Defense official; and William Henry, a groovy “investigative mythologist.”

David Hatcher Childress, who gets nearly as much screen time as Mr. Tsoukalos, is a real-life Indiana Jones who climbs megalithic ruins in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley equipped with a brown felt hat and a notebook. Since 1984, he has operated Adventures Unlimited Press, whose hundreds of paperback titles, several of which he has written, roughly chart the conspiracy du jour: Atlantis, Nikola Tesla, the Mayan calendar, recently Bigfoot.

Before “Ancient Aliens,” these believers had been scattered on the margins, hawking their ideas at small gatherings in the Nevada desert. Now they’d been unified under one tent and given a podium by a network with the sheen of educational TV. Did that awesome responsibility temper them?

Here’s Mr. Childress, in an episode from Season 10 called “The Alien Architects”: “So here we have an ancient grid structure, probably built by extraterrestrials, possibly to power their craft, that’s now being reconstructed today by the military.”

Image
Make aliens great again: One conference attendee clapped a baseball cap atop his face mask.

Such broad, unverified claims are why “Ancient Aliens” is taken by some to be carnival entertainment (see the Viceland stoner spinoff “Traveling the Stars: Action Bronson and Friends Watch ‘Ancient Aliens’”) — and by others as something darker, a show that traffics in intellectual hucksterism and challenges facts.
“The Idiocy, Fabrications and Lies of ‘Ancient Aliens,’” reads one headline from Smithsonian.com. Another critique, posted to Medium by Barry Vacker, a professor at Temple University, argued that since the Apollo 11 mission, Americans have lacked a popular narrative to explain the vast cosmos and our origins and destiny within it.

“In ‘Ancient Aliens,’ we can see philosophy’s mediated corpse,” writes Mr. Vacker, who called the show “an attack on logic, rationality, and the nature of evidence.”

For Kevin Burns, naysayers like Mr. Vacker add little to the discussion. A veteran TV producer who is often confused with the highbrow filmmaker Ken Burns (“I do the ones in color,” he likes to say), he was old enough to remember “Chariots of the Gods?” and to notice similarities with the 2008 movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” which Lucasfilm hired him to promote with a TV special.
...
“It’s not about little green men in outer space. That’s the three-headed snake lady that gets you into the tent,” Mr. Burns said. “It’s really a show about looking for God. Science would have you believe we are the result of nothing more than a chance assemblage of matter. The real truth is we don’t know.”

The questions posed by the ancient astronaut theorists, however far-fetched, serve a rare purpose, according to Mr. Burns: “It allows the audience to wonder. And very few things on television do that.”
...


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Re: NY Times take on AlienCon AKA Spookfest

Postby elfismiles » Thu Jul 26, 2018 5:01 pm

The New York Times Runs Major Feature on "Ancient Aliens," Casts Ancient Astronaut Theorists as Friendly, Lovable Rogues Searching for God

7/21/2018

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/the-n ... ng-for-god

... Kurutz interviewed me at length several weeks ago for the piece, and he had told me that he planned to use my interview in the article to discuss the dark side of the ancient astronaut theory, including its ties to racist ideas and white nationalism, as well as the racist, anti-Semitic, and paranoid statements made by the show’s talking heads, including Erich von Däniken (who called Blacks a “failed” experiment), David Wilcock (who blamed the Jews for trying to kill him), and the late Jim Marrs (who alleged that the Jews and Obama were working together to destroy America).


Kurutz emailed me late this evening to say that my interview was cut during editing, which shrank the article by 800 words. The editors, for whatever reason, dropped material about the dark side of the ancient astronaut theory.
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