Indeed, the re-hashing ploy could be one of my most gigantic peeves, let alone the pseudoscience. (Up to this point, they’d…)
I’ve threatened at various times to use a stopwatch to track the amount of original footage shown; any replay won’t count.
In a typical one of these shows, between the 30 second “title card” they run before commercials, the 30 second title card after commercials, AND the replays / recaps, I’d bet there’s 10 minutes of actual show in a half-hour episode. And that might be generous.
I’ve never done the actual experiment because I can’t stand to watch this sort of crap all the way through anymore. I’m not sure whether I’m becoming an older curmudgeon or a young phone-addicted acquired-attention-deficit-disordered mess. But either way, I’m not watching that sloppy irritating trash.
OT, but the title triggered an old memory of joining a bowling team from work. When names were floated I suggested The Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Another guy said incredulously: “Cock lips???” That’s all.
There seems to be some degree of internal logic to “The Five Hoarse Men of the Cock Lips”.
Who the fuck are those supposed to be? Whomever Hancock tells you they are?
“Core 7” is just granite. Not some miracle super-hard stone.
Again - there is NO fucking mystery.
Sure there is! Was the abrasive material used in conjunction with the copper drill quartz sand (with or without water)? Or a more exotic material?
That’s a real archeological mystery. The method itself, however, is not in question.
The real mystery is, why the aliens used such low technology.
All I know of this show I read here. Is it supposed to postulate space aliens or an ancient Earth race?
An ancient civilization, lost to history. With zero evidence for its existence other than the specious claims of Hancock.
I first heard of him when he and his partner Robert Bauval were claiming that the Sphinx was 12,500 years old, because it would have been pointing at the constellation Leo at the time. He needed the Sph8nx to be that old to prove his ‘Orion’ theory.
That’s how this nonsense works: First you notice that the three pyramids at Giza appear to be in the same configuration as the stars in the belt of Orion. This ‘proves’ that the Egyptians must have worshipped Orion. And a shaft in the Great Pyramid at Giza is somewhat close to pointing at Orion, so the pyramid must have been used to worship Orion, so his theory goes.
Except the shaft didn’t point there when tye pyramid was built, because the Earth precesses. A real scientist would admit that this throws a lot of cold water on the theory. But Hancock instead went cherry-picking, looking for some time in the distant past when the alignment did occur.
It turns out to be 12,500 years ago, long before the Egyptian civilization existed. Again, an honest person would have said, “Well, that shoots that down.” Instead, Hancock went shopping for a geologist willing to state that the Sphinx *could be older than we thought because of weathering patterns. That’s all Hancock needed to ‘prove’ his theory. Now he’s on a quest to cherry pick more ‘ancient civilization’ evidence around the world to support the other theory he pulled out of his ass.
The problems with his theory:
- Leo as a constellation representing a lion wouldn’t have been a thing to people 12,500 years ago.
- The Sphinx actually didn’t point at Leo, but at Virgo.
- There is zero evidence for an ancient civilization sophisticated and wealthy enough to carve the Sphinx.
- The erosion of the Sphinx can be explained through pollution and salt exfoliation, removing the need for a 10,500 BC date in the first place.
That’s how pseudo-science works: Grab onto the flimsiest reeds that can plausibly support your ‘theory’ and amplify them in seriousness, while ignoring the vast bodies of evidence that disprove it. For newcomers to the argument, it can sound very compelling.
For example, this is an image of the three stars in Orion’s belt, overlaid with the relative positions ofmthe three pyramids on the Giza plateau:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orion_-_pyramids.jpg#/media/File:Orion_-_pyramids.jpg
That’s pretty compelling! If you knew nothing else but were shown that along with a few cherry-picked facts, you’d probably go ‘wow!’. And it may in fact be that the pyramids were laid out intentionally in a pattern to mimic those stars, as Orion was actually considered to be the home of Osiris, god of, amongnother things, the dead and resurrection. It does make sense then to build giant tombs in relation to that. But no one really knows, and it certainly doesn’t mean there were space aliens or even more ancient civilizations about.
That wiki article your pic comes from is a pretty solid takedown of the whole theoretical house of cards. Or should I say “pyramid of malarky”?
Well, in your case it’s because they are on a low-processed diet.
My New Year resolution is to go on a low-carbon diet.
Is that why you keep trying to eat Earth? Need more iron in your diet?
I gave up on eating Earth. The amount of carbon in your atmosphere would give me the winds something terrible.
Or they might have used olive oil. Or some other lubricant. We may never know!
If it’s a fucking mystery, they might have used KY Jelly.
Hehehe, the first time I noticed this technique was long before these kinds of shows. We had a copy of Encounter With the Unknown at the videos store I worked at, and we would throw it on on in the middle of the day. They re-use so many shots, we joked that they said to themselves “Dang, we’re contracted to make a 90 minute movie, and only have 15 minutes of footage.”
But yeah, channels such as the History channel have the “Turn 10 minutes of footage into a 40 minute long show” technique down. They’re not even being subtle about it.
The implied racism of his ideas will do.
One recent development to avoid that implied racism is to declare that ‘fine, they were not aliens, but an ancient lost super civilization!’ as if not making the rulers and that ancient civilization to be white is not a problem, no siree!
An article I saw in e-Mu said the 1864 committee had been trying for 48 hours straight to name the ancient continent, at which point Chuck Brasseur de Bourbourga heard a mathematician suggest using a Greek letter, and quipped “Well, it certainly isn’t a Nu continent…”
The rest, as they say, is pseudo-history.
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Don’t try to find the article.
(double-paywalled from a Complimentary Ransomware site, sorry)