Media coverage of the crisis in Syria widely assumes that an American-led international attack will occur in the next few days. Naturally, several conspiracy theories have already arisen to situate this attack in the context of various nefarious world-controlling forces. The most bizarre must be the claim that the United States is manufacturing this attack to take control of the Anunnaki’s ancient power centers at the behest of the Grey aliens who landed in Roswell in 1947 and entered into diplomatic relations with Eisenhower in the 1950s. (Yes, it’s the long-debunked Majestic-12 claims again.)
This idea was posted at godlikeproductions.com yesterday and offers insight into how ancient astronaut theories and alternative history become part of the conspiratorial belief system:
The Grey aliens (talls & short) who we bartered a deal with under Eisenhower are now in almost full control of our government and most of the UN. & they are the one calling the shots & directing us. According to the anchient Sumerian texts all the places that the U.S has resently caused turmoil & forced the leaders out under false flag operations for the sole purpose of allowing our military, scientist and archiologist's access to the Annunaki's space ports & achient technologys still hidden or currently being reverse engineered, this includes: (Egypt, Iraq, Afganistan, Syria & we are slowing inching towards Iran & Turkey) The Grey's fear the Annunaki & know their return would put an end to their agenda of hybrid colonization.
(spelling and punctuation as in original)
A discussion followed about which Mesopotamian entities could be identified with the Anunnaki and which with the Grey aliens.
Oddly enough, this strain of thought is not unique to the fact-free speculators of internet forums. In books published in the last decade, similar claims were already in evidence. A self-published 2011 book by John Alexander called Why Religion claims that Zecharia Sitchin’s work is correct and that the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are playing out a religious war between Christianity and Islam in defense of rival, and wrong, understandings of the Anunnaki. Marie D. Jones, in 2013: The End of Days or a New Beginning (2008) cites Edgar Cayce in declaring the Afghan War as sign of the End Times, which she links to the aliens’ “final war” in Iran derived from Sitchin’s radical revision of ancient texts—all in service of “proving” Revelation is happening right now. Peter Coleman, in Black Blood (2007) similarly considered the U.S.-led Iraq and Afghan Wars part of an ongoing conspiracy to create war frenzy dating back to the Anunnaki’s original manipulation of pre-Flood humans. In Life with a Cosmos Clearance (2003), Daniel M. Salter (“as told to Nancy Red Star”), a Native American, claimed that intelligence agencies are controlled by the Illuminati, and that the Iraq and Afghan Wars were for “oil and gold and drugs” to forward their power, which descends from their Atlantis and Lemurian heritage via extraterrestrial ancestry—and only the Hopi prophecies can save us!
It disgusts me just how widespread Zecharia Sitchin’s false claims are, and just how many people take them for truth.
All of these ideas share the belief that elites of all kinds—from governments to academics—are purposely hiding a simple and straightforward truth behind the complexity of bureaucracy and historiography in order to preserve their positions of power and privilege. Sitchin is probably partially to blame here since his entire body of work derives from the idea that academics either ignorantly or purposefully falsified Mesopotamian texts to hide alien involvement.
It’s rather depressing, too, to keep running into the same claim that “professors” or “academics” are an evil cult trying to keep normal people from the astounding revelations proffered by those unmoored from the academic mainstream. A fellow wrote to me the other day to ask me to view a Flash map laying out what he claimed was his “solution” to the route taken by Gilgamesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which he takes for historical reality—despite admitting to knowing that the Epic was assembled from unrelated earlier poems and therefore must not be literally true. Anyway, the map was supposed to be convincing on its own, though he helpfully provides several pages of analysis. This, though, shouldn’t concern me because, he said, “The other Gilgamesh Link at the bottom left of this flash page is the written technical version for Professors to argue against,” as though professors were just pedants talking only to each other. (Well, the talking to each other part might be true for more than a few...)
The four authors of the forthcoming Ancient Aliens in Australia similarly argue that all of mainstream archaeology, history, and biology is wrong and that the “consensus” is nothing but a “nice theory.” Instead the authors, two of whom believe they currently receive supernatural messages from aliens in the Pleiades, argue that humanity originated in Australia and that the Egyptians colonized the continent, and that (of course) it was all planned by aliens.
I just got a new load of alternative history books to look at, and the same thing crops up everywhere. I haven’t decided yet which book to examine first, but I opened up Robert Bauval’s Afrocentrist Black Genesis (2011) (written with Thomas Brophy) and what did I see? Another appeal to ignorance, and the fallacy that facts aren’t “fun”:
Black Genesis is an intellectual time machine that takes you on a roller-coaster adventure into the beyond of recorded history. We have written it not for academic readership but for lay readers, those who wish to understand more regarding this debate on the origin of civilization and perhaps who wish even to be part of the restoration of Black Africa to its rightful place at the genesis of the human journey. Although, in this book specialized topics such as anthropology and precession astronomy are reviewed, we have kept the discussion as easy and as entertaining as possible in order to achieve a text that is user-friendly and well within the grasp of anyone who has a thirst for knowledge and a sense of adventure. Our wish is to interest a wider audience in this fascinating research and, we hope, to encourage participation in the debate. With Internet communication and the instantaneous distribution of data and information as well as the now easy-to-use astronomy software accessible to all those with a home computer, the participation of the wider public in such debates has become a real and viable possibility, and, indeed, has quite often helped (coerced may be a better word!) experts to remove their blinders and look at the wider picture.
An “easy” and “entertaining” “roller coaster” ride. There is nothing wrong with popularizing history or science, but nothing proclaims the seriousness of one’s stated intention to overturned standard historiography like “easy” and “entertaining”—or like stating that “experts” are blinded in ways that Robert Bauval and Thomas Brophy uniquely are not, thanks, they say, to their “own tool kit and methods,” which are, sadly, to look at rocks, propose astronomical alignments, declare the rocks aligned with astonishing precision, and then argue that they represent knowledge of the stars in otherwise astonishingly ancient prehistory.
It’s worth remembering that Bauval got into the “alignments” game back in The Orion Mystery (1994) because of Robert Temple, the ancient astronaut theorist, whose claims about Egyptian cities being laid out after the constellation Argo Navis Bauval found captivating. Bauval purposely downplayed the “alien” origins of these ideas (going so far as to leave out all mention of Temple’s extraterrestrial claims from Orion) until Ancient Aliens came calling and wanted him on their show. Now, like David Childress before him, he’s happy to play along with the aliens.
But the real enemy is the professors and the academics and the elites who are too blinded and blinkered and flush with alien-Illuminati kickbacks to let the truth (or whatever marketable ideas can be passed off as truth) shine through where ordinary people—the audience for these books—might get hold of it without having to do any of the hard work of learning, analyzing, or studying. The truth, they imply, is simple and easy to understand—if only the bloodthirsty, money-hungry elites weren’t mucking it up with all those confusing facts and complicated ideas.
