The Historical Jesus and the Myths of Christ Mythicism (Another Historically Blind Xmas)

A couple of times this year, one name has been popping up in my research. The first time was in my episode on the Ark of the Covenant. John M Allegro, I told you then, was an eccentric archaeologist who worked with the team in Jerusalem that brought the Dead Sea Scrolls to the world’s attention, and it was Allegro who translated the Copper Scroll and believed that the treasures it recorded were real and could be found. He was himself a kind of proto-Indiana Jones in that he led expeditions to track down this long lost treasure, which he never managed to discover. Something I didn’t mention at the time, but which serves as noteworthy context for what came next in his career is the fact that he jeopardized his academic standing by making unusual claims about the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, asserting that certain fragmentary mentions of a “Teacher of Righteousness” who seemed to be a precursor messiah analogous to Jesus Christ, actually proved that the story of Jesus was just a recycling of this older story, and thus Jesus Christ himself was a myth. Allegro appeared again, briefly, in my recent episode on the Entheogen Theory of Religion, as his notion of Jesus Christ being a myth that represents someone or something else had developed in a remarkable direction by 1970, after he encountered the work of R. Gordon Wasson, the world’s first ethnomycologist and inventor of a grand unifying psychedelic theory of religion and world history. Besides a sect that reworked older traditions about a Teacher of Righteousness, Allegro had come to view early Christians as a fertility cult, devoted to the imagery of penises and sperm, and also to ritual drug use, specifically the eating of the Amanita muscaria mushroom as a sacrament. As a mystery cult, they did not speak openly of their rite or their true beliefs, he claimed in his book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and instead spoke only in a sort of code, and early Church fathers unwittingly canonized their drug allegory as dogma. Just such a coded meaning surrounded the figure of Jesus Christ, for just as their sacred mushroom was known to spring from the earth without a seed, so too Jesus was said to have been conceived without seed. While Wasson took his mushroom theory of religion much too far, Allegro took it further still, claiming that through his maverick etymology, tracing words back to Sumerian, he could show the Bible was constantly making mushroom references. And as further evidence, he pointed to a 13th-century fresco in a French Church that depicts the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in a way that looks a lot like a cluster of mushrooms. But of course, as I pointed out before, a 13th-century French work of art could not possibly shed light on early Christian thought or the rites of a Middle Eastern mystery cult in antiquity. None of his academic colleagues found his Sumerian etymology convincing, and his scholarly career fell to shambles. Even R. Gordon Wasson, who we might imagine would latch onto Allegro as an ally, could not credit his outlandish claims, stating that Allegro “has stuck to a naive misinterpretation…only because he thinks this would serve his thesis.” While the claims of John Allegro that Jesus Christ was a myth, not a real person, have never been taken seriously by scholars and are widely viewed as unconvincing, he is not alone in theorizing that Jesus Christ was not a real, historical person. This holiday, I’ve still got more to say about the man who many see as the reason for the season. So gather round the fire as I tell a different kind of nativity story, about the birth of a modern myth, but maybe not the one you suspect I’m going to tell.

In my last holiday special, you could say that I put the Christ back in Christmas, even though I began with a lengthy discussion of the false notion that the abbreviation “Xmas” was a nefarious secular attempt to remove Christ’s name from the holiday. In that episode, I discussed the image of Christ, and how the images we revere today may have differed from the man Jesus. The underlying assumption in that holiday special was that Jesus Christ existed, historically, as a human being, though we may more accurately call this a given than an assumption. The fact is that the consensus among scholars of the New Testament and first century Palestine is that Jesus Christ was a real person. In fact, for most of the Common Era, there simply never was a reason to doubt that Jesus was real; the entire notion of Christ Mythicism is relatively recent. Now, don’t get me wrong. Even during Christ’s time and ever since there have been skeptical views about him. In his own time, he was largely viewed by everyone but his followers as a heretic or a revolutionary rabble rouser. And long have there been alternative views regarding who and what his followers proclaimed him to be, one of the first being that he certainly had not been born of a virgin. One alternative view of Christology, or “Christology,” was that Joseph was his biological father, and that Jesus only became the “Son of God” when the Holy Spirit descended on him at his baptism. Thus God was his adoptive father rather than the inseminator of Mary. Along with these “adoptionist” creeds was a “psilanthropist” view, holding that Jesus was merely a man—a man chosen to bear the revelations of God, perhaps, but a man nonetheless. Another claim, popular among critics of early Christians, was that, while Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s father, he did indeed have a biological father, a Roman soldier named Panthera who illegitimately fathered Christ. One doctrine, Docetism, even argued that Christ was divine but had no physical form and rather walked around as a kind of ghost or projected illusion. What we can see here is that, all of these Christologies uniformly took a view that there really was a figure named Jesus Christ on Earth during the first 30 years or so of the Common Era. Even the doctrine that he wasn’t corporeal still did not attempt to say that he was not actually there, doing and saying things and known to his followers and his persecutors alike. The notion that he wasn’t real would not appear until the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment.

The Festival of Reason, a celebration of rationality held by the atheistic Cult of Reason in the wake of the French Revolution.

Specifically the Christ myth theory appeared among French thinkers during the French Revolution, a time when religious dogma was being actively stamped out in favor of what was viewed then as Reason—remember that Christian churches were converted to state-run atheist Temples of Reason. During this turmoil, one Constantin Volney was the first to hazard this claim in 1791, suggesting that Christ was a kind of mythological sun god whose name was derived from the Hindu god Krishna. By 1795, the claim was taken up by Charles-François Dupuis, who, as many have done since, suggested that Christ was just another mystery cult solar deity, like Mithra. By the late 18th century, early 19th century, the idea had spread to America, where political theorist and founding father Thomas Paine, in his least popular volume of The Age of Reason, asserted “that so far from his being the Son of God, he did not exist even as a man—that he is merely an imaginary or allegorical character, as Apollo, Hercules, Jupiter, and all the deities of antiquity were. There is no history written at the time Jesus Christ is said to have lived that speaks of the existence of such a person, even as a man.” As we will see, Paine’s objection about records would resonate with later Mythicists. Later in the 19th century, the German Bruno Bauer, claimed Jesus was invented by the writers of the gospels, which as we will see would also become a mainstay argument of Mythicists. At the end of the 19th century, white supremacist William Benjamin Smith also cast doubt on all contemporaneous sources about Christ and further hypothesized that a cult worshipping some Jesus figure had existed prior to Christ’s lifetime. At the dawn of the 20th century, Scotsman John Robertson took up this theory and brought it back to its roots by again arguing Christ was a solar deity worshipped by a Jewish mystery cult, specifically identifying the sacrificed messianic figure worshipped by a certain cult of Joshua as the deity that would become Jesus Christ. In 1909, German philosopher and historian Arthur Drews synthesized these arguments in a successful and controversial book called The Christ Myth. While Drews’s work was embraced by Vladimir Lenin and Christ Mythicism became a foundational tenet of Russian atheism, the theory was almost universally rejected by historians and scholars, for reasons I will discuss throughout the episode. Thus the Christ myth theory disappeared from academic and popular discourse, until 1975 when English scholar George Albert Wells took up the cause throughout the 1980s. By the 1990s, there had arisen a coterie of Christ Mythicists publishing more and more sophisticated arguments. The consensus view of historians and scholars remains that there was indeed a historical Jesus, but if one were to read mythicist works alone, without also reading the works of trained historians and scholars that explain how we know Jesus did exist historically—like the ponderous multi-volume work A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus by John P. Meier or the more accessible work of Bart D. Ehrman, like my principal source for this episode, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth—one might think that mythicists have made an ironclad argument against Christ’s existence. In fact, while their books may be more successful with the reading public, the scholarly community rejects their methods as flawed, their arguments as unsound, and their conclusions as false.  

One of the central arguments of those who assert that Jesus Christ never existed as an actual person is that the principal sources for his existence, the gospels, cannot be trusted. They point out that that the original manuscripts of the gospels no longer exist, and that they were not written by the individuals they are named after, who might have had some first- or even second-hand knowledge of the man Jesus, but rather by men writing in a distant land some fifty years after the events narrated, give or take a decade. Since the gospels are full of contradictions and clearly legendary material, and since by their view, the gospel writers themselves were the ones inventing a mythical Christ, or at least were among the earliest promoters of the myth, they cannot be viewed as historical evidence whatsoever, and they look instead for non-Christian sources that mention Jesus within the first century of his lifetime. Such sources are few and far between, which they argue itself is proof Christ didn’t exist, though the fact is, such record keeping was not extensive or detailed in 1st century Palestine, and nevertheless there actually are some contemporaneous mentions of Jesus Christ outside of New Testament works. The most prominent of these are from Flavius Josephus, a former Jewish military commander during the First Roman-Jewish War who defected to Rome and lived the rest of his days writing histories, such as The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. In the latter work, there is a passage called Testimonium Flavianum, in which Josephus seemingly tells about Jesus, a “teacher of people,” who “was the Messiah.” In the passage, he describes Pilate’s condemnation of him, his crucifixion, and his subsequent resurrection. The problem with this passage, however, is that it doesn’t make sense for Josephus, who was not a Christian, to have stated some of these things. Since it is known that Josephus’s works survive today because they were copied and transmitted through the Middle Ages by Christians, there is scholarly consensus then, that this passage is an interpolation, something added by a Christian scribe at some later date. So, Jesus mythicists will say, you can’t trust the Bible, and the only mention of him outside the Bible is also untrustworthy. However, from a more scholarly perspective, this is an overstatement.

A romanticized woodcut engraving of Flavius Josephus

While it is true that the Testimonium Flavianum is mostly viewed as some kind of scribal interpolation, it is untrue to suggest that scholars believe the entirety of the passage was inserted by later Christians. The fact is that most scholars who are experts on the works of Josephus believe that only certain elements were added to a passage that Josephus did write himself, specifically wording that identified Jesus as divine and mentioned his resurrection. Without those interpolations, the Testimonium only describes a teacher who was put to death and who continued to inspire a tribe of followers who call themselves Christians—a historical account much more in keeping with something Josephus would have written. More than this, there is actually a second mention of Jesus in Antiquities of the Jews, a blurb in which Josephus mentions James, whom he identifies as “brother of Jesus, who is called the messiah.” The Messiah, for those who don’t know, was a Jewish eschatological concept, a redeemer or savior figure who would appear at the end of days. The word would later be translated into Greek as Christ. So here we have Josephus specifically referring to Jesus Christ, who in gospel traditions is also said to have a brother named James. Mythicists dismiss this as another scribal interpolation, but scholars disagree, as there is no reason to suspect that Josephus would not have written this. But this is a common tactic of mythicists, as Bart Ehrman consistently points out. When some source is raised as support for the historicity of Christ, they simply dismiss it as probably fake with no evidence that it is. For example, there are no less than three other potential non-Christian sources for the historical existence of Christ that appeared within a century of the years in which it is believed he lived. In 112 CE, Pliny the Younger wrote about a sect who call themselves Christians and “sing hymns to Christ as to a god.” In 115 CE, Suetonius wrote that during the reign of Roman Emperor Claudius, he deported the Jews from Rome due to riots “at the instigation of Chrestus,” which scholars believe was a misspelling of the Latin “Christus,” or Christ. And that same year, Tacitus wrote in his Annals of Imperial Rome about Nero’s persecution of a group “called Christians. The author of this name, Christ,” he explains, “was put to death by the procurator, Pontius Pilate, while Tiberius was emperor; but the dangerous superstition, though suppressed for the moment, broke out again not only in Judea, the origin of this evil, but even in the city.” When mythicists address these other sources, they often say that these too must have been scribal interpolations, even though they add no Christian message to the text, get the name wrong, and even call Christianity evil. So here we see mythicists moving the goalposts, saying they would need some non-Christian source but then refusing to accept such sources when they are given.

It is true, though, that these non-Christian sources cannot alone prove the historical Christ’s existence, as they only go to prove the existence of Christians, or at most that the story of Christ, the gospel traditions, were spreading during the first hundred years after his lifetime. For stronger evidence, we must look earlier, which means examining the books of the New Testament historically. I do not mean taking their accounts as works of history, as their contents cannot be viewed as inerrant fact. But to contend that, just because they have a bias or contain some clearly mythological or legendary elements means that they are of no use to historians is absurd. If we were to throw out all such literature, then that would mean historians would also have to reject many other ancient works of history, such as Herodotus, who commonly blended fact with fantasy and rumor. Instead we must look critically at the texts to discern what they can show us. Mythicists, as with other skeptics, including myself, will first point out the authorship of these works. It was long believed that Matthew and John were written by actual disciples of Christ—Matthew supposedly being a converted tax collector mentioned in the gospel that bears this name, and John long believed to have been the unnamed Beloved Disciple. See my episode on the Authorship of John for more on that. Meanwhile, the other two canonical gospels, Mark and Luke, were believed to have been written by followers of Christ’s followers, Mark supposedly being a companion of the disciple Peter and Luke a follower of the apostle Paul. However, as mythicists will point out, none of this appears to be true, as all evidence points to these works having been written anonymously decades later by educated individuals fluent in Greek, rather than in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and his followers. And more than this, mythicists further deconstruct the gospel traditions by pointing out that almost nothing in John agrees with or repeats anything in the other three so-called Synoptic gospels, so it should be rejected as a work of fiction. And more than this, they point to evidence that both Matthew and Luke appear to use the exact wording of passages in Mark, suggesting that their authors used Mark as a source. According to mythicists, then, this means that there is really only a single source, Mark, which they view as a work of fiction that invented the man Jesus. However, as with other mythicist arguments, they have latched onto one aspect of modern scholarship to make an argument that no New Testament scholars agree with.

Codex Vaticanus, a 4th century Greek Bible which contains one of the earliest extant complete manuscripts of The Gospel According to Mark, itself the earliest of the surviving gospels.

The fact is that mythicists are absolutely right when they point out that we don’t have original documents of the gospels, and that they contain a multitude of discrepancies, and that John presents an almost entirely different story from the Synoptic gospels, and that Matthew and Luke do appear to repeat elements of Mark. But a further fact is that Matthew and Luke also each contain unique and independent elements not copied from Mark, like the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. Matthew also contains the story of the Magi, which no other gospel contains, and Luke contains the parables of the good Samaritan and the prodigal son, which are unique to that gospel. Does this mean that these are all invented whole cloth? Experts on this topic don’t believe that. The academic consensus is that the writers of the canonical gospels were working from numerous sources. Luke even references these older accounts in chapter 1, stating, “Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I, too, decided, as one having a grasp of everything from the start, to write a well-ordered account.” New Testament scholars designate these pre-existing sources using letters. The source of episodes that appear only in Matthew being called M, and those that appear only in Luke being called L, and the source of traditions that appear in both Matthew and Luke but not Mark being designated Q, for quelle, the German word for “source.” Rather than viewing John as a complete aberration that doesn’t match source material at all, The Gospel According to John is also believed by experts to be based on pre-existing sources that simply have not survived. These are called the Signs Source, believed to be the source from which John took accounts of Christ’s miracles, and more than one Discourse Source, from which he took the speeches that he attributes to Jesus. Some scholars even suggest that his account of the passion is derived from some other currently lost work. Beyond these, there are other surviving gospels that simply aren’t canonized, like the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas. And beyond even the written sources there is scholarly analysis of the gospels that suggests they all derive ultimately from oral traditions, which would make a lot of sense considering that it’s believed literacy was uncommon in 1st century Palestine. Moreover, the fact that occasional words in the gospels are given in Aramaic and then explicitly translated into Greek supports the notion that written Gospel sources were recording Aramaic oral traditions. So altogether, this provides a picture of the evolution of gospel traditions, coming out of Palestine during the time of Christ in the form of oral tradition, being written out afterward in sources now lost to us, and then preserved in the surviving gospels. Thus, while mythicists try to reduce these sources to a single work, all evidence suggests there were numerous contemporaneous accounts of the living man named Jesus who was called by his followers the Christ.

The fact is, though, that there are numerous other early Christian sources beyond gospel accounts that attest to the existence of Jesus Christ. One source was Papias, an early second century church father who describes, in words that only survive in quotation by later writers, how he pieced together what he knew of Jesus by seeking out and questioning those who had known Christ’s disciples in life. His writing, a five-volume work reportedly called Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord, would amount to a primary source document if it had been transmitted by ancient scribes and survived for us to read today. We further have Ignatius of Antioch’s early second century letter to the Smyrnaeans, which repeats the major incidents of the gospels, and I Clement, a letter written by Roman Christians and addressed to the Christians in Corinth, which makes clear that there was early, widespread knowledge of Jesus’s life, teachings, and death. Throughout the New Testament, beyond the gospels, we see clear knowledge among early Christians of Jesus and his life that mythicists will tell you had just recently been invented. The information litters the Acts of the Apostles, numerous epistles such as I Timothy, the Letter to the Hebrews, and I and II Peter, and I John. Even the Book of Revelations contains passages that reflect clear knowledge of Christ and gospel traditions, all of which are dated to the 1st century. And the biggest stumbling blocks that mythicists must negotiate are the Pauline epistles, the numerous letters written by the Apostle Paul, which make up the majority of the New Testament and according to scholarly consensus actually were written years, even decades before the surviving, canonized gospels. You heard that right. The gospels record events said to have occurred during the life of Christ, but the letters of Paul, a one-time persecutor of Christians who was converted, are the earliest written sources that appear in the New Testament. To deal with this massive blind spot in their argument, they cast doubt on whether the epistles of Paul really show that he had any knowledge of Christ. They argue that, for someone who supposedly was so devoted to faith in Christ, he sure doesn’t talk much about Jesus and his life. The fact is that his letters were to other early Christians who were well aware of the life story of Christ, so there was no need for him to be preaching to the converted, as it were. Regardless, there are clear instances in which Paul references the life and death of Jesus—specifically about his birth, his being a Jew of the Davidic line, his brothers (specifically naming James), his teachings, his prediction of his own death, his crucifixion, and his burial. Some mythicists, as is typical of many of their arguments, attempt to address this fact, which seems devastating to their argument, by again weakly suggesting without a shred of evidence that later Christian scribes just inserted these references to Christ in Paul’s epistles.

A portrait of Paul the Apostle by Rembrandt

As Bart Ehrman explains, one major criterion for determining the historical authenticity of any report in ancient works, besides whether it is independently attested to in numerous sources—which is certainly the case with the historicity of Jesus Christ—is the so-called “criterion of dissimilarity.” Essentially, this has to do with whether the reported fact or incident serves some purpose or accords in some way with an article of faith that the transmitters of the document want to promote. To put it plainly, if some detail concerning Jesus’s life did not help later Christians, or even early Christians, to promulgate their doctrines, why would they make it up or insert it into works that did not include it. Mythicists too use this criterion to argue that each part of Christ’s story serves a purpose in spreading the Christ myth, but as Ehrman points out, this criterion is supposed to be used—can only be used, really—to prove something did happen, not to prove it did not happen. And there are several independently corroborated details of Christ’s life that meet this criterion. One is the existence of Jesus’s family, specifically his brothers. Not only does this information appear in a variety of our sources, it also seems to serve no clear Christian agenda. If it were made up, why? Another is Christ’s crucifixion, which was likewise corroborated in numerous sources, and was actually quite inconvenient for Christians. It must be remembered that Christians were trying to tie their Jesus to the foretold messiah of Jewish tradition, but it had never been part of prophecy that the Messiah would suffer and die so violently. It was said the Messiah would bring about the resurrection, but this wasn’t about the Messiah dying and rising again. Rather, it was about the resurrection of all the dead and the conquering of death altogether. Christians had to bend over backward, finding old bits of scripture that they suggested were actually prophecies about the Messiah being pierced and not having bones broken in order to bolster their case that their man Jesus was the Messiah. Why would they have made up the story of the passion if it made it harder to argue their doctrine? And lastly, the fact that Jesus came from a poor little backwater village in Galilee called Nazareth was also a real problem for early Christians, as it was said the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. To address this problem, they told a dubious story about his mother traveling to Bethlehem for a census that, according to historians, would not take place for another 6 years. The point is that, though it does indeed seem that this gospel tradition, like others, is not to be trusted, if early Christians were just inventing the story of Jesus Christ, if it were not based on a real, historical person’s life, why would they not just say that he was born in Bethlehem? Well, mythicists have an interesting response to this problem. They claim that no such place as Nazareth even existed, that Jesus being from Nazareth in the gospel traditions resulted from a mistranslation of a word for “branch,” referring to Jesus supposedly being a branch from the line of King David, or that he was a member of a sect called Nazirites, mistakenly called a Nazarene. We can safely dismiss this mythicist argument as well, though, since archaeologists have actually located the small Judean village of Nazareth. Mythicists have done mental gymnastics to refute this archaeological evidence, suggesting that, while it may have existed, it wasn’t inhabited during Jesus’s lifetime, a claim further refuted by archaeologists who have turned up a variety of evidence, from pottery to coins, that prove it was not only a real place, but also inhabited during the time in question.

The last mythicist argument to consider looks farther back, before the Common Era, to pagan traditions of antiquity. What most of the various mythicist arguments have in common is the claim that Jesus Christ was just one more version of a pagan myth or deity, that his myth was a reinvention or evolution of previous myths. I’ve brought up ideas like this before, and to be honest, they cannot be refuted entirely because there is clear reason to believe that elements of pagan belief were incorporated into Christian traditions. However, what mythicists do is take this entirely too far. For example, one strain of Christ Mythicism takes supposed similarities to Mithra and Mithraism and argues that Jesus did not exist any more than Mithra did, that Christianity was just a rebranding of Mithraism. I spoke about this in greater detail in my very first holiday special. Essentially, there is good reason to think that December 25th was chosen as the date for Christmas not because it was the literal date of Jesus’s birth, but because it coincided with the pagan holiday of the birth of the unconquered sun, Sol Invictus, which seems to have been a later development of the Mithraic mystery cult, but the numerous claims about every single element of Christianity being derived from Mithraism lack credibility. He was not born of a virgin; he was born of a rock. He did not have twelve disciples; rather, he was pictured in certain reliefs with figures representing the twelve signs of the zodiac. While it is true that certain early Christian apologists like Justin Martyr and Tertullian drew comparisons between the two religions, suggesting Christian baptism and the eucharistic ceremony were similar to Mithraic ritual meals and ablutions, these parallels are dubious. They were promoted by Christians hoping to convert pagans by suggesting their practices were not so dissimilar, and if there was any connection or crossover between the two, it may very well be that evolving Mithraic customs were actually beginning to incorporate nascent Christian practices. Any absolutist argument about Christianity being a whole-cloth adaptation of Mithraism just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

Relief depicting Mithra slaying a Bull (a tauroctony). The image was iconic in Mithraism and has no clear connection to Christianity.

Mythicists do not limit themselves to Mithraism, though. Many draw parallels to a wide variety of mythological deities, specifically what they call pagan dying-rising gods. They take this notion from the writings of comparative mythologist James Frazer, who raised the idea in his important late 19th-century work, The Golden Bough. According to Frazer, there is a motif among world religions and mythologies, a kind of archetype or category into which many deities fit, and it involved dying and rising again. For Frazer, this had to do with fertility cults and their preoccupation with the life cycles of vegetation. Just as ancient sun worship saw the setting and rising of the sun as a kind of death and resurrection, so too fertility cults saw the life cycles of plants that seem to die in the winter and revive in the spring as a cycle of rebirth. Frazer identifies deities like Osiris, Adonis, and Tammuz as just such dying and rising gods, and mythicists would throw Jesus Christ on the pile. In this, however, mythicists are working in an outmoded scholarly tradition. More recent scholarship views Frazer’s claims as flawed, suggesting that most of the deities he identified are more like disappearing gods or just dying gods. For example, Osiris does die, but he doesn’t come back to life, instead becoming the lord of the dead. Likewise, Adonis is simply forced to live some of his life in the realm of the living and some in the realm of the dead because Aphrodite and Persephone fight over him. And like Adonis, since these vegetative deities represent a cycle, there is often a perpetual death and rebirth, which is, of course, not the case for Jesus. As I have already mentioned, for early Christians, it is clear that Christ’s resurrection represented the beginning of the Messianic age, in which all the dead would be resurrected. He was viewed explicitly as a fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, not as some pagan fertility deity. And the simple fact is, though Christians throughout history have refused to acknowledge it, the earliest of Christians did not view Jesus as a god, or The God, at all. He was just the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed king, the son of God in the same way that all Davidic kings were the Sons of God, and whether in a biological sense the offspring of God as well, or just perhaps the adoptive son of God, still not God Himself. In short, there is just no clear evidence to support the notion that this human man, this historical man that came to be the leader of an apocalyptic Judaic sect, was actually, secretly viewed as a fertility deity, let alone that he did not exist and was invented to represent such a deity.

Another rather ironic claim by mythicists is that there was no Jesus because the stories about Jesus’s life are nearly identical to the stories about another sage who lived at the same time, Apollonius of Tyana, whose existence is widely confirmed by scholars. In such a claim, worded as carefully as I’ve just worded it, they are absolutely correct. According to the principal source for the life of Apollonius, a third-century biography by Lucius Flavius Philostratus, Apollonius’s mother was visited by the apparition of the Egyptian god Proteus and bore this god a son, who would himself be divine. And this son, Apollonius, was a precocious young teen, demonstrating his great wisdom at only fourteen, and he grew to become an itinerant mystic philosopher, performing miracles and mustering disciples. He runs afoul of Roman law, and according to some accounts rises into heaven instead of dying. What’s ironic about Christ mythicists suggesting Apollonius was real and Christ wasn’t is first that they would trust the majority of scholars in this case but not in the other. Indeed it is believed that Apollonius of Tyana did exist, as there are sources independent of Philostratus, including a certain 3rd or 4th century inscription, the Adama Inscription, as well as manuscript sources that Philostratus relied on. However, the sources for Apollonius’s existence suffer from the very same issues, or more! Philostratus was writing in the 220s or the 230s, it’s believed, and that’s far later removed from Apollonius’s lifetime than the gospels were from Christ’s. Like the gospel sources, Philostratus’s sources have now been lost, and one of them, a diary written by one of Apollonius’s acolytes, is believed by many scholars to have been a fictional source made up by Philostratus as a kind of literary device. There are numerous letters supposedly written by Apollonius himself, but some or all of these have also been argued to be later pseudepigraphal works. In some ways, evidence for the existence of Apollonius is weaker than that for Jesus. It simply shows a confirmation bias that mythicists would look at these two figures and argue that the gospels must have actually been about Apollonius, someone who is never even said to have visited Judea, rather than reaching the far more sensible conclusion that the similarities were a result of Philostratus, who was writing later, cribbing from the gospel traditions when he mythologized Apollonius. Interestingly, when mythicists draw this comparison, they are following a long tradition of anti-Christian polemicists going all the way back to the late 3rd century, when Porphyry of Tyre, in his work Against the Christians, argued that the Apollonius story showed that the miracles and achievements of Jesus were not unique or special. And in the early 4th century, during Diocletian’s brutal persecution of Christians, Sossianus Hierocles claimed that Apollonius was an even greater miracle worker than Jesus. But even they didn’t hazard the argument that Jesus was not a real person.

A 2nd century Greco-Roman medallion depicting Apollonius of Tyana, further independent evidence of his historical existence.

I think that, as with my refutation of the entheogen theory of religion, some who have come to view this podcast and my thinking as anti-Christian or anti-religion may be surprised by my spirited defense of the historicity of Christ. But anyone who closely follows my work should recognize that my bias, if we can call it a bias, is to lean heavily in favor of critical thought, reliable evidence, and scholarly consensus. I’ve had my pitfalls, made mistakes regarding what sources I rely on, etc., and I try to own up to them, but I always make a strong effort, in what little time I have to research each episode, to present not only the main points of arguments I think are wrong, but also the evidence that refutes them. Even though I am agnostic with atheist sensibilities, I have no qualms about arguing that Jesus Christ existed historically because the evidence supports that conclusion. This does not, however, mean that I believe he did indeed perform all the miracles attributed to him, that he rose from the dead or that he was in any way more than human. That, of course, is another argument altogether, and more a matter of faith than of history or even science. Interestingly, my view of Jesus Christ is essentially the early Christian view of every other god. There is a name for this argument: euhemerism, named after the 4th-century BCE Greek mythographer Euhemerus. Euhemerism is the argument that the gods of mythology were once just normal men and women, and as their stories were told and retold over time, they became exaggerated, made fantastical, until finally they were deified. Ironically, early Christian apologists themselves relied on euhemerism in their efforts to discredit pagan beliefs. Rather than argue that Zeus and Osiris were entirely made up, they simply said that they were more likely to have been normal men, or kings, perhaps, who were later mythologized into something more. All I would suggest, then, is that the same could be said about their man Jesus Christ, who certainly was a living human being, and perhaps the single most influential spiritual teacher in human history, if nothing else.

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Until next time, ask yourself if, a couple thousand years from now, people might not have a hard time finding concrete evidence that you yourself existed.

Further Reading

Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

Einhorn, Lena. The Jesus Mystery: Astonishing Clues to the True Identities of Jesus and Paul. The Lyons Press, 2007.

Ehrman, Bart D. Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. HarperOne, 2012.

Ehrman, Bart D. Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quiest fort he Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Volume One: The Roots of the Problem and the Person. Doubleday, 1991.

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Volume Two: Mentor, Message, and Miracles. Doubleday, 1991.

Sanders, E. P. The Historical Figure of Jesus. Penguin, 1993.

The Mushroom Kingdom: The Entheogen Theory of Religion

Medicine has always had a religious character to it, going far back into the obscuring veils of prehistory. In numerous cultures all over the world, we find medicine men or women, witch doctors, shamans, who are not only folk healers but also spiritual leaders, who are believed to heal through divination and communion with spirits, typically achieved through some sort of trance. The very word medicine, it has been suggested by some, finds cognates in numerous Indo-European languages that indicate its connection to the idea of mediation, of acting as a medium or conduit for divine healing. It is no new idea that such trance states as shamans experience may be accessed through the use of psychoactive substances, or drugs. The word drug, derived from the Dutch drogue, referring to the droge vate, or dry vat of the apothecary, who was known to deal in all kinds of substances, both medicinal and poisonous, has always had a double meaning of a substance used for medication or for intoxication, just as today we may talk about a drug store or a drug dealer. The notion of the religious use of drugs is also certainly nothing new. Many today are aware of the South American shamanic use of ayahuasca, of the Native American use of peyote, or even the Rastafarian use of ganja. However, until the 1960s, it seems many in the Western world were utterly ignorant of this aspect of religious experience. When, through the activities of the CIA in their pursuit of mind control technology, psychoactive substances such as the recently laboratory-synthesized LSD and the psilocybin or “god’s flesh” mushroom first encountered by an American in the 1950s, were brought back to the U.S., a whole new vocabulary had to be developed. The terms “psychotropic” and “psychomimetic” were used, as it was believed these drugs may turn one psychotic, or that they caused a mimicry of psychosis. To the newfound enthusiasts of the trance states these substances induced, they were “psychedelic,” or mind manifesting substances. To others they were “hallucinogens,” or generators of hallucination. But to some of the earlier explorers of these substances, none of these terms seemed appropriate. One man in particular, the man responsible for introducing “magic mushrooms” to the world, would thereafter embark on a hallucinatory odyssey through history, coming to understand the widespread use of psychedelic mushrooms in extremely disparate cultures and time periods, and beginning to suspect their use in Western cultures as well. From the late sixties through the 1980s and today, he would champion a conspiracist view of world history and religions, working together with like minded academics to popularize a new term for such substances, “entheogens,” meaning “revealers of the god within.” By the theory he spearheaded, it was the use of these drugs that inspired all religion. Here we have a compelling alternative theory of religion that has received some significant scholarly support but that also relies on tenuous connections through questionable etymology, and dubious claim of a massive, millennia-long conspiracy of silence.

We cannot explore the entheogen theory of religion without examining the life of one man, Robert Gordon Wasson. Wasson was born before the turn of the 20th century. One thing is clear: Wasson was an intelligent man. He only attended three years of high school before travelling abroad and eventually serving in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. On his return, he enrolled in Columbia School of Journalism, and after his graduation, he studied at the London School of Economics for a year before returning to instruct English at Columbia for a year. After that, he began writing for a few newspapers, eventually serving as the financial reporter of the New York Herald-Tribune, a role that he would parlay into a Wall Street career. He went to work for J.P. Morgan and Company, where he would work for almost thirty years, earning a vice-president position after around a decade. During this time, he married the love of his life, a Russian pediatrician named Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, and it was on his honeymoon with her in the Catskills that his interest in mushrooms began. His wife recognized some mushrooms that she knew from her youth in Russia, and this sparked a conversation about differing cultural attitudes toward the “toadstools” that Wasson had always been taught to avoid. From then onward, in their spare time and on the vacations that his lucrative Wall Street career afforded them, they researched fungi together, publishing a book in 1957 called Mushrooms, Russia, and History, and in the process essentially founding the academic field that has come to be known today as ethnomycology. During their research on the importance of mushrooms in Russian culture, Wasson became familiar with the ritualistic use of the psychoactive fly agaric mushroom, Amanita Muscaria, among Siberian shamans. This first suggestion of the importance of psychedelic mushrooms in religious experience was certainly a memorable one, as it involved urine-drinking. In Eastern Siberia, shamans would eat this mushroom, experiencing the full and dangerous effects of the fungus and acting as a kind of filter of its toxins, a true mediator of the experience, as others would then drink the shaman’s urine in order to experience more safely the effects of the mushroom. Reindeer were even known to follow around those who were intoxicated by the mushroom, waiting for them to urinate in the snow so they could eat the snow and become intoxicated themselves, which typically made reindeer easier to capture, and even the meat of a reindeer that had been intoxicated by fly agaric was known to confer some residual intoxication on those who consumed it. This psychedelic mushroom pervaded Siberian cultures. Among the Koryak people it was a delineator of class, as the rich would consume the mushroom, and the poor would wait outside their huts hoping to drink their psychedelic urine. So fascinated were Wasson and his wife with this mushroom that they gradually became more and more interested in psychedelic mushrooms specifically, travelling to Mexico and taking part in shamanic rituals with another kind of mushroom, the “god’s flesh” mushroom, about which Wasson wrote in a very influential LIFE magazine article called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” If the name sounds familiar to you, it’s because I mentioned Wasson in my episode on MK Ultra. Unknown to him, his efforts to acquire specimens of these mushrooms, classified today as psilocybin after the psychoactive compounds within them, were actually funded by the CIA as part of their search for a substance useful in mind control. Because of this, Wasson is mostly known as the man who popularized psilocybin mushrooms, and in Western culture, when we think about psychedelic mushrooms, we typically think of this mushroom. But during the course of his lifelong investigations into the topic, Wasson believed he discovered a much greater and seemingly hidden history to the Siberian mushroom, classified Amanita muscaria, whose name relates to flies, as does its more common European name, fly agaric, because to most of the world outside of Siberian shamanic cultures, this admittedly beautiful fungus, with its bright red cap and white spots, was just a poison toadstool known only for its use as a fly trap, as it would attract flies when sprinkled with milk. But Wasson slowly came to believe that fly agaric was more widely and secretly used to induce religious visions and trances than anyone suspected.

The Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric mushroom.

Wasson’s entheogenic theory of religion did not really start to take shape until he began researching a book on the Indo-Iranian use of the mystery drug called soma in the Rigveda. This was a longstanding historical mystery. The Indo-Iranian peoples that migrated to the Indus Valley in the second millennium BCE brought with them a unique pantheon of deities: Indra, another Sky Father and wielder of lightning, and Agni, the god of fire. Some of these Hindu deities, or Devas, are better known today in the West than others: Ganesha, Vishnu, Shiva. But in the ancient Vedic literature from which these legends evolved, one was different: Soma, god of the Moon and of night, and of plants and vegetation. What set this god apart from the others was that it was believed one could become this god by ingesting a particular sacramental offering, some sort of food or drink that when taken conferred a religious ecstasy and, it was believed, immortality. In the most ancient of Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, and especially the Rigveda, which was orally transmitted over millennia before finally written down in the Common Era, many hymns refer to this substance, soma, which appears to have been literally deified. More than a hundred hymns in the Rigveda are dedicated to this god-food. More than forty potential candidates for what this substance might have been were suggested by scholars in the 19th century, and by the 20th, dozens more were proposed, until more than a hundred contenders existed. Was it honey? Was it alcohol? Could it have been cannabis? Might it have been the plant ephedra, used today in such drugs as nasal decongestants? Perhaps it was a certain vine used for religious purposes elsewhere in India today? When R. Gordon Wasson looked into it, unsurprisingly, he came to believe it was a mushroom, and specifically the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria. He and his fellow researcher, an Indologist named Wendy O’Flaherty insist that he did not begin his research with any such presumption, claiming he only began to suspect the mushroom when he learned that one particular line in the Rigveda mentions the urination of soma, which to him recalled the Siberian shamans urinating after ingesting fly agaric, and the subsequent drinking of their urine by others. I personally find it highly suspect that Wasson, who was an amateur mycologist and arguably the world’s first ethnomycologist, had started looking into soma without any presumption that it might have been a mushroom. I think it is pretty safe to bet that he hoped to make a case that it was a mushroom and was looking for evidence that it was some fungoid substance. However, the case he puts forth, and which others have since developed further, remains pretty convincing.

Wasson argued that soma could not have been alcohol, for the Brahmans, the Hindu priesthood caste, had alcohol in the form of beer, and this drink was generally disapproved of because of its fermentation process. He suggests that, judging by the geography of the Indus Valley, adjacent to mountains that may have been temperate enough to foster a birch forest, such as the ones in which the fly agaric typically grew, it was possible the mushroom was present there. More than that, in all the hymns, there is no mention of roots or leaves or seeds or flowers in relation to soma, but there are, according to his partner’s translation, lines that refer to stems and caps, and all descriptions of the color of soma match with the red and white color of the Amanita muscaria. Even some lines about a “single eye,” Wasson claims, refer directly to the sight of a mushroom cap sprouting out of the ground. But his clincher was the single line about the urination of soma. Converts of the Wasson view of soma have sought further confirmation in nearby and related cultures, such as in Tibetan Buddhist rituals that involve the ritual drinking of colored water that may be meant to represent urine-drinking in antiquity, but the key word here is “may.” As the critics of Wasson would point out, his theory of soma is as much speculation as any other. The line about the urination of soma, for example, makes no mention of urine-drinking, suggesting he may be misconstruing its meaning. The translations he relied on can be challenged in numerous regards. His argument that nearby mountains might have had birch forests is unconvincing without evidence that birch or any similar woods that act as host to these mushrooms ever grew there. And the fact that there is no mention of leaves or seeds does not mean with any certainty that it must have been a fungus. Perhaps they simply did not mention those particular aspects of it because they ate it as a paste or drank it in a tea. And though the effects described in the hymns do not sound like an alcohol, they also don’t sound like a psychedelic, as a sensation of greater alertness and clarity is mentioned, making it sound rather more like the stimulant ephedra. Perhaps the strongest candidate remains the Cynanchum acidum, or “creeping soma,” a vine and thus leafless and seedless, which remains in use in religious ritual in South India and is widely regarded by Indians as the soma of the Rigveda.

The ritual drinking of Soma, as referenced in the Vedas.

Despite some academic resistance, though, Robert Gordon Wasson moved merrily along, insisting he had proven beyond doubt the identity of the Vedic soma, and intent on further proving the widespread use of hallucinogens among those not only in the East but also in the West, setting his focus next on the Eleusinian Mystery. In ancient Greece, the agrarian mystery cult of Demeter and Persephone, which it is believed had derived their rituals from the more ancient practices of the Mycenaean civilization, held initiation ceremonies every year in the sanctuary at Eleusis. These ceremonies, which were kept secretive and considered profane if performed outside the sanctuary, involved in a variety of dramatic reenactments of myths, the displaying of certain sacred objects, and commentaries on all of them, including warnings that if one were to divulge the mysteries, the penalty was death. It sounds very much like Masonic ritual in that way, and also like Mormon temple rituals, which were cribbed from Masonry. The Eleusinian Mystery was supposed to climax in a grand vision of the afterlife. This, of course, is what led Wasson to suspect the involvement of psychedelics, or entheogens, and he recruited classics scholar Carl Ruck to help him investigate. At some point in the Mystery ceremony, a potion or philtre was consumed by the participants, called a kykeon, so Wasson and Ruck homed in on that element of the ceremony as the ingestion of a psychoactive substance. Unfortunately for Wasson’s mushroom theory, the kykeon’s ingredients were recorded: water, barley, and mint or pennyroyal. But not all hope was lost for their theory, as they brought on a third collaborator, Dr. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, who told them just what they wanted to hear, that a certain fungal parasite, Claviceps paspali, commonly known as ergot fungus, tended to grow on barley and other grains, and alkaloids present in it, long term exposure to which can cause convulsions and gangrenous symptoms called St. Anthony’s Fire, also caused hallucinations. It was in fact ergot from which Hoffman had synthesized lysergic acid.

So it seemed Wasson had found his entheogen theory for the Eleusinian Mystery, which he and Ruck argued was strengthened by the fact that Socrates’ protégé Alcibiades, a known libertine, was once convicted in absentia of having participated in the Mystery rite in a private residence rather than in the sanctuary, giving the impression that the use of this psychedelic was spreading outside the cult of Demeter and Persephone into illicit recreational use. While Wasson might have been disappointed that it wasn’t fly agaric, he seems to have taken comfort in the fact that ergot fungus also, sometimes, developed little tiny caps like miniscule mushrooms. And not to let his beloved mushrooms languish too much, he and Ruck still suggested that, while the potion used in the central, so-called “Greater Mystery” initiation ceremony was infused with ergot, in the preliminary “Lesser Mystery” ceremony, a wild mushroom might have been ingested. Again, as with soma, their theory is by no means proven, but some evidence supporting it did recently turn up outside of Greece.  In northeastern Spain, in what was once a colony of Greater Greece, Mas Castellar de Pontós, a sanctuary built for Greeks unable to sail across the Mediterranean to participate in the Demeter and Persephone Mystery rites at Eleusis, was excavated in the 1990s by an archaeologist, and in one miniature chalice there, not unlike the cups in which the kykeon was served, the chemical signature of ergot alkaloids was detected. Of course, it was also detected in teeth among remains discovered at the site, indicating that ergotism may have been rampant in the region and offering the further possibility that there are other reasons the alkaloids may have been present, but it is at least some archaeological support for the theory, something that Wasson’s soma theory has always lacked. And ergot, it turns out, would take the entheogenic theory of religion a lot further than Wasson’s toadstools.

The Return of Persephone, by Frederic Leighton, a depiction of the myth that formed the basis of the Eleusinian mystery cult.

Already in the late 1980s, before Wasson’s death, he was extending his entheogen theory to encompass all forms of religion, seeing in every culture and every age the presence of his beloved mushrooms or some similar psychoactive agent. While the academic partner he had inspired, Carl Ruck, focused still on ancient Greece, arguing that hints in Greek theatrical writing and philosophy further suggested that the mysterious wine of Dionysus was an entheogen and the mythical Hyperborean fruits from Appollo’s garden were none other than the Siberian fly agaric mushroom, Wasson turned his dilated pupils to another region on the Mediterranean and began to suggest the influence of his mushrooms in ancient Hebrew religion, thus ushering in Judaism and by extension Christianity into the entheogenic fold. He suggested that the biblical story of Adam and Eve eating of the fruits of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was yet another reference to eating the fly agaric, which grew only at the foot of a certain type of tree in certain climates. The fruits eaten by Adam and Eve made them in some way like God, just as the soma Wasson claimed to be the same mushroom allowed its consumers to partake of the divine. He further suggested that any culture that deified or considered sacred a tree, any Tree of Life myth the world over, must also have been a reference to trees at whose foot grew the sacred mushroom. After Wasson’s passing, there was a long lull in publications on the topic, but eventually Carl Ruck and others, like Daniel Merkur and Brian Muraresku, took up where Wasson left off. Merkur argued in his book The Mystery of Manna that manna, the miraculous bread that God provided the Israelites to sustain them in the wilderness, which according to his interpretation of scriptures was also associated with visions of God, was actually bread with ergot fungus. There are, unsurprisingly, problems with this interpretation as well. Even if we were to accept his explanation that the notion of manna having fallen from heaven was pure myth, which I would certainly be disposed to accept, he suggests that this ergot-tainted bread was purposely given to the Israelites by Moses because the prophet had promised them a vision. This would suggest that Moses just had a huge quantity of this tainted bread on hand and knew it would give them visions. If we were to accept this, then we must also ask why there is no mention of ergot poisoning occurring among the Israelites who ate this tainted bread daily. Merkur goes on to connect manna with showbread, a sacramental bread placed in the Temple of Jerusalem, within the presence of the Ark of the Covenant. He argues that this ergot-tainted bread was taken as a prophetic initiation, inducing visions, and that if any died of ergotism because of taking it, they were considered to have been smitten by God himself, a further explanation for the deaths said to have been caused by the Ark. This is certainly a creative explanation, though it does not seem to accord with the biblical accounts of people who died instantaneously simply from touching the Ark, or the many people said to have been killed simply from looking at it the wrong way. And though it is tempting to suggest the plague of tumors visited upon the Philistines when they stole the Ark was really ergotism, which causes extreme skin conditions, the fact is that the small amount of showbread kept not in the Ark but near it at any given time would not have been enough to affect entire populations of people even if it were what Merkur suggests it was and had been stolen along with the Ark.

Merkur and Ruck and most recently Brian Muraresku have extended the ergot sacrament hypothesis further in the last 20 years or so, arguing what is essentially a psychedelic version of the pagan continuity concept, the idea that pagan traditions did not cease to exist but were rather adopted and changed to suit the needs of early Christians—a concept that is all but proven in many regards, as I have demonstrated time and again, particularly in my holiday special episodes. Their argument is essentially that the psychedelic ritual experience of the Eleusis Mystery was embraced by early Christians in the form of the Eucharist, the ceremony commemorating the Last Supper, in which bread and wine were ritually consumed. As with other examples used in the entheogen theory of religion, the Christian sacrament was said to be the consumption of Christ’s flesh and blood, the ingestion of God himself, which confers some aspect of godliness upon the participants. This can be compared to the Mexican ingestion of “god’s flesh” mushrooms, the Hindu ritual of eating the deified soma, and the notion that when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree’s fruit they became like God. Therefore, whether the bread of the Eucharist were originally an ergot-tainted bread, or whether the wine drunk were some psychedelic brew hearkening back to the powerful wines of Dionysus, they argued that the Eucharist ceremony was, in its earliest and most true character, a hallucinogenic experience. One specific piece of supposed evidence Ruck relied on was the 16th century Isenheim Alterpiece, a German painting of the crucified Christ that depicts his skin as pitted with lesions or sores, which Ruck suggested lends credence to the notion that Christ suffered from ergotism. As usual, though, this logic just doesn’t hold up. First of all, we know why Christ was depicted this way on the alterpiece. It was painted for a monastery that specialized in caring for plague victims and those suffering from ergotism, so the idea was clearly to draw a connection between Christ’s suffering and the suffering of the ill at the monastery. But even if we reject this explanation, the idea that the painting revealed a secret about Christ’s ritual use of ergot would require us to believe that this was a known fact even in the 16th century, that it had been kept as a secret for more than a thousand years, only occasionally hinted at in iconography. As we will see, this is the central problem with the entheogen theory of the origins of religion, that it depends on a massive conspiracy theory.

The Gathering of the Manna by James Tissot

Many other claims about entheogens influencing the foundation of both Judaism and Christianity have been put forth. It has been suggested that, since the acacia tree contains DMT, another entheogen that has been called the God or Spirit Molecule, perhaps Moses inhaled it during the episode of the burning bush. And since cannabis grew commonly in the Middle East, perhaps it was the original incense burned at altars, a theory that appears to be supported by recent archaeological discoveries at shrines in Israel, where traces of cannabis were found. This leads to the further notion that cannabis may long have been infused in the anointing oil so commonly described as being applied in biblical times. The anointing oil used by Moses in Exodus is described as being composed of cinnamon, myrrh, and something called “kaneh-bosm,” which it was understandably thought might be cannabis, though others argue that it was actually calamus, or sweet flag. In the early 2000s, Ruck promoted the research of Chris Bennett and Neil McQueen, pointing to the discovery of traces of cannabis in vessels from Judaea and Egypt as further evidence that holy anointing oil was infused with cannabis, leading to the further suggestion that when Christ anointed the sick and healed them or anointed the possessed to cast out their demons, he was actually applying a cannabis salve, the effects of which are known to ease pain and calm seizures, which might of course have been mistaken for demonic possession. Then there was the further and far more extreme argument of John Allegro that early Christians were really a mushroom cult, and that there really was no Jesus at all, that he was just a personification of their sacred mushroom, the Amanita muscaria, an untenable claim that likewise partook of the vast conspiracy theory on which much of these wider claims about the origin of religion rely. I’ll talk in greater detail about Allegro’s claims in this year’s Xmas special, but we can see this tendency just in the theories of Robert Gordon Wasson, the Mushroom King, who more than any others who might have been inspired by his thinking tried to connect all religions to some ancient precursor religion based on ritual psychedelic use.

By Wasson’s reckoning, wherever coniferous trees grew, the fly agaric might grow, and the prehistoric cult of the mushroom may have begun in Siberia, spread to Europe, the Middle East, and even the Far East from this mysterious northern Mushroom Kingdom then called Hyperborea by some. Likewise, this mushroom cult must have been carried over the land bridge into the Americas, thus explaining its persistence among indigenous cultures. And throughout the millennia it evolved, through syncretism entering into new religions and developing new mythological trappings. As evidence, he strings together numerous disparate images, suggesting that the Indo-Iranian people’s reference to the “single eye” must surely have referred to his beloved mushroom, and therefore all other references to beings with only a single eye, like the cyclops, must also have been coded references to psychedelic mushrooms. Likewise, he draws a tenuous connection between any possible mythological creature that has only a single leg or foot as necessarily being a cryptic reference to the mushroom that grows on a single stalk: the “single-foot” soma, the Greek Monocoli or “One-leg” people, the Steganopodes or “Cover-foot” monsters of medieval legend, the “one-sided man” of Siberian Chukchi lore also known as the “halfling” (a connection to Tolkien that I didn’t expect to find), and the hurakan or “one-leg” mentioned in the Mayan Popol Vuh. He even goes so far as to suggest that Satan might represent the red fly agaric mushroom because the devil is commonly depicted as having a club-foot, and thus has only one good foot, though how this identification of the mushroom with evil would work with an overall theory that the mushroom was sacred in Western religions is not entirely clear. When issues like this come up in Wasson’s writing, he merely suggests that the sacred mushroom has been suppressed by what he calls “mycophobes,” or mushroom haters. He blames mycophobes for the negative reputation mushrooms have developed, for insulting nicknames like “toadstool,” and for the disappearance of their use in modern Western religions. Whenever the point is made that mushrooms and other psychedelics are not in use in the very same religious rituals today, he rationalized that in all but a few of the cultures that supposedly used to consider the ingestion of entheogens sacred, their ritual use was put to an end and they were replaced with other substances. As to why this would happen, it must have been the mycophobes who wanted rid of their hated mushrooms, or perhaps it was because of a shortage—though this last notion really doesn’t make sense when it comes to ergot fungus, which might grow on bread anywhere. And the central role of these entheogens in so many religions was kept secret, only referred to in ambiguous language, because, Wasson argued, talking about the most holy mysteries of religious rituals was a taboo. But let’s consider this a moment. The idea that a taboo prevented the open revelation of the nature of so many different religious rituals, even after those rituals had changed and no longer used their former hallucinogenic sacraments, is a bit hard to believe. If the practice was stamped out as a kind of reform, it would have been written about in polemics and preached against. And if it had been suppressed, when had it been suppressed? If clues were present even in medieval and Renaissance art, then it was either still active relatively recently, or at least known about. So in the end, the entheogenic theory of the origin of religion is essentially a claim of massive cover-up, perhaps the most massive conspiracy theory ever dreamed up, as it must involve almost every culture and people from every era of human history. Such a conspiracy claim simply cannot be credited.

A depiction of the first ritual taking of the Eucharistic elements.

I am not sure how many people of faith listen, how many religious listeners I may still have. While I recognize that several of my episodes in the past may have driven such listeners away, I nevertheless like to think that some remain, listeners whose faith is not shaken by my skeptical polemics. Perhaps some of you who find that your faith does not rely on a literal interpretation of the Bible or who can comfortably reconcile your beliefs with science find that you can enjoy my podcast for what it is: one man’s rational seeking after the truth. For those of you who have faith and still listen, this one’s for you. Although the entheogen theory of religion seems like it might be the kind of view of religion that I would support, as it’s a great topic for atheists and agnostics who may want to make religions look foolish or hypocritical, on further researching the topic, I simply found the scholarship questionable or even downright sloppy, and the overall premise fundamentally flawed. And considering the source, Robert Gordon Wasson, it appears unreliable from the start. He was a tool of the CIA and MK Ultra, but we maybe won’t hold that against him. What’s more relevant is that Wasson was an amateur, a hobbyist. He may have invented the field of ethnomycology, but he didn’t study botany or cultural anthropology. He was a Wall Street guy who got turned on by psychedelics. It’s true, he studied journalism, but he spent far more time with JP Morgan, and it should be noted that he got the job at JP Morgan because he had written an article in 1937 that attempted to exonerate JP Morgan of certain war-profiteering accusations. After the firm hired him, he became a vice president, but it’s not often mentioned he was Vice President, specifically, of Public Relations. His job was rhetoric, spinning the facts to make his preferred view convincing, and that is what he did in his spare time too, arguing that psychedelics had fostered all religion. And certainly he was not neutral in his research, as he sometimes liked to claim. In his dismissal of mycophobes, he identified himself as a mycophile. In his discussion of mushrooms as the forbidden fruit, he portrayed himself and his wife, with whom he began his study of mushrooms, as a kind of Adam and Eve who had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. In short, he was quite a character, but not very credible. As for those who came after him, Carl Ruck, who certainly was an expert classicist, was again no authority in the more relevant fields of history, religion, ethnology, mycology, chemistry, etc., and certainly was working out of his field of expertise when he began writing about Christian sacraments and Renaissance art. Daniel Merkur is a clinical psychoanalyst, and thus also appears to be a researcher into these religious topics in an amateur capacity. The most recent proponent of the theory, Brian Muraresku, whose book, The Immortality Key, resurrected the claims of Carl Ruck, is a lawyer, but at least his undergraduate degree appears to have been in the Classics, with a linguistic focus on Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. However, one need only look at who he has associated himself with to begin to question his reliability. History falsifier Graham Hancock wrote the foreword to his book, which should be a massive red flag, and he tends to promote the book on the podcasts of those who amplify misinformation and toxic ideology, like Lex Fridman, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan. Overall, while the corpus of writings developing the entheogenic theory of religion do make convincing individual arguments, such as that the Vedic soma and the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mystery were likely some sort of psychoactive substance or narcotic, the grand unifying theory of religion it puts forth has never convinced the scholarly community and cannot be credited as anything other than a conspiracy claim. And I hope that this conclusion will demonstrate to religious listeners that in this podcast, in my own evaluation of claims about religion, I can be open-minded and am willing to defend religions and religious beliefs at least against attacks that lack merit.

Further Reading

Merkur, Daniel. The Mystery of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of the Bible. Park Street Press, 2000.

Muraresku, Brian C. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. St. Martin's Griffin, 2023.

Ruck, Carl. “Was there a whiff of cannabis about Jesus?” The Times, 12 Jan. 2003. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/was-there-a-whiff-of-cannabis-about-jesus-b3ncmnl0b8w

Wasson, R. Gordon. Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1968. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.449342/mode/2up.

Wasson, R. Gordon, Carl A.P. Ruck, and Albert Hofmann. The Road to Eleusis : Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1978. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/roadtoeleusisunv0000wass/mode/2up.

Wasson, R. Gordon, et al. Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion. Yale University Press, 1986. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/PersephonesQuest/mode/2up.

Technological Angels: The Religious Dimension of UFO Belief

In considering the cover-up claims made by UFO whistleblowers and conspiracy speculators for the last seventy years or so, one central question is why. Why would the US government or other governments feel compelled to keep such a momentous historic milestone from humanity? Dark sider UFOlogists spin their fiction about a Faustian bargain with malevolent EBEs, selling out citizens in exchange for advanced technology, but of the more down-to-earth conspiracists—and conspiracy claims are so varied that there actually are more pragmatic and realistic conspiracist beliefs—they rely on the old saw that the government wants to avoid a general panic like that seen during the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast. In fact, as I discussed in a bonus episode back in 2021 called Extra! Extra! Extra-Terrestrial Hoaxes!, there is convincing evidence that the widespread panic caused by the Welles broadcast was overblown by newspapers in a media hoax to make radio look bad, creating a scandal where one did not really exist. In reality, for a long time, we have seen people’s reactions to the possibility of disclosure, as those in the UFO community call the long-awaited revelation of extra-terrestrial visitation. When Bob Lazar’s false claims went viral, people didn’t riot in the streets, but many descended on the town of Rachel, Nevada, near Area 51, hoping to glimpse a saucer. And when Bob went viral again on Rogan, millions did not riot, but rather expressed a similar interest to “see them aliens,” Thousands traveled to Nevada again, and in the end, they just used it as an opportunity to plan a music festival, which was to be called Alienstock. In 2017, when the Pentagon’s UAP program was exposed in the New York Times, and in 2021, when the Department of Defense released and acknowledged already leaked and viral videos of UAP and when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its first annual report on the topic, and now in 2023, when David Grusch went before congress to allege a secret UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, on none of those occasions was there panic among the general populace. And this was not because most were skeptical and disbelieved it. Rather, these events were typically met with ironic detachment and indifference. On social media, many posts were made saying “So aliens are real. I still gotta pay my rent.” This summer, during the UFO whistleblower hearings, NBC News remarked on this, with the headline, “Are aliens real? People online don't seem to care either way. The congressional hearing on UFOs was met with a collective shrug by many Twitter and TikTok users.” And the Washington Post likewise reported, “Congress asks: Are aliens real? Many Americans respond: Meh.” So if it’s no longer a panic or riots the supposed government cover-up fears, what else? Some have suggested that the faith of the religious is being sheltered, fearing that the discovery of other sentient species in the universe would challenge ideas about mankind’s unique role as the Creation of God. Such a revelation would be akin to the Copernican revolution, when the world’s religions were forced to reckon with the fact that the Earth was not the center of the universe but rather, as Carl Sagan put it, “an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” But ever since the discovery in 1996 of what was at first believed to be fossilized bacteria in a Martian meteorite, a claim that has since been refuted but still served as a milestone in the field of astrobiology, theologians and believers everywhere have already come to terms with the notion of life elsewhere. Western religion and Christianity, which especially relies on the notion of an incarnation of God being sacrificed to redeem mankind, has proven very adaptable to the notion, considering that God may have likewise redeemed numerous other creations through similar incarnations. In 2016, the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton invited two dozen theologians to consider the question, and some of these religious scholars predicted that the discovery of alien life would actually strengthen religious traditions rather than weaken or undermine them, as many would turn to their faith for some sense of how to process and contextualize their new place in the universe. And certainly we can already see this sort of reaction among those in government privy to classified UAP information. As I mentioned in part two of my UFO Whistleblowers series, it appears some in the intelligence community have decided that the unidentified aerial phenomena they hear about must be celestial beings, whether demons or angels. And this view has spread among legislators who are learning more about these UAP programs, like Republican representative Eric Burlison of Missouri, who was quoted as saying “In my opinion I think it’s either angels or manmade.” Then there is the notably unbalanced Qanon-supporting representative of Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently said of UAP, “I’m a Christian and I believe the Bible…. And I think we have to question if it’s more of the spiritual realm. Angels, or fallen angels.” This religious dimension of UFO belief is actually nothing new, though, and looking closely at the intersection of UFO mythology and religious thought and the similarities between belief in religion and belief in alien visitation can help us come to a clearer understanding of the psychological and spiritual drives of such beliefs. Taking a skeptical view of both alien visitation and religion leads me to believe the similarities between these two faiths, one ancient and the other more modern, actually serves to discredit both.

At the beginning of my massive documentary-style series on UFO whistleblowers, I mentioned that early in the podcast, I made an episode on UAP of which I’m not especially proud. At the time, in 2018, I didn’t really know what the podcast was. I knew I wanted to do some critical thinking and dig into some esoteric topics, but I had more of a focus on historical mysteries, and I was cross promoting with some paranormal podcasters that were in the same pod collective as I was back then. In the episode, I relied on the illustrated survey Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, by Jacques Vallée. At the time, I considered Vallée to be the most academic and reliable of UFO researchers, so I was happy to find this work compiling seeming UFO sightings throughout history by what I then considered to be a credible author. And I still consider Vallée as far more credible than others in his field. For example, he thoroughly debunked the Philadelphia Experiment hoax, and I relied on his work there in my episode on the topic. And although I didn’t mention it in my recent episode on Bill Cooper, Vallée also rather famously interviewed and discredited that conspiracy kingpin. But my opinion of Vallée and the work Wonders in the Sky has since changed. Based on the work of Jason Colavito, I have come to recognize that Vallée and his so-called “Invisible College,” a group of educated scientists who took an interest in UFOs and the paranormal, including J. Allen Hynek of Project Blue Book and physicist Hal Puthoff, who listeners may remember for his research into psychic phenomena and remote viewing, were driven by their obsession with the occult and supernatural and have been instrumental, again and again, in getting the U.S. government interested in funding studies of absolutely bonkers claims, like those at Skinwalker Ranch, where a government research project spent taxpayer money searching for shapeshifting dogmen and space poltergeists. The story of Skinwalker may need to be told elsewhere, but suffice it to say here that Vallée and Puthoff, like the infamous George Knapp, was also on eccentric billionaire Robert Bigelow’s payroll to promote the UFO and paranormal claims of his think tank, the National Institute for Discovery Science. Colavito has also gone point by point through the “prodigies” listed in Vallée’s Wonders in the Sky, demonstrating how he took nearly all of them out of context, relied on poor translations, and presented fake quotes as genuine.  And more recently, researcher Douglas Dean Johnson has made a convincing case that Jacques Vallée is guilty of cherry-picking and omitting inconvenient evidence in order to present stories in such a way that they favor his views. All of this further makes me cringe in embarrassment at that early episode of the podcast, and it may be that I produce a more definitive episode about Vallée and his Invisible College in the future, especially if I can score an interview with Colavito, whom I’d love to have on the podcast. For the sake of this topic, though, I wanted to highlight that much of what Vallée took out of context in his book Wonders in the Sky, the accounts of “prodigies,” or luminous visions in the sky, actually seem to have been references to natural meteorological phenomena, sun dog optical illusions or references to the disk of the sun or the disk of the stars, old astronomical and astrological terms. These prodigies, although explainable with historical context and our modern understanding of the world and our perception of it, were often at the time taken to be some kind of omen or divine sign. What Vallée did was project modern notions of UFOs backward onto these historical accounts of religious visions. That is, by definition, presentism, a kind of cultural bias in historical analysis. Perhaps Vallée can be forgiven this, since he is no historian, but we should instead look at things the other way round. Rather than suggesting that the similarity of UFO beliefs today to ancient religious beliefs and visions somehow proves those ancient beliefs valid and shows that it was UFOs all along, perhaps we should instead consider that belief in extra-terrestrial visitation today is just another example of humanity’s tendency to seek meaning in the skies, and that this should not be considered any more valid than those superstitions in antiquity.

Worship of Aten, the solar disk, a sun worship religion dubiously presented as a flying saucer religion by some.

Certainly in Western religion, the emphasis has been placed on the sky or the heavens as the abode of deities and divine beings, and thus has been designated the focus of believers’ faith. The Hebrew word for heaven, shamayim, is traced back to an Akkadian word for “sky” and another word for “waters,” thus meaning “Sky waters” or “lofty waters.” This derives from an ancient conception of the earth as a flat disk, supported by pillars, and the sky above as a dome, or firmament, that was blue only because of the cosmic ocean of waters beyond. This weird cosmogony was the original flat-earther notion; God had raised this solid dome and supported it on the pillars of the Earth in order to separate the waters below from the waters above, making a pocket of habitable space for mankind. In the dome were installed windows to let in precipitation, and on the underside, God demonstrated His artistry with the lights of the heavens, which served as a kind of bulletin board, as in them could be divined prophetic signs and wonders. Certainly the heavens were the abode of the divine, where angels and God were known to dwell, and whenever these celestial beings came to mankind, or whenever a person went to them, it was referred to as a descent to Earth and an ascent up to heaven. The traditions of Christianity continued this focus on the skies, with Christ locating his “Father who art in Heaven,” with the conception of the Holy Spirit descending from “on high,” and his disciples’ reports that he himself ascended to heaven after his resurrection. Likewise Islam continued this theme with Muhammad’s heavenly ascension, journeying into the skies to observe the stars and speak with angels and the dead. Nor was Western religion unique in this regard. Certainly some pagan and Eastern traditions focused more on our natural surroundings and invested them with the qualities of the divine, but many others venerated sky gods, like Ahura Mazda of Zoroastrianism, Zeus of ancient Greece, Jupiter of Rome, and the Sumerian Anu. The list goes on and on, among ancient Egyptians, the Incans, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Hindu, and the endless names of Chinese Sky Emperors. From sun worship to wind gods enthroned on clouds, the concept is so widespread across so many disparate faiths and cultures, appearing in so many pantheons, that comparative mythology offers a name for it: the sky father. While proponents of ancient aliens like Erich von Däniken take this as evidence of alien contact in apparently every ancient culture in antiquity, an inversion of their reasoning seems far more logical: this universal tendency to seek supernatural meaning in the skies has in more recent years, with the influence of science and the Enlightenment, evolved to encourage new beliefs about the inhabitants of the heavens that are nevertheless equally religious in nature.

The idea that modern folklore about UFOs and aliens can be likened to religious mythology was not lost on early thinkers on the topic either. French psychologist and UFO researcher Aimé Michel noted the similarity of ideas about aliens to ideas in Greek antiquity about daemons, some of which, so-called eudaemons, were benevolent and others evil, a belief that was later Christianized in notions of angels and demons, the latter even using the same Greek word. And theologian Ted Peters, in the seventies, wrote in “UFOs: The Religious Dimension” that belief in UFOs was nothing more than “scientized religion,” in that believers “do want a celestial savior, but that savior will not be mysterious; instead, he will be fully comprehendible and scientifically explainable according to the laws of nature.” One of the first thinkers to recognize this tendency to place UFOs in the same role as angels and demons or gods and to suggest it was not only an explanation for widespread belief in alien visitation but also an explanation for UFO sightings themselves was Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss founder of analytical psychology. In his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, he asserts that it is hard to consider them “objects” at all, “because they behave not like bodies but like weightless thoughts.” Jung surmised that it was no coincidence that our preoccupation with flying saucers and alien contact began during the Cold War, when the looming threat of nuclear war had already invested the skies with the specter of death from above. In contrast to this existential threat, however, UFOs and the ETs that many began to believe piloted them, came to be viewed in the 1950s and beyond as not only technologically advanced but also morally superior beings come to save us from ourselves. This view of aliens in flying saucers as our saviors caused Jung to suspect that UFOs or our ideas about them were simply conforming to the established archetypes of religion. For those unfamiliar with the term, the quintessential Jungian view of psychology was that human beings inherit universal patterns of thought into which we organize our perceptions, and religion specifically can be understood as conforming to these patterns or archetypes. By Jung’s reckoning, in a world of science and technology, humanity was beginning to replace outmoded notions of sky gods with what he called “technological angels.” To Jung, identifying saucer sightings as a kind of religious experience meant that, while in some cases sights of actual things in the sky might be misconstrued according to this quasi-religious interpretation, in other cases perhaps nothing real was seen at all, or rather, the things “seen” were only figments of ecstatic imaginations. Objects actually caught by radar may likewise, he reasoned, be mundane phenomena invested with the religious mystique of the UFO. But Jung actually took his evaluation of flying saucers as a psychological phenomenon beyond the domain of the mind, thinking that perhaps the imaginations of those who believed they saw saucers were actually creating some physical manifestation of their beliefs, which in turn could be seen by others and observed with radar. “[T]he  projection-creating fantasy,” he wrote, “soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets.” Of course, he would not be the first to entertain this parapsychological notion of a thought-form or tulpa, the notion that human belief could make the unreal real. While this is quite a stretch, scientifically speaking, there was further, more concrete reason for Jung’s identification of UFO belief with religion. Not long after the advent of saucer mania came the rise of UFO contactees in the 1950s, and the formation of outright UFO cults, all of which had their roots in alternative religions.

The 1958 cover of Jung’s exploration of UFOs as psychological phenomena.

The tendency to make UFOs and aliens into sacred figures like deities has been remarked on by modern academics, like religion scholar and historian Catherine Wessinger, who observed that “increasingly in new religions, extraterrestrials and space aliens are the superhuman agents that act in the roles previously filled by God, gods, angels, and devils.” These new religions, or as they’re more commonly labeled, cults, actually began to appear long before the rise of flying saucer mania. In 1758, a Swedish philosopher named Emanuel Swedenborg published a pseudoscientific work whose ponderous title is typically translated as Worlds in Space, but in its entirety is Concerning the Earths in Our Solar System, Which Are Called Planets; and Concerning the Earths in the Starry Heaven; and Concerning Their Inhabitants, and Likewise Concerning the Spirits and Angels There from What Has Been Seen and Heard. Swedenborg was formerly a scientist, writing exclusively on chemistry and mineralogy, who had transitioned into theological treatises and then went full-blown visionary mystic, claiming that, much like Muhammad, he had ascended into the heavens, visiting other planets and detailing the anatomy and cultures of all their inhabitants, including the native beings of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Interestingly, he called them all “spirits,” even though he described their bodies and organs in detail. Swedenborg’s work should be viewed as mere fiction, telling as it is that he only visits the planets of our solar system known by science at the time. His work also conforms to a literary trope, that of the “fantastic voyage,” a popular kind of story, like Gulliver’s Travels, in which a traveler discovers a strange civilization that serves as a kind of satire or parable in order to teach us some lesson about our own world. Swedenborg, however, never admitted to writing fiction, but rather transformed himself into a revelator figure, and though he never founded a religion, he did speak in his works about a “New Church,” and in the years after his death, a cult following did develop in reading groups and among those who studied and interpreted his many weird writings. In 1787, fifteen years after his death, his New Church was eventually organized in England, and this Swedenborgian church would be brought to America by none other than John Chapman, a nurseryman and conservationist who has been immortalized in tall tales as Johnny Appleseed. But besides this Church of New Jerusalem, as it was called, and its several denominations, Swedenborg’s influence can perhaps more widely be seen in his inspiration of another quasi-religious, pseudoscientific movement: spiritualism.

Spiritualists, those who claimed to act as a medium through which contact with the dead and other spirits could be made, first arose in the Burned-Over District of upstate New York, a hotbed of new religions out of which both the Millerites and the Mormons arose. In that milieu, the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, with his claims of psychic ability and spiritual travel and a “world of spirits,” was combined with the teachings of Franz Mesmer, who claimed that a group of people chained together by holding hands could amplify the paranormal power he called animal magnetism, and these two developed into the practices of séance and mediumship. And interestingly, spiritualists did not only claim to be able to contact the dead. They also claimed to contact extra-terrestrials. Helene Smith, a French medium, claimed in the late 19th century that she, too, like Swedenborg, had spiritually traveled to Mars and encountered Martians. And Sara Weiss, an American medium, claimed the same in the early 20th century. Just as Swedenborg’s account of travel through our solar system has been revealed to be false through his omission of all planets not known at the time that he wrote his works, so too the claims these mediums made of having visited Mars have been disproven because of their reliance on inaccurate notions popular at the time. They both included descriptions of canals on Mars, a notion that actual works of engineering could be seen on the planet’s surface, a false notion that arose because of a poor translation of Italian and that has since been definitively debunked with higher resolution imagery of Mars. This conflict between science and those who claim extra-terrestrial contact tends to be persistent. The claims of contactees and UFO religions blend the occult with materialist scientific ideas, and thus when scientific errors are corrected, they too much amend their doctrines. But this never stopped such claims from proliferating. Many are the supposed alien intelligences contacted through séance and telepathy. The most influential of these were the “Ascended Masters” of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, a 19th century religion that drew its teachings from her writings, many of which were proven to have been plagiarized. Blavatsky’s religion grew directly out of spiritualism, for she started out as a medium. Eventually she claimed to be in contact with and passing on the teachings of these “ascended masters,” who were extra-terrestrial entities dwelling on Venus. Despite the many and thorough debunkings of Madame Blavatsky as a con artist, which is a whole can of worms that I’ll have to open in a future episode, Theosophy had an outsized influence on on many thinkers. In fact the notion of a tulpa, or thought-form, which Carl Jung was playing with in his explanation of UFO sightings, was itself a Theosophical concept. And Blavatsky’s assertions about alien intelligences from Venus being “ascended masters” have cropped up time and time again in the stories of contactees, some of whom also went on to found religions of their own. Guy Ballard, a California mining engineer, began claiming in 1935 that he had met with Blavatsky’s Venusian ascended masters in a cavern inside Mount Shasta, and he went on to found a cult called the “I AM Activity” in which he supposedly passed on the new teachings of Blavatsky’s Venusians to his followers. Following the advent of saucer mania, perhaps the most influential or infamous of supposed contactees, George Adamski, who faked UFO photos and claimed to have been taken on a Swedenborgian voyage across the solar system, was known to have been a Theosophist before making his claims, and his Nordic-looking aliens also just happened to come from Venus. And George Van Tassel, a contactee whom I mentioned in a recent episode, who would start a religion called “The Ministry of Universal Wisdom,” claimed to have been in contact with an “ascended master” from Venus named Ashtar, whose spiritual revelations he compiled and passed on to his believers.

Emanuel Swedenborg, the originator of so-called “astrotheology.”

Many are the UFO religions founded on the spiritualist concept of channeling or telepathically being in contact with extra-terrestrial intelligences or spirits, such as the Mark-Age movement, based on the claims of a supposed contactee whose organization received promotion in the pages of Ray Palmer’s magazine Fate, which did so much to propagate UFO myths, or similar groups whose teachings were always received through channelers, like the Universarium Foundation and the Extra-terrestrial Earth Mission.  Some emergent UFO religions or cults did not seem to have much connection to spiritualism or Theosophy but rather represent a kind of syncretism of Christian theology and UFO mythology. The most prominent example of these is the Human Individual Metamorphosis group, who also called themselves Total Overcomers Anonymous, or UFO People, but who went by another name during the last years of their existence, a name that would become infamous after the group’s mass suicide: Heavens Gate. Other UFO groups, however, tend to mash up all of these influences, spiritualism and Theosophy with Christian elements, like the Aetherius Society and the Summit Lighthouse, whose founders claimed to be in contact with Ascended Masters from Venus and claimed that Jesus had been one such Venusian being. One of these religions was based on the teachings of a supposed venusian called Unarius, a group led by two channelers, Ernest and Ruth Norman, who also claimed to be reincarnations of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Then there is the more atheistical Raëlian Movement, whose prophet, a Frenchman named Claude Vorlihon who had taken the name Raël, began claiming that he had been contacted by extra-terrestrials called Elohim. Elohim is, of course, a word translated as angels in the Bible, and Raël claimed these aliens had simply been mistaken for angels in antiquity. Throughout history, he claimed, the Elohim had created alien-human hybrids to serve as their prophets, among them included the Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, and, of course, himself. His organization relies on membership fees, and one of their major practices is “sensual meditation,” as adherents are guided toward achieving “cosmic orgasm.” The church’s founder, Raël, also organized an exclusive order of women meant to serve as the sexual consorts of the Elohim, which until their arrival would just sexually gratify him, it seems. So here we find many of the hallmarks of a cult, but not all UFO religions are so easily categorized. One of the most successful UFO religions is Scientology, which is classified also as a secularized religion or a psychotherapeutically oriented religion, or just as a privatized religion or scam, but can certainly also be classified as a UFO religion because of its emphasis of an ancient alien myth regarding the origin of humanity, the “Xenu myth,” which they themselves call a “space opera,” admitting its science-fictional nature.

Even among UFO contactees who never start or join a religion focused on UFOs, though, we still see the clear connection of their UFO beliefs with religious concepts and experiences. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the claims of UFO abductees. Of course, much of the alien abduction phenomenon can be adequately explained based on the issues with hypnotic regression. I spoke a bit in my most recent patron exclusive minisode, which delved a little into the famous claims of Betty and Barney Hill, specifically highlighting some theories about the surfacing of traumatic memories surrounding accidental awareness, or waking up under anesthesia during medical procedures. There is also the general unreliability of hypnotic memory regression, which I will likely discuss more in my next patron exclusive. And a further rational explanation of many other abduction claims is that they conform to the experience of sleep paralysis, which may involve hypnopompic and hypnogogic hallucinations. Interestingly, this phenomenon can also be used to explain other supposedly supernatural phenomena or myths. As I spoke about in my episodes on vampires, it serves as a clear explanation of the accounts of revenants troubling townspeople in their sleep. The phenomenon of sleep paralysis and its attendant hallucination also explains claims of demonic visitation, and has even been called the “incubus phenomenon,” named after demons that supposedly attack one sexually while one is in bed, an incubus being a male version of this demon and a succubus the female version. Taking a Jungian view of these experiences, religious symbolism is most common in dreams, and while religious views of the past might have colored interpretations of the shadow figures of sleep paralysis hallucinations as demons, if our collective unconscious has adopted a newer, space-age conception of sky gods, as Jung suspected, it is reasonable to believe that many modern minds would interpret these hallucinations as extra-terrestrials today rather than as demons. Moreover, we see the sexual aspect of incubus and succubus encounters present also in many of these abduction experiences. Abductees claim to have been not just poked or probed painfully, but to have their genitals examined and to engage in sexual intercourse, claims that have led to the belief that extra-terrestrials seek to inter-breed and create some hybrid offspring. Whether or not the experiencer views their alien abductors as benevolent, neutral, or malicious, they still tend to be led to a kind of religious epiphany by the experience. Many abductees claim their abductors impart some moral lesson for them to pass on to the rest of humanity, an aspect that further helps us categorize these as quintessentially spiritual or religious experiences. Then there are those whose abduction experiences are horrifying, who view their abductors as evil, or we might say demonic, like horror writer Whitley Strieber, whose book on the topic bears the very religious-sounding title Communion. Indeed, he explicitly compares his “visitors” to demons, claiming they wield a “technology of the soul.” Strieber has actually argued against an exclusively materialist interpretation of abductee experiences, emphasizing their religious character. And seemingly unrelated to his abduction experience but further indicating his tendency toward religious experiences or visitations resulting in spiritual epiphany, Strieber later claimed to have been visited by an angelic type of character, a mysterious man who came to his hotel room and helped guide him to a new understanding of God.

“Der Traum der Gräfin Marguerite von Flandern” by Vincenz Georg Kininger, a clear depiction of the incubi phenomenon that may today present as the alien abduction phenomenon.

One last way in which UFO beliefs have been observed syncretizing with religious traditions is simply through the reinterpretation of Western religion through the lens of UFOlogy. This is the very kind of presentism I spoke about in the beginning of the episode, which serves as the bread and butter of ancient astronaut proponents like Erich von Däniken. These revisionists will scour scriptures for anything that might be construed as sounding related to the UFO phenomenon and hold it up as evidence of their UFO beliefs. Thus the descending of God onto Mount Sinai, which if anything just sounds like the description of a thunderstorm, is construed as the landing of an extra-terrestrial vehicle. Likewise the pillar of fire that led Israelites out of Egypt must also have been some ET craft. Perhaps the most commonly cited is Elijah’s ascent into heaven in a chariot of fire, though if we read that closely, this chariot of fire, led by horses of fire, only is said to separate Elijah from his son, and he is actually borne into heaven by a whirlwind, but even a whirlwind is close enough for those who want to find flying saucers in the Bible. They look at the Star of Bethlehem and see a saucer, they look at the heavens opening and God’s Spirit descending on Christ at his baptism and see a saucer, they look at the bright cloud that appears at Christ’s transfiguration and see a saucer, and they look at the cloud that hid Christ from their sight during his Ascension and again see a flying saucer. Whenever an angel appears, whenever the Holy Spirit descends, they speculate that it may have been a UFO or an alien or some kind of beam technology, and this backward thinking, this inverted logic, can be seen also in claims that UFOs are commonly depicted in religious art from the Renaissance. Indeed, there are numerous paintings, such as “The Annunciation with Saint Emidius” by Carlo Crivelli, 1486, in which a beam appears to come out of a circle in the clouds right into the Virgin Mary’s head, and “The Baptism of Christ” by Aert De Gelder in 1710, which depicts the Spirit descending on Jesus like beams of light out of a circle in the sky, and “The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John” by Domenico Ghirlandaio, sometimes called Our Lady of the Flying Saucer because of a luminous shape in the sky up at which a shepherd stares in the background. To my embarrassment, I actually used details of this painting, without any analysis, as the artwork of my old episode on UAP in history. The more I research and realize the problems with that early episode, the more I cringe at keeping it up in my feed. So while I quietly remove the episode from my public feed, let’s look at these Rennaisance paintings to see why they most certainly are not depicting flying saucers.

First of all, it is absurd to think that these paintings prove something about events in the Bible. They were painted more than a thousand years after the events they depict. The only thing they can show us is how such religious traditions were being conceived of and portrayed in Rennaisance artistic trends. And we must look back at the scriptures that inspired them to understand these portrayals. The heavens are said to have opened at Christ’s baptism, so the circle overhead through which the spirit of god descends like beams of light is not a disk-like object but rather a circular opening, a window in the firmament, or heavens. As for the circle in the sky beaming something into Mary’s head in Crivelli’s “Annunciation,” we know from the title and subject of the image that this is meant to portray angels communicating to Mary that she will give birth to the Son of God. There are very high-resolution images of this painting online, and if you zoom in, you can clearly see that it’s no flying saucer. Rather, it is two concentric rings of angels in a roiling cloud. You can see their cherubim faces and wings. This unlocks the meaning of all of these paintings, including the strange object hanging in the skies behind Our Lady of the Flying Saucer. These depictions derive from the Renaissance artists’ clearer understanding of how biblically-accurate angels were described. Most I think have by now seen the viral social media memes saying “Here’s what angels really look like,” suggesting typical depictions of angels are all wrong and that the religious don’t even know their Bibles because angels really were just a terrifying mass of wings and eyes. There is some element of truth to this, as specific angels, seraphim and cherubim, are described in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation as having numerous wings, not just two, and numerous eyes as well as multiple faces. Of course, there are also descriptions of angels and archangels as being humanlike, so as always, don’t get your understanding of history or mythology from a meme. But the clincher here comes from the numerous detailed descriptions of angels in Ezekiel. The prophet’s vision repeatedly talks of cherubim forming into “wheels,” or circling up. Likewise, his vision of God enthroned describes how the throne is borne aloft by these very same angelic wheels. Of course, those who seek some confirmation of UFOs in the Bible take his description of “wheels within wheels” out of context and claim it to be yet another biblical flying saucer, but what Ezekiel is actually describing is the formation of angels into rings that encircle and carry the throne of God. It seems abundantly apparent that this is what Renaissance artists were depicting when they painted divine circles in the sky: either rings of angels or the very throne of God as described in the Bible. To project modern ideas about space aliens onto the intentions of these artists or onto the traditions of ancient religions is really to misrepresent and revise them.

Aert de Gelder’s “Baptism of Christ” (c. 1710)

The modern tendency to project newer ideas about space travel and alien visitation onto old, inherited religious ideas, and the desire to reconcile the two claims into one coherent worldview, may be more deeply entrenched among military officials, the intelligence community, and lawmakers than we might suspect. One of the first signs that this perspective was spreading in those fields came in 1994, when two former Air Force officers self-published a book called Unmasking the Enemy, claiming that because witnesses had described UFOs as vanishing like ghosts, they must actually be demons. That’s right, they jumped right past hallucinations and mass hysteria and any sort of rational explanation having to do with experimental technology like stealth, and they went right to demons! And in 2010, UFO and paranormal researcher Nick Redfern claims to have stumbled onto what appeared to be a secret group within the Department of Defense called the Collins Elite that was dedicated to investigating the possibility that UAP are actually angels and demons. Redfern is known to uncritically repeat some of the most outrageous claims of conspiracy and the supernatural in his work, so I would caution that he’s not exactly a reliable source, but after his book, when wild conspiracy claims about the Collins Elite began to spread online, he tried to correct the record, explaining that the only thing he had discovered, by being put into contact with members of the alleged group through a priest who had been approached by them, was that they started out as a group of Christians who came to this conclusion about UFOs in the 1980s, met and discussed their ideas with others, growing their numbers during the 1990s, and eventually, through the Defense Department contacts of some involved, ended up getting some state funding. According to Redfern, they are not a large or powerful organization, just an assemblage of like-minded people, and their activities are mostly focused on briefing congressmen and senators on their theory that UFOs are demonic. This is absolutely a baseless conspiracy claim from an unreliable and unverifiable source, but based on the fact that we know, from the book Unmasking the Enemy, that this theory was prevalent in the Air Force in the 90s, and we further know from the comments of Lue Elizondo that some shadowy figure in the Pentagon expressed the same theory, and we know that legislators like Marjorie Taylor Greene have started floating this theory themselves, it certainly seems believable. Redfern suggests that the Collins Elite specifically chooses to approach legislators who might be likely to believe their theory, and the notion that some rogue group of religious officials in the Pentagon may be whispering into the ears of already bonkers representatives like Greene that UFOs are probably demons is terrifying.

It seems quite possible that such a group as the Collins Elite, working behind the scenes like lobbyists, may have pushed for the recent congressional hearing in order to make a public spectacle and bring the issue into the limelight—a kind of religious evangelism through government that should be prohibited by the separation of church and state. But still, while such a group, if it exists, may be growing in its influence, and the syncretism of Christianity with UFO beliefs appears to be continuing apace, it is my personal view that there are others within the military and intelligence community who will never subscribe to such a theory since they already know that UAP are not angels or demons or aliens because they know exactly what classified technology is being mistaken for them. My personal pet theory, which I did not arrive at on my own and has been floating around for decades, is that most sightings that are hard to explain with mundane phenomena like birds and balloons and optical illusions, can be explained by radar spoofing technology. Indeed, certain recent UAP described by Navy pilots as orbs with a cube inside have been identified as radar-reflecting balloons. And for any sightings that involve impossible maneuvers or speeds, there is the potential explanation that particle beams may be theoretically projected, from the ground or from an aircraft, creating a glowing plasma ball in the sky that can be seen by the naked eye and by instrumentation, could be made to look like it was performing maneuvers and achieving speeds that no aircraft possibly could, and could be made to disappear at will simply by hitting the off switch. This is, admittedly, only theoretical, which any deeply classified technology would be until it has been revealed that we have had it for years, but it should be noted that we use very similar technology today in the medical field, to project protons for targeted radiation on cancer, in a procedure called proton beam therapy. It may likewise be speculation, but to me it seems a more rational and feasible explanation that does not smack of religion at all.

Further Reading

The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds. Edited by James R. Lewis, State University of New York Press, 1995.

https://journalnews.com.ph/the-collins-elite-what-in-hell-ufos-demons-and-putting-the-picture-straight/

Gallant, James. “Angels of the Singularity.” The Fortnightly Review, 16 Oct. 2022, https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2022/10/gallant-angels-singularity/.

Jung, C.G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Translated by R. F. C. Hull, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/carl-jung-flying-saucers-a-modern-myth-of-things-seen-in-the-skies-0_202012/mode/2up.

Partridge, Christopher. “Alien demonology: the Christian roots of the malevolent extraterrestrial in UFO religions and abduction spiritualities.” Religion, vol. 34, no. 3, July 2004, pp. 163-189. ScienceDirect, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048721X04000570.

UFO Whistleblowers, An American Tradition - Part Three: Bob Lazar

This does not represent a complete transcript of the episode or list of my sources, as the podcast version of this episode contains significant archival audio, some of which actually serves as source evidence for the argument I make. Please listen if you are interested!

Just a few years ago, in September of 2019, a proposal for American civilians to descend upon a Top Secret military research installation gained viral support on social media. The U.S. military base in question is located within the Nevada Test and Training Range at Nellis Air Force Base. Specifically, it is part of the Tonopah Bombing Range located at the dry bed of Groom Lake, a tract of land known as Area 51, famous in urban legend for being associated with flying saucers and aliens. The event to Storm Area 51 was treated as a joke by both the media and the participants, but the government appeared to take it seriously, issuing stern warnings ahead of the event and beefing up security during the gathering, which only drew about 1500 curious youth and spectators to surrounding towns, with only about 150 actually trekking out to the gates of the facility. It ended up being more of a fun happening or festival than a serious raid. The response of the federal government, though, only served to exacerbate longstanding myths about the base’s harboring of secret alien technology. Strangely, this event came years after the government began to ease security and tug back the veil of secrecy surrounding Area 51. Indeed, the fact that the dry bed of Groom Lake was being used as an airstrip was rather openly acknowledged from the beginning of the site’s use. Though the existence of the facility there and especially its purpose had long been classified, in 1998, the Air Force did acknowledge the “location known as ‘Area 51’” on Groom Dry Lake, asserting the “[s]pecific activities and operations conducted” there “remain classified and cannot be discussed publicly.” Then in 2013, when in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the CIA finally released an official history of certain spy plane programs, the existence and purpose of Area 51 was further acknowledged, complete with maps of the site. As a result of this declassification and release of information, as well as a great deal of investigative reporting in previous years, the world actually knew a lot about Area 51 and what really went on there long before some kids started planning their Naruto run at its gates. We know that, in 1955, the Central Intelligence Agency visited the Nevada Test Site, a nuclear proving ground under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission, and decided that the Groom Lake salt flat was a perfect natural airstrip for their spy plane project. Since the end of World War II, reconnaissance of Soviet atomic facilities had become paramount, and stealth was the name of the game. Groom Lake would be the perfect site for testing the U-2 spy plane and for training its pilots, and the site would remain in use for decades for test flights of the Lockheed A-12 and the F-117 Nighthawk. The flights of these high-altitude experimental aircraft also provide a clear and rational explanation for many of the reports of strange sightings in the skies over the area as well. But regardless of this revelation, which was already something of an open secret by that time anyway, the myth of Area 51 aliens or extra-terrestrial technology persisted and inspired the social media event of 2019 mainly because of the claims of one man, Bob Lazar, who claimed to have worked at a secret facility outside Area 51 on a UFO reverse engineering program. This supposed whistleblower has been absolutely discredited, but today another man, David Grusch, is making very similar claims about top secret programs reverse engineering non-human craft, and Lazar, as well as his longtime promoters, have been asserting that Grusch’s testimony somehow vindicates Lazar. In this third and final installment of my series on the longstanding American Tradition of UFO Whistleblowers blowing hot air, I look at Bob Lazar’s complete lack of credibility and suggest that rather than Grusch vindicating him, his disproven assertions rather should cast doubt on the reliability of Grusch’s similar claims.

At the outset of this episode, I must explain how the claims of a UFO hoaxer, which as I said had been thoroughly debunked decades earlier, could have possibly been influential on the Storm Area 51 phenomenon and might even be connected today to the claims of David Grusch before Congress. While it is true that Bob Lazar’s claims had long ago been systematically refuted and exposed as false, because of a recent documentary, he was having something of a moment in 2019. The movie was called Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers, and during the promotion of this film, Lazar appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience. This was in June 2019, and by the end of that summer, millions of people were threatening to storm Area 51. I think it’s pretty common knowledge the kind of reach Rogan’s podcast has. At the time, he was boasting some 190 million downloads a month. The importance of Joe Rogan’s amplification of Bob Lazar’s old, refuted claims and filmmaker Jeremy Corbell’s promotion of them cannot be underestimated. He gave Lazar a massive platform, and though he may have asked a few pointed questions, it’s clear throughout that he’s handling Lazar with kid gloves, as though careful not to confront him too much. After this episode, I’m sure you’ll agree that there is much that Rogan should have raised in the interview and made the audience aware of, facts that Corbell’s documentary also failed to emphasize. The fact that the viral Facebook post suggesting the storming of Area 51 was created within a week of the airing of Rogan’s interview of Lazar, I think makes the connection exceedingly clear. Corbell and Lazar and Rogan absolutely could have gotten some kids shot with their reckless propagation of conspiracist misinformation. And now 4 years later, just this summer, we saw another UFO whistleblower sit before a congressional panel and make very similar claims about the reverse engineering of alien technology. Now I should clarify that Grusch currently enjoys legal whistleblower protections that Bob Lazar never did. In fact, the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 came into effect a month before Lazar ever went public with his claims, yet he never attempted to claim these legal protections. Moreover, unlike other true whistleblowers who went public with real information, like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, he has never faced federal prosecution or prison, which should serve to discredit his claims at the outset. While these contrasts may seem to put Grusch into an entirely separate category from Lazar, what may surprise many is that there are suspicious connections between Lazar and Grusch. Now, here at the end of my series, I finally tie that red yarn around a pin in the photo of George Knapp, veteran Las Vegas TV news reporter, and pull it taut to John Lear, whose wild alien conspiracy claims Knapp aired on television, and I take that red string past my photo of Lear’s first supposed whistleblower protégé, Bill Cooper, to the photo of Bob Lazar, another “whistleblower” that John Lear would introduce to the world and whom George Knapp would put on TV. From Lazar’s photo, that red string originating from George Knapp extends to Jeremy Corbell, Knapp’s protégé and cohost of his podcast, who made the film that put Lazar back on the map. And finally, the red string terminates at my photo of David Grusch, who long before his testimony to Congress had met with both Corbell and Knapp, discussing his supposed revelations with them and perhaps even being counseled or coached by them. After all, look at the film of Grusch’s appearance before Congress, you can see these two, Knapp and Corbell, Bob Lazar’s biggest boosters, sitting right behind Grusch.

Bob Lazar is sometimes credited with being the first to reveal the existence of Area 51 to the public, but this is not really accurate. Certainly Lazar’s claims helped to spread the word about Area 51 and to popularize notions about it, but his naming of Area 51 was not proof of inside knowledge of the facilities there. First of all, there had long been reports linking the Nevada Test Site and Groom Lake to UFO sightings. These sightings had actually begun with the first U-2 flights. The extreme altitude at which these planes flew meant that, when the pilots of commercial aircraft caught sight of them, they simply could not comprehend what they might have been. And though they flew at night, they were at first silver and reflected lights from below. They would actually be painted black in order to help them better blend in and reduce the number of such UFO sightings. Nevertheless, Groom Lake had a reputation already, years before Lazar’s appearance, as a hotbed of UFO activity, and Lazar was not even the first to reveal on television that this secret part of the base was called Area 51. This occurred the year before, in 1988, on the television program UFO Cover-Up?: Live! On this program, Bill Moore and his partner Jaime Shandera, the men responsible for spreading the “Majestic-12” forgery, introduced two informants, Falcon and Condor, whose faces were hidden in shadow and whose voices had been electronically garbled, claiming they were high-level UFO whistleblowers. These individuals seem to be the first to publicly identify the facility as Area 51. So who were these men? One common theory about Falcon was that he was none other than Rick Doty, the AFOSI disinformation agent tasked with feeding crazy ideas about aliens to UFOlogists. Bill Moore so strenuously denied this that it seemed like he protested too much. If this were the case, if Doty were Falcon, it would mean the Air Force themselves had revealed that the facility was called Area 51, and that they had done so in order to encourage the false belief that there was spooky alien stuff happening there, rather than the very real spy-plane programs and other classified projects that probably were being conducted. The UFO Cover-Up?: Live! Program made a big deal about confirming Falcon’s credentials, which of course, in the case of Rick Doty, they would have been able to do.

But actually, the mention of Area 51 by name came from the other informant on this program, Condor. Even with his voice garbled, the tenor and cadence is very similar to that of John Lear, at least to my ear. Could John Lear, aviator turned “dark side” UFOlogist conspiracy nut, have been Condor? Interestingly, years later, when a screenwriter was working with Bob Lazar on adapting his claims to film, Lazar went through an old calendar with the writer, and on October 14th, 1988, Bob had indicated that he’d watched the UFO Cover-Up?: Live! Program, and he is on tape telling the screenwriter that he watched it to see John Lear on TV, the same John Lear whom his calendar indicated he had met ten days earlier. Well, this program can be viewed in its entirety online. John Lear did not appear on the program, unless, indeed, he was one of the supposed government informants. And even a year before the UFO Cover-Up?: Live! Program, back in 1987, John Lear was already telling George Knapp on Channel 8 that the government was hiding alien technology out at Groom Lake. So the question then becomes, how did John Lear learn the official name of Area 51? If we look back into Lear’s past, before he ever went on the air with George Knapp to express his UFO cover-up hypothesis, we find that he was an anonymous source on a scoop story out of Knapp’s news center about stealth aircraft being tested at the Nevada Test Site. Bob Stoldal, the head of KLAS-TV News and George Knapp’s boss, had worked with Lear before, and as it turns out he had done a great deal of digging into the Nevada Test Site for years, learning more and more about a particular patch of ground that went by various names. Apparently, he learned from a map on the back of a brochure printed for the visit of President Kennedy that this section of the test site was designated Area 51. Thus we see the name Area 51 was earlier turned up through good old-fashioned investigative journalism, was probably learned by John Lear through his association with the television news journalists of that station, and was then repeated through a voice garbler on live TV and shared with his other darksider UFOlogists, as well as, most likely, with a certain gangly man who came to meet him in 1989, interested in UFO research, who later that year would claim he managed to get a job out at Area 51.

According to George Knapp, Bob Lazar’s first appearance on television came as a result of a last-minute cancellation. Apparently, Knapp reached out to John Lear seeking someone else to interview, and Lear recommended Bob Lazar. Knapp conducted his first interview with Bob Lazar in a news van on John Lear’s front lawn. Lazar appeared in shadows, using the false name Dennis. He claimed that there were numerous extra-terrestrial craft—flying saucers—being dismantled and tested out at Groom Lake. This is the first time he claims that he was involved in working on the propulsion system of the craft as well. The interview spread these claims very far at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy, being aired on other stations. Well George Knapp knew ratings gold when he saw it, and he managed to get Lazar to come back and go on the record under his real name. In this second interview, he went more in-depth about the propulsion systems he was supposedly working on, mentioning anti-matter reactors. He describes being flown to Groom Lake and placed on a bus that drove him to an even more secret facility, S4, at another dry lakebed, Papoose Lake, south of Area 51. Now this little detail, about the flights conducted by military contractor EG&G to Area 51 has been highlighted as proof that Lazar was telling the truth, because EG&G did in fact conduct these flights, called Janet Airlines, ferrying workers to the base frequently. Moreover, his knowledge of the geography of the base seems to impress people that Lazar is being truthful. However, if we examine the calendar that Lazar shared with the screenwriter interested in adapting his story, we find, first, several inconsistencies, as well as indications he had doctored the calendar to support his story, and some indications of what he was actually up to. So for example, he had noted several trips out to the area before he supposedly started working there, and one entry that mentioned getting an old photo of Groom Lake blown up, which is exactly what one might do if they were planning on making up a story about the place. He had also written and then scribbled out EG&G in more than one place. He said some of these entries were his interviews with the contractor, but he could not explain the scribbled-out entries. Perhaps he was actually researching EG&G and learning about their regular flights out to Area 51. Some have suggested the Janet flights were not as secret as has been claimed. But what appears to me to be the biggest indicator that Bob Lazar was never actually on such a flight is that he seems to have told George Knapp that the flights left from EG&G or near EG&G. In fact, they departed from the westernmost terminal of MacCarran International Airport, some three miles from the EG&G facility. Perhaps he knew something about these flights. He may have even known people who did work for EG&G, people had taken a Janet flight out to the base, but as we will see, there are numerous reasons to doubt that he ever did.

The true start of Bob Lazar’s involvement with UFOs appears to begin with his friendship with one Gene Huff. George Knapp identifies Huff as a real estate appraiser. It has since been revealed that Gene Huff and Bob Lazar were already taking an interest in UFOs a full year before he started making claims publicly about working at Area 51, and several months before he was supposedly hired to work there. Gene Huff had contacted John Lear in June of 1988, wanting copies of certain UFO research materials that Lear had and offering to appraise Lear’s house in return. Huff brought his buddy Bob Lazar, who claimed that he had previously worked at Los Alamos National Lab, and because of his Q clearance, he would know whether such things about UFOs are true. As I mentioned in the Bill Cooper episode, this notion that anyone with a Q clearance who works at a lab would be able to confirm or deny all the biggest national secrets is just preposterous. If that were so, my buddy who holds a Q clearance to work at Lawrence Livermore Labs would be keeping some awful big secrets for an IT guy. It appears that Huff and Lazar may have been planning their hoax when they approached Lear for research materials. Huff would be a mainstay in Lazar’s early career, appearing with him in numerous interviews to help him keep his story straight. Once again, Lazar’s calendar and what he said about the entries in it show that he was hiding his early association with Lear, as when an entry indicated multiple meetings with Lear before the development of his claims, such as in September and October, when the UFO Cover-Up?: Live! Program aired, and November of that year. Lazar tried to claim that some of these were actually some other, random person also named John Lear. In an unbelievable coincidence that John Lear either knew was a lie or was gullible enough to believe, Lazar began telling him that now, since their discussions about UFOs, during which Lazar had supposedly been skeptical, that now he just happened to get a job at Area 51, where the secrets of aliens and their technology were revealed to him.

In March of 1989, he took Gene Huff and John Lear out to a certain spot in Tikaboo Valley to view some lights in the sky, which he claimed were saucer tests. The video footage is too poor to make out anything but a spot of light. We can hear Lear and the others marveling at its movements, but as far as we can tell by viewing it today, these are actually the movements of the camera and the unsteady hand filming it. A few different explanations have been put forth for what they saw that Wednesday night. One is that it was an experimental spy plane. Another is that it was just the Janet Airlines flight taking workers out for the night, something that happened like clockwork. One more outlandish explanation that is still more rational than aliens is that it was a test of a particle beam technology used for radar spoofing, the beam of which would not have been visible, but which would terminate in a bright globe that might have looked like a saucer below and could be dragged around the skies like a spotlight. Whatever it was that they saw, like Bob’s apparent knowledge of the Janet flights, his apparent knowledge of when there would be something to see in the night sky is sometimes touted as proof of his veracity. In fact, though, it was apparently common knowledge among area UFO enthusiasts when activity seemed most common over the base. For example, the next year, Norio Hayakawa, the very same lecture promoter of Bill Cooper briefly mentioned in the last episode, came out to Las Vegas to interview Lazar for a Japanese magazine, and he said that he came on a Wednesday because “that was the day we’d heard on the radio they did flying saucer tests.” And there is very clear, irrefutable evidence that Lazar was already driving up to those mountains and watching lights in the sky months before he ever claimed to have gotten a job there. These excursions appeared on his own calendar, and he told John Lear all about them during those early months when they first met. So there is really no reason to believe he had to have some insider knowledge to know when one was likely to see lights in the sky there.

Bob Lazar’s story was communicated in broad strokes in his interviews with George Knapp and afterward fleshed out in a short film written, produced and directed by Gene Huff and himself, The Lazar Tape…and Excerpts from the Government Bible. In one of the most hilariously melodramatic openings I’ve ever seen, Bob Lazar is filmed driving across the desert in a sportscar, approaching from a distance as eerie music plays until he is close enough to step out of the car and start telling his story. Bob says he was a physicist at Los Alamos. He claims that one day, Dr. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, was speaking at Los Alamos and Bob saw him reading the local newspaper, the Monitor, on the cover of which was Bob, as a local reporter had written a story about him installing a jet engine into his car. According to Lazar, this somehow impressed Teller, and years later, after bankruptcy and his association with John Lear, neither of which he mentions, Teller remembered Lazar when Lazar sent him a resume and asked for his help finding a job. Lazar claims Teller telephoned him and gave him a contact at EG&G, and after some tough interviews, he was hired and flown to Area 51, then bussed to the super-secret S4. It is perhaps worthwhile to recall, here, that according to the lore surrounding Area 51, not even the president had clearance. At least that’s what Bill Cooper used to claim. Yet we are to believe that a civilian with financial troubles was granted access. Financial difficulties, it should be noted, are a well-known reason for the denial of a security clearance since financial difficulties can be leveraged to get people to reveal secrets. But no, Lazar claims he had no difficulties being granted his clearance, and soon he was being shown nine different flying saucers in the hangars of S4. They didn’t work up to this reveal. They didn’t keep him in the dark at first to see if he could be trusted. They just drove him right out to see the flying disks. Lazar described three projects related to the alien craft, projects Galileo, Sidekick, and Looking Glass. The first, Galileo, was about the method of the craft’s propulsion and fuel, which Lazar described as being gravitational wave produced by anti-matter. The second, Project Sidekick, dealt with some beam weapon of extraterrestrial origin. The third, Looking Glass, was about some technology the aliens used to look backward in time. According to Lazar, they read him into all these projects, allowing him to view a file detailing alien contact with human civilization going far back in history. Let’s just consider this. I think most people understand the value of compartmentalization on top secret programs. Lazar explains that he was brought in to reverse engineer the flying disks and worked principally on their means of propulsion. There would have been no clear reason to inform him about Project Sidekick or Project Looking Glass at all, then. So on this, the most highly classified and secret project in our government’s history, there was no compartmentalization at all, and they saw fit to just reveal everything to this former Los Alamos employee simply on the recommendation of Dr. Teller, who himself apparently had nothing to do with the project.

Lazar has told different stories about Teller’s involvement, sometimes claiming that he was not active in anything other than a consultant capacity, and other times claiming he actually ran the UFO program. The only part of Lazar’s claims that appears true is that Edward Teller was at Los Alamos the day after that newspaper article about Lazar’s jetcar appeared, but at the time, and during the 6 years that followed, Teller was not running some top secret UFO program. His papers show where he was traveling, and it was only rarely to Las Vegas. He was devoting his time in those years to political activism, and in fact, on the day that Lazar claims Teller phoned him to recommend him to EG&G, Teller was actually busy giving a speech at Cal State Northridge, which both his archives and the university newspaper confirm. The idea that he would have been so impressed by Lazar strapping a jet engine to his car that he remembered him 6 years later and thought he should be working on reverse engineering extraterrestrial technology is just preposterous. Yet this is really the only evidence Lazar has ever provided that holds up to scrutiny. In his videotape, he puts an image up of the Los Alamos Monitor cover, and then he further shows the image of a clipping mentioning Teller’s visit to Los Alamos, as if this were proof of their meeting. And at the end of his video, he shares a clip of a 1990 interview with Dr. Teller in which it appears that Teller is refusing to answer a direct question about Lazar. If we pay attention to the entirety of that clip, though, it’s clear that he is saying that what the interview keeps badgering him about is just not interesting, and that if the interviewer keeps pestering him about it, he will refuse to answer. In fact, it’s unclear if he even registers the question about Lazar, whose name he may not have even recognized. One can find this snippet of a longer interview, which was edited and taken out of context in The Lazar Tape, all over the internet, but I and other researchers I’ve contacted have been unable to find the entire interview anywhere. I suspect that if we were to listen to it in its entirety, it would be clear that it’s not the nefarious refusal to address the topic that it is presented to be. It is admittedly difficult, given the poor audio and Teller’s  heavy accent, but with some effort you can make out what he’s saying at the beginning of the clip: “if you use nuclear fuel, and not definitely, possibly…nuclear fuel is feasible, but whether these very great velocities are feasible, which are interesting if you ever want to get to another star, that is an important question. And that’s about all I can say.” So it seems clear, even from the bit Lazar and Huff took out of context, that the interviewer was putting questions to him about the kinds of propulsion Lazar was describing. Making no remarks that indicate any knowledge of some anti-matter reaction capable of producing gravitational wave propulsion, as Lazar had claimed, Teller was just commenting on the general feasibility of a nuclear fuel, unsure if such a thing might make interstellar travel possible. When he said, “That’s all I can say” it was more like “I don’t know anything more than that” rather than “official secrecy proscribes further comment,” and when the interviewer kept pushing on the same topic, that was when he said he would stop answering the questions. But even if what Lazar said about meeting Teller and about Teller recommending him to EG&G were, despite all likelihood, true, there are other issues that would have certainly come up, preventing him from being granted clearance to the Nevada Test Site and Area 51, for it seems Bob Lazar’s past was just a tissue of lies.

The story becomes even more preposterous as we look further into his credentials and see he has completely misrepresented himself. The parts of his story that have most thoroughly debunked have to do with his education and thus his claims of having been a physicist. He claimed to have masters’ degrees from both MIT and CalTech. First of all, having a master’s degree is simply not as impressive as it may sound. I have a master’s degree, and I would presume that the government, wanting an expert to reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology would seek out someone with multiple doctorates. But regardless, there is ample evidence that he doesn’t even hold these degrees. One UFOlogist who actually was a nuclear physicist, Stanton Friedman, was among the first to discredit Lazar based on the fact that he simply did not have the advanced degrees he claimed to have. Neither MIT nor CalTech have any records of his enrollment. He doesn’t appear in their yearbooks. No thesis written by Lazar has ever been produced. The only education of Lazar’s that can be confirmed is his high school education, where he finished in the bottom third of his class, which means he would not have gained entry into the prestigious university’s he claimed to attend. Otherwise, he does appear to have attended a junior college, and records show he was matriculating there at the same time that he claimed to be attending MIT. Moreover, he has been consistently unable to name classmates at MIT or CalTech, and none have every come forward. When asked to name an instructor he had, he feigned an inability to recall, and then actually named an instructor from his junior college in California. Other researchers have dug up his 1980 marriage certificate, which shows that he had only completed the 12th grade. How does Lazar explain these discrepancies? Well, he says that the government is erasing any record of him. Let’s consider that a moment. For this to be true, dozens of admissions office workers at MIT and CalTech would also have to be in on it, as would his instructors and classmates. The government would have to be able to erase memories and doctor all existing copies of those schools’ yearbooks. Not only that, even if the government were capable of such an erasure, Bob Lazar himself would be able to prove it. He would have copies of his own thesis, copies of his own transcripts, copies of recommendation letters from those instructors whose names he conveniently forgot. And Lazar only ever complains about how the erasure of his credentials has discredited him, not how it has affected his livelihood or opportunities in any way, which would be the foremost effect of having one’s hard-earned graduate education revoked. Anyone with some experience of higher education knows that these things are true and thus Lazar’s claims must be false. George Knapp, however, tends to complain that he covered these things right from the start. To his credit, he did mention them. But think about that. Knapp put Lazar on the air with his identity hidden in May of that year, and then in November, he revealed his identity along with the claim that the government had already erased his past. That is a quick cover-up. It seems more likely that Lazar knew, if he revealed his identity, these lies would be promptly exposed, so he simply gave this excuse to account for them. But Knapp claimed that the mere fact Bob Lazar had worked at Los Alamos proved his educational background must have been confirmed at some point in the past. But did Lazar really work as a physicist at Los Alamos?

Knapp himself found that Los Alamos had no record of Lazar’s employment. However, Knapp dug further and discovered a phone book with listings for all workers at Los Alamos during the time when Lazar claimed to be there, and lo and behold, there was Bob’s name. Knapp presented this as evidence of a cover-up. But it has since been shown that the phone book in question listed not only scientists and other staff at the labs, but also contractors working for the Kirk-Mayer corporation, and Lazar’s name had the initials KM afterward, indicating he was just an outside contractor there, not a physicist. Kirk-Mayer hired technicians to do low level work at Los Alamos, and this lines up with other things we know about Lazar’s work history, as that 1980 marriage certificate lists his occupation as “electronics technician.” Later researchers actually managed to get physicists and co-workers of Lazar’s from Los Alamos on the record stating that Bob was something of a do-nothing employee who had been fired for trying to use the labs’ toll-free phones system to run a personal business venture. No one could doubt that Bob was certainly in Los Alamos at the time, because of the newspaper story about him and his jet car in the Los Alamos Monitor. The fact is that Bob probably misrepresented himself to this journalist, Terry England, in the same way he would later misrepresent himself to the world. But Knapp and the documentarian Jeremy Corbell have made much of the fact that the article’s author called him a physicist. Corbell, on Rogan, claimed that England told him he had confirmed Lazar’s status as a physicist at the lab back when he wrote the piece. However, in a more recent interview, England says he took Lazar at his word and denied ever saying otherwise to Corbell. Perhaps even more telling, though, is the fact that records show Bob was running a photo processing business at the same time, there in Los Alamos. On his bankruptcy filing, he lists his photo business and mentions nothing about his work with Kirk-Mayer at Los Alamos National Lab, further indicating that his role there was minor, and certainly not that of a physicist, as it was not his principal source of income.

Further evidence of Bob Lazar not being a physicist is the fact that he has never agreed to speak with a confirmed nuclear physicist who might probe his genuine knowledge. One of the first such nuclear physicists he has avoided was Stanton Friedman. And ever since, he has carefully avoided any one-on-one with anyone who might actually be able to tell he was anything other than an auto-didact, a self-taught science enthusiast who is good at giving the impression of his general understanding of scientific subjects. He is far more comfortable with other auto-didacts, like Joe Rogan. And we know he relies on technobabble to overawe and impress people. Take his jet-powered car, for example, which was supposedly such a feat of engineering that it earned him a job reverse-engineering the most secret technology on earth. Well, it turns out that, growing up in San Fernando Valley, he knew the inventor of those jet engines, Eugene Gluhareff, and as a teen he had strapped a similar engine to his bicycle. In the infamous newspaper article about his car, he claimed that the engine produced 1,600 pounds of thrust, but this is an apparent lie meant to impress the newspaperman, a further example of his self-promotion and misrepresentation. The largest Gluhareff jet engines produced only 700 pounds of thrust, and the one he had in his Honda was much smaller. Such lies for self-promotion even seem to have continued through more recent years. After Knapp’s original promotion of Lazar’s claims, but before Jeremy Corbell reinvigorated his hoax, Lazar ran a business selling mail-order supplies to amateur scientists and science teachers. When his home was raided in 2003 because he was selling the materials   make illegal fireworks and explosives, Wired Magazine wrote a short piece about it called “Don’t Try This at Home,” which amazingly made no mention at all of Bob’s claim to fame. In the article, Bob claims to have a particle accelerator in his backyard, a rather absurd claim since any particle accelerator worth its salt would be many kilometers long, and could not be powered by the Van de Graaf generator that Bob claims powers it in the article, as such generators could only produce several megavolts and a real accelerator would require hundreds of megawatts. Not to mention the simple fact that, if the authorities raided his home out of concern for explosive materials he was selling, they certainly would have also confiscated a device that uses high-energy proton beams to collide particles. Such a device could be infinitely more dangerous than any illegal fireworks.

The image used by WIRED magazine for their piece on Bob’s lab supplies business.

The most prominent display of Lazar’s supposed scientific knowledge is provided by his discussion of the means of fuel and propulsion that he claimed was used by the flying saucers he reverse-engineered at S4. In his video, he explains the science in the simplest of terms, as a “science lesson.” To summarize, he claims that the craft fire and collide particles—and here we go again with a small particle accelerator—and these are particles of a non-earthly element that Lazar supposedly located on the periodic table as Element 115. Particles of this element, he says, create anti-matter, can produce gravitational waves, and with this warping of the fabric of space and time, enables the craft to travel great distances. Now, it’s important to note that anti-matter propulsion may actually be feasible. But lest we think that this is proof of what Lazar claimed we reverse engineered in the 1980s, the fact is that we have known about antimatter for a long time, since it was first theorized by Paul Dirac in the 1930s. Even the idea of antimatter propulsion was not new, having been proposed by German scientist Eugene Sanger in the 1950s. But that idea of antimatter propulsion was to harness the energy produced by its annihilation effect, a reaction that happens when antimatter and matter collide. This annihilation effect is also the reason that it has been so difficult to harness. But the important thing to note here is that it is NOT about producing gravitational waves. Nor was the idea of gravitational waves a new idea, having been famously predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity back in 1915, long before Lazar came around. Even the idea that the warping of space and time through gravitational waves could make instantaneous travel across great distances possible was also not new. This idea really was dreamed up by children’s book author Madeline L’Engle, who after reading a book about Einstein’s theory in the late 1950s began adapting the idea for her famous novel, A Wrinkle in Time. Anyone who read this book as a kid or saw the recent film adaptation should recognize that Lazar was doing little besides paraphrasing some children’s science-fiction. What’s really interesting is that it wasn’t until 2016 that Einstein’s prediction was proven accurate, when the LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, managed to detect gravitational waves, which was not easy, since they are nearly imperceptible. It is worth mentioning, then, that the waves detected by LIGO originated from far away, generated by neutron stars. If the government were testing and operating flying saucers that generate gravitational waves right here on Earth, in Nevada, then the two LIGO observatories in Washington and Louisiana would surely have detected it.

Another supposed prediction of Bob Lazar’s touted as proof that he was telling the truth came in 2003, when Element 115 was officially discovered, or more accurately synthesized. However, any science student with a working knowledge of the periodic table could tell you that predicting an element of that designation was not some incredible feat. It was long known that an element with that atomic number might one day be discovered or created. Such is the nature of the periodic table, and Bob, who certainly did work in some capacity at Los Alamos, would have known about the search for these elements, as the Meson Physics Facility there, where he claimed to be a physicist, houses an incredibly powerful accelerator used for similar work. Teams operating comparable accelerators all over the world had been working on creating and observing these missing elements for decades. In 1970, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, they managed it with the previously unknown elements 104 and 105, and in Russia, they observed element 106, all in 1974. In the 1980s, when Bob worked as a contract technician at Los Alamos, the same was achieved for elements 107 through 109 at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Germany, and it surely would have been talked about a lot at Los Alamos. The nineties saw the discovery of 110 through 112 and 114, and the 2000s saw not just element 115 but also 113, 116, and 118. To suggest that the discovery of this element was the result of the recovery of some extra-terrestrial material is just wrong and fails to acknowledge all the hard work of physicists in this field for decades. More than that, one of Lazar’s central claims is that element 115 was stable. Some have suggested that he read this prediction in Scientific American, which had proposed a possible “island of stability” around Element 114 in an article back in 1969, and again in an article called “Creating Superheavy Elements” in May of 1989, the same month that Lazar went on TV. When Element 115 was finally discovered, though, it wasn’t stable as Lazar had predicted, and it could not possibly be used for anything, since it only lasted a fraction of a second. Lazar also claimed element 115’s melting point would be 1740 degrees Celsius, but actually it seems to be 400 degrees Celsius. And While most are focused on the synthesis of 115, Lazar also made very specific claims about element 116, which has also since been discovered and named Livermorium. He said that, when it was synthesized—again in a very small accelerator, by firing a particle at element 115—that the resulting element emits antimatter as it decays. But now that 116 has been synthesized, we know it only emits alpha particles, which is actually typical of radioactive decay.

The problematic W2 and ID badge Lazar provided as his only evidence of his claims.

Beyond the false science that Lazar spouts, there is the false evidence he has provided of his employment at Area 51. First and foremost, his timeline for the granting of his clearance is entirely unbelievable. Understandably, since it would require an extensive background investigation, getting a high level clearance takes a long time. My friend who works at Lawrence Livermore Labs tells me it was a grueling process that took a year and a half and involved interviewing not only him but also his friends and family. But Bob Lazar claims that, for a much higher level clearance and a much more secret facility, he was interviewed by an outside contractor and within five days was on site being shown flying saucers. As evidence of his short-lived employment at S4, the supposed subsection of Area 51 he claimed to work at, he provided a W2 and an ID badge. First of all the ID badge has the letters MAJ on it, which he says was the highest level clearance possible, called Majestic clearance. I think by now my listeners will realize Lazar was trying to jump on the bandwagon of the Majestic 12 hoax, based on forged documents. But besides this, we know from other employees of Area 51 that have since gone on record (more on that shortly), that the ID badges should have showed the name Wackenhutt, the security contractor then in charge of issuing such badges. Moreover, both the badge and the W2 say “U.S. Department of Naval Intelligence.” In reality, this “department” has not existed since World War II, when its name was officially changed to the Office of Naval Intelligence. Moreover, as we know now from declassified information, the Navy was not even in charge of the base or Area 51. It was the CIA and, because they were testing aircraft, the Air Force. The notion that the Navy was in charge likely came from John Lear, who may have gotten it from his contact at the local news station, Bob Stoldal, George Knapp’s boss, who tells a story about a mysterious man claiming to be from Naval Intelligence coming to question him about the sources of his investigation into Area 51. Knapp would later describe the responses he received from the Navy to his inquiriesas his being stonewalled, but knowing the Navy was not in charge of the facility, it rather sounds more like he was seeking information from the wrong entity. Nevertheless, this notion that the Navy ran Area 51 passed via Lear into the darkside mythology of his protégé Bill Cooper, who embellished it by claiming that the Navy got control of Area 51 and alien technology through Majestic 12. We know Lazar was weaving the claims of darksider UFOlogists into his narrative, as he did it more than once. Another thing Lazar claimed was that Russians worked hand in glove with Americans on alien tech there at S4, which again seems to be Lazar’s attempt to confirm things claimed by Lear and Cooper. In truth, everything tested at Area 51 was used to spy on the Soviets, and all the secrecy surrounding the site and probably all the UFO disinformation spread by Doty and the AFOSI, was meant to confuse public perceptions of what was going on there in order to further shield the site from Soviet scrutiny. Lazar eventually admitted the badge was a fake—a “reproduction,” he called it—but he has never admitted the W2 was fake, even though it only showed that he earned a measly 958 dollars for his supposedly high-level work there, and it provided an Employer’s Identification Number, or EIN, that the IRS has told researchers simply does not exist.

In addition to notions about Majestic 12 and Naval Intelligence running Area 51, Bob Lazar also repeated claims made by both John Lear and Bill Cooper about extraterrestrials coming from Zeta Reticuli, a claim with a lot of history in the field of UFOlogy. When we notice these parallels with previous claims, there are two tendencies. We either believe Lazar’s claims corroborate and strengthen them, or we see through him that he is just parroting previous claims and claiming that what he saw substantiates them. When we examine how Lazar’s claims appear to conform to previous UFOlogical claims, it is important to remember that, as they have themselves admitted, months before Lazar ever claimed to work at Area 51, or S4, Lazar and Gene Huff came to John Lear wanting his UFO files and tapes. Specifically, it has been stated that they were interested in Lear’s files on the claims of one Billy Meier. Billy Meier is a Swiss man who in the 1970s began faking flying saucer photographs and videos. According to him, he had been in contact with the pilots of these “beamships” since he was 5 years old. They were very humanlike, he claimed, but came from the Pleiades. This is the origin of the notion of “Aryan” Pleiadians that would later be repeated by Bill Cooper and many other UFOlogists, with a clear undercurrent of racism. Billy Meier, though, was squarely on the light side of UFOlogy, asserting his Pleiadians were benevolent, founding a religion called the Free Community of Interests for the Border and Spiritual Sciences and Ufological Studies, claiming to be a reincarnation of numerous ancient prophets, including Jesus and Muhammad. While his saucer pictures and videos are just manifestly models suspended from strings—if you watch the films, you can clearly see them wobbling and swinging back and forth from what is likely fishing line—they nevertheless appear to have been used by Bob Lazar as the model for his saucer designs, many of which he has sketched in detail. Ridiculously enough, in one of his early interviews with Knapp, an image of one hoax Billy Meier photograph is put on screen in order to illustrate what Lazar says the saucers looked like. And it seems Lazar may have modeled his claims even more on Meier’s claims than just in the likeness of the saucers. Billy Meier too attempted to describe the workings of his saucers through technobabble, though he said they were powered by tachyon particles and thus were capable of time travel. It seems Lazar just tweaked this to make it more believable.

A comparison of Lazar’s and Billy Meier’s saucers

The last of the claims of Bob Lazar to consider, and perhaps the ones most subject to definitive refutation, are his claims about the specific facility where he supposedly worked. Not at Area 51 on Groom Lake, but rather a place called S4 on Papoose Dry Lake some miles to the south and west of Groom Lake. He describes being put on a bus and driven out to S4, where hangar doors hidden in the side of a mountain opened to reveal the nine saucers he saw. It has been pointed out quite a bit that he estimated the hangar door dimensions to be forty feet and elsewhere stated the saucers were fifty feet in diameter. Certainly this is one more piece of evidence against his credibility, but there is strong evidence that no such facility as S4 even exists at Papoose Lake. There is an Area 4, but that is outside of the restricted airspace, on the other side of Yucca Flats, more squarely in the middle of the Nevada Test & Training Range. Probably the closest thing would be Site-4, but this is some 50 miles northeast of there, at the Tonopah Test Range, where they train Air Force pilots in electronic warfare. So what do we know IS at Papoose Dry Lake, where Bob Lazar claims there are secret hollow mountains holding alien spacecraft? Well, we know that about half of this salt flat that he claims was used as a runway for saucer tests isn’t even within the restricted airspace that protects the neighboring Area 51 at Groom Lake, so it doesn’t seem like the government is too concerned about protecting any secrets there. We also have former employees of Area 51, who worked for years in security at the site, who have gone on record saying there is nothing out there. These witnesses’ identities can be confirmed because their employment at Area 51 was declassified when they sued the federal government in the 1990s for exposure to the toxic fumes of massive burn pits, which caused skin conditions and respiratory illnesses. It was this lawsuit and the numerous court filings and FOIA requests that would come with it that would eventually force the government to acknowledge the so-called “black facility” at Area 51. One such employee, a security guard named Fred Dunham, has gone on the record, revealing that those who really worked there view the myths about Area 51 as something of a joke.  He further describes that he and another security officer checked on Lazar’s story upon first hearing it, and saw that he had never signed in at Area 51, which any employee flying in on Janet Airlines would have had to do. Speaking of Janet Airlines, he insisted that the lights Bob Lazar showed John Lear in ’89 were just the daily commuter flight. Of Papoose Lake, Dunham insisted there is nothing out there. He further gave the reason that there was nothing out there because that area is irradiated from old nuclear testing by the Department of Energy.

This is perhaps the most important point. If Bob Lazar were telling the truth about working in a facility on Papoose Lake, spending time out on the dry lakebed during test flights, etc., then both he and everyone that worked at S4 would have developed radiation poisoning or cancer by now. They never would have built a facility in such an irradiated wasteland. We further know this to be the case because of the sad story of Jerry Freeman, an archaeologist, who infiltrated the area on foot in search of artifacts left by ‘49er prospectors. George Knapp, who’s made a good deal of money continually promoting Lazar’s story over the years, addressed the Freeman story at a conference in Denmark where he was paid to speak. Freeman did claim to find a chest of ‘49er artifacts though these were later proven to be forgeries, likely perpetrated by him since it’s unlikely anyone else would hike out there to plant them. What’s relevant here is that Freeman spent about a week hiking around Papoose, which even Knapp admits at the conference is still highly irradiated, and it led to his succumbing to cancer not long after. Knapp glosses over this, not acknowledging the evidence that this area is radioactive or the simple fact that Freeman saw no hangar doors or installations or even any UFOs while he was out there. Instead, he takes one little section out of context to suggest Freeman did see these things. What Freeman actually reported in the journal he kept was as follows: “North of my position, I occasionally caught sight of the Black Hawk helicopter, chasing the tourists away from the Air Force's front door near Groom Lake. That night as I lay awake in the darkness, high above that ancient playa, I half expected a "close encounter of the third kind," but no such luck….Near the mountainous side of Papoose I saw lights. Security vehicles? Hangar doors opening and closing? I don't profess to know.” The mention of lights on the side of a mountain, and the speculation about them being hangar doors should have been enough for Knapp. It must be remembered that Freeman was writing in 1997, long after Lazar’s claims about hangar doors on mountainsides had been made, and that Freeman was himself a known hoaxer, so we should not give much weight to his remarks, especially since his later death proved that Papoose could not be an acceptable site for any top secret facility. But Knapp was not content to just pull that bit out of context. Instead, he claims Freeman saw UFOS exit a portal in the sky. This alone should be enough to totally and finally discredit George Knapp, the Las Vegas newsman responsible for delivering the claims of John Lear and Bob Lazar to the world.  

Despite all the problems I have discussed, George Knapp consistently tries to rehabilitate Lazar’s reputation and his story, to which Knapp has harnessed his media career. He claimed that Bob had passed lie detector tests. As it turns out, Knapp was close personal friends with the former law enforcement official that he asked to test Lazar, and when the first test showed indications of deception, this polygrapher just kept testing Bob until less deception was apparent. He claimed to have gotten other Area 51 employees on the record confirming all of Lazar’s claims, but those additional witnesses have never been named or confirmed. And it was George Knapp’s protégé, a former yoga instructor and mixed martial artist turned amateur documentarian, who would go on to bring Bob Lazar’s claims back into the limelight again. Initially, it seems Corbell was working on a documentary about Knapp’s first UFO whistleblower, John Lear, but when it turned out Lear had already sold the rights to his story, Corbell went to work on the Lazar documentary. And it is telling that none of the problems with Lazar’s story are mentioned in the documentary except the inability to confirm his education and background, which is heavily implied to be the result of a cover-up. In fact, numerous researchers who have done a great deal to debunk Lazar, some of whose work will be linked to on this blog post, have revealed that they reached out to Corbell to make sure he had this information. But just like his mentor George Knapp, it seems Corbell was less interested in even-handed journalism and more interested in self-promotion. The two have crafted a wide-ranging career out of their UFO cover-up conspiracy speculation, co-hosting a podcast called Weaponized and appearing on Joe Rogan both with Bob Lazar and without him. When Lazar got a book deal for an autobiography out of all this, Knapp wrote the Foreword, and in it, he claimed that Lazar had proven his bona fides by taking him on a tour of Los Alamos, where people seemed to recognize him. I don’t know what to make of this claim. Some have said that the Meson Physics Facility did not require a high level clearance of its employees, but it still does not seem believable that an employee who hadn’t worked there for years would be allowed to give people self-guided tours and that they would be allowed to film. At Lawrence Livermore Labs, where my friend works, current employees may register friends and family to take a tour only every five years or so, and they are held to strict security protocols, led not by the employee who invited them but by a specific guide, and they are explicitly prohibited from filming. So all I can say is, that sounds like another falsehood or exaggeration George Knapp has used in his efforts legitimize Lazar.

Much as Knapp has been guilty of stretching the truth or misrepresenting the facts in order to keep the Lazar story alive, so too has his boy Jeremy Corbell. Not only did Corbell omit from his documentary the preponderance of evidence demonstrating Lazar’s dishonesty, he also misrepresented statements of sources that he cites, such as the aforementioned newspaperman Terry England, but also a Los Alamos scientist named Krangle, who denied telling Corbell that he remembered Lazar being a physicist, as Corbell reported, and Mike Thigpen, who denied confirming to Corbell that he had conducted Lazar’s security clearance, as again Corbell reported. A pattern can be seen here of a lack of journalistic integrity. Why would they risk their reputations in this way? The answer is clear going all the way back to Lazar’s first interview with Knapp, which he says had the highest ratings of any news report they ever produced. His reporting on UFOs earned him accolades from United Press International, and later it got him work with a think tank bankrolled by billionaire UFO enthusiast Robert Bigelow, who was himself obsessed with a supposed Utah hotbed for UFOs and the supernatural called Skinwalker Ranch. This, of course, led to Knapp co-authoring multiple books on Skinwalker and Corbell filming a documentary adaptation. Since then, Knapp is credited as the producer of not only Corbell’s Lazar documentary, but also another prominent UFO documentary called The Phenomenon. In short, the motivation is probably money and self-promotion. Knapp won a Peabody in 2008 for some other investigative work he produced, but otherwise his entire career is tied up in stories like Lazar’s. Knapp and Corbell would probably protest that they don’t make much from these endeavors, but considering they also get paid to speak at UFO conferences, like the one you heard Knapp speaking at in Denmark earlier, we should take such claims with a grain of salt. Bob Lazar likewise tells people that he never made a dime off his story, but considering that he sold his Lazar Tape back in the 90s for about $30 a pop, and also took a cut of a flying saucer plastic model assembly kit sold by the Testors Corporation in 1996, and has been handsomely paid to speak at many conferences and on many programs, and the fact that he probably was paid nicely for his autobiography, that too seems to be a lie.

The Testors model of Lazar’s saucer.

The events of Bob Lazar’s life continue to be misrepresented by Corbell and Knapp today. Their big gotcha evidence in the documentary has to do not with any evidence that flying saucers or aliens are real, but rather that a hand scanner Lazar described was actually in use back then. Well, Lazar described it as measuring bones, when actually, 1980s newspaper articles about the scanner’s use in Army base ATMs says it “measures the length of fingers and the translucency of the webbing between the fingers.” It turns out, this hand scanner, the IDentimat 2000, was not so secret that Bob could not have heard of it. It appeared in magazines in the 1970s and was actually shown being used in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, making it not impressive at all that Lazar would describe it, knowing as we do that he regularly cribbed from science fiction. And when, during the filming of the documentary, Lazar’s home and business was raided by police, Corbell and Knapp tried to capitalize on it, adding a new dimension to the story by suggesting Lazar had actually stolen some of Element 115 thirty years earlier and the government had only now shown up in biohazard suits to repossess it. The truth was that Bob’s company, which had been raided before for selling explosive compounds, was then being raided in connection with a murder case, because he had sold a chemical to a killer who used it to poison someone. But Knapp and Corbell don’t let facts get in the way of a good story, and that is what makes me even more leery about the claims of David Grusch, which he made before Congress this summer with George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell sitting right behind him. It appears that a year before coming forward, like John Lear and Bob Lazar before him, Grusch came to George Knapp first, at a Star Trek convention. And it seems that Knapp and Corbell were originally supposed to speak under oath at the same hearing, but instead they were just thanked. Maybe this is because congressional representatives realized the credibility of the entire hearing would be undermined by putting those two on the stand. What this should make us realize is that, despite the bona fides of Grusch’s credentials and the official channels he went through as a whistleblower and the legitimate circumstances in which his claims were made, we have no more reason to believe him than we do proven liar Bob Lazar. He is claiming the same things about reverse engineering alien craft. He provides the same amount of evidence, which is absolutely none. And he came to the world’s attention, first and foremost, through the promotion of two known UFO hucksters. So here at the end of our red string, we’ve connected Grusch to a line of BS going back more than thirty years to a crackpot pilot and a hungry Vegas reporter, and hopefully our look back at UFO whistleblowers of the past has shown us that such figures who may arise in the future may be as little deserving of our trust or confidence.

Until next time, remember, behind every fraudster there are always accomplices and enablers, people who either actively take part in the dreaming up of the lies or who support and promote them and spread it far and wide, knowing, I think, deep down, or even not that deep down, that no matter how they garnish it, what they’re helping trying to feed the public is really just a plate of crap.

Further Reading

Aguilera, Jasmine. “Area 51 Is the Internet's Latest Fascination. Here's Everything to Know About the Mysterious Site.” TIME, 17 July 2019, https://time.com/5627694/area-51-history/.

Armbruster, Peter, and Gottfried Münzenberg. “Creating Superheavy Elements.” Scientific American, vol. 260, no. 5, 1989, pp. 66–75. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/24987248. Accessed 25 Oct. 2023.

Bob Lazar Debunked. https://boblazardebunked.com/.

Freeman, Jerry. “Desert Diary: Jerry Freeman Chronicles his Trip through the desert.” Wayback Machine, 20 April 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190420154107/http://67.225.133.110/~gbpprorg/stealth/diary6.html.

Gorman, Steve. “CIA Acknowledges Its Mysterious Area 51 Test Site for First Time.” Reuters, 16 Aug. 2013, https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-area51-cia/cia-acknowledges-its-mysterious-area-51-test-site-for-first-time-idUKL2N0GH1P020130817.

Jacobsen, Annie. Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

Mahood, Tom. Area 51 and Other Strange Places, OtherHand.org, https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-places/.

Papoose Lake Institute. https://www.papooselake.org/.

Sicard, Sarah. “How Area 51 Became a Hotbed for Conspiracy Theories.” Military Times, 26 Jan. https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2023/01/26/how-area-51-became-a-hotbed-for-conspiracy-theories/

SignalsIntelligence. Medium, https://medium.com/@signalsintelligence. (Anonymous research articles with on record interview material and primary source documents)

UFO Whistleblowers, An American Tradition - Part Two: Bill Cooper

In 1989, the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, a non-profit, volunteer citizen organization dedicated to the study of UFO’s, found itself in the midst of a rift. In one camp were the more conservative and traditional UFO researchers, people like astronomer Jacques Vallee and to some extent the nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, who would have liked the world to take the scientific study of UAP seriously. In the other camp was John Lear and his coterie of conspiracy theorists who made unsupported claims about government cover-ups and alien autopsies with no concrete evidence beyond the rumors of leaked documents, all of which, if they ever were leaked, turned out to be forged. That year, when MUFON organized a symposium in Las Vegas, John Lear’s home city, where Lear himself was the state director of the organization—again, on a volunteer basis—he demanded that he and his cadre of likeminded conspiracists be granted ample opportunity to speak. When MUFON leadership refused, Lear threatened to hold a rival symposium to draw audiences away. MUFON directors eventually gave in, and the theme of the symposium was declared: “The UFO Cover-up: A Government Conspiracy?” Indeed, testimony of what seemed to be a genuine government conspiracy to spread false information about UFOs was presented at this conference, but it wasn’t that presented by Lear and his conspiracists. Rather, it was by well-respected UFO researcher Bill Moore, who dropped the bombshell that he had himself been involved in these government disinformation operations. However, rather than evidence of the government covering up UFOs, it appeared to be evidence that the government was encouraging belief in the extra-terrestrial origin of UFOs. The revelation discredited Moore and by extension dealt a huge blow to many of the claims being propagated by Lear and his camp, as much of the mythology they had developed was based on supposed documents Moore had uncovered and claims made by other UFO researchers that Moore now revealed had been seeded by intelligence operatives. One member of Lear’s camp, a newcomer to the UFO speaking circuit, made his debut during that symposium, reading rather monotonously from his statement, “The Secret Government: The Origin, Identity, and Purpose of MJ-12.” Like some UFO whistleblowers today who recently testified before Congress, this man, Bill Cooper, claimed to have personally witnessed UAP while in the Navy. And unlike Donald Keyhoe and John Lear before him, Bill Cooper claimed to have personally seen classified documents revealing the extraterrestrial secrets kept by the government during his time with the Office of Naval Intelligence. Thus, in his lectures and interviews and later in his book and shortwave radio program, when he claimed to be revealing personal knowledge that the U.S. government was suppressing information about recovered alien spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains, he was very much making the same claims as former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, who recently testified to essentially the same thing in a public congressional hearing this summer. As I look further into the history American UFO Whistleblowers, I am coming to believe what Bill Moore told his audience that day in 1989: “The current crop of disinformation is really nothing new. It’s just that a different crop of people are spreading it this time around.”

The rift in MUFON at the 1989 conference might be said to reflect a wider rift among those who researched UAP and believed in the visitation of extraterrestrials to Earth. There has long been two views on this topic, one that may be called the light side, and another that has been termed the dark side. To those who keep to the light side of UFOlogy, the extraterrestrials who have supposedly taken an interest in our world and in us are benevolent creatures, come to teach us how to ascend from our current condition and guide us into a new age of enlightenment or prosperity. This is the realm of UFO religions, or cults, led by supposed contactees like George Van Tassel, who claimed to be in telepathic contact with an alien intelligence that he described as an “Ascended Master.” Now of course, this light side of UFOlogy has its own dark side as well, with UFO cults like Heaven’s Gate ending in the tragedy of mass suicide. But among those who believe (without evidence) that UFOs or UAP really do carry extraterrestrial visitors, the opposing view, of course, is that these visitors are in fact malevolent. And it was John Lear and his camp within MUFON, the darksiders of UFOlogy, who really popularized the notion of extraterrestrials being malicious. We heard it from John Lear already, who claimed that aliens had deceived the US government, that these aliens mutilated and experimented on not just cattle but people as well. And of the “dark side movement” in UFOlogy that John Lear spearheaded, no one was darker than his protégé, Milton William Cooper, or Bill Cooper, whom Lear introduced to the world. Cooper would take Lear’s claims in increasingly darker directions, asserting that extraterrestrials and the shadowy powers complicit in their plans conspired to control the population through the drug trade and by unleashing bioengineered diseases, and of course, through abduction and murder, including arguably the most famous murder in modern history: that of JFK. Over the course of Cooper’s career, his changing claims regarding UFOs and the evolution of his conspiracist ideas, we see that he came to view the sinister forces arrayed against humanity as more of a Satanic, or as he would say, Luciferian plot. While David Grusch has made no such claims, we do see the further development of this “dark side movement” in claims made by other recent UFO whistleblowers, like the equally dubious statements made by former Pentagon official Lue Elizondo, the whistleblower who served as the principal source for the momentous 2017 New York Times exposé of a secret government UAP program. In his many television and podcast interviews since going public, Elizondo has claimed that elements in the government try to suppress UAP research because they believe the phenomenon to be demonic. Whether Elizondo is making this up or not, it does seem to suggest that some of the claims of “darksider” UFOlogists from the 80s and 90s remain influential in people’s thinking about UAP today, lending a cultish aspect to Lear’s “dark side” UFO mythology. And while there is some connection between Bill Cooper and these claims that UFOs are actually a demonic plot, there is also direct connection between his claims and numerous other harmful conspiracy movements that have arisen in the last 30 years, many of which remain extremely influential today. Typically in October, I explore some myth or legend that might be considered spooky, and to be sure, some of the false claims that John Lear and Bill Cooper made about aliens are scary. In fact, aliens have been a mainstay of Hollywood horror since the first creature features, but “dark side” UFO mythology has inspired some of their most frightening treatments, as seen in the X-Files, for example. But what is truly terrifying here is how the skillful deceptions of Bill Cooper, who rose out of the field of UFOlogy to become perhaps the single most influential conspiracy theorist and agent of misinformation in modern time, continue to lead people into darkness today.

Milton William Cooper was a military brat. His father was a pilot in the Army Air Corps, and he was raised on a series of air bases, many of them overseas, never staying in one place long enough to put down roots. Because of this, much of what he understood about America and American culture he learned from those in the military and from the American Forces Radio and Television Service, or AFRTS. The irony here is that, later in his career he would present himself as a champion and defender of a kind of domestic American ideal that he never really experienced himself, and he would become the voice and mascot of many homegrown militia patriot sorts even though he had always, in a very real sense, felt alienated from his country. As a teen, on an airbase near Tokyo, he had his first brush with hosting a radio program when he was given an hour to act as disc jockey, playing Elvis, Sam Cooke, Nat King Cole, and big band music. Unsurprisingly, when he came of age, he entered the service himself, joining the Air Force in 1962 and the Navy in 1966, and serving as a patrol boat commander in Vietnam. He saw a lot of action in country, and he lost friends, but he was awarded a medal of valor for his efforts and afterward earned a cushy office job in Hawaii for a while, on the briefing team of Admiral Bernard Clarey in the Office of Naval Intelligence, a position for which he said he had to be given a Top Secret Q clearance. Bill Cooper would be the first conspiracy figure to make a big deal about having a Q clearance, suggesting that it granted him access to all the most tightly guarded secrets that the sinister U.S. government hid from its citizens. In this regard, as well as others, he can be seen as inspiring, at least in part, the Qanon online conspiracy cult of today. In truth, having a Q clearance in order to work in an office setting in a secure facility is simply not that impressive. I know someone who works in IT at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has a Q clearance simply because he is around and has access to computers and a network through which classified information may pass. In fact, Q clearance is a Department of Energy access authorization, so it doesn’t really make sense that Cooper would have it in the Office of Naval Intelligence, though he may have had some equivalent Top Secret clearance. This is just the first sign that he may have been embellishing his role in that office in Hawaii and lying about what secrets he learned there. The other is that, over the course of his decade-long career as a conspiracy theorist, whenever some conspiracist claim was made by others, Bill Cooper would afterward confirm it, saying he had seen classified files in a certain filing cabinet at the Office of Naval Intelligence that proved the claim was true. In Bill Cooper’s version of reality, any office worker with a clearance could browse files about the U.S. government’s contact with extra-terrestrials, which were kept in what must have been an absolutely stuffed and unsecured filing cabinet.

After leaving the Navy, Bill Cooper moved to California, where he married numerous women, struggled to make ends meet in a variety of business ventures, battled with PTSD, and turned to alcohol and spousal abuse. During these years he would twice get into terrible motorcycle accidents, one of them resulting in the loss of a leg. Years later, once he had commenced his career as a conspiracy theorist, he tried to claim that those accidents had been attempts on his life, that he’d been run off the road by government operatives who visited him in the hospital and threatened his life if he ever spoke about what he’d seen in that filing cabinet on Hawaii. His father, though, had a different story to tell, saying those motorcycle accidents were Bill’s own fault, and that alcohol may have been involved. In 1981 and ’82, he suffered a series of mental breakdowns and was hospitalized for his PTSD. Finally, though, later in the 1980s, he found his calling while browsing the weird postings on electronic bulletin boards accessed through computers on a newfangled network called the Internet. On one particular message board, ParaNet, Bill was introduced to the claims of UFOlogists and conspiracy theorists. In 1988, he finally decided to add his own story, reaching out to the board’s systems operator, who introduced him as a genuine military witness. The story Cooper then told was of standing atop a surfaced submarine in 1966 and seeing a massive unidentified aircraft diving into the ocean and then emerging from the waters and jetting back into the clouds. It wasn’t that world shattering, as UFO claims go—just another sighting, embellished with Cooper’s further claim that his commanding officer swore all the witnesses to secrecy. And Cooper’s post was overshadowed when, a few days later, John Lear released his statement, The Lear Hypothesis, right there on Paranet. Perhaps jealous that the attention had shifted from his story to Lear’s outlandish claims, but also probably seeing it as an opportunity, Cooper claimed on Paranet that he could confirm about half of what Lear had written about, as he had seen classified documents in that overflowing filing cabinet that corroborated it. Lear made contact with Cooper, and soon Cooper was out in Vegas with Lear, drinking and spinning out their “dark side” conspiracy narrative.

Where John Lear had latched onto the Majestic-12 forgery and embellished it, Cooper did likewise, correcting Lear according to the information he claimed to have seen in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Like Lear, he promoted the popular claims about cattle mutilations. Likening the attacks to those attributed to vampires in the past, he was kind of bumping up backward against the truth of the matter, since both phenomena are perfectly explained by the processes of decomposition and only misconstrued as something paranormal. When John Lear began to promote the claims of another supposed military whistleblower, Bill English, former Special Forces who claimed to have seen a suppressed report from Project Blue Book, the legendary Report 13, confirming that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin, Bill Cooper again hopped on the bandwagon, saying he too had seen a version of that report in the Hawaiian filing cabinet. Either Lear didn’t find it suspicious that Cooper never mentioned Report 13 before Bill English came along, or he chose to ignore that little sign of Cooper’s dishonesty. After pulling his weight with MUFON, Lear arranged for both of his military whistleblowers to speak at the 1989 symposium. Thus Bill Cooper made his debut, introducing his peculiar blend of UFO conspiracies and secret world government claims, the seeds of the grand unifying conspiracy theory he would later develop.

He read his paper in a near monotone, listing dry references to classified documents and supposed project names to outline a massive conspiracy implicating such groups as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission, members of which are typically recruited, he said, from secret societies in Ivy League colleges, like the Skull and Bones club… all of which claims have since become mainstays of popular conspiracy theory. You can tell he believed himself to be the smartest person in the room from the way he periodically stopped and asked if anyone understood what he had just read. Like Lear before him, faced with the evidence that the MJ-12 papers were fake, he nevertheless doubled down to insist that what they revealed was real—that Majestic-12 was actually called Majority-12 and it was an operation of the New World Order. Unlike others on Lear’s dark side of UFOlogy, Bill Cooper’s claims were explicitly grounded in global politics, all of which he saw as directly tied to the ET cover-up and the secret world government. And when the audience suggested he was full of it, he claimed he didn’t care if they believed, that he was just morally obliged to get the truth out. Nevertheless, it became apparent that he was there out of more than just moral obligation when he announced that he would afterward be selling the text of his speech.

At that very symposium, after Bill Moore revealed his complicity in feeding government disinformation to UFOlogists, a revelation that in some ways discredited claims John Lear had made and Bill Cooper had confirmed, Cooper reportedly raged at, believing Lear had somehow betrayed him by feeding him disinformation. This just shows that Bill Cooper was lying all along by saying he had seen documents in the Office of Naval Intelligence that confirmed was Lear claimed, since it wouldn’t really make sense to blame Lear for such false information if he had really seen it 18 years earlier in classified documents. But if we want to debunk the UFO claims of supposed whistleblower Bill Cooper, there are many far stronger pieces of evidence than this. For example, in one particularly absurd claim, Cooper asserted that the absence of RH factor in some people proved that humanity had been genetically engineered by extraterrestrials! He argued that RH factor, a protein named for rhesus monkeys, represents the genetic leftovers of money DNA, so people without it can only be the product of some extra-terrestrial experimentation, having not descended from monkeys! Actually, the rhesus blood type he’s talking about received its name only because it was first discovered in rhesus monkeys, not because it’s some kind of evolutionary marker.

A further example of claims Cooper made that prove completely baseless on further evaluation involves an early assertion of a NASA cover-up. Like Donald Keyhoe before him, who made disproven claims about lunar bases, Bill Cooper also liked to project images of the moon during his lectures and misinterpret blurry shadows as evidence of structures. He would impress upon his audience that it was “a real photo” which is meaningless. Of course the photo was really a photo, though it certainly didn’t reveal what he imagined it revealed. Cooper said the images he showed, taken from a book published by NASA called The Moon as Viewed by Lunar Orbiter, were quickly suppressed after their publication when the government realized what they revealed. In reality, the volume had a limited print run and subsequently was out of print. It was not printed again because a more definitive text entitled Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon was published the following year. And the fact is, because the orbital photographs were transmitted as analog data and had to be assembled as a mosaic, the images back then were extremely low resolution. We would not get the higher resolution images until some computer savvy volunteer researchers, working out of an empty McDonald’s since the late 2000s, started recovering the data. Today we have entirely detailed images of the moon, and the original NASA volume Cooper claimed had been suppressed is freely available online, digitized and hosted by NASA themselves. Like the supposed pyramid and face on Mars, both of which claims Bill Cooper also promoted all such claims have been disproven with higher resolution imagery.

Another simple way of revealing Bill Cooper’s general lack of credibility is by simply pointing out that most of the claims he purported to confirm because he had supposedly seen classified documents about them turned out to be verified hoaxes. This goes well beyond the Majestic-12 forgeries. He also promoted the story of a 1948 UFO crash at Aztec, New Mexico. This story had been exposed back in the fifties as a hoax concocted by two con men claiming to have alien technology for sale. And at the MUFON symposium, Bill Moore attributed its resurgence among UFOlogists to government disinformation. So really it was a twice debunked story, which through extension debunks Cooper’s claims that he was privy to government secrets, since those secrets he claimed knowledge of were debunked. Unless, as he might have you believe, the secret government had seeded forged documents into Naval Intelligence filing cabinets just to disinform random office workers. Cooper would go on to talk about Alternative 3, the secret government’s plan to establish colonies on the moon and Mars. Well this idea was pretty much plagiarized from a 1977 British television documentary called Alternative 3 that purported to reveal just such a conspiracy. The film started out as an investigative report about the so-called “brain drain,” or the idea that the most highly intelligent or skilled citizens were leaving the country, but they claimed their investigation evolved to look into actual disappearances. Over the course of the documentary, it claimed to reveal that missing scientists had actually been recruited for a secret space program that was preparing colonies on the Moon and Mars in order to ensure the survival of the elite in the face of global climate disaster. The film ends with supposed footage of a secret landing on Mars, during which astronauts film an alien life form moving beneath the sand. Needless to say, the broadcast of this program alarmed many viewers, much like the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast.  And also much like the Welles broadcast, this too was a work a fiction, a mockumentary. It was intended, its creators explained, as a satire of fringe belief and government conspiracy claims, and it was supposed to air on April 1st, as an April Fools joke, but because they were unable to obtain the intended time slot, it was aired on the 20th of June instead. There was no reason to believe the claims of Alternative 3, a clear work of fiction, but that didn’t stop Cooper from repeating its claims without any reference to the actual mockumentary.

This isn’t that surprising, however, as it’s very clear that the known fictionality of a claim would not stop Bill Cooper from asserting that it was in fact true, that it had only been dramatized as fiction to make you doubt that it could be true. He claimed, for example, that the events of Close Encounters of the Third Kind really happened. Likewise, when Cooper spoke of the types of alien races in contact with Earth and its secret government, he listed those already claimed by a variety of UFOlogists, greys from Orion or Zeta Reticuli, Pleiadians, etc. but he also threw in the benevolent Teros and the sadistic subterranean Deros, a direct reference to the Shaver Hoax. Patrons of the show just got a minisode all about these claims and the influence of their promoter on UFO mythology generally, but for those who don’t support on Patreon, essentially, the Shaver hoax claims were the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic that sci-fi magazine editor Ray Palmer reworked and published as a stunt to increase readership. So it was yet another work of science fiction Cooper repeated as if it were a secret fact he had seen evidence of in a Naval Intelligence filing cabinet. In fact, his tendency to run with known falsehoods is what eventually led to his falling out with John Lear and UFOlogy generally. One of Cooper’s many claims was having seen the original Krill Papers during his time in Naval Intelligence. The Krill Papers was a document that appeared in ’88, written by one O.H. Krill, that seemed to support much of the Lear Hypothesis, and therefore much of what Cooper claimed as well.  Cooper claimed to have insider knowledge that O.H. Krill was actually an alien hostage. Well, it turns out, as John Lear had apparently explained to Bill Cooper more than once, John Lear himself had written the Krill Papers—just another forged document intended to bolster the UFO mythology he and his darksiders were crafting. When Lear eventually suggested Cooper stop lying about the Krill papers, since Lear had already admitted to many that he had coauthored the work with one John Grace, Cooper doubled down and began claiming John Lear was lying about writing the papers. After his falling out with Lear, however, came Cooper’s falling out with UFOlogy generally. After a couple years of insupportable claims and the promotion of known hoaxes, the UFOlogists who once gave him the benefit of the doubt began to turn on Cooper. Even one of Lear’s original “dark side” protégés, Don Ecker, became fatigued, writing in a 1990 article in the magazine UFO, “Who are the UFO whistleblowers? They come out of relative obscurity and burst into the center of ufological attention. Making incredible claims of alien activity on earth and the Government's deep but covert involvement. Without exception, the whistleblowers of recent times only furnish the most hazy evidence of their claims, if that.” I think it quite apparent that this sentiment could validly be repeated regarding UFO whistleblowers today.

So Bill Cooper fell out with Lear and with MUFON. Indeed, he began claiming that they were part of the conspiracy, part of the cover-up. Lear’s former CIA connections through Air America meant he was running their disinformation. And MUFON was simply a front organization infiltrated by government operatives who used it to control the UFO narrative. One might imagine that this change in his approach would limit his platform, but Bill Cooper had already begun to evolve. Norio Hayakawa, a UFO enthusiast in California, had heard him speak and arranged and promoted a successful lecture at Hollywood High School in ’89, and from there, his speaking gigs took off. As he traveled and lectured on his conspiracy theories, his claims evolved, moving away from the alien conspiracies and toward much darker claims about the aims of the New World Order. He leaned on widespread conspiracy theories, putting his own spin on them. For example, he did a lot to spread the prevalent HIV-as-U.S.-bioweapon claims I recently refuted in an episode, sharing the text of some legislation that he claimed proved the virus had been engineered. Actually the bill was urging research in order to be prepared in the eventuality that a rival nation engineered such a biological warfare agent. And the bill absolutely does not say anything about a microbe that attacks the autoimmune system. It only posits the development of an infective microorganism that “might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes,” which only means it might be hard for our bodies and medicine to deal with. Similarly, he developed his own take on the JFK assassination, that centerpiece of modern conspiracism, asserting that in some grainy footage it could be seen that William Greer, the Secret Service agent driving his car, turned around and aimed a handgun at President Kennedy. In fact, rather like an ink blot or a shape in a cloud, if you are trying to see this in the low-resolution film, you can imagine it, even though what you’re seeing is really the sun gleaming on the shiny hair of the Secret Service agent in the passenger seat, who also turns his head back to look at the president. Cooper liked to preface his JFK theory by displaying a slide with a quote attributed to Kennedy: “The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy America's freedom and before I leave this office, I must inform the citizens of their plight." Cooper suggested that Kennedy knew about the alien cover-up, that this was the plot he had mentioned, and that he was killed to silence him. The problem is that this quotation is entirely apocryphal. Kennedy never actually said it. And Cooper’s takes on these two conspiracy theories help to demonstrate his evolving claims. He used to assert the AIDS epidemic was part of the alien cover-up, that spreading disease among humanity and controlling the population was part of the alien agenda, but later he would just claim it was part of the New World Order agenda, and aliens were a smokescreen. And not only did he assert that Kennedy had been killed for his knowledge of the aliens, he also claimed William Greer was an alien and had shot Kennedy with alien technology. But when he moved away from his UFOlogy roots, he instead claimed that Greer had used a dart gun with shellfish toxins and that Kennedy was killed because he was going to reveal the grand overarching conspiracy of the New World Order. So after all, following all the assertions he had made for years about retrieved craft and recovered aliens, claims that we saw trotted out before Congress again this year, Bill Cooper would eventually flip flop and say all of that was government disinformation—which, again, maybe he was blindly bumping against the truth here in his flailing for explanations.

Bill Cooper’s hand-drawn cover of Behold a Pale Horse.

Next in Cooper’s career came his most important legacy, a book, Behold a Pale Horse, which he managed to get published by a small New Age printer that focused on mystical works. I emphasize that he got this book published and not that he wrote it because, though it did indeed include some autobiographical writing in which Cooper tried to establish his background in Naval Intelligence in order to establish some credibility with readers, much of the volume simply reproduces other documents, or rather forgeries and hoaxes. One was The Report from Iron Mountain. This book, first published in 1967, purported to be the official report of a secret government study group meeting in a bunker. Highlights of the work include the determination that war or some credible threat of equal weight is necessary for the stabilization of society, and the recommendation of possible alternatives to the threat of war, one being the threat of alien contact. This of course fit well with Cooper’s evolving conspiracy narrative, only the book was exposed as a hoax in 1990, when its true author revealed himself in order to claim copyright on the work when others, like Cooper, started reprinting as if it were in the public domain. It turns out Leonard Lewin had written it as a satire and its publishers, including novelist E. L. Doctorow, sold it as non-fiction as a publicity stunt. Never mind all that, though. Cooper and other conspiracy theorists would continue to insist, even today, that it was real. And going along well with the plans supposedly discussed in the bunker at Iron Mountain was Cooper’s reprinting of a pamphlet from 1979 called “Concentration Camp Plans for the U.S. Citizens.” This pamphlet and Cooper’s amplification of its claims are what is responsible for the many conspiracy theories about the Federal Emergency Management Agency and supposed plans for FEMA camps.  Going back to the original pamphlet and Cooper’s dissemination of it, claims about FEMA camps degenerate into lists of supposed sites, abandoned prisons or shuttered factories named as supposed locations without any actual evidence. And this would continue with the advent of social media. Just like Cooper’s images of the moon, people post pictures of any appropriate looking installation or fortified structure, often photoshopped, and say, “Hey, look, a real picture!”

Another big chunk of the book was a document entitled Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, which was supposedly an “introductory programming manual” for those being onboarded into the secret government conspiracy. It outlined a psyop of massive proportions, being conducted on all the general populace of the world. It was World War Three, the document claimed, but instead of being waged on an opposing army, it was being waged on civilians, and instead of firing bullets, combatants had essentially weaponized misinformation and economic conditions. In some ways its observations were valid, I think, but the notion that all of this, basically the conditions of the modern world in the information age, was some ongoing operation of an intelligence group was a farce. Most believed Cooper had written it himself, but actually, it had been found on a copy machine and circulated among conspiracist newspapers before it got into Cooper’s hands. In 2003, it was claimed by one Hartford Van Dyke, who was serving an 8-year sentence for counterfeiting, as he had sent 600,000 phony dollars to the IRS with a message calling it “fake money to satisfy fake debts.” He didn’t claim the work was genuine. It was his “manifesto,” a work that he himself admitted was more an expression of his “sociopathy” than his paranoia. But Cooper printed this found document as if it were absolutely genuine proof of what “they” were doing to us. And finally, perhaps the most egregious reproduction of a known fake in his book, Cooper reprinted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its entirety. If you don’t know what that is, check out my older episode, “The Terrible within the Small; or, The Fabrication of the Learned Elders of Zion and the Forgery of Their Protocols.” Essentially, it was a plagiarized forgery that invented the notion of a global Jewish conspiracy. In perhaps the weakest caveat possible, Cooper told his readers that, though it maybe wasn’t a Jewish conspiracy the Protocols revealed, the conspiracy was still very real, telling them to just replace the word Jew with the word Illuminati.

Those who follow my efforts on Historical Blindness may be familiar with my banner episodes on Illuminati conspiracy claims, The Illuminati Illuminated, which examine their origins and demonstrate quite clearly the lack of merit and falsehood of that grand unifying conspiracy theory. In crafting his own grand unifying conspiracy theory, Bill Cooper would include the Illuminati as the architects of a New World Order, but he claimed to trace the conspiracy much further back, to the beginnings of human history. He fleshed out his conspiracist worldview during the next chapter of his career, hosting a program with massive reach on the World Wide Country Radio shortwave broadcaster out of Tennessee, home of a variety of religious programs, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Every episode of his show, The Hour of the Time, signaled his apocalyptic worldview with the sound of klaxons and jackbooted marching. It was on this program that Cooper, in a series he called “Mystery Babylon,” traced the New World Order conspirators from modern organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderbergers Group back to the Bavarian Illuminati, and before them to the Freemasons and, you guessed it, the Knights Templar. But like the plot of the Assassins Creed videogames, he claimed that these groups were just evolutions of an ancient secret society that had evolved through the millennia, taking different names along the way. Back through the Romans to the Greeks to the ancient Egyptians he traced them to so-called Mystery Schools, and specifically to a group called the Brotherhood of the Serpent. As with most of Cooper’s claims, he was repackaging theories he’d read elsewhere as if they were truths he had discovered through deep research. In reality, he seems to have adopted much of this from a 1989 book called The Gods of Eden, in which author William Bramley hypothesized that this ancient secret society was a group of extraterrestrials bent on controlling all subsequent human history.

The cover of the book Bill Cooper cribbed much of his grand unifying conspiracy theory from.

While Cooper had moved away from the ET angle, he still used everything he could from such claims, repurposing them to suit his views, which took on more and more religious, millenarian qualities. There had always been an element of this in his claims, going all the way back to his MUFON debut, when he claimed the secret government had uncovered a secret prophecy in the Vatican predicting certain end times occurrences in the nineties. Of course this wasn’t true, since none of the supposed foretold end times events actually occurred in the 90s. But it became a theme in his assertions. The shadowy powers that shaped world events were following the timeline of Revelation, working to make its prophecies a reality. Surely the Mark of the Beast would next be introduced, or perhaps it already had? Cooper told his listeners that bar codes may actually be the mark of the Anti-Christ. As I said before, we can discern the evolution of Cooper’s claims by looking at his changing views on the Kennedy assassination. After a while, when it was no longer aliens but rather New World Order assassins, Cooper began to assert that it was actually a Luciferian plot, claiming Dealey Plaza was an occult place of power, making Kennedy a human sacrifice. And he told his listeners that if you took the year 1307, when the Knights Templars were suppressed, and you subtracted it from the year 1963, when JFK was assassinated, voila! You get the Number of the Beast, 666! Actually, you get the number 656, but he was close, and his listeners probably didn’t run the numbers themselves.

His very presence on shortwave radio meant that he was garnering listeners in survivalist, white separatist, Christian Identity, and militia communities. Other hosts on his network had already cultivated dedicated audiences among such groups, like the Silent Brotherhood in the Pacific Northwest and the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord in the Ozarks, groups with ideologies that led them to commit armed robbery and murder. To his credit, Cooper said on air that the Christian Identity movement was “the biggest bunch of hogwash I ever heard in my entire life,” asserting specifically that “[t]hese people are racist, completely mental,” that they “might call themselves patriots, but they are not…. They are liars, lying to us.” Despite the fact that he had reprinted the anti-Semitic Protocols in his book, he resisted outright anti-Semitism, and when he was labeled an anti-Semite by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, he called it a “smear campaign.” In his lashing out at Jews who called him an anti-Semite, however, he began to express more and more anti-Semitic views, including Holocaust denial. And while some of his statements drove away the “patriot” militia sort, plenty of them found much to admire in his broadcasts, especially after Waco. During the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in 1993, Cooper did much to craft the white separatist American militiaman view of the event, drawing valid connections between that siege and the one at Ruby Ridge, and drawing attention to the very real mismanagement of the entire debacle by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and afterward the FBI, but also mixing in absolute falsehoods, like his claim that the government gave the Branch Davidians  poison milk or his misrepresentation of David Koresh as a monogamous family man rather than a polygamist and serial rapist of underage girls. Cooper would go on to cover the Oklahoma City Bombing in much the same fashion, claiming that Timothy McVeigh was a patsy, that he was “the Lee Harvey Oswald of the American Reichstag!” Eventually it came out, though, that Timothy McVeigh and his several accomplices were regular listeners of Cooper’s. In federal court, several of them testified that Cooper’s program had inspired them to take their anti-government action. And finally, it was revealed that Timothy McVeigh had actually come to visit him before the bombing and according to Cooper had said they intended to take some action that they believed would make a difference and cryptically told him to “Watch Oklahoma City.” The fact that Cooper knew this while he broadcasted assertions of McVeigh’s innocence and claims that the bombing was a false flag operation serves as perhaps the ultimate piece of evidence discrediting him.

Starting out on Internet bulletin boards, Bill Cooper, over the course of only about ten years, would blaze a trail through fringe belief at which one cannot help but marvel. His influence cannot be exaggerated. He is known for having popularized many conspiracy claims that have proven to have lasting power, and he even popularized a lot of the phrases that people mock when talking about conspiracy theorists, and that conspiracy speculators continue to unironically use today. For example, he coined the term “sheeple.” And he was always telling his audience to do their own research. He made broad assertions about the mainstream media, claiming we do not have a free press. But in the same breath he's urging people to publish their own content, apparently unbothered by the cognitive dissonance of it all, demonstrating how free Americans really are to express themselves and publish false claims, just as Cooper himself had done. Bill Cooper is sometimes credited as having accurately predicted certain occurrences or historical developments. For example, he is said to have predicted that we were moving toward a cashless society. In reality, what he predicted is far more extreme than what we see today with electronic transactions and e-banking. He claimed that swap meets would no longer exist, that you could not sell your neighbor a mattress…basically he said things like yard sales would be prohibited by law, and that failing to record and report each minor transaction would be grounds for imprisonment. Now, I ask you, does that sound accurate in today’s world, when we might send pitch in on a restaurant tab with cash or by sending a Venmo that will not be reported to the IRS, which would have no interest in such transactions?

People also credit Cooper with predicting 9/11. In reality, the FBI had place Osama Bin Laden on their Most Wanted list since 1999. Cooper was responding to a recent report aired on CNN in which a journalist had been able to speak with Bin Laden. Cooper couldn’t believe that a journalist might penetrate a hideout that the U.S. government had been unable to find. So it must have been propaganda allowed by the government, he claimed. In reality, though, the U.S. government was unable to apprehend Bin Laden because he was being harbored by the Taliban government. And some American CNN reporter had not managed to penetrate their defenses to interview them. It was the Bureau Chief of the Middle East Broadcasting Company in Pakistan, and he had been invited to Kandahar to interview Bin Laden because Bin Laden wanted to preemptively take credit for the 9/11 attacks. During the interview, he dropped hints about the forthcoming attacks. So really all Bill Cooper anticipated with his remarks were the unsupported talking points of 9/11 truthers who would spring up after his death. In fact, the most influential Truther work, the documentary Loose Change, has been accused of plagiarizing Bill Cooper.

One last prediction it is claimed Bill Cooper made was of his own murder by the government. A couple months after his broadcasts about 9/11, Bill Cooper died in a shootout with authorities on his property. Of course, this made him a martyr in the minds of his devotees, who believed the government had finally decided to silence him after his 9/11 broadcasts. In truth, there had been a warrant for his arrest for years because of tax evasion. Local sheriffs had put off arresting him for a long time because they just knew Bill Cooper wouldn’t go easily. Finally, after Cooper’s neighbors had made complaints of being harassed by him and of Cooper pulling a gun on them, the sheriff’s office felt they had to finally arrest him. All precautions were taken to arrest him without violence. They drew him out of his house by pretending to be partiers playing loud music on the road. Cooper came out, got in his vehicle, and drove down the hill to where the undercover officers were blasting their boombox, yelling at them to leave or he’d call the police. When he started driving back up to his house, the sheriffs blocked the road with another vehicle and declared that he was under arrest. But as expected, Cooper didn’t go gentle. He gunned it, drove directly at one agent, made it all the way back to his driveway before crashing his vehicle. Then he came out shooting as he made for his front door. In fact, he shot a deputy, Rob Marinez, in the head. Skull fragments entered the deputy’s brain, and he would afterward be paralyzed. As he fired at one deputy, another fired at him, killing him. In one way, certainly, he had made a valid prediction when, the year before, he told a friend, Doyel Shamley, that he had “decided what he was going to do now,” saying that he “can always be a martyr.” This, however, seems to have been more of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bill Cooper’s legacy, the mark he left on the world today, remains far broader than one might imagine. He made his mark on UFOlogy, and he made his mark on conspiracist culture generally. And he remains a legend among the anti-government militiamen and domestic terrorists who so loved Cooper that when he was alive they sought him out in person to ask advice before committing their crimes, though it’s true, some have since rejected him for not being racist enough. More surprisingly, though, his book, Behold a Pale Horse, gained widespread popularity in the Black community as well, thanks in large part to its promotion by conspiracy-minded members of the Nation of Islam in New York. The book was also widely read in federal penitentiaries, and it would become, according to one commonly repeated statistic, the most stolen book in the country. As Cooper’s book gained popularity in certain parts of the Black community, it exerted a huge influence on American rap music, with such rappers as Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, Nas, Ghostface Killah, Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, Mobb Deep, and Busta Rhymes considering themselves devotees of the book and making numerous references to Cooper’s ideas or even to Cooper himself.

As mentioned already, Cooper was the origin of 9/11 truther claims, but he was wildly influential on other conspiracists as well, one of whom would go on to succeed him in a lot of ways. Alex Jones, then in his twenties, was an up-and-coming young shortwave broadcaster who got his start on the same network as Bill Cooper. Jones had come up listening to The Hour of the Time, and in a lot of ways he modeled himself on Cooper. Certainly the claims that Jones would make throughout his career about false flag operations were just the same old claims Cooper used to make, recycled for the next tragedy. Alex Jones may best be known for his claims that school shootings were actually orchestrated by the government, and that itself is a claim that Bill Cooper had made in the past. Actually, by all reports, Bill Cooper greatly disliked Alex Jones, thinking him a copycat rival who was stealing his whole schtick. From Alex Jones to Qanon, which as I mentioned before makes much ado about their invisible informant/leader holding a Q clearance, we continue to see many of the conspiracy delusions of Bill Cooper touted among right-wing extremists and even by current members of Congress. Perhaps most specifically, the idea that the entrenched powers in our government (aka the “deep state”) are actually a sinister Luciferian cult can certainly be traced back to Bill Cooper. So in a way, Cooper can be credited, or blamed, for having cultivated the paranoiac milieu that has made the MAGA cult possible—though certainly Bill Cooper would chafe at calling it a cult. He didn’t like the Branch Davidians being called a cult, and once, when he was called a “cult figure,” he urged that the word not be used. But if we think about it further, the word is absolutely apt. Rather than in the sense of an unorthodox religion or deviant set of beliefs, it is in the sense of the great devotion to that set of fringe beliefs or to a figure who promulgates them. Just as the Branch Davidians were cult in the sense of an unorthodox religious sect, a cult of personality was also present, in the adherents’ devotion to Koresh. And certainly there is a cult of personality in MAGA, just as there was and is a cult of personality among the adherents of Bill Cooper. Likewise, there is an argument to be made that John Lear and the adherents of his “dark side” UFO mythology are a kind of cult: a relatively small group of people promoting and spreading a dubious set of fringe beliefs to which they are devoted despite all logical disproof. And as we’ll see in the final installment of this series on UFO Whistleblowers, after Bill Cooper, the cult of John Lear would produce another figure, far more influential in UFOlogy than Bill Cooper, who, though divisive, would inspire a true cult of personality. This figure, Bob Lazar, and his claims about Area 51, will be shown to have direct connection to the claims recently made under oath to Congress by David Grusch. 

Until next time, remember, we can all learn a thing or two from the television program X-Files, which actually cribbed ideas liberally from Bill Cooper and John Lear’s “dark side” dogma. What it teaches us is that, it is perfectly natural to, like Agent Mulder, want to believe, though we must, like Scully, remain skeptically vigilant.

 Further Reading

Jacobson, Marc. Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America. Blue Rider Press, 2018.

UFO Whistleblowers, An American Tradition - Part One: Donald Keyhoe and John Lear

While we may think of the late forties and the 1950s as the heyday of American UFO sightings, some of the most interesting developments occurred in the 1960s. In that decade, we have the first claims of abduction made by Betty and Barney Hill, Lonny Zamora’s report of a close encounter in New Hampshire, and the Kecksburg incident in Pennsylvania. Perhaps the most notorious incident took place in March of 1966, when numerous residents of certain Michigan towns reported seeing unusual lights in the sky. As the incidents all occurred over swampland, the lead scientific investigator of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book suggested that the residents may have seen marsh gas, a real phenomenon I have mentioned before, in talking about will-o’-the-wisp and jack-o'-lantern folklore as well as some aspects of vampire legends. It was and remains a valid rational explanation of the event, but it did not go over well. The “swamp gas” explanation has since become the ultimate joke among UFOlogists to illustrate the lame cover stories that the government tries to pawn off on the public. That very same year, representatives of the Air Force and Blue Book were compelled to defend themselves to the public, going on television and doing damage control to try to reassure America that they were not engaged in a cover-up. One young congressman from Michigan, Gerald Ford, who would go on to serve as President for a time, wasn’t having it, though, and he called for congressional hearings on this UFO matter. Thus in April of 1966, the Committee on Armed Services did hold a hearing on the topic, the first of its kind, reviewing Blue Book and interviewing Hynek and others. During the hearing, the committee received an evaluation of Blue Book by a scientific advisory board, which determined that “the present Air Force program dealing with UFO sightings has been well organized, although the resources assigned to it have been quite limited.” Upon its recommendations, Blue Book was shuttered, its reports made public, and a more academic organization was contracted, tasking teams of scientists with continuing Blue Book’s work. This was the Condon Committee, a University of Colorado project funded by the Air Force, which before long was accused of bias and setting out to debunk the phenomenon. In fact, there was a variety of views among the committee’s membership regarding UFOs, and the idea that a scientific study might set out to disprove something does not mean it was biased or unscientific, since falsifiability is central to scientific testing, and much of the time that’s how science proves things to be true, by trying and failing to prove them false. But a memo had leaked that showed committee members were reassuring University of Colorado administrators that they would debunk UFO sightings. Really, all this revealed was the inner workings of academic politics, since no university would want itself associated with a study that might tarnish its reputation. Nevertheless, the memo soured UFO organizations, like NICAP, on the committee, so when the Condon Committee reported in 1969 that “nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” their report was rejected by many as part of a supposed government cover-up, a notion that had developed in those years and continues to develop today, when for the first time in 57 years, we recently had another congressional hearing, in which representatives interviewed whistleblowers who made some astonishing claims about UFOs, or UAP as they’re styled now, and government efforts to hide what we know about them. As I watched these latest hearings, I couldn’t help but think of the others in US history who have come forward to reveal what the government is supposedly hiding about UFOs, and how it always seems to amount to nothing.

Welcome to Historical Blindness. If you’ve been listening for a long time or have burned through my back catalog, you might have noticed a few different views I’ve taken on this subject. In my first episode to talk about UFOs, which I produced in the wake of the 2017 revelations about the Pentagon’s UAP program and the Defense Department’s release of three declassified UFO videos recorded by Naval aviators. I used Jacques Vallee’s survey of historical descriptions of phenomena that seem like UAP reports to explore the history of such sightings before the age of aviation. I included some skeptical viewpoints, but overall, I am not that proud of that piece. I’d like to revisit that topic sometime and talk more about Vallee’s credibility issues and how he takes some of his reports out of historical context. After that, I spoke about the phantom airship sightings of the late 19th century, which I was convinced were little more than a mass hysteria fueled by hoax newspaper articles. Since that time, I dug more deeply into UFO folklore and presented the alternative conspiracy narrative that much of UFO mythology can be attributed to U.S. government disinformation or psyops, a conspiracy claim that appears to be proven at least in part by the activity of Rick Doty and the campaign to feed false delusions to Paul Bennewitz. So as I watched this latest UAP drama unfold, I asked myself, is this real, a hoax, or some disinformation? Some of the recent hearings were devoted to interviewing witnesses about the UAP encounters caught on video and made public in 2017, but interestingly, some compelling alternative interpretations of even these recordings from cockpit instrumentation displays have since been provided by skeptics like Mick West, who has been a vocal and convincing proponent of mundane explanations, suggesting that the objects seen on such videos may be distant planes, birds, balloons or other airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, or simply optical illusions. But one whistleblower who spoke with Congress this summer, David Grusch, is making far more astonishing claims than having seen or recorded something unidentified. Grusch claims that the U.S. government has retrieved crashed “non-human spacecraft,” including “non-human biologics,” or alien bodies, and that they have taken lives in the course of their cover-up of this information. Besides the obvious reasons to be skeptical of such claims, I thought it important to highlight that nothing Grusch is saying is a new and unheard of claim. In fact, since the 1950s, there have been numerous other such “whistleblowers” who have made comparable claims, and looking back at all of them, I hope to give a clear sense of why we should all remain skeptical of Grusch’s testimony as well.

  The first predecessor of Grusch that comes to mind is Donald Keyhoe, who might be safely credited as the first person to popularize the idea of a U.S. government cover-up of UFOs. Like Grusch, Keyhoe served in the armed forces, specifically in the U.S. Marine Corps, resigning from active service after receiving an injury in 1922. Afterward, he helped organize Charles Lindbergh’s nationwide tour after crossing the Atlantic, and he wrote a book about it, which helped to launch his writing career. He regularly took freelance writing work for major publications like Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post, and in 1949, when thanks to Kenneth Arnold’s claims UFOs were becoming a topic of public interest, he was tasked by True magazine with writing on the subject. His article, which suggested that the military and the Pentagon were hiding the truth about flying saucers being extra-terrestrial, was a huge success and earned him a book deal. Within five or six years, he had written 3 books on the topic, The Flying Saucers Are Real, Flying Saucers from Outer Space, and The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. Although he may seem more like a conspiracist author than a military whistleblower, he was presented by the media in his numerous television appearances as a former military man with contacts in the upper echelons of the Pentagon. Indeed the Air Force’s own press secretary provided a blurb for his book, further legitimizing him, and as he relied on official reports and interviews, he seemed to be more of an official informant than a crackpot. But in reality, he was an entertainer. Before he found the UFO topic profitable, he wrote science fiction prolifically, publishing stories in Weird Tales. And indeed his tales about UFOs became weirder and weirder as he felt the need to ratchet up his revelations about the UFO conspiracy in his successive books, bringing in claims about the Bermuda Triangle and latching onto an astronomer’s mistaken claim, quickly disproven, that a land bridge could be seen on the moon to argue that this conspiracy involved secret lunar bases.

In order to demonstrate Donald Keyhoe’s clear lack of credibility, we need only examine his 1958 interview with Mike Wallace, which can be viewed in full on YouTube. In it, Keyhoe claims that the Air Technical Intelligence Center, or ATIC, had declared that UFOs were real. Really all the ATIC confirmed was that some sightings seemed to be actual aircraft, not spacecraft, and stressed that there was simply not enough data after the fact to determine the origin of whatever flights might have been seen. He also claimed that the ATIC confirmed in a secret report that UFOs were interplanetary spaceships. This appears to have been a simple overstatement of a claim made first made by Edward James Ruppelt, former head of Project Blue Book, in his book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Ruppelt himself might be viewed as the first UFO whistleblower if it were not for the conservative view of UFOs that he maintained throughout his book. Indeed, later, Ruppelt would explicitly call UFOs a “space age myth” and would make it clear that he never cared for Donald Keyhoe, who Ruppelt thought sensationalized the topic and made unsupported claims about what military officers actually thought on the subject. Despite this, in his book, likely written to supplement his income during his retirement, Ruppelt had included enough sensational tidbits to enthuse UFOlogists, including this mention of a secret report that has never been proven to have existed and may have been an invention for the book. In reality, though, if one reads the book closely, Ruppelt only actually implies that this supposed secret report came to such a conclusion, stating that General Vandenberg rejected the report because he “wouldn’t buy interplanetary vehicles.” And further stating that “[t]he report lacked proof.” So on close examination, this is certainly not the smoking gun Keyhoe pretended it to be. If it even existed, it sounds more like a report that offered no evidence and may not have even come so certain a conclusion as Keyhoe suggests. As the interview goes on, Keyhoe offers a 1952 intelligence analysis of UFO maneuvers as if it were evidence of what he claims, but he fails to mention the findings made public in 1952, as Ruppelt reported, that “[t]he possibility of the existence of interplanetary craft has never been denied by the Air Force, but UFO reports offer absolutely no authentic evidence that such interplanetary spacecraft do exist.” This is common of Keyhoe’s rhetoric; he almost invariably misrepresents or takes material out of context in order to present it as supportive of his thesis.

To Mike Wallace’s credit, he pushes back and challenges a few of Keyhoe’s assertions, catching him when he gives some inconsistent and seemingly made-up statistics. But much of what Keyhoe states goes unchallenged by Wallace, which is often the case in an interview, as Wallace couldn’t have been expected to recognize and refute every misleading claim Keyhoe had prepared. After the fact, though, that is exactly what we can do. Besides reports that have never been proven to exist, he cited another that specifically stated there was no evidence of UFOs, and he then questions why they would continue to investigate them if there were no evidence. Then within almost the same breath he says they would be hiding information about UFOs in order to avoid a hysteria… but of course, preventing a panic would also seem to be a valid reason to investigate and disprove such claims even when they have no merit. And taking a tactic that later conspiracy theorists will also use, Keyhoe presents a quotation by General Douglas MacArthur that he seems to think proves the general is in on some hidden truth about aliens. In fact, Keyhoe is perpetuating a common misquotation of General Douglas MacArthur that our next war would be interplanetary, against people from other planets. This exact statement has been proven to have never been made by MacArthur, and especially not at West Point, as is the common claim. Rather, the Mayor of Naples reported once, secondhand, that MacArthur had said something to that effect, but that he was talking about “a thousand years from now” when “today’s civilization would appear as obsolete as the stone age.” MacArthur did talk about the idea of an “ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy,” but this was in a speech years after Keyhoe’s interview, and in it MacArthur is listing numerous astonishing places that the frontiers of science seem to be taking us, in energy and medicine. In short, he is musing on the future, calling all these thoughts “such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all times.” This interview alone serves to demonstrate the kind of cherry-picking and misrepresentation that Donald Keyhoe and other UFO conspiracists since then have relied on in order to spread their claims.

Like so many hoaxers and denialists and other purveyors of misinformation, Keyhoe makes disingenuous challenges to the Navy to reactivate him and court martial him if he is lying, challenges designed to make him seem sincere, which in reality are just patently ridiculous. Only Marines who have been retired less than 30 years, considered reservists, can be restored to active duty, and Keyhoe had been retired 35 years. And both reservists and retirees were long believed to be not subject to court-martial. That did not change until 2020, when a retiree was court-martialed in a landmark Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals decision, but that was for the crimes of attempted sexual assault and child sexual abuse. At the time Keyhoe issued this disingenuous challenge to court-martial him, he was a retiree, a civilian not subject to such a proceeding by any precedent, and by misleading the public about a government cover-up, he had committed no criminal offense warranting a court martial. In fact, as a professional writer, pretty much any outlandish claim he made was protected by the First Amendment as long as he was not inciting lawless action. The challenge was little more than a stunt. And that really sums up Donald Keyhoe’s career as a writer and media personality. Once he saw that writing about UFOs brought him money and attention, he dedicated himself to it, and he became a minor celebrity for it. Once he even appeared on a game show called To Tell the Truth, in which celebrity panelists had to pick out the real Donald Keyhoe among a group of actors pretending to be him. Some may see Keyhoe’s biggest contribution to UFOlogy as his founding of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, or NICAP, an influential civilian UFO research group, the power of which he used to lobby for the congressional hearings of 1966 which I described earlier. Really, though, I would argue that his lasting contribution was the marriage of UFOlogy to conspiracy culture, inventing the idea of a massive government cover-up. But like most prominent conspiracy theorists, his heyday would come and go, and he would disappear into obscurity. His ouster from NICAP came as the result of the organization’s bankruptcy, and by the 1980s, his involvement in UFOlogy did not extend beyond an occasional appearance at a UFO conference. It is worth noting that he died at 91 after struggling with declining health for years. He was never silenced by the “silence group” he claimed was hushing up everything that he published books about and spoke about on national television.

By the time of Donald Keyhoe’s death, another godfather of UFO conspiracy theories had arrived on the scene, born of a rather famous and influential family. John Olsen Lear was born in 1942 to Bill and Moya Lear. His father was a self-taught inventor and industrialist who as a radio engineer would pioneer the trend in miniaturization and develop 8-track music cartridges. He was best known, however, for his mass production of business jets, the Learjet. Bill’s son John attended a boarding school in Switzerland, where he claimed to have been the youngest American to have ever climbed the Matterhorn. There is no evidence of the truth of this claim that I’ve found, but it is actually among the least far-fetched claims that John Lear would go on to make. While his father made a name for himself building planes, John would make his reputation flying them, and in 1966, the very same spring that UFO sightings were blamed on marsh gas in Michigan and Congress reviewed Project Blue Book, he piloted one of his father’s jets around the world in record time. Perhaps even more than the retired Marine Donald Keyhoe, John Lear might have had a better claim to whistleblower status when he came out with revelations about a government coverup, because he claimed to have actually worked for U.S. intelligence services during Vietnam. In fact, what he did, it seems, was pilot cargo planes for Air America, which was covertly owned and operated by the CIA, making him a de facto CIA operative between 1967 and 1983. However, what Air America pilots did was deliver supplies, like livestock and rice, and perhaps the occasional narcotic for allies who happened to be drug lords, and transport doctors and refugees, as well as the occasional commando, saboteur, or spy. But as a simple pilot, he would not have been someone privy to the kinds of secrets he would later claim to have discovered. Like Keyhoe before him, and like Grusch today, he pieced together his grand conspiracy claims from things other people told him, and from things he read, usually unreliable claims spread by other conspiracy theorists. In 1987, he circulated a press release that outlined his conspiracy claims in broad strokes, and soon after, an ambitious local newsman in Las Vegas Nevada, George Knapp, put him on the air in the studios of Channel 8, KLAS-TV, a CBS affiliate. He claimed that his interest in UFOs started because of the sightings of members of his family, though here it seems he may have been continuing his long practice of exploiting the name and reputation of his father, as there is no evidence beyond John’s assertion that Bill Lear ever claimed to have seen a UFO. Regardless, the mere fact that sometimes pilots and others see things in the sky that they can’t readily identify is nothing compared to the conspiracy claims that John would promote: that the U.S. government had retrieved crashed alien spacecraft and recovered extra-terrestrial astronauts. This should sound very familiar, as it’s quite like what David Grusch asserted before Congress earlier this summer, except here Lear claims far more craft retrievals, far more biological remains, and he would even say living aliens were in custody, adding the further layer that there are numerous alien races that have visited us, and as he would go on to claim, that the U.S. government has colluded with aliens for decades.

Like Keyhoe before him, in Lear’s interview with Knapp, he makes numerous assertions that the newsman lets pass unchallenged and that prove to be illogical or entirely misleading on further examination. So, for example, he explains that there is plenty of evidence for what he claims, but that the press is not interested in the story. The simple fact that UFO stories had been huge in the 1950s, and big again in the 1960s, as evidenced by Donald Keyhoe’s continued TV appearances and the Congressional hearing of ’66, and the simple fact that Lear was spouting his claims to a television audience in that very moment would seem to disprove this and suggest that when the press rejects such news stories, it may be because they have no merit. Using Keyhoe’s established playbook, Lear also took documents and statements entirely out of context in order to make it seem like he had uncovered proof of some grand government conspiracy to cover-up their alien dealings. So for example, when asked directly by Knapp for evidence, he shares a quote from a physics textbook used by the Air Force. Now, there are a few things to point out with this quote. First, it’s saying aliens are “commonly described” this way, not that they are real and really appear this way. Also, he is completely misquoting the textbook. Its text is available online, and where Lear quotes it as saying “This leads us to believe in the unpleasant possibility of alien visitors,” it actually says “This leaves us with the unpleasant possibility of alien visitors,” a small but crucial misquote that makes it appear the textbook makes an argument that it does not. In fact, the final conclusion in this chapter is that “The best thing to do is to keep an open and skeptical mind, and not take an extreme position on any side of the question.” Moreover, Lear claims that every President knows about this well-kept secret, and then he quotes from Ronald Reagan, who a couple times mused about how humanity might come together in the face of a global threat. In reality, such a thought was not original, having appeared in science fiction like Star Trek for decades. And even further, going back 50 years before the first modern UFO sighting, it seems likely Reagan was just paraphrasing a sentiment expressed by psychologist John Dewey, who in a 1917 speech said, “the best way to unite all the nations on this globe would be an attack from some other planet…. In the face of such an alien enemy, people would respond with a sense of their unity of interest and purpose.” And if we think logically about what Lear is claiming here, he is saying that Presidents like Reagan keep this secret, but then suggesting that Reagan was regularly hinting about the secret. Likewise, he quotes President Jimmy Carter, who claimed to have seen a UFO and who swore to disclose government info on UFOs to the public. To Lear, this is evidence of the pressure to keep even Presidents quiet, but conversely, it also seems to be evidence that these Presidents would have disclosed such information if there were any such information to disclose.

Almost all of what Lear claimed to have uncovered in his research was actually cribbed from the UFO conspiracy claims of other “researchers,” claims that have mostly been convincingly refuted. For example, he repeats a lot of claims about cattle mutilations, expressing a clear admiration for Linda Moulton Howe’s television documentary on the topic, A Strange Harvest.  I spoke about these claims regarding cattle mutilation previously, in my UFO Disinfo series. Coming as they did in the midst of the Satanic Panic, one early theory for some of these livestock deaths was cult activity, but before long it was attributed to extra-terrestrials. One far more supportable and rational though still conspiracist view, which I presented in my examination, is that the livestock had been experimented on and studied not by aliens but by covert government agencies who were concerned about the emergence of Mad Cow Disease. But most scientists have concluded that all observations point to the activity of predators, scavengers, and parasites, with the supposedly surgical incisions actually being explainable through the natural processes of dehydration, decomposition, and carrion feeding. In this way, this myth is much like vampire folklore, born of ignorance about the changes death brings. To get a sense of how misleading claims about cattle mutilation can be, and how little John Lear knew about the things he said, we can listen to his ridiculous statement about supposed incisions in dead livestock showing that a laser had been used to cut between cells. The fact is that anytime we cut anything, we are cutting between the cells. A simple papercut cuts between the cells, clumping them to either side. Even an extraordinarily sharp blade made of obsidian might at most damage some cells with blunt force but not split them. What he’s saying here is absolutely backward. If the tissue were really examined at the cellular level, as he’s saying, then it would be more surprising, more indicative of laser microdissection, if the cells HAD been cut, but even then it would not be evidence of extra-terrestrial technology.

And beyond his poor grasp of science and promotion of dubious claims like these, he also promoted outright hoaxes. For example, John Lear was a big promoter of the Majestic 12 hoax. To hear more about that, check out my episode The Great Los Angeles Air Raid and the Secret Memos of Majestic 12, and also my UFO Disinfo series. Essentially, it was the purported leaking of documents claiming to show the formation of a shadowy government group responsible for the UFO cover-up, dating all the way back to the supposed UFO retrieval at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Never mind that it was leaked to a pal of Bill Moore’s, the writer responsible for turning the Roswell incident into the foundational UFO myth that it is today, and never mind that there is evidence the documents were forged and then smuggled by Bill Moore into the National Archives in an attempt to authenticate them. Moore himself had serious credibility issues, having also popularized the Philadelphia Experiment hoax, which I also discussed and refuted in detail last year in my series Stranger Things Have Happened. It was later revealed that Bill Moore had been working on a fiction novel that featured a concept very close to the Majestic 12 claims, further indicating that it had been a hoax. In 1989, when Bill Moore revealed to a UFOlogy community at a Las Vegas MUFON conference that he had spread government disinformation given to him by intelligence operative Rick Doty, it should have finally discredited him and his claims about the Philadelphia Experiment, the Roswell Incident, and MJ-12 forever. Instead it only seemed to sour UFO enthusiasts on Moore personally and convince them only of the falsity of the claims about a massive underground alien base in Dulce, New Mexico, made by Paul Bennewitz, a UFO researcher driven to mental breakdown by Doty’s and Moore’s disinformation. John Lear was a purveyor of all of these claims, including the discredited claim about the Dulce base, which he claimed was a joint operation run by extra-terrestrials and the CIA, where he said they kept vats full of human body parts, and in which he claimed a battle between aliens and humans had occurred after the agreement between the two sides had failed. Who knows what his source was for some of these claims, but after Bill Moore’s disclosure that Dulce base was a psyop, he didn’t really promote it further. Still, though, even years later, as Lear’s reach and influence on the UFO community was further magnified by his regular appearance on the massively popular Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell, the world heard him bending over backward in his insistence on continuing to believe Moore’s other claims, even the discredited Majestic 12 papers. 

As can be discerned from his claims about Dulce base, we see that John Lear seized on wild UFO conspiracy claims and then embellished them, making wilder and wilder assertions that seem to have sprung from his own imagination. For example, with the premise that Majestic 12 retrieved alien bodies, he speaks of autopsies, and using terminology that would later be found in other documents circulated among UFOlogists, likely forged to expand the MJ12 mythos and corroborate claims like the ones Lear had long made, he speaks about living Extraterrestrial Biological Entities, or EBE’s, and the interviews conducted with them, but you can hear in his interviews that he lacked any credible evidence, relying only on documents he says he has seen. Interestingly, he was among the first to suggest that Groom Lake, AKA Area 51, was a place where these alien prisoners were held and their bodies and craft studied, but like Grusch today with his claims about evidence being described to him by others, Lear always admitted that he had not seen any of this stuff himself. Yet despite having no real first-hand knowledge or evidence, he continued to make more and more unbelievable and specific claims about the EBEs he said Majestic 12 had captured, that they took sustenance through their skin instead of ingesting food in a more traditional manner, and that they moved by thought, which I guess means some kind of teleportation? It makes you wonder why they would need craft to pilot at all. And the logic of many claims he made is far faultier than this. Take his assertion to George Knapp that we had recovered 10 to15 craft and 30 to 50 alien bodies. In the very next interview with Knapp, he says there are 70 species of aliens visiting earth. Those numbers simply don’t add up! How do we know about the 20 other species if we have recovered fifty only? Were the rest living EBEs? And does this mean each spacecraft was manned by a multicultural crew representing around 7 different species aboard each vehicle? How very like a Starfleet vessel it would have to be, and since he said they came from five different civilizations, these must have been melting pot civilizations indeed!

Despite these outrageous claims, he would go on to appear on far more television programs than even Donald Keyhoe, including a lot of terrible History Channel trash like Brad Meltzer's Decoded, America's Book of Secrets, and Ancient Aliens. During his time in the spotlight, John Lear would make numerous predictions that would never come true. In talking about the UFO abduction phenomenon, he claimed without clear evidence that abductees were being programmed like the Boys from Brazil to go somewhere specific within the next five years and do something momentous…which of course none every seem to have done. Near the end of his life, he has been described even by sympathetic and credulous researchers like George Knapp as becoming even more lunatic in his claims, telling whoever would listen that there were more than 90 alien races that lived on the Sun. While at the time of his first appearance, Lear seemed like a credible figure blowing the whistle on incredible things, in the end, he would be revealed as an absolute crackpot. Today, some may try to assert that David Grusch’s claims about alien wreckage and pilot retrieval show John Lear was right, but Lear was only ever repeating those claims, just as Grusch is today. And we can’t forget about all the other completely daft claims he made, which will surely never be convincingly corroborated. Lear certainly liked to say that he would eventually be proven right, but the fact is, he’s already been proven wrong so many times that he’ll never be vindicated.

Looking back at similar claims made by others in the last hundred years of American history should provide some sense that Grusch’s claims must also be viewed skeptically. Very similar claims of a government coverup of UAP can be clearly traced back to Donald Keyhoe, and as we’ve seen, his evidence and argument were shaky and unconvincing. Now these same claims appear repackaged and made more palatable as a claim that certain agencies tasked with the analysis of UAP have not been transparent with Congress. Certainly the 2017 New York Times piece on the black money funding of the Pentagon’s former UAP program demonstrated that. That should not be news. This latest congressional hearing on UFOs, the first of its kind since 1966, was not focused on establishing that. Instead, it was a platform on which claims about UFOs and coverup could be trotted back out and paraded before the American public. Similar accusations of covert crash retrievals and alien body recovery go all the way back to the Roswell legend and the MJ12 hoax, both attributable to Bill Moore, who has been discredited as a disinformation agent—all of it popularized by John Lear, who ended up being far less trustworthy than he may have at first appeared in his Las Vegas news interview. And like Keyhoe and Lear, Grusch also just seems to be repeating things he has read or that others have told him. Yes, Grusch does appear to be a more legitimate whistleblower in that he followed the protocols to achieve lawful whistleblower status. And the context of his statements may seem to lend him further credibility, since he is speaking under oath in a public congressional hearing, rather than in a radio or television interview, in which the stakes are far lower. And it may appear that everything Grusch says must be true because his statements have been cleared by his employer. However, we must remember that, if nothing Grusch says turns out to be accurate, this wouldn’t be the first time that someone testified to something that wasn’t true. And remember that he is only saying what he says others told him, so it would not even necessarily be considered perjury, unless it could be proven that he was never told such things, which would be especially hard to prove given that he does not even testify as to who told him the things he is saying he’s heard. And last but perhaps most importantly, we must remember that his statements being cleared only means he’s not saying anything classified, not that anything he’s saying is true. Indeed, the fact that his claims about alien craft and body retrieval has been cleared seems to indicate that they’re not true, because if they were, wouldn’t they be classified and therefore not cleared for a public hearing? So we may ask, why is this being taken so seriously? How did this whistleblower’s unsupported statements about alien conspiracies get packaged as a major congressional hearing and thus draw so much press coverage?  If up on our conspiracy board we were to stretch out that red string from the pin pushed into Grusch’s photo, we may trace a direct line back to John Lear through other media figures that Lear would go on to introduce to the public, and to members of the press who brought their messages to the world—namely George Knapp, that Las Vegas talking head who first put Lear on the air, who has since made a career out of promoting other UFO whistleblowers and now has some connection to David Grusch…which I will explore further in Part Two of UFO Whistleblowers: An American Tradition.

“CHAPTER XXXIII: UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS.” INTRODUCTORY SPACE SCIENCE, vol. 2, edited by Donald G. Carpenter and Edward R. Therkelson. CUFON, 14 May 1992, https://www.cufon.org/cufon/afu.htm.

Koren, Marina. “Why Everyone Is Suddenly Talking About Aliens.” The Atlantic, 7 June 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/06/alien-intact-vehicles-ufo-us-government/674323/.

Mikkelson, David. “Did General Douglas MacArthur Predict an Interplanetary War?” Snopes, 17 Aug. 2005, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/macarthur-planets-war/.

Patowary, Kaushik. “A Natural Land Bridge on The Moon.” Amusing Planet, 17 Oct. 2019, https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/10/a-natural-land-bridge-on-moon.html?m=1.

Ruppelt, Edward J. “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.” Project Gutenberg, 13 Dec. 2020, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17346/pg17346-images.html.

United States, Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services. Hearing on Unidentified Flying Objects, 1966. 89th Congress, 2nd session, no. 55, pp. 5991-6075. Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=5tiKlTbhXvMC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Raging Against the Machine: Thoughts on Technofear and Luddism

The modern era is a time of unfettered technological development, evolving at breakneck speeds. Alongside the development of modern technology is a fear for what harmful effects it may have on humanity and civilization. With the ubiquity of the Internet have come fears about cognitive decline. With the arrival of social media platforms have arisen concerns about isolation and loneliness and this technology’s contribution to the mental health crisis. Adding to existing worries about the enablement of plagiarism and misinformation, the advent of artificial intelligence has kicked our fears into overdrive, with chatbots writing students’ essays for them and machine learning programs generating forged videos that can fool the eyes and ears. Considering the longstanding notion in fiction that technology may spell the doom of mankind, that artificial intelligence will inevitably turn on its designers and machines will rise up to dominate their creators, it’s no surprise that a creeping dread colors our relationship with AI and the information and communication technology that permeates our culture. And there is longstanding historical precedent for such technofear. Most immediately, preceding concerns about screen time on our smartphones and laptops, there were fears that video games harmed kids. Today some see a causal relationship between social media and mass shootings, just as previously it was argued that such shootings were inspired by violent games. And just as today many are concerned that social media and constant Internet use result in poor school performance, alienation from friends and family, reduced social skills, and sedentary lifestyles, the exact same things were previously said about video games. Before video games, television fueled these concerns. We all remember being told that TV will rot our brains or harm our eyesight or turn us into couch potatoes. All the same things are said today about the Internet and social media. And before TV, it was radio, which critics feared was distracting children from their schoolwork and generally overstimulating them. But such technofear goes back much further. While we can’t know for certain, since some of the first stone tools were weapons, we might imagine that fear was a common reaction to the development of technology from the beginning. How could early humans not react at first in fear of the power to create and control fire? Throughout human history, there are plenty of examples of technological innovation being feared as some kind of sorcery. Think of the development of chemical sciences by alchemists seeking the Philosopher’s Stone. And long before the fear of computing technology came the very similar fear of printing technology made possible through the development of movable type. When automobiles were developed, it’s said that pedestrians shrank from the loud smoke-belching machines and shouted “Get a horse!” And telegraph systems, which have been called the “Victorian Internet,” were once destroyed by fearful mobs. Today, rampant reliance on technology is a labor concern, due to automation in the workplace, lack of transparency in online business models, and the potential for artificial intelligence to replace entertainment industry workers. In the past, such labor concerns about technology resulted in organized rebellion and violence of a kind never seen before, by the Luddites in England, but today the word Luddite is an epithet, hurled at any who express the slightest qualm about the potential or even the measurable harm of a technology. And all of these analogies, comparing critics of technology today to those in the past, tend to paint any concerns about the safety or potential harmful effects of modern technology as baseless, as the domain of backward thinkers and old fogies who just can’t handle change. So the question is, what does history really tell us about the rationality of such fears? Is the fear that modern technology may be lead to our demise reasonable or does entertaining such fears make one a reactionary technophobe who lacks foresight and a basic understanding of the modern world?

This is a topic I have wanted to explore for a while, but it’s very different from my typical topics, and it’s also one I’ve dreaded finally tackling for a number of reasons. I teach research, critical thinking, and writing at a few colleges in my area, and for several years I have used the topic of technology and its effects and controversies as a theme of my courses. In my first-year composition courses, specifically, I have students take a side in the debate about the potential cognitive effects of the Internet, and we follow that up with a further argument about the possible social and mental health effects of screen time. After that, students enter a research project period, choosing a topic of their own related to some controversial technology, with common topics including the harms of automating industries and the dangers of artificial intelligence. Because of these classes, I have read many arguments on these debates, not just those composed by students but also editorials and scholarly articles that address concerns about these technologies. Despite having been immersed in the topic, I find myself unable to take a strong position on it. Take, for example, the concern that information and communication technology, or ICT, like the Internet, is weakening cognitive abilities. I still find myself swayed by the arguments of people like Nicholas Carr that the Internet has turned us into distracted thinkers with short attention spans and shallow readers who skim and browse instead of reading and thinking deeply. I see it in myself, of course, but I also see it in students who misuse sources and take material out of context because they have not fully read or understood it. And I further see the Internet as the central reason for the poor source evaluation and limited research skills of students even at the college level today, who frequently think that Googling a topic and browsing the first page of results constitutes research, and that some general information webpage or FAQ, probably composed by a site’s webmaster, or some blog post written by a freelancer, is a high-quality source. Some educators blame the Internet for the informality in students’ writing and see that as its chief harm, but whether informal or not, at least people are reading and writing when they are interacting online. I think the issues of digital literacy are far more significant.  But at the same time, I know that the Internet is an indispensable tool in research, and if you know what a high-quality source is and how to find it, the Internet can provide access to a vast reserve of useful and credible information. So of course, it’s up to educators to give students the tools they need to navigate and make the best use of this technology. From my own experience researching and creating this podcast and listening to other podcasts and immersing myself in podcast culture, I know that information and communication technology can be used to enrich one’s life, to hone one’s critical thinking skills, and to grow one’s knowledge. Whether you’re a podcast listener or you’re putting in the work to create a podcast, the technology encourages lifelong learning. And this is true not just of podcast listeners, but of readers of blogs and viewers on video platforms and even of those who regularly dive into Wikipedia rabbit holes. If you can discern what’s trustworthy, it seems to me the Internet can be a tool for growing your knowledge and strengthening your cognitive abilities. So then it seems to be a matter of how it’s used or misused. What has prompted me to further explore my reservations about modern technology in this episode, though, is the new technology currently being misused by students. Since the beginning of the year, the jobs of educators have been made far more difficult by the emergence of accessible AI writing bots like ChatGPT. Some students now no longer even try to complete the reading and compose their own responses, instead feeding prompts into such chatbots and submitted the AI-generated text as their own. Yes, there are ways to detect such academic dishonesty, but this new tool has me disenchanted and is sending me reeling once again into technofear, wringing my hands for future generations that may let their writing skills atrophy. A future in which very few people read books was bleak enough, but a future in which writing, one of the most fundamental skills of humanity, is delegated to a computer program is downright dystopian.  

An artist’s depiction of Homo habilis developing the first technology: stone tools.

There are some further issues I struggle with in taking on this topic. One is that taking an anti-technology stance, even uncertainly or in part, is difficult for me to take. It strikes me as being anti-science, and listeners of the show know that I’m a staunch defender of science. As I have shown in numerous topics, anti-science and anti-intellectualism are great disingenuous evils in our world that should be opposed vigorously. But I think that one can defend science and oppose anti-intellectualism while also acknowledging the potential harms or risks inherent in any scientific breakthrough. With the film Oppenheimer in theaters, it’s perhaps an apt example to point out that one can acknowledge the genius of nuclear physicists and the manifold benefits of nuclear science while also recognizing the inherent risks of nuclear power. Likewise automotive technology resulted in many social and economic benefits, such as increased personal freedom, better access to employment, and the development of infrastructure, none of which need to be ignored to decry its role in suburbanization with all its concomitant evils—social inequality, poverty, crime—and the combustion of fossil fuels resulting in the anthropogenic climate change that has initiated a sixth mass extinction event. Indeed the benefits pale when juxtaposed with these harms. The problem is that, in the debate about the potential harms of computing technology and the Internet, the effects have not yet been proven. While educators on the front lines may be saying, “Hey, these cognitive abilities appear to be waning or are being allowed to wither, and the Internet may be why,” it’s easy enough to say there’s no proof that the Internet is causing this. In his book The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Nicholas Carr does his best to offer such proof in the form of university studies involving students, but his most compelling evidence that “intellectual technologies” change the way we our brains work—and therefore could be changing them for the worse—takes the form of examples he takes from history. The technology that helped to develop cartography, he argues, also helped to change the entire way people view the world around them, the way we make sense of the world. Maps, essentially, resulted in a kind of abstract thought that did not previously exist. This was certainly a technology that changed the way we think for the better, unless we consider its contribution to colonialism. But consider another technology: the mechanical clock. Although time measuring technology existed even in antiquity, in the form of sundials, water clocks, incense clocks and candle clocks, in the Middle Ages, monks popularized mechanical clocks in order to better time their prayer schedules with exactitude, and from the swinging bells of church towers, the technology spread across the world, until every community had its own clock, and as they were miniaturized, they became a staple of households, and eventually watches filled many a pocket, a ticking handheld device that let its owner easily access the world of mechanical time. Clocks were a clear forerunner of computers in this regard, as now most of us carry one of those powerful devices in our pockets. Prior to the advent of mechanical clocks, people conceived of their lives in natural cycles and measured their days according to circadian rhythms and their years according to seasons and harvests. Yes time-keeping had long been a practice, but before movable type and the printing press, the common person was likely not consulting calendars or thinking in those terms. Thus, time-keeping devices changed the way people measured their lives, introducing the elements of haste and stress, turning us all into a species of clock watchers.

With the mention of the printing press, we bring up perhaps the best example of an information and communication technology that changed the world in ways analogous to what we see in the digital age with the Internet. Just as today the power of information has been democratized, giving easier access to knowledge and literature, in the same way the invention of the printing press brought literature to the masses in the time of the scribal system, when books were copied by hand in monasteries, written in Latin, accessible only to the elite, and controlled by the Catholic Church. Ecclesiastical authorities were right to fear the advent of this technology, because it meant they would lose their monopoly on knowledge. It resulted in so-called “vulgar” language translations of the Bible and other works, such that the masses could read them for themselves, and it led to increased literacy, the development of modern literary art, and the success of the scientific enlightenment. Indeed, this technology would prove to be the death knell for Catholic control of medieval Europe as it would greatly contribute to the Protestant Reformation. And this, of course, was only a bad thing for those attached to the old ways, and was a wonderful thing for humanity and human intellect. This is a common argument raised by those who want to discount modern concerns about the Internet and other technology. There are always naysayers, they point out, and look how they were always wrong. For example, Socrates iselieveed that the invention of writing was a great evil because it would result in the weakening of memory. And books were stupidly condemned by Martin Luther, who had himself benefited so greatly from the printing press in the promulgation of his 95 theses, when he claimed, “The multitude of books is a great evil.” Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, known for his educational theory, is strangely quoted as saying “I hate books,” and British historian and man of letters Thomas Carlyle once stated, “Books are a triviality.” Also ironically, books were decried by someone who famously made his living and reputation by writing, Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote, “The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age.” And finally, Benjamin Disraeli, a novelist and Prime Minister of England, once said, “Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race.…The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.” Look what fools you find yourself in company with, the defenders of the Internet will say, confident that they will be on the right side of history.

A depiction of Johannes Gutenberg and his press.

However, as is common with such arguments, they are cherry picking. It is absurd to suggest that as late as the 19th century people still discounted the importance of the printing press and its contribution to the advancement of our species. In fact, all of these examples, even going all the way back to Socrates, are taken out of context and don’t really represent the arguments being made. In Plato’s Phaedrus, when Socrates engages in a dialogue with Phaedrus about writing, he previously states, “Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing,” and his argument is actually that writing “is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth,” going on to explain that writing is more like painting, static and unchanging and thus inferior to instruction by a living teacher who can respond to questions. So we see his position is far more nuanced than just “writing bad.” As for Martin Luther’s supposed ironic condemnation of printing presses, he is also quoted as saying “Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one,” and the conclusion of his quote about the “multitude of books” being “a great evil” shows he was only talking about people’s motivation for writing: “every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name; others for the sake of mere gain.” Likewise, Rousseau said he hated books because, as he said in his next sentence, “they only teach people to talk about what they do not understand,” a sentiment very similar to that expressed by Socrates so many centuries earlier. Carlyle, for his part, called books a triviality because, as he went on to say, “Life alone is great,” which we can see was not an attack on the technology of printing at all but more a recommendation to put books down and touch grass once in a while. Poe called the multiplication of books in his time an evil because, “it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information, by throwing in the reader’s way piles of lumber, in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful matter, peradventure interspersed.” And in the same way, in between calling books a curse and the invention of printing a misfortune, Disraeli explained that, “Nine-tenths of all existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.” So we can see that most examples typically given to demonstrate that people had the same sort of misguided concerns about books that we have about the Internet today are either disingenuous or misinformed, and these last examples, which were actually concerns about information overload and misinformation, are even more pressing today, with the Internet, than they were in the 19th century! Indeed, what Socrates says about those who only read instead of engaging in his Socratic dialogues is also a very apt description of people today learning solely from the Internet, that repository of quick answers ready for hasty retrieval, by searching up a fact on Wikipedia or skimming an article’s headline as a quick way to seem informed: “they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

The Victorian Internet, the telegraph, has likewise been claimed to have Inflamed widespread fears and anger, but this too may not be so accurate. Henry David Thoreau is said to have been skeptical about telegraphy, but if we read his actual words, we find he was only skeptical of their usefulness, not their harms. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” he said, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” So he was really just throwing shade at regions he thought were provincial or unsophisticated. Sometimes it’s pointed out that as soon as the optical telegraph was demonstrated in France, it was immediately destroyed by a fearful mob. In truth, though, this was during the Paris Commune, shortly before their insurrection, when revolutionary sentiment was at a fever pitch, and the telegraph was destroyed not out of technofear but because it was feared that the contraption was being used to send secret messages to royalists in Temple Prison. Still, we see here an early example of machine-breaking as a response to technological misgivings, and this may serve as our central historical example instructing us where skepticism and fear of technology may lead us today. Breaking machines in the workplace as a form of organized resistance dates back to the late 17th century in England, though rather than acts of sabotage inspired by actual technofear, many of these early instances can be seen more as threats to employers used to win concessions for industrial workers—kind of a give-us-what-we-want-or-we-break-your-stuff approach. In the early 19th century, though, among English textile workers specifically, in the cotton, wool, and hosiery trades, this labor movement became cohesive, organized, and aimed specifically at the destruction of the large stocking frames, cotton looms, and wool shearers that had in recent years left so many handcrafters out of work. These rebels came under cover of darkness, broke windows with hatchets and stones, fired muskets into newly-built factories, and destroyed these offending machines with massive blacksmith hammers. According to newspaper reports and their own proclamations, they followed a leader named General Ludd, or King Ludd, and they would not stop breaking these infernal devices until the Industrial Revolution that had destroyed their lives and communities was reversed. Thus they came to be known as the Luddites. Between 1811 and 1817, these outlaws, who actually rose up around Nottinghamshire, in the same area as the mythical Robin Hood, systematically destroyed property and engaged in shoot outs with those who began to stay overnight at their factories to defend their expensive machines. People were injured, and lives were lost. Eventually, the government dispatched more than 10,000 soldiers to quell the disturbance, and numerous Luddites were hanged. One couldn’t say that these troops were defending the status quo, since really, it was the Luddites who wanted things to stay as they long had been. Instead, the government was defending its economic interests. Today Luddites are remembered as enemies of progress, but was it really progress they resisted? Was it even a fear of technology that animated them?

Artist’s rendering of General Ludd, the fictitious leader of the Luddites.

Today, it is understood that there really was no leader named General Ludd or King Ludd commanding these rebels, though some among them may have used the name as a nom de guerre, a pseudonym used during wartime. Some suspect the name referred to the mythical founder of London, King Lud, who was said to be buried beneath Ludgate. Alternatively, according to claims that made their way into contemporary newspapers, the Luddites may have taken their name from a local teen boy named Ned Ludd who was maybe a little slow or maybe a bit bullied, who when whipped for being sluggish at his work on a knitting frame grew angry and destroyed the machine. By this theory, the boy and this incident was so well-remembered locally that whenever a machine was smashed or broken, it was said that Ned Ludd had been there. And it is claimed the name even became a verb, meaning the act of rising in anger at an employer and damaging workplace property, such that an angry weaver might want to “Ned Ludd” his frame loom. None of this can be confirmed, but whatever was true of their origins and leaders, it is certainly not true that they feared or misunderstood machines. And it’s not really accurate even to say they hated the technology that they sought to destroy or that they blamed the technology for their situations. These were artisans who had long worked with the same technology, just on a smaller scale. What these laborers resented, what they actually rebelled against, was their loss of autonomy, the construction of these machines at such a scale that the human operators became mere appendages to the device rather than the other way around. And most of all, they were protesting the loss of work and the working conditions they were being forced into in order to find any work. In the late 18th century, these artisans plied their trades in small workshops, among close friends and family. They took great pride in their work, and they were able to determine their own work hours. They were a literal cottage industry, in that they worked in rural cottages, surrounded by their children, and if at any time they tired of their labor, they could take a break to work instead in their garden. Then within about 35 years, they saw their entire world transformed as huge five-story factories began appearing everywhere, full of monstrous machines that could do the work of numerous such artisans. Soon thousands upon thousands of such handcrafters found themselves out of work, and in order to continue supporting their families in the trade they had pursued all their life, they had to accept inhuman conditions in these mills and factories, where they were forced to work long unceasing hours in high temperatures with noise so deafening they had to learn to read lips. And it wasn’t just their lives that they saw the Industrial Revolution destroying, it was their entire country, as factories darkened the skies with smoke and mills polluted the waterways with filth. Yes, their actions were criminal, but Luddites had legitimate grievances. It is unfair and inaccurate to depict them today as foolish naysayers or backward holdouts who feared anything new.

At its heart, the Luddite movement was a labor movement. Karl Marx saw in their struggle and other European worker revolts, an inevitable cycle moving toward the overthrow of capitalism. In Marx’s view, technology was a central tool of the worker’s oppression. Those who owned the means of production thus determined how the proletariat could be exploited for their labor and dehumanized, reducing them to wage slaves. It is hard not to see the story of the Luddites through the lens of Marxist thought, and it is likewise hard not to compare their struggle with the struggle of modern organized labor, who likewise protest the mechanization and automation of their industries. From longshoremen, to transportation workers, from farmers to food service workers, labor unions everywhere are fighting this trend toward the replacement of workers with robots. But the most powerful tool of organized labor, the strike, could backfire because some fear that withholding labor would only encourage employers to automate jobs. Robots don’t worry about being scabs, after all, and don’t require wages, breaks, or any time off. If there’s ever a work stoppage, it’s just a matter of performing repairs. They are the ideal employee because they have no dignity and make no demands. But where does that leave human beings? We see this struggle against technology elsewhere as well, in the current entertainment industry strike of writers and screen actors. And in their case, they too fear being replaced. In a nightmare future, corporate production companies have all their film and television scripts written by artificial intelligence, and they need no longer pay actors if through deepfake technology a virtual performance can be generated. So we come back inevitably to the fears of an artificial intelligence and how it may surpass and supplant us. Humanity has long been simultaneously fascinated and horrified by this notion of artificial beings able to fool our eyes and replace us. Such a simulacrum was in ancient times called an automaton, and it was long thought they might be created with clockwork. The word automaton indicates more than just robotics, however, which we see companies like Boston Dynamics making astounding strides in today. The word indicates a machine with a will of its own, which would furthermore indicate an intelligence. The hypothetical point at which artificial intelligence surpasses our own and makes humanity obsolete is called the Singularity, and there is an argument to be made that such a thing may be impossible. Indeed, we may even quibble and say that what we call artificial intelligence today, in the form of bots like ChatGPT, is not actually genuine intelligence but rather a simulacrum of it, the mere resemblance of thought through language patterns and algorithms for generating responses to prompts. However, one of the first tests of whether a machine has achieved intelligence is called the imitation game, or the Turing test, named after Alan Turing, who proposed it in 1950. By this test, a human evaluator would engage in a text conversation with both another human being and with a machine, and if the person could not tell the which was a person and which a machine, it could be said that the machine had exhibited intelligent behavior. By this admittedly rudimentary measure, then, we do now have true artificial intelligence. So the question then becomes, what should be done about it?

The disastrous risks of unsafe technology were well known in the Industrial Era in the form of boiler explosions. Image credit: Mark Wahl.

As Nicholas Carr characterizes this debate in his book, The Shallows, the conflict is over whether we take an instrumentalist or a determinist view of technology. Is technology just a tool that is neutral, subservient to our commands, or has it developed out of our control, such that now we must adapt to its new paradigm? Put simply, do we still use it or do we in some ways serve it? Certainly the Luddites would have told us that it is the latter. But regardless of this debate, it seems we can all agree that a tool used by us can still be dangerous, can be misused, and in such cases, when a technology poses a harm to society, measures must be taken to prevent its misuse. For example, the invention of the steam engine was the catalyst for the Industrial Revolution that followed, a truly disruptive technology, as we may say today. But we might also call it explosive, because boilers had this inconvenient tendency to explode. The catastrophic risk of this technology could not be ignored, but it could be mitigated with further improvements to the technology and, more importantly here, the imposition of safety practices to prevent such harm. The Industrial revolution that the steam engine made possible led to terrible environmental harms and labor conditions, and these would eventually be mitigated through legislation to reduce pollution, expand workers’ rights, and improve working environments. It is labor unions at the forefront of this fight right now, but it is legislators who must go on to address these technofears. Certainly there is a strong case to be made for the regulation of automation in all industries, and especially of artificial intelligence. As for other concerns about what harmful cognitive effects information and communication technologies may be having on all us, the only solution may be the encouragement to use with caution and education regarding self-care and digital detox. After all, machines like the one on which I researched and wrote this are far too ubiquitous for modern Luddites to break, and the way things work now, if all computers crashed and the Internet failed, it would put far more of us out of work.

Further Reading

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Newport, Cal. “The Myth of Technophobia.” WIRED, 18 Sep. 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/weve-never-feared-tech-as-much-as-we-think-we-have/.

Plato. Phaedrus. The Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. Basic Books, 1996.

The Hunt for Lost Nazi Gold Trains

Throughout the decades since the end of World War II, the idea of lost Nazi gold has intrigued numerous researchers, animated many a conspiracy theorist, led to a great deal of lawsuits, and inspired an entire subculture of treasure hunters. The Nazis were known to have drained and hoarded their own gold reserves, looted gold and other valuables from the countries they invaded, and seized the wealth of the Jews they worked to systematically erase from the Earth. While some of this plunder was seized by Allied forces and much of the rest of it disappeared into the Swiss banking system, it seems a reasonable enough notion that somewhere, some deposit remains awaiting discovery. This prospect seems especially plausible to those who live in Poland, or more specifically, Lower Silesia, in southwest Poland, where the idea of buried German treasure has long been an absolute reality. Between 1945 and 1947, after Germany retreated from Poland and Soviet forces entered the region and pushed all remaining Germans out, nearly 2 million Germans were forced to leave their homes, which afterward were tenanted by Polish refugees displaced from Central Poland and areas of the east annexed by the Soviet Union. What they found were empty homes, but soon they discovered that the German residents, forced suddenly from their homes, had often buried their valuables, hoping to return to find them later. So caches of jewelry, furs, silken clothes, and porcelain dishware were frequently found when tilling fields or digging up gardens, buried in chests and jars and sometimes even in coffins. Many of the settlers of the area became speculators in treasure, digging for and selling the goods they found, and since then, treasure hunting has become a central aspect of the Polish culture there. There are numerous rumors of larger treasure deposits, not just the worldly belongings of Germans forced from their homes, but hoards of Nazi gold buried underground or sealed in secret tunnels. The most well-known of these legends is that of the Nazi Gold Train, a train carrying riches untold, looted by the Nazis, shipped by rail to avoid its falling into enemy hands, and then hidden away somewhere there in Poland. This old legend became modern news in 2015 when a group of treasure hunters claimed to have discovered the location in which the elusive gold train had been buried. They had used ground penetrating radar, and they had informed the Polish government of their discovery in accordance with local laws. Thus, before they even attempted to dig up what they’d found, their discovery was trumpeted the world over, and a kind of modern gold rush ensued, with other treasure hunters hopping on planes to poke around in the Polish woods. Quite disappointingly, no gold train had ever been discovered, and historians insist that there is no reason to believe that such a gold train is even in Poland. It is tempting, then, to dismiss the entire notion of a lost Nazi gold train as an urban legend, if it were not for the fact that such a gold train certainly did exist.

Indy atop a Nazi plunder train in The Dial of Destiny.

Welcome to Historical Blindness. As that Adventure theme tells you, this is yet another installment of my longest-running series yet, exploring the truth behind the MacGuffins and legends of the Indiana Jones films. This will actually be my last installment in the series, as I’ve gone through the previous films and am now digging into the new film, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Don’t worry, though! Any spoilers here are few and minor. If you saw the film, or even if you didn’t, you know even from the title that the MacGuffin is not a Nazi gold train. Instead, the dial of the title is a fictionalized version of the Antikythera Mechanism, a mysterious ancient device with gears, which they attribute to the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Though the film handles them in an entirely fictional way, the Antikythera Mechanism and the technology attributed to Archimedes are extremely interesting subjects. I anticipate eventually devoting an episode of the podcast to exploring claims about ancient advanced technology, in which I could talk about these topics as well as others, like the claims of advanced technology attributed to Egyptians and other ancient cultures. But for topics wholly associated with Indiana Jones films, the Nazi Gold Train is going to conclude our series. Early on, it seems, the first drafts of the screenplay for this new Indy film were focused almost entirely on the lost Nazi Gold Train legend. In the end, the film we got only featured an opening scene on a “plunder train” that was carrying a lot of looted goods, including valuable art and ancient artifacts. It certainly makes for a rousing first sequence in the film, one that even features another relic that I recently devoted an episode to discussing! But there is no sense in the finished product that this film is exploring the real legend of the Nazi gold train. And perhaps that is a good thing, because the true story of the Nazi gold train—the only one we know really existed—is not one of adventure and mystical artifacts. It’s a story of national chauvinism, slow dehumanization of the other, and genocide, of the destruction and plunder of a helpless minority. And the use of this story in dubious claims of buried gold made by treasure hunters in Poland today is at the very least in bad taste, and at worst, is in a way another kind of plundering, a pillaging of tragedy for a good story.  

The true story of the Nazi Gold Train takes place not in Poland, but in Hungary, and it’s hard to call it a story of lost Nazi gold, as it’s manifestly a story of stolen Jewish wealth. What happened to the Jewish population in Hungary is made even more tragic by the fact that for a long time, Hungary was a very welcoming place for eastern European Jews. After Hungary achieved independence in 1867 under a Dual Monarchy as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a series of laws granted Hungarian Jews equal rights. Jewish immigration was encouraged by the government, and European Jews assimilated by adopting the Magyar language, thereby swelling the Magyar-speaking minority and ensuring the political leadership of the Magyar-speaking peoples. Anti-Semitism lurked in the background but was unpopular as Hungarian Jews prospered and contributed to the wealth of the nation. Things changed after World War I, when Hungarian Communist revolutionary Béla Kun established the radical, violently repressive, and short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. As a result of this brief experiment in Communism, anti-Semitism surged. As has so often been the case throughout history, Jews were blamed for any Bolshevist activity, and from 1920 to 1944, the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the far right gained acceptance even among centrists. As has always been typical of such anti-Semitic rhetoric, it was clearly contradictory in its main arguments. Jews were said to be too prosperous for how small a portion of the population they represented, but also somehow too numerous. They were said to be too influential as capitalists, being too well represented among industrialists and bankers, but were also, simultaneously, Bolsheviks who wanted to overthrow the Capitalist order. They were too foreign, too separate from Hungarian culture, but simultaneously too dominant, and their religion was too exclusive and insular, but somehow also threatening to the supremacy of Christianity. And developing alongside this resentment of the Jews in Hungary was a peculiarly Hungarian brand of racial pride and nationalism, called Hungarism, which was similar to that which was developing among Germans. This movement was inspired by Turanism, a pseudoscientific pan-nationalist ideology that was inspired by the ideologies of pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism. According to this pan-Turanianism, Hungarians, or more exclusively Magyars, along with other Turkic tribes, were descended from a “Uralo-Altaic race” who were the real Semites of the Bible. Thus Jusus was a Magyar, the Bible was written in a variation of the Magyar language, and Hungarians should be thanked for all of Western Christian civilization. If this sounds familiar, it should. It shares much in common with both Nazi ideology and other harmful pseudo-anthropological claims like those associated with British Israelism, the Black Hebrew Israelites, and the Christian Identity movement, all of which have developed or were founded on the same brand of virulent anti-Semitism.

Hungarian Jews arrive at Auschwitz

1920 brought down another domino that would eventually push Hungary in the direction of the Third Reich with the ratification of the Treaty of Trianon, which completely dismembered Hungary as a state and awarded much of her territory and Magyar-speaking populations to Austria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Ever since that time, alongside the rising anti-Semitism rose a political movement to restore the borders and regain these territories, a goal that partnership with the Nazis would eventually help them achieve. But still it was a slow process, a slow descent into Fascism. The far right Hungarist factions calling for extreme anti-Semitic legislation were kept at bay and did not achieve a political majority for some time because mainstream political factions pacified them by passing watered-down anti-Semitic laws in the 1930s. These laws sought to limit Jewish presence in certain professions, causing tens of thousands of Jews to lose their careers. One result of such legislation was that Jews, who had previously been considered Magyars because of their adoption of the language and were at most considered a religious minority, were thereafter defined as a distinct race, as was the case in Nazi Germany. And while centrists thought they were pacifying the far right with such laws, they were really legitimizing them and helping to spread their anti-Semitic views. With the rise of other far right leaders, and the influence of the Nazis who had political agents on their payroll starting explicitly Nazi factions and parties, more anti-Semitic legislation was passed, excluding Jews from any public sector employment, revoking their citizenship, banning intermarriage with them, and generally removing them from the economy and national life altogether. One of the last pieces of legislation enacted by the Hungarian government was the confiscation of Jewish property, framed as a contribution to the war effort. During this time, Hungary had allied itself with Nazi Germany, which made good on its promises to win them back the land they’d lost in the Treaty of Trianon, in the process increasing even further the Hungarian population of Jews. The solution of the far right was deportation: shipping Jewish refugees out of Hungarian territories and into German-controlled regions where they would supposedly be resettled. But many of these refugees were sent to their deaths, as they were sent right into the path of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen who were gunning down Jews in those regions and burying them in mass graves. Thus Hungary had begun to play a concrete role in the Holocaust.

In Hungary’s defense, when the nature of the Nazi’s Final Solution to the “Jewish Problem” became more apparent, government ministers ceased their deportation of Jewish refugees, and the country moved toward neutrality and even began making diplomatic overtures with the Allied powers. By that time, though, it was too late. Since the Annexation of Austria, Hungary was right on the southern border of Nazi territory, and Hitler was not about to let his enemies flank him and seize Hungary’s resources. Additionally, the destruction of the large Jewish community in Hungary would be a major step toward the completion of his Final Solution. So in 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary and propped up a collaborationist regime there. They then set about deporting the largest remaining population of European Jews, seizing their material wealth and placing them on trains bound for Auschwitz and death. So we see, the real story of the Nazi Gold Train starts with other trains, laden not with valuables but with human beings who were shunted away to their destruction. Much of the wealth of Hungarian Jews had already been surrendered and redistributed prior to the German invasion, and a great deal more was looted by their German occupiers before it could be loaded onto a train and sent out of Hungary. In December of 1944, the transportable items that had been protected from looting were loaded onto a train. Twenty-four cars were laden with the valuables of Hungarian Jews, but lest we think of this as gold bullion and chests overflowing with gems like some pirate booty, it should be noted that most of it was mundane, the earthly belongings of 800,000 people that had been deemed to be of some monetary worth: furniture, sewing machines, cameras, binoculars, carpets, dishes, and stamp collections. Yes, some gold and paper money and some pearl and diamond jewelry were among the items, but most of that sort of thing had already been looted in Budapest. Still, the train that escaped Hungary before the advance of the Red Army is estimated to have contained valuables worth billions of dollars today. The fate of some of its looted goods is largely unknown. We know that after passing into German territory, some of it was transferred onto trucks, never to be seen again, and we further know that the commander of the train took trunks of gold and disappeared into Switzerland. As for the rest of it, in May of 1945, the train was seized by Allied troops, and despite pressure from a Hungarian Jewish organization seeking the return of whatever valuables remained on the train, the U.S. Government kept it and auctioned off most of it. Even to this day, the fate of some 200 works of art taken from the train remains unknown. The details of what was done with these seized goods by the U.S. was not made public until 1999, after which a lawsuit was filed by Hungarian Holocaust survivors. The U.S. government settled for $25 million and apologized, while insisting these were just “shortcomings in the restitution efforts,” due to the “application of several policies,” and that “the conduct of its personnel was appropriate in most respects.” One might imagine what went unsaid, that the Soviet Army was at the time occupying Hungary, and the U.S. did not want to surrender the Gold Train’s wealth to their rivals, even if refusing to do so ran counter to U.S. policy. So we see that this true story of the Nazi Gold Train is far less sexy and mysterious than that told by Polish treasure hunters. It is not a story of buried gold, but rather of genocide, first and most importantly, and thereafter of plundering on all sides.

An American soldier guards the Hungarian Gold Train. Image courtesy the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Apparently, though, there was more than one lost Nazi Gold Train legend circulating around Europe. According to local lore in Poland, there was another such train laden with gold and other valuables being sent through Poland in 1945 in hopes of keeping the resources out of Soviet hands. According to this legend, this gold train vanished near Walbrzych. Or at least, this is the story told by some treasure hunters, such as Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, who claimed to have found the hiding place of this train in 2015. By their telling, there was a long history to this legend, and the Communist Polish Army long searched for this train. Curiously, though, the existence of this local legend is just as difficult to confirm as the location of any buried treasure. Certainly there is a culture of treasure hunting in Poland, as I spoke about at the top of this episode, and there are numerous legends and facts that contribute to rumors of hidden Nazi Gold, one being that the Nazis did indeed use the forced labor of concentration camp prisoners to excavate a complex of secret underground tunnels beneath a castle in Walbrzych in Lower Silesia. The castle was to be a new headquarters for Hitler, and the tunnels would form a kind of bunker city underground. The tunnel complex was never completed, though, and was abandoned, its entrances long ago collapsed, but unsurprisingly, legend claims that the Nazis, unable to take up residence in the tunnels, still used them to secret away their deposits of ill-gotten gold. And there are even very specific legends about the Nazi gold that may be hidden in that region. The central claim of lost Nazi gold in Poland revolves around a German police chief at Breslau named Herbert Klose, who under interrogation in 1944 said that he had helped hoard and secure the gold and valuables of that city’s residents. According to Klose, these chests of gold and valuables were buried somewhere. Searches for Klose’s gold trove and other buried Nazi treasure in Poland became so widespread during the second half of the 20th century that a sort of guild for treasure hunters was organized, the Lower Silesian Research Group, and the prospect of the discovery of such a treasure even prompted the Polish government to pass specific laws requiring treasure hunters to declare their finds and surrender 90% of their value to the state. The idea that Klose’s treasure is out there somewhere, perhaps buried in a disused Nazi tunnel in Lower Silesia, drives an entire subculture and cottage industry. And it was among these treasure hunters that the legend of another gold train, this one leaving Breslau with Klose’s treasure and perhaps with secret German weapons inside, was conceived. But is there any historical basis for this legend?

While there is certainly truth behind the stories of hidden underground Nazi tunnels in Poland, which were excavated with slave labor and explosives under a top-secret project called Riese, or “giant,” all the rest of these treasure tales are likely urban legends. While there appears to be some corroboration for the story about Herbert Klose’s buried Nazi gold from his interrogation, there is no sense whatsoever of where that looted gold may have ended up. Klose himself said that he had been unable to take part in the hiding of those chests of gold because he had been injured in a fall from a horse. Thus there is no reason to believe those chests were ever put onto a train or taken very far away from Breslau, or modern day Wrocław, at all. Likely, those chests were simply looted by the Germans tasked with hiding them, or by others who encountered them, as was the case with the gold plundered from Hungarian Jews. As for the story of a Gold train loaded up in Breslau and vanishing near Walbrzych, where the Riese tunnels had been dug, that appears to have no historical basis whatsoever. It is claimed that this was a long well-known rumor in Poland, but in fact, it appears to have originated from one man, Tadeusz Słowikowski. Like many of the treasure hunters of Poland, he is a former miner who turned to treasure hunting when there was no longer any mining work to employ him. Słowikowski claims that he was told about the vanishing gold train back in the 1950s by a German. The entire story of this gold train’s existence, of its being loaded with plunder in Breslau and disappearing somewhere near Wałbrzych, appears to have been started by his account of having been told such a tale. That’s it. The claim that this was a longstanding belief in Poland and that the Polish government had long been in search of this train appears to be entirely false, as far as I can determine. Instead, it is just a story told by one treasure hunter and believed by other treasure hunters, and it should be noted that many other treasure hunters in Poland don’t believe in this Gold Train’s existence, preferring instead to focus on the promise of Klose’s buried chests and other caches of German valuables.

An American soldier guards the Hungarian Gold Train. Photo credit: Chmee2, (CC BY-SA 3.0)

On August 28th, 2015, the head of conservation at Poland’s culture ministry held a press conference at which he announced an astonishing find. Two treasure hunters had learned of the location of the fabled lost Nazi gold train from an anonymous source: a man who had been involved in burying the train had made a deathbed confession to them. These men then claimed to have confirmed with 99% certainty using ground-penetrating radar, that an armored train had been buried at around the 65th kilometer of the Polish State Railway’s Wałbrzych line. These treasure hunters, who at first kept their anonymity, were following local law by disclosing their discovery before the find’s excavation in order to claim their 10% finder’s fee. The national heritage minister’s press conference set off a sensation, and Polish military had to be dispatched to the area to keep away other treasure hunters, who arrived in droves armed with metal detectors and other gear, hoping to find a piece of the treasure for themselves. Acting out of an abundance of caution, the military searched the area for landmines or other booby traps, after which a non-invasive exploration of the site commenced. The location and the ground-penetrating radar findings were examined by mining specialists and geologists, and these experts protested that the findings in no way represented proof positive of the presence of a buried train at the site, suggesting that perhaps the treasure hunters had detected one of the subterranean tunnels of Project Riese, but not an actual train. Nevertheless, the treasure hunters, who eventually revealed their identities as Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, stuck tenaciously to their claim. With further pressure, a complete excavation of the site was eventually arranged, with engineers and demolitionists, and with the involvement of archaeologists and chemical experts on the chance they encountered hazardous buried war materials. In a stunning letdown akin to Geraldo Rivera’s opening of an empty vault on live television, the dig was shut down after nothing was discovered and further radar indicated that what had previously been detected at the site was nothing more than underground ice formations. The dig cost upwards of $130,000, but that was okay with the government, because all the excitement had actually driven tourism to the area, boosting the economy by around $200 million. One town official was quoted as saying, “Whether the explorers find anything or not, …the gold train has already arrived."

In retrospect, it’s surprising that Poland’s head of National Heritage took the treasure hunters seriously at all. Perhaps their presentation of the ground-penetrating radar findings was very persuasive, but the mere fact that their entire theory was based on an unverifiable deathbed confession, the details of which have never been released as far as I can find, made their entire claim unreliable from the outset. In fact, this subculture of Nazi gold hunters active in Poland is simply not known for credible research. Instead, many rely on mystical divining practices, as was revealed in a 2016 New Yorker piece by Jake Halpern, in which he traveled to Poland and interviewed numerous such individuals. One treasure hunter showed him how he uses divining rods to find secret underground tunnels. Some may swear by the practice of dowsing for such tasks, but this treasure hunter also showed the journalist a bizarre looking dowsing rod with a glass device attached to it that he claimed pointed the way toward gold. I think even farmers who dowse for water would admit that this sounds like a load of hogwash. Added to their mystical superstitions, these treasure hunters harbor a lot of paranoia and indulge in conspiracy speculation. Many believe they are followed by secret agents of some surviving Nazi organization, which they call “guards.” They partake of the conspiracy theories I refuted in my episode on the death of Hitler, that far more Nazi leaders escaped Germany than is known, and that they maintain an international spy network, looking after their hidden treasures and likely planning some future Fourth Reich. And as for the contents of the Nazi train they search for, they let their speculation run wild. In it, they expect not only to find gold and other such treasures, but perhaps also the long lost amber panels and gilded mirrors of Russia’s famous Amber Room, disassembled by Nazis in 1944. Or perhaps, as some of these Polish treasure hunters claim, the train will hold secret German war technology, their Wunderwaffe, or “wonder-weapons,” like the fabled Nazi Bell claimed by some conspiracy theorists to be a genuine time travel device, or maybe even good old-fashioned flying saucers!

The location where Polish treasure hunters believed they had found their gold train. Photo credit: RafalSs (CC BY-SA 4.0)

But there is a pretty basic problem with all of these notions. First, if the Nazis remained active and posted agents in Poland to safeguard their treasure caches, then wouldn’t they just have retrieved the treasure for themselves long before now? And even if we dismiss that paranoid idea, there is the fact that the Soviet forces took control of this region shortly after the Germans abandoned it, and trophy brigades scoured the area for any valuables, including the castle beneath which the tunnels had been built. They would likely have seized any remaining treasure. And finally, there is witness testimony describing how the Germans took everything with them before the Red Army arrived, even ripping the piping out of the tunnels they had built in order to deny such raw materials to their enemies. It seems unlikely they would have left behind great riches and wonder weapons for the Soviets to find. But such arguments won’t dissuade dyed-in-wool treasure hunters like Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter. The two continued to insisted that they need only dig deeper to find their gold train. They led another dig in 2017 that also failed to turn up their treasure, and Koper continues his search for gold, in the form of a hunt for more funding to continue his digs. In 2019, he got lucky and stumbled upon some half-a-century-old renaissance wall portraits beneath the plaster of an old palace he was renovating nowhere near the site he still believes to be the resting place of his Nazi gold train. I guess it goes to show that if you just keep searching, you may find some treasure, even if you’re hunting for something that doesn’t actually exist.

Until next time, remember, historical myths and urban legends make great fodder for sensational news stories. Back in 2015-2016, you may have heard about the supposed gold train in Poland, but then did not hear how it turned out to not be true. So…I’m not saying to distrust all news media, but I am saying to take seemingly extraordinary stories like these with a big pinch of salt.

 Further Reading

Alexander, Harriet. “Did A Deathbed Confession Reveal the Location of Nazi Gold Train?” The Telegraph, 28 Aug. 2015, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/11830226/Nazi-gold-train-found-live.html.

Halpern, Jake. “The Nazi Underground.” The New Yorker, vol. 92, no. 13, 2 May 2016, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/09/searching-for-nazi-gold.

Gitau, Beatrice. “Deathbed Confession Reveals Location of Nazi Train That Might Contain Gold.” The Christian Science Monitor, 28 Aug. 2015, www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2015/0828/Deathbed-confession-reveals-location-of-Nazi-train-that-might-contain-gold.

Rębała, Monika, and Sara Miller Llana. “Legend Realized? Discovery of Lost Nazi 'Gold Train' Invigorates Polish Town.” The Christian Science Monitor, 4 Sep. 2015, www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2015/0904/Legend-realized-Discovery-of-lost-Nazi-gold-train-invigorates-Polish-town.

Zweig, Ronald W. The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary. William Morrow, 2002.

The Piltdown Fraud: Fundamentalists Favorite Fake Fossil

When you hear the word “creature,” what comes to mind? We think of an animal, perhaps, a “lower” form of life, since the word can bear a negative connotation when applied to human beings. If a person is seen as a creature, it may be because they are seen as a servile tool being used by another, their creature. If you play Dungeons and Dragons, maybe you think of it as any living thing, but do you think of it as a tacitly religious term, supporting the notion of Creationism, of the origin of organisms through an act of divine creation rather than through the natural process of evolution? If we look at the etymology, “creature” comes from the Latin verb for creation. We might interpret this only to mean that organisms are created through reproduction, but the word was long historically associated in Old French with the notion of all the world as God’s Creation. Thus a creature is part of Creation. It’s not surprising that ancient religious ideas about our origins remain woven into the very fabric of our language, even though science has helped us achieve a clearer understanding of the evolution of populations through natural selection. Throughout the 20th century, Creationism has lost its cultural cachet as a viable scientific idea. Those who would like to see divine creation taught as a coequal scientific theory have had to rebrand the idea as Creation Science and Intelligent Design, but offering no actual testable, reproducible, or falsifiable evidence, their claims cannot be considered science and to enforce their instruction in science classrooms would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment separating church and state, as has been decided in numerous Supreme Court challenges, most recently in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in 2005. Tellingly, in searching for some scientific proof for their religious belief, Creationists rely on outmoded thought.  A favorite “proof” of Intelligent Design is the metaphor of a watch in a field, and how if one found such a complex device, it is far more logical to reason that it was created by some intelligent inventor and left there rather than formed by natural forces. This pithy analogy actually was first used in 1802, by Anglican clergyman William Paley, and even at the time it was absolutely deconstructed and shown to be fallacious by Enlightenment scholar David Hume. But more than that, Charles Darwin, who had previously been convinced by Paley’s arguments, would eventually disprove them through his observations of gradual changes in populations, demonstrating how complex organic structures could take shape over generations as inherited features. Beyond long discredited ideas like that, Creationists also seize on the idea of a “Missing Link,” suggesting that proof of evolution requires proof of an intermediate state between lower and higher life forms, and they complain that such links are exactly that, missing from the fossil record. Of course, many a Creationist might dismiss the fossil record altogether as a kind of prank planted into the Earth to test the faith of Christians, as they have claimed about dinosaur bones in their insistence on the young age of the Earth. But this idea of a Missing Link also derives from outdated ideas. It partakes of the ancient philosophy of the Great Chain of Being, in which there is a hierarchy of lower and higher animals, each creature having been formed perfectly with all its distinctions by God. What Darwin and evolutionary science have shown is that there was not a linear chain of species, but rather a kind of tree of life branching in many directions from various roots. Thus, paleontologists prefer the term “intermediate” or “transitional form,” and though Creationists may claim that these “links” are missing, in fact they were even found in Darwin’s lifetime. In 1863, he learned of the discovery of Archaeopteryx, a fossil that shows feathers and other anatomical structures peculiar to birds as well as saurian features, demonstrating the evolution of dinosaurs into birds. Beyond that, the fossils of intermediate forms revealing the evolution of many other species, including mollusks, fish, whales, and horses, have been discovered. But Creationists cry out for the Missing Link connecting monkeys to human beings, often demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, which does not assert that Homo sapiens are descended from monkeys but rather that they both are descended from a common ancestor, which would be recognized as an entirely different species. And despite what preachers may tell their congregations from the pulpit, there is no shortage of these intermediate forms either. Paleontologists have pieced together the timeline of our evolution from the earliest apes in the Miocene epoch between 23 and 5 million years ago, with the first evidence of bipedal movement occurring after the last of our common ancestors with gorillas and chimps, as evidenced in Sahelanthropus tchadensis. In the Pliocene, we see the development of our Hominin ancestors and the early use of stone tools, with the transitional species Ardipithecus and Australopithecus, like the fossil named “Lucy,” who was bipedal but had a small skull. From the Pleistocene epoch, paleontologists have pieced together some 20 or so transitional hominin forms, some our own ancestors and some from other branches of the tree of life: Heidelberg Man and Java Man—both examples of Homo erectus—the Old Man of La Chapelle, a Neanderthal; The Taung Child, Peking Man, the Little Lady of Flores. The list goes on and on, even up to 2008, when the 9-year-old son of a paleontologist in South Africa found a new and distinct subspecies of Australopithecus named sediba. When pressed on the fossil evidence, though, Creationists are likely to just dismiss all of it as untrustworthy, casting doubt based on the fact that there have, in the past, been fake fossils. In this, they are cherry picking, placing undue emphasis on one notorious hoax that eventually was exposed by scientists themselves. This is Historical Blindness. I’m Nathaniel Lloyd, and here I need to tread carefully, gently brushing the dust away to reveal a fascinating and extremely significant hoax while also recording its context in order to refute Creationists who tout it as evidence that evolutionary theory generally cannot be believed. Thank you for joining me as I discuss The Piltdown Fraud: Misuse of a False Fossil.  

After the last blog post on the crystal skull forgeries, it made sense for me to move from one archaeological fraud to the story of this paleontological fraud, which I have long wanted to discuss. However, as I indicated, I am very conscious of how topics on this blog can actually be taken out of context to support misinformation. For example, I had a podcast listener write me last summer to tell me that my episode on MK-Ultra led them to give more credence to other conspiracy theories involving the CIA, including their involvement in the JFK assassination. While I can absolutely understand the story of MK-Ultra leading one to healthy sense of mistrust when it comes to the U.S. intelligence apparatus, my discussion of their publicly exposed efforts to develop mind control technology in no way stands as evidence in support of any other conspiracy claims. Likewise, recently, I noticed someone using promotional materials for my podcast to promote the Tartaria conspiracy theory. Though I was recently kicked off of TikTok when I was posting about my episodes on the death of Hitler and the Hitler’s diaries hoax—I believe because of one disgruntled admirer of Hitler who defaced my posts with pro-Hitler sentiments and who I believe may have wrongfully reported me as spreading hate speech (when in fact he was)—I have still been able to search TikTok on my desktop browser. While researching the last patron exclusive minisode, which went into the republic of the Russian Federation sometimes called Tataria, I did an image search to find a map, and I discovered that numerous promoters of the ridiculous Tartaria fraud are using the title card I created for my episode as the background for their little talking head videos. It’s a historic image of some brick layers working in the foreground with the Renaissance-style Iowa State Capitol looming in the background, and I added the title “The Lost Empire of Tartaria.” It was part of my ruse as an April Fool’s joke to act like there was something to this baseless conspiracy delusion in the episode’s cold open, but now I’m kicking myself, because the image is being widely used to promote those false claims. If only I’d been clear from the start and called it “The Myth of the Lost Empire of Tartaria,” or something, then they couldn’t use it or would have to put in more effort to make their own image. So I’ve decided that, from now on, my titles will make it abundantly clear when a topic I’m tackling is total bunk, and I will be doing all I can, at the beginning of episodes and and these accompanying blog posts, to clarify the truth, to debunk from the outset rather than playing it coy and building up to the reality of things. Because of that, at the beginning of this post, I want to talk a bit more about the flaws in Creationist arguments before I really dig into the one example of a fossil hoax they’re so fond of touting.

A diagram demonstrating the similarity of hominoid skeletal structure.

Proponents of Intelligent Design as a scientific theory will delve into very specific biological minutiae in order to argue that evolution cannot be true. They will say that there is no way eyes could have evolved because they are too complex, or that the propeller-like flagellum of bacteria are too complicated and must have been engineered. Actually, these are just the old “watch in a field” argument wearing different clothes, and in reality, biologists have observed more primitive versions of light-sensing organs and simpler flagellae, demonstrating the fact that these structures too developed slowly over time. And it’s funny that Creationists would point to bacteria to prove their views, since on a microevolutionary level, we see evolution today in the form of bacteria adapting to resist antibiotics. The fact is that almost all Creationists believe in evolutionary theory at the microevolutionary level, since few can reasonably deny the truth of viruses evolving resistant variants or insects evolving resistance to pesticide, and the common practices of plant and animal breeding show clearly how traits are inherited and change populations in sometimes dramatic ways. It’s usually only the implications of macroevolution, which involves speciation, that they reject. Perhaps the most common objection that Creationists rely on is that evolution is “just a theory,” and theories aren’t proven fact or necessarily true, and they will try to suggest that intelligent design is equally a theory by the dictionary definition, in that it too is an idea to explain something. But this relies on a grammar school understanding of the scientific process. The scientific community uses the term “theory” to denote an explanation that is substantiated with evidence. In reality, evolution meets the criteria of being considered a fact, as according to the National Academy of Sciences, a fact is “an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as ‘true.’” Therefore, I will mostly try to refer to evolutionary science, rather than evolutionary theory, in order to avoid any hairsplitting over terminology. Creationists will claim that there is no scientific consensus, cherry-picking an outlier academic here or there that seems to be anti-evolution. This is just false, though, as was shown in numerous independent surveys of academic literature since the 1990s, conducted in efforts to determine the prominence of Intelligent Design views in academia, which found that no scientific studies supporting the claims of so-called “Creation Science” are published at all. The closest thing to it are papers by anti-evolution authors that do little more than highlight areas of uncertainty that the scientific community does not dispute. And any claims that academic publishers censor them and refuse to publish the findings of “Creation Science” are also refuted by the statements of major scholarly journal editors that few such manuscripts are even submitted for their consideration. The fact is that evolution science is consensus among experts because it has never been falsified by evidence. In other words, all study has helped to prove it’s true. Yes, evolutionary biologists disagree with each other on particulars, but not on the principles of evolutionary biology generally. This disagreement is part of the scientific process, and it’s why frauds like Piltdown Man are inevitably exposed.

In the autumn of 1812, rumors in the British press had begun to circulate that there had been an important paleontological find in Sussex, at Piltdown in Southern England. At a momentous meeting of the Geological Society of London, in December of that year, this find was finally revealed. Arthur Smith Woodward, a geologist with the British Museum, revealed that earlier that year, his friend Charles Dawson, a solicitor and amateur antiquarian, had written to him about a curious gravel pit near Barkham Manor, a Georgian mansion dating to the 18th century. Dawson told him that he had been curious of the brown flintstones in the gravel, as stone of that sort was known to have been used for crafting tools in the Stone Age. Dawson had asked the workers in the pit to keep an eye out for anything interesting, and on a return visit, one of them handed him a piece of an unusually thick skull. After finding yet another piece of what appeared to be the same skull in the gravel bed on a subsequent visit, Dawson had reached out to Woodward, and the two had undertaken a careful excavation of the pit throughout that summer. At first, they kept their efforts secret, bringing in only the French Jesuit prehistorian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. They discovered seven fragments of the same skull, as well as half of a jaw with two intact molars, and in the same context, they discovered various Paleolithic stone tools and the fossilized bones of horses, deer, hippopotomi, elephants, and mastodon, which appeared to confirm the great age of the fossilized human remains. By summer the following year, Woodward had completed a reconstruction of the skull and presented it to anatomists at the International Congress of Medicine, and the importance of the find became even clearer. While Piltdown Man appeared to have an apelike jaw and thick skull, it had a braincase that would accommodate a fully-developed modern human brain. There were definite features of both ape and man present in the reconstruction, even in just the jaw fragment alone, which showed apelike morphology and yet had deep-rooted molars like those of a human. So it appeared that the much sought after “Missing Link” had been discovered, right there in England, just 44 miles from London, a hub of modern scholarship in paleontology. And more than that, this new find appeared to confirm what most British paleontologists and evolutionary biologists theorized at the time. And perhaps more importantly, it also appealed to everyday English men and women everywhere, stoking nationalism and inflating racial pride.

The Piltdown skull reconstruction

At the beginning of the 20th century, a notion had arisen among the paleo-intelligentsia that the large brain of Homo sapiens must have developed first, perhaps at the end of the Pliocene and beginning of the Pleistocene, before the loss of other apelike features in hominins. Previous candidates for the Missing Link had been the various Neanderthal fossils found in Germany and France, or Homo erectus, as observed in the Java Man fossil discovered in the 1890s. Those were at the time rejected as early human fossils because of their small braincases. In fact, Neanderthals had larger braincases but seemed smaller because it was more elongated. Regardless, Arthur Smith Woodward’s reconstruction of the Piltdown skull was seized on as an example of a seemingly transitional form between ape and man that showed early development of a large brain. It must be remembered that during this time, the old pseudoscience of craniometry, which attributed intelligence and personality traits to cranial measurements, was still clinging to life in academia. But Piltdown was also seized on for less academic reasons. Almost all major early human fossils to date had been discovered elsewhere in Europe. The Old Man of La Chappelle was discovered in France, the Engis skull in Belgium, and most galling to the English during the years preceding the Great War, several important fossils had been discovered in Germany, including the Feldhofer skull found in a valley from which Neanderthals take their name, and more recently, Homo heidelbergensis, found in Heidelberg. The British were desperate for some fossil man of their own, and this yearning can be discerned even in the first letter Dawson wrote to Woodward, in which he suggested his find “will rival H. heidelbergensis.” Not only would a British fossil allow British paleontologists an opportunity to study an important site without having to travel abroad, and not only would it allow them some bragging rights against their German rivals, but there was also the sense that finding the Missing Link in one’s country indicated that your country must have been the cradle of humanity and therefore of civilization. British paleontologists were eager to accept the Piltdown Man fraud because they wanted to believe in it. It meant they were right about the development of braincases, but it also meant that, though this might have gone without saying, maybe, just maybe, the first human being was English. And as if to emphasize this idea, the following year at the Piltdown site, a new tool was discovered, this one carved from an elephant bone—the earliest known bone tool—and it was shaped much like a cricket bat. It seemed the first man not only an Englishman but also a cricket player!

To be fair, paleontologists had some valid reasons for giving weight to the discovery as well. The specimens were seen by Smith Woodward, a respected expert, being picked up from a gravel bed in which had also been found paleolithic tools and extinct animal fossils. The context of the find alone appeared to confirm the legitimacy of the find, and this field site was widely photographed and visited by scientists who gave credence to the claim and lent it further legitimacy. As one might expect from a putative Missing Link, Piltdown Man very quickly became arguably the most famous fossil in the world. Even during the initial excavation of the gravel bed in Sussex it drew the attention of the aristocratic tenants living in area manor houses like the nearby Barkham Manor. Those who’ve watched Downton Abbey might imagine it vividly: “Some workmen are digging near the road causing quite the disturbance, and they say they’ve found some old bones there. How exciting!” During 1913, the Piltdown excavation became a popular day trip for Edwardian ladies and gentlemen, dressed in their finest picnicking clothes and driving out to have a look at the place where the Missing Link had been found. The number of photographs taken of the site and of the reconstruction of the Piltdown skull further propagated the hoax even among those who would never examine the actual fossils themselves. They were displayed in museums and used in education. One Belgian museum conservator even created a reconstruction of a living Piltdown Man from the waist up, a kind of noble looking humanlike ape, and this work of art was mass produced as a stereoscope card with the caption “Early Man.” Before long it was not only scholars who had staked their reputations on Piltdown, it was museums and media companies, and they were not just intellectually invested but also financially. This investment resulted in Piltdown being peddled as the end-all find of paleontology, to the detriment of legitimate new finds. For example, in 1925, more than a decade into the life of the Piltdown hoax, it was still going so strong that when the Taung Child, an almost 3 million year old fossil, was discovered in South Africa and showed a small braincase with more human features—exactly the opposite of what Piltdown showed—it was dismissed as a baby chimp. Piltdown not only fooled the scientific community, it also perpetuated a false notion about the evolution of human traits, as now it is more widely accepted that our large human brains were not among the first of our traits to develop.

A portrait of the scientists who examined the Piltdown fossil. Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward are pictured in the back right.

It should be said, however, that acceptance of the Piltdown fossils was not universal and wholehearted. Of course, even then the fundamentalists cast doubt on the find, as they would on any transitional fossil that appeared to confirm Darwinian evolution. Most famously, the lawyer William Jennings Bryan, who had been a progressive reformer in the Democratic Party and later in his career turned his attention to religious fundamentalist causes, acting as the prosecutor in the Scopes Monkey Trial, said of the Piltdown fossil, “The evolutionists have attempted to prove by circumstantial evidence (resemblances)that man is descended from the brute…. If they find a stray tooth in a gravel pit, they hold a conclave and fashion a creature such as they suppose the possessor of the tooth to have been, and then they shout derisively at Moses.” All bluster aside, in this instance, fundamentalist mistrust would be proven justified. But the fact is that there were scientists who also doubted Piltdown from the beginning. There was Arthur Keith, a museum conservator associated with the Royal College of Surgeons, who suggested that Woodward’s reconstruction of the skull was manifestly inaccurate. There was David Waterston, an anatomist with King’s College, who said the apelike jaw could not possibly have been from the same creature as the humanlike skull, despite the humanlike rooting of its molars, arguing they were two entirely different fossils. Across the Atlantic, in America, there were further grumblings by Gerrit Miller of the U.S. National Museum, who likewise believed the skull and jaw fragments were from two distinct fossil creatures. Eventually these holdouts were converted by further discoveries. In 1913, after some reservations were expressed about the suspicious fact that no eyetooth, or canine, had been found, as a canine tooth would certainly help to determine how apelike the Piltdown creature had been, suddenly an eyetooth was discovered in the gravel pit by the Jesuit, De Chardin, and it matched perfectly with Woodward’s reconstruction of what the half-ape and half-human canine might look like. And in 1915, finally laying to rest all doubts that the two fossils had been from different creatures, Dawson just happened to discover an entirely different set of fossil remains two miles distant from the first site, complete with very similar skull fragments and another human-like molar, along with a Pleistocene-era rhinoceros tooth to provide some sense of its age. This finally quieted most critics, although some continued to doubt. Decades later, their doubts would be vindicated, as scientific testing proved that, not only were the skull and jaw fragments from different creatures, as long suspected by some, but also that the whole thing had been a carefully crafted fraud.

In the 1940s, as misgivings and suspicions about Piltdown had steadily resurged, a way to test the fossils was discovered. The fragments that comprise the Java Man fossil had recently been proven to have come from a single individual through fluorine testing. Throughout a creature’s lifetime, its bones absorb the same amount of fluorine from the water it drinks, so a test of fossilized remains could determine whether fragments were all from the same creature by determining if they all contained the same amount of fluorine. When the tests were conducted in 1948, sure enough, the jaw and skull contained differing levels of fluorine, proving that despite their being found close together and being the exact same brownish color, they were not from a single creature. Since this initial debunking, further chemical tests were able to prove that the remains are far younger than originally believed, despite having been found with animal remains from the Pleistocene, suggesting they may have been planted there. And any further doubts about whether it had been a deliberate hoax evaporated when powerful modern microscopes revealed that the fossils had been doctored. As long suspected by many, the skull fragments were human, unusually thick but within normal human ranges, and the mandible and teeth were from a young orangutan. The hoaxer or hoaxers knew what they were doing. They had filed down teeth in an orangutan jaw to make them appear more human, and they had even gone so far as to drill into the mandible to widen the root holes and make the molars appear more deeply rooted in the human fashion, filling in the roots with gravel and putty. And they had artificially aged all of the fragments with an iron solution to give them all the exact same brown hue. Since these discoveries, the central mystery surrounding Piltdown has been the identity of the hoaxer. Was it a single person or a conspiracy? There have been many suspects. The most outrageous is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who lived nearby and regularly golfed near the Piltdown site and was known to collect fossils and enjoy a good practical joke. It has been suggested that Doyle, a believer in spiritualism, might have been motivated to make the scientific community and their focus on materialism look foolish in retaliation for their scorn for spiritualism. Another suspect was a young member of the Natural History Museum staff, Martin Hinton. In 1970, a trunk of his was discovered that contained bones that had been filed and stained in the same manner as the Piltdown fragments. According to this theory, Hinton had some personal and intellectual differences with Arthur Smith Woodward and wanted to make him look the fool. The major problem with these theories, as I see it, is that both men went to their deaths without ever revealing that they had played the prank, the whole point of which would have been that it is revealed to be a fraud and thus make those who believed it look foolish.

Charles Dawson, the prime suspect in the forgery.

The most likely scenario involves one or all of the three men who initially undertook the excavation of Piltdown in secrecy, Arthur Smith Woodward, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Charles Dawson. Indeed, those who believe in a conspiracy to perpetrate the hoax typically focus on these three. De Chardin is interesting as a suspect because he personally found the eyetooth, but he was a serious scientist who would later help to discover the authentic fossil remains of Peking Man in China. The theory put forward of why he would be involved is also rather flimsy, suggesting that as a Frenchman he just wanted to make British paleontologists look foolish. According to those who knew him best, this was not in his character. As for Arthur Smith Woodward, I think it is safe to exclude him from any such conspiracy altogether. We have the evidence of the letters from Dawson to Woodward showing that he had been drawn to the Piltdown site after fragments were already discovered there, and the fact is that, after Charles Dawson died in 1916, Woodward continued to search for more fossils at Piltdown for nearly 30 years, never finding anything else. Indeed the very fact that Dawson was present at the discovery of or personally dug up every Piltdown find and that nothing else was ever found after his passing seems to implicate him the most. And there are further indications of his guilt as well. Though he was an amateur, he had long sought recognition among the scholarly community. He had a long-standing certificate of candidacy for the Royal Society that he renewed every year until his death, though he was never accepted. And he may not have shrunk from unethical efforts to receive that recognition. Before the Piltdown affair, he had written two volumes of a history of Hastings Castle and was afterward accused of plagiarizing most of it. One early version of the story he told about discovering the first skull fragment actually said that the worker who handed it to him said they thought it was a coconut, and this is actually identical to the story of the discovery of Java Man, indicating he may have even plagiarized his claims about finding the Piltdown fossil. And according to the most recent scientific investigations into the Piltdown hoax, published by Dawson’s beloved Royal Society, the inexpert forgery of the skull, which appears to have resulted in cracks and damage that had to be mended and covered up with putty, show that the forger was an amateur like Dawson, not a trained paleontologist like Woodward or De Chardin, or even a museum conservator like Martin Hinton. Furthermore, the techniques used by the forger are so consistent that they act as a signature, indicating one forger. In fact, in 2003, an archaeologist examined his antiquarian collection and found several fake artifacts, some showing the same telltale filing of teeth. Add to this the fact that bringing in an accomplice would have introduced a far greater likelihood of exposure, and all signs point to Charles Dawson alone fabricating the Piltdown fragments and either pretending to find them in the Piltdown gravel or planting them where he knew his dupes would see them.

As a means of casting doubt on the consensus of the scientific community, the Piltdown fraud is perfect ammunition for Creationists. It does show that academics are prone to error, like any human beings, and that they seek to preserve and support their own pet theories, their prejudices. It also shows how peer pressure does exist, and casting doubt on accepted views can be discouraged. But it also shows how science inevitably corrects itself because of the power of evidence and falsifiability. The scientific process wins out in the end, and the fact is that, with the development of sophisticated tests such as have been used to reveal Piltdown, a hoax of such a massive scale could not happen again. No, scientists are not infallible, but they may be more likely to examine their preconceptions than theologians, as their entire worldview is based on the correction of false ideas and the empirical building of knowledge. This is not to say that scientists know everything about our origins either. It’s true that we do not yet know with any certainty how life originated, although biochemists have a strong idea of how it may have begun from basic building blocks, and astrochemists have provided some further idea of how comets may have brought those building blocks to Earth. But the thing is, we don’t have to know how life first appeared to acknowledge the fact of how it has evolved. And there are many, many people of strong religious faith who accept this. Some of the keenest minds in Christianity don’t reject science but rather reconcile their faith with the fact of evolution. Darwin himself had been on the path of becoming a clergyman before taking an interest in natural history, and he said himself that he had “never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.” The Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had reconciled his Christian faith with the principles of evolution, as had Raymond Dart, the discoverer of the Taung Child. Famous novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis reconciled the two with this elegant and concise turn of phrase: “For long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself.” And the influential evangelist Billy Graham admitted “The bible is not a book of science” and reconciled his faith with biological evolution by stating, “I believe that God created man, …whether it came by an evolutionary process…or not.” Even the last two Popes have reconciled with science, with Benedict XVI calling them “complementary—rather than mutually exclusive—realities” and Francis asserting that “[t]he evolution of nature does not contrast with the notion of creation.” I think fundamentalists can learn a thing or two from these figures. If one feels their faith is threatened by science, then their faith is simply not very strong, because the fact is that faith and science are neither compatible nor in conflict. They are entirely unrelated realms of human thought…that were clearly developed following the evolution of larger brains.

Until next time, remember, When the latest scientific discovery is trumpeted in the press, give it a few years before you start placing too much weight on it.

 Further Reading

Black, Riley. “What’s a ‘Missing Link’?” Smithsonian, 6 March 2018, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/whats-missing-link-180968327/.

De Groote, Isabelle, et al. “New genetic and morphological evidence suggests a single hoaxer created ‘Piltdown man.’” Royal Society Open Science, 1 Aug. 2016, doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160328.

Kramer, Brad. “Famous Christians Who Believed Evolution is Compatible with Christian Faith.” BioLogos, 8 Aug. 2018, biologos.org/articles/famous-christians-who-believed-evolution-is-compatible-with-christian-faith?gad=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwldKmBhCCARIsAP-0rfziunqkYPe1whthvBLbHKBKcNaeqiGV-WOGIWIphFPx2ltaDLI7j90aAgOsEALw_wcB.

Price, Michael. “Study reveals culprit behind Piltdown Man, one of science's most famous hoaxes.” Science, 9 Aug. 2016, www.science.org/content/article/study-reveals-culprit-behind-piltdown-man-one-science-s-most-famous-hoaxes.

Pyne, Lydia. Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils. Viking, 2016.

Rennie, John. “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense.” Scientific American, 1 July 2002, www.scientificamerican.com/article/15-answers-to-creationist/.

“What Is the Evidence for Evolution?” BioLogos, 4 Nov. 2022, biologos.org/common-questions/what-is-the-evidence-for-evolution?gad=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwldKmBhCCARIsAP-0rfyUG_nCH4_0o0BRikNSP-5JtaRjCLjY2PfAvqwuQfKirToWTc8uDHIaAhu4EALw_wcB.

The Forging of the Crystal Skulls

There is no denying that the use of crystals to ensure health and wellness is ancient, as the modern purveyors of crystal healing will surely tell you. What they won’t tell you is that their use today differs fundamentally from their use in the past. Yes, crystals were used, as were almost every other precious stone, in the form of amulets worn for protection and good fortune in ancient Greece and Egypt. Different minerals were believed to have different uses or affect us in different ways, and as we have seen with all lore associated with magic and alchemy, these beliefs persisted, crossed cultural barriers, and evolved through the years into the Middle Ages, when the medicinal and magical properties of crystals and other minerals were catalogued in medical papyri and grimoires. But the use of crystals by New Age gurus today really is not based on historical practices, which fell out of favor in the 17th century as the medicinal powers attributed to crystals began to be attributed instead to the Christian God and his angels. New Age crystal healing really was invented in the 1980s, mostly attributed to the work of Katrina Raphaell, who took what had always been a folk tradition that relied on the placebo effect and transformed it into a modern pseudoscience with an elaborate mythos behind it. According to her, the “science” of crystal healing originated in Atlantis, which as so many have claimed through the ages, was a technologically advanced civilization that, according to Raphaell and the New Age movement, used crystals for telepathic purposes. She claims to possess and teach the supposedly Atlantean art of arranging crystals on the body in such a way that they activate the chakras, allowing one to access deeper levels of consciousness that enable self-healing. And of course, she sells the crystals that are needed. Crystals have become a billion dollar industry since the advent of the New Age movement, and the price can really be hiked if the crystal is claimed to be from Atlantis. Considering this phenomenon and subculture, it is perhaps unsurprising that the most famous and fabled of all crystal artifacts, the crystal skulls that appeared in the possession the Mesoamerican antiquities dealers between the 1870s and the 1930s, would eventually be claimed to have come from Atlantis and have the ability to heal or to kill, to reveal the past or the future. But even dismissing these claims out of hand, the simple claim that these crystal skulls are genuine Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican artifacts cannot be credited. Thus these hoax objects have a false history that has since been encircled by further false claims and pseudohistory, making them a perfect topic for this blog.

This is another of my posts exploring on the lore of the MacGuffins featured in Indiana Jones films, as obviously the fourth film, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, featured a crystal skull as its main MacGuffin. Unlike some of the preceding films, which actually seemed well-read in the lore they explored, this one just mentions that Indy was “obsessed with the Mitchell-Hedges skull” in college… and that’s about it. The crystal skull in the film is not claimed to be one of the known crystal skulls and is shaped differently to look like an elongated skull, thus to connect with Peruvian skull modification and then, of course, to aliens. It might at first seem unrealistic to suggest that an archaeology student would be obsessed with the crystal skull, knowing as we do today that all of them were fakes, but that’s not really accurate. When the aforementioned Mitchell-Hedges skull came to the attention of the scholarly community in the 1930s, since it corresponded with another crystal skull in the possession of the British Museum, it actually did generate some interest. The timeline does not really work, though, since the watershed moment, a major article in the anthropology journal Man, did not come until 1936, at which time Indy was already a professor and international relic-hunter, not a student at University of Chicago. But it’s close enough for jazz, and indeed, the crystal skulls did interest some in the scholarly community at first, as they were at the time preoccupied with craniometry, but more so they interested the general public, especially in France, where these crystal skulls seem to have first appeared. In mid- to late-19th century Europe, there was a real market for trinkets symbolic of death, sold as mementos mori, kept to remind one of the inevitability of death. And in France in particular, a burgeoning industry of macabre art was booming. Stereoscopic cards were becoming more and more popular at the time. These were pairs of nearly identical photographs or prints that appeared three dimensional when viewed in a stereoscope. Think of the viewfinder toys of your youth, if you grew up in the eighties. Increasingly popular in France was a style of stereoscope card called Diableries, in which sculptures or devils and skeletons, often making satirical commentary on the corruption of Napoleon III and his court, came to life, with special effects like a red glow in the eyes of skulls when the lighting was right. Amplifying this was the French interest in Mexican culture, occasioned by Louis Napoleon’s invasion of the country and installment of Austrian archduke Maximilian von Hapsburg as its emperor. Anyone boasting even a passing familiarity with Mesoamerican cultures must be aware of the depiction of skeletons and skulls in their art going all the way back to the Aztecs. The Spanish tried to suppress skull art as pagan, but it remains common in the culture today, in syncretistic coexistence with Catholic traditions. When crystal skulls began to be sold in France in the latter half of the 19th-century, claimed to be Mesoamerican artifacts, they appealed to the European taste for the macabre as well as for the exotic.

A “Diablery,” image courtesy The London Stereoscopic Company.

These first crystal skulls were quite small, perhaps an inch high, and they each had a hole drilled vertically through them from the top of the skull downward, such that they could be worn like a bead. According to my principal source, the extensive work of Jane MacLaren Walsh on this subject, cited below, one of the first such crystal skulls was acquired in Mexico by a British banker sometime in the 1850s, and then two more were displayed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. A fourth was purchased in 1874 by the national museum, and a fifth in 1880. The Smithsonian purchased one from Mexico in 1886. There should have been more caution about the provenance and authenticity of these small crystal skull beads from the start, however, because there was nothing else like them in Mesoamerican art. As it turns out, it was exceedingly rare to find quartz artifacts, at least in controlled archaeological digs, whose finds can be trusted to be genuine. In fact, the sole piece of carved crystal known to have ever been discovered in a pre-Columbian Mesoamerican dig, at Monte Albán in southern Mexico, was a crystal goblet whose rough tool marks indicate the inability of Mesoamerican artists working with stone tools to achieve the kinds of workmanship we see in pretty much all crystal skulls. Any other Mesoamerican artifacts made of crystal are simply small ornaments, like beads. In fact, the Smithsonian’s crystal skull bead was determined in the 1950s to have been carved using a modern lapidary wheel, making it a definite fake, though the hole drilled through it may have been accomplished using more rudimentary tools. This raised the possibility that these small crystal skulls were genuine Mesoamerican crystal beads that had been altered using modern tools in order to make them appeal to European buyers. Indeed, an 18th century South American painting of Saint Teresa of Ávila depicts her wearing just such a skull charm on her rosary. It has been suggested that these skull beads, like the crucifix, may have represented a reminder of Christ’s Passion, which occurred on Golgotha, the hill on which he was crucified, whose name meant “place of the Skull.” This would suggest yet another, older market for such an artifact, giving further reason for their manufacture. But if these first crystal skulls were manufactured in the 19th century, or if they were perhaps simply 18th-century Spanish religious baubles misrepresented as ancient Mesoamerican artifacts, who was responsible for them? As it turns out, one man can be connected, at least circumstantially, to all of them. The two skulls exhibited in Paris at the Exhibition Universelle in 1867 were both from the collection of a French antiquities dealer who served as the official archaeologist of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico, where all the rest of the similar crystal skull beads had been sold to collectors. And this man, Eugène Boban, would later be tied to the emergence of the first life-size crystal skulls.

Boban had left Paris for the Americas at 19 years old, hoping to avoid Napoleon III’s draft and to strike gold in California. Unsuccessful in the gold fields, he came to Mexico City in 1857 and found a new way to strike it rich. After learning Spanish and the indigenous language of Nahuatl, he reinvented himself as an antiquities trader, doing a brisk business selling Aztec artifacts to tourists. About 20 years later, a Smithsonian archaeologist who visited the city warned his fellow scholars about the shops on every corner selling fake artifacts. It was this burgeoning trade in spurious antiquities that Boban helped to spearhead. When, after civil war, the Zapotec native Benito Juarez became president and began dismantling the Catholic churches that had been built on top of Aztec temples, Boban benefitted by acquiring a great deal of Spanish artifacts and art. Then, when Louis Napoleon invaded and established Maximilian as the Mexican Emperor, he benefited again, becoming the “antiquarian to the Emperor,” and amassing a large collection of pagan artifacts. It was Napoleon III’s Commission Scientifique that sent his collection to Paris to be exhibited in 1867, and two years later, Boban went there himself, hoping to sell his collection and finally get rich. He opened a curio shop called Antiquites Mexicaines. During his time there, he became a source for real skulls, which he sold and donated to anthropologists and anatomists. Perhaps having already observed the interest in small crystal skull baubles, and knowing the market for life-size skulls, he seems to have put the two together when he began exhibiting and offering for sale ever larger crystal skulls. In 1878, he sold a collection of small crystal skulls and one grapefruit-sized skull, which also had a hole drilled through it like all the others. Then in 1881, he began to display a life-size crystal skull with no hole drilled through it. These skulls came into his possession while he was in France, so either he had a pipeline direct from Mexico, where artifacts unlike any others ever seen before were promptly shipped to his antiquities shop, or he somehow found and purchased these artifacts from another dealer or a forger whose name he never revealed, or he simply made them himself. Even at the time there was suspicion about them. When his larger crystal skulls were exhibited publicly in Paris, they were displayed with the caveat that “the authenticity appears doubtful.” Unable to sell his life-size crystal skull, Boban returned with it to Mexico and began asserting it was a genuine Aztec artifact that had been discovered in a dig at Veracruz and attempting to sell it to the National Museum of Mexico. When the provenance and authenticity of the skull was challenged before its sale to the museum, and Boban accused of fraud, he hastily took his collection and fled to New York, where he thereafter managed to sell his crystal skull to Tiffany & Co. for an exorbitant price. About ten years later, Tiffany’s sold it to the British Museum, where for a long time it was displayed alongside genuine Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican artifacts as if it were authentic.

Eugène Boban with his collection of Mexican antiquities.

Cut to about 50 years later, in 1943, when a man named Frederick Mitchell-Hedges bid £400 in a Sotheby’s auction to acquire another crystal skull. This one was different from Boban’s skull in that it was more finely polished, more anatomically realistic, and the jaw was of a separate piece, removable from the rest of the skull. Otherwise, though, it was of almost the same exact shape, which fact had garnered interest in the object years earlier, when the anthropological journal Man published a 1936 article consisting of a morphological comparison of the Boban skull in the British Museum and this new skull, which the article indicated was in the possession of one Sydney Burney. After Mitchell-Hedges obtained the skull, he immediately began making unsupported claims about its age and the method by which it was made, saying in a letter to his brother that “scientists put the date at pre-1800 B.C., and they estimate it took five generations passing from Father to son, to complete.” Mitchell-Hedges kept this crystal skull in his possession for the next 16 years, until his death in 1959, and thereafter, it passed into the possession of his adopted daughter Anna Mitchell-Hedges. Since her death in 2007, it has been in the care of her widower, Bill Homann. The story of the Mitchell-Hedges skull is not one of dubious provenance. We know very little about where it came from. It apparently came into Sydney Burney’s possession in 1933 from an undisclosed source. Burney was a London art dealer. It makes sense that he would buy the object and then approach museums with his find in order to ascertain its potential worth, afterward putting it up for auction to the highest bidder. We have no reason to think he forged the item himself, but we do have good reason to suspect that it may have come from the same source as Boban’s skull, since analysis indicates they were carved according to the exact dimensions of the same skull. Whether Boban fabricated both of them or both were carved by some unknown forger, or the latter was copied from the former somehow, we may never know. The story of the Mitchell-Hedges skull is rather more interesting in the way that it gathered myth and legend through the years, like a snowball growing as it tumbles down a snowy slope, false claims accreting as it passed through the decades and through the hands of those who sought to profit from it. And it all began with Mitchell-Hedges himself, whose life story should have demonstrated his lack of credibility from the start.

Frederick Mitchell-Hedges loved a big fish story…literally. He was a wealthy man who spent his time pursuing the hobby of deep-sea fishing, and capitalizing on his hobby by selling stories about his supposed adventures. The fish that got away in his stories, which he published in articles and books, were always giant, man-eating monsters, and Hearst newspapers paid him to spin his yarns. Soon his tales turned to fantastical pseudo-archaeological claims. He claimed to have discovered tribes uncontacted by civilization, to have found unknown continents, and to have been the first to explore the ruins of amazing lost civilizations. In 1927, he claimed to have been assaulted and robbed of some important anthropological artifacts, including papers and shrunken heads, but the Daily Express newspaper exposed this claim as a hoax. Mitchell-Hedges then tried to sue the newspaper for libel the next year, but he lost the suit and under cross-examination was revealed to be something of an imposter when it came to his claims as an explorer. In his 1931 book, Land of Wonder and Fear, he capitalized on these dubious claims, such as having discovered the Mayan city of Lubaantún in British Honduras, though archaeologists and European residents of the area protested that the ruins he had visited, by motor car, had been well-known for a long time. A few years after buying the Burney crystal skull in 1943, and immediately mythologizing it with claims that it was 2000 years old—far older than Boban had ever claimed his “Aztec” skull to be—he had changed his story and begun claiming that he had discovered it himself in the 1930s. Within another five years, he published a new book, Danger My Ally, in which he embellished the story of his crystal skull even further, claiming that it was 3,600 years old, and that somehow he knew it had been used by a Mayan High Priest for some occult ritual. “When the High Priest willed death,” he wrote, “with the help of the skull, death inevitably followed. It has been described as the embodiment of evil.” Thus the Mitchell-Hedges skull came to be called the Skull of Doom, which of course would have been a better name for an Indiana Jones film, if they hadn’t already made Temple of Doom. It seems possible that Mitchell-Hedges’s fictionalizing of the crystal skull’s paranormal powers was inspired by a piece of short fiction published in 1936 called The Crystal Skull. In this story, the author Jack McLaren tells the story of a stolen crystal skull that gives its wielder some kind of psychic powers. Whether Mitchell-Hedges read that story or dreamed up his tall tales on his own, this was just the beginning of the claims of supernatural or occult powers that would eventually surround the Mitchell-Hedges skull.

Mitchell-Hedges (left), as pictured on the cover of one of his books. Image courtesy Archaeology magazine.

The majority of the paranormal claims made about the Mitchell-Hedges skull and crystal skulls generally, were made after Anna Mitchell-Hedges had inherited the object. Like her adopted father before her, she changed the story of where the skull had come from, likely in an effort to provide some more credible provenance. Now she claimed that it was not Frederick Mitchell-Hedges who found it, but rather that she had found it herself when she accompanied him on a certain expedition to the lost Mayan city of Lubaantún. And in order to account for the well-documented fact that her adopted father had bought the crystal skull from London art dealer Sydney Burney, she later claimed that he had borrowed money from Burney and left the skull as security, that he’d merely put the skull in hock until he could redeem it. But of course, it had been auctioned at Sotheby’s, not bought directly back from Burney, and a letter about the skull from Burney to the American Museum of Natural History indicates that it had been in Burney’s possession for a full decade before it was sold at Sotheby’s. More than this, Anna Mitchell-Hedges’s story about finding the skull continually changed. She found it in 1924, or was it 1926 or ’27 or ’28? She remembered being lowered down into a cave, or was it the interior of a pyramid? Or rather, she had climbed to the top of the pyramid and found it under the stones of a fallen altar. And after all, eventually, she recalled that it had been her birthday when she discovered it. Odd that this would slip her mind for so long. Since other archaeologists who were at the Lubaantún site in 1927 and 1928 and asserted that neither Frederick nor Anna Mitchell-Hedges were there at the time, she eventually decided it must have been 1924, making her only 17 years old. The further problem here is that Frederick Mitchell-Hedges wrote extensively about his expeditions, and he did not mention bringing a 17-year-old daughter with him. He wrote about other women he brought, though. For example, he writes about his companion and the bankroller of his expeditions, Lady Richmond Brown, and he even mentions that his secretary, Jane, traveled with him. He even goes into great detail about bringing a pet monkey named Michael along, who became ill on the expedition and whom he had to shoot to put out of his misery, burying him with all the ceremony of a loved one. As scholar Jane MacLaren Walsh points out, it is certainly strange that he would devote more time to his secretary and his pet monkey than to his own teenage daughter in recording the events of the expedition, especially if it were she who had discovered a life-size crystal skull on her birthday. That, it seems, would certainly have made it into the book. Instead, in Danger My Ally, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges is coy about where and when he supposedly found the skull, saying only, “How it came into my possession, I have reason for not revealing.”

Once Anna had acquired the coveted Mitchell-Hedges skull, it wasn’t long before some former associates of her father came around to encourage her to profit from it. Specifically, Frank Dorland, an art dealer from San Francsico, convinced her that he could “launch a programme about the skull” that would raise its worth and drive up its potential price. Dorland had done this before for Anna father. In 1953, six years before his death, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges had purchased a religious icon that was likely one of many copies of a famed icon, the Black Virgin of Kazan. With Dorland’s help, though, Mitchell-Hedges had been able to promote his icon as the original Kazan icon, lost in 1904. Failing that, he asserted that it was at least a certain 16th-century copy of the original, the “Fátima image,” which was lost in 1917 and was just as sought after. Dorland continued his promotion of the Mitchell-Hedges icon for years after Frederick’s death, managing to get it exhibited in New York’s World Trade Fair in 1964. By that time, he had also contracted with Anna Mitchell-Hedges to promote the crystal skull, and he did so by amplifying the idea that it was a supernatural object. He took to calling it “The Skull of Divine Mystery,” “The Skull of Knowledge,” and “The Godshead Skull.” In documents sent to the director of the Museum of the American Indian, it was claimed that the skull could protect against the evil eye, that it “carries protection from heaven” and “defeats all evils of witchcraft,” claiming that it wielded “benevolent divine magic dealing with heaven and angelic forces.” The fingerprints of Dorland’s marketing of the skull seem apparent here, and after this, his “programme” seemed focused on getting books published that further mythologized the crystal skull as a talisman of occult power. In 1970, a book appeared called Phrenology, about the pseudoscience of studying the bumps on people’s skulls in order to determine their personality traits. But the book was more than a simple phrenology manual. It was written by Sybil Leek, a self-proclaimed psychic medium and probably the best-known representative of witchcraft in England. She wrote some 60 books in her lifetime, on astrology, numerology, faith healing, reincarnation, et cetera, and the cover of her book on phrenology pictured the Mitchell-Hedges skull. In it, she made strange claims that the skull was not actually Mesoamerican but had been carried to the New World by… and maybe you can guess who… that’s right, the Knights Templar. After this book’s publication, Anna Mitchell-Hedges was upset with Dorland, not so much about the claims Leek made in it, but rather that the English witch said the skull belonged to Frank Dorland. In order to pacify her, Dorland arranged for another book to be published by a novelist named Richard Garvin. This 1973 book, with the kind of eye-catching occult cover art that grabbed readers’ attention in those years, was called The Crystal Skull, and in it, it was suggested that the skull originated in Atlantis, that it was evil, that it brought death to those who would not revere it and could be used as a terrible weapon in the wrong hands.

The beguiling cover of the 1974 book that helped popularize the Crystal Skull legend. Image used under Fair Use.

So we see that the mythologizing of crystal skulls as objects of occult power started with the yarn-spinner Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, and continued after his death with his adopted daughter and with Frank Dorland, his old partner in marketing dubious artifacts. From the 1970s onward, it is possible to trace all outlandish paranormal claims about crystal skulls, including their ability to hypnotize and impart knowledge when one looks into their eyes, as depicted in the Indiana Jones film, back to these efforts at marketing an artifact that previously had only been viewed as a ritual object, if not as a fraud. In the book that Frank Dorland commissioned, the author insinuated that archaeologists dismissed it and scientists refused to study it “because they cannot come to grips with the fact that there may be a knowledge demonstrated here which is beyond our civilized comprehension.” And this, as usual, is the ultimate joke. As I have argued before, such claims just show a fundamental lack of understanding of the scholarly community and academic study and publishing, as a scientifically verifiable discovery of something seemingly supernatural would be sought after. It would mean fame, which would mean funding. And in fact, my principal source for this episode, the anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh, a Smithsonian archivist, has done more than dig up all the history of the crystal skulls, from Boban to Mitchell-Hedges. She has also subjected the Mitchell-Hedges skull to the scientific testing that it was long claimed scientists refused to conduct. What she found was that, indeed, the Mitchell-Hedges skull appeared to be an exact copy of the Boban skull in its dimensions, but that the anatomical details of its eye sockets, nasal cavity, teeth and jaw were more correct, which leads to the conclusion that a later forger was attempting to capitalize on the Boban skull while also improving on its workmanship. Using ultraviolent light, computerized tomography, and scanning electron microscopy, Walsh confirmed that the Mitchell-Hedges skull showed signs of having been carved with high-speed wheeled rotary carving using diamond-coated, hard metal tools that have only been available in modern times. Thus, the Mitchell-Hedges skull was likely forged sometime in the 1930s, before it came into Sydney Burney’s possession. Likewise, similar testing was conducted on the Boban skull that demonstrated it too had been carved using wheeled rotary technology that would have been in use in the 19th century. Considering this evidence, it is safe to dismiss all the crystal skulls as forged artifacts, and all the claims made about their provenance and paranormal powers as nothing but hoaxes.

At first blush, one might think that these hoax artifacts are a ridiculous MacGuffin for Indiana Jones to quest after, since as an archaeologist in the 1950s, when that film was set, he likely would not have given much credence to the stories of crystal skulls. But of course, if we were to judge his character based on the real-life authenticity of the objects he searches for, then the notion that he and his father believed the Holy Grail was a real object makes them seem just as ridiculous. Based on the idea that he thought the literary invention of the Holy Grail might have been real, and that he was obsessed with the Mitchell-Hedges skull, we might begin to view Indy as a credulous dupe and a pseudo-archaeologist. But we must remember that these are action-adventure films with science-fiction/fantasy elements, and for such a story, the crystal skulls are kind of perfect MacGuffins to weave into a story about the search for a lost city of gold founded by ancient aliens. Even though the execution wasn’t great, I suppose I see what they were going for and can’t fault them for trying. Interestingly, there is one more connection between the story of the crystal skulls and the Indiana Jones films. The golden idol that Indy snatches from a booby-trapped ruin in South America in Raiders of the Lost Ark is apparently modeled after a statuette of the goddess Tlazolteotl on display at the Dumbarton Oaks museum in Washington, D.C. The provenance of this statuette was questionable, and because images of this deity do not typically depict her in a squatting position giving birth, as is the case with this piece, some suggestions of its inauthenticity have arisen. As it turns out, Eugène Boban played a significant part in the original acquisition of this piece, and when Jane MacLaren Walsh, who was piecing together Boban’s frauds more than a hundred years later, analyzed the statuette, she again discovered evidence of modern rotary lapidary tools. Thus it seems more than one hoax artifact cooked up by the swindler Eugène Boban may have ended up inspiring the MacGuffins that famous archaeologist Indiana Jones risks his very life seeking out.

The Mitchell-Hedges skull. Image courtesy Archaeology magazine.

Until next time, when next you visit a museum, remember, even the objects displayed there and asserted to be of a certain age and origin, aren’t always as authentic as is claimed.

Further Reading

May, Brian. “Diableries: French Devil Tissue Stereos.” The London Stereoscopic Company, www.londonstereo.com/diableries/index.html.

Morant, G. M. “142. A Morphological Comparison of Two Crystal Skulls.” Man, vol. 36, 1936, pp. 105–07. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/2789341. Accessed 26 July 2023.

Walsh, Jane MacLaren, and David R Hunt. “The Fourth Skull: A Tale of Authenticity and Fraud.” The Appendix, vol. 1, no. 2, April 2013, theappendix.net/issues/2013/4/the-fourth-skull-a-tale-of-authenticity-and-fraud.

Walsh, Jane MacLaren. “The Dumbarton Oaks Tlazolteotl: Looking Beneath the Surface.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes, vol. 94, no. 1, 2008, pp. 7-43. OpenEdition Journals, journals.openedition.org/jsa/8623.

Walsh, Jane MacLaren. “Legend of the Crystal Skulls.” Archaeology, vol. 61, no. 3, 2008, pp. 36–41. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41780363. Accessed 26 July 2023.

Walsh, Jan Maclaren. “The Skull of Doom.” Archaeology, 27 May 2010, archive.archaeology.org/online/features/mitchell_hedges/.  

The Source of the Fountain of Youth Myth

The existence of Amazon warrior women was a mainstay of Western mythology. These women who fight on horseback and, it was sometimes said, had one of their breasts removed so as to better operate a bow, fought in the Trojan War according to Homer’s Iliad, one of the oldest surviving literary works of Europe, likely dating to the 8th century BCE. They did not cross over from myth to what might be considered history by some until around 450 BCE, when Greek historian Herodotus made reference to them as if they were real. When he encountered in Lycia a society that valued maternalism and traced kinship through matrilineal descent, he thought without evidence that they must be descended from the famous Amazons. And in describing the forerunners of the Sarmatian people, a matriarchal and equestrian culture, Herodotus writes “the story is as follows” and seemingly repeats an unsupported claim that their people were produced by some shipwrecked Amazons who procreated with Scythian men. While evidence has arisen to suggest real Eurasian warrior women inspired these tales, they fall squarely in the realm of myth, and evolved as they were embraced by other cultures. In Arabian legend, Alexander the Great was said to have married the Queen of the Amazons, and it was claimed that the homeland of the warrior women was on an island in the Indian Ocean, but in the Middle Ages, Arab cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi located this mythical island in the Atlantic Ocean, and here we start to see hints of the modern day legends that inspired Wonder Woman. Unsurprisingly, in the 15th and 16th centuries, when explorers believed that they might encounter any number of such mythical isles across the great sea, such as Antillia or the Fortunate Isles, the notion that any island they might happen upon could be the isle of the Amazons loomed in imaginations. As a result, when explorers did make landfall, they looked for indications of a matriarchal culture as evidence of such a discovery. Christopher Columbus wrote in the log of his first voyage that some natives told him, no doubt in response to some leading and poorly translated questions, that some nearby island was inhabited only by women, and that they received male visitation only during certain times of the year for reproductive purposes. Columbus was actually well-versed in such myths and in Greek and Arab classic literature generally. He latched onto such indications with alacrity, quick to twist any native tales, whether poorly understood or even fabricated in an effort to please him, as proof of the existence of such mythological locations. In reality, it seems, the natives he was questioning were actually referring to an island on which they kept female prisoners for forced breeding. But this would not be the last time that Columbus or other explorers mistakenly believed they had discovered a mythical site. Another such myth, that of the Fountain of Youth, the spring that originated in paradise and rejuvenated those who bathed in or drank from it, was also sometimes prominent in the thoughts of New World explorers, though we find when we look further into this myth that it has become even more a myth, a historical myth, falsely claimed to have been a legend among native tribes and inaccurately asserted to have been the obsession and sole objective of the conquistador Juan Ponce de León’s expedition to Florida.

While the story of Ponce de León and his discovery of Florida during the course of his obsessive search for the Fountain of Youth has made him a rather famous and romantic historical figure, some may be surprised to learn that previous to the 20th century there was little interest in him and his expedition in search of the mysterious island called sometimes Bimini and other times Beniny. In 1913, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the supposed discovery of Florida, a variety of historians wrote more on the 1513 voyage of Ponce de León than had been written about him since the beginning of the 17th century. What they found was certainly a figure of interest who had fallen between the cracks of historiography and deserved to be more widely known. Juan Ponce de León, a youth of 19 years from an influential family, is said to have served as a page and squire and perhaps to have fought Muslims in the Granada War before joining the crew of Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas, where he was present at the discovery of Puerto Rico. Lest anyone suspect that I glorify the memory of this man, it should be established that he was a conquistador at heart from the beginning. He was a nobody before 1504, and he won respect as well as a grant of land and native slaves for the large part he played in suppressing a Taíno rebellion on Higüey, a massacre described in nauseating detail by Bartolomé de las Casas. Four years later, after expanding Spanish colonization in the area, he was tasked by King Ferdinand with forcing all the remaining Taíno into servitude, mining gold for the Spanish coffers. And chasing gold, he then set out to explore and settle Puerto Rico, then called San Juan, and eventually would become the governor of the island. In 1513, however, having lost his governorship for reasons I will explain later, de León obtained a royal contract to seek out the rumored “islands of Beniny” northwest of Hispaniola, on the understanding that he would serve as their governor once settled. There are numerous myths associated with this journey that 20th century historians repeated based on 16th-century accounts, causing Ponce de León’s journey to be so thoroughly mythologized. One was that he landed at St. Augustine, the place where today in Florida an “Archaeological Park” daily attracts tourists as the site of his first landing. This land was purchased in 1868 by someone hoping to turn it into a tourist attraction, and lo and behold, within a few years of creating the park, one of his employees claimed to find a stone cross buried on the property, supposedly left by Ponce de León as a marker. As early as 1935, a historian riding the new popularity of stories about de León, T. Frederick Davis, tried to provide this claim with a veneer of scholarly respectability, claiming that navigational data showed his course would have taken him to St. Augustine. This interpretation of the data proved erroneous. In the 1950s, another historian, Edward Lawson,  argued that testimonies and other archaeological evidence indicating the existence of a populous native village at the site proved it was where de León landed, when in fact he would likely have avoided such a landing site where natives might have repelled their boats. In fact, Ponce de León’s log indicates he looked for a landing site in this area but found no amenable inlet or harbor and thus moved on. Another big myth perpetuated by 20th-century historians actively renewing interest in Ponce de León’s voyage was that he had discovered Florida. The land of Florida, or it was called back then, the islands of Beimini or Beniny, had already been systematically raided by Europeans in slaving expeditions. This was how King Ferdinand and Ponce de León even knew to sail north of San Juan Bautista to find the land. His real legacy, his actual discovery, the Gulf Stream, that ocean current that would become so important as a marine highway, was largely overlooked by historians for a long time, overshadowed by the misconception that he had discovered Florida and by the myth that the whole purpose of his venture was to find the fabled Fountain of Youth.

Depiction of Spanish massacre of natives, courtesy John Carter Brown Library (CC BY-SA 4.0)

To give a sense of how widespread and accepted the idea was, in 1985, the historian Robert Weddle wrote, “That the Fountain of Youth legend influenced Ponce de León’s discovery of Florida has long been accepted as fact,” and though it did not prove the truth of it, the statement that it was accepted was surely accurate. The aforementioned work of T. Frederick Davis in 1935 explicitly claimed the search for a “spring” that was capable of “restoring youth to the aged” as the “Purpose of the Voyage,” and he claimed that Ponce de León was drawn on this quest because there existed an “Indian legend” that this spring could be found on “an island called Bimini (supposed by the Spaniards to be one of the Lucayos, or as we call them now, the Bahamas).” To give a sense of the inaccuracies in this 20th-century historiography, the island of Beniny or Beimini for which de León searched was not in the Bahamas, though this confusion may have eventually led to those islands being called the Bahamas. To illustrate this fact, Ponce de León put ashore at the northernmost of the Bahama islands, Guanahani, for ten days to prepare for his northwestward voyage across the open sea in his effort to reach the island of Beniny (actually the mainland of North America) that he knew lay somewhere in that direction. But this error was repeated by numerous historians, as was the insistence that de León was in search of the Fountain of Youth, to the point that the inaccuracies appeared in editions of Collier’s Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Americana, and Encyclopedia Britannica, thereafter resulting in both myths being printed in school textbooks. The popularity in 20th-century historiography of the myth that Ponce de León was obsessed with finding the Fountain of Youth is sometimes blamed on the mythmaking of 19th-century American writer Washington Irving. Much as we saw Irving was largely responsible for myths surrounding Christopher Columbus, he also embellished the story of Ponce de León in some chapters of his 1831 work Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus. This work was produced just a little more than a decade after Spain renounced all claim to Florida to the U.S. in 1819, and we might consider this the first instance of a resurgence in interest in the voyage of Ponce de León, written with something of an axe to grind, as Irving depicts de León as vain and credulous. Even Irving acknowledges how far-fetched the idea seems that this conquistador would credit the tales he supposedly heard from natives about a river that restored youth when one bathed in it, writing: “It may seem incredible, at the present day, that a man of years and experience could yield any faith to a story which resembles the wild fiction of an Arabian tale; but the wonders and novelties breaking upon the world in that age of discovery almost realized the illusions of fable, and the imaginations of the Spanish voyagers had become so heated that they were capable of any stretch of credulity.” Whether or not Juan Ponce de León really was this credulous and truly had been searching for the Fountain of Youth will be further examined, but first let us examine the existence of the myth itself. Irving’s statement is at least true in this regard. As we have seen, the Spanish certainly chased after myths, and certainly transplanted their myths onto New World soil. And one of these transplanted myths certainly was that of the Fountain of Youth.

In my episode on Christopher Columbus, I explained how the idea of Earth’s roundness was not a novel idea Columbus had, as Washington Irving had suggested, but in truth, Columbus didn’t even believe the world was round. He had a notion that it was more pear-shaped, with a kind of nipple atop it, and atop this nipple, he believed, was the Garden of Eden at the point closest to heaven. While I call it a myth that Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth, it does seem clear that Columbus was searching for this Terrestrial Paradise. Columbus carried a book by Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, which claimed that the earthly paradise must exist on some phantom island in the Atlantic, such as the Fortunate Isles, and Columbus treated the text like the authoritative source on global geography. He believed that in the Garden of Eden, from the Tree of Life, sprang a great fountain that served as the source of all the great rivers of the world. Indeed, when he reached the mouth of the Orinoco near Trinidad on his third journey, he wrote back to his royal patrons that he must have found that font of life springing from Paradise, for he had never dreamed of such a massive freshwater river. Columbus’s ideas about a fountain of life springing from the Terrestrial Paradise did not come from actual scriptures but rather from medieval legend, which had been grafted onto scriptural accounts of the Garden of Eden. Some claim that the origin of the Fountain of Youth myth, like the Amazonian myth, can be traced back to Herodotus, who once wrote of a long-lived people he called the Icthyophagi, or fish eaters, whose longevity owed to the peculiar quality of a fountain in whose oily waters they bathed. The myth of the Fountain of Youth as we know it today, though, and as the Spanish knew it in the 16th century, first seems to have arisen in the Alexander Romance, which was first composed in the 4th-century CE in Greek and was through the centuries translated into numerous languages in the Middle East before being printed in European vernacular languages in the 13th century. It spoke of Alexander finding a land of flowers where they stumbled across a golden fountain, inset with crystal and surrounded by marble pillars, into which four times a day flowed magical waters from a statue of a golden lion, and when his men bathed in it, their health and vigor were renewed, such that they were younger and could hardly be recognized. The 12th-century letter of Prester John, that anonymous hoax that I devoted a whole episode to discussing a few years ago, also brought this legend to European imaginations. The writer of that fictional account of a Christian king in a magical land far to the East indicates that there is a spring, flowing out of Paradise into a grove at the foot of Mount Olympus, and if one drank from it, they would “suffer no infirmity from that day on” and would forever be exactly thirty-two years old. Then the fountain appeared again in another dubious and anonymous work I’ve mentioned before, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville written in the 14th century and attributed to an English knight who seems to have not existed. In this work, it is called the well of youth, is said to flow out of Paradise, prevent illness, and keep people young, and is placed in an imaginary Eastern city called Palombe. Given Columbus’s mistaken belief that he was sailing westward to reach the East, it was reasonable for him to think he might find such places as were described in these classical and medieval fantasies. But even other explorers and Spanish historians, after finally coming to the understanding that this was not the East they had set out to reach but rather a New World, a new continent to them, the rumors persisted, encouraged, it seems, but the myths of natives that seemed to indicate the fountain’s existence.

16th century depiction of the Fountain of Youth.

In 1516, in a letter to Pope Leo X, the Italian historian chronicling New World discoveries for Spain, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, mentioned a “notable fountain” on an island he called Boyuca, whose waters rejuvenated the old who drank them. In one of his later histories he also shared the story of a native who had been made a slave and baptized a Christian that his father had bathed in a magical fountain in Florida and been made young again. Some historians cite these early claims as evidence that the Fountain of Youth was a legend among natives and was the object of Ponce de León’s voyage, even though Martyr, who would have spoken with Ponce de León in his research, never claimed this. In fact, the story told to him by the captive native can easily be dismissed as unreliable, and also of a later origin. As for the original claim in the 1516 letter, some historians have, without evidence, suggested that Boyuca was actually Bimini, but in fact, this rumor Martyr was sharing was one heard on the expedition of Juan Díaz de Solís, and the description of where this isle of Boyuca supposedly resided seems to place it closer to the Bay of Honduras. Moreover, any and all claims made by the Spanish that the natives they encountered had their own myths of a Fountain of Youth are hard to credit. Bartolomé de Las Casas as well as Spanish friar Ramón Pané and others, after living with Caribbean natives and learning their languages, wrote numerous works detailing the nature of the customs and religion of the indigenous peoples of the West Indies, including accounts of their folktales and myths, and none mention anything resembling a Fountain of Youth. Each supposed rumor of a Fountain of Youth in the Caribbean, coaxed out of natives through poorly translated interrogation, rather tellingly placed the mythical spring in a different place. Thus we might presume that all such “rumors” were actually just natives, failing to entirely understand the meaning of the question, pointing the Spanish toward various ordinary sources of water.

But if the myth of the Fountain of Youth was real, and if some Spanish were questioning natives and looking for it in the New World, why shouldn’t we credit the idea that this was the object of Ponce de León’s voyage, as Washington Irving and so many 20th century historians claimed? This is a valid question, and it can be answered by looking at the sources relied on by those historians. The most cited of all sources that claim Juan Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth is the work of Antonio de Herrera, whose history of Ponce de León’s voyage, published in 1601, relied on the conquistador’s own log as primary source material. This very fact that it relied on Ponce de León’s log, as well as the fact that de Herrera was the official historiographer of Spain at the time, seems to lend his work credence, even though it was written some 80 years after the voyage. The problem is that nothing in Ponce de León’s log refers to the Fountain of Youth legend at all, and the only mentions of the myth appear in statements that de Herrera inserted, not based on the log at all. He never claims that the log reflects de León’s search for the fountain, or that any native guides were leading him to any rejuvenating spring. Once, he mentions the work of another author, Don d’Escalante Fontaneda, whose late 16th-century memoir claimed Ponce de León had been searching for the Fountain of Youth at a river in Florida called Jordan. And then at the end of his work, de Herrera simply says that Ponce de León never found that Fountain. This memoir by Fontaneda that de Herrera seems to have relied on for evidence of de León’s motivation is manifestly unreliable. Fontaneda was a colorful figure. He came from a noble family and like Ponce de León went into service at a young age, at just 13 years old. In 1549, he was shipwrecked in the Florida Keys, and while the natives there killed his shipmates, perhaps because of his youth they spared him, and he lived among these indigenous islanders for 17 years. Ten years after his rescue, he wrote his memoirs, and there is no reason to consider him an authority on the voyage of Ponce de León or much of anything beyond the culture of the particular natives he lived among on the Keys. Indeed, there is no River Jordan in Florida, and this appears to have been a kind of scriptural allusion to the river in which John the Baptist conducted the ritual of baptizing, which represents a kind of rebirth like the Fountain of Youth is said to provide, making the whole account more literary than historical.

17th century engraving of Juan Ponc e de León

There was, however, one principal, original source from which Fontaneda likely derived his account of Ponce de León’s search for the Fountain of Youth, written in 1535 by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Indeed, the fact that de Oviedo was his predecessor as Spain’s official historiographer likely compelled de Herrera to make sure his later account of Ponce de León’s voyage fell in line with the earlier one. De Oviedo speaks explicitly and derisively of de León as a vain and avaricious egotist and claims that searching for the Fountain of Youth was the sole purpose of his voyage, specifically because Ponce de León hoped that the fabled spring might cure his enflaquecimiento del sexo, literally his “emaciation of sex,” meaning his impotence. The fact that the myth of Ponce de León’s search for the Fountain of Youth originated with this claim, made 14 years after the conquistador had died and thus after he could protest, is ridiculous. It is libel, pure and simple, and there is evidence that it was false. Ponce de León was a portrait of machismo, just like his father, who sired dozens of illegitimate offspring. Having a philandering father and acting macho is surely no certain sign of virility, but Ponce de León fathered four children of his own with his wife, and it is known that he insisted on taking his mistress with him on his voyage. Some historians, seeking to bolster de Oviedo’s credibility, claimed that de León must have been older by the time of his voyage, thus suggesting his obvious virility must have been waning, but other historians have proven he was only 39 at the time. Then again, historians partial to de Oviedo’s myth about his search for the Fountain have suggested that it was not his own impotence he sought to cure with the waters of the Fountain, but that of King Ferdinand, who was older and had married a younger woman. But this is pure speculation, and there is no evidence of it. In fact, just as Ponce de León’s log makes absolutely no mention of the Fountain of Youth, so too his royal charter, the official patent issued by King Ferdinand, mentions nothing about searching for the Fountain of Youth. Rather, it indicates, in precise details, that the purpose and goal of his expedition was to explore and settle the large island of Beniny, which was actually not an island but the continental mainland, and which Ponce de León named Florida after his landing because of the flowers he admired there. In truth, as we know today, Ponce de León’s voyage was intended not to find a mythical fountain but to find gold and to expand the Spanish Empire, and on a more personal level, Ponce de León was seeking to reestablish his own power, which had recently been taken from him in a political struggle with Diego Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus. Unprecedented rights had previously been granted to Columbus for his discoveries, and his son came to the New World to seize power, taking the position of Viceroy as his birthright and forcing Ponce de León out of power in Puerto Rico. King Ferdinand, who viewed Ponce de León as a faithful servant and resented the Columbus family’s growing power, encouraged de León to establish himself in Florida as both a reward and to ensure he still had loyal governors in the region. Though it is admittedly speculation, the fact that Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo wrote with such admiration about Christopher Columbus and was personally acquainted with Columbus’s son, Diego Colón, suggests that perhaps his blatant slander of Ponce de León was simply a matter of personal bias against a man he had only heard about from friends who maligned his memory.

It is astonishing and disconcerting that one nasty statement by a biased historian almost 500 years ago could result in a falsehood being perpetuated even today. We see in this story how one unsupported statement is repeated by other historians through the ages, relying only on the views of historians who came before them rather than on primary source material, none of which actually support the claim that Florida was discovered in an effort to find a magical spring that grants eternal youth. In my principal source, “Anatomy of an Historical Fantasy: The Ponce de León-Fountain of Youth Legend,” published in Revista de Historia de Americá in 1998, Douglas Peck details each step of the way how this myth migrated from its Eurasian roots to the New World, how Oviedo maliciously made an unfounded claim about Ponce de León’s vain preoccupation with it, and how this lie was carried through the centuries and embellished even by otherwise conscientious historians until it entered encyclopedias and textbooks. It took more than 450 years to set the record straight, and with the myth now firmly rooted as common knowledge in the minds of most Americans, who knows how long it will take to replace the myth in the public imagination. After all, the false version has become a foundational story in Florida. Starting in 1900 with a new owner, the St. Augustine Archaeological Park was aggressively marketed as the actual Fountain of Youth, where tourists can pay the price of admission and drink some sulphury-smelling spring water that they’re told was the object of Juan Ponce de León’s 16th-century expedition. Indeed, this has become something of a tourist industry, with numerous mineral springs laying claim to the title of the real Fountain of Youth. We might even see this as a theme in Florida’s culture generally, with elderly retirees from all over the country moving there to find a new lease on life, and adults all over the world flying there to visit Disney World and feel young again. We could even see a parallel in the current political culture of Florida under their governor, who is determined to take his state, and the country if he ever manages to win higher office, backward rather than forward. And the idea of our national political culture reverting to a juvenile or infantile state should really scare all of us. Today the concept of the Fountain of Youth survives mostly as a metaphor. Just as the Holy Grail and El Dorado have become metaphors for an ideal or perfect thing that we may pursue, so too the Fountain of Youth has come to represent anything that we may use or do or seek out that makes us healthy or young at heart. The term is used heavily in marketing health and wellness products, as well as aphrodisiacs. Though the products have changed, we find that the myth has long been used by snake-oil salesmen to hawk whatever frauds they have on hand, and looking at the history of this myth, we find that maybe it was always used as a kind of deceptive marketing scam, to sell tickets to theme parks, to sell the idea of Florida, to sell a romantic version of European colonialism, and to sell a version of history tainted by myth.

An old postcard for the “Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park” in St. Augustine, Florida

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Until next time, remember, even otherwise trustworthy and scrupulous historians are not immune to the spread of historical myths, but in due course, it seems, eventually, they do get revealed. 

Further Reading

Fuson, Robert H. Juan Ponce de Leon and the Spanish Discovery of Puerto Rico and Florida. University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Peck, Douglas T. “Anatomy of an Historical Fantasy: The Ponce de León-Fountain of Youth Legend.” Revista de Historia de América, no. 123, 1998, pp. 63–87. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20139991.

The Search for Cities of Gold

If I were to say the phrase “Gold Rush,” one undoubtedly will think of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion and, of course, the California Gold Rush, a 19th-century migration boom animated by gold fever. In fact there were numerous gold rushes in the 19th century in numerous regions of North America. But few, upon hearing someone talk of an American Gold Rush would think of the 16th-century Age of Exploration and Spanish conquests, even though, really, this was the first gold rush in the Americas. From the beginning, European exploration of the Americas was animated by a lust for riches and a search for wealthy civilizations that could be sacked and pillaged for their gold, their silver, and their pearls. Christopher Columbus, who sought a sea passage to the East as an alternative to Marco Polo’s overland route, dreamed of finding fabulous cities rich in minerals and precious stones. In particular, he hoped to find the island that Marco Polo had called Cipangu, which legend said was “covered in gold.” In reality, Cipangu was only the Chinese word for Japan, which was not exactly a mythical city of gold, and which Columbus would never reach. Landing in the Caribbean, Columbus focused on the riches of the inhabitants they encountered on each island, always asking about the source of the gold he observed native peoples wearing as ornaments. When his ship the Santa Maria ran aground at the island he would name Hispaniola and the natives greeted them with offers to trade gold items for brass bells, Columbus believed he had found it. He returned to Europe with exaggerated tales of the gold mines of Santo Domingo, and he returned there in 1493, forcing the native Taíno people to gather gold for him. Within thirty years, because of this forced labor as well as the diseases spread by the Europeans, almost the entirety of the Taíno population had died. Recently I had a listener of Taíno descent message me about my episode on Columbus and point out that the Taíno did not die out, and indeed there are descendant communities today, so on that listener’s request, I want to make that correction, but the fact of the survival of the Taíno in no way diminishes the fact that Columbus’s lust for gold drove him to nearly wipe out an entire culture. Meanwhile, his letter to the king and queen of Spain describing the gold of the New World was published in numerous languages, galvanizing conquistadors for the next century. Driving all of them, in some way, was the dream of gold. When it was clear that the Americas were not Asia, the dream came to be of the riches that might be earned with the discovery of an easier passage to the Pacific than the fearsome strait sailed by Magellan, or it came to be a dream of the riches that could be accumulated through the settlement of land on which they might cultivate a profitable crop, but preferable to all these prizes was the discovery of the source of native gold, the rich gold mine that Columbus failed to find on Hispaniola. When in 1519 Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico and discovered the wealthy Aztec civilization, this original American gold rush changed. When Cortés marched on the Aztec capital, imprisoned their King Moctezuma, and seized all the gold in their treasury, the dreams of conquistadors turned principally to the discovery of hidden civilizations rich in gold that could be looted, melted down, and coined. Unsurprisingly, then, numerous rumors and legends began to arise among conquistadors and their armies about secret cities of gold in both South and North America, waiting to be discovered and plundered.

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In this piece, I am once again exploring the historical context behind one of the Indiana Jones films. By the time this is posted, the new Indy film, The Dial of Destiny, has already released, and I’ve already seen it and am considering what topics I might tackle to finally wrap up this long-running series of standalone blog posts. In the meanwhile, although some may want to disavow its existence, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull actually offers more than one potential topic that I have long wanted to cover on this podcast, so for my purposes, it does exist. In fact, I feel that in many ways this fourth film is unfairly maligned, but in other ways, I entirely understand the disappointment in it. Not because of any far-fetched action sequences; in fact, rewatching the films, it’s hard to get more far-fetched than jumping from a plane in an inflatable raft, and even the beloved Last Crusade has all kinds of continuity errors in iconic action sequences that make them less than believable. Nuked fridges and Tarzan vine-swinging aside, the writing on the fourth one just doesn’t live up to the others. But this is not a film podcast, so I’m not talking about dialogue here. I’m talking about the object of Indy’s quest: the MacGuffin and the lore surrounding it. I understand that behind the scenes there was some push and pull between the filmmakers regarding what this one should be “about,” and it really shows. There was an effort to make this one about flying saucers simply because it was set in the 1950s, but there needed to be some archaeological angle, of course, considering Indy’s profession. Thus the notion of ancient aliens is featured, with that claim’s connections to the Nazca Lines in Peru and the elongated skulls of Peruvian native cultures folded in. But there was a need for an object, a physical MacGuffin, so they mashed these ideas together with the dubious crystal skull artifacts claimed in the 19th century to be pre-Columbian Mesoamerican artifacts. I could, and probably will, devote an episode to talking about crystal skulls. And I most certainly will eventually devote an episode or series to the claims of ancient aliens made by Erich von Däniken and others, but it seems to me that the more compelling MacGuffin, the one really worthy of a quest by Indiana Jones, which should have been focused on without all the other trappings, was the city of the aliens—er, inter-dimensional beings—a place of great wealth, a lost city of gold, here fictionalized as Akator, but conflated in the film’s script with El Dorado. The idea of Indiana Jones seeking after a lost or hidden city of gold is rich in historical significance, so I took on the search myself, or rather, the research, and found that there was never just one city of gold.

Artificially deformed Peruvian skulls, commonly and falsely attributed to alien contact, which feature minimally in the fourth Indiana Jones film.

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Before the legend of El Dorado, there was the legend of the land of Meta, which originated with Diego de Ordás, formerly a captain under Cortés and in 1530 a governor of some islands in the estuary of the Amazon River. In those years, the source of the gold of the Americas remained a mystery. Conquistadors expected everywhere to find gold and silver mines to explain the ornaments that were traded by the cultures they encountered, and they could not believe that it was all taken from rivers, which most of it was. Instead, they believed it must have come from some hidden source. De Ordás believed, like many, that gold grew, like plant in the earth, and that because its color was associated with that of the sun, it must grow in greater abundance closer to the equator. Thus in 1530, he organized an expedition up the Orinoco River, seeking its source. He and his men traveled a thousand miles, both relying on the natives they encountered along the way and making war on them. Eventually, he reached the river’s confluence with the river Meta, where some native prisoners, shown a gold ring and asked whether their land contained such metal, told de Ordás that beyond a mountain range on the side of the Meta there was a city rich in gold, ruled by a one-eyed king, and that the conquistadors did not have enough men to conquer it, but if they did, they could “fill their boats with that metal.” De Ordás’s  expedition ended in abject failure, with the loss of most of his men and the only thing he had to show for his efforts a rumor of a rich land that may have just been a lie told by a prisoner. But the search for the land of Meta would animate other conquistadors as well. During the next few years, numerous expeditions were undertaken into the South American wilderness, and a kind of standard operating procedure was developed. Conquistadors sought out native peoples, not only to trade for gold, but also because they relied on them for food and to carry their luggage. Whenever they encountered a group of indigenous people, they traded with them and pressed them into service, and if they did not comply, they attacked them by surprise and slaughtered them and pressed them into slavery regardless. But to maintain the veneer of Christian respectability, they first read out a document called the Requirement, often without any translation, which explained that the native population was required to accept the Spanish authority and Christian conversion, on the threat of rape and pillaging, and stated, absurdly, that “any death or losses that result from this are your fault.” The expeditions of conquistadors like the German Nicolaus Federmann and Ambrosius Dalfinger cut a violent scar through Venezuela. Many of the native inhabitants they massacred they believed were cannibals, but ironically, members of their own expedition turned to cannibalism when lost and without food. Some of these expeditions did successfully seize and bring back gold, but never discovered the source of it. The notion that hidden civilizations were still out there, full of vast wealth to be stolen, grew in the minds of conquistadors and their cut-throat adventurers when Francisco Pizarro discovered the Inca in Peru, and in 1532 took their ruler, Atahualpa, hostage, demanding a literal king’s ransom. The great wealth stripped from the Incas just further fired the imaginations of other adventurers, many of whom believed the source of Incan gold must be elsewhere, beyond the Andes Mountains. One Spanish governor, Jerónimo de Ortal, believed that the source of Peruvian gold was the rumored land of Meta, and in another effort to find this golden kingdom of the one-eyed king, he sent conquistador Alonso de Herrera up the Orinoco to find it, but the expedition was repelled by natives. Governor de Ortál then led his own expedition overland, but when they believed they were nearing the fabled land of Meta, his men mutinied, intending to seize the gold for themselves. They found nothing, however, as with later expeditions for Meta, but in those later years, it was the legend of a different city of gold that animated the conquistadors, one that it has been suggested was the source of the rumors of the rich land of Meta all along: the story of El Dorado.

The legend of El Dorado was given birth among the conquistadors and Spanish adventurers who sacked the Incan Empire in Peru. Interestingly, it was not originally a rumor of a city of gold, but of a golden man, as the name indicates. In Spanish, “gold” is oro, as in “ore”; thus if something were made of gold, it would be de oro, which as an adjective would be dorada in the feminine, or dorado in the masculine. If it actually referred to a city or land, it would be formed in the feminine and would need the further noun, la ciudad dorada or la tierra dorada. We can better understand the name El Dorado when we find its first use. After Francisco Pizarro accepted the Incan ruler Atahualpa’s ransom, which was literally his weight in gold, he had the king executed anyway and marched on the capital city, Cusco, pillaging the treasury of all its gold and silver, and smelting it into bullion. By one contemporaneous report, they coined more than 1.3 million gold pesos, yet Pizarro and others would never shake the uneasy feeling that the Incas had escaped Peru with a great deal of their gold. Indeed, hearing that one of Atahualpa’s generals had mustered an army at the northern Incan capital Quito, the Spanish marched on, not only to stamp out any further resistance, but also because they suspected to find more gold there. To their disappointment, they did not, and though they tortured captured Incan leaders to death, they were unable to discover the whereabouts of any further treasure, leading to a long-lived legend of lost Incan gold. During the scramble to capture the leaders, there were reports of native chief from the north called el indio dorado, the Golden Indian, whose gold-rich tribe had allied with the Incas. This was 1534, and not much was made of this chief or his tribe at the time. But as rumors spread, they change. Seven years later, as recorded by soldier and historian Fernandez de Oviedo, the Spanish in Quito were still talking about the Golden Chief, and now the story was that he was a king who was daily anointed with oil and a fine powdered gold. Natives of the region were known to paint themselves with resins and ground plants, so the notion was in keeping with extant cultural practices, while hinting at a great wealth of gold. The earliest accounts say that the Spanish learned of this Golden Chief from an “itinerant Indian” that they captured and interrogated, giving the story an even shakier foundation. Over time, the legend evolved further, such that this king, El Dorado, was said to cover himself daily in gold and then bathe in a lake, and all his people made regular offerings of gold which were also deposited in this sacred lake’s waters, such that this lake, it was thought, must contain vast quantities of sunken treasure. And eventually, the story, as such legends do, became simplified, such that this king, ruled over a city near that lake, a city equally rich in gold, nay, covered in gold—built of gold!—a city also, for ease of memory, called El Dorado.

Diego de Ordas, originator of the first city of gold legend: the Land of Meta.

Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, a conquistador who quested after El Dorado and failed, and the soldier and poet Juan de Castellanos, came to believe that El Dorado was none other than their own province of New Granada, or more specifically the area around the city of Bogotá in what is today Colombia, and this notion is actually accepted by many today as the most likely case. First of all, the area is north of Quito, where the first rumors of the Golden Chief said his kingdom resided, and more than that it was beyond a mountain range on a bank of the Meta River, further identifying it with the fabled land of Meta. The Muisca or Chingcha people that lived and were conquered there had previously been a well-established and populous kingdom that has been compared with the Aztecs and the Incas. And, they worshipped and made offerings at a nearby sacred lake, the Guatavita, a peculiar, perfectly round lake, which actually appears to be a crater lake. Indeed, since Guatavita was identified with the lake of the El Dorado legend, numerous attempts were made, in the 16th century and the 19th century, to drain it and obtain the gold said to have been deposited in its depths. In 1580, a businessman from Bogotá actually excavated the rim of the lake, cutting a notch in it to let its waters out. Though he did supposedly discover some gold ornaments as the water receded, the earthen walls of his excavation collapsed and ended up killing many of his workers. The next major attempt to drain the lake was made in 1898, by a British contractor who actually succeeded in draining the lake entirely by means of a tunnel. What he was left with was only a pit of mud that his company had difficulty finding anything in, especially when it dried as hard as concrete in the sun. Now the lake has been declared a protected area for conservation and has been restored. Thus whatever may be hidden in the sediment on its floor will remain a mystery. But even if Guatavita and the Muisca lands of Bogotá provide a tidy solution to the mystery of El Dorado, this does not mean the legend was real. In fact, the Muisca were not at all rich in gold, for they did not produce it themselves, but rather acquired it through trade with other tribes like the Incas. As there was no golden kingdom in Bogotá to conquer, the legend of El Dorado shifted elsewhere, to be associated with other lakes. Indeed, examining 16th-century maps of South America, we find Eldorado on the shores of lakes that seem to always be in different unexplored reaches of the Amazon. Funny enough, the name of the lake is always the word for lake in some native language. El Dorado came to be associated with a lake called Manoa, which was actually just the word for lake in Arawak; and Lake Parime, which meant simply “big lake” in Carib. Thus we get the sense that, just as native peoples being attacked and interrogated by conquistadors simply waved them on to the next tribe’s territory, assuring them that they’d find the gold they looked for elsewhere, so too when the conquistadors started asking about lakes, they just told them what they wanted to hear about a lake and gold off thataway somewhere.

At this point I should address the fact that there is a clearly defined historical myth representing the Spanish as pillagers of the New World lusting only after gold and committing all sorts of atrocities to get what they wanted. This is known as the Black Legend of the Spanish, and it was widely employed by the English as a propaganda tool during the two empires’ colonial wars. I want to be clear here. I think some may look at my episode on Columbus and this episode and think that I am promoting this Black Legend. Well… in a way I am, because I reject the notion that we should overlook Spanish atrocities, which certainly and commonly occurred, in order to appreciate accomplishments like their taming of wilderness, building of infrastructure, and advancement of agriculture. I reject this because those things were accomplished on the backs of the native cultures they subjugated. But I do acknowledge that there is a Black Legend of the Spanish insofar as the English were no better and engaged in all the same inhumanities. I’ve been careful in this episode to refer to Europeans or conquistadors, rather than just the Spanish, and I’ve already pointed out two German conquistadors, Federmann and Dalfinger. Now it should be pointed out that in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the English became the more prominent seekers after El Dorado. Having heard the somewhat famous story of one Spanish soldier who claimed, very dubiously, to have been abducted by natives and taken to the lost city of gold in a blindfold, Sir Walter Raleigh became preoccupied with finding El Dorado himself. Since they did not have a presence in South America or as much knowledge of its inhabitants and geography as the Spanish, he descended on Trinidad, captured the Spanish colony’s governor, Antonio de Berrío, who had undertaken several El Dorado expeditions himself, and interrogated him to discover all he knew about the gold city’s supposed whereabouts. Raleigh would mount more than one expedition into the interior of the continent to search for El Dorado, all of them failures of course, and he would eventually be beheaded by King James for his failure to obey orders to avoid conflict with the Spanish. Such expeditions continued sporadically, sponsored by the English and the Dutch, as well as the Spanish, into the 18th century, none of them succeeding since El Dorado is a myth, and all of them resulting in some loss of life. Thus the legend of El Dorado drove European exploration and exploitation of Latin America for around 250 years.

Lake Guatavita, long thought to hold the treasures of El Dorado. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

The way that European mapmakers haphazardly placed El Dorado on maps of the continent, thereby fueling belief in it as a physical place, recalls the treatment of some myths of antiquity, like that of Atlantis. Indeed, even the name of the Amazon referenced the legendary homeland of the Amazon warrior women. Likewise, the name given to the Caribbean archipelago on which Columbus first landed, the Antilles, references another old legend that also transformed into a modern myth and drove further expeditions into North America searching for lost cities of gold. The name connects the islands to the Iberian legend of Antillia, an island of seven cities said to be a kind of utopia. This legend partakes of a long tradition depicting paradisal islands in the Atlantic Ocean, including that of Atlantis and the Fortunate Isles of Homer. This legend was of later origin than those, though, telling of seven bishops who fled Spain with numerous parishioners during its conquest by Muslim Arabs in the year 711 CE. It was said they sailed westward, into the Atlantic, and landed at a bountiful island, on which each bishop built a city. So that the inhabitants of their seven cities would not risk the peace they had established, they were said to have burned all their ships. It’s not at all clear when this legend was born, however, as the first record of it is in maps of the late Middle Ages, one which Antillia appeared as one of many such phantom islands, drawn in different locations depending on the whims of the cartographer. In 1530, when a captive native in New Spain, or Spanish-occupied Mexico, told the Spanish of a land to the north with seven large settlements rich in gold that he remembered visiting as a child, some believed the fabled Seven Cities of Antillia had been located. Years later, in 1536, four survivors of a failed expedition to Florida, led by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, told a similar story. Their expedition had failed to find gold during their northward march in Florida, and facing stiff opposition from natives, decided to build rafts and sail westward up the Gulf Coast, where they were mostly drowned in a storm at Galveston Bay. The survivors lived as castaways on Galveston Island then were captured by natives and remained in captivity for several years before the four survivors escaped. They traveled across modern-day Texas and northeastern Mexico, and arrived with a rumor, told to them by the Sonora tribe about populous and wealthy native lands to the north. Specifically, Cabeza de Vaca mentioned riches of gold, silver, and turquoise, and thus the legend of an Island of Seven Cities was transformed into a legend of Seven Cities of Gold somewhere in North America.

In 1538, two Franciscan friars reached what is believed to be modern day Arizona, and reported on a vast and rich native civilization, probably the Pueblo peoples of the Southwestern U.S., and their report encouraged another expedition led by another monk of the same order, Fray Marcos de Niza, who ended up in modern-day New Mexico and likewise learned of a populous native civilization farther north, said to be rich, with magnificent two- and three-story houses. De Niza called this place Cíbola, and even though he only heard about it and did not visit it himself, he claimed to have seen it with his own eyes. Thus when the Spanish mustered a major expedition to find and exploit these rumored Seven Cities of Cíbola, headed by the conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, Fray Marcos de Niza went along as a guide. When Coronado eventually arrived at the “seven cities,” which were actually seven adobe farming villages of the Zuñi people, devoid of any wealth, de Niza was roundly cursed for a liar and sent back to New Spain. The rest of the expedition stayed, though, exploring the southwestern U.S. and continuing their search for the Seven Cities. One native informant, whom they called The Turk, told the Spanish of a wealthy nation called Golden Quivira to the east, where the inhabitants were said to all eat from plates and bowls of gold. Thus Coronado went marching again after yet another city of gold, traveling all the way to Kansas to find only the grass huts of the Wichita people. Deceived yet again by his guide, Coronado had The Turk garroted and before long returned to Mexico. Today, The Turk is viewed by the Pueblo native culture as a hero and martyr who purposely fed the conquistador disinformation in order to lead the Spanish away from his beleaguered people.

Coronado’s expedition, depicted being led by a native guide.

Back in South America, the suspicion that the Incas had escaped with most of their gold would continue to haunt the Spanish and fuel further myths of lost cities of gold. Among the Incas themselves, there long existed a myth about the Inkarri, whose father was the sun itself, and who was king of the Incas. This myth evolved when Pizarro had King Atahualpa killed. It was said their ruler swore to return from the dead to exact vengeance, and it was claimed that the Spanish had dismembered Atahualpa and buried parts of his body in separate places to prevent his return, but that his head was growing toward his feet, and when at least he was whole again, he would be the Inkarri, he would destroy the Spanish, and he would restore the Incan civilization at the mythical city of Paititi. Through the years, this Paititi the Incas spoke of was taken to be the lost city to which it was always suspected they had escaped with their gold. While the term El Dorado has today become more of a metaphor than a literal place, expeditions to search for Paititi have become far more common. In 1925, the man some believe was an inspiration for Indiana Jones, Percy Fawcett, set out to find what he called the city of “Z,” which has been identified with Paititi legends by some, and he disappeared, his fate a mystery fit perhaps for another episode. In the 1950s, Nazi propagandist Hans Ertl claimed to have discovered the ruins of the city. In 1970, an American journalist went in search of Paititi and like Fawcett before him, disappeared in the jungle. Since then, journalists, researchers, pseudohistorians and amateur explorers of every stripe have mounted expeditions for Paititi, many just as fodder for travel shows and bad history television. Likewise, there are even in the 21st century continued efforts to locate the mythical Lake Parime associated with El Dorado. These modern efforts more and more rely on aerial photography, satellite imagery, and radar topography technology. It is hard to imagine a greater anachronism than this, wasting state of the art technology in search of places we have long understood to be figments of European minds addled by gold fever.

Further Reading

Crampton, C. Gregory. “The Myth of El Dorado.” The Historian, vol. 13, no. 2, 1951, pp. 115–29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24436112. Accessed 24 July 2023.

Buker, George E. “The Search for the Seven Cities and Early American Exploration.” The Florida Historical Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 2, 1992, pp. 155–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30150358. Accessed 24 July 2023.

Hemming, John. The Search for El Dorado. E.P. Dutton, 1978.

Silver, John. “The Myth of El Dorado.” History Workshop, no. 34, 1992, pp. 1–15. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289179. Accessed 24 July 2023.

Vigil, Ralph H. “Spanish Exploration and the Great Plains in the Age of Discovery: Myth and Reality.” Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1, 1990, pp. 3–17. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23531150. Accessed 24 July 2023.

The Thrust of the Holy Lance of Longinus

The story of the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine I is a powerful tale marking the birth of the Holy Roman Empire. It is said that around 312 CE, only 6 years into his reign and at a time when his rule was threatened by civil war and rebellion, he had a dream. The night before he went into battle at the Milvian Bridge in Rome against Maxentius, the leader of those opposing his rule in the West, he dreamed that a fiery cross appeared in the midday sky, and in it were the words “in this sign, conquer.” It was this dream, which some have claimed was a waking vision, that led to Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Flying the sign of the cross on his banners and emblazoning it on his soldiers’ shields, he was victorious, and afterward, he Christianized the Roman Empire. It was a watershed event in Christian history. But how true was it? The sources of this story, court bishop Eusebius and court adviser Lactantius, could not even agree on what it was Constantine saw, a cross or the superimposed first two letters of Christ’s name, chi and rho, a sort of monogram. Moreover, the notion that it was a waking vision or even a kind of miraculous celestial event that may have been seen by others appears to be a later embellishment by Eusebius. Indeed, there swirl around Constantine many dubious legends related to Christianity, and perhaps the most questionable and yet most influential centers on his mother, Flavia Helena, now the canonized St. Helena, the simple daughter of an innkeeper who had become empress upon marrying Constantine’s father. According to legend, and again, the story is murky here, after her son’s conversion to Christianity, when she was nearly eighty years of age, she undertook an arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem. She went seeking the place of Christ’s crucifixion and was led to a temple dedicated to Jupiter that Roman emperor Hadrian had built atop the ruins of a former temple. This she tore down, and beneath the rubble, she is said to have discovered not only Jesus’ tomb, into which Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus deposited his remains, but also a treasure trove of crucifixion relics, most famously, the True Cross. It was after this alleged discovery that Constantine ordered the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which encompassed both the site believed to be Golgotha, where Christ was crucified, and the place said to be his tomb. Destroyed and rebuilt numerous times, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands today as one of the most important places in Christendom, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There are, of course, numerous reasons to look on this legend doubtfully. First, to get it out of the way, in the tomb, there is a limestone burial bed that is claimed to be where Christ’s body was laid out, but in 2017, scientists tested the quartz within the masonry of this limestone bed, and using optically stimulated luminescence, were able to determine that the bed was built circa 345 CE, that’s after the deaths of both Helena and Constantine, and a full decade after the church was first consecrated. But even without such scientific debunking, the tale itself is hard to believe. It is not only hard to credit the notion of an eighty-year-old woman overseeing the destruction and excavation of the site, especially when the stories make it sound like she was digging through the rubble with her own hands, but when we consider exactly what has been claimed was found there, it simply strains credulity. Through the years, every possible Crucifixion relic imaginable was claimed to have been discovered at that site by St. Helena: not just the True Cross, but all three crosses used on the day of the Crucifixion, the placard placed on Christ’s cross, the seamless tunic stripped from him before his torture, the crown of thorns placed on his head, the nails used to crucify him, and even the marble stairs that Jesus climbed to Pontius Pilate’s palace, and, unbelievably, as I have mentioned before in one of my Xmas specials, the remains of the Three Wise Men. All of this, remember, is said to have been uncovered beneath the rubble of a Roman pagan temple by an elderly empress. Clearly the tale was simply used in later pious frauds as a go-to, readymade provenance for fraudulent artifacts. And one cannot help but wonder, then, about the original discovery of the site, if it happened at all as is claimed. In some versions of the story, a guide led Helena to the site. Could this person have simply been putting one over on the old woman? Might he have perpetrated one of the earliest pious frauds by planting “relics” there for her to find? It’s impossible to know now, but we see in the story how religious belief breeds superstition, which further breeds myth and legend and fraud, and this is a perfect explanation of the further, expansive myths surrounding one of the most mysterious and famous relics said to have been discovered by St Helena: the Holy Lance, used by the Roman centurion Longinus to pierce the side of Christ on the Cross.

Although, as we will see, the story of the Holy Lance has been expanded in legend to extend much further back in time than its presumed origins at the crucifixion, the most accepted birth of this relic is at the death of Christ, on the day memorialized as Good Friday. The lance is actually mentioned in a canonical gospel, the Gospel of John, which states that Jesus was already dead when the Roman soldiers came to break his legs, a common practice in crucifixion called crurifragium, meant to hasten the deaths of the crucified by  preventing them from raising their chests to breathe, and thus also preventing those being crucified from being set free and escaping in the night. One of the soldiers is said to have thrust his lance into Christ’s side, and a mixture of blood and water issues from the wound. Many are the interpretations of the significance of this blood and water. Some find metaphorical and spiritual meaning in it, while others are rather more materialist, arguing that this little detail proves the veracity of the account because it demonstrates that Christ had already died from asphyxiation, that fluid had built up around his heart as circulation ceased, and the lance pierced his pericardial sac, releasing this fluid. But to the first century author of this gospel, the detail of the blood and water seems less important than the act of piercing him itself and the fact that Christ escaped having his legs broken. This is emphasized in John because it is said to represent a fulfillment of prophecy, as Psalm 34 verse 20 states “He keeps all their bones, not one of them will be broken.” Never mind the fact that this Psalm is describing how God rescues all the righteous from afflictions, rather than representing an explicit prophecy of the Messiah. This is somewhat common, though. For example, Matthew points out the drink of vinegar and gall offered to Christ, and more than one gospel features the detail that vinegar is given to him later, in a sponge on a stick lifted to his lips, and these details were important to the authors because it hearkens back to Psalm 69, a kind of prayer about delivery from one’s enemies, which mentions that the speaker is given gall to eat and vinegar to drink. Likewise, John indicates that the piercing by the lance connects Christ to other scriptures that mention one who is pierced and then looked upon. The gospel writers are clearly engaged in a process of religion-making here, scouring the Psalms and other verses in an effort to prove that Christ’s death fulfilled prophecy. Interestingly, though, it is only in the Gospel of John that this piercing with the lance is even related. Other gospels mention various conflicting miraculous signs upon Christ’s death, darkness at noon, the Temple curtain rent in half, or an earthquake that disinters the remains of saints from their tombs, and afterward mention that one Roman centurion watching Christ reacts to the sign by acknowledging that he was the son of God, or at least that he was innocent. In later retellings, this centurion who changes his mind about Christ is conflated with the soldier who pierced his side, but there is no real reason to believe the two characters are the same. The account of the piercing of Christ’s side with the lance is just another way that the Gospel of John is different from the other, Synoptic gospels, which as I’ve discussed in previous posts like The Beloved Disciple and the Authorship of John, appears to be a composite text composed some decades after the other gospels. Thus it is here, it seems, that the myth of the Holy Lance was invented, in an effort to further connect Christ to prophecy, by the unknown author or authors of the Gospel according to John.

Depiction of Helena finding the True Cross from an Italian manuscript circa 825

The centurion who wielded the lance would not receive a name until centuries later, in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, the same text that inspired much of the Grail legend that would be intertwined with that of the Holy Lance. This work, also called the Acts of Pilate, is a composite as well. Some of the oldest passages of it are believed to have been written to counteract or refute another 4th century work also called the Acts of Pilate, this one anti-Christian. The extent of the mention of the Holy Lance in this apocryphon is one line, which adds nothing to John’s account beyond the name of the soldier being “Longinus.” It has been suggested, though, that the etymology of the name proves it was entirely made up or the result of a misreading, as the name Longinus appears to just be a Latinization of the Greek word for lance, lonche. But once the figure had a name, there was no stopping the legend. Eventually, he became a full-fledged saint, and the full name of Gaius Cassius Longinus appeared out of nowhere. It may seem quite odd for a Roman soldier who stabbed Jesus to be canonized as a saint, but according to the Christian view of the account, Longinus’s act was one of mercy. It’s said that he knew Jesus’s followers needed to bury him before the Sabbath, and thus he needed to prove Christ was dead before the other soldiers broke his legs and left him for dead overnight. Thus Longinus pierced Christ in order to show he was dead and allow him to be buried according to Jewish custom, or according to some interpretations, he actually killed Christ with his thrust, putting him out of his misery and ensuring that prophecy would be fulfilled by making the breaking of his legs unnecessary. This certainly puts a positive spin on a seemingly callous act. According to the hagiography of Saint Longinus, we learn that he inherited the lance from his father, who had been given it by Julius Caesar himself, and that he had very poor eyesight but was miraculously healed and could see perfectly after the blood of Christ trickled down his lance and touched his hand. It is said that after this miracle, he left the service of Rome and devoted his life to his newfound Christian faith, either as a monk or as a wandering sage. According to one account he was tortured by the Roman governor of Caesarea and executed. Like the relics of Christ, and his own lance, there are numerous competing claims about what happened to his body, which as a saint would itself be a powerful relic. Pieces of his body have been claimed at different times to reside in Cappadocia, in Turkey; on Sardinia, an isle in the Mediterranean; in a castle in Prague, Czechoslovakia; and of course, in the Vatican. However, hagiographic writings, that is biographies of saints, are notorious for their fictionalizing of figures, even when, unlike Longinus, their actual existence seems more likely. But interestingly the hagiography, which was in such a large part responsible for the legend of the Holy Lance, completely contradicts the story of St. Helena, as it’s said, rather than interring it in Christ’s tomb with all the other Crucifixion relics, that Longinus kept his lance.

Just where the Holy Lance ended up, whether carried by Longinus himself or taken by others, is a question with many convoluted answers. Among the first rumors of its whereabouts are the accounts of 6th-century scholars and pilgrims to the Holy Land. Both Gregory of Tours and Cassiodorus claimed that the Holy Lance was in Jerusalem, though neither had been there and seen it for themselves. One anonymous pilgrim, called by historians the Piacenza Pilgrim after the city in Italy from which he hailed, claimed to have seen it around 570 CE in a church on Mount Zion.  And a Latin guidebook for Christian pilgrims of uncertain date also mentions its presence in Jerusalem. In the early 7th century, following the Persian sack of Jerusalem, one Greek chronicle relates that the tip of the lance was snapped off and carried to Constantinople.  In the late 7th century, Arculf, a Frankish pilgrim who was supposedly shipwrecked in Scotland on his return from the Holy Land and related the things he had seen there, claimed to have seen the Holy Lance, or what remained of it, in the “basilica of Constantine,” in other words, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. These may have been tall tales, or they may have been true accounts of people having witnessed early pious frauds circulating the region. Whatever the case, around the 8th century, the presence in Constantinople of the entire Holy Lance, along with the Crown of Thorns, was attested to by numerous pilgrims. Whether this was the broken tip of the lance previously said to have made its way there, now attached to a replica lance for exhibition, or whether the rest of the Lance that Arculf had seen was later taken to Constantinople as well to be reunited with the tip, as others claim, is entirely unclear. What we see, here, though, is the beginning of a process of multiplication, as Holy Lances begin appearing all over the place.

Image of Longinus the saint.

In the year 1098, the army of the First Crusade, on its way to seize Jerusalem from the Saracens, sacked the city of Antioch and found themselves in a terrible pickle. Arab and Turkish forces promptly besieged them, and they were running out of food. That was when one peasant knight from Provençal named Peter Bartholomew claimed that he had received a vision. An angel had visited him, he said, and revealed that the Holy Lance was buried beneath the cathedral of St. Peter right there in Antioch. The bishop who traveled with the army was skeptical. First, Bartholomew was a drunk and a rake, not the sort of man whom angels visit, and second, he most probably was aware of the claims that the Holy Lance resided in Constantinople. But Peter Bartholomew’s patron, Raymond, the Count of Toulouse, was intrigued. So they excavated beneath the cathedral while the armies of Islam waited outside the walls. At first, they found nothing and were about to give up, but then, rather suspiciously, Peter Bartholomew himself jumped into the hole and suddenly produced an iron spearhead. The discovery convinced their beleaguered forces that God was on their side, and a further vision proclaimed by Peter Bartholomew inspired the starving men to burst out from the walled city in a last-ditch attack, and miracle of miracles, they actually routed their enemies in a glorious triumph that they largely attributed to their discovery of the Holy Lance. Only afterward did doubts creep in, as men began pointing out that this was a spear, not a lance, and that the Holy Lance was actually in Byzantium. Some said they had actually seen it there. Peter Bartholomew insisted that his find must be the real deal, though. After all, it had shepherded them to an unlikely victory against those they considered infidels. In a gambit that seems to indicate he truly believed in the spear himself, Peter Bartholomew volunteered to undergo an ordeal by fire to prove his Lance was genuine. Logs were stacked and set on fire, and Peter, carrying the iron spear, walked through a narrow passage between them, passing through the fire that he seems to have been sure would not harm him so long as he carried the relic. Instead, he was horrifically burned when he emerged and perished from his injuries. This Lance was discredited by Peter’s death in the ordeal, though some tried to say maybe it wasn’t the Lance of Longinus but actually one of the Holy Nails. By then, though, this supposed relic had served its purpose by then, and already there were others being proclaimed elsewhere.

 Certainly the most famous of artifacts claimed to be the Lance of Longinus is the Hofburg Spear, or Holy Lance of Vienna. This weapon, which is typical of the Carolingian period, is a winged lance with a pointed, ovular hole chiseled out of the blade for the placement of an ornamental pin in the core of the weapon’s head. Interestingly, this artifact has a long history. Originally, it was actually said to be the lance of Saint Mauritius, the legendary 3rd-century leader of the martyred Theban Legion who resisted the Christian persecutions of Emperor Maximian. As an artifact associated with a saint, then, it was already a holy relic, but it was not considered a relic of the Crucifixion until the 10th century. The story connecting this relic to the crucifixion actually comes from one single account, by Luitprand of Cremona, as an addendum to his narrative of Otto the Great’s struggles against rebellious dukes. Interestingly, this first account, which discusses Otto’s veneration of the lance and how it ensured his victory in battle, claimed that it was important not because it was the Lance of Longinus, but because it had once belonged to Emperor Constantine. The connection to the crucifixion came with the claim that a nail from the crucifixion, supposedly retrieved from the Holy Land by St. Helena, was fastened to the lance, and this claim remains today, with the central pin within the blade asserted to be a Holy Nail. Luitprand is clear about custody of this lance strengthening claims to the throne. Thus this lance, which was already associated with Holy Roman Emperors before Luitprand mythologized it, became a symbol of legitimacy inextricably linked to sovereignty and divine right. Interestingly, it would not be until the 13th century that this lance, which had never previously been claimed to be the Lance of Longinus, came to be considered the Holy Lance—twice holy, really, in that it was claimed to be the Lance of Longinus with a Holy Nail attached! In the 11th century, a silver covering was placed over the blade by Henry IV, inscribed Nail of Our Lord, and demonstrating the evolution of its legend, in the 14th century, Charles IV replaced it with a golden covering that read “Lance and Nail of the Lord.” By that time, it was already being used officially as part of the coronation, cementing its further role as symbol of royal legitimacy. By the 15th-century, it was officially considered part of the Imperial Regalia, kept at Nuremberg. It would be moved from there to Vienna, Austria, when the French Revolutionary Army marched on Nuremberg in 1796, eventually coming into the possession of the Habsburg dynasty. The evolving claims about the Holy Lance of Vienna show that everyone wanted a Holy Lance of their own, to the point that they sought to mythologize their past in order to write themselves into the story of the Holy Lance.

A depiction of the discovery of the lance at Antioch.

While physical lances and spears were showing up and being mythologized on all sides of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages, a rather unique Holy Lance legend developed in England, inextricably linked with the legend of the Holy Grail. This began in France, however, in the work of Chretien de Troyes that I discussed so much in the previous post. In his story, Perceval, the young knight, as a guest of the Fisher King, sees a bleeding lance carried in the grail procession. It is certainly debatable whether de Troyes intended this image of a bleeding lance to represent the Holy Lance. As I stated in my last post, the image of blood running down the length of a lance certainly recalls the hagiographic legends of the Holy Lance, and how Christ’s redemptive blood ran down it and touched Longinus’s hand, thereby healing his poor eyesight. Moreover, as his patron Philip of Flanders was a crusader, he very well may have heard the story of the lance found at Antioch and wanted the fabled Holy Lance written into this chivalric romance. However, most grail romances—those of Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, for example—do not explicitly relate this bleeding lance to the Lance of Longinus. Even Robert de Boron, who incorporated the apocryphal tale of Joseph of Arimathea from the Gospel of Nicodemus into Grail lore, makes no mention whatsoever of Longinus or his lance. Instead, in de Troyes, the lance is discussed only as a powerful weapon, one so powerful that a single blow from it could destroy all of England. In von Eschenbach, it is the poisonous weapon that grievously wounded the Fisher King. Some scholars have therefore suggested that the image was rather meant to reference a fairy spear of Celtic legend, the Fiacail or Luin, which causes great destruction and is venomous. Or perhaps it was intended to represent the spear of the legendary King Cormac of Ireland, called the Crimall or the Bloody Spear. But just as with the Grail, in continuations and later works the sacred dimension of this lance is stressed, and it becomes the focus of Sir Gawain’s quest. If Chretien de Troyes did not intend this identification in the first place, if it was not suggested to him by his patron, it didn’t really matter, because such is the nature of the Holy Lance myth that it becomes identified with any lance or spear mentioned in history. Once the idea was dreamed up that Longinus and his lance accompanied Joseph of Arimathea to ancient Britain, any and all lances or spears prominent in ancient British lore could be said to have been the Holy Lance, even though there had never been any indication that they were the Holy Lance before the Grail Romances. So the spear wielded by legendary warrior queen Boudica, who led an uprising against the Roman Empire, is claimed to have been the Holy Lance, and even King Arthur’s mythical spear, the Rhongomyniad, can be said to have been the Holy Lance, all with no evidence or without even a shred of corroboration in folkloric traditions.

This same superimposing of medieval myth over ancient lore extended even further back, with some developments of the Holy Lance legend seeking to trace its existence prior to when it came into Longinus’s possession. These tales, again, find mention of a lance or spear and argue this too must have been the fabled Holy Lance. Thus the spear thrown by King Saul at the young David must too have been the Lance, and Joshua must have raised this very lance at the head of the army of Israelites as the walls of Jericho fell, and when the priest Phinehas brought an end to a plague visited on the Israelites for sexual intermingling by running an Israelite man and a Midianite woman through with a javelin while they were in the act, that also must have been the Holy Lance in his hand, the conspiracists will say. One alternative history even traces the origin of the lance to Tubal-Cain, a descendant of Cain and a metalsmith mentioned briefly in Genesis. According to this legend, Tubal-Cain saw a fire fall from heaven, and when he looked for where it had fallen, he found a strange metal. That’s right, this legend, attributed to “ancient” Masonic texts, claims that the Holy Lance was forged more than 3000 years before the Common Era from a meteorite, a magical weapon formed of extra-terrestrial metal. To corroborate this notion, some armchair etymologists have claimed that the name Cain means “spear,” and Tubal means “bringer,” making Tubal-Cain literally mean “bringer of the spear.” Here’s the thing. This legend certainly did originate from the alternative histories of Freemasonic ritual, as with their focus on crafting, they revere Tubal-Cain as a supposed originator of such arts. His name is even a secret password used by Masons to recognize each other. But as I’ve spoken about before, despite what Freemasons claim about their order, this fraternal organization began in the Middle Ages as a guild system providing lodgings for traveling stonemasons who plied their trade far from home, working on the construction of great castles and cathedrals. The mythical ideas about the order’s ancient origins did not emerge until the 18th century, when it became a different sort of organization, an old boy’s club composed of upper-crust “speculative” masons, rather than actual stonemasons, whom they would call “operative” masons. Stories like these about Tubal-Cain were just the result of a secret society romanticizing its past. And the etymology of Tubal-Cain is entirely wrong. Cain actually means “smith,” or “forger.” The idea that it meant “spear” may derive from the fact that spears were, of course, forged. And Tubal means “spice,” giving the sense that Tubal-Cain’s workmanship represented a seasoning or improvement of the art of smithing. All of it, then, much like the legend of Longinus, is just an embellishment of a single mention in the Bible of a person described only as “a forger of all instruments.”

Photo of the Hofburg Spear said to be the Holy Lance and claimed by Trevor Ravenscroft to be the object of Hitler’s obsession. Photo credit: Saibo (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Among the worst of the speculators and fabricators of the myth of the Holy Lance, and the person almost single-handedly responsible for the conspiracy theories surrounding it today, was Trevor Ravenscroft, author of The Spear of Destiny. Ravenscroft is among the worst offenders in speculating about ownership of the Holy Lance throughout history, claiming as if it were fact that the relic was carried into battle by 45 different emperors. I have spoken about Ravenscroft before, briefly, in part two of my series on Nazi Occultism. If you aren’t familiar with his book, it posits that Hitler saw the Holy Lance of Vienna at the Hofburg in his youth, researched it and discovered its power, and was inspired to seize power by the relic, which he eventually acquired through his annexation of Austria in 1938. I recently reread the book, and I honestly can’t understand how anyone takes it seriously. As I said before, he makes claims that biographers of Hitler have proven inaccurate, including claims about where he was and what his financial situation was at certain times, and the plot of his story contains too many coincidences to be credited. Like most conspiracists, he takes material out of context and presents material from unreliable sources as if they were fact, relying on quotes from Hitler’s school friend August Kubizek, whose credibility has been challenged by scholars, to portray Hitler as being obsessed with the Hof Museum and some research that he was undertaking in its library. In fact, after cashing in with his book on young Hitler, Kubizek admitted in a private letter to an archivist that Hitler was not so studious and never seemed much of a reader. More than this, though, Ravenscroft presents direct quotations from Hitler about his obsession with the Holy Lance that are not at first properly cited. Eventually it becomes clear that these quotations were supposedly told to Ravenscroft by a Grail researcher named Walter Stein. Much of the book depicts Ravenscroft’s conversations with Stein, and the central conceit of the book is that Stein would have written himself about all this first-hand knowledge he had of Hitler’s occult obsession with the Lance, if he had lived long enough.

In fact, none of the written work that Stein left behind indicates that he had any interest in the Holy Lance, beyond its connection to Grail lore, and there is no evidence that he ever met Hitler as the book claims. More than this, during a court case in which Ravenscroft sued a novelist for using his intellectual property in a work of fiction, Ravenscroft essentially admitted that he’d made the whole thing up, that he’d never even met Stein except through the faculties of a medium in a séance, and that all the unsupported historical claims he made in the book were dreamed up through transcendental meditation. In retrospect, this should have been obvious. In the very introduction of the book he describes a process of writing about history and discovering previously unknown truths about the past through a “transcendent faculty” or “clairvoyant vision” and only later seeking confirmation of findings through historical research. One would be hard pressed to describe a less reliable approach to historical research than this. The truth of the matter is that Hitler was interested in the Hofburg Spear, though all signs indicate that he was only interested in it as part of the regalia that represented imperial legitimacy. To acquire the regalia would be good fodder for his propaganda machine; that is all. Through his psychic research, Ravenscroft supposedly learned that General George Patton personally recovered the Spear of Destiny at the conclusion of World War II, and that possession of the Holy Lance is what thereafter transformed America into a global superpower. In fact, there’s no record of Patton ever handling the artifact himself—that too must have been glimpsed in a vision—and the U.S. promptly returned it, with the rest of the Imperial Regalia, to the Hofburg. It boggles the mind that anyone could read this book and think it presents accurate historical fact. And yet some do, and from this morass of conspiracy speculation have sprung further bonkers conspiracist claims, like those of Jim Keith, Jerry E. Smith, and George Piccard, claims of Hitler’s survival and phony decoy lances kept in secret Antarctic bases, and of course, flying saucers thrown in for good measure.

A photograph of the less-than-credible Trevor Ravenscroft. (Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.)

Today, the number of relics contending for the title of the Holy Lance has diminished. The broken tip of the lance once venerated in Constantinople was sold to the French Crown and enshrined in Paris, but during the French Revolution, it disappeared. The other, intact lance venerated at Constantinople was seized by the Turks and was later sent to Rome, but with the rival lance in Nuremberg, as well as another that had cropped up in Armenia, the Church has never made any official claim of its authenticity. It is kept with other relics beneath the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica, and it’s trotted out, along with other relics, during Lent, to be gawped at. The lance discovered buried at Antioch by Peter Bartholomew may have been lost when the army of Raymond, Count of Toulouse, was annihilated by Turks in the doomed Crusade of 1101, but interestingly, Raymond of Toulouse may have given the Antioch lance to the emperor when he returned to Byzantium. And that means that the lance given back to Rome may actually have been the lance found at Antioch. Ironically, in the 18th century, the Catholic Church declared the lance found at Antioch, possibly the very one that they display every year, to be a pious fraud. As for the Hofburg Spear, in 2003, scientific tests demonstrated that the body of the spear was no older than the 7th century, in one swift stroke cutting through decades of conspiracy theory BS. As for the pin in the center of the blade, claimed to be a Holy Nail, this could not be dated and is said to be at least consistent in size and shape with a Roman nail of the 1st century. But it must be remembered that even if this were proven to be a 1st century Roman nail, that doesn’t mean it is genuinely from the Crucifixion. There are nails all over the world that are claimed to be Holy Nails, far too many nails for them all to be genuine. The phenomenon of pious fraud leaves us unable to give credence to any of them.

*

Until next time, remember, there is a difference between popular books on history, and actual historical research. Sometimes you can tell by looking at the book flap and checking out the author’s bona fides, but on The Spear of Destiny, it claimed Ravenscroft “studied history under Dr. Walter Johannes Stein for twelve years,” which we now know to be a lie. You might also discern the quality of such a book by examining how it is categorized. The fact that Ravenscroft’s book is categorized under “occultism” is a pretty clear indication that it shouldn’t be read as if it were a reliable work of history.

Further Reading

Adelson, Howard L. “The Holy Lance and the Hereditary German Monarchy.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 48, no. 2, 1966, pp. 177–92. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3048362. Accessed 14 June 2023.
Barber, Richard. The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Brown, Arthur C. L. “The Bleeding Lance.” PMLA, vol. 25, no. 1, 1910, pp. 1–59. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/456810. Accessed 14 June 2023.

Callahan, Tim. “Holy Relics, Holy Places, Wholly Fiction.” Skeptic, 13 Sep. 2022, https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/holy-relics-holy-places-wholly-fiction/

Cavendish, Richard. “The Discovery of the Holy Lance.” History Today, vol. 48, no. 6, June 1998, www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/discovery-holy-lance.

Jarus, Owen. “’Tomb of Jesus’ Dates Back Nearly 1,700 Years.” 28 Nov. 2017, www.livescience.com/61043-tomb-of-jesus-excavated.html.

Nickell, Joe. Relics of the Christ. University of Kentucky Press, 2007.

Nitze, William A. “The Bleeding Lance and Philip of Flanders.” Speculum, vol. 21, no. 3, 1946, pp. 303–11. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2851373. Accessed 14 June 2023.

The Quest for the Truth of the Holy Grail

I have spoken in previous pieces, and recent posts, about British Israelism, the claim that the British are the direct descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a belief that relies a great deal on pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology and masks a decidedly racist worldview. Among the additional claims by British Israelists is the story that the prophet Jeremiah traveled, in the company of Egyptian royalty, to Ireland in the 6th century BCE, and with him he carried certain holy relics, the Ark of the Covenant and the Stone of Destiny, also known as Jacob’s Pillow. There are numerous competing traditions in Ireland and Britain about this Stone of Destiny, and as I’ve spoken about before, British Israelists desecrated the Hill of Tara, near the Irish contender for the Stone of Destiny, the Lia Fáil, in their efforts to uncover the resting place of the Ark. All of these claims linking Britain to stories from the Bible, featuring ancient visitors from the Near East carrying sacred and powerful relics, are dubious in the extreme, but interestingly, they are not alone. These arguments echo another story, popular in the Middle Ages, which has entered modern myth today and continues to be believed by some who see in it a hidden historical truth, despite the fact that it was introduced through the fanciful legends of the Arthurian literary tradition. There are those, too, who may claim that Arthurian legend was real, but most people accept this body of medieval romances as nothing but fantasy. How strange it is, then, that one motif and thread in the cycle of Arthurian tales, that of the quest for the Holy Grail, is viewed as real by some who even reject the stories in which it appeared. These believers will suggest that the poets who penned Arthurian romances must have incorporated pre-existing traditions about a real Christian relic, or that they were cryptically revealing some hidden truth regarding this artifact, which was far more real than the chivalric adventure stories in which it appeared. These believers, for the most part, contend that what can be trusted in the medieval romances, the kernel of truth at their heart, is that a certain vessel, used by Christ at the Last Supper, was thereafter used to collect his blood when he was crucified, making of Christ’s seemingly metaphorical dinnertime conversation about drinking his blood, the blood of the covenant, into something far more literal, and imbuing the vessel, which would come to be called a “grail,” with some divine power, or at least, significance. Afterward, Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple now venerated as a saint, took Christ’s body down from the cross and provided a tomb for his interment. And it is this figure, Joseph of Arimathea, who it is said took this Grail, along with the Holy Lance that pierced Christ’s side on the cross, and traveled with them to ancient Britain, where he became the first Christian Bishop of the British Isles and ensured that these relics would thereafter be protected. Thus it entered Arthurian legend, where the family of Joseph of Arimathea, known as the Grail Family, kept the relics through the ages, their lives supernaturally extended by the taking of the host, or sacrament, from the Grail. Though to many it may seem a silly question to ask, akin to asking what is the historical basis of the Lord of the Rings, the number of later traditions and works of fiction and pseudohistory and conspiracy theory that treat the Holy Grail as if it were real obliges me to determine what, if any, real basis the legend may have in reality.

As you have probably already figured out, if you’ve been reading my blog posts for the last few months, this is yet another of my explorations of the history and the legends that served as the basis of the Indiana Jones films. I’ve been really enjoying digging deeper into these topics and rewatching the films as I look forward to the release of the final, long-awaited film of the series, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. As a MacGuffin for an Indiana Jones film, the Holy Grail seems absolutely perfect. It serves as the Christian counterpart to the Ark of the Covenant, in that it was of divine origin, even containing within it the very power or essence of God, and was capable of performing miracles, by some readings of the source material. In fact, it has even been discussed, in my principal source, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief by Richard Barber, as a kind of Christian allegory for the Ark, with Joseph of Arimathea’s wanderings with it representative of the Israelites’ wanderings through the wilderness with the Ark. But more than that, since a MacGuffin is something quested after, the Holy Grail is one of the most famous MacGuffins of all. For Indy to quest after the Grail was for him to take part in a long literary tradition; far more even than the Ark of the Covenant, the idea of undertaking a quest to find or discover the true nature of the Holy Grail has always been a large part of the legend. The nature of what that search meant, however, has evolved with the story through the years. In the later Arthurian romances of Sir Thomas Malory, it became an important part of a solidifying national mythology.

Photo of the Grail and Grail Diary from the third Indian Jones, as displayed at The Hollywood Museum. Image credit: Courtney "Coco" Mault, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0)

In another regard, the Holy Grail again certainly seems to have been a perfect MacGuffin, since Nazis were genuinely interested in the legend of Percival, the Arthurian Knight tasked with Questing after the Grail. Just as Arthurian legend became very important to the construction of national identity in Britain, so too it slowly became embraced by Germans and reinvented as a text foundational to their own Teutonic racial identity. This began in the early 19th century, with German Romantics adapting Arthurian legends featuring the Grail, and reached its apogee with the creation of Richard Wagner’s mid-19th-century opera, Parzival. Adolf Hitler was a great admirer of Wagner’s operas and viewed them as an important touchstone for the heroic nationalist myth that he promoted in Nazi Germany, and as Wagner was himself an anti-Semite and racist, his work and the resurgent myths they focused on, including that of the Holy Grail, became a major element of Nazi identity. But it should be emphasized that the Nazis were never out searching for the Grail as if it were a real artifact. The Ahnenerbe, about whom I spoke a great deal in my series on Nazi occultism, was actually interested in scholarly evidence of an Aryan precursor race, and hunting down a Christian relic would not have served their purpose. The notion in Last Crusade that the Nazis were after the Grail actually derives from the claim that Hitler was obsessed with another relic of the Crucifixion that was featured in the same Arthurian legend as the Holy Grail: the Holy Lance. This item, also called the Lance of Longinus, had already been mythologized as a kind of supernatural MacGuffin that Hitler was seeking in the 1972 occult book The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft, which was undoubtedly an influence on the Indiana Jones films generally in that it portrayed Hitler as being obsessed with acquiring Jewish and Christian relics. Ravenscroft’s book is a work of pseudohistory, and like the Holy Lance, the legend of the Holy Grail too evolved in more modern times, to be embraced not only as a powerful symbol by Jungian psychoanalysts and New Age enthusiasts, but as a literal object or hidden secret by pseudohistorians and conspiracy theorists who see in its legend a kind of coded treasure hunt. I’ve explored this before, in my blog posts The Priory of Sion and the Quest for the Holy Grail and The Secret of Rennes-le-Château and Abbé Saunière’s Riches, but those were early pieces and narrow in focus. I’ll mention the subject matter of those blog posts again later, and it may be worth revisiting them after reading this. But for this post, the question is of the historicity of Grail Legend.

The very name of the third Indy film, the Last Crusade, seems to indicate some genuine historicity to the legend of the Grail, because unlike the Grail quests of Arthurian legend, the Crusades were real historical events. Indeed, some who have viewed the Indiana Jones film but lack further historical knowledge may mistakenly believe that the Crusades were about searching for the Holy Grail. That is not the case at all. The Crusades were a series of religious wars waged between Christendom and the Islamic world, starting in the 11th century, when the Byzantine Emperor asked the Pope for military aid against the Turks, and the Pope in response mustered the Christian nobility of Western Europe to march on the Holy Land and occupy Jerusalem for Christianity. In fact, the launching of the Third Crusade was, in some ways, undertaken to recover a supposed relic of the Crucifixion. The kings of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem had long held a fragment of wood supposed to be a piece of the True Cross, and their armies carried it with them into battle. When Saladin defeated crusader forces in 1187, that piece of the True Cross fell into Muslim hands, and many European preachers urged the launching of another crusade to recover it. It was exactly during this period, when the idea of the recovery of a relic of the Crucifixion was being used to encourage further crusades, that the first Arthurian romance featuring the Holy Grail was composed, in France, or more specifically Flanders, by a poet named Chrétien de Troyes. Here we find the only further potential connection between the Grail and the Crusades, in that the poet Chrétien de Troyes dedicated his works to his patron, Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders, who had participated in the failed Second Crusade. Thus it is entirely possible that Chrétien de Troyes introduced the element of a quest for a relic of the crucifixion animating the knights of his chivalric romance as a kind of propaganda for further crusades.

1933 German postage featuring the Parsifal and the Holy Grail.

In the Last Crusade, the legends of King Arthur are only mentioned in an offhand way, dismissed as fairytales, yet the Grail is presented as a historical object, which of course has misled many fans of the film who know little else about the legend besides what the film portrays, to believe it was a real object. The question of whether or not it was real, however, may be simply answered. The Holy Grail was a purely literary tradition. And it appears to have been invented by Chrétien de Troyes between 1181 and 1190. In his work, The Story of the Grail, also called Perceval, we are introduced to the young knight of Arthur’s Round Table, Perceval, who encounters a king out fishing on a river, the Fisher King, who invites Perceval to his castle. At the castle, Perceval witnesses a strange procession, which includes a man bearing a bleeding lance and a woman carrying a fine, expensive-looking “grail.” Perceval, who had been taught not to speak out of turn, says nothing, and later is admonished for not having asked about the grail and whom it “served.” Beyond this, as Chrétien de Troye’s work was unfinished, little more is said of the Grail and its history or nature, except that it contained a piece of sacramental bread that kept the Fisher King alive. Interestingly, most elements of the legend are not clearly established in the work. The grail is not identified as being a relic of the crucifixion or even being a sacred relic at all. In fact, by de Troyes’s description it was to be seen more as a “rich grail” than a holy one. The notion of its holiness was not really established until the “continuations” of de Troyes’s work, when a series of poets, some anonymous, attempted to further his work, or complete it, during the following 20 years. In the first of these, the author suddenly uses the full title, calling it the Holy Grail, as if this had already been established. However, scholars analyzing the language of these continuations have determined that they must have been written by French poets of the same region, who may even have served the same patron, raising the possibility that they knew something of de Troyes’s intentions and where he was headed with the story. There are some elements of de Troyes’s original work that do hint at the eventual direction the continuations and later derivative works would take. The grail is said to hold a special host wafer that extends the Fisher King’s life, thus clearly connecting it with the Christian ritual said to have first been established by Christ at the Last Supper. And indeed, the leading question, the secret of whom the Grail served, seems to have clearly been a setup for a later reveal that it had served Christ, in that it was used at the Last Supper. Lastly, de Troyes’s portrayal of the bleeding lance can only be interpreted as a depiction of the Holy Lance, which was typically described as having blood running down it. It seems pretty evident that de Troyes was indeed heading in the direction that later writers eventually took the story. But this has led some to suggest that he wasn’t actually inventing the story, that he was actually retelling an ancient tale. Chrétien de Troyes himself speaks of a source book that his patron gave him, but from the way he refers to it only vaguely, this seems to only be a literary device. Later scholars have suggested that Arthurian legends such as Percival’s were derived from ancient Celtic legends as seen in texts such as the Mabinogion, and the argument is convincing for some other Arthurian legends, but no clear connection can be discerned with the story of the Grail. Still, though, as we will see, there may have been some pre-existing tradition that inspired Chrétien de Troyes as well as those who continued his work.

Among the French poets who expanded on the work of Chrétien de Troyes, the man most responsible for the creation of the Holy Grail myth as we know it today was Robert de Boron, writing about a century later. It was de Boron who revealed the nature of the Grail as being a Crucifixion relic, and it was he who developed the supposed history behind it, telling of Joseph of Arimathea’s involvement and thereby giving the entire legend a biblical cast. But the actual biblical basis for this Christian dimension to the story may surprise some. In reality, there is no scriptural basis to the story whatsoever. The extent of the scriptural evidence is only the existence of Joseph of Arimathea. This figure does appear to have existed, based on his presence in multiple gospels as one of the men who takes Christ’s body down and prepares it for burial. The notion that Joseph of Arimathea may have been a member of the Sanhedrin appears to have derived from his association with Nicodemus, a Pharisee who is clearly stated to have been a member of that assembly of rabbis and who in the Gospel of John helps Joseph of Arimathea prepare the body. Interestingly, pretty much everything about Joseph of Arimathea from Robert de Boron’s work appears to have been cribbed not from the canonical scriptures, but from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which I have mentioned before in a few episodes. In that work, Joseph of Arimathea is arrested and imprisoned after placing Christ in his tomb, but when they open his cell to kill him, they find he has disappeared. When Joseph is eventually found, he says that Christ visited him in his cell and released him. What de Boron added was that Christ brought with him the chalice from which he drank during the Last Supper, which had earlier been used to collect his blood on the cross, and commanded Joseph to keep it safe, whereupon Joseph took it away to ancient Britain. Such a journey would of course have been extremely arduous and unlikely, and it’s unclear why Joseph would choose Britain of all places. But this may not have occurred to de Boron as being unbelievable in the 12th century. A hundred years after Chrétien de Troyes seems to have invented the Grail, and hinted about its secrets, Robert de Boron incorporated apocrypha to flesh out that secret. And he may also have been weaving in an older tradition that could possibly have inspired de Troyes himself, as in my principal source, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief, Richard Barber reveals that there existed an iconographic motif in artwork depicting the crucifixion that shows figures standing beside the cross and catching Christ’s spilled blood in a chalice. Some examples of this iconography predate the work of Chrétien de Troyes by nearly 300 years. This certainly seems to be the origin of Robert de Boron’s conception of the Holy Grail as both the chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper and the cup that caught his blood. There is a problem, however, with the idea that this iconography inspired Chretien de Troyes’ original invention of the Grail, though, as in its original form, it appears this thing called the “grail” was never meant to be a chalice or cup at all.

The Achievement of the Grail, a 19th-century tapestry depicting the end of Perceval’s quest after the Grail.

Many assume that the word “grail” means cup or chalice and always has, but that is not the case. The meaning and etymology of the word “grail,” or graal in the Old French as used by Chrétien de Troyes, is unclear. Some think that it derived from the Latin cratis, for woven basket, and that this evolved to mean other kinds of vessels and receptacles. Most however think that it derives from the Latin gradale, signifying some kind of dish or cup. Those in the cup camp see the Latin word as having derived from an earlier Greek word, krater, for a cup with two handles, but it may have derived from the Latin garalis, which was a dish that Romans used to serve fish. Indeed, all signs in the original Grail text by Chrétien de Troyes point to the word being used to refer to a shallow dish from which meat would be served in a sauce. At one point, when a hermit further teases Perceval with the secret of what the graal contained before revealing that it held the Eucharistic bread, he tells him that it did not have in it “a pike or lamprey or salmon,” which would be absurd things to place in a chalice. Its use in other vernacular texts in the south of France confirm this, and we even have the words of one Cistercian monk of Froidmont who in 1220 explicitly identifies the word grail with the Latin gradale and furthermore states that “[g]radalis or gradale in French means a broad dish, not very deep, in which precious meats in their juice are customarily served to the rich.” Thus, the Grail, if de Troyes originally meant it to be related to the Last Supper at all, can only be viewed as the platter from which Christ and his disciples were served. It appears only later to have been confused with, or combined with, the chalice often depicted in art as having caught Christ’s blood, which may actually be meant to depict a different cup altogether, not one that he drank from at the Last Supper, but one that the Roman soldiers used at Golgotha when offering Jesus a drink of vinegar and gall just before crucifying him.

Beyond this misreading of the source, which resulted in the invention of a holy chalice, there have been other misreadings, the most famous of which being that the Old French phrase san graal, or Holy Grail, was actually intended to be parsed with the “g” at the end of the first word, making sang raal, or sang réal, meaning “royal blood.” This was, of course, popularized by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh in their bestselling 1982 work of conspiracist pseudohistory, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which claimed that the Holy Grail really was a coded tradition referring to the progeny of Christ and Mary Magdelene, who had traveled to the south of France and founded the Merovingian dynasty. This refuted claim was afterward further propagated by Dan Brown in his blockbuster novel and film The Da Vinci Code. Again, check out my post The Priory of Sion and the Quest for the Holy Grail to read more about the flaws with their theories and how they were actually the victims of an elaborate hoax. Here it is more relevant to focus on the fact that they were not the first to misread the source material in this way. In the 15th century, an English contemporary of Thomas Malory, John Hardyng, was the first to misread the Grail texts in this way, and in his work, the secret of the Grail leads Galahad to undertake a crusade and set himself up as a king over the Saracens, to “achieve” royal blood, as it were. Nevertheless, Hardyng’s interpretation of the term, which has been expanded upon ad nauseum, was incorrect from the start. In the original Grail text, Chrétien de Troyes never even called it a “Holy Grail,” thus there was no such phrase to be parsed. The closest he came was when he says tant sainte chose est li graal, or “so holy is the grail,” likely because it held the Eucharistic host that prolonged the Fisher King’s life. But this phrase can in no way be parsed to fit the “royal blood” interpretation, unless de Troyes meant, despite many spelling errors, to nonsensically write, “so bloody is the royal.” And even if you accept the later continuations as canon and believe they were truly finishing the story de Troyes intended to write, the Grail is never associated with blood as the lance is. It holds a communion wafer. In the later extrapolations of Robert de Boron, certainly it is said to have caught Christ’s blood, but we have seen this story was an adaptation of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which also contains no mention of any vessel catching Christ’s blood.

Byzantine art depicting Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus taking Christ’s body from the cross.

Beyond these misreadings, however, there were also further reimaginings of the nature of the Grail throughout its numerous literary treatments. For example it was at one point viewed as a book, written in blood by Jesus himself, kind of the ultimate Gospel written by the man himself. This interpretation appears to have been invented as the framing story of a thirteenth century French poem called the “Grand St. Graal,” in which Christ is said to have appeared to a hermit in the 7th century and given him the book, which contained the history of the Holy Grail, and making it clear that holding the book itself conferred the same effect as holding the Grail. Another reinvented version of the Grail comes from 13th-century German knight and epic poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, who in his work Parzival reveals the Grail to be a stone. In fact, when this is revealed, it seems more like a revelation of what the Grail holds, the thing which extends life, not the host here but a stone which can prolong youth and extend life, which is called lapsit exillis. This description of it as a stone that confers long life would, of course, cause alchemists to view von Eschenbach’s work as yet another coded hint regarding the Philosopher’s Stone, and it does make sense for alchemists to equate the Grail with the object of their perennial quest, which may be used to create an elixir of life. Indeed, they read von Eschenbach, and they suggested, much like the san graal/sang real misreading, that he must have written it incorrectly, because lapsit exillis means nothing in Latin. They will say that he must have meant lapis, which means stone, and that perhaps he meant the “stone of elixir,” or maybe lapis exilii, the stone of exile, or lapis ex celis, the stone from heaven, or even lapsavit ex celis, meaning “it fell from heaven.” This last view of von Eschenbach’s Grail stone has even led some to identify it with the Black Stone of the Ka’aba, thought to be a meteorite, about which I spoke in depth in my last patron exclusive minisode. The simple and disappointing truth of the matter, though, is that Wolfram von Eschenbach was, by his own admission, illiterate, his poems taken down by dictation. Likely he just made up a Latin-sounding term with no deeper meaning and most probably got the idea that the Grail contained a precious stone from a misunderstanding of Chrétien de Troyes, who described the Grail as made “of fine, pure gold; and in it were set precious stones of many kinds.” The truth that should be emerging here is that no one, not even the earliest of the poets who wrote about it, had a clear conception of what the Holy Grail should be, and so they just made stuff up.

Nevertheless, these disparate notions of the Holy Grail did eventually cohere, and the myth became so widespread and such a part of the medieval zeitgeist that real physical chalices began to crop up and be claimed as the genuine article. One is the Sacro Catino, or Sacred Basin, held at Genoa Cathedral. Another is the Holy Chalice of Valencia, an agate bowl mounted in such a way as it can be used as a chalice, which is kept at Valencia Cathedral. It is worth noting that the provenance of both of these relics cannot be confirmed to precede the grail romances, thus making it quite apparent that they were claimed to be the Holy Grail only after the literary tradition had become popular. This has not kept them from receiving some official recognition by popes, though, they have refrained from officially recognizing the relics as the actual cup of Christ. And there is even a contender in New York City, at the Met! The very fact that there are competing relics that only appeared after the birth of the legend goes to show that they are all most likely cases of pious fraud. The term pious fraud is used to refer to deception, such as the counterfeiting of miracles, meant to increase faith, with the idea that the ends justify the means, but in this context, we refer to the phenomenon of churches claiming to have sacred relics in order to bolster attendance and encourage pilgrimage for the principal purpose of boosting their earnings. Indeed, it appears that a chalice said to have been used by Christ at the Last Supper, along with a lance said to be the Holy Lance, was being displayed and drawing pilgrims from the British Isles to Palestine as far back as the 7th century, another possible origin for the legends, but likely also another case of pious fraud. I’ve spoken about this phenomenon before, most recently when I pointed out the any church that had possession of the actual Ark of the Covenant likely would not have kept it a secret, and more specifically when exploring objects such as the Veil of Veronica, the Guadalupe Tilma, and the Turin Shroud.

The Holy Chalice of Valencia

The legend or myth of the Holy Grail survives today not only in Italian and Spanish Cathedrals, but in fiction, in novels and films and television, and it has maintained the interest of readers and  viewers because of the inventions of conspiracy speculators who have further mythologized the Holy Grail as a secret kept hidden by shadowy secret societies, and especially the Knights Templar. As we saw with the Ark of the Covenant, the Knights Templar, or the Order of Solomon’s Temple, were a Catholic military order organized to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land during the Crusades, and they became a wealthy financial institution as well, forming a kind of proto-multinational banking system. In 1307, the order was suppressed by King Philip IV of France, who was indebted to them and leveraged rumors that they worshipped the devil in order to wipe them out and seize their wealth. The Knights Templar certainly kept a hoard of valuable items in their treasury, all of which was seized by the French crown, and the notion that they had acquired some religiously significant relics from the Holy Land seems believable enough, but history tells us that the treasure seized by King Philip was in part composed of coin, but was predominately in the form of land. Any valuable items that they held were being stored for clients, who deposited them with the order for safekeeping, since the knights could better protect them. Again, they were essentially a banking organization. There is no evidence that they dug up the Temple Mount and carried the Ark of the Covenant to France, and there is even less reason to believe that they had a real Holy Grail in their possession. First of all, we have no reason to believe that the Holy Grail actually existed, and if we think of it only as the cup used at the Last Supper, or the cup of vinegar and gall served to Christ on Golgotha, or simply as whatever early pious fraud was being displayed in Palestine as such a cup back in the 7th century, we have no reason to think it was kept at the Temple Mount by Muslims before Crusaders sacked it, or that it had been buried there centuries earlier, as is the legend of the Ark. But more than this, the timeline simply does not make sense. The very beginning of the idea of the Holy Grail began in the 1180s, when Chretien de Troyes wrote his poem, and the first concrete sense of the Grail as holy relic would not arrive until the First Continuation of his poem years later. Whereas the Templars were founded around 1120. If the Templars were indeed founded in order to protect the Holy Grail, as the legend would eventually claim, why was there no sense of this in the original lore? In the first Grail romances, it is protected by the Grail Family of the Fisher King, and when Robert de Boron fleshed out the myth in his 13th century adaptation, he has Joseph of Arimathea taking it out of the Holy Land long before the Templars ever existed. Thus, if we are to believe the Templars discovered it in Palestine, then we cannot believe the rest of the background about its relevance to the crucifixion story.

In fact, the first explicit connection of the Templars to the Grail legend seems not to have arisen until a hundred years or so after they were stamped out in France, in John Hardyng’s Chronicle, as he claimed that, when the fictitious Galahad learned the Grail secret and set out on Crusade to “achieve royal blood” and set himself up as a King in the Holy Land, he founded an order of knights, the order of the royal blood, based on Arthur’s Round Table, and the Templars, he said, were thereafter founded and modeled after them, and the Hospitallers after them in the same fashion. It was a clear attempt to draw some parallel between Catholic military orders and Arthur’s knights, and it probably doesn’t need to be said that Galahad and his order of the Holy Grail never really existed. This first explicit link between the Templars and the Grail is tenuous at best. Most conspiracists who are looking for a stronger link go back to the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, he who imagined the Grail to be a magical stone, for in his work Parzival, he mentions that, while the Grail was entrusted to a certain dynasty, it was kept at a certain temple, rather than in a castle as the previous romances had depicted, and he uses a certain word, templeise or templeisen, for the keepers of the Grail. It has been argued that Eschenbach actually meant Templar, but there is little reason to believe this. The Templars were not well-known in Germany at the time von Eschenbach was writing, and according to his description, there were women among these templeisen who took care of the Grail, which seems to make it quite clear that it wasn’t a fraternal order of knights he was describing. And it must be remembered that Wolfram von Eschenbach was illiterate, or at least said himself that he could neither read nor write. So like his faux-Latin term for the Grail, lapsit exillis, it seems likely that his templeise was just another nonce word, a fictional name for a fictional group, and Templar conspiracists have since read into it, seeing what they want to see. And that is an apt explanation of all the Grail lore, from the authors of the Continuations who imagined a more sacred nature of the Grail, to Robert de Boron who connected it to the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, to Thomas Malory and John Hardyng who used Arthurian legend to reflect 15th-century English politics, and on from there, with, as we’ve discussed, ideas of German nationalism inspired by Wolfram von Eschenbach’s work and themes of spiritual and psychological significance found by New Agers and Jungian writers and conspiracy speculators assembling elaborate pseudohistories based on questionable readings of medieval poetry. In this way, the Quest for the Grail, as a quest for knowledge or understanding, is quite real, even if the secrets revealed at its conclusion may be, like the sources of the myth, more fantasy than fact.

*

Until next time, remember, it may seem silly that some have treated works of fiction like The Da Vinci Code as if they are reliable sources of accurate history, but we see that ancient works of fiction like the Grail romances have long been mistakenly treated like historical records, resulting today supposed non-fiction works of pseudohistory like The Spear of Destiny and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which inspire movies like the Indiana Jones films and novels like The Da Vinci Code. It’s all simply part of the mythologizing of our past, and you have to look past the adventure stories and deeper into history to see through it.

 Further Reading

Barber, Richard. The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Callahan, Tim. “Holy Relics, Holy Places, Wholly Fiction.” Skeptic, 13 Sep. 2022, https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/holy-relics-holy-places-wholly-fiction/

Goodrich, Norma Lorre. The Holy Grail. HarperCollins, 1992. https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780060922047/mode/2up

Nickell, Joe. Relics of the Christ. University of Kentucky Press, 2007.

The Hidden Ones: Sect of Assassins

In the Middle Ages, contact between Islamic cultures and Europe introduced many new things to the West.  Along with luxury goods that were acquired, so too new words were brought to Europe, words such as crimson, saffron, jasmine, taffeta, and musk. Comfortable new styles of silken garb were imported, as was the word for them, pyjamas. And new sweets were discovered, along with the word candy. Alongside such commodities, tales were also imported to the West through this commerce. One of the first Europeans to travel the Silk Road, that superhighway of commercial and cultural intercourse, was Marco Polo, an Italian merchant and also a spinner of fanciful tales. One tale he told was of a certain group of Muslims who followed a mysterious old man, whom he said had created a veritable paradise on earth, a bountiful garden into which he had channeled canals that carried not only flowing water, but wine, and milk, and honey. According to Polo, the Old Man of the Mountain commanded the absolute loyalty of his subjects, who truly believed that they resided in paradise on Earth. And when the Old Man wanted something done about an enemy of his, he plied some youthful follower with a drug that caused them to sleep, at which point he would take the youth out of his paradise. Upon waking, the youth believed he had been ejected from heaven and was told that in order to obtain reentry, he would have to do the Old Man’s bidding, to kill his enemy. Thus, Polo explained, the Old Man drugged and manipulated his disciples and transformed them into his personal legion of murderers. This tale illustrated the growing lore surrounding a distinct group of Muslims whom Europeans had encountered throughout the Crusades, when members of this Order began killing or attempting to kill European Crusaders at their Grandmaster’s command. Europeans quickly learned to fear their daggers, just as the Order’s other enemies in the region long had, and a black legend was developed. These were fanatics, it was said, who kept their secret conclaves in impregnable castles. They were deluded, it was believed, by a heretic cult leader and kept mad with intoxication on hashish. This was the origin of their name, the hashishin, it was claimed, and thus another word entered our lexicon, derived from this word: assassin, a noun, but soon a verb as well, assassinate, to murder suddenly, using subterfuge or surprise, for religious or political reasons. This Order of Assassins was no fairy tale, as some of Marco Polo’s stories were, and they had long been quite successful in destabilizing and defeating their enemies purely through assassination. Many were the military commanders, viziers, emirs, Imams who fell beneath their blades. Among the most famous of those was Conrad of Montferrat, the Crusader King of Jerusalem. It is difficult to always be certain whether an assassination was carried out by them or perhaps by others, and this was actually one of the benefits of their assassinations, that they destabilized by creating paranoia and confusion, but among the rumored and real assassination plots attributed to them were attempts on the lives of a Mongol Khan; multiple efforts to kill Saladin, the sultan who spearheaded the Counter-Crusade, and even a failed attempt on the life of Edward Longshanks, Hammer of the Scots and future King of England, during the Ninth Crusade, called Lord Edward’s Crusade. Real though the Assassins were, though, that does not mean they weren’t surrounded by myths and misconceptions.

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The reason I was drawn to discuss this topic directly after my post on the Thuggee should, I think, be quite obvious. It’s nothing to do with the era or the locale or the culture, as the strangler bandits of 18th and 19th century India have none of this in common with the 11th century Arab Muslim Order of Assassins active in Persia, Syria, and elsewhere for a few hundred years. Rather, I see a connection of theme. While the Thugs were not the organized, hierarchical religious cult that they were made out to be and the Assassins were followers of a specific creed who devoted themselves entirely to accomplishing the goals of their Imam, both were secretive brotherhoods among whom were members specially tasked with murder of a most intimate and gruesome sort. The names of both have entered the lexicon to represent those who commit similar crimes. And both became the storied boogeymen of European imaginations during the eras in which they were active. Indeed, it is the fact that Assassins have been so mythologized in fiction that they have become enshrouded in multiple layers of false history, much like Thuggee. The modern imagination has been quite drawn to the Order of Assassins, as they have appeared in numerous novels, by those of such vastly different talents as Umberto Eco and Dan Brown. They were the inspiration for the League of Assassins led by Batman’s nemesis Ra's al Ghul in DC comics, and they were the basis of the Faceless Men in George R. R. Martin’s unfinished A Song of Ice and Fire book series… that’s the assassin’s guild that little Arya Stark joins, as also depicted in the television series Game of Thrones. But the most in-depth treatment of the Order of Assassins in modern fiction, the reason it is so well-known today, and the source of the most creative fabrications about the group is the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise, from which I took the name of this episode. I’ll be the first to say I’ve enjoyed these games, and being a fan of historical fiction, I appreciate how they weave in real historical figures and events into their storylines. But if one were to confuse the story presented in these games as real history, one would believe that the Assassins were actually heroes fighting for freedom against the proto-Fascistic Knights Templar, and that actually both groups were, in fact, evolutions of even older secret societies going back to ancient Egypt, and that these groups were vying for control of ancient artifacts that contained the advanced technology of a long extinct species that was a pre-cursor to humanity. It’s a cool story, obviously science fiction/fantasy, not something to debunk but to enjoy. However, as it weaves in such myths as the existence of Atlantis and such mythical figures as Hermes Trismegistus, it might easily confuse someone as to what might be real, historically, and what false. But this question could have been asked about the Assassins long before the elaborate mythmaking of modern entertainment featuring them, as they were mythologized even from the beginning.

Marco Polo, mythologizer of the East.

A cursory understanding of the Muslim world and the conflicts within it must be achieved before anyone can really understand the origins of the Order of Assassins. I say cursory because this is a topic far too expansive and complicated to possibly do justice in one brief segment of one standalone podcast episode. So we will look, in admittedly broad strokes, at the background of the rise of the Assassins because we need the context. After all, the Black Legend of the Assassins propagated by Europeans purposely ignores the actual religious context of the sect and their beliefs. Before the Crusades, this could be explained by ignorance, but after the Crusades, when Europeans came to better understand the complex religious fabric of Islamic society, they then purposely ignored the distinctions between one sect or denomination and another, choosing to portray them all as godless infidels who worship an anti-Christ. This contributed greatly to the spread of myths about the Assassins, and we don’t want to be like Crusaders in this regard. We must first understand that the Prophet Muhammad unified the Arab world under the Islamic faith and also established a social and political order characterized by multiculturalism, religious freedom, and social justice, as represented in the Constitution of Medina. But we must further understand that, since his death, the Islamic world and faith had been long troubled by disunion and schism. Much of this had to do with disagreements over succession, as it was believed by many that the next ruler should be of Muhammad’s lineage, specifically his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, but instead the mantle of caliph passed to his father-in-law, Abu Bakr. This essentially political faction supporting Ali for the job, Shīʿatu ʿAlī, or “followers of Ali,” transformed through the years to become a doctrinal branch of Islam, Shīʿa or Shīʿism, the Shīʿite view being that Ali had been designated to succeed Muhammad as caliph and Imam, and that only those descended from Ali were divinely ordained to lead. Ali did eventually take up the role as leader, but this did not put an end to the internecine strife. A new Caliphate was established by the Umayyad clan in resistance to Ali’s sovereignty. The Umayyad Caliphate lasted about a hundred years before another revolution, led by the Shīʿite Abbasid clan toppled them and established a third Caliphate. Throughout these conflicts, the schism of Islam became more and more concrete, with Shīʿism on one side and Sunnism, a more orthodox camp who rejected the notion that Muhammad ever intended to establish a blood dynasty, on the other. But even within the Shīʿa branch of Islam, there was much diversity of belief and much disagreement, and it was from among these denominations that the Assassins would rise.

Many of the doctrinal disputes within Shīʿa Islam had to do, yet again, with the legitimacy of the succession of Imams. This was not only about Earthly power and legitimacy; it was about prophecy. During the Abbasid Caliphate, a number of secret religious societies appeared, and with them the notion of esoteric knowledge being present in the Quran. It was believed that the Islamic scriptures carried some secret, hidden messages, that only the true, divinely ordained Imam and his initiates could discern. Among the secrets of the Quran interpreted was the idea that there would only be twelve divinely ordained Imams, and the twelfth would be hidden away and mystically preserved, in Occultation, it is called, until such time as he returns, a messianic figure called the Mahdi, whose appearance will signal the end times. This remains the belief of Twelver Shīʿites to this day, and belief in the return of an Imam as the Mahdi has become a common feature of Shīʿa Islam generally. However, some other subsects have differed regarding the succession of Imams and the number of Imams. The second largest branch of Shīʿa Islam, after the Twelvers, believe that when the Imam Shīʿites recognized as the sixth true Imam died and passed the Imamate to the son recognized by Twelvers as the seventh Imam, it should have and indeed did actually pass to his eldest son, Isma'il ibn Jafar. The Isma’ili Shīʿa believe he was the true inheritor because of his great understanding of the hidden meaning of texts, and that he did not actually die, as was claimed, but rather was hidden away from the Abbasids. The fact that he was missing, presumed dead or in hiding, led some Isma’ili to believe that he was actually the last Imam, waiting in Occultation to return as the Mahdi, and they became known as the Seveners, as Isma’il was considered the seventh Imam. Whether proponents of Isma’il as simply the seventh Imam or as the last Imam and the coming Mahdi, Isma’ilism spread across the Islamic world through aggressive proselytizing. In the tenth century, an Arab dynasty called the Fatimids, who traced their lineage back to Ali and Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and were recognized as legitimate Imams by some Isma’ilis, began to wrest control of the Mediterranean coast of Africa and Western Asia from the Abbasids. The Fatimid Caliphate saw a further schism early in the 11th century, when upon the death of one Imam, the son whom he had publicly named as his successor, Nizar was thereafter prevented from succeeding to the Fatimid throne in Egypt as the next Caliph-Imam by a dictatorial coup. Thus the Nizari Isma’ilis were born. Nizar was later taken captive in battle against his usurper and executed, but one of his most devoted lieutenants, Hassan-i Sabbah, who had captured and made impregnable a castle called Alamut in the mountains of northern Persia, took Nizar’s son, whom the Nizari Isma’ili then considered the true Imam, under his protection and established a Persian Nizari Isma’ili state. Hassan-I Sabbah was the original Old Man of the Mountain who would enter legend centuries later, and his Nizari Isma’ili, a state with no army and many enemies, were the sect of Islam that would become known to the world as Assassins.

19th century engraving of Hassan-I Sabbah

The coup against Nizar in Egypt had been engineered by the commander of the armies there, and this has been seen as one of the principal reasons that Hassan-I Sabbah never gathered an army to the Nizari Isma’ili cause. Instead, he developed a three-pronged approach to war, the first being fortification. As Alamut Castle proved to be a safe refuge, he undertook to capture other castles and thereby expand his Imam’s territories without armed conflict. This he managed through the second prong of his approach, infiltration. There are numerous stories of the way that Hassan-I Sabbah captured Alamut. One is that he converted the owner to his creed, and another that he simply snuck so many of his men in that, slowly but surely and unnoticed by its current occupants, he was taking possession right under their noses. Such stories are impossible to credit with any certainty, but considering the kinds of stealth and subterfuge he would go on to utilize, such tactics must have been among his favorites. And his final approach to war was tactical murder, or what would be called today assassination. Hassan-I Sabbah did indeed train killers and send them out with daggers, directing them to use guile and disguise to get close enough to their targets to end their lives. And these agents did indeed expect to die in the completion of their tasks, and were indeed promised rewards in paradise upon their deaths. The policy itself, of effecting political and social change through strategic killings, can be seen to have evolved rather organically out of Islamic teachings and recent history. Passages in the Quran were long interpreted as approving of regicide in extreme cases, when leaders were wicked. And Hassan-I Sabbah was not the inventor of political murder. Indeed, of the first four Caliphs after Muhammad, the Rashidun Caliphs, three of them, including Ali, were assassinated. Hassan-I Sabbah was just the first to place such importance on assassination as opposed to field warfare, to strike terror into enemies who would gladly risk their lives in battle but feared an ignoble death in their homes. Hassan-I Sabbah did not invent assassination, but he perfected it.

Since I use the word terror to describe the effect that Hassan-I Sabbah’s tactics had on his enemies, I should address a certain analogy that has been made in modern times, likening his Order of Assassins to terrorists. The Assassins of Nizari Isma’ilism have not only been likened to Islamic terrorists, but also terrorists of the IRA, or Kamikaze bombers. Like the IRA, the Assassins relied on a constant threat of sudden violence to intimidate, and like the kamikaze, Assassins were fully expected and in fact intended to die in completion of their missions. But of course, the comparison to modern-day Islamic terrorists is the most obvious, being that they share cultural and religious backgrounds. There are other commonalities as well, in that, like the Assassins, suicide bombers intend to sacrifice their lives to get close enough to their enemy that they might inflict harm, again to intimidate and terrorize. Like the Assassins, they rely on this approach to warfare against militarily superior enemies, and they believe they will be rewarded in paradise for their acts of violence against those they see as the enemies of their faith. Like I said, the similarities seem obvious, even apt, but on closer consideration, the Nizari Isma’ili Assassins are far different, in both motivation and practice. First, as we have said, their choice to rely on assassination was part of a conscious refusal to gather armies and engage in traditional warfare, not resorted to because of military inferiority. And second, the Assassins used assassination out of a kind of chivalry that was borne out of Arabian culture. Even long before the rise of Islam, single combat was preferred to the destruction of war. “Pure” warfare, in the Arabian sense, avoided any unnecessary loss of life, and strictly prohibited the killing of women and children or the elderly. The Assassins were never known to target such vulnerable or innocent people, and in avoiding actual battlefield engagements, the Assassins were returning to the Arabian roots of pure warfare, eliminating leaders in a kind of forced single combat and thus saving the lives of the rank and file. This character of the Assassins’ tactics cannot be further from the reality of Islamic terrorism, which is all too accepting of collateral damage.

16th century depiction of the capture of the Assassin fortress of Alamut

One of the principal misunderstandings about the Assassins deriving from the myths surrounding them has to do with the group’s name. There was for a very long time a robust debate about the etymology of the word “assassin,” with numerous theories put forth to explain where the word came from. The word entered European languages via the Latin, assasinus, but it was long unclear where it had come from before that. One theory is that it was a corruption of the Arabic word for the weapon that Assassins chose as their sole means of killing, sikkin, or dagger. Another theory was that it was an application of the Arabic word for a night watch, asas. Others said it came from the ancient Persian word shahanshah, meaning “king of kings” in reference to their leader. Perhaps the most convincing is that the term was derived from the name of their first leader, Hassan-I Sabbah, such that the word is a corruption of the Persian hasaniyyun, or “followers of Hasan.” However, the truth of the matter was not figured out until the 18th century, by Baron Silvestre de Sacy, who in his study of Isma’ilis determined that the term was derived from the name of the drug they were said to use: hashish. Thus they were called the Hashishiyyun, or hashashun, literally “hashish-eater,” and the word simply evolved from there as it was taken into other languages. The fact of this etymology has done much to perpetuate the myth of the Nizari Ismai’ili Assassins as drugged stooges, as portrayed by Marco Polo and others. In fact, the use of hashish and other powerful narcotics, like opium, was widespread in Islamic society throughout the Middle Ages. But the truth is that this was a total misnomer. Crusaders and other Europeans heard the term being used not by the Nizari Isma’ili to describe themselves, but by the enemies of the Nizari Isma’ili. They read the term in anti-Isma’ili polemics written by Sunnis who despised the Nizari Isma’ili, not only for their success in converting Muslims to their creed, but also because they lumped all Isma’ili in together, whether Nizari or Sevener. Indeed there was one particularly militant subsect of Sevener Isma’ili, completely distinct from Hassan-I Sabbah’s Nizaris, called the Qarmatians, who in 930 CE sacked both Medina and Mecca, and who were hated for desecrating some holy sites and artifacts. Specifically, they are said to have dumped corpses into the Zamzam Well, which was said to have miraculously produced water during the time of Abraham, and they stole and held for ransom the Black Stone, a relic, thought to be a meteorite, that is said to have fallen from heaven to mark the place where Adam and Eve should build the first earthly temple. So Sunni writers generalized all Isma’ili as heretics bent on destroying Islam, and they used the term Hashishiyyun not literally, but rather to indicate that they were men of low social status and weak moral character. So we find that the word “assassin,” as a name for this sect, had nothing to do with the drugs and everything to do with an ad hominem attack on the sect. In fact, among the Nizari Isma’ili, only a select few were ever tasked with committing assassinations, and they called themselves fidai, meaning “devotee.”

So we see that the Black Legend of the Assassins was nothing but mythmaking all along. Even if we were to reject the evidence that Sunni polemics called Nizari Isma’ili “hashish-eaters” only metaphorically, logic tells us that any such accusation must have been a lie. The Nizari Isma’ili were highly disciplined and sober. The clearest evidence of their strict sobriety is that Hasan-I Sabbah is known to have actually executed his own son for drinking wine! Moreover, the fidai tasked with assassinations could not have been drugged-out pawns. Their role required a great deal of education, learning several languages so that they could infiltrate different cultural communities. And they had to be quick-witted, resourceful, and adaptable in order to get close to their targets. Indeed, there were some cases in which fidai insinuated themselves into the inner circle of their targets and posed as their closest advisors and friends for long periods of time before suddenly producing a dagger and revealing themselves to have been assassins all along. It is simply not credible that they were also abusing hashish the whole time. Some may hear hashish and think, “That’s not so powerful or harmful of a narcotic. It’s just cannabis.” But smoking a little hash today is quite different that eating hash back then. There is a 19th-century book called the Hasheesh Eater by Fitz High Ludlow in which he described his hallucinatory trips, ingesting higher and higher quantities of the drug, until, as he described it: “time [and] space expanded… The whole atmosphere seemed ductile, and spun endlessly out into great spaces surrounding me on every side.” All this to say, hashish eating would cause one to have an intense psychedelic trip, one that would certainly prevent anyone from competently disguising themselves and convincingly posing as someone else in order to get near a heavily guarded target. Like opium eating, it was more likely to cause someone to lie down than to leap into action. Anyone who has ever taken too many edibles knows exactly what I mean. So in the end we owe the legend of the Assassins to the ignorance of the Crusaders. The myth repeated by Marco Polo, of the Old Man of the Mountain and his earthly Paradise, reentry into which was promised in exchange for committing assassinations, would have been seen as obvious fiction if anyone spreading it had actually visited Alamut castle, the headquarters of the sect, which was no paradise flowing with milk and honey. And other such myths, such as that the Assassins were chosen as children, kept in isolation and manipulated their whole life, or that they would gladly leap to their deaths for no reason other than the simple command of the Old Man of the Mountain, could also have been easily dismissed if any European studying them had relied on written records other than those composed by the enemies of the Nizari Isma’ili. The problem was, the Nizari did not leave their own records behind. In 1256 CE, the Mongols massacred them, razing their castles, and burning their libraries. As a result, the Black Legend that their enemies had created about them would be accepted as truth for 700 years. And even today, with a new Assassin’s Creed video game releasing later this summer, the Assassins—if we want to still call them by that term, which they would have found offensive—live on in memory only through fantasy. 

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Until next time, think about this: they say that history is written by the victors, but rather, I’ve found that it’s actually myth that they leave behind, and historians are able to set the record straight.

Further Reading

Daftary, Farhad. The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma’ilis. I.B. Taurus & Co., 2001.

Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Secret Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizârî Ismâî'lîs Against the Islamic World. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Waterson, James. The Ismaili Assassins: A History of Medieval Murder. Frontline Books, 2008.

The Myth of the Thuggee Cult

In American culture, the meaning of the term “thug” varies depending on your background and the cultural context. By its modern dictionary definition, the word refers to violent criminals, or some kind of vicious ruffian, but among many who identify with urban street life and Black hip-hop culture, the term has taken on a different meaning, reflecting the idea that systemic racism creates gang culture. This use of the term was championed by rapper Tupac Shakur, who touted a “Thug Life” as a kind of determined response to the setbacks and obstacles that the disadvantaged face. For Tupac, “Thug” was an acronym deriving from “The Hate U Give,” referring to the idea that so-called thugs are created by hate and inequality, and that their very existence is an inspiring show of resilience in the face of great adversity. Interestingly, the word “Thug” entered the English language from Hindi, where likewise it referred to a subculture of violent criminals viewed as a savage threat by English colonizers but viewed quite differently in many Indian villages. The Thug, those who perpetrated a class of crime called Thuggee, would become legendary, not just in India where, during the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, their crimes were perpetrated, but across the Western world, where the word Thug could hardly be spoken without a shudder. The crimes of the Thuggee became well-known after English authorities in India undertook the task of wiping them out, when the world learned that they were not just bands of highway robbers, but actually a murderous sect that put to death every person they robbed, leaving none behind to witness against them, not even women or children. More than just ragtag gangs of bandits, they were an organized conspiracy that acted as one, it was said, controlled by some central authority. And not just thieves with a bloodlust, they were a cult, it was claimed, devoted to Kali, the goddess of destruction. It was explained that they strangled all their victims so as not to spill their blood but would afterward mutilate their corpses in their evil sacrificial rituals. On the lawless roads of India, it was said that Thuggee claimed the lives of 40,000 innocent travelers every year, until the 1830s, when British authorities began to stamp them out. But even after their suppression, the Thugs of India would loom large over European and American imaginations. They became the fabled villains of many  a work of fiction, and their name entered the lexicon, such that even today we talk about “thuggery” as a class of criminal behavior. And just as today hip-hop culture suggests that thugs are misunderstood or misrepresented, so too revisionist historians have looked skeptically back on the idea of Thuggee in India and suggested that it may have been a colonial construction, an exaggeration or misrepresentation exploited by colonizers to seize greater control of India. This revisionist view even goes so far as to suggest, in some arguments, that Thugs did not really exist, that Thuggee was only ever a lie promoted by the British.

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I am once again exploring a topic from the Indiana Jones film franchise in my quest to immerse myself in the real history and folklore behind the films ahead of what is likely the last film in the series this summer. When it comes to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the sequel to the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is actually a prequel, the macguffin itself, the Sankara Stones, are rather light on actual historical background, and at first I didn’t think I would make a full episode having to do with Temple of Doom, beyond perhaps a patron exclusive minisode. But that was before I started looking into depictions of India and Indian culture in the film. I was inspired to take a second look at the film because my wife, who is Indian by way of Fiji, has spoken more than once about how this film, which incidentally she loves, caused her some grief growing up in California because of its totally incorrect depiction of Indian culture. Specifically, she says that other kids would ask her if, because she is Indian, she eats monkey brains. This of course refers to the famous dinner scene in which Indy and his companions are disgusted by a dinner of live snakes and beetles, soup floating with eyeballs, and chilled monkey brains eaten directly out of the skull for dessert. Obviously the scene serves only as comic relief in the film, but a 2001 study conducted by the University of Texas does indicate that, as my wife experienced, a majority of Americans believed it to be an accurate portrayal of Indian cuisine. In fact, there is no historical evidence of such foods being eaten in India. Nor was my wife the only Indian to be troubled by this depiction, as the film was initially banned in India because of its misrepresentation of Indian culture, specifically because of the dinner scene. But as I looked further into the cultural representation in the film, a much larger problem revealed itself: that of the Thuggee cultists who served as the film’s villains. As indicated, there is historical debate over the very existence of such a group. I struggled a bit to access the research materials I needed to make this episode, but I was helped out by friend of the show Mike Dash, whose work on such topics as the missing lighthouse keepers of Eilean Mor, the Devil’s Footprints, and Spring-Heeled Jack I have relied on before, and whom I interviewed for the podcast some years ago. Mike Dash wrote an exhaustively researched book on this topic, Thug: the True Story of India’s Murderous Cult, and when I couldn’t get a copy in time, he generously sent me the galleys of the book. I really recommend listeners interested in this topic check it out for themselves. It is a fascinating read, and that is why it’s somewhat unsurprising that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas chose to feature the Thugs of India as the bogeymen of Indy’s second outing: they are and have long been a fascinating and terror-inducing group. Ever since the early 19th-century novel about them, Confessions of a Thug, appeared in 1839, they became a mainstay villain of literature. They appeared in the popular French novel, The Wandering Jew, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, even featured them in a story. Most notably, a series of swashbuckling stories by Italian novelist Emilio Salgari cemented them as apt villains for an adventure tale. Into the 20th century, they continued to crop up in novels and were featured in numerous films, including the 1939 adventure film Gunga Din, in which characters discovered that the Thugee cult was still active even long after its supposed suppression. It is this film that appears to have inspired their use as villains in Temple of Doom, but really, if the filmmakers were looking for a villain in India as iconic as the Nazis in Europe, then Thugs were the obvious choice. But to what degree were the filmmakers, knowingly or unknowingly, perpetuating a historical myth?

The poster for Gunga Din

First, we must understand the context in which a Thuggee cult supposedly operated, which means a few words about India and the establishment of British imperial interests there. Before the rise of British power in India, the last great dynasty was that of the Mughals, Muslim rulers who built an empire of such wealth and grandeur that it grew to be too much for lesser rulers to handle. The last of the great Mughal emperors was Aurangzeb, and after his passing in 1707, the Mughal Empire disintegrated into a patchwork of rival princedoms, with the governors of rich provinces ruling as independent monarchs, paying only lip service to later Mughal emperors. This chaotic state of affairs was further complicated by the conquests of bellicose Hindu tribes from Central India called Marathas who began seizing territories for themselves. At this time, the merchants of the British East India Company, who had established themselves over the preceding centuries as buyers of spices and other goods and had establishecd a network of warehouses and forts across India, began to view all these recent civil wars as bad for business. With muskets and artillery at their command, they realized they could subdue the subcontinent and improve their bottom line, which they set about doing, taking possession of city after city and establishing themselves as an imperial power. In 1784, parliament passed the India Act, placing company directors under government supervision, and thereby nationalizing the entire colonial venture. Thus the British came to rule numerous cities and regions of India, collecting taxes and charging exorbitant rents of area villagers and essentially monetizing the populace. It was in one such town in northern India, Etawah, about 300 kilometers southeast of Delhi, that the British first caught wind of the dreaded Thug menace. Thomas Perry, a British Magistrate struggling to bring order to the lawless area, began to receive reports of corpses being discovered in wells and roadside pits. It was a mystery that he seemed unable to solve. He knew that there were highway robbers in the area, as there were on the roads throughout India, but this was unprecedented. These murderers seemed to be mutilating and hiding corpses, and leaving no one alive, for no witnesses could ever be found, and the bodies themselves, assumed to be those of travelers, could not be identified locally. The horrifying conclusion was that some band of prolific killers resided nearby, or even among them.

Perry and other British, as well as the Indian people they had essentially conquered, were perfectly familiar with the threat of banditry. As Mike Dash points out in his book, some of the earliest of Indian texts, such as the Sanskrit hymns the Vedas, which are some 3000 years old at least, portray a certain Hindu deity, Rudra, as the lord of all highway robbers. And in one of the first accounts written by a foreign visitor to India, that of the 7th-century Buddhist monk Xuanzang, we see a traveler nearly being killed by pirates who haunt the rivers. British merchants reported in the 1600s that they could not travel with their goods on the roads without a large contingent of armed men because the country was “so full of outlaws and thieves that a man cannot stir out of doors without great forces.” The kinds of highwaymen that they were accustomed to, however, did not murder entire parties and hide the bodies like this. There were, though, organized bands of thieves who would not shrink from murder called dacoits. These gangs of robbers typically attacked their victims in town, however. They would target a rich man and fall upon his house without warning, invading his home and terrorizing all the residents and servants within. Indeed, dacoits were active in the area around Etawah, and an increase in banditry could be blamed on the British themselves. There was a region nearby, the Chambal, a maze of ravines that was difficult to navigate unless you were native to the area, and the men of the Chambal had long worked as soldiers for hire because the land of the Chambal did not support much agriculture. With the coming of East India Company, though, who refused to hire them as mercenary soldiers, they had little choice but to turn to highway robbery and to join dacoit gangs to support their families. But like most highwaymen, these dacoits did not typically set out to murder. They used fear, and when they were forced to attack those who did not cooperate with their robbery, they aimed to injure rather than kill. Indeed, dacoity was considered an honest profession by many, as dacoits served as a kind of informal militia for some villages, and they tended to rob the rich and share with the poor. As Thomas Perry looked into the murders occurring in his territory, he was quite certain that they were not being committed by run-of-the-mill highwaymen or dacoit gangs. And eventually, he confirmed this conviction when some of the murderers were arrested and confessed, identifying themselves not as dacoits but as Thugs. 

A family of dacoits

Through Perry’s investigation and the confession of captured Thugs, as well as through the numerous East India Company records of later prosecutions, we can know a great deal about the practices of the Thugs. Unlike dacoits or other highway robbers, they worked in absolute secrecy. As already established, they left no one alive to witness against them, but they did not fall on their prey like a raiding party. Rather, they insinuated themselves, just a few at a time, into the travelling parties they targeted, convincing their marks that they were friendly and trustworthy fellow travelers and that it would be best for them to travel together to reduce the chances of highway robbery. This is one part of the horrific practices of the Thug, that they befriended and traveled with their victims, sometimes for days and weeks, always intending to murder them all when they could steer them toward an out-of-the-way location, at which time the rest of their band, which might be trailing behind on the road or even riding in advance, would converge to share the spoils. First, however, came their other horrible practice, the murder itself. Thuggee bands distinguished themselves again from other bandits in the methods of their violence, which were equally as intimate as their inveigling of targets: they strangled their victims to death. There were men among them whose specific job it was to do the strangling, cold-blooded killers who sometimes used nooses or special garrotes, but as these could easily identify a strangler, most instead began using scarves with a knot tied in it that could be used to mercilessly tighten it around a victims throat with a twist. Some wrapped a coin in their scarves that proved effective at crushing windpipes. These stranglers were callous executioners, murdering entire retinues and convoys full of people, whole families, men, women, and children, though sometimes a child would be kept alive and raised to become a Thug themselves. Strangely, they did not shrink from stabbing and cutting open their victims before burying them, but they only did this after they had strangled them to death, and this practice would be the cause of some myths about Thuggee, as will be seen. But the Thuggee were already, even among themselves, it seems, surrounded by myth. It became clear during the earliest investigations that Thuggee gangs had been operating beneath the nose of the East India Company for many years without their even being aware of the group’s existence. According to the oral traditions of the Thugs themselves, given under interrogation in later campaigns against them when many turned King’s evidence against their fellows, Thuggee tribes had existed since great antiquity, all the way back to the time of Alexander the Great, and they claimed to be descended from Muslim families of a high caste. However, the word “thug” does not appear to have been used to refer to murderers before the 1600s, and other traditions trace Thug tribes to 16th-century Delhi, when a clan was exiled by the Mughal Emperor for killing one of his slaves. Other ideas were that the practice of Thuggee started among destitute Mughal army soldiers, or among poor herdsmen driving cattle on the roads. In short, Thugs did not themselves agree on the origin of their way of life, but some of their boasts about their ancient heritage, and some of the consistent practices among even distant bands, such as their secret communication by coded phrases and signs, and their very particular murder rituals, fed into later claims that they were an ancient secret society, a murderous cult operating as one, its crimes coordinated by some sinister overseer.

The first of the campaigns against Thuggee gangs began in the Chambal ravine country, as British forces commanded by Magistrate Perry’s assistant followed some leads to that area, where they ended up being first poisoned by local villagers and then ambushed by Thugs in the ravines. Concerned about an all-out rebellion against their government, the British returned with artillery and leveled the Thug stronghold in the area. For several years, then, the British approach to Thugs was just to pursue them if they plied their grisly trade too close to British-controlled towns and cities. This seemed amenable to Thugs, who were travelers by nature and simply began murdering farther afield, on roads where it was safe to operate without rousing the ire of the British. However, the view of the threat they posed changed over the next several years as British citizens more and more became the victims of these highway killers, and as Thugs chose to target many soldiers-for-hire who had sold their service to the British, not so much because of who they served as because they were a perfect target when they took their leave and traveled home with all their back pay on their person. And when the Thugs began robbing the treasure parties of powerful Indian bankers, all tides finally turned against them. British Company men began pursuing and trying Thugs regardless of where they were operating, and one officer, William Sleeman, an ambitious man, saw in the hunt for Thugs the cause of a lifetime. He felt strongly about the evil of Thuggee and believed wiping them out entirely would be a boon to the Indian people, but he also saw that he could make a name for himself doing it and earn a comfortable political position. He threw himself into the campaign with religious fervor, greatly relying on a tactic he had seen was working elsewhere, that of turning captured Thugs into informers, or what were called “approvers.” This was somewhat necessary, since by the very nature of their crimes, Thugs did not leave witnesses alive. By promising that Thugs who turned King’s evidence could keep their lives, he found many eager to cooperate in identifying other Thugs. As he developed his tactics in 1829 and 1830, Sleeman jailed hundreds of alleged Thugs, but his suppression of Thuggee did not kick into high gear until he pursued and captured an influential young Thug leader named Feringeea, who had been raised a Thug and knew everything about how they worked. With Feringeea as his principal approver, Sleeman was able to identify and arrest more than 700 Thugs in 1831 and 1832, and more than that, Feringeea was able to predict the movements of Thug gangs like no other informant before him. By the mid-1830s, with Feringeea’s help, Sleeman had produced charts marking known Thug routes as well as their favorite places to dump bodies. And more than that, he had mapped the homes of all identified Thugs and, believing based on the confessions of Feringeea and other approvers that Thuggee was a hereditary profession, he compiled genealogies in order to identify and arrest Thugs simply for familial association. We begin to see here the potential for egregious miscarriages of justice.

An 1857 drawing in the Illustrated London News depicting Thugs and other classes of Indian criminals

It is easy to take the side of the British in this story, as on the surface, they are pursuing and bringing to justice bands of brutal murderers. But of course, we should also look at the entire imperial presence of the British in India as morally and philosophically wrong, and thus any law enforcement campaign of theirs, administered as it was on their unwilling subjects, as being inherently unethical. And that is the lure of historical revisionist views of the Thuggee, some of which deny Thuggee’s existence altogether and see it as a kind of witch hunt used as an excuse by the British to brutally crack down on those they had imperially dominated. From a postcolonial view, it is a tempting position to take, and it certainly illustrates well the true evils of imperialism. Indeed, revisionist historians are not even the originators of this view, as in the beginning of anti-Thug campaigns, even many British in India were skeptical, finding it hard to believe that such a mighty evil as Thuggee could possibly have been at work right beneath their noses for years without them knowing it. And just as historical revisionists focus on Sleeman’s reliance on the testimony of approvers, approver testimony was viewed as unreliable hearsay by many even at the time, and in the beginning, Thugs were usually acquitted simply because they categorically denied what approvers said about them. Much of what critics point out is absolutely accurate. The motives of approvers should be questioned. They turned King’s evidence to save their own necks, and they knew that, to receive clemency, they would need to provide what Sleeman was looking for, and that might have meant telling him what he wanted to hear. Moreover, there certainly were miscarriages of justice. Innocent and guilty alike were arrested in the sweeping anti-Thug campaigns of the 1830s. Sleeman’s genealogies of Thug families included men who had chosen not to become Thugs like others in their families, so certainly many innocents were detained. And he served warrants and prosecuted suspected Thugs based on hearsay evidence from known criminals with reliability problems. There is the clear possibility that approvers simply accused innocents of Thuggee because they had some personal ax to grind with them, much as in a witch hunt. All of this is true, but it does not amount to the British inventing the entire phenomenon.

Company records, which Mike Dash researched exhaustively, reflect that great care was actually taken to marshall convincing evidence due to the very fact that Sleeman had to overcome skepticism about Thuggee. His approvers must have been giving mostly reliable information, and there are a few indications. First, they viewed turning King’s evidence as a valid change in career path; just as previously they viewed Thuggee as a legitimate occupation, changing their allegiance to serve the British was viewed as just a change in profession, nothing dishonorable about it. Many, like Feringeea, appeared earnest and eager to serve Sleeman to the best of their abilities. And the threat of losing their privileges, or even losing their lives, hung over them if they were caught lying. Also, we know that they provided accurate information in most regards, as their depositions led to hard evidence. They routinely led Sleeman to the places where they and others had hidden bodies and helped exhume the remains of these victims to be identified. Likewise when they fingered fellow Thugs, stolen loot was frequently recovered from those they identified, confirming that they were indeed involved with Thug murders. Furthermore, as Mike Dash shows in his research, Sleeman and others did not trust approver accusations blindly; they pitted approvers against each other, cross-examining them to ensure their claims could be believed, and having each of them pick suspects out of line-ups, or identity parades as the British call them. And whatever we might say about the ethics and fairness of the British, their tactics certainly worked, for Thug murders plummeted amid the anti-Thug campaigns. Some historical revisionists who claim that there never were any Thugs, that the whole thing was made up as a cudgel to keep the Indian people down, might say the reduction of Thug crimes was a further lie, but their position is simply insupportable. Thuggee gangs certainly existed. The British were not alone in pursuing them, as Indian bankers had also undertaken anti-Thug campaigns. These bands of stranglers left a wake of bodies behind them, and the records of the East India Company attest to the discovery of these corpses even before the threat of Thuggee was properly identified. And early reports about and investigations into these highway murders demonstrate that this was no conspiratorial lie spread by the East India Company. The Thugs of the Chambal ravines were viewed as a local threat at first, but unbeknownst to Magistrate Perry at the time, about a thousand miles away to the south, near Madras or what is today Chennai situated on the Bay of Bengal, another Company administrator had been recording his own struggles to bring a tribe of highway murderers to justice, these called Phansigars, or “stranglers.” But while the existence of Thuggee stranglers cannot be denied, their nature was certainly misrepresented, and while Sleeman’s practices in bringing them to justice may have been effective, though unethical and imperfect, he certainly was responsible for the creation of the lasting myth of a Thuggee cult.

As William Sleeman waded through so many approver depositions and testimonies, learning all he could about Thuggee methods, including their customs and their beliefs, he latched onto frequent mentions of the goddess Kali as being protector of Thugs, and he developed a notion that Thug bands were not actually thieves, that their looting of corpses was an afterthought, and that in fact they were sacrificing their victims to Kali. In his mind, this explained why they did not shed blood until after they had strangled their victims, because they intended to offer that blood to Kali, thus the post-mortem stabbing and mutilation of corpses. This seed of an idea grew in his mind, added to with further speculation, until he imagined that all Thugs across the subcontinent served some central Thug priesthood, funneling money from their highway robberies to a certain temple that he believed was their headquarters. This notion was almost certainly engendered by the typical Christian British view of Hinduism as a barbaric religion. Many were the misconceptions about Hinduism among the British, who believed false claims that Hindu sacred texts actually encouraged some of the terrible things they heard about Indian customs, such as the murder of unwanted infant daughters, the sacrifice of children, and the practice of suttee, in which widows were thrown onto their husbands’ funeral pyres. In fact, these practices were uncommon, if they existed at all, and were forbidden by the tenets of the Hindu faith. But British could not get over their view of the Other as savage and backward. Every year they saw Hindus pushing massive wooden carts carrying gargantuan statues of Hindu deities to a temple in Puri on the Bay of Bengal dedicated to the god Jagganath, and often some faithful were crushed to death beneath the huge wheels of these wagons. Indeed these massive Jagganath wagons that rolled right over people are where we derive the English word “juggernaut.” The British learned of these deaths, and saw the sun-bleached bones that lined the roads to this temple, and believed that Hinduism encouraged a religious madness, murder, and suicide. In fact, the bones on the road were those of the terminally ill people who had died making pilgrimage to the temple, and crushing deaths beneath the wheels of juggernaut carts were rare and accidental. But the British came to view Hinduism as a death cult, and Kali, who is depicted with blood on her hands and a blood-drenched sword, wearing a necklace of severed heads, was the most horrifying aspect of the religion. Thus it is not that surprising that William Sleeman would latch onto mention of Kali by his approvers and invent this dark and horrifying backstory for the Thugs he pursued.

It seems, however, that William Sleeman was so steeped in the massive files and endless records he was keeping that he simply could not see the forest for the trees. Study of his own records, undertaken by scholars like Mike Dash and another academic whose work I’ve relied on, Kim Wagner, demonstrate that religious belief was not central to Thuggee culture. Certainly Thug approvers mentioned their belief that Kali protected them, but this was little more than common folklore. In fact, many Hindus thought of Kali as a protector, and that belief was especially common among criminals of all stripes. Nor was this the only kind of superstitious belief common among the Thugs, who put great stock in portents and omens that had nothing to do with Kali or Hinduism, such as believing that the movements or cries of certain wild animals, like owls, may mean bad luck, necessitating a change in plans. The Thugs had no official religious texts, no uniform ritual of worship; in fact, there was great religious variety among them, as some were Hindu but others were Muslim and Sikh. It is possible that some of Sleeman’s approvers emphasized the Thuggee connection to Kali as a kind of excuse for their murders, to suggest it was Kali who really killed, and not them, but the bulk of all testimony makes it abundantly clear that they killed in order to rob and leave no witnesses. There was even among the many confessions of Thugs a clear reason given for why they strangled and only afterward stabbed and mutilated corpses. In the Mughal empire, under Islamic law, murder by strangulation did not incur the death penalty, thus they likely strangled just so that they wouldn’t be put to death if caught. Afterward, they stabbed only to make sure their victims were dead, or in some cases, they disemboweled in order to minimize bloating during decomposition, which often caused the soil of the shallow mass graves they used to rise, revealing the hiding places of bodies. But even though Sleeman’s speculations about a Thuggee cult could be refuted by his own research, he became the mouth of the anti-Thug campaign and spread these rumors. He sent anonymous letters to the Calcutta Gazette, published as a series called “Conversations with Thugs,” and in it he promulgated his view of the Thugs as a vast secret religious society devoted to performing blood sacrifices to Kali. Soon his version of the criminal band was generally accepted among the British, and the 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug, inspired by Sleeman’s accounts and depicting Thugs as being somehow both Muslim and devotees of a Hindu goddess, became a bestseller in Britain. Thus the myth of the Thuggee blood cult, brought so vividly to life in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, was born.

Image falsely depicting Thuggee as a cult of Kali.

By 1840, the practice of Thuggee had effectively been wiped out by the aggressive policing and prosecution of William Sleeman and other Company administrators. But there would always be rumors that some Thug enclaves, perhaps in the foothills of the Himilayas, had evaded capture. This is what served as the core notion of adventure films like Gunga Din and Temple of Doom, the idea that, after its supposed suppression, the cult had survived and remained secretly active. It is not unlike fiction in which escaped Nazis scheme to bring about a Fourth Reich in the 1970s, like the novel and film The Boys from Brazil, or the current streaming series Hunters. In truth, there are records that indicate some Thugs escaped the anti-Thug campaigns, but since Thuggee was not a cult that might grow in secret and rise again but rather an occupation resorted to due to socio-political and economic circumstances, when it was no longer safe nor profitable to practice Thuggee, former Thugs just went into other work, becoming soldiers-for-hire or even merchants. The real mystery that remains is not whether they survived their suppression, but how many victims they claimed. William Sleeman’s grandson published a book about a hundred years after the anti-Thug campaigns called Thug, or a Million Murders, in which he asserted that Thuggee claimed in the neighborhood of 40,000 lives a year, and since he believed the claims that Thuggee had been practiced since the 13th century, he claimed it must have been responsible for something like 20 million murders. Mike Dash, however, is skeptical. Pointing out that Thugs may not have really existed, as such, so long before the British noticed their trail of dead, and further pointing out that their activities were seasonal, only undertaken in the cold season, and that Thug confessions were extremely inconsistent vis-à-vis the number of dead, that they were possibly inflating numbers out of braggadocio or to please their captors, Dash estimates a far more conservative fifty to one hundred thousand victims… and yet this too is staggering and stomach-turning. In the end, we find multiple layers of false history surrounding the Thugs of the Temple of Doom. They were misrepresented by the British at the time in such a way as to mischaracterize and defame Indian culture generally, representing it as a cesspool of evil pagan blood cults, and then the historical reality of Thuggee was erased by revisionist historians who sought to use them as an example of the evils of imperialism, which of course can be easily demonstrated without resorting to historical negationism. And in between, they were made into the nefarious villains of a blockbuster eighties adventure film whose depictions of Indian culture should rightly cause us to cringe today.

Further Reading

Dash, Mike. Thug: The True Story of India's Murderous Cult. Granta Books, 2005.

Wagner, Kim A. Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

The Key to the Secrets of King Solomon (an Encyclopedia Grimoria volume)

The push today by the religious right to remove so many books from schools and libraries has many parallels throughout history, stretching much further back in time than any curriculum controversy I have previously discussed. While Nazis are known for their burning of books, their actions, at least in this regard, are likely dwarfed by those of the Catholic Church, whose history of inspecting libraries, removing offending literature, and banning and burning books is unparalleled. In 1966, Pope Paul VI discontinued a longstanding and frequently updated list of authors and works that were forbidden by the Catholic Church. This Index Librorum Prohibitorum included the names of many playwrights, novelists, philosophers, and theologians, specifically any whose works were deemed morally objectionable or heretical. This index, and others like it, have a long history, going all the way back to the Inquisition, when many of the works included in their earliest versions were more magical in nature. Many of the books banned by the Spanish inquisitor Fernando de Valdés y Salas in 1559, for example, were books believed to be instruction manuals for the practice of black magic—grimoires, they were called. Among the most popular of these magic handbooks was one attributed to the biblical King Solomon, the son of King David, thought to have reigned in ancient Israel sometime between 970 and 920 BCE. Indeed, there have been numerous books of magic attributed to King Solomon, each with a variety of different names, some said to be separate works and others believed to be variations of the same. In the 17th century, a book called the Secrets of Solomon was seized by the Venetian Inquisition and said to be a handbook for practicing witches. This may have been a version of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, the Lesser Key of Solomon, thought to have been authored in the 1600s, or it may have been a version of an earlier work, which inspired the Lesser Key, Clavicula Salomonis, The Greater Key of Solomon. This work appears to have been authored not in antiquity but during the Italian Rennaissance, in the 14th or 15th centuries. Certainly earlier pseudepigraphal works had inspired this one as well, such as the Hygromanteia or Magical Treatise of Solomon, which may date back even to the thirteenth century. Some version of this book, under the name “The Book of Solomon,” is said to have been ordered by Pope Innocent VI to be burned during the 1300s. The various versions of the Keys of Solomon provide instructions for the practitioner of magic, directing them in purification rituals and how to prepare the tools they will require. They collect incantations like recipes, demonstrating how to cast spells that invoke rain, conjure gold coins, make oneself invisible, instill love, and curse enemies. And perhaps most offensive to the Church, they name and describe many demons and teach the magician how to summon them and how to compel them to do their bidding. The question this begs is not why the church would ban such literature, but how the figure of Solomon, presented in the Bible as a wise and holy king favored by the Judeo-Christian God above all other men, came to be associated with black magic.

According to the lore of magic, King Solomon was not only a master magician, he was the originator of some magics. Just as Zoroaster is viewed as the first magus and inventor of astrology, and Hermes Trismegistus the first alchemist, King Solomon is thought of as the originator of more than one form of magic, such as Ars notoria, the magical art of supernaturally achieving knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, Ars goetia, the ritual magic used to summon and bind demons and thus obtain favors from them. As we will see, though, much like those of Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus, the legend of King Solomon’s contributions to magic prove impossible to credit upon closer examination. This should be apparent even at the outset, as we see the legend evolve into folklore about King Solomon that rivals even the most fantastical of fairy tales. Anyone who attended Sunday school knows that the wisdom of King Solomon is legendary, and we already know that he is associated with magical artifacts, for he had possession of the Ark of the Covenant, for which he built a permanent Temple in Jerusalem. But according to the magical myth of Solomon, which developed out of numerous traditions in multiple cultures, God granted him supernatural wisdom like a superpower, including even the ability to talk with animals and to command spirits. From angels he received four magical stones, one that gave him power over the animal kingdom, one that empowered him to move heaven and earth, one that granted him dominion over all angels, and one that enabled him to bind even demons to his service. Like Thanos, he united these stones into a ring that made him the most powerful human of all time. He possessed also the philosopher’s stone, it was believed by others, and thus was able to create gold and riches. And with this great wealth and power, he built many wonders, forcing demons to complete the labor on his behalf. Not only did he build the Temple of Jerusalem in this manner, but also mythical constructions like the walled city of copper, a vast and secret city built to contain all his treasures and books of arcane wisdom. Even if the city were ever found, as it is said has happened before, no mortal can penetrate its walls without dying of laughter. How King Solomon himself might have visited this marvelous place is clear, though, for like a tale out of the Thousand and One Nights, he rode a flying carpet, carried aloft either by the demons at his command or by the winds that he could tame, depending on what source you read. In total, he was an ancient superhero, and his legend would provide the background for quite the adventure story. But where does this all come from? As mentioned, those who only know Solomon from the Bible know him only as the wise king, a writer of songs, lauded for his clever judgments, the builder of the First Temple, arrayed in riches and luxuries, and known for his sexual escapades. Unsurprisingly, there is no biblical basis for these fanciful legends, but perhaps more surprisingly, there is little scriptural support for any claims of Solomonic magic. To find the origin of this pseudohistory, we must revisit these scriptures, the earliest of sources recording the life of Solomon, and trace the evolution of his legend from there.

A depiction of Solomon’s dream, when his celebrated wisdom was imparted by God.

The books of the Bible that give us a portrait of Solomon are the first book of Kings and the second book of Chronicles. Additionally, the book of Proverbs is attributed to him, as is, of course, the Song of Solomon. The story told of Solomon in the Bible centers around his wisdom and his building of the Temple, as well as his lusting after foreign women, like the Queen of Sheba. It is emphasized that his great sin was not so much his marrying of foreign women, but that he thereafter built temples for their foreign gods. This is given as the reason for the secession of the northern tribes and the division of his kingdom into the Kingdom of Judah, ruled by his son Rehoboam after his death, and the separate northern Kingdom of Israel, inhabitants of which would later be deported after its conquest, thereby creating the idea of the Lost Tribes of Israel, as I spoke about in my series on the subject. The image of Solomon in the Bible gives no indication of the esoteric magus he would later become, but there are present the seeds of the idea, which would later be developed through exegesis and adaptation to the values of future eras and cultures. For example, Solomon receives his wisdom in a divine vision, during which he requests it of God. Already here we find the idea that he was gifted some supernatural faculties in a kind of celestial encounter, and it is easy to see how this would later be transformed into the fantasy tales I have already described. While millennia later, this wisdom would be interpreted as arcane knowledge, in Kings and Chronicles, it is very clearly the practical wisdom to be a just ruler, depicted in the stories of his judgments, such as the famous example when two women come to him both claiming to be the mother of a certain child and Solomon suggests cutting the child in half simply to discern who the real mother is by their different reactions. But even these scriptures, the earliest of records about Solomon, cannot be relied on as accurate historical portrayals, as we already see a process of shaping his legend to suit the authors’ purposes and the tendency to attribute to him works he did not write. Scholars agree that the Book of Kings was not authored by the prophet Jeremiah, as tradition suggests, but rather was composed, compiled, and edited by the same authors as the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Jeremiah, during the Babylonian exile, hundreds of years after Solomon’s reign. There is even analysis of Kings that suggests it was redacted from some unknown source material, edited to depict Solomon as a kind of idealized universal king of all humanity, but also to emphasize his sin and blame him for the division of the kingdom. Likewise the book of Chronicles is believed to have been written by a single person even later, post-exile, during the Achaemenid Empire after Cyrus the Great liberated the Hebrews and allowed them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild. This author presents an even more mundane version of Solomon, idealizing him as the best of Jewish kings, but not so much as the perfect king of kings. As for the Book of Proverbs, which appears to display the preternatural wisdom of Solomon, and Song of Solomon, also called Song of Songs, which is basically an erotic poem that demonstrates Solomon’s lustful nature, debate rages regarding whether these were unified works or collections, with most scholars agreeing that they are certainly later pseudepigraphal works attributed to Solomon. Thus even in the Bible, among the very first pieces of writing related to Solomon, we already see him being credited with writing things he did not write.

This rewriting of Solomon’s life continued in the postexilic Second Temple period, when much “parabiblical literature” was produced that adapted the history and lessons of the Bible for Hellenistic sensibilities as the known world came under the influence of ancient Greece. Works such as The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Eupolemus’s work Concerning the Kings in Judea, and of course Flavius Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities again emphasize the wisdom of Solomon, but in a more Hellenized sense, this wisdom is conceived of not just as a practical political skill, but also as a knowledge of physical sciences and of divine and philosophical truths. We must remember that the Hellenized world was the hotbed from which emerged all the lore about the beginnings of magic. I traced the claims about Zoroaster’s invention of magic to the Hellenized Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, and I further traced the lore of alchemy to the syncretistic transformation of the Egyptian god Thoth into the Greek figure of Hermes Trismegistus during the Hellenistic period. Likewise, in Second Temple literature and Hellenistic culture, the figure of Solomon was transformed into a kind of Hermetic sage. This reinterpretation of his character reflects the philosophical milieu of the late Hellenistic period, the 1st century BCE, and beyond. It can be seen in the aforementioned work of Josephus as well as in the deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom, also called the Wisdom of Solomon. Again, “deuterocanonical” means this work is part of Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canon but tends to be viewed as apocryphal by Protestants. In it, Solomon is not only wise, he is also a teacher of wisdom, a revealer of secrets. The secrets to which he is privy are those of the structure and elements of the earth and the heavens. We see here the root of later folktales in that he bears knowledge regarding the nature of animals and how to tame them, as well as sorcery in that he understands all there is to know about plants and what can be done with them. Thus in the Wisdom of Solomon, and also in Jewish Antiquities, he is depicted as a master of occult knowledge, and specifically two areas of knowledge: astronomy, which would further link him to the magical art of astrology, and demonic exorcism, which would contribute to the tales of his power to bend all spirits to his will.

A depiction of Solomon planning the Temple’s construction.

The 1st century BCE author of The Wisdom of Solomon and Flavius Josephus, writing about a hundred years later in the Common Era, were presenting reinterpretations of Solomon that were entirely extra-biblical. However, they were likely deriving their portraits of the king from Jewish traditions that had developed during the Second Temple period, especially among Jews in Hellenized Egypt. The portrait of Solomon as a powerful exorcist certainly goes hand in hand with the portrait of him as being endowed with esoteric knowledge like a hermetic sage, as his power over demons was said to come from his knowledge of their nature and their names. However, there already existed some Jewish traditions connecting kingship with exorcism in the story of Solomon’s father David, who in the Book of Samuel soothed an evil spirit in King Saul by playing his harp, thereby setting him on the path to succeed the king. This was likely not the only source of the depiction of Solomon as an exorcist, though. In part it must have been derived from the tendency in Hellenistic culture to portray kings as divine and capable of performing miracles. And in even larger part, it represents a syncretism of ideas that were very popular in the Hellenized world regarding the hierarchies of demonology and angelology. In short, it just made sense, if Solomon were a great king endowed with divine wisdom, that he be a demonologist and be capable of performing the miracle of exorcism. The oldest Second Temple literature portraying Solomon as an exorcist was not found until modern times, in a cave in Qumran. These apocryphal Psalms, which date to between 50 and 70 CE, read somewhat like instructions for casting out demons and talk of Solomon invoking the name of God and asking the name of the demon in order to command it. A few decades later, in the 90s of the 1st century CE, Josephus included in his Jewish Antiquities an account of an exorcism performed by a man named Eleazar who cast out demons in the name of Solomon, speaking incantations the text says were written by Solomon, and pressing a ring said to bear the seal of Solomon to the possessed man’s nose. Clearly by this point, the exorcism rituals attributed to Solomon had become a kind of folk healing remedy, and his name and seal an apotropaic protection against evil spirits. Interestingly, we see here a ring, though not the magical ring gifted by angels to endow Solomon with power over all things. Rather it seems perhaps many such rings may have been made and used in such rituals, their power thought to derive from the “seal” engraved on it. Here we find the myth of Solomon’s ring and his power over demons in its infancy. Over the following centuries, many apotropaic amulets would be inscribed with the names of demons, following the Solomonic exorcism ritual, and would even claim to bear the seal given to Solomon to ward off demons. Sometime after the first century CE, likely in the period of Late Antiquity between the 3rd and 6th centuries, we find this legend fully formed in the fragments later collected in the Middle Ages as the pseudepigraphal work called the Testament of Solomon, which not only has him wielding his magic ring but also compiles an entire demonology, with the names of each offending spirit, the nature of their activities, and specific prescriptions for exorcising them.

Present in the demonologies later attributed to Solomon are also some elements of astrology, identifying spirits with certain heavenly bodies. While incantations and seals for warding against and exorcising demons certainly was a kind of miracle and magic, and would develop through the centuries to be represented as a different kind of magic—the binding and commanding of spirits to do one’s will—it may seem rather less occult today, since priests still claim to cast demons out of people. Such is the case as well with astrology, a kind of divination magic, which as we discussed in my previous volume in this series, on Zoroaster, was thought to be one of the oldest forms of magic, invented by the magi, from whom we derive the word for magic. In the Testament of Solomon, the view of Solomon as astrologer is definitely present. In it, he refers to planets and their identification with demons, and he even refers to the signs of the Zodiac. The tradition is further developed in the Hygromanteia or Magical Treatise of Solomon, a work that appears to bridge the Hermetic sage and exorcist Solomon of Late Antiquity with the all-out sorcerer and alchemist Solomon of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. In some ways this portrayal of Solomon also has its roots in the Bible, as in 1 Kings 5:10, it is claimed that “Solomon’s wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of the East and all the wisdom of Egypt.” As Midrashic commentaries have emphasized, the wisdom of the East and Egypt was astrological in nature, so it would only make sense then that Solomon’s surpassing wisdom also partook of this kind of divination and augury. And in the Magical Treatise, we can even find evidence of the further evolution of this depiction of Solomon as magus. The Hygromanteia is a Greek work, but portions of it appear to have Italian influence and to have been added later, in the early Middle Ages. In these sections, Solomon is not only a practitioner of astrology, but also of other forms of magic, such as hydromancy, the summoning of demons in a water basin to create a kind of crystal ball that would show him things he desired to see. Here we have the notion of his control of demons that had evolved from the view of Solomon as exorcist combined with a form of divination evolved from the view of Solomon as astrologer, syncretized in such a way that we see Solomon compelling demons to do him favors. Thus the image of Solomon the commander of demons, master of Ars goetia, is forged.

A magic circle used in the summoning of demons, according to the Lesser Key of Solomon

Since by the Middle Ages, Solomon had already picked up these extra-biblical magical trappings, like a snowball gathering mass as it rolls downhill, growing from a wise king and builder to a magician endowed with a magical ring that allows him to bend spirits to his will, it is unsurprising that medieval alchemists and Renaissance magicians, many of them Christian, focused on Solomon as the originator of some of their esoteric beliefs and even attributed new works on magic to him. In Hellenistic Egypt, the alchemists and writers who immortalized alchemical lore looked not just to the mythological figure of Hermes Trismegistus as the progenitor of their art, but also to biblical figures. They were very familiar with the Greek translation of the Bible, and as their Hermetic perspective taught them to seek mystery and symbolism in everything, they looked to the scriptures, seeing in the Genesis narrative of Creation an analog for their Great Work of transmuting base metals into gold. They even went so far as to write the protagonist of their mythos, Hermes Tristmegistus, into the lineage of antediluvian heroes, claiming he was a grandson of Noah who preserved the ancient knowledge of alchemy revealed to mankind. This adaptation of the Bible to suit the purposes of alchemists began in Alexandria, toward the end of the 3rd century CE and into the beginning of the next, by Zosimos of Panopolis, a Gnostic mystic and alchemist who invented entire traditions in his prolific writings, which survive only in fragments today. Zosimos combined Hermetic ideas with the Gnostic view, prevalent during his time, that the secrets of the universe, including alchemy, had been shared with humanity by the fallen angels who lay with human women mentioned in Genesis as well as various apocrypha. If you want to learn more about Gnosticism, check out my post Gnostic Genesis, and for more on the wild traditions about these fallen angels, find my 2-part series No Bones About It, on giants, as well as my post on The Secrets of Enoch. Much of what we know of Gnostic tradition comes from the Nag Hammadi library, a trove of ancient codices whose discovery rivals that of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and some of the demonological and astrological material that has been attributed to Solomon seems to be echoed in or even have been derived from these Gnostic traditions about the spiritual forces in the world and their identification with certain planets. Thus already, in Zosimos’s time, the traditions surrounding Solomon were being incorporated into new belief structures. The writings of Zosimos, who combined Christian Gnosticism with Hermeticism and sought to tie the practices of alchemy to the Old Testament, talk of Solomon binding demons not with a ring or a seal or even in a water basin, but in sealed bottles that he specially made, on instructions from angels, by mixing silver, copper, gold, and a mystery metal called “orichalcum” into a magical kind of electrum alloy. Thus Zosimos takes the myth of Solomon the demon-binder and turns him into an ancient alchemist. He even in one work refers to some supposedly ancient and conveniently lost book purportedly written by Solomon that is said to have detailed the many uses of quicksilver. As the legend of Solomon grew among alchemists, they saw hidden meaning in every part of his story. His songs, they said, must have been incantations, and he must, they reasoned, have had possession of the Philosopher’s Stone, for only that could explain how rich in gold he was said to have been. So scouring the scriptures, they fell on a verse in 1 Chronicles that talks of King David collecting wealth for the future Temple Solomon was to build, which mentions “all sorts of precious stones,” whose original Hebrew referred to “stones of pukh,” a term whose true meaning has been lost to time, and they said that was the Philosopher’s stone. Alternatively, some looked at 1 Kings, which tells of the Queen of Sheba gifting him jewels or precious stones, and they invented an entire story about Solomon recognizing the Philosopher’s Stone among the jewels. Regardless of what version of this story they believed, the idea stuck. Solomon was not just a wise king, not just a sage mystic, not just an exorcist, not only a diviner, he was among the most powerful of wizards, an ancient practitioner of alchemy, and if you wanted the grimoire you were writing to be taken seriously and be copied down through the centuries, you might just want to slap his name on it.

The legend of King Solomon and his place in the vast myth complex about magic is a truly global phenomenon. It had its beginning in ancient Israel, with what must have been a real man, and his memory was edited and redacted for political and cultural purposes in the Second Temple Period. Thereafter, with the Greek influence on the Hellenized world, his legend continued to evolve, and to incorporate new views of wisdom and kingship along the way, until he came to be viewed as a kind of esoteric guru like Hermes Trismegistus, and an astrologer like the ancient Zoroaster, and an exorcist, like another great sage of the era, Jesus Christ. Indeed, the connections between Christ and these depictions of Solomon are many. Both were exorcists, and both were teachers of sage wisdom. Indeed, both were called the “Son of David,” Solomon because he was literally the successor of David and fruit of his loins, and Christ because he was said to be of Davidic descent. Indeed, some apocryphal texts go further in identifying the two, such as the Questions of Bartholomew, sometimes thought to be the lost Gospel of Bartholomew, which describes Christ binding demons in fiery chains and torturing them, and even name dropping Solomon as he does so. It has led some scholars to question whether the development of Christian lore may not have borrowed from the emerging lore of King Solomon in an effort to legitimize Christ as a kind of new Solomon, King of the Jews and king of kings. Certainly the evolution of the Solomonic legend is a story of one tradition borrowing from another throughout time, resulting in a syncretistic amalgamation. Other figures that are suggested to have been amalgamated with King Solomon are the legendary Indian king Vikramaditya, or the much mythologized Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, whose legend has also been suggested to be the true origin of the story of Jesus Christ—a theory sometimes called the Jesus Myth Theory that I may have to explore in more depth in the future, perhaps in my annual Xmas episode. But the legend of Solomon does not belong to the Jews or even the Christians alone. Certainly the myth complex that depicted him as a mage and alchemist proved quite popular among Jewish mystics and Christian alchemists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but from the hotbed of syncretism that was Hellenistic Egypt, his legend also spread to and was further developed in the Arab and Muslim world, where he was called Nabi Sulayman and was said to be master of their version of demons, the djinn. Indeed, the entire notion of Solomon keeping demons in a bottle and forcing them to do his bidding may explain much about the development of stories featuring wish-granting genies kept in bottles. But as with all mythology about magic, it is nearly impossible to discern if one legend gave birth to others or was itself born of them.

 Further Reading

Lecouteux, Claude. King Solomon the Magus: Master of the Djinns and Occult Traditions of East & West. Translated by Jon. E. Graham, Inner Traditions, 2022.

Schwarz, Sarah L. “Reconsidering the Testament of Solomon.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, vol. 16, no. 3, May 2007, pp. 203–37. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1177/0951820707077166.

Torijano, Pablo A. Solomon the Esoteric King: From King to Magus, Development of a Tradition. Brill, 2002.

The Whereabouts of the Lost Ark of the Covenant

According to the biblical narrative, about a year after the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, thought to be around 1200 BCE, God appeared to them at their encampment at the foot of Mt. Sinai. The description of His visitation sounds like little more than a thunderstorm to modern readers, but the Israelites believed Moses was called up the mountain to confer with God. After Moses ascended, he returned and explained that no one else was to likewise ascend the mountain in an effort to see God for themselves. He also told them that, on the mountain, God had given him a new law, not just the well-known Ten Commandments, but also an entirely new covenant, detailing a social and civil legal code. God even allowed some other priests to see him, and afterward it is said that Moses spent 40 days and nights on the mountain alone with God, during which time he was provided with further detailed instructions for priestly ordinances the Israelites were to keep as well as directions for how to design the Tabernacle, a portable sanctuary to be constructed as a place of worship. Along with these instructions were detailed designs for a cask to be built of acacia wood and overlaid with gold. This cask or chest was intended to carry the tablets of the law, which would be written by the very finger of god. On its lid, two cherubim were to be carved, facing each other, extending their wings so that the tips of them met above the center of the chest, and it was in this place, between the two cherubim, a place that was called the Mercy Seat, that God would reside, invisible. As the very throne of God, it was too holy an object to be touched by man, so rings were to be crafted on its feet, through which poles could be passed so that it could be carried aloft without being touched. This object, called the Ark of the Covenant, was considered the most sacred relic of the Israelites, kept in the Holy of Holies, the most secure central chamber of the Tabernacle, approached only by priests. Legend of the Ark grew over the ages. In the Letter to the Hebrews it is said that it contained not only the tablets of the law, but also the Rod of Aaron, a talisman endowed with the power to perform miracles, as well as a pot of manna, the supernatural substance that fell from the sky to sustain the Israelites during their travels in the desert. But most importantly, it was the very seat of God’s power on Earth, and as such, it was the symbol of their power as well. They carried it aloft before them as they marched into the Promised Land. It miraculously made victory possible for their armies on more than one occasion, drying up the River Jordan so that they could cross, and simply by carrying it in a circuit around the walls of the fortified city of Jericho, it made it possible to bring the walls crashing down with the just the sounding of several trumpets. But as mentioned, this artifact, which carried their invisible God aloft and housed their most sacred relics, was too powerful for a mere mortal to touch. At one point, the Philistines captured the Ark and reveled in the idea that they had stolen the Israelite God, but when plagues of rats and tumors were inflicted on them, they sent the Ark back, and in 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles, it is described that one of the drivers of the cart carrying the Ark was struck down simply for laying a hand on it to steady it when the oxen pulling the cart caused it to lurch. Likewise, when the inhabitants of a certain city did not greet the return of the Ark enthusiastically enough, some seventy of them were struck dead, though by some interpretations, the Ark may have laid waste to something more like fifty thousand people that day. The Ark of the Covenant has grown in legend to become the most powerful sacred object in history, a talisman of untold power, a symbol that confers legitimacy, and a weapon. When King Solomon the Wise constructed his Temple, a permanent version of Moses’s Tabernacle, the Ark was placed in its Holy of Holies and was not officially ever heard of again. In 587 BCE, Solomon’s Temple was sacked, along with the rest of Jerusalem, by the Babylonians, and there are only rumors and conflicting accounts of what became of it thereafter.

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I was inspired to cover this topic by one of my favorite films of all time, the first installment in the Indiana Jones franchise, Raiders of the Lost Ark. I credit these films and the character of Indiana Jones with my lifelong interest in historical mysteries and arcane knowledge. In fact, as the release of the fifth and likely final Indiana Jones film, the Dial of Destiny, approaches, I had the idea to focus in a series of episodes that won’t necessarily be contiguous, on the macguffins and historical mysteries central to the Indiana Jones films. A lot of the episodes of this podcast have already touched on notions from the films, most notably my series on Nazi occultism, but I haven’t entirely focused on the mysteries explored in the films, and of course, I had to start with the Ark of the Covenant. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the stakes are high to find the Ark. As it was believed to be a supernatural weapon that could tip the balance of power, the Nazis are after it, and Indy must keep it from falling into evil hands. Today, the search for the lost Ark of the Covenant likewise carries far greater import than simple archaeological significance. Don’t get me wrong, though. If it were ever discovered that the Ark of the Covenant first of all was real and not just a fabled legend, and more than that, that it had survived to modern day like the Dead Sea Scrolls, it would be an earth-shaking revelation, academically speaking. Not all scholars agree that the Ark actually existed, or that it existed as described in Exodus, but many do, and its discovery would go a long way toward demonstrating the historicity of certain passages in the Bible, which of course would then be touted by biblical literalists as evidence for the historicity of the entire bible, even if it were shown not to possess supernatural powers. But more than this, the discovery of the Ark of the Covenant would have massive repercussions for peace in the Middle East. There are those who believe that discovery of the Ark would not only prove the truth of scriptures, but also the existence of God and the validity of Judeo-Christian faiths. Some orthodox Jews have hoped that its discovery might somehow heal the rift between Islam and Judaism by somehow proving the political legitimacy of Israel. However, as with most aspects of Middle Eastern conflict, the matter may not be so simple. While the discovery of the Ark in modern times might convince some to set aside their differences or even to convert, more likely it would exacerbate the conflict. One place where the Ark is rumored to have been hidden away is in a secret chamber beneath the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine built atop the Temple Mount in Old Jerusalem, perhaps the most contested holy place in the region or on Earth. To both Jews and Muslims, this place is believed to be the site of the creation of the world. To Muslims, it bears further significance as the place from which Muhammad ascended into the heavens on his miraculous Night Journey, and it is their third holiest site, known to them as the “Farthest Mosque.” To Jews, it is the place where God created Adam, where He asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, and where the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple was located, where the Ark, the seat of God on Earth, was kept. To really delve into this conflict and the significance of this site is beyond the scope of this episode, but what is important to know is that the rebuilding of the Israelite Temple on that site has been foretold as a precondition to the end of days, the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment for the Jews, Armageddon and the Second Coming for Christians. Indeed, there has long been a desire, among some Jews but perhaps even more so among Evangelical Christians, to relocate, or even to destroy, the Dome of the Rock in order to kickstart the end times by rebuilding the Temple. Certainly the prospective discovery that the Ark of the Covenant was real, that it had been recovered and was waiting to be restored to its place on the Temple Mount would raise the already high temperature of the region to a fever pitch. This scenario would prove the fiery power of the Ark, for it would be like tossing a match into a tinder-box.

The first photograph of the Dome of the Rock, c. 1842

This assessment of the explosive prospect of the recovery of the Ark of the Covenant is proven by an incident in 1911, when a British expedition intent on digging for the Ark under the Temple Mount nearly resulted in a Middle Eastern crisis. It began with a Finnish scholar named Valter Juvelius, who had convinced himself and others that by deciphering some ancient code in the Bible, he had discovered the location of the long sought after gold treasures of Solomon, including the Ark of the Covenant, believed by many to have been hidden away before the arrival of the Bablyonians. Juvelius engaged a wealthy English socialite, Montagu Parker, to help him bankroll his expedition, and in 1909, still some forty years before the State of Israel would be created, they traveled to Jerusalem, which at the time was controlled by the Ottomans. Excavation beneath the Noble Sanctuary Mosque on the Temple Mount was forbidden even then by the Sultan in Istanbul, but Juvelius believed that they could begin their dig outside the walls of the Old City and penetrate through to the ancient tunnels that would take them to the treasure they sought. It was the largest and most expensive excavation in the history of Jerusalem at the time, and indeed, they did break through into dark subterranean passages that honeycombed the area. What they did not find was any treasure beyond a few pieces of pottery. Finally, desperate to succeed after years of effort, in 1911, they bribed the sheikh in charge of the Noble Sanctuary Mosque to send his guards away to a ten-day festival that was then being held outside the city, and they set about digging numerous holes on the raised platform of the mosque, and even beneath the Dome of the Rock—the ultimate desecration. On April 12th, 1911, the tenth night of their secret dig, they were discovered, and word swiftly spread through the city that some Western Christians were despoiling their holy site. Muslims flooded the streets, enraged and searching for the offenders, and the Englishmen hopped on the first train out of Jerusalem, back to their yacht in Jaffa. Thousands of demonstrators continued to march the streets of Jerusalem, and Turkish soldiers had to be deployed to quell what looked like impending riots. Around the world, the leaders of Islam condemned the act. It was no exaggeration that they were on the precipice of a global holy war. Eventually, though, the sheikh who had accepted the bribe was arrested, as was the governor of the city, though he had had nothing to do with it. Investigators determined that nothing had actually been looted by the Englishmen, and trouble subsided. However, the expedition’s hasty retreat had led to numerous rumors, spread in the Western press, that Montagu Parker and his men had actually made off with the Ark of the Covenant. This was completely false, however, and indeed, Parker even tried to return later that same year to continue his excavations. Because of the scandal, however, he would never be tolerated to set foot again in Jerusalem. His expedition, though, would go on to inspire others who dreamed of digging up the Temple Treasure and specifically the Ark in Jerusalem, but they would never have the opportunity to excavate beneath the Dome of the Rock again. For about a month in 1967, during the Six-Day War, the site was wrested from Muslim control, but jurisdiction was ceded back before anyone attempted any organized search for the Temple treasure. Once, in 1981, a rabbi broke into a catacomb while constructing a synagogue beyond the Western Wall and organized a secret dig to reach the Holy of Holies, but the news media exposed their excavation and an angry mob put a stop to it, sealing the cavern. Besides these attempts, most other expeditions for the Ark of the Covenant sought the relic outside of Jerusalem, and some even claimed to have found it.

Perhaps the most outrageous of these adventurers was Ron Wyatt. This American nurse from Tennessee, a devoted Seventh Day Adventist, belongs among the biblical literalist fraudsters I previously discussed in my episode on the seekers after Noah’s Ark. He first entered the field of “biblical archaeology,” which is most of the time just amateur archaeology or often pseudoarcheology, because he believed that the Durupinar site, a kind of boat-shaped rock formation that I mentioned in that previous episode, was Noah’s Ark. Starting around 1977, he began organizing various Middle Eastern expeditions designed to recover biblical relics and thereby prove the historicity of the Bible. He had the idea of searching the bottom of the Red Sea for traces of Egyptian chariots, which he would tout as evidence of the scriptural account of the sea having parted for the Israelites and afterward swallowed the Pharaoh’s army. He claims that he discovered the exact place of the crossing and recovered the chariot remains of the army that he sought, but he provided no evidence that the artifacts had actually come from the bottom of the Red Sea, and professional divers have argued that he would not have been physically capable of diving to the depth he claimed. This is rather typical of Ron Wyatt’s adventures. When he provided evidence, it was always suspect, and he dismissed valid criticism as being the efforts of Satan to cast doubt on the truth. He claimed to find everything he looked for, and far too easily. He said he had discovered the true locations of Mt. Sinai, Sodom and Gomorrah, and even the site of Christ’s crucifixion. And here is where his most fantastical claims were made. According to Wyatt, the site of Christ’s crucifixion was just outside the Old City of Jerusalem’s walls, and he further claimed that an ancient earthquake had cracked the hill, an act of God to allow access to a chamber beneath, where the Ark of the Covenant had been hidden. By Ron Wyatt’s reckoning, God had opened the earth there to allow Christ’s blood to flow down onto the Mercy Seat of the Ark, making official the notion that Christ’s death was the ultimate sacrifice and marked the beginning of a new covenant between God and humanity. He further claimed to possess evidence of the find, including video and photographs and even samples of Christ’s blood, which remained upon the Ark and which through DNA analysis showing an absence of a Y-chromosome, proving he had been born of a virgin. But, with Wyatt, there was always an excuse. The Israeli government conspired, he claimed, to cover up the discovery, fearful that it would result in a mass conversion to Christianity. According to him, Israelis had been killing anyone who got close to discovering the site, and it was for this convenient reason that he could not release his evidence. But one day, he promised, he would reveal all to the world. Ron Wyatt passed away in 1999, and no such evidence has ever been shared.

Valter Juvelius, photographed during his and Montagu Parker’s excavations.

In 1946, Bedouin shepherds made the discovery of the century when they found numerous scroll fragments in the Qumran Caves of the Judaean Desert. This very discovery lends some hope to the otherwise far-fetched notion that an artifact like the Ark of the Covenant might be rediscovered today. In 1952, an archaeologist further searching the Qumran Caves discovered a scroll unlike the others in that it had been inscribed on a copper sheet. This “Copper Scroll,” as it has been called, was not a work of literature or a religious manuscript, but rather a list, detailing 63 locations at which gold and silver treasure had been hidden. Some scholars have suggested the scroll was a hoax, but as it has been dated to the 1st century CE, it would have had to have been a very ancient hoax, which doesn’t hold up to logical scrutiny. Some believe the Copper Scroll to be a list of treasures hidden by those at Qumran, others that it may be a key to the location of the treasure of the Second Temple, hidden away before the Roman invasion. But some, including John Allegro, the first scholar to study the Copper Scroll, believed it could refer to the treasure of the First Temple, taken out of the Temple by priests to prevent it falling into Babylonian hands. Allegro pointed to one passage that indicates a silver chest was buried under a hill “in the desolations of the Valley of Achor,” a location northwest of Jericho and thus far outside of Jerusalem, and that this chest contained “all the gold and silver of the Great Tabernacle and all its Treasures.” All the treasures of the Great Tabernacle certainly would include the Ark, but it is unclear how the Ark, which itself is supposed to be four feet long and 2 and a half feet wide and tall, would fit within another chest and still have room for further treasures. It would have to be quite a large silver chest indeed. Whether or not the simple question of how the Ark might fit within a silver chest puzzled him, he mounted a series of excavations to search for the Temple treasure in the West Bank and Jordan, following clues from the Copper Scroll. He never found a thing. Allegro would eventually go on to discredit himself in the eyes of many with some rather bizarre later work in which he claimed that Jesus had been a fictional character dreamed up by early Christians who were really just a sex cult that consumed a lot of psychedelic mushrooms, but Allegro’s work on the Copper Scroll would inspire others to search for the Ark in caves and other locations outside of Jerusalem.

One Vendyl Jones, an American archaeologist who had moved to Israel in the 1960s, claimed to have used the directions in the Copper Scroll to find some of the hidden treasures it told of, including a small jug of the oil used to anoint the kings of Israel, called the balm of Gilead. Vendyl Jones believed that the Copper Scroll was one key to the mystery of the Ark, but that another could be found in the book of Second Maccabees, a deuterocanonical book, meaning it is considered canon by Catholics and certain Eastern churches, but is disregarded as apocryphal by others, in this case both by Jews and Protestants. In Second Maccabees, it is stated that the prophet Jeremiah, having been warned about the impending Babylonian invasion, absconded with the Ark and hid it in a cave on Mount Nebo, well east of Jerusalem, past the Dead Sea, and that its location would remain unknown until the Gathering of Israel. This foretold event, also called the Ingathering of the Exiles, is an eschatological milestone, prophesied as a precursor to the reign of the Messiah, and so Vendyl Jones, who made some efforts to find the Ark, believed that when he discovered it, he would be ushering in the End of Days. Vendyl Jones claimed that he may have been the inspiration for the character of Indiana Jones, asserting that someone who had joined him on his digs wrote a screenplay about an archaeologist named Endy Jones based on him, and that the makers of Raiders of the Lost Ark had cribbed ideas from that script. This claim has been vigorously disputed, however, and Vendyl Jones’ involvement with Kabbalist mystics and fundamentalist rabbis seeking to re-establish a national rabbinical court in Israel, along with his inflated sense of himself as being the person who will usher in the end times by discovering the Ark, rather undermine his credibility as an archaeologist. For example, he announced in 2005 that he would bring forth the Ark on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction in August of that year, but then didn’t, claiming much like Ron Wyatt and probably just to save face, that he had been prevented by the government, though not because of a conspiracy but rather because of some bureaucratic constraints.

The Copper Scroll.

The notion that the Ark was hidden away in a cave on Mount Nebo, where Moses is said to have died, was not a new one in the 1970s and 80s. Back in the 1920s, a Californian named Antonia Frederick Futterer followed the verse from Second Maccabees to Mount Nebo and claimed that he found a cavern entrance closed with stone and engraved with some sort of ancient glyph, which he claimed his Hebrew translator interpreted to mean “Herein Lies the Golden Ark of the Covenant.” The only evidence he ever offered was a sketch of the entrance, which of course is no evidence at all, and considering the fact that he could have reproduced the hieroglyph and named his Hebrew interpreter as corroboration and never did, it’s pretty safe to dismiss this as a hoax. But in the 1980s, another American, Tom Crotser, took Futterer’s claims seriously and mounted a new expedition to Mount Nebo in Jordan. Unsurprisingly, Crotser could not find the cave entrance described by Futterer, but on a nearby mountainside he claims to have discovered a ravine closed off with a tin metal sheet. According to Crotser, his team penetrated this barrier and discovered a crypt beyond, in which lay a gold chest that perfectly matched the description of the Ark of the Covenant. Unbelievably, he states that he only took photos of it rather than bringing it back with him. Crotser’s claims too can be easily dismissed based on his general lack of credibility. He has devoted his life to finding artifacts that prove the historicity and literal truth of the Bible, and he further claims, without convincing evidence, to have discovered the stone on which Cain murdered Abel, the Tower of Babel, and Noah’s Ark. Furthermore, he refused to make his photographs of the Ark of the Covenant public, only circulating them among a select few of his supporters. Eventually, he made the mistake of showing them to Siegfried Horn, a Bible scholar who was a genuine archaeologist and antiquities expert, and Horn promptly revealed that Crotser photos were of a brass-plated chest that appeared to have been manufactured in modern times using machine-cut materials, with a regular, modern-day nail protruding visibly from it. In short, it was just another hoax.

Many seekers after the lost Ark of the Covenant set their eyes farther afield than Israel, and there is some compelling reason to consider that the Ark was at some point in its history taken out of Israel. Some claims, however, are rather ludicrous. In my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel, I spoke of the failed excavations at the historic Hill of Tara in Ireland by Anglo-Israelists or British Israelites, who rather foolishly believed the Ark of the Covenant had been buried there and would prove that the British were descended from the Lost Tribes. In fact, they only damaged a historical site and found nothing, proving only that they were destructive and wrong. Other theorists point to the Knights Templar, a Christian military order organized to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land during the Crusades in 1119. I have spoken about the Templars before in a patron exclusive episode back in February of 2020 called Philip the Unfair and his Unholy War. In short, the Templars grew extremely wealthy over the nearly 200 years of their existence, and the French king Philip the Fair conspired to steal their wealth by making dubious claims about Templars being sodomite Satanists. In 1307, they were arrested, some of them burned alive, and their wealth seized by the crown. In that exclusive minisode, I refuted the notion that the Templars secretly survived in the Freemasons, but there are countless other conspiracy claims about the Templars, such as that they discovered the New World before Columbus, and that they removed the Temple treasure and brought it to Europe. This last claim derives from the fact that they made their headquarters at the Temple Mount. As the brotherhood became extremely wealthy, legend had it that they had dug up the treasure some believe was or is still buried beneath the Dome of the Rock. In fact, Templar wealth derived from the many donations made to the order across all Christendom, as well as the vast trade network they established. But rumor breeds myth, and today there is no shortage of conspiracists who will tell you with unfeigned certainty that the Templars brought back and hid away such mystical treasures the Spear of Destiny—about which I spoke in my series on Nazi occultism—the Holy Grail—about which I spoke in my episode on the Secret of Rennes-le-Château and Abbé Saunière's Riches and which I intend to explore further in our adventures into Indiana Jones lore—and finally, the Ark of the Covenant. Common is the speculation that the Ark may have been hidden in the south of France by the Templars, or even farther afield. One claim has it that the Templars carried it to the New World and buried it on Oak Island, and that’s a whole other rabbit hole that some patrons have actually requested I excavate. I do intend to dig into that morass of pseudohistory eventually, but for now, suffice it to say that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the Templars found the Ark of the Covenant or stashed it anywhere. In fact, logic would dictate that if they had discovered it, they would have announced it to the world as a symbol that God was on their side of the conflict, just as they certainly would not have kept secret the discovery of Christian relics as important as the Holy Grail or the Spear of Destiny.

The photograph of what Tom Crotser claimed was the Ark. Reproduced according to the Fair Use doctrine.

And now we come to the seemingly more credible but, in reality, just as unreliable claims of Graham Hancock, who in his 1992 tome The Sign and the Seal also traces the paths of the Knights Templar and engages in speculation about their carrying of the Ark of the Covenant out of Jerusalem, though he focuses more on Africa. Several listeners have asked when I will be devoting an episode exclusively to refuting Graham Hancock’s claims, especially since his Netflix series premiered. The thing is, the ideas that Hancock resurrects in his pseudohistorical, pseudoarcheological Netflix series, which I won’t amplify by naming it, are old racist ideas that I already refuted in detail in my episode on the Myth of a Lost Mound Builder Race. Likely I will refute Hancock again whenever I get around to producing a series about Atlantis, which he has written a lot about, but in the meantime, I’ll just talk here about his Ark claims, which like his other claims are not original. He is not an archaeologist, and actual experts recognize him for what he is: a journalist engaged in popular writing. So to argue that he is a conspiracist or a fringe lunatic would be unfair. He writes lucidly about a lot of real scholarship, and in some ways he is an effective science communicator in that he makes very complicated and esoteric academic material digestible and accessible to wider audiences. The problem is that he is not as concerned as a real academic about credibility and truth. His are elaborate stories that err on the side of entertainment rather than fact, and as such, he tends toward the fantastical rather than the accurate, and in the process he resurrects and propagates sometimes harmful narratives, like the racist idea that Native Americans could not have constructed the American earthworks. In the case of the Ark of the Covenant, he finds himself part of a rich tradition that suggests the Ark of the Covenant was carried out of Jerusalem and into Africa, and not necessarily by the Templars. Indeed, this path was even suggested in canonical scriptures, as the Book of Kings speaks of an Egyptian king named Shishak assaulting Jerusalem and carrying away “the treasures of the House of the Lord.” Indeed, this verse is referred to in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark and is the reason its story is largely set in Egypt.

Although it made for a ripping yarn in the first Indiana Jones film, there is no evidence that the Ark of the Covenant was ever brought to Egypt, and in fact, the verse in Kings mentions only vague treasures. However, one mysterious document, the Tractate of the Temple Vessels, does appear to lend some credibility to the claims that the Ark and the Temple treasures were brought to Arabia by priests hoping to hide their most sacred object before the Babylonian invasion. It must be acknowledged, though, that the origins of the Tractate are extremely suspicious. It did not appear until the Middle Ages, the 10th century CE, to be more specific, and thus in all likelihood is a medieval fantasy. Graham Hancock favors more the notion that the Ark of the Covenant was carried out of Jerusalem a hundred years before the coming of the Babylonians, to protect it from a sacrilegious king: Manasseh, the fourteenth King of Judah. According to one of the several theories Hancock entertains, these priests would have carried it to the Egyptian island of Elephantine, where a replica of the Temple had been constructed. This too is pure conjecture, though, and even if it were true, 2 Chronicles records that Josiah, the 16th King of Judah, restored the Temple and specifically ordered that “the sacred ark” be put into it, indicating that if it had been taken to Elephantine during Manasseh’s reign, it would only have been as a brief sojourn and was back in Jerusalem before the Babylonian invasion. There is the further possibility that priests may have brought it to the Temple replica on Elephantine, again or for the first time, ahead of the coming of the Babylonians, but as one of my sources, The Lost Ark of the Covenant by Tudor Parfitt points out, the record that provides us with the most information about the ancient goings on at Elephantine, the papyri discovered in the 19th century by American journalist Charles Edwin Wilbour, makes no mention of the arrival of the Ark of the Covenant, and as Parfitt I think wisely points out, if the temple there had ever held such a relic, it would have been something they bragged about rather than hid. Such is the case with temples and churches generally. They tend to make a big deal about possessing miraculous objects in order to draw more visitors to them and thereby collect more money. So despite what Raiders may have led us to believe, all claims about the Ark of the Covenant residing in Egypt suffer for lack of evidence.

Historical image of the original church in Ethiopia believed by many to have housed the Ark of the Covenant. Courtesy The Digital Collections of the National WWII Museum.

Finally, because it is such a fun story despite reliability problems, Graham Hancock falls back on an age-old belief that the Ark had perhaps been stolen from ancient Israel long before the Babylonian sacking of the Temple or even before the reign of Manasseh or the invasion of the Egyptian king Shishak. By this telling, King Solomon the Wise, who built the first Temple to house the Ark, lost it to a thief who carried it to Ethiopia, where it has resided ever since. But it’s far more interesting than only that. So the tale goes, when the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon to partake of his wisdom, she lay with him and returned to her homeland—Ethiopia, according their national legends—pregnant with his son, whom she named Menelik. Menelik returned years later to meet his father, and in a show of alliance, Solomon sent the sons of members of his court back with Menelik in an effort to recreate the wisdom and greatness of Israel in Ethiopia, known as Abyssinia at the time. However, one of these young men, disgruntled at being sent away, stole the Ark and took it with him. Since the Ark did not destroy the thief or the rest of the party, it was believed that God willed for the relic to reside thenceforth in Ethiopia, and the claim is that, ever since, as kings of a Solomonic dynasty reigned and even as foreign invasions and modern revolutions changed the political landscape, the Ark of the Covenant has remained in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion at Aksum, protected by a virgin priest who is the only person alive who is allowed to see it. This narrative is supported by their national epic, the Kebra Nagast, or The Glory of Kings, which purports to be an account of a dialogue at the First Council of Nicaea that then shares what is ostensibly a far older tradition from more ancient sources. To be very clear, Graham Hancock’s work The Sign and the Seal is not a work of historical scholarship, but insofar as he supports the story of the Ark being in Ethiopia, it must be acknowledged that this is not a new tradition, and it is one that many faithful in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church believe in to this day. A detailed exploration of the evidence refuting this myth is far beyond the scope of this episode, but if you are interested in researching it for yourself, I recommend reading Stuart Munro-Hays’s The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant: The True History of the Tablets of Moses, or if you’re looking for something a bit easier to digest, listen to the Our Fake History podcast’s 2-part episode, “Does Ethiopia Have the Ark of the Covenant?” Suffice it to day here that historians and scholars mostly find that, first, there is no evidence that the Queen of Sheba ever existed except as a literary character; second, despite claims that the Kebra Nagast’s contents are a retelling of ancient traditions, there is no evidence that the work or the legends about Menelik and the Ark existed prior to the Middle Ages; and third, the story appears most likely to be a medieval fiction fabricated as propaganda to legitimize the divine right of Ethiopian kings and enhance the glories of the Ethiopian church.

Even if we were to credit the claims of Graham Hancock and the Ethiopian church, even by their own legend, the relic they revere as the Ark sounds less like the Ark itself and more like the stone Tablets of the Law the Ark was said to contain—or rather, their replacement, since Moses broke the originals and had to get God to remake them. Indeed, every church in Ethiopia possesses such tablets, or tabots, claiming they are replicas of the real ones that, of course, no one is allowed to see. And in their long history, they too tell of times when their priests took their Ark out of its Holy of Holies and hid it elsewhere in order to protect it from invaders, making it further questionable whether whatever it is they actually have now is what they claim it was long ago and whether whatever they had then may now also be lost. Further complicating the matter is the fact that they are not the only African people to claim to be descended from Hebrews or Jews. There are the Beta Israel and the Qemant, also in Ethiopia. There are the Lemba of Zimbabwe, and the Nyambo of Tanzania, the Igbo of Nigeria, and the Ibro of Somalia. Some of these groups have genetic evidence to support their claims of having being descended from Middle Eastern semitic peoples, and more than one has their own tradition about carrying the Ark into Africa long ago. Add to this further legends from Arabic texts that claim the Ark ended up in Mecca after Arabs defeated the Israelites in battle and that it was thereafter sealed in some cave somewhere in the Arabian desert, and we come to a dizzying conclusion that the Ark, if it ever existed, and if it survived the ravages of time, could be secreted almost anywhere: under the most hotly contested holy site on earth, buried somewhere in modern day Israel or Jordan, in some ancient Egyptian catacomb, or in some church anywhere from Ethiopia to the South of France. Rather than lead us to take any such claims more seriously, this preponderance of competing claims should cause us to view all of them more skeptically. Instead of driving anyone to take on a costly expedition that would in all likelihood end in failure and could very well disturb what fragile peace we may have in the world, it seems rather that it should be enough to convince us that, whether it’s ancient history or ancient myth, it’s certainly nothing to chase after now.

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Until next time, remember, when it comes to legendary magical artifacts, it is far more likely that, if they ever existed, they weren’t magical, and they have likely been destroyed by people or the elements and in fact are not filed away somewhere among endless crates in a top secret warehouse.

Further Reading

Munro-Hay, Stuart. The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant: The True History of the Tablets of Moses. I.B. Tauris, 2005.

Parfitt, Tudor. The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Old Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark. HarperCollins, 2008.

Ricca, Brad. True Raiders: The Untold Story of the 1909 Expedition To Find the Legendary Ark of the Covenant. St. Martin’s Press, 2021.

InfeKtion: Operation DENVER and the Engineering of AIDS Conspiracy Legends

(This blog post is not an exact transcription of the podcast episode, which contains a great deal of material from my interview of Dr. Douglas Selvage. I encourage you to listen to the podcast for a full sense of the what was discussed. Additionally, Patreon supporters have been granted access to the entire interview).

In 2020, early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump administration, amid criticism of its response to the crisis, asserted without evidence that China was to blame for the virus. Certainly the original epicenter of the outbreak occurred in Wuhan, but as a way to deflect blame from their handling of the situation, the Trump administration promoted an emerging hypothesis that the virus had been released upon the Chinese population in a “lab leak.” Medical scientists and the scholarly community were quick to decry this assertion, as study of the virus, a variant of the coronavirus that caused the severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS epidemic in the early 2000s, showed that it had likely crossed the species barrier much like its predecessor. What their research was showing was that what was most likely to blame were the conditions of the wet markets and the practices of the wildlife trade in China. However, the existence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the fact that it had been studying coronaviruses that cause respiratory infections ever since the 2003 SARS outbreak was viewed by many as a kind of smoking gun. Rumors about researchers at this institute falling ill with flu-like symptoms late in 2019 further encouraged the lab leak hypothesis, though there is no evidence that any researchers at the institute had Covid-19. Since that time, it has become a mire of conspiracy speculation, with the institute being depicted as a U.S.-funded bioweapons development site and with further claims that Anthony Fauci, a public health spokesman during the first year of the pandemic and chief medical advisor to the President during the first two years of the Biden administration, was himself personally responsible for “gain of function” research to develop a more transmissible virus. While the scholarly community and the intelligence community worked slowly but surely to assemble evidence for a natural origin, the conspiracist community latched onto any gaps in their evidence as if it proved the opposite. Most recently, a declassified report by the U.S. Department of Energy that claimed with “low confidence” that the lab leak theory was correct, along with the FBI director’s comments indicating that his agency agreed, has resulted in numerous major press reports that act like it had been proven, even though this conclusion runs counter to the findings of most other federal agencies and intelligence services and scientific consensus. The fact is that it is still too early to make draw such a conclusion, which is exactly why they have been drawn with “low confidence.” Even as I wrote this, President Biden signed the Covid-19 Origin Act to declassify intelligence on the subject, which has been deemed inconclusive. And this announcement came on the heels of a further revelation that samples deposited by Chinese researchers in a virology database show that the novel coronavirus was present in civets and racoon dogs sold at a Wuhan wet market. Yet these developments will not likely not be trumpeted with quite the same gusto by the press, which often amplifies conspiracy claims simply because it gets them clicks and views. When the recent conclusions of the Department of Energy were making headlines, a disgruntled listener who insisted he was “not an idiot,” emailed me to say that, since “COVID-19 is thought to have escaped a lab,” he hoped I would “reconsider the possibility of HIV having been foisted upon us.” But of course we know that the notion of HIV having been created as a bioweapon is a baseless conspiracy claim, widely spread by the KGB. Really, the story of how this myth appeared and was propagated for political purposes serves as the perfect example from history of why we must reserve judgment about the origin of Covid until the evidence is more conclusive.

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Before I continue with this story, since I have heard that the best way to combat misinformation is not to tease the accurate information until later but to state the truth at the outset of your discussion, let’s start by talking about the natural origin of AIDS. Just as medical scientists have been studying the natural origin of Covid since its emergence, ever since the 1981 recognition of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome as a new disease and the subsequent identification of the causative retrovirus now called the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, scientists studied it and hypothesized about its natural origin. Early on, even though it seemed to have emerged in America, it was believed to have come “out of Africa” because of the discovery of its similarity to a simian virus known to affect primates in sub-Saharan Africa. With far more time spent studying this pathogenesis than has been spent studying Covid, it has been borne out with consistent evidence that HIV passed naturally to humans through a cross-species transmission, that it actually first appeared in west central Africa, then came to Haiti before emerging in America, all long before the years when it would subsequently be claimed that the CIA was developing it as a bioweapon. And the intelligence services that were responsible for legitimizing and spreading these baseless claims have since confessed! In 1992, the head of the post-Soviet intelligence service, successor of the KGB, explicitly admitted to the existence of the KGB’s disinformation campaign to convince the world that HIV was created by the U.S. as a biological weapon, and that same year, former members of the Stasi, the East German intelligence agency, further confessed to their participation in the campaign. As for hard evidence of the workings of the KGB’s program, and the Stasi’s involvement in it, that was lacking for a long time, causing some to doubt, but eventually, it was discovered in the archives of Bulgaria’s secret police. In the podcast episode, you can hear more about this from Dr. Douglas Selvage, historian at the Humboldt University in Berlin, who along with Christopher Nehring published a German language study irrefutably proving not only the existence of the KGB disinformation campaign but also the nature and details of the significant involvement of East German intelligence in spreading the myth. He has published major papers on the topic in the Journal of Cold War Studies, as well as on openDemocracy and the Wilson Center website. Dr. Selvage generously agreed to chat with me on this topic, and you can hear a great deal of additional information from him throughout the podcast episode, so I encourage you to listen and not just read this blog post.  

Dr. Douglas Selvage. Listen to the podcast for material from his interview. Check out the citations under Further Reading below for research and articles on this topic published by Dr. Selvage.

It would be inaccurate to suggest that Russian disinformation is entirely responsible for the invention of the conspiracy claim that HIV was developed by the U.S. government. Before the first known insertion of the narrative into the media by the KGB, some form of the conspiracy theory had already arisen among the community most affected by AIDS during the first years of the epidemic. More than a week before the first known use of the conspiracy claim by the KGB, Boston’s Gay Community News and New York’s Native, another newspaper focused on gay issues and the gay community, printed and repeated the erroneous claim that HIV was a variant of the African Swine Fever virus, and pieces in these papers argued, without evidence, that it had been brought across the Atlantic by the CIA for biological warfare purposes in Cuba. The fact that the conspiracy theory originated in a marginalized and oppressed community is no surprise. When the spread of AIDS elicited mostly homophobic sentiments by legislators and the Reagan administration seemed to be purposely dragging their feet in responding to the crisis, one can hardly blame them for beginning to suspect some sinister intentions. Likewise, as the Black community came to be greatly affected by AIDS later in the eighties, it seemed pretty reasonable to many that they may be the victims of some sort of “ethnic weapon,” especially since history showed the U.S. government was entirely capable of such atrocity, the most obvious example being the Tuskegee Experiment, the 40-year study in which 400 African American men were purposely infected with syphilis. Also fresh in the minds of the American public were the Church Committee revelations about Operations MKULTRA, the CIA search for mind control drugs, and MKNAOMI, which developed biological and chemical warfare technology. These revelations led to Richard Nixon’s 1969 executive order banning the military use of biological weapons. Certainly the Soviets had agents in America observing the media for any social and political conflicts they could leverage in their disinformation, and having recently been accused of developing biological weapons themselves, the opportunity to deflect such allegations and simultaneously discredit the Reagan administration by suggesting it had been ignoring this ban and engaging in biological warfare against America’s own citizens was too great to pass up.

If one looks up the Soviet AIDS disinformation campaign today, on the Internet, one finds that it is widely called Operation INFEKTION, when in fact, as Dr. Selvage has shown in his work, the campaign was actually called Operation Denver. There are a few reasons for that. The first is that one of the former Stasi members who first revealed that agency’s involvement in the operation, an individual whose other revelations have been shown to be mixed with falsehoods, thus discrediting him to some degree, actually claimed it was called Infektion. The other reason is that it’s just a better name. It is more evocative of the actual nature of the program, and it has led to a useful metaphor, describing the spread of conspiracy theories and disinformation as a kind of viral infection. Indeed, the New York Times even produced a great nearly hour-long documentary on the topic, complete with engaging animation, that calls the operation by this incorrect name and makes much use of that extended metaphor. It’s for that reason and for search engine optimization, that I’ve used it in the title of this episode, in order to catch those keyword searches. While he has argued against the incorrect designation of the program, Dr. Selvage has himself made clever use of the metaphor, acknowledging that conspiracy claims spread like a viral infection, especially on the Internet, where they spread as memes. He makes the fantastic point, however, that the KGB did not invent this “virus” but rather, since they modified conspiracy claims that had already appeared in order to make them spread more virally, it can be said that they engineered this claim to make it more infectious, a process Selvage cleverly calls “memetic engineering.” In order to draw a more modern parallel to the spread of Covid misinformation, it might be said that Soviet and East German intelligence performed “gain of function” research on existing conspiracy claims, and as a result, turned a small outbreak of conspiracy theory into a disinformation pandemic.

On July 17th, 1983, the very same month that this conspiracy claim appeared in newspapers serving the gay community in America, a newspaper in India called the Patriot, published an anonymous letter purporting to be from an eminent U.S. scientist. The letter claimed that the Pentagon had not abandoned its biological weapons program after Nixon’s executive order to do so, and that the CIA and the CDC had discovered and developed HIV at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland, a facility known for its research into biological warfare and defensive countermeasures against it. This would prove to be the principal Soviet contribution to the conspiracy claim. The fact that the anonymous author claimed to be an anthropologist, not an infectious disease expert, and cited sources like the magazine Army Research, Development & Acquisition, not your typical reading for an anthropologist but just the sort of publication the KGB monitored, went a long way toward demonstrating that the letter was KGB propaganda, as did the poor English of the supposed American academic who wrote the letter. But beyond these tells, the intelligence community was aware that the KGB actually helped establish the Patriot in 1967 and regularly used it as their mouthpiece to circulate propaganda. This was a tried and true method for the KGB: plant the seed of a story in an Indian newspaper and watch it get picked up and spread in other papers. For example, in 1968, during the Vietnam War, the KGB likewise forged a letter claiming that the U.S. was using biological weapons in Southeast Asia, and they spread it by placing it in a Bombay newspaper. The Patriot story did not spread far, but a couple years later, as AIDS became a global crisis, and as accusations were made of the USSR engaging in biological weapons development themselves, the KGB resumed their campaign with a vengeance. In 1985, they published a story in the Literary Gazette, their principal mouthpiece, which cited the fake Patriot letter as if it were evidence. This article argued that HIV’s spread in America was the result of experiments on unsuspecting citizens, suggested AIDS victims should sue the CIA, and warned the nations of the world not to host the U.S. Armed Forces because American soldiers were surely carriers of the scourge.

Even though these news articles, which mixed fact with baseless conspiracy fiction, were illegitimate, they could then be cited to seemingly legitimize further articles, some likewise placed by the KGB and others written by people who were unwittingly helping them spread their narrative. But what the KGB campaign really needed was an academic to lend their claim scholarly clout, and their partner agency, the Stasi, or Ministry of State Security of East Germany, provided it to them. His name was Jakob Segal, a committed Communist who had been born in Russia and studied biology in Germany. As a Jew, he had been forced to flee Nazi Germany for France, where he completed his doctorate. When the Nazis invaded France, he joined the resistance, where he likely first came in contact with Soviet intelligence. He returned to Germany after the war, becoming the head of the Institute for Applied Bacteriology in East Berlin and, according to former Stasi agents, acted as an operative or informer for the Stasi. Likely at the behest of the Stasi and KGB, or perhaps just with their sly encouragement, Segal began to produce scholarly-style literature that argued against the African origin of HIV, suggesting that the virus was an artificial synthesis of the human T-cell lymphotropic virus and a retrovirus that affects sheep—even though the technology required to recombine parts of viruses did not exist at the time and those two viruses are too distinct to even be synthesized—and asserting with no evidence whatsoever the truth of a very specific scenario: that at Fort Detrick, HIV was tested on convicts, and because of its long incubation period, it was believed to have no effect, causing the subjects to be released into the population, whereupon they made their way to New York and spread the virus through sexual contact with others. His claims relied not only on complete speculation, but also on two dubious assumptions. First, he asserted that these ex-convict test subjects must have made their way from Fort Detrick in Maryland to New York City, where the first outbreak occurred, because they were criminals, and there simply was no criminal community to accommodate them in nearby Washington, D.C., when the truth is Washington’s crime rate was extremely high at the time. And second, he claimed that, because the test subjects must have been convicts who had spent a long time in prison, they must also have become homosexual, thus explaining why they introduced the virus specifically into the gay community. Considering the stereotypes relied on and the lack of evidence provided by Segal, it is unsurprising that the scientific community largely ignored him or scorned his claims, as was the case with one AIDS expert who called it “nothing but a hypothesis, and not a very original one at that” in popular German magazine Der Spiegel. However, while the academic world never took him seriously, the press in the third world and the tabloid press in the UK, became unwitting stooges for Soviet intelligence by spreading Segal’s thesis far and wide.

A brochure by Jakob Segal and his wife. Courtesy Dr. Douglas Selvage and the Wilson Center.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., some useful idiots did their part to strengthen the resolve of Soviet propagandists and promote aspects of their disinformation by spreading a variant conspiracy theory that blamed the Soviets for engineering HIV. Dr. Selvage cleverly calls this a different “strain” of the same viral conspiracy claim, and it was promulgated by Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche is a fascinating character that everyone in America should know about, though I suspect he is largely forgotten. LaRouche became involved in far-left Marxist politics in the 1950s and ‘60s, while working as a management consultant in New York City, but as his conspiracist worldview evolved, he gradually drifted to the far-right, growing anti-Semitic. History might have forgotten him as just another voice on the lunatic fringe, if not for his surprising political career. Lyndon LaRouche ran for president in every election for about thirty years, from the mid seventies to the mid-aughts. While he never had the numbers to come close to a nomination, he had a devoted following, sometimes described as a cult, who in the mid-eighties infiltrated the Democratic party by winning some primaries for state office. Today, no less influential a figure than Roger Stone has expressed admiration for LaRouche, and I can’t help but find parallels between LaRouche and Trump, who himself drifted from the left to the right during the course of his political career and over the course of his several failed presidential campaigns and single successful campaign espoused numerous conspiracy claims. As for the LaRouchite cult infiltrating the Democratic Party, I find it very similar to Qanon wackos consuming the Republican Party from within, though the latter have proven far more successful, as they currently hold some sway over the Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives. LaRouche’s principal mouthpiece was his magazine Executive Intelligence Review, which in 1985 supported the claim that HIV was engineered at Fort Detrick, but with one crucial twist. It claimed that it had been developed by the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization, whom they asserted had been infiltrated by the Soviets, so it was not the CIA but actually the KGB who had developed the virus. Of course, this only launched a disinformation war, with the Soviets citing parts of LaRouche’s claims as further support for their own allegations. But LaRouche’s conspiracy mongering went further. Much like Covid conspiracy claims decades later, his AIDS conspiracy claims involved anti-vaccinationism.  Furthermore, his publications endorsed the notion that AIDS could be spread through even casual contact, like through insect bites, through the exchange of saliva in kissing, and the old myth about toilet seats. On the basis of these groundless fears, he organized support for a 1986 ballot initiative in California that, if it had passed, would have enforced the HIV testing of every Californian and resulted in the removal and forced confinement of those who tested positive. Frighteningly enough, almost a full third of Californians voted for this.

Eventually, the AIDS disinformation campaign seems to have been officially discontinued. When the disease began to spread more widely in the Soviet Union in the late eighties and suddenly the Kremlin was more interested in trading medical research about it, Mikhail Gorbechev found the U.S. Secretary of State less than cooperative because of the known KGB campaign to blame the disease on America. Suddenly official organs of the state, like the newspapers Izvestia and Sovetskaya Rossiya, disavowed the HIV-as-US-bioweapon thesis, and of course, within a few years, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the active measure would be admitted to, as I shared earlier. Nevertheless, Jakob Segal would continue to promote his claims until his death in 1995, and media outlets continued to amplify his misinformation through interviews. It is hard to imagine that he truly believed all the claims he made, such as that aspirin was the cure for HIV and the pharmaceutical industry was covering up this simple remedy. But there is a sense that many of those involved in the KGB campaign believed that, while they may have been spreading unproven claims, the claims were likely true or at least reflected a broader reality about the corruption and immorality of the U.S. government. Thus it is possible that, though he knew his thesis rested on assumptions, he still believed it likely, and looking at his later claims, we get the sense that eventually he came to truly believe his arguments and simply sank further and further into conspiracist delusions. For example, he would eventually finger a specific scientist, someone who had actually done a great deal to fight the AIDS epidemic, as the central villain of his narrative, responsible for the creation of HIV. Dr. Robert Gallo co-discovered HIV as the cause of AIDS in 1984 and during his long career, most of which was devoted to ending the epidemic, he developed the HIV blood test. But in Jakob Segal’s fevered imagination, since Gallo was head of the National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology in the seventies, and since in 1971, after his ban of biological weapons, Nixon converted Fort Detrick into a cancer research center, Segal saw this as de facto proof that Gallo had synthesized HIV at Fort Detrick. In fact, the NCI was extremely transparent about the cancer research conducted at Fort Detrick, and the Soviet Union’s Minister of Health even toured their lab in 1972. Interestingly, Jakob Segal’s obsession with Robert Gallo, his scapegoating of a respected scientist who was fighting the disease as being the actual person responsible for the creation of it, seems to me to parallel the bizarre and insupportable Covid conspiracy claims that have surrounded Dr. Anthony Fauci for the last few years.

Lyndon LaRouche. Public Domain image.

Despite the fact that the inner workings of the Soviet disinformation campaign have been exposed and its thesis proven false, the conspiracy claim has gone on to do serious harm, especially in Africa, which was and is ravaged by the disease and because of that has proven to be fertile ground for the propagation of the myth. The fact that the consensus of the scientific community remains that AIDS spread to humans from monkeys in Africa has made Africans and even African scientists defensive and more open to alternative narratives that do not seem to lay blame on them, even though of course no blame is actually being placed on African peoples, since it was a matter of natural cross-species transmission. As AIDS has ravaged African nations, we again have seen the tendency of those most marginalized and most effected by an epidemic giving the most credence to conspiracy claims that offer some explanation of their suffering and lay blame on an oppressive villain. For example, one newspaper in Zimbabwe in 1991 added to the myth complex the wild allegation that the CIA had spread the disease by distributing “AIDS-oiled condoms” to other countries. Major African political figures and social activists even publicly promoted the notion that AIDS was an ethnic weapon created by white powers-that-be to destroy Africa, long after this was refuted, such as Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and Kenyan Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. Of course, the continued spread of these conspiracy claims has variously discouraged safe sex practices and contributed to AIDS denialist claims that effective treatments like antiretrovirals are ineffective and alternative treatments, like Segal’s aspirin doses, are preferable. The fallout of these false conspiracy claims has been deadly.

Although the Soviet AIDS disinformation program was eventually ended and even acknowledged after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian intelligence has continued to make similar claims about other diseases. Using the same playbook, epidemics such as SARS and Ebola were routinely asserted to have been engineered by U.S. scientists at Fort Detrick as bioweapons, and among the many justifications for his invasion of the Ukraine that Putin threw at the world to see what might stick, one was the accusation that U.S. sponsored biological weapons research was being conducted at Ukrainian facilities. In fact, it has even been claimed that Covid was developed by the U.S. at Fort Detrick, in what appears to be a Chinese disinformation campaign intended to throw the lab leak theory back in American faces. This long history of disinformation campaigns and false accusations lobbed back and forth, with nations accusing and counter-accusing each other of engineering and releasing diseases that actually spread naturally should teach us, if we aren’t affected by a bad case of historical blindness, that we should be cautious and disbelieve any such claims until there is irrefutable evidence about the actual origins of diseases. As Dr. Selvage expressed to me in our interview, any notion that the U.S. developed Covid, or that it was created as a bioweapon by China, or even that it leaked accidentally from their lab, really in a way exonerates the Chinese government for their secrecy about the initial spread of the disease and their lack of international cooperation since.

*

Until next time, remember, just because a newspaper prints a claim doesn’t make it true. But that doesn’t mean that claims about the free American press being controlled in a massive conspiracy of silence and official cover-up are the least bit tenable.

Further Reading

Boghart, Thomas. “Operation INFEKTION: Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign.” Studies in Intelligence, vol. 53, no. 4, Dec. 2009, pp. 1-24. Defense Technical Information Center, apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA514366.

Geissler, Erhard, and Robert Hunt Sprinkle. “Disinformation Squared: Was the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick Myth a Stasi Success?” Politics and the Life Sciences, vol. 32, no. 2, 2013, pp. 2–99. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43287281. Accessed 17 Apr. 2023.

---. “Were Our Critics Right about the Stasi?: AIDS Disinformation and ‘Disinformation Squared’ after Five Years.” Politics and the Life Sciences, vol. 38, no. 1, 2019, pp. 32–61. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26677588.

Selvage, Douglas. “Memetic Engineering: Conspiracies, Viruses and Historical Agency.” openDemocracy, 22 Oct. 2015, www.opendemocracy.net/en/memetic-engineering-conspiracies-viruses-and-historical-agency/.

---. “Operation ‘Denver’: The East German Ministry of State Security and the KGB’s AIDS Disinformation Campaign, 1985–1986 (Part 1).” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 21, no. 4, Fall 2019, pp. 71–123. EBSCOhost, doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1162/jcws_a_00907.

---. “Operation ‘Denver.’” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, Summer 2021, pp. 4–80. EBSCOhost, doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1162/jcws_a_01024.

Selvage, Douglas, and Christopher Nehring. “Operation ‘Denver’: KGB and Stasi Disinformation regarding AIDS.” Wilson Center, 22 July 2019, www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/operation-denver-kgb-and-stasi-disinformation-regarding-aids.

Breaking News: The Hitler Diaries Fiasco

On April 20, 1945, while the stooped and shuffling Adolf Hitler, reticent to celebrate his birthday, received his usual regimen of injections and presided over a war conference in which he came to grips with his dire situation, Operation Seraglio was elsewhere underway. This operation was what many had been looking forward to, an evacuation of numerous members of Hitler’s entourage from the bunker, bound for Berchtesgaden. Aside from some evacuees, the operation was also packing up and flying out a fortune in valuables and a library’s worth of government documents. Around ten heavy trunks were carried out of the bunker and loaded onto a truck that day, and the convoy made their way to an airfield north of Berlin, dodging Allied air strikes along the way. These trunks with their mysterious contents were loaded onto a waiting plane, along with sixteen passengers. But their flight was doomed. No one knows exactly what struck them. Whether it was friendly fire from German anti-aircraft guns or an American fighter pilot who took them down, down indeed they went, crashing near the border of Czechoslovakia, outside a village called Boernersdorf. Villagers ran to the scene to find the transport burning and to hear the screams of one occupant inside. According to Hans Baur, Hitler’s pilot and one witness to his eventual suicide, when he informed Hitler of the disappearance of this flight, Hitler grew pale and appeared greatly disturbed, saying, “In that plane were all my private archives, that I had intended as a testament to posterity. It is a catastrophe!” After the fall of Berlin, the US Counter-Intelligence Corps, or CIC, searched for such private archives and documents, all of which would have great historical value. Some of these already resided in Berchtesgaden, at Hitler’s vacation residence, the Berghof, including Hitler’s love letters to Eva Braun, which had been hidden in a cave by Nazis. Eva had ordered them to be posthumously burnt, but instead a certain SS captain kept them. Additional correspondence stolen by this individual included letters between Hitler and Himmler. Despite the CIC catching wind of this document hoard and raiding the SS captain’s family home, they never recovered either set of letters. Afterward, rumors of the existence of Hitler’s personal diaries cropped up, and when the CIC investigated, they always considered it a possibility that the documents they were chasing were actually his letters to Eva Braun or Heinrich Himmler and not diaries. Historians came to the consensus that Adolf Hitler, who hated writing and much preferred to give dictation, never actually kept a diary, and as the decades passed, researchers learned of certain troves of dictated material that might also have sparked the rumors of Hitler having left private diaries behind. The first were the Bormann Notes, transcripts of conversations had at Hitler’s dinner table, published in 1953 as Hitler’s Table Talk. Some of these notes, covering 1943 to 1944, were missing, and considering their nature, with Hitler’s long and boring monologues on whatever topic arose, these could easily have been mistaken for diaries. Finally, in the 1970s, as journalist James O’Donnell researched the mysterious ten trunks lost in the plane crash for his book, The Bunker, he came to the conclusion that the historical documents that Hitler was mourning the loss of were likely the transcripts of his war conferences, which Hitler demanded be transcribed by stenographers in order to establish for posterity what he believed to be his military genius. But one particular passage from O’Donnell’s book would be latched onto and used to resurrect the rumor of Hitler’s diaries: “[D]ocuments have a way of surviving crashes,” O’Donnell wrote. “One is left with the nagging thought that some Bavarian hayloft, chicken coop, or pigsty may well have been waterproofed and insulated with the millions of words of the Führer’s unpublished, ineffable utterances, simply hauled away at dawn as loot from a burning German transport plane.”

Previously, I introduced the character of Hugh Trevor-Roper, the historian who was tasked by British intelligence with establishing the fate of Hitler, and whose work, The Last Days of Hitler, went a long way toward establishing the historical certainty of Hitler’s demise in his air raid shelter. Go back and read the previous blog post/podcast transcript, The Specter of Hitler’s Survival, for more on that. In the decades since the 1940s, Trevor-Roper had become one of the most respected historians and essayists in the world. His expertise was actually 16th and 17th-century England, but because of his work during the war, he remained an authority on Nazi Germany. He had taken the noble title of Baron Dacre of Glanton, and served as a director of the mostly respected British Times Newspapers. In the 60s and 70s, he began to seem like something of a dinosaur, receiving staunch criticism from postcolonialist historians about  some of his outmoded and frankly racist comments regarding African history. Thus, when the editor of The Times called him in 1983 to say the private diaries of Hitler had been discovered and they wanted him to authenticate them, he came to view it as a way to make himself relevant again. But at first, he thought it was a joke. It was April Fools Day, after all, and Trevor-Roper knew quite well that Hitler had stopped writing by his own hand for the last decade of his life, finding it actually painful. Thus he had always dismissed any claims of the existence of his diaries. When it became clear that the Times editor was serious, and that the paper’s new owner, the Australian newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch, was prepared to pay a large sum for English publication rights of the diaries, Trevor-Roper began to see possibilities. After all, his most popular book since The Last Days of Hitler, The Hermit of Peking, had involved the debunking of a diary as a forgery. In the book, Trevor-Roper exposed oriental scholar Sir Edmund Backhouse as a fraud and specifically discredited one of his principal sources, a supposed Chinese diary describing the Boxer Rebellion firsthand, claimed to have been recovered from a burned building. And back in the fifties, when the Bormann Notes were discovered and authenticated, he was given the opportunity of writing the introduction for them when they were published as Hitler’s Table Talk. Thus, whether or not these supposed Hitler diaries were genuine, Trevor-Roper could benefit from being involved, either by debunking them or by introducing them to the world. So what at first he took for an April Fools prank he began to view as an opportunity.

Hugh Trevor-Roper (detail of an image dedicated to public domain, courtesy Dutch National Archives)

Hugh Trevor-Roper had no love for Rupert Murdoch. As a director of the Times, he had opposed the media mogul’s acquisition of the paper, fearing he would tarnish the reputation of the Times and the Sunday Times by turning them into tabloids like his other papers, which eventually he did. Indeed, when Murdoch was negotiating the purchase of the papers, Trevor-Roper and the rest of the directors forced him to sign a pledge to preserve the integrity of the publications, though this would prove entirely toothless. Despite his dislike for Rupert Murdoch, Trevor-Roper agreed to authenticate the diaries, but only as long as he wouldn’t be rushed. He was not fluent in German, so he would have to be given the complete transcript and be given time to evaluate the diaries’ contents. Of course, he was assured, he would have all the time he needs, but a week later, before boarding a flight for Zurich to see the diaries, he was informed that Murdoch was against the clock and competing with other newspapers for the publication rights and would require Trevor-Roper’s assessment of their authenticity immediately, which was not what they had originally agreed to. Nevertheless, Trevor-Roper remained hopeful that he could take advantage of the occasion. On the plane to Zurich, he examined a transcript of a portion of the diaries that were of especial interest. These entries appeared to settle a historical mystery, indicating that Hitler did indeed know about Rudolf Hess’s secret peace mission to Britain and Hitler’s intention to disavow knowledge of the effort only if it failed. Listeners may recall me talking about Nazi Party leader Rudolf Hess and his unauthorized 1941 solo flight back in my episode on supposed psychic spies, because of Hess’s reliance on astrology and the notion that British intelligence may have gulled him into flying off to arrange peace talks using phony horoscopes. The version of events contained in the diaries caused Trevor-Roper to be even more certain that they were a fraud, since he knew of multiple accounts recording Hitler’s shocked reaction to the news of Hess’s flight, all of them contradicting the notion that he knew about it beforehand. Yet despite all these doubts, when Trevor-Roper appeared to examine the diaries at a bank in Zurich, he was taken aback to find not only a diary, but 58 volumes of a diary, along with an entire trove of Hitler’s personal things, his paintings and sketches, even the helmet he wore in the First World War. The directors and editors of the German magazine Stern, who were selling the rights to publish the diaries to the English-speaking world ahead of their own publication of them in German, assured Trevor-Roper that the diaries were genuine, telling him that three handwriting experts had authenticated the writing, that they had confirmed the provenance of the artifacts, that they had been salvaged from the plane that had crashed in 1945 in Boernersdorf, that they had confirmed the identity of the diaries’ supplier, and that the paper of the diaries had passed chemical testing to demonstrate its age. Considering all of this, as well as the reputation of the magazine Stern, and further believing that no forger would spend so much time forging so many volumes when just a few would do the trick, Trevor-Roper began to believe. He signed a non-disclosure to the effect that he wouldn’t discuss the diaries with anyone, and when the Times editor called him at his hotel room later, he said the fateful words, “I think they’re genuine.”

Later that month, Trevor-Roper observed further red flags that should have piqued his suspicions when he returned to Germany to meet the investigative journalist from Stern who had turned up the diaries. This reporter, Gerd Heidemann, was an odd fellow. He waited for Trevor-Roper at the airport, and at first, Trevor-Roper mistook the man for his driver. After this awkward start, they drove off to view Heidemann’s archive of historical artifacts that he had turned up during his investigations. As it turned out, it was a massive collection of Nazi memorabilia. The historian in Trevor-Roper was delighted by all the seemingly genuine historical objects, and he remained enthralled as Heidemann presented his further collection of Mussolini artifacts. He didn’t start to realize Heidemann had an unhealthy obsession with violent despots until his host showed him a further object: the underwear of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Still, a fanatical collector like Heidemann, called “The Bloodhound” by his colleagues, would be just the sort of person to sniff out new finds like the Hitler diaries in the illicit Nazi memorabilia market. But when Heidemann began showing him photos of a man he claimed was Martin Bormann and saying he had spoken to him, that Borman was still alive, Trevor-Roper realized that Heidemann may have been something of a gullible fellow. It was Heidemann’s own magazine, Stern, that had recently proven to the satisfaction of the world that Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary, had never escaped Berlin. Still, though, Trevor-Roper thought that surely Stern’s editors and directors knew Heidemann was this unreliable and had properly vetted the diaries. They had assured him of the handwriting’s authentication, the confirmation of the provenance, and the supportive chemical test results. Once he’d returned home, he received a phone call from Phillip Knightley, a respected special correspondent for The Sunday Times, who voiced serious concerns about the authenticity of the diaries. Knightley had written a memo after learning of the burgeoning story, urging caution, questioning how thoroughly the diaries had been examined by experts, questioning the narrative of their provenance, and reminding everyone at the paper, and specifically Rupert Murdoch, of times when journalists had been duped by similar forgeries in the past, hopeful that The Times would not now allow themselves to be made fools of in the same way. Murdoch had ignored the memo. Finally, when The Times was about to publish breaking news of the diaries’ discovery along with Trevor-Roper’s assertion that they were genuine, Knightley called him, mostly to be reassured by the venerable historian that his anxieties were groundless. Trevor-Roper obliged, assuring Knightley that the diaries were certainly real, but when he got off the phone, all his former misgivings reoccurred to him: Hitler’s known aversion to writing, the ludicrous notion that the cunning and obstinate Hitler would have approved of Rudolf Hess’s doomed solo mission for peace, and the indication that Heidemann, the man who had brought the diaries to Stern, was a credulous fool. Suddenly, Trevor-Roper had a sinking feeling that he’d made a terrible mistake, but already papers were coming off the presses linking his reputation to the diaries forever.

Gerd Heidemann. Image credit: AP (fair use)

When news of the diaries’ discovery was trumpeted to the English-speaking world, it was met with much skepticism, but this was to be expected. Indeed, one of the loudest critical voices was that of David Irving, a Holocaust denying historian whom I discussed in my episode on Holocaust denialism, “The Wrong Side of History.” In fact, David Irving was recognized as something of an expert at uncovering and authenticating historical documents, as well as debunking forgeries, so his qualms that he was aware of these diaries and that they were fakes should have been taken more seriously. However, Irving’s reputation as a historical negationist, using specious arguments to exonerate Hitler of his war crimes, meant that his objection didn’t carry the weight it might have otherwise. Behind the scenes, though, as The Sunday Times prepared their blockbuster edition, publishing actual excerpts of the diaries, Trevor-Roper, to his credit, had begun the painful process of backpedaling. He called the editorial staff just as they were celebrating the edition going to press and indicated, to their horror, that he not only had become uncertain about the diaries’ authenticity, but that he was “doing a 180-degree turn,” as those who remember the telephone conversation put it. Editor Frank Giles, stoic in the face of a great scandal, hung up and called Rupert Murdoch to tell him that their principal authenticator, the man on whose reputation their entire story was staked, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, had changed his assessment of the diaries, and asked if they should stop the presses. Murdoch answered in his Australian accent: “Fuck Dacre. Publish.” That Sunday, as 1.4 million copies of the paper were circulated, Trevor-Roper flew to Hamburg to meet with Heidemann again and clarify some details about his discovery of the diaries. Heidemann had always insisted on keeping his source anonymous, and that in itself was understandable. Smugglers of Nazi documents might face consequences if their identities were divulged, and in the past, the sources of other finds, like the papers of Goebbels and Bormann, had remained unidentified to the public. But Trevor-Roper was further troubled when Heidemann actually changed his story about provenance and suddenly stated that the other items in the archive, the artifacts that had been displayed with the diaries and had gone a long way toward convincing Trevor-Roper of their authenticity, had come into his possession separately, from a different source. Trevor-Roper came away from the meeting even more certain that he had blundered in giving his assessment without taking the proper time to be certain. The next day, he attended a press conference at the Stern offices, and when he spoke, much to the discomfort of the magazine representatives present, he admitted that the provenance of the diaries was “shaky” and that he regretted that “the normal method of historical verification [was] sacrificed to the requirements of a journalistic scoop.” As if this admission were not explosive enough, suddenly the Holocaust denier David Irving burst into the press conference waving photocopies of the diaries that he had obtained and declaring them to be forgeries. He challenged Trevor-Roper and the editors of Stern to say whether the ink had been tested for age, a question that they could not answer. The reporters present began to chant the word: “Ink! Ink! Ink!” One can hardly imagine a more humiliating end to the career of Hugh Trevor-Roper than this, being made to look like a fool on television by a Holocaust denier.

Sure enough, the news came out shortly afterward. The diaries were a fraud, and as a further stain upon Trevor-Roper’s reputation, they weren’t even a very sophisticated fraud. The forger had apparently used regular school notebooks, the paper of which contained a whitener that proved it was not as old as it was purported to be. Moreover, it seems the forger had given the notebooks an artificial look of aging simply by dipping them in tea. But this was not the end of the obvious tells. The notebooks’ binding contained polyester and viscose, which did not exist at the time the diaries were supposedly composed, and the ink in which the entries were written, which David Irving had rightly insisted be tested, also proved to be of post-war manufacture. And numerous typed labels for volumes comprising thirteen tumultuous years had all been typed on the same typewriter. Hugh Trevor-Roper was immediately suspicious of the content of the single passage given to him in transcription, that of the Hess flight, but if he had been able to read the entire diary, the truth would have been utterly apparent. The forger clearly had no historical training, as the entries contained chronological inconsistencies throughout. As it turned out, nearly the entirety of the diaries was a first-person retelling of the events chronicled in one work, Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945 by Max Domarus, and reproduced the inaccuracies of that book. As for the handwriting, there is no doubt that the forger had mastered Hitler’s signature, but authentication of the handwriting by three experts was misleading. First of all, it was more like two experts, and unbelievably, these handwriting analysts had been given separate forgeries from the same source to use as comparison! Unsurprisingly, they found all these forgeries to be consistent because of course they were forged by the same hand. As the affair unraveled later, it turned out Trevor-Roper had been egregiously misled when he examined the diaries in the Zurich bank. The Stern editors told him the paper had been chemically tested, but that was not true. In fact, it was still in the process of being chemically tested, and preliminary results had shown that other items in the trove of artifacts, such as Hitler’s artwork, contained paper whitener and were thus forgeries. Indeed, this was why Heidemann had changed his story to suggest the diaries had come from a different source. And it was a further lie that the Stern editors had confirmed their provenance and the identity of their source. In truth, only Heidemann had dealt with this mystery individual, if he even existed.

The forger, Konrad Kujau. Image via Museum of Hoaxes.

When the diaries were revealed to be forgeries, Rupert Murdoch was unapologetic. He had increased the readership of his papers with an entertaining though false story, and now he could also refuse to pay Stern for the rights to the fraud. He buried an mea culpa blurb in the next edition and opted to shift all blame on Stern with a new headline, emphasizing the “Hunt for the Forger.” During the course of the Times investigation, a few conspiracist claims emerged about who was behind the diaries, many of them based on the fact that the contents of the diary tended to paint Hitler in a somewhat positive light. It was thought that the diaries were a plot by surviving Nazis to rehabilitate Hitler’s image, or that they were a plot to raise money by aging former SS soldiers who no longer had a pension, or they were a plot by East Germany to destabilize West Germany by stoking Neo-Nazism. Not to be outdone by such conspiracy speculation and always on the lookout to throw some disinformation that may color perception of their rivals, the Soviet media apparatus jumped in, insisting it was all a plot by the CIA to exonerate the Nazis. While this mudslinging went on, the disgraced editors at Stern went about the real business of tracking down the forger. Suspect number one was Gerd Heidemann himself. As Trevor-Roper suspected, his colleagues did indeed know he was a kook. He had begun his career as a photographer for the magazine, taking on the occasional dangerous assignment, but had transitioned into investigative journalism. He had a tendency to go off the rails and grow obsessive when digging into a story. For example, he previously worked on a piece about the anonymous German novelist who used the pseudonym B. Traven, and eventually came to the dubious conclusion, based on a resemblance in a photograph, that Traven was the son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He likewise fell down the rabbit hole when he began taking an interest in Nazi memorabilia. It started when he bought Hermann Goering’s yacht, the upkeep of which proved to be very expensive, but the ownership of which put him in a peculiar position to draw out old, nostalgic Nazis and get them talking. He began hosting soirees on the yacht and recording his Nazi guests chatting over champagne, and he eventually convinced his editor that he was on to something, that he could maybe parlay this into a scoop about escaped Nazis. So he took money from the magazine, as well as from book publishers, buying memorabilia and coming to identify more and more with the Nazis he spent so much time with. Indeed, Stern’s managing editor had forbade him to continue his investigations, especially when Heidemann became so utterly convinced (again based on a dubious photograph) that Martin Bormann was alive even though Stern had proven his death. It seemed as though Heidemann had lost his mind, or that he had gone full Nazi. He’d even invited his elderly Nazi friends to his wedding, which was officiated by a couple of SS generals! Nevertheless, when Heidemann told them that he had come across the Hitler diaries during the course of his investigations into the Nazi collectibles market, one news editor in charge of historical stories secretly encouraged him and funneled more money his way. Gradually, as the affair grew larger and more money was required, other editors were taken into their confidence, until finally the magazine was entirely invested in the project despite some editors’ misgivings. And when the whole thing came apart, it was Heidemann they turned to, making it clear that he must reveal his source or it would appear that he had forged the diaries himself.

Heidemann, for his part, continued to insist on the authenticity of the diaries even despite all the evidence that they had been forged, and over the course of one grueling night, his bosses grilled him and wore him down. He claimed that he was in touch with someone who was communicating with Martin Bormann, and the elusive Nazi was going to fly to Germany from South America on a Lear jet to authenticate the diaries. But Lear jets at the time could not cross the Atlantic, and besides that, Bormann was dead, they angrily shouted at him. Obviously Heidemann was a fool who was being duped by con men. Eventually, Heidemann’s resistance began to fade and he gave them a name and address. He had received the diaries from an antiques dealer named Fischer who told him that they had come into his possession from an old villager in Boernersdorf, where the transport had crashed in 1945. In reality, this antiques dealer was an incorrigible criminal named Konrad Kujau, a deserter from the East German army and convicted counterfeiter and forger who had served time in prison for evading a jail sentence. It does seem that Kujau, who had been dutifully producing the diaries for years, undertook the forgery solely for the money, but just this year, the diaries were finally published in full, and it certainly does also appear that Kujau purposely depicted Hitler as not having planned the Holocaust. Whether he truly wanted to spread this denialist view of history or whether he simply thought it would make the forgeries more valuable, perhaps to someone like David Irving who wanted to believe such a thing, remains unknown. Kujau never spoke on this. As soon as he read in the papers that his work had been exposed as forgeries, he fled his home. But with the pressure on, and his forgery workshop having been raided, he eventually surrendered himself. Despite all the other forgeries they took out of his home, Kujau lied his face off, insisting that he was just the middleman and had no idea he was dealing forgeries. However, at one point, when his interrogators discussed the amount of money Heidemann had paid him, Kujau realized that Heidemann had been skimming off the top, embezzling from the funds that Stern had allocated to pay for the diaries. Knowing that he was on the hook for the crime while Heidemann, who also had profited, was out there free, he finally confessed. He had forged them, but, he said, intent on taking some revenge, Heidemann was in on it and knew they were forged all along.

Rupert Murdoch. Image credit: David Shankbone (CC BY 3.0)

The forgery of the Hitler diaries was perhaps the greatest hoax of modern times. Certainly it was one of the most successful forgeries in that it fooled many and was only exposed as a fraud when it achieved global attention. Stern paid nearly the equivalent of $4 million for them, which accounting for inflation would today be around $11 million, and that’s not even considering the money Stern almost earned from selling the rights to the fraud. The affair destroyed the reputation of many involved. For example, Frank Giles, editor of The Sunday Times, who boasted a long and illustrious journalistic career, died in 2019, and even though he can hardly be blamed for the scandal considering the farce of its authentication and Rupert Murdoch’s decision to publish despite rising suspicions that the diaries weren’t authentic, Giles’s obituaries were devoted almost entirely to the Hitler diaries fiasco. When he learned that the forger Kujau had implicated him, Gerd Heidemann’s first concern was for his own reputation. “I don’t want to be remembered as the man responsible for the greatest flop in newspaper history,” he confided to a friend. He and Kujau were tried together, and they both were sentenced to around four and a half years in prison, Kujau for defrauding Stern and Heidemann for his embezzlement. As for Hugh-Trevor Roper, even though it can be argued that he was lied to and forced to rush his judgment, he also suffered a grievous blow to his reputation as a shrewd and diligent historian. Indeed, his error in judgment in the Hitler diaries affair is frequently used by purveyors of the myth of Hitler’s survival as a way to somehow discredit all of his previous work investigating Hitler’s suicide. Thus the hoax had repercussions on history and misinformation far wider than one might expect. For example, while Heidemann was ruined, Kujau, the real culprit, parlayed his lies into a career. He opened a successful shop, selling his forgeries to the public as “genuine fakes,” and his forged artwork can still be found in books published after the scandal, attributing them falsely to Adolf Hitler. And worst of all, we find that Rupert Murdoch came out of the scandal entirely unscathed. He ended up losing no money on the forgeries and actually profiting from the affair, as his Times newspapers recorded a boost in circulation. One can tentatively draw a line between this affair, which seems to have taught Murdoch that entertainment trumps journalistic integrity and truth, to the propagandistic practices of Murdoch’s NewsCorp and specifically his FOX Corporation and Fox News Channel in America. The Hitler diaries showed him that he can knowingly publish falsehoods, ignore experts and science, and simply change the narrative when lies he has amplified are ultimately exposed. In his zeal for breaking news, he has broken the news. This same greed and cynicism was on full display when Fox News promoted election fraud lies even though Murdoch has said under oath that he thought such claims lacked merit. It remains to be seen whether the current defamation lawsuit in which he is embroiled will change the way he distorts reality with his media empire, but I, for one, am not holding out much hope.

Until next time, remember, if you or someone you love still clings to election fraud claims because Fox News promoted them, the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit has proven beyond doubt that neither Murdoch nor the worst of the Fox hosts, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, ever actually believed these conspiracy lies. Not that definitive proof ever swayed folks from believing nonsense.
*Deep sigh.  

Further Reading

Harris, Robert. Selling Hitler: The Extraordinary Story of the Con Job of the Century—the faking of the Hitler “Diaries.” Pantheon Books, 1986.

McGrane, Sally. “Diary of the Hitler Diary Hoax.” The New Yorker, 25 April 2013, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/diary-of-the-hitler-diary-hoax.

Steers, Edward. Hoax: Hitler’s Diaries, Lincoln’s Assassins, and Other Famous Frauds. University Press of Kentucky, 2021.