Episode 10: Atlantis

 Episode Summary: It just wouldn't be a show like this without an Atlantis episode.

Bike summary: 2.4 miles, 121.6 calories.

The inevitable Atlantis episode is like every other Atlantis "documentary" I've ever seen (possibly it was even the prototype) as there are shots of a lot of different things and a voice over about how mysterious and ancient they are -- only this is In Search Of, so the voice over is given by Leonard Nimoy, which gives it a kind of gravitas. 

There's Easter Island (maybe the Easter Islanders made the statues?), the Olmec heads, a bunch petroglyphs or geoglyphs (including the Cerne Abbas Giant, which was recently dated to late Anglo-Saxon or early Norman times -- in other words, about when it's first mentioned in written sources. It also may have originally been Jesus, before being overgrown during the English Reformation and re-cut to mock Oliver Cromwell. It's complicated) and a "city older than the pyramids atop the Andes".

"Never have we been so close to finding Atlantis," Nimoy intones. 

There are some scenes of Akrotiri, which is described as "reminiscent of the Minoans" and the Antikythera Mechanism, which in chronological terms comes from closer to the time of Christ than to the Minoans. Nimoy also says something about how the first "modern" computer was invented in I'm not sure what it says in my notes, could be 1922, or maybe even 1940. Regardless, mechanical and analog computers predate even electromechanical computers (by some definitions, IBM is older than the computer, which is weird). 

The episode goes into the usual points, talking about Plato and his account, though relying on the shorter version in Timaeus. Nimoy talks about the wealthy land "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" and how there was once a great land mass in the Atlantic. 

Then we get our first interview -- Dr Maxine Asher, who says she started excavating an Atlantean shipwreak off the coast of Cadiz before the Spanish authorities revoked her permission to dive and so has no artifacts or photographs, other than an amphora. Asher was a fraudster who ran degree mills and believed the "Jews and Catholics" were trying to suppress her Atlantis discoveries. I guess this is something they get together to do on weekends, after the Jews are done with the week's Freemasonry, Communism and International Banking and the Catholics have subverted liberalism, taken over public schoolds, used convents as brothels for priests and the like. 

Interestingly the real lost city/civilization Tartessos is widely believed to be near Cadiz. 

Then there's a shot of the Piri Reis map, supposedly showing ice free Antarctica. This continues to annoy me, as it keeps being brought up in the Atlantis discourse to this day. In the first case, if it is a super advanced ancient map, it doesn't show Cape Horn and the Straights of Magellan! That's a big thing to miss for ancient astronauts. Moreover, according to translations of the map the information from the time of Alexander the Great pertains to the Near East, while the information about the coast of South America comes from captured Portugeuese ships. The origin, where zero degrees of longitude and zero degrees of latitude meet, is at Alexandria. I don't know what projection is used, but it's probably not the Mercator.    

And then we go to the Carribean for the Bimini Road. I think most of the episode is set here, which involves an archeologist, an Italian count/diver, a psychic and Peter Tompkins of the Bermuda Triangle  and talking plants episodes. The "road" was discovered by people looking for evidence of Edgar Caycee's prediction that Atlantis would start to rise again in the late 60s and I believe the psychic was from the Caycee Foundation. They claim to have found a 3,000 year old shipwreck beneath a 16th century one and suggest that Bimini was Atlantis' western port and Cadiz its eastern. 

One of the weird things is that everyone talks about Atlantis as having awe-inspiring advanced technology, but what we are shown as "Atlantean" are not very advanced -- especially since the producers don't have their dates right. The story in Timeaus is that it came down through Critias' family, his great-grandfather having heard the story from Solon, who died around 560 BC. It was set some 9,000 years before him, so call it 9500 BC. For context, this would make the destruction of Atlantis older than Gobekli Tepe and contemporaneous with the beginning of agriculture in the Ancient Near East. 

If Atlantis did exist at those dates, its pottery and architecture would be thousands of years in advance of everyone else. But the episode gives a date range of 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, or 3,000 BC to 1000 BC, which is roughly the Bronze Age. 

Then they talk about Tiwanaku, the "city atop the Andes older than the pyramids" as being 10,000 years old, but this is only a segue to talk about the Moche people, who apparently made statues of people of all the races, which somehow proves Atlantis. I guess the unspoken assumption is that they're pre-Columbian.

Podcast summary

Jeb and Blake were once again joined by Sharon Hill and they have a lot of fun with this one. I imagine Atlantis is one of those things that gets real archeologists all bent out of shape. As evidence, I give you how annoyed Jeb gets with the brief shots of different things. 

"Here are many things from around the world and now we're going to tell you things that aren't true about them," he says.

He's confused by opening oin Easter Island and notes that nothing Nimoy says in the first two minutes is correct, eventuially asking what any of it has to do with Atlantis. 

Blake calls it a "litany of mystery", which WBAGNFAB and Jeb calls it a myth parade. I like to think of it as a mythquerade -- there's some interesting real stuff hiding behind this crap. Not about Atlantis, but about the things they're trying to link together seemingly at random in and of themselves. For instance, I'm sure we know or suspect we know more about the Olmec than just the heads, but whenever they're brought up it's about the heads and how they "prove" Atlantis or some other Old World contact, as though an entire civilization did nothing else than exist to provide racists and tv producers with B-roll. 

Anyways, they bring up the idea of "flat antiquity" -- there's us, the recent past and everything else, which is genericly "ancient". This is, to an extent, part of the human condition (as one of those people who thinks that the mid-90s was 10 years ago, I know) and I wonder if it might be related to the modern trope of Medieval Stasis, where the author of a sci-fi or fantasy novel will have 10,000 years pass between stories, but next to nothing changes in the setting.  

Another concept is hyperdiffusionism, which tries to trace every cultural or technological advance back to a presumed "mother civilization." It's ancient aliens without the aliens and it relies on things like Elisha Gray inventing the telephone at the same time as Alexander Graham Bell as fantasy. It also falls apart when one considers that trying to find a common origin for Egyptian and Mayan pyramids is stupid since they had different purposes, designs and the Egyptians stopped building them some 3,000 years before the height of Mayan civilization. 

The result of hyperdiffusion, which still doesn't provide any proof of Atlantis, is that, as Blake says "Atlantis is everywhere and nowhere."

Maybe Atlantis is the friends we made along the way?

Sharon Hill gets to talk about the Minoan eruption and how it ejected 61 cubic kilometers of debris, forming the modern island of Santorini and may have caused typhoons in various places around the Med. Jeb notes people (read: Simcha Fisher and James Cameron)  have tried playing with the date to associate it with the Exodus. They note that no one ever goes looking for Plato's Cave and Jeb says "Ten thousand years ago, beyond the Pillars of Hercules? In other words it was a long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away."

Jeb sighs audibly when talking about the Antikythera mechanism. "It's first century BC, it's not Atlantis!"

Blake says it's "evidence" of lost knowledge. "They lived in stone buildings, how could they have had gears?"

"I live in a wooden house and I have microchips," Jeb counters. 

They talk about how fewer people today talk about the Bimini Road and discus Peter Tompkins as the voice on the radio in the Bermuda Triangle episode. I don't know if it is or not, it does kind of sound like him, but he has a Mid-Atlantic Accent, so he sounds like William F Buckley, Jr. Given the number of WASPs who moved the Miami area over the years, it's possible there were quite a few people with that accent in those days.

They talk about a lot more and Atlantis is one of my favorite subjects, so I will bring this to a close. One day I hope to launch a podcast of my home, talking about the transformation of Atlantis from allegory to a supposed place still being looked for. 

  

Episode Nine: Martians

 Episode summary: Is there life on Mars? Do we take a look at the law man beating up the wrong guy? Is this film a saddening bore? Were there any sailors fighting in the dance hall?

Bike summary: 2.3 miles 118.8 calories

And God said, let there be Nimoy. 

This episode opens with a 1970s understanding of the evolution of the solar system and rocky planets. It's a lot of lava for some reason. I guess film of the Sun was in its infancy. It's like Nimoy's Genesis, especially when he says things like "The planets were the cinders left by the cosmic holocaust". The writing of this show frequently veers into attempts to be poetic and ends up as purple prose, but it's never dull or banal. It's hard to imagine any show today being writen with such aspiration, especially in this genre. Maybe that's why it's survived to be rebroadcast on the History Channel and sold on DVD -- you can't even get all of America's Castles on DVD. 

Then we get a bit of a taste of the history of cinema, as we're shown a lot of Georges Melies' Le Voyage dans la Lune because the idea of extraterrestials would have been completely unfamiliar to viewers in 1977. Then we get Percival Lowell and the canals he saw (he may have been seeing the blood vessels in his eyes). He believed that Mars once had oceans and that Earth might lose its. 

But then we go to the Viking missions, that landed probes on Mars and analyzed some soil (I think it's technically regolith like on the Moon) and rocks, as well as taking photographs. (It's astonishing -- this was just a few years after the last Moon landing and I'm sure a lot of people thought Viking was preliminary to a manned mission to Mars, instead of 44 years after this episode aired and we're doing cool things like flying helicopters there, but have yet to set foot on it.)

Nimoy says that the analyses done by Viking show that Mars was once like Earth, before an ice age and dessication. As we know, we were not on the cusp of a new ice age. There was (and is) desertification, but much of it is due to human activity, not some pre-ordained water loss. 

The thing that really amazed me about this episode was that they didn't talk about the Face! 

Podcast summary

Jeb and Blake pointed out that this episode doesn't mention War of the Worlds, Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars books, or theosophy, which all influenced each other and were influenced by Lowell's observations of Mars. They also point out that the episode doesn't talk about Giovanni Schiaparelli, the Italian astronomer who first observed what he called canali or channels on Mars. 

But the idea of Mars as a dying planet was fueled by a marriage of Lowell's canals to 19th century ideas on evolution and Darwinism. Everything "evolved" -- "races", nations, civilizations and even planets. But it wasn't really scientific evolution, it was more like Star Trek evolution (and, unsurprisingly, bad sci fi traces its tropes back here) with "evolutionary levels", inevitable transformations and predictable endpoints (for a good example, see the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Distant Origin"; relatedly, I once read an anthology of so-called Golden Age science fiction that opened with such a story from very early in the genre's history and a note by editor Isacc Asimov that in the late 30s or early 40s he submitted such a story to John Campbell, who rejected it for being cliched and unscientific).

It led into the same kind of thinking that we got in the Mummy's Curse -- there are all these ancient civilizations on earth that declined into decadence and were taken over by Europeans, eventually European civilization will also decline. And therefore Mars would be advanced in planetary and social evolution, so it would be inhabited by "minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic".

From there they talked about "spacebro culture" and the idea of terraforming Mars, which they rejected, since there's no air or water (there's also no magnetic field and not much atmosphere, but I don't think they make sunscreen with high enough spf). They also pointed out that a lot of the questions asked by the makers of Viking still haven't been resolved, although the consensus today is that Mars did once have liquid water on the surface. 

They also discussed the meteorite found in Antarctica that was believed to show evidence of microfossils, ALH84001, and talked about the panspermia hypothesis, which they said wasn't impossible but just puts off the big question, so it seems pointless. To that I say it's turtles all the way down.   

Episode Eight: The Mummy's Curse

 Episode summary: Say Akhenaten one more time, I dare you 

Bike summary: 2.2 miles, 112 calories 

We're back with the weirdness.

This episode opens with two women chanting "Akhenaten" in unison (and boy did I get tired of hearing it quickly) and saying things like "We call out the name, Akhenaten" before Nimoy tells us in voice over about the women were in a play and before opening night they had identical dreams, except that one was struck across the face and other across the chest. The next morning the first went partially blind and the second was suffering from life-threatening internal bleeding . . . so the legend says (I wonder if this was told to the actresses in the recreation?)

Having established the idea that Akhenaten was cursed by the priests of Amun-Re for his heresy, they then cut to a shot of the mask of Tutankhamun, a pharoh who is famous for not being Akhenaten. This isn't the last time that the pharoh who is cursed or cursing changes, either. 

Then, in a jump cut that can cause whiplash, we get b-roll of Downtown Abbey: Highclere Castle, where Henry Herbert, the Sixth Earl of Carnarvon, looks and sounds very much the part of the British lord: he's in tweed, he smokes a pipe and he speaks with that clipped Received Pronounciation accent you never hear any more. He talks about his father, the Fifth Earl, who financed the excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb and died shortly thereafter. Lord Carnarvon could tell a good story and he talks about how when his father died, all the electricity in Cairo went out and when he returned to Highclere, he was told how the exact moment the fifth Earl died his dog started howling and died. 

(I have Lone Star-ish relationship to the Earls of Carnarvon, by coincidence. One of my earliest ancestors in what's now the United States was Major Simon Willard, a soldier, explorer, politician, trader and land speculator who was born in Kent and immigrated to Massachusetts in 1634 and died in 1676. He had three wives and 18 children, of whom quite a few lived to adulthood and sired children themselves. One of his descendents was Joseph Clapp Willard, co-founder of what's now the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, DC. His son was Joseph E. Willard, a Democratic politician in Virginia who served as United States Ambassador to Spain. He had two daughters, Belle Wyatt Willard, who married Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Mary Elizabeth Willard, who married Mervyn Herbert, half brother of the fifth Earl. Mervyn's full brother, Aubrey Herbert, who was the mother of Laura Herbert, wife of Evelyn Waugh. Geneaology: it's like a boring game of Five Degrees of Kevin Bacon sometimes.)

According to Nimoy, a tablet was found in Tutankhamun's tomb, which has now disappeared, that said "Death will slay with his wings all who enter here." I think this has been traced to a 19th century novel called The Mummy. It's odd to worry about curses when excavating tombs, since virtually all Egyptian pharaonic tombs were robbed in Antiquity. In a gothic-sounding recitation, Nimoy quickly lists off the names of the people who died soon after opening Tutankhamun's tomb -- Carnarvon, Jay Gould (whom I thought was the "robber baron" involved in the Erie War and Black Friday, but it was his son) and a few others. 

Then, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, we get back to the story of the play from the opening narration, by a man Nimoy introduces as an historian: Henry Lincoln. I was completely blindsided by this appearance (and another great RP accent). Lincoln was a script-writer, who if not for one other thing, would be best known for the three Doctor Who scripts he wrote in the 60s that featured Yetis, the Great Intelligence and introduced long-running, beloved character Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart (played by the late Nicholas Courtney from 1968 until 2008). The other thing, unfortunately, was Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which is Chariots of the Gods for people who think the Templars built the Pyramids. 

After yet more "Akhenaten Akhenaten" (Let's face it, you can't akhenaten anything), there's a mostly accurate description of the Aten heresy and how the priest of Amun-Re recovered their power after Akhenaten's death, explaining why they might want to curse him. Except we haven't been talking about the curse of Akhenaten, but of Tutankhamun, and the curse has been about vengeance for disturbing the king's tomb and the things inside he needs for the afterlife, not the revenge of reempowered clerics. 

Immediately, after that Nimoy starts talking about how the mummy of Ramesses II was flown to Paris to be examined (he was given an Egyptian passport with "Former King" written on the "Occupation" form, which considering that Fuad II was in exile and the other mummies on international tours, must have meant that Egypt was a net exporter of kings), even though not only was Ramesses not part of the same dynasty as Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, but his tomb was looted in antiquity and his mummy transferred out of the Valley of the Kings to Deir el-Bahri before being discovered in 1881 and put on display -- 1976 is a little late for that curse to manifest. 

Finally Nimoy casts doubt on the whole thing by pointing out that Howard Carter lived a long and happy life. He doesn't say it, but Lady Evelyn Beauchamp, the fifth earl's daughter and one of the first people in the tomb, was still alive when the episode broadcast. Stephen Fry said on QI that one of the excavators died in the 1970s in his 90s and the New York Times headline was "Mummy's curse strikes again".

All I know is that the word Akhenaten has lost all meaning for me.

Podcast summary:

Jeb said very early on what he thought of the whole thing: "A lot of this is crazy white people."

He explained that many French and British people involved in colonialism were seeking to validate the imperial project. They also had anxiety about their own civilization succombing to decadence and superstition like the ones they were busy subjugating. I get his point, but I guess I don't understand how civilizational anxiety leads to believing in curses. Jokes about how the United States' current political dysfunction is due to being built on an Indian burial ground aside, although it might not be too dissimilar, come to think of it -- Jay Anson claimed the house in The Amityville Horror was built on a field where the local Native American abandoned their elderly and mentally ill to die (spoiler: he was making it up). I guess believing in ghosts and curses (or ethnic or religious minorities) is easier than actually reading about political science. Or confronting political issues. 

A lot of the curse mythos, they note, seems to come from newspapers, most of which were locked out of the tomb opening and spread stories of a curse to make up for the fact that they didn't have an actual story. "I'm not saying the Titanic was cursed," Blake notes. "But everyone involved with her is now dead."

They talk a bit about the play, comparing it to the films of Kenneth Anger. It was written by Arthur Weigall, a journalist and archeologist who had a professional rivalry of sorts with Howard Carter. He helped introduce Akhenaten to a popular audience. They say Weigall "made Akehenaten famous", although I think Sigismund Freud is more deserving of that "honor". 

 

Episode Seven: Earthquakes

 Episode summary: Back in the 70s, only the Earth itself was trying to kill California. Now it's all the elements. 

Bike summary: 2.6 miles, 131.6 calories 

Another largely fact-based episode that really takes advantage being based in California. There's lots of footage of the San Francisco earthquake from 1906, the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, images of then-contemporary San Francisco and the Good Friday earthquake in Alaska in 1964. (Supposedly, many of the fires from the San Fransisco earthquake, which really devastated the city, were set deliberately because people had fire insurance but not earthquake insurance.) 

Nimoy says that 28,000 buildings were destroyed in San Francisco. If it happened today, the NIMBYs there would not let it be rebuilt. (Another thing that's never talked about, but which I suddenly wonder: how local were the effects? The Bay Area was, of course, not nearly as developed back then, but no one ever talks about the effects on Oakland or Marin County.)

Earthquakes seem to have been in the zeritgeist somehow. Two major movies, 1978's Superman and the last James Bond film with Roger Moore, A View to a Kill in 1985, featured villains who wanted to destroy California by setting off the San Andreas Fault. 

A lot of the episode is, however, taken up by speculation -- or Nimoy was pitching a screenplay. He says two British scientists predicted that the combined gravitational field of all the planets lining up on one side of the Sun in 1982 would play havoc with the Sun's magnetic field, causing lots of solar flares and this would somehow result in devastating earthquakes breaking out across the world.

In SF this would cause the Golden Gate Bridge to fail, the Embarcadero to collapse full of cars, huge firestorms would result from downed powerlines sparking ruptured gas mains, etc, until everyone was dead (except for one, gravelly voiced geologist-hero, played by Nimoy, who would lead survivors out of the burning city and find love at the same time). It's incredibly over the top. 

There's also a bit about studying animals' activity to see if they predict earthquakes, especially cockroaches. I know that dogs and horses have been reported acting strangely before earthquakes, but I can't imagine most insects care that much about them. They're pretty hardy. 

Podcast summary.

Jeb and Blake were joined by geologist Sharon Hill, who was amused there was an add for Rice-a-roni in the 1906 footage. 

She said that the 1964 Alaska eartthquake was signifigant because geologists from the United States Geological Survey were able to get on the scene very quickly and it was also the first earthquake understood in terms of plate tectonics, which was a very new theory then.

As far as the animals predicting earthquakes, she said that she wants it to be true and despite there being a large number of anecdotes, there's no good data. Similarly, she said that one technique geologists are looking at to predict earthquakes are emissions of electrons from the earth, but they only happen sometimes. 

Blake mentioned a Japanese legend that earthquakes are caused by a giant catfish trapped in the earth and its attempts to break free. He said earthquakes will continue "Unless we find that catfish and kill it."

I think we're gonna need a bigger pot of gumbo. (And now I'm sad that the Border Cafe in Harvard Square, that served great Tex-Mex and Cajun food, shut down.)