Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #873 The New Age, Fascism and the Atlantis Myth

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This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: The gulf between Nazism and the so-called New Age might seem to be so wide as to be unbridge­able. Sad­ly, that is not the case. At the core of Nazi belief was occultism, draw­ing on Pan-Ger­man­ic mythol­o­gy deriv­ing from the Thule Soci­ety, arios­o­phy, ele­ments of Hin­du reli­gious doc­trine and more com­mon­ly rec­og­niz­able belief sys­tems such as astrol­o­gy.

The SS Ahnenerbe drew togeth­er many of these threads and anoint­ed them with a man­tle of respectabil­i­ty.

Many of these same ele­ments have sur­vived and man­i­fest­ed in the so-called counter-cul­ture.

As a result, New Age sects and reli­gion have fre­quent­ly dove­tailed with ele­ments of Nazi and fas­cist phi­los­o­phy. (For more about the Nazi/fascist/New Age con­nec­tion, see–among oth­er pro­grams–FTR #‘s 170172221 as well as L‑2. The inti­mate rela­tion­ship between ele­ments of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, mind con­trol, cults and fas­cism are dis­cussed in–among oth­er pro­grams–AFA #7Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M7, and FTR #291. The recent under­ground film “Thrive” is very much worth exam­in­ing in this regard.)

We intro­duce the theme of the pro­gram with dis­cus­sion of some huge works of art in Kaza­khstan. Note that an ana­lyst referred dis­mis­sive­ly to the notion that these were built by ancient astro­nauts linked to Hitler, Atlantis, the Hyper­bore­ans, Lemuria and/or any num­ber of com­mon focal points of Nazi occultism.

One of the prin­ci­ple fea­tures of the “Nazi/Atlantis/New Age syn­the­sis” is a fun­da­men­tal­ly racist con­cept called “poly­ge­n­e­sis.” Inher­ent in the con­tention that parts of the human species orig­i­nat­ed from out­er space, Atlantis, etc., poly­ge­n­e­sis is cen­tral to the “sci­en­tif­ic racism” prop­a­gat­ed by eugeni­cists and their Nazi pupils.

Among the edi­fices sit­ed by occult poly­ge­n­e­sis advo­cates is Tiwanaku in Bolivia, seen by SS offi­cer Edmund Kiss as proof of the set­tle­ment of Latin Amer­i­ca by “Aryans” from Atlantis, Hyper­borea, Lemuria etc.

The notion of an ancient, Aryan-con­trolled past brought low by “sub-humans,” (gen­er­al­ly grouped around “Da Joos”) recalls a com­mon fea­ture of fascism–a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with a long-gone, ide­al­ized past. (We high­light­ed this in our dis­cus­sions with Peter Lev­en­da about his land­mark text The Hitler Lega­cy.) The New Age/Atlantis/Nazi con­junc­tion con­sti­tutes a form of “weaponized reli­gion,” and it epit­o­mizes Peter’s con­cept of Nazism as a cult.

The pro­gram high­lights the polit­i­cal and reli­gious phi­los­o­phy of “eso­teric Nazism,” a sub­ject we will explore in our next pro­gram as well. One of the prime expo­nents of “eso­teric Nazism” was Miguel Ser­ra­no, a Chilean Nazi who was also dis­cussed in our con­ver­sa­tions with Peter Lev­en­da.

Fus­ing tra­di­tion­al Nazi anti-Semi­tism with var­i­ous occult strains, Ser­ra­no posit­ed that the Nazis and Hitler were the man­i­fes­ta­tion of an oth­er­world­ly and supe­ri­or civ­i­liza­tion which would ulti­mate­ly tri­umph after an apoc­a­lyp­tic, cat­a­stroph­ic war involv­ing UFOs,   Aryans from Antarc­ti­ca, “Hyper­borea” etc. If some of this dis­cus­sion seems opaque, bear in mind that eso­teric Nazism fus­es polit­i­cal the­o­ry with mythol­o­gy.

In this respect, it exem­pli­fies yet anoth­er aspect of Nazism we ana­lyzed in our dis­cus­sions with Peter Levenda–the con­cept of Nazism as a cult. One should not be over­ly dis­mis­sive of eso­teric Nazism, as it is held in high esteem by some well-con­nect­ed, deter­mined and lethal indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: 

  • Ele­ments of com­mon­al­i­ty between the phi­los­o­phy of Julius Evola and Ser­ra­no.
  • The dove­tail­ing of Ser­ra­no’s phi­los­o­phy with that of aspects of Hin­du the­ol­o­gy.
  • The rela­tion­ship between the Dalai Lama’s polit­i­cal out­look and that of Ser­ra­no.

1. We intro­duce the them of the pro­gram with dis­cus­sion of some huge works of art in Kaza­khstan. Note that an ana­lyst referred dis­mis­sive­ly to the notion that these were built by ancient astro­nauts linked to Hitler, Atlantis, the Hyper­bore­ans, Lemuria and/or any num­ber of com­mon focal points of Nazi occultism.

Much of that Nazi occultism has been incor­po­rat­ed into the so-called “New Age,” which we pro­nounce “Newage” (rhymes with “sewage”).

“Built by the Ancients, Seen from Space” by Ralph Blu­men­thal; The New York Times; 11/3/2015.

“High in the skies over Kaza­khstan, space-age tech­nol­o­gy has revealed an ancient mys­tery on the ground.

Satel­lite pic­tures of a remote and tree­less north­ern steppe reveal colos­sal earthworks–geometric fig­ures of squares, cross­es, lines and rings the size of sev­er­al foot­ball fields, rec­og­niz­able only from the air and the old­est esti­mat­ed at 8,000 years old.

The largest, near a Neolith­ic set­tle­ment is a giant square of 101 raised mounds, its oppo­site cor­ners con­nect­ed by a diag­o­nal cross, cov­er­ing more ter­rain than the Great Pyra­mid of Cheops. anoth­er is a kind of three-limbed swasti­ka, its arms end­ing in zigza­gs bent coun­ter­clock­wise. . . .

. . . . “I don’t think they were meant to be seen from the air,” Mr. [Dmitriy] Dey, 44, said in an inter­view from his home­town, Kostanay, dis­miss­ing out­landish spec­u­la­tions involv­ing aliens and Nazis. (Long before Hitler, the swasti­ka was an ancient and near-uni­ver­sal design ele­ment.) he the­o­rizes that the fig­ures built along straight lines on ele­va­tions were “hor­i­zon­tal obser­va­to­ries to track the move­ments of the ris­ing sun. . . .”

2. Next, we exam­ine the link between the revival of the Atlantis myth and the advent of sci­en­tif­ic racism. Both would find res­o­nance with the Nazi SS and the Ahnenerbe research bureau.

In Bolivia, with the high­est per­cent­age of indige­nous peo­ple in Latin Amer­i­ca, the Atlantis/polygenesis syn­the­sis pro­vid­ed the white over­lords with intel­lec­tu­al ratio­nal­iza­tion of their supe­ri­or­i­ty.

Study­ing the city of Tiwanaku, Edmund Kriss posit­ed that the supe­ri­or “Aryan” race (from Atlantis, of course) built Tiwanaku. Lat­er Kriss fur­thered his “research” work­ing for the SS and the Ahnenerbe.

“Andean Atlantis: Race, Sci­ence and the Nazi Occult in Bolivia” by Matthew Gild­ner; theappendix.net; 6/5/2013.

As the train steamed around the bend, Lake Tit­i­ca­ca became vis­i­ble far to the north. The morn­ing sun danced on the water. The majes­tic Cordillera Real tow­ered beyond. The whis­tle howled. The engine lurched. After an ardu­ous jour­ney from Berlin, ama­teur arche­ol­o­gist and future SS com­man­der Edmund Kiss had final­ly reached his des­ti­na­tion: the ruins of the ancient city-state ofTiwanaku.

Tiwanaku had been an object of west­ern fas­ci­na­tion since 1549, when a mot­ley band of Span­ish con­quis­ta­dors encoun­tered the ruins deep in the Andes, in what is today Bolivia. Mas­sive stone gate­ways, enor­mous gran­ite mega­liths, colos­sal earth­works, intri­cate­ly-carved stele, mys­te­ri­ous glyphs—the Spaniards mar­veled at their dis­cov­ery. Asked of the ori­gins of the ruins and the fate of the civ­i­liza­tion that con­struct­ed them, local indige­nous caciques, or lords, stat­ed that they were from a time long past, and that their orig­i­nal inhab­i­tants had been destroyed by a great flood.

Its antiq­ui­ty so obvi­ous, its prove­nance so uncer­tain, Tiwanaku became one of the great mys­ter­ies of mod­ern arche­ol­o­gy. Dur­ing the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, the ruins attract­ed a host of Euro­pean nat­u­ral­ists that spec­u­lat­ed on the civ­i­liza­tion that built the mon­u­men­tal struc­tures. Some attrib­uted the site to ancient Egyp­tians, oth­ers to beard­ed Euro­peans. All agreed that the ances­tors of Lake Titicaca’s local peo­ples, the Aymara, would have been inca­pable of accom­plish­ing such a mag­nif­i­cent feat. But if native Andeans hadn’t con­struct­ed Tiwanaku, then who had?

Kiss dis­em­barked at Tiwanaku with a bold the­o­ry. Tall and bespec­ta­cled, his face pink from the unre­lent­ing Alti­plano sun, he stood out among the Aymara porters shuf­fling past. Their rur­al, ‘unciv­i­lized’ con­di­tion only strength­ened his con­vic­tion that the ruins were built a mil­lion years ago by his Aryan ancestors—an ancient Nordic race—who had migrat­ed from the Lost City of Atlantis.

Kiss’s Atlantis the­o­ry may have been strange; but stranger still was the fact that it was hard­ly new. For decades, Boli­vians them­selves had been pon­der­ing their Altan­tean ancestry—in fact, for many of the same rea­sons that Kiss had. A con­nec­tion to Atlantis empow­ered Bolivia’s Euro­pean-descen­dant aris­toc­ra­cy for the very same rea­sons that it attract­ed Nazis. It gave them their own pri­vate Gar­den of Eden; and it rein­forced the myth of white suprema­cy.

The leg­end of Atlantis traces its ori­gins to Pla­to, who intro­duced the fabled city in the dia­logues Timaeus and Critias. He told of an advanced island civ­i­liza­tion beyond the “Pil­lars of Her­cules” that was ruled by a “remark­able dynasty of Kings” endowed with unimag­in­able wealth. The Kings, hav­ing grown overzeal­ous, set out to con­quer Athens and enslave its peo­ples. The Athe­ni­ans mobi­lized a hero­ic defense. But the con­flict angered the gods. They sent earth­quakes and floods, and Atlantis was “swal­lowed up by the sea and van­ished.”

Clas­si­cists have long main­tained that Atlantis was a fable that the ancient philoso­pher invent­ed to warn of the arro­gance of pow­er. Over the cen­turies, how­ev­er, Plato’s leg­end acquired an air of truth. Dur­ing the Renais­sance, tales of Atlantis cir­cu­lat­ed in the Euro­pean imag­i­na­tion, borne on Human­ist inquiry and the dis­cov­ery of the Amer­i­c­as. Six­teenth-cen­tu­ry Span­ish chron­i­clers, from Bar­tolomé de las Casas to Fran­cis­co López de Gómara, drew par­al­lels between the New World and Plato’s Lost City, as did Fran­cis Bacon and Thomas Moore of Great Britain. For French schol­ars who believed that humans had mul­ti­ple ori­gins, Atlantis evi­denced the exis­tence of man before Adam.

But it was dur­ing the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry that inter­est in the fabled Lost City explod­ed. A Min­neso­ta politi­cian and ama­teur anti­quar­i­an named Ignatius Don­nel­ly is wide­ly cred­it­ed for the Atlantis revival. In 1882, his best­seller, Atlantis: The Ante­dilu­vial World, didn’t just argue that Plato’s Atlantis exist­ed; it claimed that Atlantis had shaped oth­er ancient cul­tures, from the Maya to the Egyp­tians. Pop­u­lar and sci­en­tif­ic inter­est in Atlantis flour­ished. The Roy­al Geo­graph­ic Soci­ety of Lon­don and the U.S. Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Soci­ety were soon spon­sor­ing research on the lost city’s loca­tion and fund­ing quixot­ic and, at times, unnec­es­sar­i­ly dead­ly expe­di­tions.

It’s often over­looked that this “Atlantis revival” coin­cid­ed with the apogee of poly­ge­n­e­sis, one of the fun­da­men­tal assump­tions of sci­en­tif­ic racism. Poly­ge­n­e­sis was an alter­na­tive the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion that reject­ed the com­mon ori­gins of humans, a belief root­ed in Chris­t­ian cre­ation­ism and sus­tained by Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion. Poly­genists divid­ed humans into sep­a­rate bio­log­i­cal species, or races, that each orig­i­nat­ed and evolved inde­pen­dent­ly. Races were clas­si­fied accord­ing to innate, inher­i­ta­ble phys­i­cal attributes—that is, not just skin col­or, but cra­nial capac­i­ty.

Locat­ing those ori­gins, how­ev­er, was more com­pli­cat­ed. If dark­er skinned peo­ples orig­i­nat­ed in Africa, as poly­genists had long assumed, the where did the lighter-skinned peo­ples come from?

Atlantis would pro­vide nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry poly­genists with their own pri­vate Gar­den of Eden—an idea that appealed espe­cial­ly to Bolivia’s cre­ole, or Euro­pean-descen­dant, elite. Since secur­ing their inde­pen­dence from Spain in 1825, they governed—often precariously—the most indige­nous coun­try in the hemi­sphere. Poly­ge­n­e­sis pro­vid­ed irrefutable sci­en­tif­ic proof of their bio­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence and social supe­ri­or­i­ty over native Andean peo­ples. And deployed along­side the Atlantis myth, it allowed them to claim Tiwanaku as a source of cre­ole her­itage.

Twen­ty kilo­me­ters south­east of Lake Tit­i­ca­ca, on the high plateau strad­dling Peru and Bolivia, Tiwanaku was once the admin­is­tra­tive and cer­e­mo­ni­al cen­ter of a vast Andean empire. Strati­graph­ic exca­va­tions car­ried out by Wen­dell Ben­nett in the 1930s indi­cat­ed that the civ­i­liza­tion emerged as ear­ly as 300 BCE and reached its apex between 600 and 800 AD. Radio­car­bon dat­ing sub­se­quent­ly con­firmed its age, and arche­ol­o­gists today gen­er­al­ly agree that Tiwanaku was built by the ances­tors of the Aymara-speak­ing peo­ples who pop­u­late the Lake Tit­i­ca­ca basin today.

Such a claim was laugh­able in the Bolivia of Belis­ario Díaz Romero. Born in La Paz in 1870 to a wealthy fam­i­ly of Span­ish prove­nance, Díaz belonged to an elite class of states­men and intel­lec­tu­als that reaped enor­mous prof­its by export­ing nat­ur­al resources and exploit­ing indige­nous labor. The repub­lic they gov­erned was over­whelm­ing­ly made up of native Americans—largely Aymara- and Quechua-speak­ing peo­ples in the high­lands and val­leys of the East­ern Andean Escarp­ment.

Cre­ole wealth rest­ed on their access to indige­nous labor; their social priv­i­lege and polit­i­cal legit­i­ma­cy rest­ed on a shared con­vic­tion that indige­nous Boli­vians belonged to an infe­ri­or race.
Among the cre­ole gen­tle­man schol­ars who shored up such beliefs, Díaz stood apart. He prac­ticed med­i­cine, wrote his­to­ry, exper­i­ment­ed with botany, and stud­ied geog­ra­phy, lin­guis­tics, and archae­ol­o­gy. He was a mem­ber of the Geo­graph­ic Soci­ety of La Paz, the Nation­al Insti­tute of Sta­tis­tics, and the Nation­al Acad­e­my of His­to­ry. He direct­ed the Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Obser­va­to­ry and the Nation­al Muse­um. Sharp yet soft-spo­ken, he was the last of Bolivia’s great poly­maths.

His most orig­i­nal con­tri­bu­tion to Boli­vian sci­ence was in evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy. Díaz vehe­ment­ly reject­ed cre­ation­ism, and was an ear­ly pro­po­nent of nat­ur­al selec­tion. Yet he dis­missed Darwin’s belief in the com­mon ori­gins of the human species, embrac­ing instead the poly­genic the­o­ries of lead­ing French and Ger­man biol­o­gists. He divid­ed the human species into “three liv­ing and per­ma­nent races: the white race, the yel­low, and the black.” Homo nigerorig­i­nat­ed in Africa and Homo atlaicus in Asia. Homo atlanti­cus was a white, ancient Aryan race that came from Atlantis.

Díaz attrib­uted the con­struc­tion of the mon­u­men­tal archi­tec­ture at Tiwanaku to Homo atlanti­cus. Two hun­dred mil­lion years ago, the ancient Aryans migrat­ed west to South Amer­i­ca from the orig­i­nal Atlantis across a long-lost land bridge. They set­tled in the Boli­vian Alti­plano, which was much dif­fer­ent back then. Lake Tit­i­ca­ca was three times larg­er and the sur­round­ing plain was not windswept and bar­ren. It was lush and trop­i­cal, ide­al for farm­ing, and abun­dant in nat­ur­al resources. Homo atlanti­cus set­tled in a shal­low val­ley on the south­ern shore of the lake, where they con­struct­ed a mag­nif­i­cent city.

Díaz not only revealed the ori­gins of the ruins, but explained their sup­posed con­trast with Bolivia’s present-day indige­nous pop­u­la­tion. By mea­sur­ing skulls, he argued that the cra­nial mea­sure­ments of Boli­vian Indi­ans were not con­sis­tent with those of Homo atlanti­cus. Rather, the Aymara were descen­dants of Homo atlaicus, bar­bar­ic Asians who arrived in a lat­er migra­tion. It was Homo atlaicus that con­quered the ancient city and named it Tiwanaku.

Díaz’s “dis­cov­er­ies” were well received in the elite sci­en­tif­ic and polit­i­cal cir­cles of fin-de-siè­cle La Paz—so well received, in fact, that the gov­ern­ment pro­mot­ed Tiwanaku as the offi­cial icon of Bolivia’s Cen­ten­ni­al cel­e­bra­tions in 1925.

The months lead­ing up to Inde­pen­dence Day were marked by the typ­i­cal flour­ish of stat­ues, mon­u­ments, and nation­al­ist speech­es. The streets were cleaned and the Parisian town­hous­es lin­ing the state­ly calle Montes were repaint­ed. The Pres­i­dent even issued a supreme decree pro­hibit­ing Indi­ans from side­walks and plazas. And when the big day final­ly came, cre­ole aris­to­crats could raise their glass in the name of the Repub­lic and toast their ancient ances­tors from Tiwanaku, the “prim­i­tive metrop­o­lis of South Amer­i­can whites.”

Whether or not the Ger­man writer Edmund Kiss met Díaz Romero dur­ing his stay in Bolivia remains uncer­tain. But Kiss was undoubt­ed­ly exposed to his ideas by Arthur Pos­nan­sky, a swash­buck­ling Aus­tri­an cap­i­tal­ist, ama­teur archae­ol­o­gist, and inter­na­tion­al gen­tle­man of sci­ence. Tiwanaku was Posnansky’s endur­ing obses­sion. From 1903, the year he set­tled in Bolivia, to his death in 1946, he pub­lished over 130 titles on the site, in four lan­guages.

What brought Kiss and Pos­nan­sky together—and what drew Kiss to Tiwanaku in the first place—was Kiss’s com­mit­ment to Ger­man eth­nic nation­al­ism and his obses­sion with the myth­ic past. Nei­ther were uncom­mon in the Weimar Repub­lic. As the Nazi Par­ty expand­ed dur­ing the 1920s and 1930s, right-wing roman­tic nation­al­ists cel­e­brat­ed an ide­al­ized folk cul­ture as the essence of Ger­man nation­hood.

Though the Nazis didn’t come up with the idea of a pure Aryan race, they did invest man­pow­er and invent new knowl­edge to fill in its his­to­ry and evo­lu­tion. Kiss and his fel­low Nazi ide­o­logues had a par­tic­u­lar weak­ness for Atlantis. Like Díaz Romero, they too believed that Cau­casians had orig­i­nat­ed in the Lost City. The Nazis took the poly­genic fan­ta­sy a step fur­ther, how­ev­er; sub­di­vid­ing whites into Semi­tes, the ances­tors of the Jews, and Aryans—an ancient race autochtho­nous to north­ern Europe. The Aryan-Atlantis con­nec­tion occu­pied a cen­tral place in Nazi mys­ti­cism and was one of the most pop­u­lar themes of Ger­man sci­ence fic­tion dur­ing the 1920s and 1930s.

Where archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence of Aryan Atlanteans was lack­ing, an elab­o­rate the­o­ry called Glac­i­er Cos­mol­o­gy did the trick. A moon had once col­lid­ed with Earth, destroy­ing Atlantis and cov­er­ing the plan­et with glac­i­ers. What led Kiss to Tiwanaku was his belief that fol­low­ing the cat­a­clysm, sur­vivors of that ancient Nordic civ­i­liza­tion took refuge in the high Andes, one of the few places where life was still pos­si­ble. Kiss found Pos­nan­sky while research­ing the ques­tion and in 1928 he set off to Bolivia to study the ruins.

Kiss spent almost a year at Tiwanaku. Always wear­ing the same long white smock and Pana­ma hat, he care­ful­ly sur­veyed the ruins and their rel­a­tive posi­tion to the sun, stars, and moon. Kneel­ing, notepad on thigh, he stud­ied the glyphs for mean­ing, some­times for hours, seek­ing clues to the iden­ti­ty of the ancient archi­tects. Day after day in the base­ment of the Nation­al Muse­um he stud­ied skulls, won­der­ing if the ancient Tiwanakan’s elon­gat­ed cra­nia were arti­fi­cial­ly deformed, or belonged to a supe­ri­or Nordic race.

Back in Ger­many, his work was a wild suc­cess. “The works of art and the archi­tec­tur­al style of the pre­his­toric city are cer­tain­ly not of Indi­an ori­gin,” Kiss had con­clud­ed. “Rather they are prob­a­bly the cre­ations of Nordic men who arrived in the Andean high­lands as rep­re­sen­ta­tives of a spe­cial civ­i­liza­tion.” Kiss fur­ther pub­li­cized his find­ing with a pop­u­lar ter­tiary of sci­ence fic­tion nov­els that chron­i­cled the rise, decline, and ulti­mate tri­umph of the ancient Aryans.

Nazi offi­cials seized on Kiss’s work and fea­tured the ancient Nordic city of Tiwanaku in par­ty news­pa­pers and Hitler Youth pub­li­ca­tions. Kiss was soon put in touch with Hein­rich Himm­ler, leader of the Nazi SS and a prin­ci­ple archi­tect of the Holo­caust. In 1935, Himm­ler had found­ed a new SS think tank called the Ahnenerbe to con­duct social sci­en­tif­ic research into the his­to­ry of the Aryan peo­ples. So far, he had sent arche­o­log­i­cal mis­sions to Scan­di­navia, France, Tibet, and Antarc­ti­ca in search of the ancient ori­gins of the Aryan race.

Now he want­ed Kiss to lead a trip to Bolivia, to Tiwanaku, the ancient Nordic civ­i­liza­tion in the Andes. Work­ing for much of 1938 and 1939, Kiss assem­bled a crack team of Nazi sci­en­tists for the job. Their objec­tive: reveal the pres­ence of the Mas­ter Race in pre­his­toric South Amer­i­ca, and dis­pel, once and for all, the mys­tery sur­round­ing the Tiwanaku ruins.

The expe­di­tion nev­er hap­pened. When Hitler invad­ed Poland in Sep­tem­ber 1939, the war took prece­dence. Kiss, already an offi­cer in the SS, was dis­patched to War­saw, and then took com­mand of Wolf­schanze, one of Hilter’s mil­i­tary head­quar­ters in East Prus­sia. In 1945, he sur­ren­dered to the Allies and was impris­oned along­side oth­er Nazi war crim­i­nals. At the “de-naz­i­fi­ca­tion” hear­ings, Kiss was ini­tial­ly clas­si­fied a “major offend­er,” but he plead­ed for and won the less­er sta­tus of “fel­low traveler”—on account of his archae­o­log­i­cal research. He remained com­mit­ted to his Atlantis-Tiwanaku the­sis until his death in 1960.

Like Kiss, Díaz and Pos­nan­sky also died long ago—and their fan­tas­tic inter­pre­ta­tions of Tiwanaku have since been thor­ough­ly dis­cred­it­ed. Nonethe­less, their lega­cy lives on. Pop­u­lar tele­vi­sion series like Ancient Aliens and Secrets of the Dead con­tin­ue to explore the Tiwanaku-Atlantis con­nec­tion. Best­selling books by Erich von Däniken and Gra­ham Han­cock go fur­ther, attribut­ing the con­struc­tion of Tiwanaku to ancient extrater­res­tri­al beings.

Though it may be hard to stom­ach, the sur­vival of the Atlantis myth is cer­tain­ly not sur­pris­ing. Plato’s Lost City has proven both time­less and uni­ver­sal in the west­ern imag­i­na­tion. Its time­less­ness lies in its capac­i­ty to reveal the mys­ter­ies of human ori­gins; its uni­ver­sal appeal, in its unlim­it­ed imag­i­nary poten­tial. And lest we for­get: the leg­end of Atlantis evolved along­side dan­ger­ous the­o­ries of race that rein­forced white suprema­cy for Aryan nation­al­ists and Boli­vian cre­oles alike. Attribut­ing the con­struc­tion of Tiwanaku to ancient extrater­res­tri­al beings only per­pet­u­ates this nefar­i­ous myth. When we won­der if Tiwanaku was built by Atlanteans or by Aliens, those assump­tions are based on the same twist­ed log­ic that drove men like Díaz, Pos­nan­sky, and Kiss: that Andean peo­ples could not have built Tiwanaku.

And that’s the great­est myth of all.

3. Next, we exam­ine “Eso­teric Nazism,” a brand of Nazi ide­ol­o­gy that incor­po­rates ele­ments of SS mys­ti­cism and res­onates pow­er­ful­ly with the “New Age.”

The notion of an ancient, Aryan-con­trolled past brought low by “sub-humans,” (gen­er­al­ly grouped around “Da Joos”) recalls a com­mon fea­ture of fascism–a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with a long-gone, ide­al­ized past. (We high­light­ed this in our dis­cus­sions with Peter Lev­en­da about his land­mark text The Hitler Lega­cy.)

The pro­gram high­lights the polit­i­cal and reli­gious phi­los­o­phy of “eso­teric Nazism,” a sub­ject we will explore in our next pro­gram as well. One of the prime expo­nents of “eso­teric Nazism” was Miguel Ser­ra­no, a Chilean Nazi who was also dis­cussed in our con­ver­sa­tions with Peter Lev­en­da.

Fus­ing tra­di­tion­al Nazi anti-Semi­tism with var­i­ous occult strains, Ser­ra­no posit­ed that the Nazis and Hitler were the man­i­fes­ta­tion of an oth­er­world­ly and supe­ri­or civ­i­liza­tion which would ulti­mate­ly tri­umph after an apoc­a­lyp­tic, cat­a­stroph­ic war involv­ing UFOs,   Aryans from Antarc­ti­ca, “Hyper­borea” etc. If some of this dis­cus­sion seems opaque, bear in mind that eso­teric Nazism fus­es polit­i­cal the­o­ry with mythol­o­gy.

In this respect, it exem­pli­fies yet anoth­er aspect of Nazism we ana­lyzed in our dis­cus­sions with Peter Levenda–the con­cept of Nazism as a cult. One should not be over­ly dis­mis­sive of eso­teric Nazism, as it is held in high esteem by some well-con­nect­ed, deter­mined and lethal indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions.

“Eso­teric Nazism;” Wikipedia.com.

Savitri Devi

Greek writer Sav­it­ri Devi was the first major post-war expo­nent of what has since become known as Eso­teric Hit­lerism.[1] Accord­ing to that ide­ol­o­gy, sub­se­quent to the fall of the Third Reich and Hitler’s sui­cide at the end of the war, Hitler him­self could be dei­fied. Devi con­nect­ed Hitler’s Aryanist ide­ol­o­gy to that of the pan-Hin­du part of the Indi­an Inde­pen­dence move­ment,[2] and activists such as Sub­has Chan­dra Bose. For her, the swasti­kawas an espe­cial­ly impor­tant sym­bol, as she felt it sym­bol­ized Aryan uni­ty of Hin­dus and Ger­mans.

Sav­it­ri Devi, above all, was inter­est­ed in the Indi­an caste sys­tem, which she regard­ed as the arche­type of racial laws intend­ed to gov­ern the seg­re­ga­tion of dif­fer­ent races and to main­tain the pure blood of the fair-com­plex­ioned Aryans. She regard­ed the sur­vival of the light-skinned minor­i­ty of Brah­mans among an enor­mous pop­u­la­tion of many dif­fer­ent Indi­an races after six­ty cen­turies as a liv­ing trib­ute to the val­ue of the Aryan caste sys­tem (Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, p. 92).

Sav­it­ri Devi inte­grat­ed Nazism into a broad­er cycli­cal frame­work of Hin­du his­to­ry. She con­sid­ered Hitler to be the ninth Avatar of Vish­nu, and called him “the god-like Indi­vid­ual of our times; the Man against Time; the great­est Euro­pean of all times”,[3] hav­ing an ide­al vision of return­ing his Aryan peo­ple to an ear­li­er, more per­fect time, and also hav­ing the prac­ti­cal where­with­al to fight the destruc­tive forces “in Time”. She saw his defeat—and the fore­stalling of his vision from com­ing to fruition—as a result of him being “too mag­nan­i­mous, too trust­ing, too good”, of not being mer­ci­less enough, of hav­ing in his “psy­cho­log­i­cal make-up, too much ‘sun’ [benef­i­cence] and not enough ‘light­ning.’ [prac­ti­cal ruth­less­ness]”,[4] unlike his com­ing incar­na­tion:

Kal­ki” will act with unprece­dent­ed ruth­less­ness. Con­trar­i­ly to Adolf Hitler, He will spare not a sin­gle one of the ene­mies of the divine Cause: not a sin­gle one of its out­spo­ken oppo­nents but also not a sin­gle one of the luke-warm, of the oppor­tunists, of the ide­o­log­i­cal­ly hereti­cal, of the racial­ly bas­tardised, of the unhealthy, of the hes­i­tat­ing, of the all-too-human; not a sin­gle one of those who, in body or in char­ac­ter or mind, bear the stamp of the fall­en Ages.[5]

Robert Charroux

Unlike most ancient astro­naut writ­ers, Robert Char­roux took a large inter­est in racial­ism. Accord­ing to Char­roux Hyper­borea was sit­u­at­ed between Ice­land and Green­land and was the home of a NordicWhite race with blonde hair and blue eyes. Char­roux claimed that this race was extrater­res­tri­al in ori­gin and had orig­i­nal­ly come from a cold plan­et sit­u­at­ed far from the sun.[6] Char­roux also claimed that the White race of the Hyper­bore­ans and their ances­tors the Celts had dom­i­nat­ed the whole world in the ancient past. Some of these claims of Char­roux have influ­enced the beliefs of Eso­teric Nazism such as the work of Miguel Ser­ra­no.[7][8]

Miguel Serrano

The next major fig­ure in Eso­teric Hit­lerism is Miguel Ser­ra­no, a for­mer Chilean diplo­mat. Author of numer­ous books includ­ing The Gold­en Rib­bon: Eso­teric Hit­lerism (1978) and Adolf Hitler, the Last Avatar (1984), Ser­ra­no is one of a num­ber of Nazi eso­teri­cists who regard the “Aryan blood” as orig­i­nal­ly extrater­res­tri­al:

Ser­ra­no finds mytho­log­i­cal evi­dence for the extrater­res­tri­al ori­gins of man in the Nephilim [fall­en angels] of the Book of Gen­e­sis... Ser­ra­no sug­gests that the sud­den appear­ance of Cro-Magnon Man with his high artis­tic and cul­tur­al achieve­ments in pre­his­toric Europe records the pas­sage of one such divya-descend­ed race along­side the abysmal infe­ri­or­i­ty of Nean­derthal Man, an abom­i­na­tion and man­i­fest cre­ation of the demi­urge... Of all the races on earth, the Aryans alone pre­serve the mem­o­ry of their divine ances­tors in their noble blood, which is still min­gled with the light of the Black Sun. All oth­er races are the prog­e­ny of the demi­urge’s beast-men, native to the plan­et.[9]

Ser­ra­no sup­ports this idea from var­i­ous myths which assign divine ances­try to ‘Aryan’ peo­ples, and even the Aztec myth of Quet­zal­coatl descend­ing from Venus. He also cites the entire­ly respectable (but not wide­ly accept­ed) sci­en­tif­ic hypoth­e­sis of Bal Gan­gad­har Tilak on the Arc­tic home­land of the Indo-Aryans, as his author­i­ty for iden­ti­fy­ing the earth­ly cen­tre of the Aryan migra­tions with the ‘lost’ Arc­tic con­ti­nent of Hyper­borea. Thus, Ser­ra­no’s extrater­res­tri­al gods are also iden­ti­fied as Hyper­bore­ans.[10]

In attempt­ing to raise the spir­i­tu­al devel­op­ment of the earth­bound races, the Hyper­bore­an divyas (a San­skrit term for god-men) suf­fered a trag­ic set­back. Expand­ing on a sto­ry from the Book of Enoch, Ser­ra­no laments that a rene­gade group among the gods com­mit­ted mis­ce­gena­tion with the ter­res­tri­al races, thus dilut­ing the light-bear­ing blood of their bene­fac­tors and dimin­ish­ing the lev­el of divine aware­ness on the plan­et.[11]

The con­cept of Hyper­borea has a simul­ta­ne­ous­ly racial and mys­ti­cal mean­ing for Ser­ra­no.[12] He believes that Hitler was in Shamb­ha­la, an under­ground cen­tre in Antarc­ti­ca (for­mer­ly at the North Pole and Tibet), where he was in con­tact with the Hyper­bore­an gods and from whence he would some­day emerge with a fleet of UFOs to lead the forces of light (the Hyper­bore­ans, some­times asso­ci­at­ed with Vril) over the forces of dark­ness (inevitably includ­ing, for Ser­ra­no, the Jews who fol­low Jeho­vah) in a last bat­tle and thus inau­gu­rat­ing a Fourth Reich.

The “Black Sun” emblem, rep­re­sent­ing the celes­tial home­land of the Hyper­bore­ans and the invis­i­ble source of their ener­gy, accord­ing to Ser­ra­no. Ser­ra­no, how­ev­er, has not iden­ti­fied the Black Sun with the above orna­ment in the Wewels­burg. Accord­ing to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke:[13]

Ser­ra­no fol­lows the Gnos­tic tra­di­tion of the Cathars (fl. 1025–1244) by iden­ti­fy­ing the evil demi­urge as Jeho­vah, the God of the Old Tes­ta­ment. As medieval dual­ists, these eleventh-cen­tu­ry heretics had repu­di­at­ed Jeho­vah as a false god and mere arti­fi­cer opposed to the real God far beyond our earth­ly realm. This Gnos­tic doc­trine clear­ly car­ried dan­ger­ous impli­ca­tions for the Jews. As Jeho­vah was the trib­al deity of the Jews, it fol­lowed that they were dev­il wor­shipers. By cast­ing the Jews in the role of the chil­dren of Satan, the Cathar heresy can ele­vate anti-Semi­tism to the sta­tus of a the­o­log­i­cal doc­trine backed by a vast cos­mol­o­gy. If the Hyper­bore­an Aryans are the arche­type and blood descen­dents of Ser­ra­no’s divyas from the Black Sun, then the arche­type of the Lord of Dark­ness need­ed a counter-race. The demi­urge sought and found the most fit­ting agent for its arche­type in the Jews.

As reli­gious schol­ars Fred­er­ick C. Grant and Hyam Mac­co­by empha­size, in the view of the dual­ist Gnos­tics, “Jews were regard­ed as the spe­cial peo­ple of the Demi­urge and as hav­ing the spe­cial his­tor­i­cal role of obstruct­ing the redemp­tive work of the High God’s emis­saries”.[14] Ser­ra­no thus con­sid­ered Hitler as one of the great­est emis­saries of this High God, reject­ed and cru­ci­fied by the tyran­ny of the Judai­cized rab­ble like pre­vi­ous rev­o­lu­tion­ary light-bringers. Ser­ra­no had a spe­cial place in his ide­ol­o­gy for the SS, who, in their quest to recre­ate the ancient race of Aryan god-men, he thought were above moral­i­ty and there­fore jus­ti­fied, after the exam­ple of the anti-human­i­tar­i­an “detached vio­lence” taught in the Aryo-Hin­du Bha­gavad Gita.

Collective Aryan unconscious

In the book Black SunNicholas Goodrick-Clarke reports how Carl Gus­tav Jung described “Hitler as pos­sessed by the arche­type of the col­lec­tive Aryan uncon­scious and could not help obey­ing the com­mands of an inner voice”. In a series of inter­views between 1936 and 1939, Jung char­ac­ter­ized Hitler as an arche­type, often man­i­fest­ing itself to the com­plete exclu­sion of his own per­son­al­i­ty. “ ‘Hitler is a spir­i­tu­al ves­sel, a demi-divin­i­ty; even bet­ter, a myth. Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni is a man’ ... the mes­si­ah of Ger­many who teach­es the virtue of the sword. ‘The voice he hears is that of the col­lec­tive uncon­scious of his race’ ”.[15]

Jung’s sug­ges­tion that Hitler per­son­i­fied the col­lec­tive Aryan uncon­scious deeply inter­est­ed and influ­enced Miguel Ser­ra­no, who lat­er con­clud­ed that Jung was mere­ly psy­chol­o­giz­ing the ancient, sacred mys­tery of arche­typ­al pos­ses­sion by the gods, inde­pen­dent meta­phys­i­cal pow­ers that rule over their respec­tive races and occa­sion­al­ly pos­sess their mem­bers.[16] A sim­i­lar eso­teric the­sis is also put for­ward by Michael Moyni­han in his book Lords of Chaos.

Conspiracy theories and pseudoscience

The writ­ings of Miguel Ser­ra­noSav­it­ri Devi, and oth­er pro­po­nents of Eso­teric Nazism have spawned numer­ous lat­er works con­nect­ing Aryan mas­ter race beliefs and Nazi escape sce­nar­ios with endur­ing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about hol­low earth civ­i­liza­tions and shad­owy new world orders.[cita­tion need­ed] Since 1945, neo-Nazi writ­ers have also pro­posed Shamb­ha­la and the star Alde­baran as the orig­i­nal home­land of the Aryans. The book Ark­tos: The Polar Myth in Sci­ence, Sym­bol­ism, and Nazi Sur­vival, by Hyp­nero­tomachia Poliphili schol­ar Josce­lyn God­win, dis­cuss­es pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries about sur­viv­ing Nazi ele­ments in Antarc­ti­caArk­tos is not­ed for its schol­ar­ly approach and exam­i­na­tion of many sources cur­rent­ly unavail­able else­where in Eng­lish-lan­guage trans­la­tions. God­win and oth­er authors such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke have dis­cussed the con­nec­tions between Eso­teric Nazism and Vril ener­gy, the hid­den Shamb­ha­la and Agartha civ­i­liza­tions, and under­ground UFO bases, as well as Hitler’s and the SS’s sup­posed sur­vival in under­ground Antarc­tic oases in New Swabia or in alliance with Hyper­bore­ans from the sub­ter­ranean world.[17]

Relationship to neopaganism

Organ­i­sa­tions such as the Arma­nen-Orden rep­re­sent sig­nif­i­cant devel­op­ments of neo-pagan eso­teri­cism and ‘Arios­o­phy’ after World War II, but they do not all con­sti­tute forms of Nazi eso­teri­cism. Some north­ern Euro­peanneo­pa­gan groups, such as Theods,Ásatrúar­félag­ið and Viðartrúar, have explic­it­ly stat­ed that neo-Nazism is not com­mon among their mem­bers. On the oth­er hand, there are neo­pa­gan organ­i­sa­tions with close ties to neo-Nazism, such as the Art­ge­mein­schaft or the Hea­then Front, and the attrac­tion of many neo-Nazis to Ger­man­ic pagan­ism remains an issue par­tic­u­lar­ly in Ger­many (see Nornirs Ætt).

Neo-völkisch movements

There is a con­tem­po­rary loose net­work of small musi­cal groups that com­bine neo-fas­cism and satanism. These groups can be found in Britain, France, and New Zealand, under names such as “Black Order” or “Infer­nal Alliance”, and draw their inspi­ra­tion from the Eso­teric Hit­lerism of Miguel Ser­ra­no.[18] These groups advo­cate the anti-mod­ernneo-trib­al­ism and “Tra­di­tion­al­ism” found in the “pagan” mys­ti­cist ideals of Alain de Benoist’s Nou­velle Droite inspired by Julius Evola.

Eso­teric themes, includ­ing ref­er­ences to arti­facts such as the Spear of Long­i­nus, are also often allud­ed to in neo-Nazi music (e.g. Rock Against Com­mu­nism) and above all in Nation­al Social­ist black met­al.[19]

4. One of the pri­ma­ry expo­nents of Eso­teric Nazi the­o­ry is Miguel Ser­ra­no, high­light­ed in FTR #843. We detail key ele­ments of his past.

“Miguel Ser­ra­no;” Wikipedia.com

Miguel Ser­ra­no (10 Sep­tem­ber 1917 – 28 Feb­ru­ary 2009) was a Chilean diplo­mat, jour­nal­ist and author of poet­ry, books on spir­i­tu­al quest­ing and Eso­teric Hit­lerism. Ser­ra­no’s anti-mod­ernist neo-Gnos­tic phi­los­o­phy claims to elu­ci­date the extrater­res­tri­al ori­gin of the Hyper­bore­an-descend­ed Aryan race, image-bear­ers of the God­head, and pos­tu­lates a glob­al con­spir­a­cy against them by an evil infe­ri­or godlet: The Demi­urge, wor­shipped by theJew­ish peo­ple, lord of plan­et Earth, spawn­er of the prim­i­tive hominid stocks, and author of all base mate­ri­al­i­ty.

Ser­ra­no fore­most­ly syn­the­sized the Hin­du-Vedic and Nordic-Ger­man­ic reli­gious tra­di­tions, both of which he con­sid­ered to be of ancient Aryan-Hyper­bore­an prove­nance, in addi­tion to par­tic­u­lar­ly eso­teric and racial­ist inter­pre­ta­tions of Bud­dhismChris­tian­i­ty (or “Kris­tian­ism”)Lucife­ri­an­ism (not to be con­fused with Satanism), and Gnos­ti­cism. He was espe­cial­ly indebt­ed to the Jun­gian the­o­ry of col­lec­tive racial arche­types, bor­rowed heav­i­ly from Julius Evola in sup­port­ing a spir­i­tu­al con­sid­er­a­tion of race, as opposed to a sole­ly bio­log­i­cal one, and fol­lowed Sav­it­ri Devi in rec­og­niz­ing Adolf Hitler as an avatar (a divine incar­na­tion) who bat­tled against the demon­ic mate­ri­al­is­tic hosts of the Kali Yuga.

Miguel Joaquín Diego del Car­men Ser­ra­no Fer­nán­dez was born in San­ti­a­go and edu­cat­ed at the Inter­na­do Nacional Bar­ros Arana from 1929 to 1934.[1] Orig­i­nal­ly embrac­ing Marx­ism, and writ­ing for left-wing jour­nals, he quick­ly became dis­il­lu­sioned withCom­mu­nism, and was drawn to the Movimien­to Nacional Social­ista de Chile (M.N.S.), a Chilean Nazi Par­ty (head­ed by Jorge González von Marées).[1] In July 1939 he pub­licly asso­ci­at­ed him­self with the M.N.S. (then renamed Van­guardia Pop­u­lar Social­ista –Pop­u­lar Social­ist Front), writ­ing for its jour­nal Tra­ba­jo (“Work”).[2]

After the Nazi inva­sion of the Sovi­et Union in July 1941, Ser­ra­no began his own biweek­ly polit­i­cal and lit­er­ary review called La Nue­va Edad (“The New Age”).[2] Orig­i­nal­ly indif­fer­ent to anti­semitism, Ser­ra­no dis­cov­ered and began to pub­lish mate­r­i­al from The Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion in ear­ly Novem­ber 1941.[2] Lat­er Ser­ra­no would trans­mute the Jew­ish world con­spir­a­cy into a meta­phys­i­cal one, fol­low­ing in the tra­di­tion of the Gnos­tic Cathars by iden­ti­fy­ing Yah­weh as the evil prin­ci­ple itself: The Demi­urge, lord of shad­ows, and ruler over our fall­en plan­et.[3]

In late 1941, Ser­ra­no was intro­duced to a Chilean eso­teric order found­ed by “F.K.” (a Ger­man immi­grant to Chile), which claimed alle­giance to a mys­te­ri­ous and far-flung Brah­min elite cen­tered in the Himalayas.[4] This mys­ti­co-mar­tial order prac­ticed rit­u­al mag­ic, includ­ing tantric and kun­dali­ni yoga linked to Niet­zschean con­cepts of the will to pow­er and fas­cist activism. He was ini­ti­at­ed into the order in Feb­ru­ary 1942.[4] Cult mem­bers regard­ed Adolf Hitler as a sav­ior of the Indo-Euro­pean or Aryan race. The order con­sid­eredastral pro­jec­tion and oth­er high­er states of aware­ness as the nat­ur­al ances­tral her­itage of all pure-blood­ed (“twice-born”) Aryans. The order’s mas­ter described Hitler as an ini­ti­ate, a being of bound­less and unprece­dent­ed willpow­er (shudibud­ishv­ab­ha­ba), abod­dhisat­va who had vol­un­tar­i­ly incar­nat­ed on earth in order to over­come the Kali Yuga; he claimed to have been in astral con­tact with Hitler, not only dur­ing the war but also after it had end­ed, “sure evi­dence that he was alive and had sur­vived the Berlin bunker”.[4]

Con­vinced by these rev­e­la­tions, and prompt­ed also by pop­u­lar spec­u­la­tions as to Hitler’s sur­vival in Antarc­ti­ca, Ser­ra­no accom­pa­nied the Chilean Army and Navy on their expe­di­tion to Antarc­ti­ca in 1947–48, in the capac­i­ty of a jour­nal­ist.[5] The stark and lone­ly wastes of the polar region left a per­ma­nent impres­sion on Ser­ra­no’s mind. He made his first vis­it to Europe in 1951, still obsessed by the enig­mat­ic fig­ure of Hitler. Ser­ra­no vis­it­ed and brood­ed over the ruins of the Berlin bunker, Span­dau Prison, and the ruins of Hitler’s Berghof in Bavaria.[5] In Switzer­land, he met and befriend­ed Her­mann Hesse, the well-known, Nobel Prize-win­ning Ger­man Roman­tic writer, and C. G. Jung.[5] Jung’s pre-war psy­cho­analy­sis of Hitler being a “spir­i­tu­al ves­sel, a demi-divin­i­ty, a myth,” and an embod­i­ment of the “col­lec­tive uncon­scious of his race”[6] great­ly influ­enced Ser­ra­no’s world­view. He and Jung pas­sion­ate­ly exchanged thoughts on the mean­ing of mythol­o­gy and arche­types in the mod­ern age of dehu­man­iz­ing mass tech­noc­ra­cy.[5] These encoun­ters with Hesse and Jung cul­mi­nat­ed in Ser­ra­no’s most famous and pres­ti­gious book, C.G. Jung and Her­mann Hesse: A Record of Two Friend­ships.

In 1953, fol­low­ing a fam­i­ly tra­di­tion, Ser­ra­no entered the diplo­mat­ic corps and held var­i­ous ambas­sado­r­i­al posts for Chile dur­ing the IbáñezAlessan­dri and Frei admin­is­tra­tions from 1953 to 1970, in India (1953–62), Yugoslavia (1962–64), Roma­niaBul­gar­ia, andAus­tria (1964–70).[5]

India seemed to him a source of eso­teric truth, and he immersed him­self in its spir­i­tu­al her­itage. He sought out the secret Sid­dha order of his Chilean mas­ter in the Himalayas, although Mount Kailash (where the order sup­pos­ed­ly had its seat), was inac­ces­si­ble to him in Chi­nese-admin­is­tered Tibet.[5] In his book, The Ser­pent of Par­adise, Ser­ra­no describes this jour­ney and claims that he had nev­er­the­less dis­cov­ered the “inner” aspect of Mount Kailash. He met many lead­ing Indi­an per­son­al­i­ties through his diplo­mat­ic posi­tion, becom­ing a per­son­al friend of Jawa­har­lal NehruIndi­ra Gand­hi and the 14th Dalai Lama.[5]

Ser­ra­no was Chile’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive to the Inter­na­tion­al Atom­ic Ener­gy Com­mis­sion and Unit­ed Nations Indus­tri­al Devel­op­ment Orga­ni­za­tion (UNUDI).[5] He was dis­missed from the Chilean diplo­mat­ic ser­vice in late 1970 by pres­i­dent Sal­vador Allende.[7] Remain­ing in exile, he rent­ed an apart­ment (pre­vi­ous­ly inhab­it­ed by Her­mann Hesse) at Mon­tag­no­la in the Swiss Tici­no.[8]

Dur­ing his ambas­sado­r­i­al post­ings in Vien­na and sub­se­quent­ly in Switzer­land, Ser­ra­no con­tact­ed and cul­ti­vat­ed ties of friend­ship with Léon DegrelleOtto Sko­rzenyHans-Ulrich RudelMarc “Saint-Loup” Augi­er and Han­na Reitsch. He paid vis­its to Julius Evola, Her­man WirthWil­helm Landig and Ezra Pound.[9]

Ser­ra­no returned to Chile after the Pinochet coup in 1973. Find­ing the regime unsym­pa­thet­ic to his ideas, he adopt­ed “the role of intel­lec­tu­al gad­fly”.[9] In May 1984, Ser­ra­no gave the Nazi salute at the funer­al in San­ti­a­go of SS Colonel Wal­ter Rauff.[9] He con­vened a ral­ly in San­ti­a­go on 5 Sep­tem­ber 1993, in hon­or of Rudolf Hess, and in mem­o­ry of the 62 young Chilean Nazi sup­port­ers who were shot dead while occu­py­ing a social secu­ri­ty build­ing dur­ing an abortive coup in 1938.[1][10] He main­tained cor­re­spon­dence with neo-Nazi lead­ers such as Matt Koehl. He was inter­viewed in depth by the Greek far-right mag­a­zine To Anti­do­to, and has also fea­tured in the lit­er­a­ture of the Black Order.[10]

Ser­ra­no died on 28 Feb­ru­ary 2009 in San­ti­a­go.

Ser­ra­no termed his phi­los­o­phy Eso­teric Hit­lerism, which he has described as a new reli­gious faith “able to change the mate­ri­al­is­tic man of today into a new ide­al­is­tic hero”, and also as “much more than a reli­gion: It is a way to trans­mute a hero into God.”[cita­tion need­ed]

In 1984 he pub­lished his 643-page tome, Adolf Hitler, el Últi­mo Avatãra (Adolf Hitler: The Last Avatar), which is ded­i­cat­ed “To the glo­ry of the Führer, Adolf Hitler”. In this arcane work Ser­ra­no unfolds his ulti­mate philo­soph­i­cal tes­ta­ment through elab­o­rate eso­teric and mytho­log­i­cal sym­bol­ism.[11][12] He insists that there has been a vast his­tor­i­cal con­spir­a­cy to con­ceal the ori­gins of evolved humankind. Ser­ra­no’s epic vista opens with extra­galac­tic beings who found­ed the First Hyper­borea, a ter­res­tri­al but non­phys­i­cal realm which was nei­ther geo­graph­i­cal­ly lim­it­ed nor bound by the cir­cles of rein­car­na­tion. The Hyper­bore­ans were asex­u­al and repro­duced through “plas­mic ema­na­tions” from their ethe­re­al bod­ies; the Vril pow­er was theirs to com­mand, the light of the Black Sun coursed through their veins and they saw with the Third Eye. Ser­ra­no con­tends that the last doc­u­ments relat­ing to them were destroyed along with the Alexan­dri­an Library, and that lat­ter­ly these beings have been mis­un­der­stood as extrater­res­tri­als arriv­ing in space­ships orUFOs. How­ev­er, the First Hyper­borea was imma­te­r­i­al and alto­geth­er out­side our mech­a­nis­tic uni­verse.[13][14]

The lat­ter is under the juris­dic­tion of the Demi­urge, an infe­ri­or godlet whose realm is the phys­i­cal plan­et earth. The Demi­urge had cre­at­ed a bes­tial imi­ta­tion of human­i­ty in the form of pro­to-human “robots” like Nean­derthal Man, and inten­tion­al­ly con­signed his crea­tures to an end­less cycle of invol­un­tary rein­car­na­tion on the earth­ly plane to no high­er pur­pose. The Hyper­bore­ans recoiled in hor­ror from this entrap­ment with­in the Demi­urge’s cycles. They them­selves take the devayana, the Way of the Gods, at death and return to the earth (as Bod­hisattvas) only if they are will­ing.[14][15]

Deter­mined upon a hero­ic war to reclaim the Demi­urge’s dete­ri­o­rat­ing world, the Hyper­bore­ans clothed them­selves in mate­r­i­al bod­ies and descend­ed on to the Sec­ond Hyper­borea, a ring-shaped con­ti­nent around the North Pole. Dur­ing this Gold­en Age or Satya Yuga, they mag­nan­i­mous­ly instruct­ed the Demi­urge’s cre­ations (the Black, Yel­low and Red races native to the plan­et) and began to raise them above their ani­mal con­di­tion.[15][16] Then dis­as­ter struck; some of the Hyper­bore­ans rebelled and inter­min­gled their blood with the crea­tures of the Demi­urge, and through this trans­gres­sion Par­adise was lost. Ser­ra­no refers to Gen­e­sis 6.4: “the sons of God came in to the daugh­ters of men, and they bore chil­dren to them”. By dilut­ing the divine blood, the pri­mor­dial mis­ce­gena­tionaccel­er­at­ed the process of mate­r­i­al decay. This was reflect­ed in out­ward cat­a­stro­phes and the North and South Poles reversed posi­tions as a result of the fall of a comet or moon. The polar con­ti­nent dis­ap­peared beneath the del­uge and Hyper­borea became invis­i­ble again.[15][16] The Hyper­bore­ans them­selves sur­vived, some tak­ing refuge at the South Pole. Ser­ra­no regards the mys­te­ri­ous appear­ance of the fine and artis­tic Cro-Magnon Man in Europe as evi­dence of Hyper­bore­ans dri­ven south­ward by the Ice Age.[15][16]In the then-fer­tile Gobi Desert, anoth­er group of exiled Hyper­bore­ans estab­lished a fan­tas­tic civ­i­liza­tion.[15]

The world thus becomes the com­bat zone between the dwin­dling Hyper­bore­ans and the Demi­urge and his forces of entropy.[15] But Ser­ra­no claims that the Gold­en Age can be reat­tained if the Hyper­bore­ans’ descen­dants, the Aryans, con­scious­ly repu­ri­fy their blood to restore the divine blood-mem­o­ry:[17]

“There is noth­ing more mys­te­ri­ous than blood. Paracel­sus con­sid­ered it a con­den­sa­tion of light. I believe that the Aryan, Hyper­bore­an blood is that – but not the light of the Gold­en Sun, not of a galac­tic sun, but of the light of the Black Sun, of the Green Ray.”[18]

Discussion

3 comments for “FTR #873 The New Age, Fascism and the Atlantis Myth”

  1. Speak­ing of the Lama... he’s in the news today! Got to keep Ger­many for the Ger­mans... Hel­lo, Dalia: You’re a refugee, too!

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/31/the-dalai-lama-says-too-many-refugees-are-going-to-germany/

    The Dalai Lama says ‘too many’ refugees are going to Ger­many
    By Max Bear­ak May 31 at 12:46 PM

    (Ash­wi­ni Bhatia/AP)

    Speak­ing to Ger­man reporters in the de fac­to cap­i­tal of Tibet’s exiled gov­ern­ment, the Dalai Lama appar­ent­ly said that “too many” refugees are seek­ing asy­lum in Europe.

    “Europe, for exam­ple Ger­many, can­not become an Arab coun­try,” he said with a laugh, accord­ing to AFP, which quot­ed from an inter­view the spir­i­tu­al leader gave to Frank­furter All­ge­meine Zeitung, a Ger­man news­pa­per. “Ger­many is Ger­many. There are so many that in prac­tice it becomes dif­fi­cult.”

    It was an unex­pect­ed exten­sion of sym­pa­thy for a sen­ti­ment that has found fer­tile ground most­ly among nation­al­ist groups. The Dalai Lama, who often speaks of human­i­ty’s need to acknowl­edge its “one­ness,” is a refugee him­self. After Tibetans rose up against Chi­nese lim­i­ta­tions on their auton­o­my in 1959, the cur­rent (and 14th) Dalai Lama led tens of thou­sands of his fol­low­ers to India, where they and their descen­dants have lived since. An esti­mat­ed 120,000 Tibetans live in India, and those born in the coun­try can vote.

    [Far-right Ger­man group got upset about can­dy pack­ag­ing and now looks quite sil­ly]

    “From a moral point of view, too, I think that the refugees should only be admit­ted tem­porar­i­ly,” the Dalai Lama said.

    The bulk of Arab refugees he was ref­er­enc­ing are flee­ing Syr­i­a’s bru­tal and seem­ing­ly end­less civ­il war, and its spillover into Iraq. But the truth is that the vast major­i­ty of those refugees are not seek­ing asy­lum in Europe, but in Turkey and two oth­er Arab-major­i­ty coun­tries, Lebanon and Jor­dan. Ger­many is a coun­try of 80 mil­lion peo­ple and has accept­ed just over 1 mil­lion refugees. Before the war in next-door Syr­ia, Lebanon had a pop­u­la­tion of more than 4 mil­lion peo­ple. It has since tak­en in well over a mil­lion Syr­i­ans.

    Beyond the skep­ti­cism, the Dalai Lama did con­vey his char­ac­ter­is­tic com­pas­sion.

    “When we look into the face of every sin­gle refugee, espe­cial­ly the chil­dren and women, we can feel their suf­fer­ing,” he said. “The goal should be that they return and help rebuild their coun­tries.”

    Posted by Tiffany Sunderson | May 31, 2016, 2:35 pm
  2. Like grand­fa­ther, like grand­son. It’s a com­par­i­son we keep hear­ing about Elon Musk and his grand­fa­ther Joshua Halde­man. A com­par­i­son made by Musk him­self in a 2015 Van­i­ty Fair inter­view when he shared how, “My grand­fa­ther had this desire for adven­ture, explo­ration — doing crazy things....Maybe that sort of adven­tur­ous spir­it is in all of [Haldeman’s descen­dants].” A 2015 inter­view that came years before all of the more recent report­ing on the incred­i­bly racist nature of his grand­fa­ther’s deci­sion to relo­cate his fam­i­ly from Cana­da to apartheid South Africa in 1950. And, of course, years before Musk revealed him­self to be an open­ly Sieg Heil­ing Nazi who now rou­tine­ly pro­motes the Great Replace­ment the­o­ry. As we saw, Musk’s grand­fa­ther’s deci­sion to uproot the fam­i­ly was root­ed in a deep seat­ed belief that the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion were true and the apartheid gov­ern­ment was the lead­ing enti­ty in a glob­al strug­gle between white Chris­tians and a Jew­ish con­spir­a­cy to lead the non-white races of the world against them. And let’s not for­get how Musk’s father, Errol, has now con­firmed that his father-in-law was a sup­port­er of the Cana­di­an Nazi Par­ty. Elon Musk’s South African roots are deeply inter­twined with the con­tem­po­rary glob­al far right resur­gence. We did­n’t real­ly know that a decade ago, but we know it now. When it’s prob­a­bly too late.

    That’s all part of the dark con­text of a new CBC pro­file of Halde­man that flesh­es out his pro­found­ly racist moti­va­tions. Moti­va­tions that, as we’re going to see, includ­ed a sense of prophet­ic des­tiny. And like so much of this sto­ry, it was a sense of prophet­ic des­tiny with dis­turb­ing echoes today. Recall how Errol was gush­ing about how his son had final­ly accept­ed his des­tiny fol­low­ing Pres­i­dent Trump’s elec­toral vic­to­ry. Does a sense of des­tiny run in the fam­i­ly?

    So what was Musk’s grand­fa­ther’s des­tiny? Well, it was a pair of prophe­cies dri­ving him. First, we are told about an expe­ri­ence Halde­man had in 1936 when a psy­chic medi­um informed him that he was to spend the next 14 years in Regi­na, Cana­da, and then ‘move to a city in a far­away place’. Almost 14 years lat­er, Halde­man met an Angli­can min­is­ter from South Africa at an Inter­na­tion­al Trade Fair in Toron­to. The min­is­ter has a prophe­cy of his own: “‘SOUTH AFRICA WILL BECOME THE LEADER OF WHITE CIVILIZATION IN THE WORLD’” Halde­man was con­vinced.

    But then the CBC arti­cle describes a sec­ond sense of des­tiny that gripped Halde­man after he made the move to South Africa: find­ing the Lost City of Kala­hari. It turns out Halde­man became what was arguably the biggest fan of the claims made by a William Hunt, aka, “The Great Fari­ni”, a Cana­di­an cir­cus per­former. Hunt claimed to have dis­cov­ered the Lost City of Kala­hari in 1885 dur­ing an expe­di­tion across the Kala­hari dessert. Halde­man did­n’t just go on numer­ous expe­di­tion to find the city, but he took the entire fam­i­ly on 16 of these trips, which would have includ­ed Musk’s moth­er Maye. It was such a big deal for the entire fam­i­ly that one of his youngest son, Lee, wrote two books on the top­ic.

    And as we’re also going to see, Halde­man’s moti­va­tions for dis­cov­er­ing the Lost City of Kala­hari was­n’t sim­ply a pas­sion for ama­teur archae­ol­o­gy. Because Halde­man was­n’t just con­vinced the lost city exist­ed. He was also con­vinced it could­n’t pos­si­bly have been built by black Africans because he did­n’t see them as capa­ble of the kind of sophis­ti­cat­ed con­struc­tions Hunt described. Halde­man appar­ent­ly believed the dis­cov­ery of the lost city, and sub­se­quent proof that it was­n’t built by black Africans would lend fur­ther jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the South African apartheid project. Yes, Halde­man’s ‘lost city’ obses­sion was deeply root­ed in a fer­vent belief in the right­eous­ness of the white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy under­pin­ning the South African gov­ern­ment. It sounds like he was con­vinced the city’s dis­cov­ery might reveal that the Egyp­tians had a South African pres­ence. As experts explain, the Egyp­tians were seen as a kind of Euro­pean-like civ­i­liza­tion in the eyes of many of these 19th and 20th cen­tu­ry lost city hunters.

    And while Musk’s grand­fa­ther obvi­ous­ly nev­er found the lost city, we are told he nev­er gave up belief it was out there. As the CBC report reminds us, Halde­man was­n’t alone in his quest to dis­cov­er lost cities that would jus­ti­fy white suprema­cy. As Jean-loïc Le Quel­lec, author of The White Lady and Atlantis: Ophir and Great Zim­bab­we: Inves­ti­ga­tion of an Archae­o­log­i­cal Myth, puts it, there are more than 1,000 books on the top­ic of lost civ­i­liza­tions between the mid-19th cen­tu­ry and 1940, “and none of them is about the search for or dis­cov­ery of a ‘lost black tribe.’ They are always about white peo­ple.”

    It’s anoth­er telling piece of Musk’s South African roots. And while we haven’t heard about Musk search­ing for lost cities on earth, the fact that he has whole heart­ed­ly embraced so much of the broad­er far right con­spir­a­to­r­i­al world­view that ani­mat­ed his grand­fa­ther rais­es the ques­tion as to whether or not Musk is a ‘lost cities (built by white peo­ple, of course)’ alter­nate his­to­ry fan by now. Because it’s not like he has­n’t expressed relat­ed sen­ti­ments. For exam­ple, back in 2020, the coun­try of Egypt per­son­al­ly invit­ed Musk to pay a vis­it after he decid­ed to tweet out that “Aliens built the pyra­mids obv”. Per­haps it was a tweet made in jest. Who knows with him at this point. But as we’ve seen, the whole “alien astro­naut” con­cept is deeply infused with racist themes, like the idea that the dif­fer­ent races are real­ly dif­fer­ent species and white peo­ple are descend­ed from advanced alien civ­i­liza­tions. A decade ago, before he dropped the mask, it would have been easy to dis­miss Musk’s “aliens built the pyra­mids” quip as just a sil­ly joke. But these days? This is the same guy who insist­ed Hitler was a Com­mu­nist dur­ing an inter­view with the AfD’s Alice Wei­del last year. Alien astro­naut the­o­ries aren’t much a stretch when you’ve already gone that deep into the far right rab­bit hole.

    And, of course, we aren’t just talk­ing about the Nazi-aligned beliefs of the wealth­i­est man on the plan­et and some­one cur­rent­ly empow­ered to oper­ate as a kind of unelect­ed co-Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. This is also as man obsessed with col­o­niz­ing Mars. Which begs the ques­tion: is Musk’s obses­sion with space trav­el root­ed in some sort of ‘alien astro­naut’ ori­gin sto­ry for white peo­ple? Because he’s clear­ly very focused on ‘sav­ing the white race’, much like his grand­fa­ther, and has appar­ent­ly had an obses­sion with trav­el­ing to Mars going back to child­hood. Is Musk qui­et­ly hop­ing to make first con­tact? Maybe hang out with some of the tall blond Nordic aliens? Again, it would have been easy to dis­miss such notions as sil­ly if we were talk­ing about pre-MAGA Musk. But he’s an open Nazi now, get­ting weird­er and seem­ing­ly more ambi­tious by the day. It would be nice if we could just assume Musk does­n’t have ancient alien dis­cov­ery ambi­tions but, real­ly, can we rule it out?

    The new CBC also includes a num­ber of oth­er inter­est­ing fun facts about Halde­man’s biog­ra­phy. For exam­ple, it turns out the Total War and Defence par­ty — the short-lived polit­i­cal par­ty Halde­man start­ed in 1941, fol­low­ing his depar­ture from the Tech­noc­ra­cy move­ment — did­n’t just call for the con­scrip­tion of every able-bod­ied man and woman between the ages of 16 and 60 to sup­port the British in WWII. It also called for the con­scrip­tion of “all nat­ur­al resources, all indus­tri­al equip­ment and all prop­er­ty,” includ­ing “all bank deposits and pri­vate hold­ings of mon­ey.” It’s a remark­able plat­form for some­one who was open­ly defend­ing the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion as the chair­man of the Social Cred­it Par­ty in 1946 and pro­fessed a deep antipa­thy towards Com­mu­nism.

    We also got to learn about a grim­ly amus­ing point of appar­ent dis­agree­ment between Halde­man and his grand­son: Elon Musk, a Cana­di­an cit­i­zen, has unsur­pris­ing­ly come out in sup­port of Pres­i­dent Trump’s land-grab­bing ambi­tions. Beyond tweet­ing in sup­port of Green­land choos­ing to join the US, he even tweet­ed how “Cana­da is not a real coun­try,” in a now-delet­ed tweet, result­ing in Cana­di­ans start­ing a peti­tion to have his cit­i­zen­ship revoked. His grand­fa­ther, on the oth­er hand, actu­al­ly expressed alarm in 1945 over what he saw as “insid­i­ous and sedi­tious pro­pa­gan­da” from his then-for­mer Tech­noc­ra­cy move­ment after the move­ment began advo­cat­ing for the US to take over Cana­da and Green­land by “force of arms”. What’s old is new again. And dumb­er than ever.

    Ok, first, here’s a quick look back at those “Aliens built the pyra­mids obv” com­ments Musk made back in 2020, which result­ed in the gov­ern­ment of Egypt issu­ing an invi­ta­tion so he can see for him­self. Yes, while Musk’s grand­fa­ther was con­vinced only a non-black civ­i­liza­tion like the Egyp­tians could have built a ‘lost city’ in South­ern Africa, Musk appar­ent­ly felt it was too much for even the Egyp­tians:

    BBC

    Egypt tells Elon Musk its pyra­mids were not built by aliens

    2 August 2020

    Egypt has invit­ed bil­lion­aire Elon Musk to vis­it the coun­try and see for him­self that its famous pyra­mids were not built by aliens.

    The SpaceX boss had tweet­ed what appeared to be sup­port for con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists who say aliens were involved in the colos­sal con­struc­tion effort.

    But Egyp­t’s inter­na­tion­al co-oper­a­tion min­is­ter does not want them tak­ing any of the cred­it.

    She says see­ing the tombs of the pyra­mid builders would be the proof.

    The tombs dis­cov­ered in the 1990s are defin­i­tive evi­dence, experts say, that the mag­nif­i­cent struc­tures were indeed built by ancient Egyp­tians.

    On Fri­day, the tech tycoon tweet­ed: “Aliens built the pyra­mids obv”, which was retweet­ed more than 84,000 times.

    Egyp­t’s Min­is­ter of Inter­na­tion­al Co-oper­a­tion Rania al-Mashat respond­ed on Twit­ter, say­ing she fol­lowed and admired Mr Musk’s work.

    But she urged him to fur­ther explore evi­dence about the build­ing of the struc­tures built for pharaohs of Egypt.

    Egypt­ian archae­ol­o­gist Zahi Hawass also respond­ed in a short video in Ara­bic, post­ed on social media, say­ing Mr Musk’s argu­ment was a “com­plete hal­lu­ci­na­tion”.

    “I found the tombs of the pyra­mids builders that tell every­one that the builders of the pyra­mids are Egyp­tians and they were not slaves,” Egypt­To­day quotes him as say­ing.

    Mr Musk did lat­er tweet a link to a BBC His­to­ry site about the lives of the pyra­mid builders, say­ing: “This BBC arti­cle pro­vides a sen­si­ble sum­ma­ry for how it was done.”

    ...

    ———–

    “Egypt tells Elon Musk its pyra­mids were not built by aliens”; BBC; 08/02/2020

    “On Fri­day, the tech tycoon tweet­ed: “Aliens built the pyra­mids obv”, which was retweet­ed more than 84,000 times.”

    Is Elon Musk — some­one who claims to have the col­o­niza­tion of Mars as his top pri­or­i­ty — an ‘ancient aliens’ advo­cate? It would appear so. At least if we take him at his word.

    And those trou­bling ques­tions about ancient astro­nauts, alter­na­tive ori­gin sto­ries, and Musk’s mar­t­ian ambi­tions bring us to the fol­low­ing CBC piece about alter­na­tive ori­gin sto­ries that con­sumed Musk’s grand­fa­ther, Joshua Halde­man. The same grand­fa­ther who relo­cat­ed his fam­i­ly from Cana­da to apartheid South Africa in 1950 after becom­ing enam­ored with the apartheid poli­cies. As well as becom­ing enam­ored with the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion. Apartheid South Africa was going to be the white race’s best chance of defeat­ing the glob­al Jew­ish con­spir­a­cy against white Chris­tians. As the piece describes, Halde­man’s strug­gles on behalf of the white race includ­ed an obses­sion with the Lost City of Kala­hari. He nev­er found his lost city, but he also nev­er gave up hope. Hope that includ­ed 16 fam­i­ly trips across Africa ded­i­cat­ed to the lost city’s dis­cov­ery that includ­ed his kids. One of whom was Musk’s mom Maye. The quest to find the Lost City of Kala­hari was­n’t just a major fea­ture of Halde­man’s life in South Africa. It was a major fea­ture for the entire fam­i­ly. Had Halde­man not died when Elon was 3, Musk would have prob­a­bly gone on these search­es too. Which is all part of the trou­bling con­text of Elon’s alien pyra­mids 2020 now-delet­ed tweet: maybe it was a joke. Or maybe it was a reflec­tion of a very real belief. A belief in alarm­ing synch with the larg­er far right world view that Musk has pub­licly embraced in recent years. And alarm­ing­ly in synch with his grand­fa­ther’s racist lost city obses­sion:

    CBC

    The Cana­di­an roots of Elon Musk’s con­spir­acist grand­pa

    Raised in Saskatchewan, Joshua Halde­man was a tech-utopi­an, politi­cian and apartheid fan

    By Geoff Leo
    Mar. 20, 2025

    Joshua Halde­man was just one of thou­sands of Saskatchewan farm­ers who lost their land in the drought of the Dirty ’30s.

    While that trau­ma shaped the lives of every­one who went through it, the cri­sis affect­ed Halde­man in an excep­tion­al way — he nev­er stopped rag­ing at what he per­ceived were the caus­es of the Great Depres­sion.

    “He would remain leery of finan­cial insti­tu­tions and oth­er bureau­cra­cies through­out his life, a sen­ti­ment that would shape his polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy,” says a 1995 aca­d­e­m­ic paper about Halde­man co-writ­ten by his son Scott.

    Halde­man came to believe that an inter­na­tion­al com­mu­nist con­spir­a­cy con­trolled the banks, the media and the uni­ver­si­ties and was aim­ing to run the world.

    “An ‘Invis­i­ble Gov­ern­ment,’ work­ing to car­ry out the objec­tives of the Inter­na­tion­al Con­spir­a­cy, is oper­at­ing in every coun­try,” he wrote in his book The Inter­na­tion­al Con­spir­a­cy in Health, which was pub­lished in the mid-1960s. In it, he also said the con­spir­a­cy was push­ing for the flu­o­ri­da­tion of water sup­plies, manda­to­ry milk pas­teur­iza­tion and mass vac­ci­na­tion pro­grams.

    Halde­man ded­i­cat­ed his life to fight­ing it.

    “Only by fol­low­ing the exam­ple and guid­ance of Jesus Christ will man be able to suc­cess­ful­ly com­bat the evil forces of the Inter­na­tion­al Con­spir­a­cy and achieve the great­ness for him­self and his coun­try.”

    Halde­man thought gov­ern­ment was being bad­ly mis­man­aged and at one point in his career, he embraced the solu­tion pro­posed by a move­ment called Tech­noc­ra­cy: that gov­ern­ment should be run by sci­en­tists and engi­neers, not politi­cians.

    ...

    Kevin Ander­son, a his­to­ri­an at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­gary who has stud­ied the con­spir­a­to­r­i­al think­ing that emerged dur­ing the 1930s and ’40s, told CBC there are stun­ning echoes between that time and today.

    He said if he were to read a list of Haldeman’s beliefs in one of his class­es today and ask, “When do you think this was writ­ten? I bet the more aware stu­dents would say, ‘Oh, two years ago — this year.’”

    The Cana­da con­nec­tion

    Halde­man died in a plane crash in 1974, when he was 72 years old.

    His grand­son, Elon Musk, was just three. Musk would become the CEO of Tes­la and SpaceX — and the wealth­i­est man in the world.

    Elon’s moth­er, Maye, born in Regi­na in 1948, was one of Joshua and Win­nifred Haldeman’s five chil­dren.

    “Through­out his child­hood, Elon heard many sto­ries about his grandfather’s exploits and sat through count­less slide shows that doc­u­ment­ed his trav­els and trips,” wrote Musk biog­ra­ph­er Ash­lee Vance in his 2015 book Elon Musk: Tes­la, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fan­tas­tic Future.

    “My grand­moth­er told these tales of how they almost died sev­er­al times along their jour­neys,” Musk told Vance. “They were fly­ing in a plane with lit­er­al­ly no instru­ments — not even a radio…. My grand­fa­ther had this desire for adven­ture, explo­ration — doing crazy things.”

    “Maybe that sort of adven­tur­ous spir­it is in all of [Haldeman’s descen­dants],” Musk said to Van­i­ty Fair in 2015.

    Like his grand­pa, Musk — a cit­i­zen of Cana­da, South Africa and the U.S. — has also tak­en an inter­est in pol­i­tics, hav­ing become a senior advis­er to U.S. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump since his elec­tion last year. And, like Halde­man, Musk has tan­gled with a Cana­di­an prime min­is­ter of his own.

    In ear­ly Jan­u­ary, then-prime min­is­ter Justin Trudeau post­ed a response on X to Trump mock­ing­ly call­ing Cana­da the 51st state. (Trudeau announced on Jan. 6 that he was step­ping down as prime min­is­ter, and has since been replaced by Mark Car­ney.)

    ...

    Last month, thou­sands of Cana­di­ans start­ed sign­ing a peti­tion to have Musk’s cit­i­zen­ship revoked for his attempts to “attack Cana­di­an sov­er­eign­ty.”

    “Cana­da is not a real coun­try,” he post­ed on X in reply. (That post has since been delet­ed.)

    Eighty years ear­li­er, Musk’s grand­pa had a much dif­fer­ent response when he saw a polit­i­cal move­ment advo­cate that the U.S. take over Cana­da and Green­land by “force of arms.” He issued a warn­ing against its “insid­i­ous and sedi­tious pro­pa­gan­da.”

    “The Cana­di­an peo­ple and the Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment must take pos­i­tive action now as a mea­sure of nation­al safe­ty,” Halde­man wrote in the Apr. 5, 1945, edi­tion of the Cana­di­an Social Cred­iter mag­a­zine.

    ...

    Gophers and scurvy

    Joshua Halde­man was born in a log cab­in in Min­neso­ta in 1902 and raised in Waldeck, Sask., near Swift Cur­rent.

    Accord­ing to the CSC biog­ra­phy, Halde­man “became quite skilled in bron­co horse­back rid­ing, box­ing, wrestling and exhi­bi­tion rope spin­ning.”

    His moth­er, Alme­da, rec­og­nized by many as Canada’s first chi­ro­prac­tor, ran a strict home, allow­ing “no one in her house to drink, smoke, use improp­er lan­guage or tell shady sto­ries,” accord­ing to Erik Nordeus’s book The Engi­neer: Fol­low Elon Musk on a Jour­ney from South Africa to Mars. “Play­ing cards and med­i­cines were also pro­hib­it­ed.”

    Halde­man attend­ed nine col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Moose Jaw Col­lege and Regi­na Col­lege, accord­ing to the aca­d­e­m­ic paper writ­ten by his son Scott. Scott Halde­man declined CBC’s request for an inter­view, but did answer some ques­tions by email.

    Halde­man con­clud­ed his chi­ro­prac­tic train­ing in 1926. Through­out his life, Halde­man was a leader in the chi­ro­prac­tic indus­try, tak­ing board posi­tions in provin­cial and nation­al asso­ci­a­tions and push­ing for new leg­is­la­tion.

    But in the mid-1920s, instead of tak­ing up chi­ro­prac­tic, he began farm­ing.

    His tim­ing was not ide­al. He lost his farm dur­ing the 1930s after he was unable to keep up with loan pay­ments.

    ...

    “Stewed gopher, canned gopher, gopher pie” were “not infre­quent­ly” on the menu at that time, wrote Cur­tis McManus in his book Hap­py­land: The His­to­ry of the ‘Dirty Thir­ties’ in Saskatchewan.

    ...

    Errol Musk, Elon’s father, told CBC in an inter­view ear­li­er this year that he remem­bers Halde­man speak­ing about his frus­tra­tion with Saskatchewan’s rail sys­tem, which had a dif­fi­cult time get­ting food from the farm to those who need­ed it.

    “He point­ed out to me about how the Depres­sion was man-made,” said Errol Musk. “In oth­er words, it was planned…. a plan to screw up the world in favour of cer­tain peo­ple.”

    Ander­son said peo­ple in Saskatchewan at the time had an under­stand­able fear of “glob­al forces that feel com­plete­ly out of every­body’s con­trol.”

    ...

    A gov­ern­ment with­out politi­cians

    Halde­man’s polit­i­cal activism began in 1928 when, at 26, he joined a cou­ple of left-lean­ing farm­ers orga­ni­za­tions.

    In 1933, the Co-oper­a­tive Com­mon­wealth Fed­er­a­tion (CCF) was formed with the sign­ing of the Regi­na Man­i­festo, which called for the erad­i­ca­tion of cap­i­tal­ism and the estab­lish­ment of a social­ist state. (The CCF was the fore­run­ner of today’s NDP.) The next year, Halde­man joined the CCF and took on lead­er­ship roles in the par­ty, accord­ing to the paper writ­ten by Scott Halde­man.

    “[The CCF] pro­mot­ed the abo­li­tion of the prof­it sys­tem and the estab­lish­ment of a planned econ­o­my,” wrote Joshua Haldeman’s sec­re­tary Vivan Doan in a let­ter to Scott cit­ed in the paper. “He worked tire­less­ly for this new par­ty.”

    By 1936, Halde­man had moved to Regi­na and estab­lished his chi­ro­prac­tic office.

    Around that time, Howard Scott — a 6’5” man with broad shoul­ders and a mag­net­ic per­son­al­i­ty — began deliv­er­ing fiery lec­tures across West­ern Cana­da. The New York-based engi­neer and polit­i­cal vision­ary was the leader of Tech­noc­ra­cy Inc., an orga­ni­za­tion pro­mot­ing his plan for an econ­o­my run by experts, not politi­cians.

    ...

    The move­ment began in the Unit­ed States in the 1930s. By 1940, it was sweep­ing across West­ern Cana­da. Tech­nocrats were known for wear­ing iden­ti­cal grey uni­forms and salut­ing one anoth­er in what The Dai­ly Province called “Tech­no­crat fash­ion — right hand raised smart­ly to eye-lev­el.”

    Halde­man quick­ly became entranced by the move­ment and took up a lead­er­ship role. In a July 1940 arti­cle in Tech­noc­ra­cy Digest, he argued that advances in tech­nol­o­gy and glob­al affairs had made it pos­si­ble to cre­ate a utopi­an soci­ety in North Amer­i­ca.

    ...

    ‘A sci­en­tif­ic Franken­stein’

    The Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment was not swayed by Technocracy’s rhetoric. In June 1940, it declared Tech­noc­ra­cy an ille­gal and sub­ver­sive orga­ni­za­tion.

    “The lit­er­a­ture of Tech­noc­ra­cy dis­clos­es, in effect, that one of its objec­tives is to over­throw the gov­ern­ment and con­sti­tu­tion of this coun­try by force,” said prime min­is­ter William Lyon Macken­zie-King in a July 16, 1940, speech in the House of Com­mons.

    Halde­man was appar­ent­ly not intim­i­dat­ed by this move. He placed an ad in the Regi­na Leader-Post pro­mot­ing Tech­noc­ra­cy and call­ing the government’s move an “unjus­ti­fied…. polit­i­cal blun­der.”

    A few months lat­er, he was arrest­ed and charged with stir­ring up dis­loy­al­ty to the King and under­min­ing Canada’s pros­e­cu­tion of the Sec­ond World War. He was found guilty in a down­town Regi­na court.

    Short­ly after his arrest, Halde­man left the move­ment, after com­ing to the con­clu­sion it had become trea­so­nous. His son Scott wrote that Halde­man became dis­il­lu­sioned when Tech­noc­ra­cy flipped from oppos­ing com­mu­nism to sup­port­ing “com­plete eco­nom­ic and mil­i­tary col­lab­o­ra­tion with Sovi­et Rus­sia.”

    ...

    In an April 1945 arti­cle in the Cana­di­an Social Cred­iter, Halde­man warned that Tech­noc­ra­cy had become “a sci­en­tif­ic Franken­stein.”

    He wrote that since his depar­ture, the orga­ni­za­tion had begun push­ing for the U.S. to take over Cana­da and Green­land “either by pur­chase, nego­ti­a­tion or by force of arms” – a posi­tion advo­cat­ed by Howard Scott, who argued for iso­la­tion­ism and a strong con­ti­nen­tal defence.

    Halde­man warned that Que­bec and what is now Mex­i­co were being tar­get­ed in par­tic­u­lar. He quot­ed Scott as argu­ing “that these alien cul­tures on the con­ti­nent of North Amer­i­ca be anni­hi­lat­ed. Assim­i­la­tion is out of the ques­tion.”

    Halde­man warned “Tech­noc­ra­cy Inc. is con­spir­ing against the British Empire — against the sov­er­eign­ty of Cana­da.”

    A mav­er­ick

    Halde­man was a bit of a mav­er­ick through­out his life — con­fi­dent in his own appre­hen­sion of issues.

    “He nev­er had any per­son that would be con­sid­ered a spir­i­tu­al guide,” Scott Halde­man told CBC in an email. “He felt he knew the Bible bet­ter than any min­is­ter and only went to church for wed­dings and funer­als.”

    After Tech­noc­ra­cy, Halde­man decid­ed he would start his own polit­i­cal par­ty, Total War and Defence. In his 1941 book, Total War and Defence for Cana­da, which was his man­i­festo for this new par­ty, he argued for a pol­i­cy of total con­scrip­tion to sup­port our British allies dur­ing the Sec­ond World War.

    He called for the con­scrip­tion of “every employ­able man and woman between the ages of six­teen and six­ty” and “all nat­ur­al resources, all indus­tri­al equip­ment and all prop­er­ty,” includ­ing “all bank deposits and pri­vate hold­ings of mon­ey.”

    His move­ment did not catch on.

    His next stop was the Social Cred­it Par­ty, a rapid­ly grow­ing polit­i­cal move­ment that formed gov­ern­ment in Alber­ta in 1935 and held it until 1971.

    Social Cred­it advo­cat­ed low tax­es, min­i­mal reg­u­la­tion and free mar­kets. But it doesn’t fit neat­ly into the mod­ern left-right polit­i­cal divide. Social Cred­it want­ed gov­ern­ments to give mon­ey direct­ly to con­sumers in order to com­bat inher­ent inequity in the mar­ket.

    Halde­man quick­ly rose through the ranks, becom­ing leader of the Social Cred­it Par­ty of Saskatchewan in 1945 and the chair of the nation­al party’s coun­cil in 1946.

    Dur­ing his polit­i­cal tenure he ran, unsuc­cess­ful­ly, against three giants of Cana­di­an pol­i­tics. In the 1945 fed­er­al elec­tion, he faced Lib­er­al prime min­is­ter William Lyon Macken­zie-King in a Prince Albert rid­ing. In 1948, Halde­man led Social Cred­it in a provin­cial cam­paign against Tom­my Dou­glas and the CCF. Social Cred­it lost, receiv­ing just eight per cent of the vote.

    ...

    Halde­man cam­paigned as the Chris­t­ian alter­na­tive to god­less com­mu­nists.

    “The trou­ble with pol­i­tics is that Chris­tian­i­ty has been left out,” said Halde­man in an April 1948 address on CBC Radio, tran­scribed in the Cana­di­an Social Cred­iter.

    A 1948 con­fronta­tion at Regi­na City Hall put Halde­man in the midst of a polit­i­cal con­flict that has echoes of our mod­ern pol­i­tics. He had been invit­ed to a par­ty lead­ers’ forum by the Regi­na House­wives League to dis­cuss their pro­pos­al for nation­al price con­trols.

    Halde­man crit­i­cized their idea as a “strict­ly social­ist res­o­lu­tion” and accused the league of being “a front for the com­mu­nist orga­ni­za­tion.”

    Accord­ing to the Regi­na Leader-Post, “Dr. Halde­man was repeat­ed­ly inter­rupt­ed by ‘boos’ and cat­calls.”

    “I am mak­ing a speech here,” Halde­man replied. “Isn’t there still free­dom of speech in Regi­na?”

    ‘Home-baked fas­cism’

    In 1946, Halde­man found him­self in the midst of a nation­al scan­dal, after the Que­bec wing of Social Cred­it pub­lished the noto­ri­ous Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion.

    A Saska­toon Star Phoenix edi­to­r­i­al said Social Cred­it was cook­ing up “home-baked fas­cism” by pro­mot­ing a fraud­u­lent doc­u­ment that “pur­ports to reveal a plot [by Jews] to dom­i­nate the world.”

    This rein­forced Social Credit’s rep­u­ta­tion as an anti­se­mit­ic orga­ni­za­tion — which can be traced back to its founder, Clif­ford Hugh Dou­glas, also known as “Major Dou­glas.”

    “The Jew has no native cul­ture and always aims at pow­er with­out respon­si­bil­i­ty. He is the par­a­site upon, and cor­rupter of, every civil­i­sa­tion in which he has attained pow­er,” Dou­glas wrote in a 1939 edi­tion of the party’s mag­a­zine.

    Halde­man, as the chair­man of the Nation­al Social Cred­it Asso­ci­a­tion, respond­ed in a let­ter to the edi­tor of the Star Phoenix. He said “Social Cred­it is absolute­ly opposed to anti­semitism,” adding, “the great mass of the Jew­ish peo­ple in Ger­many suf­fered great­ly and our full sym­pa­thy goes out to them.”

    But he also defend­ed the pub­lish­ing of the Pro­to­cols. He said whether the doc­u­ment was fraud­u­lent “is not the point.”

    “The point is that the plan as out­lined in these pro­to­cols has been rapid­ly unfold­ing in the peri­od of obser­va­tion of this gen­er­a­tion,” Halde­man wrote, not­ing the con­spir­a­cy this book sup­pos­ed­ly revealed was exe­cut­ed “by inter­na­tion­al financiers, many but not all of them, Jew­ish.”

    In a 1947 let­ter to the edi­tor of the Saska­toon Star Phoenix, Rab­bi Irwin Gor­don expressed skep­ti­cism about Haldeman’s dis­avow­al of anti­semitism.

    “Doc­tor Halde­man must have a short mem­o­ry as well if he does not remem­ber his own speech­es shot through with anti­se­mit­ic talk,” Gor­don wrote. “Doc­tor Haldeman’s over-inter­est in clear­ing the par­ty and him­self from the charge of anti­semitism and anti-Cana­di­an­ism will not fool the peo­ple.”

    Even Alberta’s Social Cred­it pre­mier thought the par­ty had an anti­semitism prob­lem. In a let­ter to a nation­al leader after the Pro­to­cols inci­dent, Pre­mier Ernest Man­ning (father of Pre­ston Man­ning, founder of the Reform Par­ty of Cana­da) took aim at the organization’s mag­a­zine, the Cana­di­an Social Cred­iter.

    “No one who val­ues their name or their influ­ence is going to get behind a pub­li­ca­tion which con­tains lit­tle but neg­a­tive and destruc­tive crit­i­cism flavoured with ‘Jew-bait­ing,’” Man­ning wrote, demand­ing that Halde­man, as par­ty chair­man, clean things up.

    South Africa move prompt­ed by prophe­cies

    In the midst of his fre­net­ic polit­i­cal career, Halde­man made time to start a fam­i­ly.

    In 1942, he took up danc­ing and a few months lat­er mar­ried his instruc­tor, Win­nifred Fletch­er. (This was his sec­ond mar­riage. He mar­ried Eve Peters in 1934 and they had one child togeth­er — Joshua Jer­ry Noel Halde­man — but the cou­ple divorced by 1937.)

    ...

    The cou­ple had five chil­dren, includ­ing twins Maye and Kaye in 1948.

    That same year, Halde­man got his pilot’s licence and bought a plane that enabled him to run his chi­ro­prac­tic busi­ness along­side his polit­i­cal career. The girls flew with their dad so often that news­pa­pers began refer­ring to the fam­i­ly as “the Fly­ing Halde­mans.”

    ...

    By mid-1949, Halde­man start­ed look­ing for a new home, a search inspired in part by two prophe­cies, accord­ing to a biog­ra­phy of his son Scott.

    “Josh relates an expe­ri­ence with a ‘medi­um’ [spir­i­tu­al­ist] in 1936 who told him he must prac­tice in Regi­na for 14 years and then, ‘move to a city in a far­away place,’” says the book, The Jour­ney of Scott Halde­man, writ­ten by Reed Phillips.

    It goes on to say that once his 14 years were up in Regi­na, “every­thing fell into place.”

    “After speak­ing with an Angli­can min­is­ter from South Africa at an Inter­na­tion­al Trade Fair in Toron­to, Joshua became con­vinced that South Africa was that ‘far­away place,’” the book says.

    So what did that min­is­ter say?

    Haldeman’s 1960 book, The Inter­na­tion­al Con­spir­a­cy to Estab­lish a World Dic­ta­tor­ship and The Men­ace to South Africa, begins this way:

    “‘SOUTH AFRICA WILL BECOME THE LEADER OF WHITE CIVILIZATION IN THE WORLD’ was the prophet­ic and emphat­ic state­ment of an Angli­can Min­is­ter in Toron­to, Cana­da, 1949. He had lived many years in South Africa.”

    A new life for Halde­man

    The Halde­mans’ move to South Africa made news across Cana­da, with a Sept. 11, 1950, arti­cle not­ing the fam­i­ly was leav­ing behind a “thriv­ing prac­tice as a chi­ro­prac­tor,” Winnifred’s dance school and a 20-room home in Regi­na, to “stake every­thing on this new ven­ture.”

    They set­tled with their five chil­dren in Pre­to­ria, where they enjoyed warm weath­er and hired help.

    “We have two native (Negro) gar­den boys in the sum­mer and one in the win­ter and a native girl,” accord­ing to an arti­cle Halde­man wrote that was pub­lished in the Aug. 6, 1951, edi­tion of the Regi­na Leader-Post.

    “The natives are very prim­i­tive and must not be tak­en seri­ous­ly. We get quite a bang out of them and they are real­ly quite use­ful,” he wrote. “It takes three natives to do the work of one white man.”

    In 1948, the Nation­al Par­ty swept to pow­er in South Africa and imme­di­ate­ly began imple­ment­ing its pro­gram of apartheid, a pol­i­cy of racial seg­re­ga­tion.

    Months after arriv­ing, Halde­man told South Africa’s Die Trans­valer news­pa­per “instead of the gov­ern­men­t’s atti­tude keep­ing me away from South Africa, it has actu­al­ly encour­aged me to set­tle here.”

    “White man…. the most dif­fi­cult to con­trol’

    In his 1951 Regi­na Leader-Post arti­cle, Halde­man defend­ed apartheid.

    “Some [African natives] are quite clever in a rou­tine job, but the best of them can­not assume respon­si­bil­i­ty and will abuse author­i­ty,” he wrote. “The present gov­ern­ment of South Africa knows how to han­dle the native ques­tion.”

    On March 21, 1960, police fired sub­ma­chine guns on a crowd of Black peo­ple protest­ing apartheid in Sharpeville, South Africa, killing 69 and wound­ing more than 180 oth­ers. It came to be known as the Sharpeville mas­sacre, “one of the first and most vio­lent demon­stra­tions against apartheid in South Africa,” accord­ing to the Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­ni­ca.

    A few weeks lat­er, Halde­man pub­lished his book The Inter­na­tion­al Con­spir­a­cy to Estab­lish a World Gov­ern­ment and Men­ace to South Africa, writ­ing in such a hur­ry that the intro­duc­tion said “due to the present urgency this brief has been rushed and typo­graph­i­cal errors must be excused.”

    Halde­man said the lead­ers of the Black protest move­ment hope, “with the sup­port of the Inter­na­tion­al­ists, to oust the white man, who has in a few years brought their peo­ple from prim­i­tive sav­agery to a great mea­sure of peace and secu­ri­ty.”

    “An uncon­di­tion­al pro­pa­gan­da war­fare is car­ried on against the white man because the white man’s integri­ty, ini­tia­tive and inde­pen­dence make him the most dif­fi­cult to con­trol,” he wrote.

    Halde­man opposed the state man­dat­ing sys­tems like com­pul­so­ry med­ica­tion on the white pop­u­la­tion, but had a dif­fer­ent stan­dard for the Black pop­u­la­tion.

    “The State has the right to do for them what it thinks is best, the same rights as the par­ents have for their chil­dren,” he wrote in The Inter­na­tion­al Con­spir­a­cy in Health. (Both of Haldeman’s Inter­na­tion­al Con­spir­a­cy books were first report­ed on by Har­vard his­to­ri­an Jill Lep­ore in a 2023 arti­cle in The New York­er.)

    ‘The Great Fari­ni’

    Short­ly after his arrival in South Africa, Halde­man was swept up in the “lost city” craze.

    Her­mann Wit­ten­berg, a pro­fes­sor at South Africa’s Uni­ver­si­ty of the West­ern Cape, says in the late 1800s and ear­ly 1900s, white ama­teur arche­ol­o­gists and explor­ers dis­cov­ered ruins, mon­u­ments and sculp­tures of ancient African civ­i­liza­tions.

    He said because of wide­spread racism, these explor­ers — even more pro­gres­sive, lib­er­al explor­ers — believed “that Black Africans, Ban­tu-speak­ing peo­ples, are prim­i­tive, not capa­ble of any civ­i­liza­tion­al attain­ments. The best they can do is build mud huts, you know?”

    As a result, they the­o­rized that these civ­i­liza­tions, which exhib­it­ed some sophis­ti­ca­tion, must have been built by non-Africans.

    “They would have imag­ined that this was some ancient north­ern, West­ern, Mediter­ranean civ­i­liza­tion which had built these things. And they thought there was a whole string of these things in south­ern Africa, includ­ing that Kala­hari thing,” said Wit­ten­berg.

    “That Kala­hari thing” became Haldeman’s obses­sion: the leg­end of the Lost City of the Kala­hari, which was alleged­ly dis­cov­ered by William Hunt in 1885.

    Hunt, who came to be known as “The Great Fari­ni,” was a Cana­di­an cir­cus per­former who became famous in the 1860s for cross­ing Nia­gara Falls on a tightrope — once with a wash­ing machine on his back and anoth­er time with a sack over his entire body.

    Fari­ni, who was also the inven­tor of the “human can­non­ball’ per­for­mance, became a pro­mot­er of “freak shows,” fea­tur­ing a girl he called Krao and deemed the Miss­ing Link.

    P.T. Bar­num once called Fari­ni “the most tal­ent­ed show­man” he knew, accord­ing to Shane Peacock’s book The Great Fari­ni: The High-Wire Life of William Hunt.

    The show­man was also an explor­er and sto­ry­teller.

    As the sto­ry goes, in 1885, Fari­ni trav­elled to Africa and led an expe­di­tion across the Kala­hari Desert. In a book he wrote about his trav­els (Through the Kala­hari Desert), Fari­ni claimed he had chanced upon the ruins of an ancient city:

    A rel­ic, may be, of a glo­ri­ous past,

    A city once grand and sub­lime,

    Destroyed by earth­quake, defaced by the blast,

    Swept away by the hand of time.

    Accord­ing to Maye Musk, Halde­man read Farini’s book and became trans­fixed. In 1953, Halde­man began tak­ing reg­u­lar trips into the desert with his wife and five chil­dren to hunt for the lost city.

    “My father want­ed to try to fol­low Farini’s path,” Musk wrote in her auto­bi­og­ra­phy. “And that became our July vaca­tion. Now I think: Can you imag­ine tak­ing five lit­tle kids to the desert for three weeks?”

    ...

    Lost city search­es ‘always about white peo­ple:’ expert

    Haldeman’s youngest son, Lee, has inher­it­ed his father’s pas­sion for the lost city, hav­ing writ­ten two books on the top­ic. He ded­i­cat­ed Find­ing Farini’s Lost City of the Kala­hari to his par­ents.

    “They com­plet­ed six­teen search­es for the fabled ruins,” he wrote. “There are no oth­ers in the his­to­ry of this mys­tery that believed Farini’s sto­ry as intense­ly, or who ded­i­cat­ed so much time, mon­ey, and effort to look for this fabled City.” Lee Halde­man declined CBC’s request for an inter­view.

    Wit­ten­berg agreed with the assess­ment, call­ing Halde­man “the undis­put­ed Fari­ni devo­tee of his time.”

    As for the moti­va­tion behind Haldeman’s fix­a­tion, Elon Musk biog­ra­ph­er Erik Nordeus wrote that “it’s unclear… why he became inter­est­ed in find­ing [the lost city] but he did every­thing he could to find it.”

    Jean-loïc Le Quel­lec, author of The White Lady and Atlantis: Ophir and Great Zim­bab­we: Inves­ti­ga­tion of an Archae­o­log­i­cal Myth, says Haldeman’s lost city search was part of a well-estab­lished cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non.

    He said there are more than 1,000 books on the top­ic of lost civ­i­liza­tions between the mid-19th cen­tu­ry and 1940, “and none of them is about the search for or dis­cov­ery of a ‘lost black tribe.’ They are always about white peo­ple,” he wrote in an email to CBC.

    Le Quel­lec, direc­tor of research at France’s Cen­tre Nation­al de la Recherche Sci­en­tifique, men­tions Halde­man in his 2016 book, but had no idea of his con­nec­tion to Musk until CBC reached out.

    “I don’t know if Halde­man was explic­it­ly look­ing for evi­dence of an ancient white pres­ence, but this was very gen­er­al­ly the case in his time, and for decades,” Le Quel­lec wrote.

    He said these sto­ries were used by colonists through­out Africa as a means of claim­ing his­tor­i­cal legit­i­ma­cy for their actions.

    “The main moti­va­tion of the authors and explor­ers was to demon­strate the exis­tence of an ancient white (Euro­pean, Sumer­ian, Egypt­ian or Cre­tan) pres­ence in Africa, in order to jus­ti­fy col­o­niza­tion in gen­er­al, and apartheid in the case of South Africa,” he said. “The Lost City of Kala­hari is just one exam­ple among many of this type of approach.”

    Like Le Quel­lec, Wit­ten­berg also wrote about Halde­man with­out know­ing his con­nec­tion to Musk.

    In his PhD the­sis, The Sub­lime, Impe­ri­al­ism and the African Land­scape, Wit­ten­berg not­ed that explor­er Doreen Tain­ton, a con­tem­po­rary of Halde­man, believed that the Indige­nous Black peo­ple of South Africa were inca­pable of build­ing the sort of intri­cate archi­tec­ture described by Fari­ni in his book.

    That led her to ask “who, then, were these long dead builders?” In answer­ing her own ques­tion, she sug­gest­ed they could have been Romans, Greeks, Phoeni­cians, Egyp­tians or Arabs.

    Wit­ten­berg not­ed that just like Tain­ton, Hald­man was also open to the notion that the lost city was not of Indige­nous ori­gin, writ­ing that Halde­man believed “this would be a major archae­o­log­i­cal find, if it could be locat­ed, as it would show that the Egyp­tians were this far south.”

    In an inter­view with CBC, Wit­ten­berg said “Egyp­tians were not seen as African at the time. The gen­er­al sort of idea was that Egyp­tians were some sort of Mediter­ranean civ­i­liza­tion…. It was seen as not part of Africa, but it was seen as a Euro­pean type of civ­i­liza­tion.”

    A plane crash

    Despite his years of search­ing, Halde­man was unable to locate the lost city.

    On Jan. 13, 1974, Halde­man died in a plane crash along with his son-in-law Peter Rae, accord­ing to Die Trans­valer news­pa­per. It was front page news, fea­tur­ing a pho­to of the over­turned plane.

    “One of South Africa’s most famous chi­ro­prac­tors and adven­tur­ers…. died yes­ter­day morn­ing,” the arti­cle says. “The sus­pi­cion exists that they want­ed to car­ry out an emer­gency land­ing,” but “there were pow­er lines that pre­vent­ed the alleged emer­gency land­ing and the plane crashed nose first.”

    In a sep­a­rate arti­cle, the paper reflect­ed on Haldeman’s Kala­hari obses­sion, not­ing he “nev­er allowed him­self to be con­vinced that he was look­ing for some­thing that might not exist.” The paper said Haldeman’s trust in Farini’s integri­ty drove him, even as oth­er explor­ers con­clud­ed the cir­cus performer’s sto­ry was false.

    Wit­ten­berg said in the decades since the lost city craze, arche­ol­o­gy, geol­o­gy and eth­nol­o­gy have shown that gen­uine African ruins are, in fact, of Indige­nous Black ori­gin. And, he says, leg­ends like the Lost City of the Kala­hari have been large­ly aban­doned — though not entire­ly.

    “Myths are myths because they don’t die,” he said. “They have a par­tic­u­lar longevi­ty. They’re not killed off by fact, you know?”

    Accord­ing to Nordeus’s book, after Farini’s death, Halde­man wrote to his fam­i­ly, say­ing “We do not feel he made the Lost City up as we have con­firmed every­thing else in the book.”

    For much of his life, Halde­man was cap­ti­vat­ed and dri­ven by mys­ter­ies — a shad­owy group of inter­na­tion­al com­mu­nists con­spir­ing to con­trol the world and an elab­o­rate ancient city, lost to the sands of time.

    And he believed in them to the very end.

    ———–

    “The Cana­di­an roots of Elon Musk’s con­spir­acist grand­pa” By Geoff Leo; CBC; 03/20/2025

    ““An ‘Invis­i­ble Gov­ern­ment,’ work­ing to car­ry out the objec­tives of the Inter­na­tion­al Con­spir­a­cy, is oper­at­ing in every coun­try,” he wrote in his book The Inter­na­tion­al Con­spir­a­cy in Health, which was pub­lished in the mid-1960s. In it, he also said the con­spir­a­cy was push­ing for the flu­o­ri­da­tion of water sup­plies, manda­to­ry milk pas­teur­iza­tion and mass vac­ci­na­tion pro­grams.”

    An ‘Invis­i­ble Gov­ern­ment’ was oper­at­ing in every coun­try on the plan­et. A glob­al cabal Elon Musk’s grand­fa­ther ded­i­cat­ed his life to oppos­ing. That was his mes­sage to the world in The Inter­na­tion­al Con­spir­a­cy in Health, pub­lished in the mid-1960s, long after Joshua Halde­man reset­tled his whole fam­i­ly to apartheid South Africa as part of that fight. Also long after he pub­licly defend­ed the pub­li­ca­tion of Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion by his own polit­i­cal par­ty. It’s not a mys­tery as to who Halde­man sus­pect­ed was behind this ‘invis­i­ble gov­ern­ment’. It’s a remark­able biog­ra­phy for the grand­fa­ther of the wealth­i­est man on the plan­et. Made all the more remark­able by the fact that, as his­to­ri­an Kevin Ander­son points out, this vein of far right con­spir­a­to­r­i­al think­ing is today in the midst of a kind of glob­al renais­sance. A ren­nais­sance that has only ben­e­fit­ed from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twit­ter that has trans­formed the plat­form into a giant adver­tise­ment for today’s updat­ed ver­sions of the Pro­to­cols. What’s old is new again:

    ...
    Halde­man ded­i­cat­ed his life to fight­ing it.

    “Only by fol­low­ing the exam­ple and guid­ance of Jesus Christ will man be able to suc­cess­ful­ly com­bat the evil forces of the Inter­na­tion­al Con­spir­a­cy and achieve the great­ness for him­self and his coun­try.”

    Halde­man thought gov­ern­ment was being bad­ly mis­man­aged and at one point in his career, he embraced the solu­tion pro­posed by a move­ment called Tech­noc­ra­cy: that gov­ern­ment should be run by sci­en­tists and engi­neers, not politi­cians.

    ...

    Kevin Ander­son, a his­to­ri­an at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­gary who has stud­ied the con­spir­a­to­r­i­al think­ing that emerged dur­ing the 1930s and ’40s, told CBC there are stun­ning echoes between that time and today.

    He said if he were to read a list of Haldeman’s beliefs in one of his class­es today and ask, “When do you think this was writ­ten? I bet the more aware stu­dents would say, ‘Oh, two years ago — this year.’”
    ...

    And as the arti­cle notes, one of the iron­ic echo’s of Halde­man’s pol­i­tics that we’re see­ing play out today has to do with Pres­i­dent Trump’s seem­ing grow­ing desire for the US to takeover not just Green­land but Cana­da too. A desire seem­ing­ly shared by Elon. Or at least hes not both­ered by it with his “Cana­da is not a real coun­try” tweet. Keep in mind Musk has Cana­di­an cit­i­zen­ship. Well, it turns out Halde­man end­ed up being alarmed by a very sim­i­lar pro­pos­al by his then-for­mer par­ty, the Tech­noc­ra­cy Par­ty, which was call­ing for a US takeover of Cana­da and Green­land in 1945. But, again, what’s old is new again. Depress­ing­ly so:

    ...
    “Through­out his child­hood, Elon heard many sto­ries about his grandfather’s exploits and sat through count­less slide shows that doc­u­ment­ed his trav­els and trips,” wrote Musk biog­ra­ph­er Ash­lee Vance in his 2015 book Elon Musk: Tes­la, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fan­tas­tic Future.

    “My grand­moth­er told these tales of how they almost died sev­er­al times along their jour­neys,” Musk told Vance. “They were fly­ing in a plane with lit­er­al­ly no instru­ments — not even a radio…. My grand­fa­ther had this desire for adven­ture, explo­ration — doing crazy things.”

    “Maybe that sort of adven­tur­ous spir­it is in all of [Haldeman’s descen­dants],” Musk said to Van­i­ty Fair in 2015.

    Like his grand­pa, Musk — a cit­i­zen of Cana­da, South Africa and the U.S. — has also tak­en an inter­est in pol­i­tics, hav­ing become a senior advis­er to U.S. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump since his elec­tion last year. And, like Halde­man, Musk has tan­gled with a Cana­di­an prime min­is­ter of his own.

    In ear­ly Jan­u­ary, then-prime min­is­ter Justin Trudeau post­ed a response on X to Trump mock­ing­ly call­ing Cana­da the 51st state. (Trudeau announced on Jan. 6 that he was step­ping down as prime min­is­ter, and has since been replaced by Mark Car­ney.)

    ...

    Last month, thou­sands of Cana­di­ans start­ed sign­ing a peti­tion to have Musk’s cit­i­zen­ship revoked for his attempts to “attack Cana­di­an sov­er­eign­ty.”

    “Cana­da is not a real coun­try,” he post­ed on X in reply. (That post has since been delet­ed.)

    Eighty years ear­li­er, Musk’s grand­pa had a much dif­fer­ent response when he saw a polit­i­cal move­ment advo­cate that the U.S. take over Cana­da and Green­land by “force of arms.” He issued a warn­ing against its “insid­i­ous and sedi­tious pro­pa­gan­da.”

    “The Cana­di­an peo­ple and the Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment must take pos­i­tive action now as a mea­sure of nation­al safe­ty,” Halde­man wrote in the Apr. 5, 1945, edi­tion of the cana­di­an social cred­iter mag­a­zine.

    ...

    The Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment was not swayed by Technocracy’s rhetoric. In June 1940, it declared Tech­noc­ra­cy an ille­gal and sub­ver­sive orga­ni­za­tion.

    “The lit­er­a­ture of Tech­noc­ra­cy dis­clos­es, in effect, that one of its objec­tives is to over­throw the gov­ern­ment and con­sti­tu­tion of this coun­try by force,” said prime min­is­ter William Lyon Macken­zie-King in a July 16, 1940, speech in the House of Com­mons.

    Halde­man was appar­ent­ly not intim­i­dat­ed by this move. He placed an ad in the Regi­na Leader-Post pro­mot­ing Tech­noc­ra­cy and call­ing the government’s move an “unjus­ti­fied…. polit­i­cal blun­der.”

    A few months lat­er, he was arrest­ed and charged with stir­ring up dis­loy­al­ty to the King and under­min­ing Canada’s pros­e­cu­tion of the Sec­ond World War. He was found guilty in a down­town Regi­na court.

    Short­ly after his arrest, Halde­man left the move­ment, after com­ing to the con­clu­sion it had become trea­so­nous. His son Scott wrote that Halde­man became dis­il­lu­sioned when Tech­noc­ra­cy flipped from oppos­ing com­mu­nism to sup­port­ing “com­plete eco­nom­ic and mil­i­tary col­lab­o­ra­tion with Sovi­et Rus­sia.”

    ...

    In an April 1945 arti­cle in the Cana­di­an Social Cred­iter, Halde­man warned that Tech­noc­ra­cy had become “a sci­en­tif­ic Franken­stein.”

    He wrote that since his depar­ture, the orga­ni­za­tion had begun push­ing for the U.S. to take over Cana­da and Green­land “either by pur­chase, nego­ti­a­tion or by force of arms” – a posi­tion advo­cat­ed by Howard Scott, who argued for iso­la­tion­ism and a strong con­ti­nen­tal defence.

    Halde­man warned that Que­bec and what is now Mex­i­co were being tar­get­ed in par­tic­u­lar. He quot­ed Scott as argu­ing “that these alien cul­tures on the con­ti­nent of North Amer­i­ca be anni­hi­lat­ed. Assim­i­la­tion is out of the ques­tion.”

    Halde­man warned “Tech­noc­ra­cy Inc. is con­spir­ing against the British Empire — against the sov­er­eign­ty of Cana­da.”
    ...

    Also note the extreme nature of the short-lived par­ty Halde­man start­ed in 1941 fol­low­ing his falling out with the Tech­noc­ra­cy move­ment: the Total War and Defense par­ty which called for a com­plete­ly con­scrip­tion of “every employ­able man and woman between the ages of six­teen and six­ty” and “all nat­ur­al resources, all indus­tri­al equip­ment and all prop­er­ty,” includ­ing “all bank deposits and pri­vate hold­ings of mon­ey.” Yep, he called for the con­scrip­tion of basi­cal­ly all non-elder­ly adults and all pri­vate prop­er­ty and wealth. It’s a pret­ty remark­able plat­form for some­one who was vir­u­lent­ly anti-Com­mu­nist in lat­er years:

    ...
    After Tech­noc­ra­cy, Halde­man decid­ed he would start his own polit­i­cal par­ty, Total War and Defence. In his 1941 book, Total War and Defence for Cana­da, which was his man­i­festo for this new par­ty, he argued for a pol­i­cy of total con­scrip­tion to sup­port our British allies dur­ing the Sec­ond World War.

    He called for the con­scrip­tion of “every employ­able man and woman between the ages of six­teen and six­ty” and “all nat­ur­al resources, all indus­tri­al equip­ment and all prop­er­ty,” includ­ing “all bank deposits and pri­vate hold­ings of mon­ey.”

    His move­ment did not catch on.
    ...

    As we’ve seen, Halde­men went on to play­ing a lead­ing role in the Social Cred­it Par­ty, result­ing in the 1946 pub­li­ca­tion of the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion by the Que­bec wing of the par­ty and Halde­man’s woe­ful half-defense of the pub­li­ca­tion where he essen­tial­ly argued that the under­ly­ing argu­ment in the Pro­to­cols was real. And by 1949, he was mov­ing on to the next big chap­ter of his life. In apartheid South Africa. But as we can see, the deci­sion to move his fam­i­ly to South Africa was­n’t some spon­ta­neous deci­sion he made. Instead, it appears Halde­man has been heav­i­ly influ­enced by a 1936 encounter with a medi­um who told him he must con­tin­ue his chi­ro­prac­tic prac­tice in Regi­na for the next 14 years and then move to a “far­away place”. And in 1949, an Angli­can min­is­ter from South Africa who was vis­it­ing an Inter­na­tion­al Trade Fair in Toron­to proph­e­sied that “SOUTH AFRICA WILL BECOME THE LEADER OF WHITE CIVILIZATION IN THE WORLD”. That prophet­ic dec­la­ra­tion appar­ent­ly con­vinced Halde­man that South Africa was the ‘far­away’ place he was sup­posed to go. Halde­man’s deci­sion to move the fam­i­ly to South Africa was dri­ven, in part, by a prophet­ic fer­vor. A prophet­ic fer­vor shaped heav­i­ly by the under­ly­ing mes­sage of Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion:

    ...
    By mid-1949, Halde­man start­ed look­ing for a new home, a search inspired in part by two prophe­cies, accord­ing to a biog­ra­phy of his son Scott.

    Josh relates an expe­ri­ence with a ‘medi­um’ [spir­i­tu­al­ist] in 1936 who told him he must prac­tice in Regi­na for 14 years and then, ‘move to a city in a far­away place,’” says the book, The Jour­ney of Scott Halde­man, writ­ten by Reed Phillips.

    It goes on to say that once his 14 years were up in Regi­na, “every­thing fell into place.”

    “After speak­ing with an Angli­can min­is­ter from South Africa at an Inter­na­tion­al Trade Fair in Toron­to, Joshua became con­vinced that South Africa was that ‘far­away place,’” the book says.

    So what did that min­is­ter say?

    Haldeman’s 1960 book, The Inter­na­tion­al Con­spir­a­cy to Estab­lish a World Dic­ta­tor­ship and The Men­ace to South Africa, begins this way:

    “‘SOUTH AFRICA WILL BECOME THE LEADER OF WHITE CIVILIZATION IN THE WORLD’ was the prophet­ic and emphat­ic state­ment of an Angli­can Min­is­ter in Toron­to, Cana­da, 1949. He had lived many years in South Africa.”

    ...

    In 1948, the Nation­al Par­ty swept to pow­er in South Africa and imme­di­ate­ly began imple­ment­ing its pro­gram of apartheid, a pol­i­cy of racial seg­re­ga­tion.

    Months after arriv­ing, Halde­man told South Africa’s Die Trans­valer news­pa­per “instead of the gov­ern­men­t’s atti­tude keep­ing me away from South Africa, it has actu­al­ly encour­aged me to set­tle here.”
    ...

    And it’s that prophet­ic fer­vor that brings us to anoth­er chap­ter of Halde­man’s life that just might have rubbed off on Elon: the quest to find the Lost City of the Kala­hari. A lost city of such sophis­ti­ca­tion that Halde­man was con­vinced could­n’t have been built by native Africans. In oth­er words, this was a quest to find his­tor­i­cal evi­dence that would jus­ti­fy white col­o­niza­tion:

    ...
    Short­ly after his arrival in South Africa, Halde­man was swept up in the “lost city” craze.

    Her­mann Wit­ten­berg, a pro­fes­sor at South Africa’s Uni­ver­si­ty of the West­ern Cape, says in the late 1800s and ear­ly 1900s, white ama­teur arche­ol­o­gists and explor­ers dis­cov­ered ruins, mon­u­ments and sculp­tures of ancient African civ­i­liza­tions.

    He said because of wide­spread racism, these explor­ers — even more pro­gres­sive, lib­er­al explor­ers — believed “that Black Africans, Ban­tu-speak­ing peo­ples, are prim­i­tive, not capa­ble of any civ­i­liza­tion­al attain­ments. The best they can do is build mud huts, you know?”

    As a result, they the­o­rized that these civ­i­liza­tions, which exhib­it­ed some sophis­ti­ca­tion, must have been built by non-Africans.

    “They would have imag­ined that this was some ancient north­ern, West­ern, Mediter­ranean civ­i­liza­tion which had built these things. And they thought there was a whole string of these things in south­ern Africa, includ­ing that Kala­hari thing,” said Wit­ten­berg.

    “That Kala­hari thing” became Haldeman’s obses­sion: the leg­end of the Lost City of the Kala­hari, which was alleged­ly dis­cov­ered by William Hunt in 1885.

    Hunt, who came to be known as “The Great Fari­ni,” was a Cana­di­an cir­cus per­former who became famous in the 1860s for cross­ing Nia­gara Falls on a tightrope — once with a wash­ing machine on his back and anoth­er time with a sack over his entire body.

    Fari­ni, who was also the inven­tor of the “human can­non­ball’ per­for­mance, became a pro­mot­er of “freak shows,” fea­tur­ing a girl he called Krao and deemed the Miss­ing Link.

    P.T. Bar­num once called Fari­ni “the most tal­ent­ed show­man” he knew, accord­ing to Shane Peacock’s book The Great Fari­ni: The High-Wire Life of William Hunt.

    The show­man was also an explor­er and sto­ry­teller.

    As the sto­ry goes, in 1885, Fari­ni trav­elled to Africa and led an expe­di­tion across the Kala­hari Desert. In a book he wrote about his trav­els (Through the Kala­hari Desert), Fari­ni claimed he had chanced upon the ruins of an ancient city:

    A rel­ic, may be, of a glo­ri­ous past,

    A city once grand and sub­lime,

    Destroyed by earth­quake, defaced by the blast,

    Swept away by the hand of time.

    ...

    As for the moti­va­tion behind Haldeman’s fix­a­tion, Elon Musk biog­ra­ph­er Erik Nordeus wrote that “it’s unclear… why he became inter­est­ed in find­ing [the lost city] but he did every­thing he could to find it.”

    Jean-loïc Le Quel­lec, author of The White Lady and Atlantis: Ophir and Great Zim­bab­we: Inves­ti­ga­tion of an Archae­o­log­i­cal Myth, says Haldeman’s lost city search was part of a well-estab­lished cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non.

    He said there are more than 1,000 books on the top­ic of lost civ­i­liza­tions between the mid-19th cen­tu­ry and 1940, “and none of them is about the search for or dis­cov­ery of a ‘lost black tribe.’ They are always about white peo­ple,” he wrote in an email to CBC.

    Le Quel­lec, direc­tor of research at France’s Cen­tre Nation­al de la Recherche Sci­en­tifique, men­tions Halde­man in his 2016 book, but had no idea of his con­nec­tion to Musk until CBC reached out.

    ...

    He said these sto­ries were used by colonists through­out Africa as a means of claim­ing his­tor­i­cal legit­i­ma­cy for their actions.

    “The main moti­va­tion of the authors and explor­ers was to demon­strate the exis­tence of an ancient white (Euro­pean, Sumer­ian, Egypt­ian or Cre­tan) pres­ence in Africa, in order to jus­ti­fy col­o­niza­tion in gen­er­al, and apartheid in the case of South Africa,” he said. “The Lost City of Kala­hari is just one exam­ple among many of this type of approach.”

    ...

    In his PhD the­sis, The Sub­lime, Impe­ri­al­ism and the African Land­scape, Wit­ten­berg not­ed that explor­er Doreen Tain­ton, a con­tem­po­rary of Halde­man, believed that the Indige­nous Black peo­ple of South Africa were inca­pable of build­ing the sort of intri­cate archi­tec­ture described by Fari­ni in his book.

    That led her to ask “who, then, were these long dead builders?” In answer­ing her own ques­tion, she sug­gest­ed they could have been Romans, Greeks, Phoeni­cians, Egyp­tians or Arabs.

    Wit­ten­berg not­ed that just like Tain­ton, Hald­man was also open to the notion that the lost city was not of Indige­nous ori­gin, writ­ing that Halde­man believed “this would be a major archae­o­log­i­cal find, if it could be locat­ed, as it would show that the Egyp­tians were this far south.”

    In an inter­view with CBC, Wit­ten­berg said “Egyp­tians were not seen as African at the time. The gen­er­al sort of idea was that Egyp­tians were some sort of Mediter­ranean civ­i­liza­tion…. It was seen as not part of Africa, but it was seen as a Euro­pean type of civ­i­liza­tion.”

    ...

    Wit­ten­berg said in the decades since the lost city craze, arche­ol­o­gy, geol­o­gy and eth­nol­o­gy have shown that gen­uine African ruins are, in fact, of Indige­nous Black ori­gin. And, he says, leg­ends like the Lost City of the Kala­hari have been large­ly aban­doned — though not entire­ly.
    ...

    Final­ly, as we can see, this quest to find the lost city of Kala­hari did­n’t just con­sume Halde­man. He took the entire fam­i­ly on trips to find it. 16 fam­i­ly trips. This was a major focus of the fam­i­ly:

    ...
    Accord­ing to Maye Musk, Halde­man read Farini’s book and became trans­fixed. In 1953, Halde­man began tak­ing reg­u­lar trips into the desert with his wife and five chil­dren to hunt for the lost city.

    ...

    Haldeman’s youngest son, Lee, has inher­it­ed his father’s pas­sion for the lost city, hav­ing writ­ten two books on the top­ic. He ded­i­cat­ed Find­ing Farini’s Lost City of the Kala­hari to his par­ents.

    “They com­plet­ed six­teen search­es for the fabled ruins,” he wrote. “There are no oth­ers in the his­to­ry of this mys­tery that believed Farini’s sto­ry as intense­ly, or who ded­i­cat­ed so much time, mon­ey, and effort to look for this fabled City.” Lee Halde­man declined CBC’s request for an inter­view.

    Wit­ten­berg agreed with the assess­ment, call­ing Halde­man “the undis­put­ed Fari­ni devo­tee of his time.”

    ...

    Accord­ing to Nordeus’s book, after Farini’s death, Halde­man wrote to his fam­i­ly, say­ing “We do not feel he made the Lost City up as we have con­firmed every­thing else in the book.”
    ...

    Musk’s grand­fa­ther was­n’t just a big fan of The Great Fari­ni. He was “the undis­put­ed Fari­ni devo­tee of his time.” Demon­stra­bly so. But it was­n’t just him. The whole fam­i­ly got dragged into the quest. Again, had Halde­man not died with Musk was just three years old, we can be con­fi­dent Elon would have gone on some of these lost city hunts too. That’s how the fam­i­ly oper­at­ed.

    And here we are, with Musk now arguably the most pow­er­ful per­son on the plan­et and exe­cut­ing an agen­da that appears to be designed to not just secure his grip on pow­er but utter­ly repri­or­i­tize civ­i­liza­tion towards his whims. Whims that have the col­o­niza­tion of Mars as a top pri­or­i­ty. Musk has undoubt­ed­ly been shaped by his fam­i­ly’s South African obses­sions. Which is sad­ly why we can’t rule out the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the dis­cov­ery of some sort of ‘alien lost tribe’ is part of what is ani­mat­ing Musk’s Mars obes­sion. Sure, maybe he just real­ly, real­ly, real­ly wants to be the guy who col­o­nizes Mars. That should have been our default assump­tion. But then he had to go and show the world how he’s a lunatic Nazi. And now, a secret obses­sion with find­ing alien astro­nauts is kind of the log­i­cal end point of this Haldeman/Musk fam­i­ly affair.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 26, 2025, 6:32 pm
  3. Did you hear the incred­i­ble news? Earth-shat­ter­ing news. Or, rather, his­to­ry-shat­ter­ing news: A pair of researchers has uncov­ered evi­dence of a vast under­ground city beneath the pyra­mids of Giza. A pre­vi­ous­ly undis­cov­ered sub­ter­ranean com­plex that is many times deep­er than the height of the pyra­mids. So vast that it has observers point­ing to the dis­cov­ery as pow­er­ful evi­dence of a civ­i­liza­tion with advanced capa­bil­i­ties that has been lost to his­to­ry. Or even aliens.

    It’s that sig­nif­i­cant a dis­cov­ery. Or at least it would have been that sig­nif­i­cant a dis­cov­ery had it been based on ver­i­fi­able sci­en­tif­ic meth­ods and with­stood peer review. Instead, as we’re going to see, the study is based on claims that experts say sim­ply aren’t fea­si­ble giv­en the tech­nol­o­gy used by the two researchers to map out the under­ground struc­tures. The two researchers — Cor­ra­do Malan­ga, from Italy’s Uni­ver­si­ty of Pisa, and Fil­ip­po Bion­di with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Strath­clyde in Scot­land — had already pub­lished a sep­a­rate peer-reviewed paper in Octo­ber 2022 in the sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal Remote Sens­ing which found hid­den rooms and ramps inside the Khafre pyra­mid. But this lat­est non-peer-reviewed paper pur­ports to reveal under­ground struc­tures on a much larg­er scale. Malan­ga is a UFOl­o­gist and has appeared on YouTube shows about aliens. Bion­di is a spe­cial­ist in radar tech­nol­o­gy. Accord­ing to Pro­fes­sor Lawrence Cony­ers, a radar expert at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Den­ver who focus­es on archae­ol­o­gy, any claims based on the radar tech­nol­o­gy they used are ‘a huge exag­ger­a­tion’ since it’s not pos­si­ble for the tech­nol­o­gy to pen­e­trate as deeply into the ground to back up the claims they are mak­ing.

    And yet, as we’re going to see, the report­ing on these ‘find­ings’ includes breath­less reports in The Dai­ly Mail with quotes from ‘experts’ about how the whole his­to­ry of Egypt­ian his­to­ry has been rewrit­ten and evi­dence of advance pre-flood civ­i­liza­tions is about to be revealed. Or maybe it’s evi­dence of an alien ori­gin for the pyra­mids. Per­haps the pyra­mids real­ly are ancient pow­er plants! Yep, that’s the spin this sto­ry has been get­ting from the Dai­ly Mail, includ­ing quotes from Joe Rogan about how ‘mind-blow­ing’ a devel­op­ment this all is or quotes from ‘researcher Jay Ander­son’ who has con­clud­ed that “The pyra­mid itself was already a mas­sive red flag in the ancient Egypt­ian his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive but now, with this dis­cov­ery, I think it’s impos­si­ble to say that the Egyp­tians we’ve been taught about built these structures...It pro­vides the most extra­or­di­nary evi­dence for a pre-flood era civil­i­sa­tion that was flour­ish­ing in a way that we can scarce­ly com­pre­hend.”

    It’s also rather notable that, of the two Dai­ly Mail arti­cle below on this sto­ry, it’s only the arti­cle from March 22 that even men­tions the fact that the study has­n’t been peer reviewed and has already been debunked by experts. The Dai­ly Mail piece from March 30 makes no men­tion but instead run with the head­line “Were the Pyra­mids built by aliens? Inside the bizarre con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry ‘backed’ by Elon Musk — after experts make aston­ish­ing dis­cov­ery.” Of course, as we’ve seen, not only has Elon Musk pro­mot­ed the ‘aliens built the pyra­mids’ meme but his mater­nal grand­fa­ther was utter­ly obsessed with dis­cov­er­ing ‘lost cities’ in South­ern Africa that would prove the exis­tences of advanced non-black civ­i­liza­tions. The main­stream­ing of the ‘lost civilization/alien astro­naut’ nar­ra­tives con­tin­ues.

    But as we’re going to be remind­ed of in the fol­low­ing 2018 South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter piece, the main­stream­ing of the ‘lost civilization/alien astro­naut’ nar­ra­tives is hard­ly new. It’s been going on for decades. Cen­turies, if you fac­tor in the real­i­ty that the notion of a lost white civ­i­liza­tion that pre-dat­ed the Native Amer­i­cans on North Amer­i­ca was a wide­ly held view from the colo­nial era until the 20th Cen­tu­ry. In fact, when Pres­i­dent Andrew Jack­son was jus­ti­fy­ing the eth­nic cleans­ing and forced relo­ca­tion of Native tribes, he cit­ed the mytho­log­i­cal exter­mi­na­tion of this alleged ancient Aryan tribe at the hands of Native Amer­i­cans as a kind of his­tor­i­cal prece­dent for his action. Nar­ra­tives whol­ly embraced by the Nazis’ anti-Enlight­en­ment myths and con­tin­ued per­co­lat­ing through the cul­ture for decades. Flash for­ward to the 2000s, and we find out­lets like the His­to­ry Chan­nel rou­tine­ly plat­form­ing ‘lost civ­i­liza­tion’ and ‘ancient alien’ nar­ra­tives. Nar­ra­tives still going strong today, thanks, in large part, to their now-rou­tine media main­stream­ing that has been going on for decades:

    South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter
    Hate­watch

    Close encoun­ters of the racist kind

    Alexan­der Zaitchik
    Jan­u­ary 2, 2018

    The mod­ern far right is criss­crossed with pseu­do-sci­en­tif­ic research into lost Aryan super-civ­i­liza­tions, bib­li­cal giants, ancient astro­nauts and the occa­sion­al inter-dimen­sion­al alien.

    On Decem­ber 6, 1830, Andrew Jack­son used his sec­ond State of the Union address to defend the Indi­an Removal Act, the administration’s sole leg­isla­tive vic­to­ry. He described the law pro­mul­gat­ing the expul­sion and reset­tle­ment of south­east­ern Native Amer­i­can tribes as the “hap­py con­sum­ma­tion” of U.S. Indi­an pol­i­cy. To his crit­ics who “wept over the fate of the abo­rig­ines” —and who, it turned out, accu­rate­ly pre­dict­ed the hor­rors of the forced migra­tions known col­lec­tive­ly to his­to­ry as the Trail of Tears — Jack­son offered an arche­ol­o­gy les­son. Any “melan­choly reflec­tions” were ahis­tor­i­cal, he said, because the Indi­ans were nei­ther inno­cent vic­tims nor first peo­ples, but per­pe­tra­tors of what Jackson’s mod­ern admir­ers might call “white geno­cide.”

    Jack­son knew this because the evi­dence was every­where in plain sight.

    “In the mon­u­ments and for­ti­fi­ca­tions of an unknown peo­ple, we behold the memo­ri­als of a once-pow­er­ful race,” said Jack­son, “exter­mi­nat­ed to make room for the exist­ing sav­age tribes.”

    This ref­er­ence to a “once-pow­er­ful race” was not lost on the Amer­i­can pub­lic of 1830. Every school­boy and girl knew it to be the Lost Race of the Mound Builders, believed to be the continent’s orig­i­nal Cau­casian inhab­i­tants. From the colo­nial era into the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, it was wide­ly accept­ed that cer­tain earth­en struc­tures and bur­ial grounds proved the exis­tence of “white” or Indo-Euro­pean peo­ples who set­tled North Amer­i­ca only to be wiped out by the arrival of Jackson’s “sav­age (Asi­at­ic) tribes.”

    ...

    In the ear­ly 1890s, the U.S. eth­nol­o­gist Cyrus Vance dis­cred­it­ed the the­o­ry in a series pub­lished by the Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion. But the idea of a pre-Colom­bian “white geno­cide” nev­er dis­ap­peared. It sur­vived in sub­cul­tures, influ­enced by the occult and Atlantis leg­ends, which clung to the­o­ries of lost ancient super-civ­i­liza­tions that, curi­ous­ly, always seemed to be racial­ly “white.”

    In recent decades, as evi­dence of a rich­er pale­oamer­i­can record than pre­vi­ous­ly real­ized has come to light, Jackson’s “once-pow­er­ful race” has found a new gen­er­a­tion of boost­ers on the far right, where fan­tasies of “white geno­cide” dis­tant­ly past and cur­rent­ly unfold­ing are an ani­mat­ing obses­sion.

    In the frac­tured and con­stant­ly cross-fer­til­iz­ing galaxy of extrem­ist con­spir­a­cy cul­ture, the white Mound­builders —now known on the far right as “the Solutre­ans” — share a stage with oth­er char­ac­ters from an ancient and racial­ly glo­ri­ous but “sup­pressed” past: ancient Nordic-look­ing astro­nauts, bib­li­cal Aryan giants, Nazi sci­en­tists under the South Pole, and the occa­sion­al inter-dimen­sion­al alien in league with the Jews.

    Alt-His­to­ry Goes Prime Time

    Over the last decade, the His­to­ry Chan­nel has exploit­ed and fueled the pop­u­lar­iza­tion of alter­na­tive arche­ol­o­gy, or alt-his­to­ry. Numer­ous pro­grams on the net­work show­case ideas that, while not explic­it­ly racist or anti-Semit­ic, have ori­gins in colo­nial projects and have been cham­pi­oned (for a rea­son) by mod­ern extrem­ists.

    Take “Amer­i­ca Unearthed,” which aired between 2012 and 2015 on H2, a defunct His­to­ry Chan­nel net­work. That show’s host, a geol­o­gist named Scott Wolter, pro­mot­ed the­o­ries that ancient Celts and Scots set­tled North Amer­i­ca and hybridized Native Amer­i­cans cen­turies before Colum­bus. The details can be found in Wolter’s con­tri­bu­tions to Lost Worlds of Ancient Amer­i­ca, a 2012 anthol­o­gy edit­ed by Frank Joseph, born Frank Collin, founder of the Nation­al Social­ist Par­ty of Amer­i­ca. (In 1993, fol­low­ing his expul­sion from the par­ty for “impure blood”, Collin became edi­tor of Ancient Amer­i­can mag­a­zine and has authored dozens of books deal­ing with ancient “sup­pressed” his­to­ry.) In anoth­er episode, when a guest pro­fess­es admi­ra­tion for the Knights of the Gold­en Cir­cle, a group of wealthy South­ern­ers who sought to cre­ate a hemi­spher­ic slave empire, Wolter just nods. (Wolter has denied that he or his ideas are racist, and claims to be polit­i­cal­ly lib­er­al.)

    What­ev­er the per­son­al pol­i­tics of the host, these shows serve as vec­tors for racist ideas and schol­ar­ship, argues the inde­pen­dent schol­ar Jason Colav­i­to, who has been track­ing this cul­tur­al crossover and ampli­fi­ca­tion of fringe his­to­ry for years. In books like Foun­da­tions of Atlantis, Ancient Astro­nauts, and Oth­er Alter­na­tive Pasts, Colav­i­to explores and debunks many of the ideas pro­mot­ed on the His­to­ry Chan­nel and far right web­sites alike.

    ...

    Shows like “Amer­i­ca Unearthed” are heav­i­ly dis­cussed on white nation­al­ist alt-his­to­ry forums, as well as gen­er­al far right polit­i­cal sites like Storm­front. They are rou­tine­ly praised for intro­duc­ing view­ers to vari­a­tions on the Solutre­an Hypoth­e­sis (see below) and rais­ing the pro­file of racist pseu­do-schol­ar­ship.

    Con­sid­er the H2 series “In Search of Aliens,” which, before its demise, pro­mot­ed the work of Jan Udo Holey, a Ger­man writer whose anti­se­mit­ic books have been banned across Europe. (Holey’s pen name, Jan Van Hel­sig, is a blunt Drac­u­la ref­er­ence, i.e. Jews are blood­suck­ers.) The His­to­ry Channel’s long-run­ning series “Ancient Aliens,” mean­while, fea­tures David Chil­dress, whose books cite and build on the work of James Church­ward, who pro­mot­ed an ancient empire called the “lost con­ti­nent of Mu,” whose “dom­i­nant race” was an “exceed­ing­ly hand­some peo­ple, with clear white or olive skin.”

    While the appeal of these the­o­ries has roots in Jack­son­ian jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for Man­i­fest Des­tiny, their cur­rent man­i­fes­ta­tions are close­ly inter­twined with the ven­omous per­se­cu­tion com­plex­es that moti­vate the mod­ern far right .

    “Pseu­do-his­to­ries feed the self-impor­tance and aggriev­e­ment of neo-Nazis and alt-right folk,” says Ben­jamin Rad­ford, a fel­low with the Com­mit­tee for Skep­ti­cal Inquiry who has writ­ten wide­ly on pseu­do-his­to­ry and claims of para­nor­mal activ­i­ty. “They feel their right­ful place in the world has been denied them — by‘Big Arche­ol­o­gy’, byJews, by an oppres­sive gov­ern­ment.”

    ...

    The Nazi Con­nec­tion

    The basic tenets of alt-arche­ol­o­gy and alt-his­to­ry were foun­da­tion­al to the ide­ol­o­gy and pro­gram of Nation­al Social­ism, but the Nazis did not invent them. The Nazi belief in a pure Aryan race with a glo­ri­ous ancient past and dis­tinct genet­ic his­to­ry was cen­tral to a transat­lantic nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry occult scene (that fea­tured a heavy Ger­man influ­ence.) After Hitler assumed pow­er, this belief was insti­tu­tion­al­ized in the form of the Ances­tral Her­itage and Teach­ing Soci­ety, or the Ahnenerbe, an alt-arche­ol­o­gy research out­fit found­ed by Hein­rich Himm­ler and the Atlantis the­o­rist Her­man Wirth.

    Under the ban­ner of the Ahnerbe, Nazi explor­ers fanned out across Europe and the globe in search of relics hold­ing (pos­si­bly super­nat­ur­al) hints of ancient Aryan glo­ry. In 1938, a team was dis­patched to Ice­land in search of the lost Aryan civ­i­liza­tion of Thule, which Nazi lead­ers dis­cov­ered in an Ice­landic epic poem. Among the Nazis’ inter­ests in Thule was the leg­end of a race of ancient Aryan giants. (Ver­sions of this myth remain com­mon among bib­li­cal­ly focused alt-his­to­ri­ans like Steve Quayle and L.A. Marzul­li.)

    Belief in these leg­ends was pos­si­ble because of the Nazis’ sharp rejec­tion of the Enlight­en­ment. Dis­miss­ing the sci­ence of racial diver­si­fi­ca­tion and the arche­o­log­i­cal record, they rev­eled in sym­bol­o­gy, myths and leg­ends of “pure” ancient king­doms that con­quered the world under its sym­bol, the swasti­ka. (This, the Nazis believed, explained the symbol’s pres­ence in both Native Amer­i­can and Indi­an art.)

    The Solutre­ans and the Orig­i­nal “White Geno­cide”

    In the U.S., the aver­age mem­ber of the far right is like­ly more famil­iar with the mod­ern ver­sion of Jackson’s Race of the Mound­builders, known as the Solutre­ans.

    The name is tak­en from a hypoth­e­sis first pro­mot­ed in the 1930s by the Amer­i­can arche­ol­o­gist Frank Hibben, who dis­cov­ered arrow­heads in North Amer­i­ca that pre-dat­ed the ear­li­est Native Amer­i­can cul­ture known at the time, the Clo­vis. The arrow­heads, argued Hibben, resem­bled those of the Solutre­ans, a Stone Age peo­ple who inhab­it­ed south­west­ern Europe. Most of the field quick­ly dis­missed the sim­i­lar­i­ty as mean­ing­less, but Hibben found adher­ents among those yearn­ing for a new and more sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly respectable ver­sion of Jackson’s “once-pow­er­ful race.” For them, the arrow­heads (and oth­er con­test­ed find­ings) prove that “Euro­pean” Solutre­ans migrat­ed to Amer­i­ca across the north­ern ice-shelf mil­len­nia before “the Mon­goloids” (as Solutre­an adher­ents are apt to describe Native Amer­i­cans.)

    There is a sec­ond punch­line to white nation­al­ists con­tin­u­ing to hold up the Solutre­ans as vic­tims of a pre­his­toric white per­se­cu­tion dra­ma: Most schol­ars believe the Solutre­ans pre­ced­ed racial diver­si­fi­ca­tion, and their arrow­heads are arti­facts of a dark-skinned peo­ple not long out of North Africa.

    Atlantis, Aliens & Ancient Astro­nauts

    In 1882, a decade before the Smith­son­ian debunked the Race of the Mound­builders, a Min­neso­ta Con­gress­man and writer named Ignatius Loy­ola Don­nel­ly pub­lished Atlantis: The Ante­dilu­vian World. The book pro­vid­ed anoth­er and more elab­o­rate the­o­ry of an Aryan-look­ing super civ­i­liza­tion that dif­fused tech­nol­o­gy to the rest of the world. Donnell’s book, based on men­tions of Atlantis by Pla­to, cut the tem­plate for the sci-fi-tinged lost white civ­i­liza­tion the­o­ries now expe­ri­enc­ing a revival on cable tele­vi­sion and beyond.

    But just as Atlantis the­o­ry gained trac­tion fol­low­ing the debunk­ing of the Mound­builders, so have the­o­ries of ancient Aryan astro­nauts super­seded Atlantis with the map­ping of the oceans and their floors.

    ...

    In the 1960s and 70s, Erich von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchin put a twist on myths about Aryan vis­i­tors from a lost civ­i­liza­tion pre­dat­ing the last Ice Age. These vis­i­tors to Mesoamer­i­ca didn’t come from Atlantis but from the sky. Best­sellers like von Daniken’s Char­i­ots of the Gods (sev­en mil­lion sold and count­ing) pop­u­lar­ized the idea that Aryan-look­ing aliens brought sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy to prim­i­tive peo­ples around the world. In recent years, Gra­ham Han­cock has repack­aged Ancient Astro­naut The­o­ry for a new gen­er­a­tion in his best­selling Fin­ger­prints of the Gods, and through steady work as a His­to­ry Chan­nel talk­ing head.

    Today’s far right is divid­ed on Ancient Astro­naut the­o­ry. On the one hand, it denies agency to brown-skinned peo­ples, and fea­tures Aryan-look­ing heroes, which they con­sid­er good things; but it also deprives ancient (human) Aryans of the accom­plish­ments cred­it­ed to them so lav­ish­ly in Atlantis and oth­er the­o­ries.

    Con­sid­er the case of Patrick Chouinard, a pro­lif­ic writer who oper­ates the alt-his­to­ry sites RenegadeTribune.com and ancientaryans.com. (The lat­ter site’s sym­bol, the Norse rune, was also the logo of the Nazi Ahnenerbe.) Like the Nazis, the sites are ded­i­cat­ed to recap­tur­ing a lost, pure Aryan civ­i­liza­tion —one respect­ful of, but not depen­dent on alien life. In Sep­tem­ber, Chouinard cast a crit­i­cal eye on the upcom­ing tenth sea­son of the His­to­ry Channel’s Ancient Aliens, in an arti­cle titled “Are Ancient Aliens The­o­rists Sell­ing Our Peo­ple Short?”

    Chouinard believes they are. He cites an old episode of the H2’s In Search of Aliens in which the hosts, Gior­gio Tsouka­los and David Chil­dress (see above), explore the alleged mys­tery of some “elon­gat­ed skulls” dis­cov­ered in Peru. Chouinard scoffs at the hosts’ con­clu­sion that the skulls belonged to aliens. Rather, he argued, recon­struc­tions “show a very Nordic facial struc­ture with [a] huge cra­ni­um.” This could be proof, fur­ther­more, of “a sep­a­rate branch of the White race the went along its own evo­lu­tion­ary path over 5,000 years ago.”

    And who, you might won­der, does Chouinard believe is behind the Ancient Alien The­o­ry that is “sell­ing his peo­ple short”?

    “The Jews,” writes Chouinard, “are using … the ancient alien camp to con­found our race to the point that we deny our own accom­plish­ments. The White race did not need ancient aliens to build our ancient civ­i­liza­tions, or to found oth­er civ­i­liza­tions in remote cor­ners of the Earth. Our race is capa­ble of so much more.”

    In 2018, it is dan­ger­ous in alt-ancient his­to­ry cir­cles to com­plete­ly dis­count Ancient Aliens. Chouinard knows this. Rather than risk alien­at­ing his read­ers, he con­cedes, “It is very pos­si­ble that vis­i­ta­tions from extrater­res­tri­als did hap­pen in ancient times, [but] I will not con­clude that the major­i­ty of our accom­plish­ments as a race can be attrib­uted to extrater­res­tri­als.”

    UFOs & “Refract­ed” Anti-Semi­tism

    Mas­sive and hope­less­ly intri­cate cov­er-ups. Nefar­i­ous alien races with gnomish phys­i­cal fea­tures. Tales of secret Nazi super-tech­nolo­gies. It was always inevitable that the UFO and far right scenes would end up in bed togeth­er. UFO cul­ture cast a shad­ow over every­thing in the post­war years, and as not­ed above, the far right has nev­er been a stranger to the super­nat­ur­al.

    In Cul­ture of Con­spir­a­cy, the his­to­ri­an Michael Barkun locates the ear­ly 1990s as the decade this con­ver­gence accel­er­at­ed. Books like William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse and jour­nals pub­lished by Gye­or­gos Ceres Hatonn described UFO con­spir­a­cies that fit snug­ly into the New World Order con­spir­a­cy tem­plate, heav­i­ly influ­enc­ing that decade’s mili­tia move­ment. (Okla­homa City bomber Tim­o­thy McVeigh was report­ed­ly a fan of Cooper’s radio show.)

    But the seeds of this union are much deep­er in the post­war record. One of the most impor­tant ear­ly UFO writ­ers in the ear­ly 1950s, William Dud­ley Pel­ly, was an Amer­i­can occultist and fas­cist; his most impor­tant dis­ci­ple, George Hunt Williamson, pro­duced Byzan­tine UFO the­o­ries that incor­po­rat­ed anti-Semit­ic themes. Williamson’s 1958 book, UFOs Con­fi­den­tial, claimed every gov­ern­ment on earth was under the con­trol of a hand­ful of (most­ly Jew­ish) “inter­na­tion­al bankers,” which for some rea­son the author believed includ­ed U.S. Supreme Court Jus­tice Felix Frank­furter.

    Pel­ley and Williamson’s suc­ces­sors are not always or even often so bla­tant­ly anti-Semit­ic. But the fin­ger­prints of anti-Semi­tes are vis­i­ble in the works of influ­en­tial mod­ern UFO writ­ers like Jim Marrs and Jim Kei­th. These fin­ger­prints appear in what Barkun calls “refract­ed racism and anti-Semi­tism,” in which old tropes are repack­aged as an episode of the X‑Files. This repack­ag­ing often includes not very sub­tle dis­tinc­tions between “benev­o­lent” aliens (tall, Aryan-look­ing) and “malev­o­lent” aliens (short, grotesque, often in league with “inter­na­tion­al bankers”).

    More than any­one else, the British con­spir­acist David Icke has pop­u­lar­ized the Alien ver­sion of New World Order con­spir­a­cy. The for­mer sportscaster’s elab­o­rate the­o­ry is the Sgt. Pep­pers album-cov­er of the genre, fea­tur­ing the Masons, the Vat­i­can, the Illu­mi­nati, the House of Wind­sor —every­one is there. At the cen­ter of the the­o­ry is an alien race of lizard peo­ple from the fifth-dimen­sion. Though Icke has always denied traf­fick­ing in anti-Semi­tism, he has endorsed the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion —the famous forgery and foun­da­tion­al text of mod­ern anti-Semi­tism —choos­ing to call it “The Illu­mi­nati Pro­to­cols.”

    ...

    Hol­low Earth, Secret Nazi Labs & the South Pole

    Anoth­er inevitable devel­op­ment in post­war con­spir­a­cy sub­cul­ture was the rise of a belief in secret Nazi bases under­neath Antarc­ti­ca. The idea of a “hol­low” or “inner” earth was a key tenet of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry occultism, and in the post­war years it reemerged as a set­ting for escaped Nazi sci­en­tists work­ing in secret tech­nol­o­gy and weapons labs.

    The leg­end took root dur­ing the mid-1970s, nur­tured by the Cana­di­an neo-Nazi Ernst Zun­del, who argued that Nazis invent­ed fly­ing saucers and had tak­en their break­through tech­nol­o­gy to bases deep under the South Pole.

    The Third Reich was inter­est­ed in a pos­si­ble base at the South Pole, and a few high-lev­el Nazis did escape to Argenti­na, whose nation­al ter­ri­to­ry includes a slice of Antarc­ti­ca extend­ing to the South Pole. Zun­del and his suc­ces­sors have infused these facts with Vic­to­ri­an inner-earth leg­ends, and then mar­i­nat­ed them over mul­ti­ple view­ings of the 1968 B‑flick, They Saved Hitler’s Brain. Ver­sions of the the­o­ry remain pop­u­lar on neo-Nazi alt-his­to­ry sites, and in recent years British tabloids like the Mir­ror and Dai­ly Star have found click-bait gold in spread­ing them.

    The story’s per­sis­tence led Col­in Sum­mer­hayes of Cam­bridge University’s Polar Research Insti­tute to look into the mat­ter. In a 2006 edi­tion of The Polar Record, Sum­mer­hayes pre­sent­ed his heav­i­ly foot­not­ed and researched con­clu­sion that secret Nazi bases do not exist, and have nev­er exist­ed, on or below Antarc­ti­ca.

    As exhaus­tive as it was, it is unlike­ly Sum­mer­hayes’ study had much impact among the theory’s adher­ents. It was, after all, com­pet­ing with an ever expand­ing glut of “hid­den his­to­ry” books, pod­casts and web­sites. One of many such titles to appear that year was SS Broth­er­hood of the Bell: The Nazi’s Incred­i­ble Secret Tech­nol­o­gy, penned by Joseph P. Far­rell, a pro­lif­ic alt-his­to­ri­an and reg­u­lar on Red Ice Radio.

    ————

    “Close encoun­ters of the racist kind” by Alexan­der Zaitchik; South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter; 01/02/2018

    “In recent decades, as evi­dence of a rich­er pale­oamer­i­can record than pre­vi­ous­ly real­ized has come to light, Jackson’s “once-pow­er­ful race” has found a new gen­er­a­tion of boost­ers on the far right, where fan­tasies of “white geno­cide” dis­tant­ly past and cur­rent­ly unfold­ing are an ani­mat­ing obses­sion.”

    Yes, it’s real­ly that gross. Andrew Jack­son real­ly did warn of a past myth­i­cal “white geno­cide” of the myth­i­cal Aryan Mound Builders as a past col­lec­tive sin of the Native Amer­i­cans that was being revis­it­ed with the Trail of Tears. A belief in the pre-Native Amer­i­can Aryan Mound Builders was the main­stream thought in the US from the colo­nial era into the 20th cen­tu­ry. A high­ly moral­ly con­ve­nient found­ing myth for a nation built on replac­ing the natives. And it’s just one promi­nent exam­ple of an alter­na­tive his­to­ry phe­nom­e­na that now includes Aryan astro­nauts and alien con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries that are some­how also anti­se­mit­ic. Trans-dimen­sion­al alien Pro­to­cols are the new Mound Builders. And it’s not actu­al­ly that new:

    ...
    On Decem­ber 6, 1830, Andrew Jack­son used his sec­ond State of the Union address to defend the Indi­an Removal Act, the administration’s sole leg­isla­tive vic­to­ry. He described the law pro­mul­gat­ing the expul­sion and reset­tle­ment of south­east­ern Native Amer­i­can tribes as the “hap­py con­sum­ma­tion” of U.S. Indi­an pol­i­cy. To his crit­ics who “wept over the fate of the abo­rig­ines” —and who, it turned out, accu­rate­ly pre­dict­ed the hor­rors of the forced migra­tions known col­lec­tive­ly to his­to­ry as the Trail of Tears — Jack­son offered an arche­ol­o­gy les­son. Any “melan­choly reflec­tions” were ahis­tor­i­cal, he said, because the Indi­ans were nei­ther inno­cent vic­tims nor first peo­ples, but per­pe­tra­tors of what Jackson’s mod­ern admir­ers might call “white geno­cide.”

    Jack­son knew this because the evi­dence was every­where in plain sight.

    “In the mon­u­ments and for­ti­fi­ca­tions of an unknown peo­ple, we behold the memo­ri­als of a once-pow­er­ful race,” said Jack­son, “exter­mi­nat­ed to make room for the exist­ing sav­age tribes.”

    This ref­er­ence to a “once-pow­er­ful race” was not lost on the Amer­i­can pub­lic of 1830. Every school­boy and girl knew it to be the Lost Race of the Mound Builders, believed to be the continent’s orig­i­nal Cau­casian inhab­i­tants. From the colo­nial era into the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, it was wide­ly accept­ed that cer­tain earth­en struc­tures and bur­ial grounds proved the exis­tence of “white” or Indo-Euro­pean peo­ples who set­tled North Amer­i­ca only to be wiped out by the arrival of Jackson’s “sav­age (Asi­at­ic) tribes.”

    ...

    In the ear­ly 1890s, the U.S. eth­nol­o­gist Cyrus Vance dis­cred­it­ed the the­o­ry in a series pub­lished by the Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion. But the idea of a pre-Colom­bian “white geno­cide” nev­er dis­ap­peared. It sur­vived in sub­cul­tures, influ­enced by the occult and Atlantis leg­ends, which clung to the­o­ries of lost ancient super-civ­i­liza­tions that, curi­ous­ly, always seemed to be racial­ly “white.”

    ...

    In the frac­tured and con­stant­ly cross-fer­til­iz­ing galaxy of extrem­ist con­spir­a­cy cul­ture, the white Mound­builders —now known on the far right as “the Solutre­ans” — share a stage with oth­er char­ac­ters from an ancient and racial­ly glo­ri­ous but “sup­pressed” past: ancient Nordic-look­ing astro­nauts, bib­li­cal Aryan giants, Nazi sci­en­tists under the South Pole, and the occa­sion­al inter-dimen­sion­al alien in league with the Jews.
    ...

    What is new is the promi­nence giv­en to these ‘alter­na­tive his­to­ries’ by pur­port­ed­ly cred­i­ble media out­lets like the His­to­ry Chan­nel. And that’s not even new. The His­to­ry Chan­nel has been devolv­ing into this garbage for way too many years now, like the “Amer­i­ca Unearthed” show which aired between 2012 and 2015 on H2 with host Scott Wolter, who hap­pened to also con­tribute to the 2012 Lost Worlds of Ancient Amer­i­ca anthol­o­gy edit­ed by Frank Collin, founder of the Nation­al Social­ist Par­ty of Amer­i­ca. As we should expect, Amer­i­ca Unearthed was quite pop­u­lar on forums like Storm­front:

    ...
    Over the last decade, the His­to­ry Chan­nel has exploit­ed and fueled the pop­u­lar­iza­tion of alter­na­tive arche­ol­o­gy, or alt-his­to­ry. Numer­ous pro­grams on the net­work show­case ideas that, while not explic­it­ly racist or anti-Semit­ic, have ori­gins in colo­nial projects and have been cham­pi­oned (for a rea­son) by mod­ern extrem­ists.

    Take “Amer­i­ca Unearthed,” which aired between 2012 and 2015 on H2, a defunct His­to­ry Chan­nel net­work. That show’s host, a geol­o­gist named Scott Wolter, pro­mot­ed the­o­ries that ancient Celts and Scots set­tled North Amer­i­ca and hybridized Native Amer­i­cans cen­turies before Colum­bus. The details can be found in Wolter’s con­tri­bu­tions to Lost Worlds of Ancient Amer­i­ca, a 2012 anthol­o­gy edit­ed by Frank Joseph, born Frank Collin, founder of the Nation­al Social­ist Par­ty of Amer­i­ca. (In 1993, fol­low­ing his expul­sion from the par­ty for “impure blood”, Collin became edi­tor of Ancient Amer­i­can mag­a­zine and has authored dozens of books deal­ing with ancient “sup­pressed” his­to­ry.) In anoth­er episode, when a guest pro­fess­es admi­ra­tion for the Knights of the Gold­en Cir­cle, a group of wealthy South­ern­ers who sought to cre­ate a hemi­spher­ic slave empire, Wolter just nods. (Wolter has denied that he or his ideas are racist, and claims to be polit­i­cal­ly lib­er­al.)

    What­ev­er the per­son­al pol­i­tics of the host, these shows serve as vec­tors for racist ideas and schol­ar­ship, argues the inde­pen­dent schol­ar Jason Colav­i­to, who has been track­ing this cul­tur­al crossover and ampli­fi­ca­tion of fringe his­to­ry for years. In books like Foun­da­tions of Atlantis, Ancient Astro­nauts, and Oth­er Alter­na­tive Pasts, Colav­i­to explores and debunks many of the ideas pro­mot­ed on the His­to­ry Chan­nel and far right web­sites alike.

    ...

    Shows like “Amer­i­ca Unearthed” are heav­i­ly dis­cussed on white nation­al­ist alt-his­to­ry forums, as well as gen­er­al far right polit­i­cal sites like Storm­front. They are rou­tine­ly praised for intro­duc­ing view­ers to vari­a­tions on the Solutre­an Hypoth­e­sis (see below) and rais­ing the pro­file of racist pseu­do-schol­ar­ship.

    Con­sid­er the H2 series “In Search of Aliens,” which, before its demise, pro­mot­ed the work of Jan Udo Holey, a Ger­man writer whose anti­se­mit­ic books have been banned across Europe. (Holey’s pen name, Jan Van Hel­sig, is a blunt Drac­u­la ref­er­ence, i.e. Jews are blood­suck­ers.) The His­to­ry Channel’s long-run­ning series “Ancient Aliens,” mean­while, fea­tures David Chil­dress, whose books cite and build on the work of James Church­ward, who pro­mot­ed an ancient empire called the “lost con­ti­nent of Mu,” whose “dom­i­nant race” was an “exceed­ing­ly hand­some peo­ple, with clear white or olive skin.”

    ...

    But just as Atlantis the­o­ry gained trac­tion fol­low­ing the debunk­ing of the Mound­builders, so have the­o­ries of ancient Aryan astro­nauts super­seded Atlantis with the map­ping of the oceans and their floors.

    ...

    In the 1960s and 70s, Erich von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchin put a twist on myths about Aryan vis­i­tors from a lost civ­i­liza­tion pre­dat­ing the last Ice Age. These vis­i­tors to Mesoamer­i­ca didn’t come from Atlantis but from the sky. Best­sellers like von Daniken’s Char­i­ots of the Gods (sev­en mil­lion sold and count­ing) pop­u­lar­ized the idea that Aryan-look­ing aliens brought sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy to prim­i­tive peo­ples around the world. In recent years, Gra­ham Han­cock has repack­aged Ancient Astro­naut The­o­ry for a new gen­er­a­tion in his best­selling Fin­ger­prints of the Gods, and through steady work as a His­to­ry Chan­nel talk­ing head.

    Today’s far right is divid­ed on Ancient Astro­naut the­o­ry. On the one hand, it denies agency to brown-skinned peo­ples, and fea­tures Aryan-look­ing heroes, which they con­sid­er good things; but it also deprives ancient (human) Aryans of the accom­plish­ments cred­it­ed to them so lav­ish­ly in Atlantis and oth­er the­o­ries.
    ...

    And as we can see, not only do some pro­po­nents of lost white civ­i­liza­tions view the ‘ancient astro­naut’ theme as a con­tro­ver­sial means of rob­bing the white race of its mytho­log­i­cal alter­na­tive his­to­ry accom­plish­ments, but they view it as a Jew­ish plot. Because of course:

    ...
    In 1882, a decade before the Smith­son­ian debunked the Race of the Mound­builders, a Min­neso­ta Con­gress­man and writer named Ignatius Loy­ola Don­nel­ly pub­lished Atlantis: The Ante­dilu­vian World. The book pro­vid­ed anoth­er and more elab­o­rate the­o­ry of an Aryan-look­ing super civ­i­liza­tion that dif­fused tech­nol­o­gy to the rest of the world. Donnell’s book, based on men­tions of Atlantis by Pla­to, cut the tem­plate for the sci-fi-tinged lost white civ­i­liza­tion the­o­ries now expe­ri­enc­ing a revival on cable tele­vi­sion and beyond.

    ...

    Con­sid­er the case of Patrick Chouinard, a pro­lif­ic writer who oper­ates the alt-his­to­ry sites RenegadeTribune.com and ancientaryans.com. (The lat­ter site’s sym­bol, the Norse rune, was also the logo of the Nazi Ahnenerbe.) Like the Nazis, the sites are ded­i­cat­ed to recap­tur­ing a lost, pure Aryan civ­i­liza­tion —one respect­ful of, but not depen­dent on alien life. In Sep­tem­ber, Chouinard cast a crit­i­cal eye on the upcom­ing tenth sea­son of the His­to­ry Channel’s Ancient Aliens, in an arti­cle titled “Are Ancient Aliens The­o­rists Sell­ing Our Peo­ple Short?”

    Chouinard believes they are. He cites an old episode of the H2’s In Search of Aliens in which the hosts, Gior­gio Tsouka­los and David Chil­dress (see above), explore the alleged mys­tery of some “elon­gat­ed skulls” dis­cov­ered in Peru. Chouinard scoffs at the hosts’ con­clu­sion that the skulls belonged to aliens. Rather, he argued, recon­struc­tions “show a very Nordic facial struc­ture with [a] huge cra­ni­um.” This could be proof, fur­ther­more, of “a sep­a­rate branch of the White race the went along its own evo­lu­tion­ary path over 5,000 years ago.”

    And who, you might won­der, does Chouinard believe is behind the Ancient Alien The­o­ry that is “sell­ing his peo­ple short”?

    “The Jews,” writes Chouinard, “are using … the ancient alien camp to con­found our race to the point that we deny our own accom­plish­ments. The White race did not need ancient aliens to build our ancient civ­i­liza­tions, or to found oth­er civ­i­liza­tions in remote cor­ners of the Earth. Our race is capa­ble of so much more.”

    In 2018, it is dan­ger­ous in alt-ancient his­to­ry cir­cles to com­plete­ly dis­count Ancient Aliens. Chouinard knows this. Rather than risk alien­at­ing his read­ers, he con­cedes, “It is very pos­si­ble that vis­i­ta­tions from extrater­res­tri­als did hap­pen in ancient times, [but] I will not con­clude that the major­i­ty of our accom­plish­ments as a race can be attrib­uted to extrater­res­tri­als.”
    ...

    Final­ly, we get to the nation­al secu­ri­ty dimen­sion of this sto­ry, where tales of Nazi UFO bases hid­den in Antarc­ti­ca poten­tial­ly serve as a kind of his­tor­i­cal absur­dist clut­ter to help obscure the much more sub­stan­tive his­to­ry of the US’s own post-WWII top secret UFO research and devel­op­ment emerg­ing from the Third Reich tech­nol­o­gy and sci­en­tists. Wild Pro­pa­gan­da serves a vari­ety of pur­pos­es:

    ...
    Anoth­er inevitable devel­op­ment in post­war con­spir­a­cy sub­cul­ture was the rise of a belief in secret Nazi bases under­neath Antarc­ti­ca. The idea of a “hol­low” or “inner” earth was a key tenet of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry occultism, and in the post­war years it reemerged as a set­ting for escaped Nazi sci­en­tists work­ing in secret tech­nol­o­gy and weapons labs.

    The leg­end took root dur­ing the mid-1970s, nur­tured by the Cana­di­an neo-Nazi Ernst Zun­del, who argued that Nazis invent­ed fly­ing saucers and had tak­en their break­through tech­nol­o­gy to bases deep under the South Pole.

    The Third Reich was inter­est­ed in a pos­si­ble base at the South Pole, and a few high-lev­el Nazis did escape to Argenti­na, whose nation­al ter­ri­to­ry includes a slice of Antarc­ti­ca extend­ing to the South Pole. Zun­del and his suc­ces­sors have infused these facts with Vic­to­ri­an inner-earth leg­ends, and then mar­i­nat­ed them over mul­ti­ple view­ings of the 1968 B‑flick, They Saved Hitler’s Brain. Ver­sions of the the­o­ry remain pop­u­lar on neo-Nazi alt-his­to­ry sites, and in recent years British tabloids like the Mir­ror and Dai­ly Star have found click-bait gold in spread­ing them.

    The story’s per­sis­tence led Col­in Sum­mer­hayes of Cam­bridge University’s Polar Research Insti­tute to look into the mat­ter. In a 2006 edi­tion of The Polar Record, Sum­mer­hayes pre­sent­ed his heav­i­ly foot­not­ed and researched con­clu­sion that secret Nazi bases do not exist, and have nev­er exist­ed, on or below Antarc­ti­ca.

    As exhaus­tive as it was, it is unlike­ly Sum­mer­hayes’ study had much impact among the theory’s adher­ents. It was, after all, com­pet­ing with an ever expand­ing glut of “hid­den his­to­ry” books, pod­casts and web­sites. One of many such titles to appear that year was SS Broth­er­hood of the Bell: The Nazi’s Incred­i­ble Secret Tech­nol­o­gy, penned by Joseph P. Far­rell, a pro­lif­ic alt-his­to­ri­an and reg­u­lar on Red Ice Radio.
    ...

    And that SPLC report from back in 2018 brings us to the fol­low­ing sto­ry that has received quite a bit of cov­er­age in recent weeks. The kind of sto­ry that has advo­cates of both ‘ancient astro­nauts’ as well as ‘long lost advanced civ­i­liza­tions’ tit­ter­ing with excite­ment: a pair of Ital­ian researchers claim to have dis­cov­ered a vast under­ground city beneath the pyra­mids of Giza. So vast is this pre­vi­ous­ly undis­cov­ered under­ground com­plex that a num­ber of researchers are treat­ing it like a par­a­digm-shat­ter­ing dis­cov­ery that should force a rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the his­to­ry of the Pyra­mids. That’s the nar­ra­tive get­ting main­stream treat­ment in pub­li­ca­tions like The Dai­ly Mail. Ancient non-advance peo­ple could not have built these vast struc­tures. Only a lost advanced civ­i­liza­tion could have done it. Or aliens:

    Dai­ly Mail

    Were the Pyra­mids built by aliens? Inside the bizarre con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry ‘backed’ by Elon Musk — after experts make aston­ish­ing dis­cov­ery

    By HARRY HOWARD, HISTORY EDITOR
    Pub­lished: 05:54 EDT, 30 March 2025 | Updat­ed: 08:58 EDT, 30 March 2025

    They were not, so the polemic went, the work of ‘puny’ man, but instead those ‘giants of Mars’.

    Yes, the Pyra­mids of Giza — those mon­u­ments to god-like splen­dour that have stood for more than 4,000 years — were built by aliens.

    That was the ‘claim’ made by Amer­i­can astronomer Gar­rett P. Serviss in his 1898 book Edis­on’s Con­quest of Mars.

    Per­cep­tive read­ers will have not­ed that Servis­s’s work — an unau­tho­rised re-write of HG Wells’ 1897 alien inva­sion nov­el The War of the Worlds — was fic­tion­al.

    But it did pop­u­larise a the­o­ry that, even in more recent years, has con­tin­ued to find trac­tion.

    In 2020, bil­lion­aire Tes­la boss Elon Musk drew the scorn of experts when he took to Twit­ter — the social net­work that he bought in 2022 for $44billion — to write: ‘Aliens built the pyra­mids obv’.

    Now, the dis­cov­ery this month that an ‘under­ground city’ lies in a ‘hid­den world’ beneath Egyp­t’s most famous pyra­mids has again focused atten­tion on the struc­tures that have obsessed experts and ama­teurs alike for mil­len­nia.

    Just what could the vast net­work, which descends more than a mile into the sands, have been used for?

    ...

    The largest of the three pyra­mids at Giza — the Great Pyra­mid — was built more than 4,500 years ago in around 2560BC for King Khu­fu, who was the sec­ond pharaoh of Ancient Egyp­t’s fourth dynasty.

    Until the com­ple­tion of Lin­coln Cathe­dral in the 14th cen­tu­ry, it was the tallest build­ing in the world.

    The pyra­mid, which was topped with a gold or elec­trum cap­ping stone, was built as a sacred tomb for Khu­fu, who believed him­self to be divine.

    The oth­er two pyra­mids, built for pharaohs Menkau­re and Khafre, were con­struct­ed decades lat­er.

    The notion that the struc­tures were built by or with the help of aliens gained fur­ther trac­tion with Swiss author Erich von Däniken’s influ­en­tial 1968 book Char­i­ots of the Gods.

    He argued that Giza­’s Great Pyra­mid could not have been built with­out the help of advanced alien tech­nol­o­gy.

    The author wrote: ‘If we meek­ly accept the neat pack­age of knowl­edge that the Egyp­tol­o­gists serve up to us, ancient Egypt appears sud­den­ly and with­out tran­si­tion with a fan­tas­tic ready-made civ­i­liza­tion.

    ‘Great cities and enor­mous tem­ples, colos­sal sta­tus with tremen­dous expres­sive pow­er, splen­did streets flanked by mag­nif­i­cent sculp­tures, per­fect drainage sys­tems, lux­u­ri­ous tombs carved out of the rock, pyra­mids of over­whelm­ing size — these and many oth­er won­der­ful things shot out of the ground, so to speak.

    ‘Gen­uine mir­a­cles in a coun­try that is sud­den­ly capa­ble of such achieve­ments with­out rec­og­niz­able pre­his­to­ry!’

    He added: ‘An arti­fi­cial moun­tain, some 490 feet high and weigh­ing 6,500,000 tons, stands there as evi­dence of an incred­i­ble achieve­ment, and this mon­u­ment is sup­posed to be noth­ing more than the bur­ial place of an extrav­a­gant king!

    ‘Any­one who can believe that expla­na­tion is wel­come to it...’

    The late Bel­gian author Philip Cop­pens was sim­i­lar­ly forth­right in his 2011 book The Ancient Alien Ques­tion.

    He said in one pas­sage: ‘If aliens built the Great Pyra­mid, then it needs to be argued that they were also respon­si­ble for at least some of the oth­er pyra­mids in ancient Egypt.’

    But experts have rub­bished any notion that beings from oth­er plan­ets might have been involved in the con­struc­tion of the pyra­mids.

    Speak­ing on the BBC’s His­to­ry Extra pod­cast, British Egyp­tol­o­gist Pro­fes­sor Joyce Tyldes­ley said: ‘It’s almost almost sort of a bit like a form of racism, isn’t it, that these peo­ple could­n’t do it, so some­one else must have done it.’

    ‘But I think there’s a bit more to it than that. Because pri­or to the idea of aliens help­ing build the pyra­mids, we had the idea that maybe peo­ple from Atlantis might have helped build the pyra­mids, and pri­or to that, we had the idea that God inspired builders to use the pyra­mid inch, a divine­ly inspired mea­sure­ment to build the pyra­mids.

    ‘So I think it’s that there’s always been a long suc­ces­sion of the­o­ries about how the pyra­mids might have been built, and as one is sort of super­seded by the oth­er.

    ‘So it does­n’t just come out of nowhere. I think it’s a sort of chang­ing and evolv­ing belief as how the pyra­mids might have been built, and that’s just the lat­est one that we have.

    ‘As we become more inter­est­ed in space and aliens, then they’ve sort of been attached to this the­o­ry as well.’

    ...

    The Great Pyra­mid was sup­pos­ed­ly com­plet­ed in 24 years.

    But it was built from 2.3million lime­stone blocks, with each one weigh­ing between 2.5tons 70 tons.

    British writer Gra­ham Han­cock not­ed: ‘Assum­ing the masons worked ten hours a day, 365 days a year, they would have need­ed to place one block every two min­utes.’

    ...

    The lat­est dis­cov­ery that cav­ernous spaces exist beneath the pyra­mids was made by researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Strath­clyde in Glas­gow and the Ital­ian Uni­ver­si­ty of Pisa.

    ‘When we mag­ni­fy the images we will reveal that beneath it lies what can only be described as a true under­ground city... an entire hid­den world of many struc­tures,’ said Cor­ra­do Malan­ga, one of the archae­o­log­i­cal researchers.

    It remains a mys­tery how much old­er than the pyra­mids the struc­tures are.

    It is also unknown was their pur­pose is, but they are con­nect­ed by geo­met­ric pas­sages.

    Even more spec­tac­u­lar are eight ver­ti­cal columns that descend 2,1245feet into a pair of huge cham­bers.

    The depth is is almost five times the height of the Khafre Pyra­mid.

    The cylin­ders are aligned in two rows of four that run north to south.

    Giv­en that the edges of the Great Pyra­mids face exact­ly north, south, east and west, the arrange­ments of the cylin­ders is cer­tain to be sig­nif­i­cant.

    And around each pil­lar is a stair­case-like walk­way.

    ...

    —————-

    “Were the Pyra­mids built by aliens? Inside the bizarre con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry ‘backed’ by Elon Musk — after experts make aston­ish­ing dis­cov­ery” By HARRY HOWARD; Dai­ly Mail; 03/30/2025

    “Now, the dis­cov­ery this month that an ‘under­ground city’ lies in a ‘hid­den world’ beneath Egyp­t’s most famous pyra­mids has again focused atten­tion on the struc­tures that have obsessed experts and ama­teurs alike for mil­len­nia.”

    Yes, it’s quite an excit­ing dis­cov­ery, isn’t it? A vast pre­vi­ous­ly undis­cov­ered under­ground city, with a depth near­ly five times the height of the pyra­mid. What kind of won­ders are hid­den down there? Tru­ly a remark­able dis­cov­ery. At least if it’s not all BS:

    ...
    The lat­est dis­cov­ery that cav­ernous spaces exist beneath the pyra­mids was made by researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Strath­clyde in Glas­gow and the Ital­ian Uni­ver­si­ty of Pisa.

    ‘When we mag­ni­fy the images we will reveal that beneath it lies what can only be described as a true under­ground city... an entire hid­den world of many struc­tures,’ said Cor­ra­do Malan­ga, one of the archae­o­log­i­cal researchers.

    It remains a mys­tery how much old­er than the pyra­mids the struc­tures are.

    It is also unknown was their pur­pose is, but they are con­nect­ed by geo­met­ric pas­sages.

    Even more spec­tac­u­lar are eight ver­ti­cal columns that descend 2,1245feet into a pair of huge cham­bers.

    The depth is is almost five times the height of the Khafre Pyra­mid.

    The cylin­ders are aligned in two rows of four that run north to south.

    Giv­en that the edges of the Great Pyra­mids face exact­ly north, south, east and west, the arrange­ments of the cylin­ders is cer­tain to be sig­nif­i­cant.

    And around each pil­lar is a stair­case-like walk­way.
    ...

    And then we get to the seem­ing­ly inevitable ques­tion: Is this evi­dence of an alien ori­gin for the pyra­mids? It’s the lat­est form of a ques­tion that has been asked for ages, pre­ced­ed by the­o­ries like the idea of a long lost Atlantean civ­i­liza­tion. The­o­ries all root­ed in a firm con­vic­tion that the ancient peo­ples who actu­al­ly lived could­n’t have pos­si­bly been capa­ble of doing it on their own. It must have been a lost white civ­i­liza­tion. Or aliens. Per­haps Aryan aliens:

    ...
    The notion that the struc­tures were built by or with the help of aliens gained fur­ther trac­tion with Swiss author Erich von Däniken’s influ­en­tial 1968 book Char­i­ots of the Gods.

    He argued that Giza­’s Great Pyra­mid could not have been built with­out the help of advanced alien tech­nol­o­gy.

    ...

    The late Bel­gian author Philip Cop­pens was sim­i­lar­ly forth­right in his 2011 book The Ancient Alien Ques­tion.

    He said in one pas­sage: ‘If aliens built the Great Pyra­mid, then it needs to be argued that they were also respon­si­ble for at least some of the oth­er pyra­mids in ancient Egypt.’

    ...

    Speak­ing on the BBC’s His­to­ry Extra pod­cast, British Egyp­tol­o­gist Pro­fes­sor Joyce Tyldes­ley said: ‘It’s almost almost sort of a bit like a form of racism, isn’t it, that these peo­ple could­n’t do it, so some­one else must have done it.’

    ‘But I think there’s a bit more to it than that. Because pri­or to the idea of aliens help­ing build the pyra­mids, we had the idea that maybe peo­ple from Atlantis might have helped build the pyra­mids, and pri­or to that, we had the idea that God inspired builders to use the pyra­mid inch, a divine­ly inspired mea­sure­ment to build the pyra­mids.

    ‘So I think it’s that there’s always been a long suc­ces­sion of the­o­ries about how the pyra­mids might have been built, and as one is sort of super­seded by the oth­er.

    ‘So it does­n’t just come out of nowhere. I think it’s a sort of chang­ing and evolv­ing belief as how the pyra­mids might have been built, and that’s just the lat­est one that we have.

    ‘As we become more inter­est­ed in space and aliens, then they’ve sort of been attached to this the­o­ry as well.’
    ...

    And note one of the famil­iar names we saw ref­er­enced in the above SPLC piece: Gra­ham Hanock a now-reg­u­lar His­to­ry Chan­nel ‘talk­ing head’ who rou­tine­ly pro­motes the ancient astro­naut the­o­ries. And here he is being cit­ed in the Dai­ly Mail piece hint­ing at an alien ori­gin for the pyra­mids:

    ...
    The Great Pyra­mid was sup­pos­ed­ly com­plet­ed in 24 years.

    But it was built from 2.3million lime­stone blocks, with each one weigh­ing between 2.5tons 70 tons.

    British writer Gra­ham Han­cock not­ed: ‘Assum­ing the masons worked ten hours a day, 365 days a year, they would have need­ed to place one block every two min­utes.’
    ...

    And that Dai­ly Mail report from March 30 brings us to the fol­low­ing Dai­ly Mail report from 8 days ear­li­er. A report that includes some rather impor­tant details regard­ing the verac­i­ty of these find­ings. Details left out of the March 30 report entire­ly: the study has­n’t been peer reviewed and experts have already debunked it:

    Dai­ly Mail

    Wild new the­o­ries emerge after sci­en­tists claim to have dis­cov­ered a ‘vast CITY’ 6,500ft below the Pyra­mids of Giza — as Joe Rogan weighs in on ‘mind-blow­ing’ devel­op­ment

    By EMILY JANE DAVIES and STACY LIBERATORE
    Pub­lished: 15:43 EDT, 22 March 2025 | Updat­ed: 16:52 EDT, 22 March 2025

    Wild new the­o­ries have emerged after sci­en­tists claimed to have dis­cov­ered a ‘vast city’ 6,500ft below the Pyra­mids of Giza.

    The ‘ground­break­ing’ dis­cov­ery beneath the Egypt­ian pyra­mids has tak­en the world by storm and new the­o­ries have emerged to cast doubt on how the struc­tures were built.

    Researchers from Italy and Scot­land claim to have uncov­ered ‘a vast under­ground city’ which stretch­es more than 6,500 feet direct­ly under­neath the Pyra­mids of Giza, mak­ing them 10 times larg­er than the pyra­mids them­selves.

    The bomb­shell the­o­ry — which many experts claim to have already debunked — comes from a study that used radar puls­es to cre­ate high-res­o­lu­tion images deep into the ground beneath the struc­tures, the same way sonar radar is used to map the depths of the ocean.

    Amer­i­can pod­cast­er Joe Rogan has now weighed in on the ‘mind-blow­ing’ devel­op­ment, call­ing it ‘very very very weird’.

    Rogan said: ‘This is insane. It’s quite stun­ning. They don’t under­stand what it is but it’s a uni­form struc­ture. There are sev­er­al pil­lars and all of this is very very very weird.

    ‘It’s real­ly crazy.’

    He added: ‘Christo­pher Dunne believes that the Pyra­mid of Giza is a big pow­er plant.

    ‘He has a the­o­ry about why its built the way its built.

    ‘He thinks it coin­cides with the abil­i­ty to pro­duce hydro­gen, to utilise the rays of space and to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty through this.’

    Researcher Jay Ander­son added: ‘What has just been announced in rela­tion to the pyra­mids at the Giza plateau and the plateau itself is so incred­i­ble, so awe-inspir­ing and nar­ra­tive shat­ter­ing that I’ve been sit­ting here for the last hour try­ing to wrap my heard around the impli­ca­tions of what we were just told.

    ‘It’s noth­ing short of mind­blow­ing. What’s been dis­cov­ered is that there are huge struc­tures com­ing down from the base of the pyra­mid deep into the bedrock.

    ‘It then con­nects to mas­sive inter­nal struc­tures deep deep down.

    ‘The pyra­mid itself was already a mas­sive red flag in the ancient Egypt­ian his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive but now, with this dis­cov­ery, I think it’s impos­si­ble to say that the Egyp­tians we’ve been taught about built these struc­tures.

    ‘It pro­vides the most extra­or­di­nary evi­dence for a pre-flood era civil­i­sa­tion that was flour­ish­ing in a way that we can scarce­ly com­pre­hend.’

    The paper, which has not been peer-reviewed by inde­pen­dent experts, found eight ver­ti­cal cylin­der-shaped struc­tures extend­ing more than 2,100 feet below the pyra­mid and more unknown struc­tures 4,000 feet deep­er.

    A press release described the find­ings as ‘ground­break­ing’ and if true could rewrite the his­to­ry of ancient Egypt.

    How­ev­er, inde­pen­dent experts have raised seri­ous con­cerns about the study.

    Pro­fes­sor Lawrence Cony­ers, a radar expert at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Den­ver who focus­es on archae­ol­o­gy, told DailyMail.com that it is not pos­si­ble for the tech­nol­o­gy to pen­e­trate that deeply into the ground, mak­ing the idea of an under­ground city ‘a huge exag­ger­a­tion.’

    Pro­fes­sor Cony­ers said it is con­ceiv­able there are small struc­tures, such as shafts and cham­bers, beneath the pyra­mids that exist­ed before they were built because the site was ‘spe­cial to ancient peo­ple.’

    He high­light­ed how ‘the Mayans and oth­er peo­ple in ancient Mesoamer­i­ca often built pyra­mids on top of the entrances of caves or cav­erns that had cer­e­mo­ni­al mean­ing to them.’

    The work by Cor­ra­do Malan­ga, from Italy’s Uni­ver­si­ty of Pisa, and Fil­ip­po Bion­di with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Strath­clyde in Scot­land has only been released dur­ing an in-per­son brief­ing in Italy this week and is yet to be pub­lished in a sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal, where it would need to be ana­lyzed by inde­pen­dent experts.

    Despite the scep­ti­cism, Pro­fes­sor Cony­ers added that the only way to prove the dis­cov­er­ies to be true would be ‘tar­get­ed exca­va­tions.’

    ‘My take is that as long as authors are not mak­ing things up and that their basic meth­ods are cor­rect, their inter­pre­ta­tions should be giv­en a look by all who care about the site,’ he explained.

    ‘We can quib­ble about inter­pre­ta­tions, and that is called sci­ence. But the basic meth­ods need to be sol­id.’

    He also told DailyMail.com that he could not tell if the tech­nol­o­gy used actu­al­ly picked up hid­den struc­ture below the pyra­mid.

    ‘They are using all kinds of fan­cy pro­pri­etary data analy­sis soft­ware,’ said Pro­fes­sor Cony­ers.

    ...

    Malan­ga is a UFOl­o­gist and has appeared on YouTube shows about aliens, where he has dis­cussed his more than decade-long career of study­ing UFO sight­ings in Italy.

    Bion­di, on the oth­er hand spe­cial­izes radar tech­nol­o­gy.

    Malan­ga and Biondi’s pub­lished a sep­a­rate peer-reviewed paper in Octo­ber 2022 in the sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal Remote Sens­ing which found hid­den rooms and ramps inside Khafre, along with evi­dence of a ther­mal anom­aly near the pyra­mid’s base.

    The new study used sim­i­lar tech­nol­o­gy, but got a boost from a satel­lite orbit­ing Earth.

    The new radar tech­nique works by com­bin­ing satel­lite radar data with tiny vibra­tions from nat­u­ral­ly-occur­ring seis­mic move­ments, to con­struct 3D images of what lies beneath the sur­face of the earth, with­out doing any phys­i­cal dig­ging.

    Nicole Cic­co­lo, the pro­jec­t’s spokesper­son, said: ‘A vast under­ground city has been dis­cov­ered beneath the pyra­mids,’

    ‘[The] ground­break­ing study has rede­fined the bound­aries of satel­lite data analy­sis and archae­o­log­i­cal explo­ration.’

    ...

    The cylin­der-shaped struc­tures, which Cic­co­lo referred to as ‘shafts,’ were arranged in two par­al­lel rows and sur­round­ed by descend­ing spi­ral path­ways.

    Cic­co­lo said the cylin­der struc­tures were found under­neath each of the three pyra­mids and appeared ‘to serve as access points to this under­ground sys­tem.’

    The team explained the sys­tem as oth­er cham­ber-like struc­tures inter­con­nect­ing under all three of the pyra­mids.

    ‘The exis­tence of vast cham­bers beneath the earth­’s sur­face, com­pa­ra­ble in size to the pyra­mids them­selves, which have a remark­ably strong cor­re­la­tion between the leg­endary Halls of Amen­ti,’ Cic­co­lo said.

    ‘These new archae­o­log­i­cal find­ings could rede­fine our under­stand­ing of the sacred topog­ra­phy of ancient Egypt, pro­vid­ing spa­tial coor­di­nates for pre­vi­ous­ly unknown and unex­plored sub­ter­ranean struc­tures,’ she added.

    The news has gone viral this week, with X flood­ed with posts about the poten­tial dis­cov­ery.

    Flori­da con­gress­woman Anna Pauli­na Luna shared a post about the struc­tures on her X page.

    ...

    ———–

    “Wild new the­o­ries emerge after sci­en­tists claim to have dis­cov­ered a ‘vast CITY’ 6,500ft below the Pyra­mids of Giza — as Joe Rogan weighs in on ‘mind-blow­ing’ devel­op­ment” By EMILY JANE DAVIES and STACY LIBERATORE; Dai­ly Mail; 03/22/2025

    “The bomb­shell the­o­ry — which many experts claim to have already debunked — comes from a study that used radar puls­es to cre­ate high-res­o­lu­tion images deep into the ground beneath the struc­tures, the same way sonar radar is used to map the depths of the ocean.”

    A bomb­shell theory...that hap­pens to have already been debunked by experts. It’s a rather impor­tant detail in this sto­ry. A detail the Dai­ly Mail decid­ed to include in this March 22 ver­sion of that sto­ry but left out of the above March 30 ver­sion entire­ly. No men­tion at all of all the prob­lems with this ‘ground­break­ing research’. That’s part of the con­text of this sto­ry of the amaz­ing dis­cov­ery beneath the pyra­mids. The Dai­ly Mail went from pro­mot­ing this sto­ry — while at least includ­ing some expert caveats — to just pro­mot­ing it with­out the caveats. So when we see how Joe Rogan has been pro­mot­ing the idea that the pyra­mids are some sort of ancient hydro­gen-gen­er­at­ing pow­er plant or oth­er ‘experts’ sug­gest it’s all evi­dence of a “pre-flood era civil­i­sa­tion that was flour­ish­ing in a way that we can scarce­ly com­pre­hend”, keep in mind how the pub­lic at large is being ‘informed’ about these ‘alter­na­tive his­to­ries’ from a vari­ety of dif­fer­ence sources. Between online news like the Dai­ly Mail or pod­cast­ers like Joe Rogan, the main­stream­ing of the ‘ancient aliens’ meme has gone well being the His­to­ry Chan­nel. Learn­ing that one of the two researchers, Cor­ra­do Malan­ga, is a UFOl­o­gist and has appeared on YouTube shows about aliens is kind of what we should expect at this point:

    ...
    Amer­i­can pod­cast­er Joe Rogan has now weighed in on the ‘mind-blow­ing’ devel­op­ment, call­ing it ‘very very very weird’.

    Rogan said: ‘This is insane. It’s quite stun­ning. They don’t under­stand what it is but it’s a uni­form struc­ture. There are sev­er­al pil­lars and all of this is very very very weird.

    ‘It’s real­ly crazy.’

    He added: ‘Christo­pher Dunne believes that the Pyra­mid of Giza is a big pow­er plant.

    ‘He has a the­o­ry about why its built the way its built.

    ‘He thinks it coin­cides with the abil­i­ty to pro­duce hydro­gen, to utilise the rays of space and to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty through this.’

    Researcher Jay Ander­son added: ‘What has just been announced in rela­tion to the pyra­mids at the Giza plateau and the plateau itself is so incred­i­ble, so awe-inspir­ing and nar­ra­tive shat­ter­ing that I’ve been sit­ting here for the last hour try­ing to wrap my heard around the impli­ca­tions of what we were just told.

    ‘It’s noth­ing short of mind­blow­ing. What’s been dis­cov­ered is that there are huge struc­tures com­ing down from the base of the pyra­mid deep into the bedrock.

    ‘It then con­nects to mas­sive inter­nal struc­tures deep deep down.

    ‘The pyra­mid itself was already a mas­sive red flag in the ancient Egypt­ian his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive but now, with this dis­cov­ery, I think it’s impos­si­ble to say that the Egyp­tians we’ve been taught about built these struc­tures.

    ‘It pro­vides the most extra­or­di­nary evi­dence for a pre-flood era civil­i­sa­tion that was flour­ish­ing in a way that we can scarce­ly com­pre­hend.’

    ...

    Malan­ga is a UFOl­o­gist and has appeared on YouTube shows about aliens, where he has dis­cussed his more than decade-long career of study­ing UFO sight­ings in Italy.

    Bion­di, on the oth­er hand spe­cial­izes radar tech­nol­o­gy.

    Malan­ga and Biondi’s pub­lished a sep­a­rate peer-reviewed paper in Octo­ber 2022 in the sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal Remote Sens­ing which found hid­den rooms and ramps inside Khafre, along with evi­dence of a ther­mal anom­aly near the pyra­mid’s base.

    The new study used sim­i­lar tech­nol­o­gy, but got a boost from a satel­lite orbit­ing Earth.

    The new radar tech­nique works by com­bin­ing satel­lite radar data with tiny vibra­tions from nat­u­ral­ly-occur­ring seis­mic move­ments, to con­struct 3D images of what lies beneath the sur­face of the earth, with­out doing any phys­i­cal dig­ging.
    ...

    Sad­ly, instead, it appears that the researchers behind this bomb­shell report are engag­ing in a “huge exag­ger­a­tion” at best, mak­ing claims that sim­ply aren’t pos­si­ble giv­en the tech­nol­o­gy. And then there’s the pro­pri­etary data analy­sis soft­ware that does­n’t lend itself to peer review. How con­ve­nient:

    ...
    The paper, which has not been peer-reviewed by inde­pen­dent experts, found eight ver­ti­cal cylin­der-shaped struc­tures extend­ing more than 2,100 feet below the pyra­mid and more unknown struc­tures 4,000 feet deep­er.

    A press release described the find­ings as ‘ground­break­ing’ and if true could rewrite the his­to­ry of ancient Egypt.

    How­ev­er, inde­pen­dent experts have raised seri­ous con­cerns about the study.

    Pro­fes­sor Lawrence Cony­ers, a radar expert at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Den­ver who focus­es on archae­ol­o­gy, told DailyMail.com that it is not pos­si­ble for the tech­nol­o­gy to pen­e­trate that deeply into the ground, mak­ing the idea of an under­ground city ‘a huge exag­ger­a­tion.’

    Pro­fes­sor Cony­ers said it is con­ceiv­able there are small struc­tures, such as shafts and cham­bers, beneath the pyra­mids that exist­ed before they were built because the site was ‘spe­cial to ancient peo­ple.’

    He high­light­ed how ‘the Mayans and oth­er peo­ple in ancient Mesoamer­i­ca often built pyra­mids on top of the entrances of caves or cav­erns that had cer­e­mo­ni­al mean­ing to them.’

    The work by Cor­ra­do Malan­ga, from Italy’s Uni­ver­si­ty of Pisa, and Fil­ip­po Bion­di with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Strath­clyde in Scot­land has only been released dur­ing an in-per­son brief­ing in Italy this week and is yet to be pub­lished in a sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal, where it would need to be ana­lyzed by inde­pen­dent experts.

    Despite the scep­ti­cism, Pro­fes­sor Cony­ers added that the only way to prove the dis­cov­er­ies to be true would be ‘tar­get­ed exca­va­tions.’

    ...

    He also told DailyMail.com that he could not tell if the tech­nol­o­gy used actu­al­ly picked up hid­den struc­ture below the pyra­mid.

    ‘They are using all kinds of fan­cy pro­pri­etary data analy­sis soft­ware,’ said Pro­fes­sor Cony­ers.
    ...

    Final­ly, note the mem­ber of con­gress who decid­ed to share their inter­est in the alleged find­ings: Anna Pauli­na Luna, the same mem­ber of con­gress who has tak­en the lead in the dis­clo­sure of state secrets sur­round­ing events like the assas­si­na­tions of JFK, MLK, and UFOs. Again, how con­ve­nient:

    ...
    The news has gone viral this week, with X flood­ed with posts about the poten­tial dis­cov­ery.

    Flori­da con­gress­woman Anna Pauli­na Luna shared a post about the struc­tures on her X page.
    ...

    It’s kind of amaz­ing that we aren’t get­ting more reports of mem­bers of Con­gress tout­ing this sto­ry. Unfound­ed claims of ancient aliens and lost civ­i­liza­tions are weird­ly on brand for the sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion. How long before we get a con­gres­sion­al hear­ing on the hor­rors of Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry wip­ing away the proud his­to­ry of the Aryan Mound Builders? It’s just a mat­ter of time at this point. It’s the actu­al cred­i­ble evi­dence for the Aryan Mound Builders that we’ll have to keep wait­ing for.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 14, 2025, 9:23 pm

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