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

4 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
  4. It’s that time again. Time to dis­sect the Dai­ly Mail’s increas­ing­ly irre­spon­si­ble pro­mo­tion of ‘the aliens are already here’ sto­ries. As we’ve seen, sto­ries about aliens and the pyra­mids have become a Dai­ly Mail spe­cial­ty. But sto­ries about ‘ancient aliens’ and the pyra­mids are far from the only nar­ra­tive tem­plate the Dai­ly Mail has been deploy­ing.

    Take the fol­low­ing pair of Dai­ly Mail arti­cles, one from a lit­tle over a week ago and the sec­ond from ear­ly last month. Both about alien encoun­ters with CIA psy­chic ‘remote view­ers’. And both just old unsub­stan­ti­at­ed sto­ries that were dug up and retold for pret­ty much no dis­cernible rea­son. The Dai­ly Mail just decid­ed to report old tabloid-lev­el sto­ries as if they were some­how new­ly rel­e­vant.

    So what did these CIA remote view­ers expe­ri­ence? Well, in the fol­low­ing arti­cle from ear­ly June of this year, the Dai­ly Mail recounts the claims made by Ingo Swann back in 1998, who claimed that he was tasked with remote­ly view­ing an alien base on the dark side of the moon back in 1975. What he found were aliens oper­at­ing some kind of base on the moon’s sur­face. Human-like aliens who look human, although were all males and wore no clothes, which makes this a good time to recall the fas­cist his­to­ry of human-like alien claims that tend to be high­ly con­ve­nient for white suprema­cists. Giant tow­ers were erect­ed by the aliens and some kind of min­ing of the crater was tak­ing place. The aliens also appeared to be psy­chic them­selves and even detect­ed his psy­chic pres­ence at one point before the remote view­ing ses­sion was cut off. Swann claimed the US gov­ern­ment knew about this base. Swann end­ed up ask­ing the mys­te­ri­ous gov­ern­ment employ­ees who tasked him with this job, ‘They some­how have told you to stay away. That’s why you are resort­ing to psy­chic per­cep­tions. They are not friend­ly, are they?’ and was told that he was ‘approx­i­mate­ly cor­rect… but not com­plete­ly so.’

    Swann made all of these claims in a book pub­lished in 1998 and died in 2013. So why was this sto­ry being re-told today? No expla­na­tion is giv­en. It’s just the Dai­ly Mail rehash­ing this sto­ry as if it’s some sort of spec­tac­u­lar rev­e­la­tion. Much like the CIA alien remote view­ing sto­ry pub­lished by the Dai­ly Mail back in May about three more alien bases dis­cov­ered by CIA remote view­ers. One of the bases was locat­ed at Mount Hayes in Alas­ka. Anoth­er was either in South Amer­i­ca or Africa, accord­ing to the remote view­er. A third alien base was found on Titan, Sat­urn’s largest moon.

    Aliens that looked entire­ly human, includ­ing an attrac­tive female, were found on Titan. In this case, they had clothes. The base in Alas­ka also appeared to be human-like, although lacked defin­i­tive fea­tures. Like Ingo Swan­n’s moon base aliens, these aliens also seemed to acknowl­edge the psy­chic’s pres­ence.

    But at the sec­ond earth base, the psy­chic found two dif­fer­ent types of aliens. One was human-like but with no hair or dis­tinct facial fea­tures. The sec­ond alien had a very large, round head on slen­der neck and an almost robot-like appear­ance. The human-like alien seemed to friend­ly and aware of the remote view­er’s psy­chic pres­ence.

    In keep­ing with the ‘ancient aliens and the pyra­mids’ theme we’ve seen before, this sec­ond Dai­ly Mail arti­cle also includes pass­ing ref­er­ences to CIA remote view­ing ses­sions involv­ing the remote view of the Ark of the Con­venant and also giant pyra­mids on Mars. The remote view­er in that Mars ses­sion described wit­ness­ing large humans strug­gling with a col­laps­ing atmos­phere. This was appar­ent­ly a view­ing of 1,000,000 BC.

    But there’s anoth­er bit of jour­nal­is­tic malfea­sance worth not­ing in this sec­ond arti­cle: the arti­cle opens with the fol­low­ing pair of sen­tences:

    ...
    Amer­i­cans tuned into a con­gres­sion­al UFO hear­ing today, where top sci­en­tists and Pen­ta­gon insid­ers claimed the US gov­ern­ment has been hid­ing proof of alien life.

    And while offi­cials con­tin­ue to deny encoun­ters with mys­te­ri­ous aer­i­al phe­nom­e­na, a resur­faced CIA doc­u­ment sug­gests the gov­ern­ment may have iden­ti­fied extrater­res­tri­al beings decades ago.
    ...

    And that link to a “resur­faced CIA doc­u­ment” is actu­al­ly a link to anoth­er Dai­ly Mail arti­cle about UFOs pub­lished by the Dai­ly Mail back in April. But that arti­cle had absolute­ly noth­ing to do with CIA remote view­ing exper­i­ments. Instead, the arti­cle described a pur­port­ed top secret CIA doc­u­ment declas­si­fied in 2000 describ­ing an inci­dent in the late 1980s in the Sovi­et Union where a UFO was shot down with a sur­face-to-air mis­sile. Sovi­et Sol­diers then sur­round­ed the downed craft, where five alien sur­vivors emerged. Those aliens then some­how formed into a sin­gle ball-like enti­ty and emit­ted a bright light. Twen­ty three sol­diers were turned to lime­stone. The two sur­vivors hap­pened to be in the shade dur­ing the light flare. That was the remark­able sto­ry shared with the Dai­ly Mail, seem­ing­ly for no rea­son at all, back in April. Well, there was one stat­ed qua­si-rea­son for the new report­ing: the “AI or Evil” pod­cast recent­ly talked about it. That’s as close as we get to a rea­son for this sto­ry.

    Well, except, of course, the whole sto­ry was com­plete non­sense. Now, it is true that the CIA con­tains a report on this ‘inci­dent’. But it was­n’t a report by CIA ana­lysts. Instead, it was a trans­la­tion of a 1993 arti­cle that appeared in a Ukrain­ian news­pa­per. That arti­cle, in turn, was reprint of an arti­cle that appeared in a dif­fer­ent Ukrain­ian news­pa­per. But the sto­ry did­n’t orig­i­nate in Ukraine. It start­ed in the Week­ly World News. Yes, the joke tabloid sis­ter pub­li­ca­tion to the Nation­al Enquir­er. That’s sourc­ing for this sto­ry. So back in 1993, a Ukrain­ian news­pa­per recy­cles a Week­ly World News report, which is fur­ther reprint­ed by a sec­ond Ukrain­ian news­pa­per. The CIA even­tu­al­ly trans­lates that reprint­ed piece, and decades lat­er the Dai­ly Mail reports on it as if it’s a real sto­ry. And not just by the Dai­ly Mail. As we’ll see in the Snopes piece below, that ‘Sovi­et UFO shoot­down’ sto­ry was per­co­lat­ing across social media and even the Joe Rogan pod­cast, along with news out­lets like the New York Post, Fox News (both owned by Rupert Mur­doch along with the Dai­ly Mail), as well as India Today, NDTV, and The Eco­nom­ic Times. That’s the BS com­plex we’re see­ing on dis­play here. Decades old tabloid arti­cles are being rehashed for mass con­sump­tion.

    Ok, first, here’s the Dai­ly Mail piece for just over a week ago about the incred­i­ble tale of Ingo Swan­n’s psy­chic dis­cov­er­ies on the dark side of moon. An incred­i­ble tale that is being rehashed today for no dis­cernible rea­son that the Dai­ly Mail decid­ed to share:

    The Dai­ly Mail

    Secret CIA pro­gram claimed to have found alien civ­i­liza­tion on dark side of the moon: ‘They look like us’

    By CHRIS MELORE, ASSISTANT SCIENCE EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
    Pub­lished: 17:35 EDT, 3 June 2025 | Updat­ed: 17:38 EDT, 3 June 2025

    As the US pre­pares to send astro­nauts back to the moon, a CIA file has resur­faced that claims to have found life there more than 25 years ago.

    In the 1970s and 80s, the CIA con­duct­ed exper­i­ments with indi­vid­u­als who claimed they could per­ceive infor­ma­tion about dis­tant objects, events, or peo­ple, a process known as ‘remote view­ing.’

    The expe­ri­ence of remote view­er Ingo Swann was first revealed in 1998 when he explained how his psy­chic episode took him to the dark side of the moon, a region that always faces away from Earth and out of sight from human eyes.

    That’s where the remote review­er made a shock­ing dis­cov­ery: tow­ers, build­ings, and human-like aliens work­ing at a secret com­plex on the moon’s sur­face.

    Dis­turbing­ly, Swann said gov­ern­ment offi­cials knew the aliens had a base there, and these humanoids could actu­al­ly sense his pres­ence as he viewed them with his mind from 238,000 miles away.

    He claimed that a race of aliens that ‘looked exact­ly like us’ erect­ed sev­er­al giant tow­ers on the moon. One was the size of the Unit­ed Nations build­ing in New York.

    Swann, who died in 2013, made the shock­ing claims in his book ‘Pen­e­tra­tion: The Ques­tion of Extrater­res­tri­al and Human Telepa­thy’ released in 1998.

    Despite Swann’s detailed claims, there has nev­er been any tan­gi­ble proof of alien bases or life on the moon dis­cov­ered by lunar mis­sions led by the US, Rus­sia, Chi­na, Japan, and India.

    ...

    Swann wrote how he received a phone call in Feb­ru­ary 1975 from intel­li­gence agents in Wash­ing­ton DC, ask­ing for his help with anoth­er secret project.

    A meet­ing was set up between Swann and a mys­te­ri­ous gov­ern­ment oper­a­tive known as Mr Axel­rod.

    Swann had a hood placed over his head and was instruct­ed not to speak or ask any ques­tions as he was tak­en by heli­copter to an under­ground base.

    Once there, Mr Axel­rod gave the remote view­er a very sim­ple task: ‘We want you to go to the Moon for us, and describe what you see.’

    How­ev­er, Swann was also told that he could not reveal any­thing he saw in that vision for ‘at least 10 years.’

    When the CIA oper­a­tive-turned-author was final­ly able to share his psy­chic vision, the descrip­tion he gave was jaw-drop­ping.

    ‘I found tow­ers, machin­ery, lights of dif­fer­ent col­ors, strange-look­ing build­ings,’ Swann wrote in the 1998 tell-all.

    ‘I found bridges whose func­tion I could­n’t fig­ure out. There were a lot of domes of var­i­ous sizes,’ he con­tin­ued.

    Swann not­ed that the aliens appeared to be all male and did not wear any cloth­ing. They were dig­ging holes into the moon’s craters dur­ing some kind of min­ing or earth-mov­ing oper­a­tion.

    One thing he did not expect to see was two of the aliens spot­ting his con­scious­ness view­ing the secret moon base.

    ‘Two of them point­ed in my direc­tion,’ Swann explained.‘How could they do that… unless… they have some kind of high psy­chic per­cep­tions, too?’

    It was at that moment Mr Axel­rod end­ed the remote view­ing ses­sion he recruit­ed Swann for.

    How­ev­er, Swann revealed that the news of an alien takeover on the moon did not phase Axel­rod or oth­er intel­li­gence offi­cials.

    The remote view­er then ques­tioned his recruiters about why NASA or the US mil­i­tary haven’t gone back to the moon since 1972.

    His ques­tions stum­bled upon the unnerv­ing truth: ‘They some­how have told you to stay away. That’s why you are resort­ing to psy­chic per­cep­tions. They are not friend­ly, are they?’ Swann asked Axel­rod.

    The oper­a­tive report­ed­ly told him that he was ‘approx­i­mate­ly cor­rect… but not com­plete­ly so.’

    NASA has not con­duct­ed a manned moon mis­sion since 1972. Swan­n’s remote view­ing ses­sion alleged­ly took place in 1975, 3 years after humans gave up on trav­el­ing to the moon

    ...

    On May 1, the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion slashed $6 bil­lion that would have paid for research, oper­a­tions on the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion, and future mis­sions, includ­ing the Mars Sam­ple Return (MSR) mis­sion.

    At the same time, the cuts will allow NASA to allo­cate over $1 bil­lion to manned space mis­sions, ensur­ing ‘that Amer­i­ca’s human space explo­ration efforts remain unpar­al­leled, inno­v­a­tive, and effi­cient.’

    ...

    ———–

    “Secret CIA pro­gram claimed to have found alien civ­i­liza­tion on dark side of the moon: ‘They look like us’ ” By CHRIS MELORE; The Dai­ly Mail; 06/03/2025

    The expe­ri­ence of remote view­er Ingo Swann was first revealed in 1998 when he explained how his psy­chic episode took him to the dark side of the moon, a region that always faces away from Earth and out of sight from human eyes.”

    Yes, this stun­ning remote view­ing ‘rev­e­la­tion’, first revealed in 1998, is once again in the news. Why? We have no idea. Ingo Swann died in 2013 and there does­n’t appear to have been any sort of update to the sto­ry. The Dai­ly Mail is just recy­cling this old atten­tion-grab­bing sto­ry for some rea­son:

    ...
    Swann, who died in 2013, made the shock­ing claims in his book ‘Pen­e­tra­tion: The Ques­tion of Extrater­res­tri­al and Human Telepa­thy’ released in 1998.

    Despite Swann’s detailed claims, there has nev­er been any tan­gi­ble proof of alien bases or life on the moon dis­cov­ered by lunar mis­sions led by the US, Rus­sia, Chi­na, Japan, and India.

    ...

    Swann wrote how he received a phone call in Feb­ru­ary 1975 from intel­li­gence agents in Wash­ing­ton DC, ask­ing for his help with anoth­er secret project.

    A meet­ing was set up between Swann and a mys­te­ri­ous gov­ern­ment oper­a­tive known as Mr Axel­rod.

    Swann had a hood placed over his head and was instruct­ed not to speak or ask any ques­tions as he was tak­en by heli­copter to an under­ground base.

    Once there, Mr Axel­rod gave the remote view­er a very sim­ple task: ‘We want you to go to the Moon for us, and describe what you see.’

    How­ev­er, Swann was also told that he could not reveal any­thing he saw in that vision for ‘at least 10 years.’
    ...

    And then we get to the most provoca­tive claims in this ‘report’: the aliens on the dark side of the moon “looked exact­ly like us”, although they were nude. And appar­ent­ly psy­chic and vague­ly hos­tile too:

    ...
    He claimed that a race of aliens that ‘looked exact­ly like us’ erect­ed sev­er­al giant tow­ers on the moon. One was the size of the Unit­ed Nations build­ing in New York.

    ...

    Swann not­ed that the aliens appeared to be all male and did not wear any cloth­ing. They were dig­ging holes into the moon’s craters dur­ing some kind of min­ing or earth-mov­ing oper­a­tion.

    One thing he did not expect to see was two of the aliens spot­ting his con­scious­ness view­ing the secret moon base.

    ‘Two of them point­ed in my direc­tion,’ Swann explained.‘How could they do that… unless… they have some kind of high psy­chic per­cep­tions, too?’

    It was at that moment Mr Axel­rod end­ed the remote view­ing ses­sion he recruit­ed Swann for.

    How­ev­er, Swann revealed that the news of an alien takeover on the moon did not phase Axel­rod or oth­er intel­li­gence offi­cials.

    The remote view­er then ques­tioned his recruiters about why NASA or the US mil­i­tary haven’t gone back to the moon since 1972.

    His ques­tions stum­bled upon the unnerv­ing truth: ‘They some­how have told you to stay away. That’s why you are resort­ing to psy­chic per­cep­tions. They are not friend­ly, are they?’ Swann asked Axel­rod.

    The oper­a­tive report­ed­ly told him that he was ‘approx­i­mate­ly cor­rect… but not com­plete­ly so.’
    ...

    And that Dai­ly Mail piece from ear­li­er this month brings us to the fol­low­ing Dai­ly Mail piece from last month. A piece about anoth­er CIA remote view­ing aliens sto­ry. This time, the aliens were found on Earth. Two of them. And the aliens were all human-like either, although some were. An alien base was appar­ent­ly spot­ted by CIA remote view­ers too on Titan, Sat­urn’s largest moon. This base was entire­ly pop­u­lat­ed by human-like aliens. At one loca­tion, two dif­fer­ent types of aliens were seen work­ing togeth­er. One was human-like while the oth­er had a very unhu­man large round head with a thin neck. The arti­cle ends with a ref­er­ence to oth­er CIA remote view­ing exper­i­ments, includ­ing the alleged remote view­ing of the Ark of the Con­venant and giant pyra­mids on Mars. Because of course:

    The Dai­ly Mail

    Secret CIA files claim to expose loca­tions of three alien bases... and two of them are on Earth

    By STACY LIBERATORE FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
    Pub­lished: 23:16 EDT, 1 May 2025 | Updat­ed: 08:46 EDT, 2 May 2025

    Amer­i­cans tuned into a con­gres­sion­al UFO hear­ing today, where top sci­en­tists and Pen­ta­gon insid­ers claimed the US gov­ern­ment has been hid­ing proof of alien life.

    And while offi­cials con­tin­ue to deny encoun­ters with mys­te­ri­ous aer­i­al phe­nom­e­na, a resur­faced CIA doc­u­ment sug­gests the gov­ern­ment may have iden­ti­fied extrater­res­tri­al beings decades ago.

    In the 1970s and 80s, the CIA con­duct­ed exper­i­ments with indi­vid­u­als who claimed they could per­ceive infor­ma­tion about dis­tant objects, events, or peo­ple — a process known as ‘remote view­ing.’

    One such report, titled ‘Descrip­tion of Per­son­nel Asso­ci­at­ed ‘ET’ Bases,’ detailed a ses­sion in which a remote view­er was giv­en unknown tar­gets and asked to describe what they per­ceived.

    The doc­u­ment describes alleged alien bases locat­ed in Alas­ka, South Amer­i­ca or Africa, and on Titan, Sat­urn’s largest moon.

    ...

    The remote view­er also report­ed see­ing ‘enti­ties’ at these sites. One was said to have ‘a very large, round­ed-shaped head’ and ‘very unhu­man appear­ance,’ while anoth­er was described as ‘very pale’ with a ‘sharp nose.’

    But the Titan base appeared to be staffed with human sci­en­tists, includ­ing ‘an attrac­tive female.’

    The remote view­ing ses­sion was part of the CIA’s top-secret STARGATE pro­gram, which recruit­ed indi­vid­u­als believed to have psy­chic abil­i­ties for mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence pur­pos­es dur­ing the Cold War.

    ...

    The report on extrater­res­tri­al bases was pro­duced in 1987 and lat­er declas­si­fied in 2000.

    Dur­ing a remote view­ing ses­sion, par­tic­i­pants typ­i­cal­ly sketched what they ‘saw’ and jot­ted down brief notes about their per­cep­tions.

    The 12-page doc­u­ment includes sev­er­al draw­ings believed to depict the loca­tions of these ET bases—one sketch appears to resem­ble a rocky moun­tain.

    That draw­ing has been inter­pret­ed as Mount Hayes in Alas­ka, which stands rough­ly 8,000 feet tall.

    Mount Hayes has long been the sub­ject of UFO sight­ings and the­o­ries about a hid­den under­ground alien base. Numer­ous wit­ness­es have report­ed see­ing fly­ing saucers, strange lights, and oth­er unex­plained phe­nom­e­na in the area.

    ...

    The remote view­er described see­ing two beings stand­ing out­side one of the bases, ‘accom­plish­ing some sort of rou­tine task.’

    Inside the base, they per­ceived two more enti­ties. One was seat­ed at a cir­cu­lar con­sole with a round, screen-like object, accord­ing to the ses­sion notes.

    The sec­ond fig­ure was per­form­ing anoth­er task in the back­ground.

    ‘The enti­ty at the con­sole appeared to be in human form but lacked defin­i­tive fea­tures,’ the remote view­er shared, adding that the being appeared to acknowl­edge their pres­ence and invit­ed them to observe its work.

    At the Titan base, the remote view­er did not report see­ing any alien life.

    Instead, they described the site as appear­ing to be staffed by indi­vid­u­als who ‘looked no dif­fer­ent than native earth­lings.’

    They observed two male tech­ni­cians seat­ed at a con­trol pan­el, with a female figure—described as hav­ing brown hair and wear­ing a pale green lab coat—standing behind them in what appeared to be a super­vi­so­ry role.

    The final loca­tion was described as being some­where south of the equa­tor, though the remote view­er could­n’t deter­mine whether it was in South Amer­i­ca or Africa.

    Although the sketch was labeled ‘South Amer­i­ca,’ the land­scape report­ed­ly resem­bled Europe.

    At that base, the view­er report­ed see­ing two enti­ties.

    ‘The first had a very large, round­ed-shaped head on a slen­der neck… very unhu­man appear­ance… almost robot-like… unable to make con­tact with this being,’ the report notes.

    The sec­ond enti­ty appeared more human, though it had no hair and lacked dis­tinct facial fea­tures. ‘The enti­ty seemed friend­ly enough and appeared to be aware of my pres­ence,’ the remote view­er wrote.

    The CIA oper­at­ed sev­er­al secret remote view­ing pro­grams dur­ing the Cold War, using indi­vid­u­als with alleged psy­chic abil­i­ties to assist in a range of intel­li­gence operations—from track­ing kid­napped hostages held by ter­ror­ist groups to locat­ing fugi­tive crim­i­nals inside the U.S.

    One such pro­gram, known as Sun Streak, even tasked a remote view­er with locat­ing the Ark of the Covenant, which they claimed was hid­den some­where in the Mid­dle East.

    In anoth­er high-pro­file ses­sion, famed remote view­er Joe McMonea­gle, known as the CIA’s ‘Remote View­er No. 1,’ was report­ed­ly giv­en coor­di­nates and asked to describe what he saw.

    Speak­ing on the show Amer­i­can Alche­my in March, McMonea­gle said he visu­al­ized a giant pyra­mid on Mars, larg­er than Egyp­t’s Great Pyra­mid of Giza, filled with what he called ‘mon­ster rooms.’

    ‘I start­ed get­ting an image of human beings that were trapped in a place where the atmos­phere was turn­ing bad,’ McMonea­gle recalled. ‘It was obvi­ous these peo­ple were dying for some reason—but they were humans. They were just twice our size.’

    The coor­di­nates he had been giv­en were lat­er revealed to cor­re­spond to Mars, 1,000,000 BC—as writ­ten on a white card hand­ed to him dur­ing the ses­sion.

    ———–

    “Secret CIA files claim to expose loca­tions of three alien bases... and two of them are on Earth” By STACY LIBERATORE; The Dai­ly Mail; 05/01/2025

    “And while offi­cials con­tin­ue to deny encoun­ters with mys­te­ri­ous aer­i­al phe­nom­e­na, a resur­faced CIA doc­u­ment sug­gests the gov­ern­ment may have iden­ti­fied extrater­res­tri­al beings decades ago.

    A “resur­face CIA doc­u­ment” sug­gests the US gov­ern­ment may have iden­ti­fied aliens decades ago. That’s the head­line mes­sage from this Dai­ly Mail piece, pub­lished just a month before the above piece about the CIA dis­cov­er­ing aliens on the dark side of the moon. And, sure enough, we find this to be anoth­er sto­ry about CIA remote view­ing exper­i­ments from the 70s and 80s. Except this time, it’s not about alien bases on the dark side of the moon. It’s about alien bases found on Earth and on Sat­urn’s largest moon. The CIA just keeps find­ing alien bases:

    ...
    In the 1970s and 80s, the CIA con­duct­ed exper­i­ments with indi­vid­u­als who claimed they could per­ceive infor­ma­tion about dis­tant objects, events, or peo­ple — a process known as ‘remote view­ing.’

    One such report, titled ‘Descrip­tion of Per­son­nel Asso­ci­at­ed ‘ET’ Bases,’ detailed a ses­sion in which a remote view­er was giv­en unknown tar­gets and asked to describe what they per­ceived.

    The doc­u­ment describes alleged alien bases locat­ed in Alas­ka, South Amer­i­ca or Africa, and on Titan, Sat­urn’s largest moon.
    ...

    And look at that: more human-like aliens. There’s even an attrac­tive female this time. And they were wear­ing clothes. Inter­est­ing­ly, it was the Titan base were the CIA remote view­ers spot­ted the human-like aliens:

    ...
    The remote view­er also report­ed see­ing ‘enti­ties’ at these sites. One was said to have ‘a very large, round­ed-shaped head’ and ‘very unhu­man appear­ance,’ while anoth­er was described as ‘very pale’ with a ‘sharp nose.’

    But the Titan base appeared to be staffed with human sci­en­tists, includ­ing ‘an attrac­tive female.’

    The remote view­ing ses­sion was part of the CIA’s top-secret STARGATE pro­gram, which recruit­ed indi­vid­u­als believed to have psy­chic abil­i­ties for mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence pur­pos­es dur­ing the Cold War.

    ...

    The report on extrater­res­tri­al bases was pro­duced in 1987 and lat­er declas­si­fied in 2000.

    ...

    At the Titan base, the remote view­er did not report see­ing any alien life.

    Instead, they described the site as appear­ing to be staffed by indi­vid­u­als who ‘looked no dif­fer­ent than native earth­lings.’

    They observed two male tech­ni­cians seat­ed at a con­trol pan­el, with a female figure—described as hav­ing brown hair and wear­ing a pale green lab coat—standing behind them in what appeared to be a super­vi­so­ry role.

    ...

    And then we get this inter­est­ing twist at one of Earth-based bases: there were two dif­fer­ent types of aliens. A some­what human-like alien and a sec­ond very unhu­man, almost robot-like, alien. Work­ing togeth­er it would seem:

    ...
    The final loca­tion was described as being some­where south of the equa­tor, though the remote view­er could­n’t deter­mine whether it was in South Amer­i­ca or Africa.

    Although the sketch was labeled ‘South Amer­i­ca,’ the land­scape report­ed­ly resem­bled Europe.

    At that base, the view­er report­ed see­ing two enti­ties.

    ‘The first had a very large, round­ed-shaped head on a slen­der neck… very unhu­man appear­ance… almost robot-like… unable to make con­tact with this being,’ the report notes.

    The sec­ond enti­ty appeared more human, though it had no hair and lacked dis­tinct facial fea­tures. ‘The enti­ty seemed friend­ly enough and appeared to be aware of my pres­ence,’ the remote view­er wrote.
    ...

    And as we should prob­a­bly expect at this point, the arti­cle includes a ref­er­ence to remote view­ing exper­i­ments involv­ing the Pyra­mids and even the Ark of the Con­venant:

    ...
    The CIA oper­at­ed sev­er­al secret remote view­ing pro­grams dur­ing the Cold War, using indi­vid­u­als with alleged psy­chic abil­i­ties to assist in a range of intel­li­gence operations—from track­ing kid­napped hostages held by ter­ror­ist groups to locat­ing fugi­tive crim­i­nals inside the U.S.

    One such pro­gram, known as Sun Streak, even tasked a remote view­er with locat­ing the Ark of the Covenant, which they claimed was hid­den some­where in the Mid­dle East.

    In anoth­er high-pro­file ses­sion, famed remote view­er Joe McMonea­gle, known as the CIA’s ‘Remote View­er No. 1,’ was report­ed­ly giv­en coor­di­nates and asked to describe what he saw.

    Speak­ing on the show Amer­i­can Alche­my in March, McMonea­gle said he visu­al­ized a giant pyra­mid on Mars, larg­er than Egyp­t’s Great Pyra­mid of Giza, filled with what he called ‘mon­ster rooms.’

    ‘I start­ed get­ting an image of human beings that were trapped in a place where the atmos­phere was turn­ing bad,’ McMonea­gle recalled. ‘It was obvi­ous these peo­ple were dying for some reason—but they were humans. They were just twice our size.’

    The coor­di­nates he had been giv­en were lat­er revealed to cor­re­spond to Mars, 1,000,000 BC—as writ­ten on a white card hand­ed to him dur­ing the ses­sion.
    ...

    Oh, but it gets worse. Because it turns out the Dai­ly Mail arti­cle that was linked to in ref­er­ence to what “a resur­faced CIA doc­u­ment sug­gests”, hap­pens to be an arti­cle from back in April that is arguably even more irre­spon­si­ble. An arti­cle about an alleged CIA report describ­ing an inci­dent in Sovi­et Union involv­ing the shoot down of a UFO with a sur­face-to-air mis­sile. Accord­ing to this CIA report, 25 Sovi­et sol­diers sur­round­ed the crashed craft, where 5 aliens emerged. Those alien sur­vivors then some­how mor­phed into a sin­gle ball-like form that emit­ted a bright light. 23 out of 25 of the sol­diers were pet­ri­fied into lime­stone. The top secret CIA report was declas­si­fied in 2000.

    Well, except the CIA report was­n’t declas­si­fied in 2000 because it was nev­er clas­si­fied. Now, it is true there was a report found on the CIA’s web­site about this alien pet­ri­fi­ca­tion sto­ry. But it was­n’t some sort of CIA review of a real event. Instead, it was a trans­la­tion of an arti­cle pub­lished in a Ukrain­ian news­pa­per in March of 1993. That arti­cle, in turn, was just the reprint of an arti­cle that appeared in a dif­fer­ent Ukrain­ian news­pa­per. And that arti­cle was based on a report in the tabloid Week­ly World News. Behold the pow­er of tabloid pub­li­ca­tions. Even decades lat­er:

    Dai­ly Mail

    Chill­ing declas­si­fied CIA file reveals aliens com­mit­ted ‘revenge mas­sacre’ after UFO was shot down

    By CHRIS MELORE, ASSISTANT SCIENCE EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

    Pub­lished: 10:38 EDT, 3 April 2025 | Updat­ed: 10:08 EDT, 4 April 2025

    A bone-chill­ing doc­u­ment declas­si­fied by the CIA has exposed an alleged mas­sacre by aliens from a crashed UFO who turned an entire mil­i­tary unit into stone.

    Accord­ing to the report, Sovi­et troops shot down a fly­ing saucer hov­er­ing over the Sovi­et mil­i­tary unit in Siberia rough­ly 35 years ago, and what hap­pened next was tru­ly ter­ri­fy­ing.

    In the doc­u­ment, sum­ma­riz­ing a 250-page top secret file acquired by US intel­li­gence agents, eye­wit­ness­es said five aliens climbed out of their wrecked craft, com­bined them­selves into one crea­ture, explod­ed in a burst of intense ener­gy, and turned 23 sol­diers into sol­id rock.

    One CIA offi­cial referred to the shock­ing bat­tle as ‘a hor­rif­ic pic­ture of revenge on the part of extrater­res­tri­al crea­tures, a pic­ture that makes one’s blood freeze.’

    The agency added that the ‘extreme­ly men­ac­ing case’ proved the aliens who vis­it­ed Earth pos­sessed weapons and tech­nol­o­gy far beyond the US gov­ern­men­t’s ‘assump­tions’ — sug­gest­ing they were already aware of the aliens’ exis­tence.

    The unearthed doc­u­ment, declas­si­fied in 2000, was recent­ly the top­ic of the AI or Evil pod­cast, where host Josh Hoop­er revealed that two of the sol­diers at the UFO crash site actu­al­ly sur­vived the encounter.

    How­ev­er, the 23 ‘pet­ri­fied sol­diers’ could not be saved. Their remains and the debris from the space­craft were report­ed­ly moved to a secret research base near Moscow.

    ...

    The sub­ject of the doc­u­ment states: ‘Paper reports alleged evi­dence on mishap involv­ing UFO.’

    This extra­or­di­nary tale was also pub­lished in the Ukrain­ian news­pa­per Holos Ukrayiny on March 27, 1993.

    The inci­dent, which a Cana­di­an news­pa­per believed took place between 1989 and 1990, was only uncov­ered by the CIA after the fall of the Sovi­et Union and its ‘secret police’ orga­ni­za­tion, the KGB.

    The CIA doc­u­ment explained that the alleged alien craft was fly­ing low and qui­et­ly above the Sovi­et unit while they were engaged in a train­ing mis­sion.

    Offi­cials wrote that ‘for unknown rea­sons’ the Sovi­ets launched a sur­face-to-air mis­sile at the UFO, send­ing it crash­ing to the Earth near the unit’s posi­tion.

    Accord­ing to the only two sol­diers who sur­vived, when the sol­diers approached the craft, the five aliens freed them­selves of the debris and came close togeth­er near the wreck.

    Moments lat­er, the sol­diers said the group of aliens ‘merged into a sin­gle object that acquired a spher­i­cal shape.’ In sim­pler lan­guage, the aliens beings some­how mor­phed into a giant ball.

    That’s when the new ball-like alien began to buzz and hiss before ignit­ing into a bril­liant white light.

    With the sol­diers still look­ing on, the ball of light erupt­ed like a giant flare of ener­gy, turn­ing 23 of the 25 Sovi­ets into ‘stone poles.’

    The report stat­ed that the only rea­son two of the men sur­vived was because they were stand­ing in a shad­ed area at the time of the alien ener­gy blast.

    Test­ing of the sol­dier’s bod­ies showed the alien flare had some­how changed liv­ing tis­sue into a sub­stance that close­ly resem­bles lime­stone.

    The CIA doc­u­ment added that ‘a source of ener­gy that is still unknown to Earth­lings’ was respon­si­ble for the blast which fatal­ly trans­formed the Sovi­ets.

    Even in 2025, the sci­ence behind such a shock­ing trans­for­ma­tion is still dif­fi­cult to explain med­ical­ly and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly.

    Accord­ing to the Jour­nal of Applied Physics, it is pos­si­ble to use high-ener­gy radi­a­tion or elec­tro­mag­net­ic puls­es to change nor­mal mat­ter into plas­ma — a form that’s not a liq­uid, sol­id, or gas.

    In the report, the CIA described the aliens as short humanoids with ‘large heads and large black eyes.’

    The account match­es who UFO researchers, alleged alien abductees, and oth­ers who believe in alien life refer to as a race called ‘the Greys.’

    Their fea­tures have become the clas­sic image the pub­lic thinks of when dis­cussing aliens from out­er space — a small, skin­ny, grey-skinned alien, with an over­sized head and large black eyes with no iris.

    The Greys would even­tu­al­ly become linked to the infa­mous Roswell Inci­dent of 1947, as CIA doc­u­ments would lat­er sug­gest that alien beings were pulled from the alleged wreck in New Mex­i­co.

    ...

    Despite their promi­nent place in extrater­res­tri­al research, this dis­turb­ing inci­dent appears to be the first time humans have alleged that these beings could have accom­plished such ter­ri­fy­ing feats.

    ———–

    “Chill­ing declas­si­fied CIA file reveals aliens com­mit­ted ‘revenge mas­sacre’ after UFO was shot down” By CHRIS MELORE; Dai­ly Mail; 04/03/2025

    “In the doc­u­ment, sum­ma­riz­ing a 250-page top secret file acquired by US intel­li­gence agents, eye­wit­ness­es said five aliens climbed out of their wrecked craft, com­bined them­selves into one crea­ture, explod­ed in a burst of intense ener­gy, and turned 23 sol­diers into sol­id rock.”

    As we can see in that April 2025 arti­cle, pub­lished about a month before the above arti­cle, the report­ing is based on a 250-page top secret file acquired by US intel­li­gence and declas­si­fied in 2000. That’s what we’re told. So why is this being report­ed on in 2025? Because the “AI or Evil” pod­cast talked about it. Yep. That’s the expla­na­tion we are giv­en. But then there’s this impor­tant addi­tion­al detail: the tale was also pub­lished in 1993 in a Ukrain­ian news­pa­per:

    ...
    One CIA offi­cial referred to the shock­ing bat­tle as ‘a hor­rif­ic pic­ture of revenge on the part of extrater­res­tri­al crea­tures, a pic­ture that makes one’s blood freeze.’

    The agency added that the ‘extreme­ly men­ac­ing case’ proved the aliens who vis­it­ed Earth pos­sessed weapons and tech­nol­o­gy far beyond the US gov­ern­men­t’s ‘assump­tions’ — sug­gest­ing they were already aware of the aliens’ exis­tence.

    The unearthed doc­u­ment, declas­si­fied in 2000, was recent­ly the top­ic of the AI or Evil pod­cast, where host Josh Hoop­er revealed that two of the sol­diers at the UFO crash site actu­al­ly sur­vived the encounter.

    How­ev­er, the 23 ‘pet­ri­fied sol­diers’ could not be saved. Their remains and the debris from the space­craft were report­ed­ly moved to a secret research base near Moscow.

    ...

    The sub­ject of the doc­u­ment states: ‘Paper reports alleged evi­dence on mishap involv­ing UFO.’

    This extra­or­di­nary tale was also pub­lished in the Ukrain­ian news­pa­per Holos Ukrayiny on March 27, 1993.
    ...

    It’s quite an “extra­or­di­nary tale”. Or at least it would have been extra­or­di­nary had it not orig­i­nat­ed with the Week­ly World News. But that’s what hap­pened. Mean­ing the only extra­or­di­nary thing about this sto­ry is the fact that a Week­ly World News joke fan­ta­sy that’s over three decades old was suc­cess­ful­ly res­ur­rect­ed in 2025 and passed off as a top secret CIA report. It’s an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly sad state of affairs:

    Snopes

    CIA doc­u­ment does­n’t prove aliens turned Sovi­et sol­diers to stone — and it was nev­er clas­si­fied

    The sto­ry orig­i­nat­ed from Week­ly World News, a tabloid known for fab­ri­cat­ing sto­ries.

    Alek­san­dra Wrona
    Pub­lished April 26, 2025

    Claim:
    A recent­ly declas­si­fied CIA doc­u­ment con­firms that after Sovi­et troops shot down a UFO in 1987, the aliens turned 23 sol­diers into stone.

    Rat­ing:
    False

    In April 2025, rumors spread on social media about an alleged­ly declas­si­fied CIA doc­u­ment that proved a sto­ry about aliens turn­ing 23 Sovi­et sol­diers to stone after a UFO was shot down.

    One X post (archived) with the claim reached more than 11.1 mil­lion views, as of this writ­ing. The text on the image attached to the post read, “DECLASSIFIED CIA DOCUMENT CLAIMS ALIENS TURNED 23 SOVIET SOLDIERS TO STONE AFTER UFO WAS SHOT DOWN.”

    The sto­ry also gained atten­tion across social media plat­forms includ­ing X, Threads, YouTube, Insta­gram and Face­book. Pod­cast­er Joe Rogan also dis­cussed the alleged CIA doc­u­ment in an episode of his pod­cast fea­tur­ing guest Post Mal­one.

    News out­lets includ­ing the New York Post, Dai­ly Mail, Fox News, India Today, NDTV and The Eco­nom­ic Times, also report­ed on the alleged doc­u­ment.

    In short, although the doc­u­ment at the cen­ter of the claims was gen­uine­ly avail­able on the CIA’s web­site, it was not an offi­cial agency report. Rather, it was a trans­la­tion of a Ukrain­ian news­pa­per arti­cle based on a fic­tion­al sto­ry orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the tabloid Week­ly World News. Addi­tion­al­ly, the doc­u­ment was nev­er clas­si­fied and there­fore nev­er declas­si­fied. As such, we have rat­ed this claim as false.

    ...

    What’s actu­al­ly in the doc­u­ment

    The doc­u­ment cir­cu­lat­ing online appeared on the offi­cial CIA web­site under the title, “Paper reports alleged evi­dence on mishap involv­ing a UFO.”

    It opened with a line cred­it­ing the CIA’s For­eign Broad­cast Infor­ma­tion Ser­vice, which the agency estab­lished to “mon­i­tor, record, tran­scribe, and ana­lyze for­eign broad­casts,” accord­ing to records in the Nation­al Archives. The third line of the doc­u­ment con­tained the label “UNCLAS,” indi­cat­ing the page was nev­er clas­si­fied — mean­ing it was also nev­er declas­si­fied, despite what some social media users claimed. The fifth line sug­gest­ed the doc­u­ment was sup­posed to be passed to the BBC.

    Addi­tion­al­ly, the top sec­tion of the doc­u­ment stat­ed that the source was an arti­cle that appeared in the March 27, 1993, issue of the Ukrain­ian news­pa­per Holos Ukrayiny, on Page 5. Fur­ther down, how­ev­er, a note in the doc­u­ment explained that the sto­ry was a reprint of an arti­cle, titled “Cos­mic Revenge,” that ran in anoth­er news­pa­per, Ternopil Vechirniy (see image below). Ternopil is a city in west­ern Ukraine.

    We have con­tact­ed both Ukrain­ian news­pa­pers to request copies of the rel­e­vant issues and will update this sto­ry if we hear back.

    The arti­cle also not­ed the sto­ry orig­i­nat­ed from “the author­i­ta­tive mag­a­zine Cana­di­an Week­ly World News.” Week­ly World News is a U.S. news­pa­per known for pub­lish­ing fab­ri­cat­ed sto­ries. It is also dis­trib­uted in Cana­da — like­ly the rea­son the CIA trans­la­tion of the Ukrain­ian arti­cle used the word “Cana­di­an” to describe the pub­li­ca­tion.

    The scan of the doc­u­ment showed a stamp in the bot­tom right cor­ner mark­ing it as “Approved for Release” in May 2000, although the CIA’s Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act Elec­tron­ic Read­ing Room web­site said the doc­u­ment was released on Jan. 31, 2011.

    ...

    ———-

    “CIA doc­u­ment does­n’t prove aliens turned Sovi­et sol­diers to stone — and it was nev­er clas­si­fied” by Alek­san­dra Wrona; Snopes; 04/26/2025

    “In short, although the doc­u­ment at the cen­ter of the claims was gen­uine­ly avail­able on the CIA’s web­site, it was not an offi­cial agency report. Rather, it was a trans­la­tion of a Ukrain­ian news­pa­per arti­cle based on a fic­tion­al sto­ry orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the tabloid Week­ly World News. Addi­tion­al­ly, the doc­u­ment was nev­er clas­si­fied and there­fore nev­er declas­si­fied. As such, we have rat­ed this claim as false.”

    A trans­la­tion of a Ukrain­ian news­pa­per arti­cle based on a fic­tion­al sto­ry orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the tabloid Week­ly World News. That’s what was get­ting passed off by the Dai­ly Mail as some sort of declas­si­fied top secret CIA doc­u­ment. But it’s not even just a trans­la­tion of a Ukrain­ian news­pa­per arti­cle based on a Week­ly World News report. It’s actu­al­ly a trans­la­tion of a reprint of a Ukrain­ian news­pa­per arti­cle based on a Week­ly World News report:

    ...
    Addi­tion­al­ly, the top sec­tion of the doc­u­ment stat­ed that the source was an arti­cle that appeared in the March 27, 1993, issue of the Ukrain­ian news­pa­per Holos Ukrayiny, on Page 5. Fur­ther down, how­ev­er, a note in the doc­u­ment explained that the sto­ry was a reprint of an arti­cle, titled “Cos­mic Revenge,” that ran in anoth­er news­pa­per, Ternopil Vechirniy (see image below). Ternopil is a city in west­ern Ukraine.

    We have con­tact­ed both Ukrain­ian news­pa­pers to request copies of the rel­e­vant issues and will update this sto­ry if we hear back.

    The arti­cle also not­ed the sto­ry orig­i­nat­ed from “the author­i­ta­tive mag­a­zine Cana­di­an Week­ly World News.” Week­ly World News is a U.S. news­pa­per known for pub­lish­ing fab­ri­cat­ed sto­ries. It is also dis­trib­uted in Cana­da — like­ly the rea­son the CIA trans­la­tion of the Ukrain­ian arti­cle used the word “Cana­di­an” to describe the pub­li­ca­tion.
    ...

    And as we can see, the Dai­ly Mail has­n’t been the only online plat­form ped­dling this sto­ry. A num­ber of out­lets have been push­ing it, includ­ing mul­ti­ple out­lets own by Rupert Mur­doch (the Dai­ly Mail, the New York Post, and Fox News). What a coin­ci­dence:

    ...
    The sto­ry also gained atten­tion across social media plat­forms includ­ing X, Threads, YouTube, Insta­gram and Face­book. Pod­cast­er Joe Rogan also dis­cussed the alleged CIA doc­u­ment in an episode of his pod­cast fea­tur­ing guest Post Mal­one.

    News out­lets includ­ing the New York Post, Dai­ly Mail, Fox News, India Today, NDTV and The Eco­nom­ic Times, also report­ed on the alleged doc­u­ment.
    ...

    Keep in mind that there are decades of old UFO sto­ries avail­able for unscrupu­lous out­lets to rehash for years to come. We don’t know what the next Dai­ly Mail UFO sto­ry will be, but we can be con­fi­dent it’s com­ing. Pre­sum­ably soon­er rather than lat­er giv­en that no actu­al UFO sight­ings are required.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 12, 2025, 3:47 pm

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