There were giants in the Earth

I remember reacting with honest bafflement when Barack Obama was running for his first term as president in 2008, and one of the criticisms levied against him was that he was part of the "academic elite."

I mean, don't you want your elected leaders to be smarter than you are?  I sure do.  I know I'm not smart enough to run an entire country.  Hell, I'm not smart enough to be mayor of my village, much less responsible for anything grander.  But strangely, that doesn't seem to be the way a lot of people think.  My first inkling that I was in the minority for wanting the president to be brilliant was when George W. Bush was running during the lead-up to the 2000 election, and I heard people say they were voting for him because he was "one of the common folk" and "someone you could sit down and have a beer with."

Never mind that in Bush's case, he was born into money, and his folksy aw-shucks demeanor was a sham; it worked.  He got elected (twice).  "Vote for Dubya, At Least He Won't Make You Feel Intellectually Inferior" apparently was a viable campaign slogan.

The result of this attitude, of course, is that we end up with leaders who are grossly incompetent.  Some of them are genuine lunatics.  And shockingly, for once I'm not talking about Donald Trump here.

Eric Burlison is a member of the House of Representatives from Missouri.  He made a name for himself in 2013 by taking a copy of a gun control bill and using it for target practice at a gun range, then posting a video of the event.  Prior to the Biden/Trump debate in 2019, he informed people in outraged tones that Biden was going to be "jacked up" -- on Mountain Dew.  Last year he was one of 26 Representatives -- all Republican -- who voted against a resolution condemning white supremacy.  He has repeatedly claimed that the January 6 riots weren't incited by Trump, whom Burlison idolizes, but by the FBI, as part of a plot to discredit Dear Leader.

So far, none of this is outside the norm for the GOP these days.  But just a few days ago, Burlison showed that he'd set up permanent residence in CrazyTown with a claim that has a long history,  but that I'd dearly hoped had gone the way of the dodo.

Burlison thinks that the Nephilim are real, and that the Smithsonian Institute has bones of giant humanoids from North America (fossils that are evidence of the truth of Genesis 6:4, "There were giants in the Earth in those days"), but is covering it up.  

For those of you who are neither (1) biblical scholars nor (2) people who frequent the dark corners of Woo-Woo Conspiracy World, the Nephilim are a race of big powerful dudes mentioned in a handful of places in the Bible, and who were supposedly the offspring of humans and fallen angels.  And when I say they were big, I mean abso-fucking-lutely enormous.  In Numbers 13:32-33, we read, "And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight verily as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight."

I mean, I'm pretty much of average height and build, but even so it'd take someone mighty tall to make me feel verily as a grasshopper.

A couple of archaeologists in Brazil excavating some Nephilim bones, or possibly a clever use of PhotoShop

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that way back in 2015 I wrote about a guy named Steven Quayle, who did a series of YouTube videos about how not only were there giant bones in the Smithsonian, but there was a program being run by the Evil Deep State to use Nephilim DNA to create a race of giant super-soldiers.  So that'd be pretty fucking scary, except for the fact that to believe it, you'd have to have the IQ of a bowl of pudding.

Which brings me back to Eric Burlison, who is all in on the idea of the Nephilim.  He's so convinced that "giants are real" (direct quote) that he was asked to speak at a conference of true believers called "NephCon 2025," which I swear I am not making up.

And one of the things he promised to do, in his keynote speech at NephCon, was to launch an investigation into the Smithsonian and their nefarious coverup of enormous humanoid bones that came from the descendants of fallen angels.

Your tax dollars at work.

Oh, and I haven't yet mentioned that Burlison is a prominent member of the House Oversight Committee, the main investigative panel in Congress.  Because having a member of one of the most powerful committees in our government giving the impression that he thinks Lost in Space is a scientific documentary isn't scary at all.

Every new thing that comes out of the current administration prompts me to think that we are truly in the most idiotic timeline possible.  Then along comes another elected official who does or says something even more idiotic.  It brings to mind the quip by Albert Einstein, "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

There's probably nothing much that can be done about Burlison; he's pretty well entrenched as the Republican representative from one of the deepest red regions of the country.  In that part of Missouri, a hard-boiled egg could run against a qualified Democrat, and people would vote for the egg as long as there was an "R" after its name.  So I'm afraid we're stuck with him.  At least if he's wasting his time searching for giant bones in storerooms in basement of the Smithsonian, he'll have less time to work toward taking away civil rights from people who are the wrong color, religion, or sexuality, which seems to be the other favorite occupation of the GOP lately.

How people like Burlison get elected has always been a mystery to me, but I'm beginning to think that it's not a fluke, but a systemic problem with the way a great many Americans think.  It all brings to mind the rather terrifying quote from French lawyer and diplomat Joseph de Maistre; "Every country gets the government it deserves."

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The Nephilim visit Miami

If you needed further evidence that whoever is controlling the simulation we're all trapped in has gotten drunk and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us, today we have: giant shadow aliens visiting a mall in Miami.

The event in question took place over a month ago, so I have to apologize for being a half a measure behind the rest of the orchestra, here.  On the other hand, since then the story has taken on a life of its own, and has grown way beyond the original claim, which was bizarre enough.  Apparently on January 1, some rowdy teens started a large brawl at Bayside Marketplace, so the police were called in.  This isn't anything unusual for Miami, so you'd think it'd have passed for business as usual, but then someone -- no one seems quite sure who -- got on social media and claimed that the police weren't there to handle some teenage brawlers, but to deal with "eight to ten foot tall shadow aliens."

This would be eye-opening even by south Florida standards.  Oddly enough, despite the fact that everybody and his dog now has a phone capable of taking high-quality photographs, no one seems to have snapped a pic of these aliens.  So of course, very quickly people realized that it was just a stupid rumor, there were no aliens, and everyone calmed down and went home, chuckling about how silly they'd all been.

Ha-ha, just kidding!  Of course that's not what happened.  What happened is that the rumor exploded that the police had prevented people from photographing the aliens, even resorting to confiscating and/or destroying people's phones.  Or that the aliens were "interdimensional space beings" who could not be photographed.  Possibly both.  The Miami Police Department issued a statement that it had "just been an altercation between about fifty juveniles," adding, "There were no aliens, UFOs, or ETs.  No airports were closed, and there were no power outages," and followed it up with the facepalm emoji.

Which accomplished exactly nothing.  Because why would the police be denying it if it weren't true?

Inescapable logic, that.

After that, there were only two things left to figure out; why were the police suppressing information about the aliens?  And who exactly were these tall, shadowy beings that mysteriously could not be photographed? 

I think we can all agree that given the evidence, there's only one possible conclusion: we are seeing the return of the Nephilim, as hath been foretold in the Bible, and the police are under orders from the Illuminati to make sure that no one finds out.

You may think I'm making this up, but this claim went off on social media like some hundred-megaton stupidity bomb.  "Let's talk about these creatures that supposedly are UFOs," said one TikToker.  "If you're a Christian you should already know.  These UFOs are fallen angels.  Remember, the devil's main goal is to make sure you don't believe he is real, and that Jesus is also not real.  This is just a warning that time is running out, and you better get close to Jesus."  One guy calling himself "the Apostle Preston," who on the video appeared to be tuning into God via an earpiece, said, "I hear you, Lord.  Tell the people there will be sightings of giants.  Giants that have been in hiding.  There will be sightings of them.  He said, 'But tell my people also not to fear.  Because what's going to happen is that when these giants are sighted, there will be great fear among men, and many of you will forget who your God is.'  This is why you need to be in a place of preparation."  A TikToker called -- I swear I'm not making this up -- "endtimelady" did a long video about how the aliens in Miami are actually Nephilim but they're also demons, and they're going to come out and terrorize us.  Oh, and we should be careful to control our thoughts, because they're telepathic.  "This is going to get more and more common," she said.  "Because we're in the End Times."

I guess if your handle is "endtimelady" you gotta bring that up somehow.

My favorite, though, is the guy who kept saying, "Why is nobody talking about this?" when, in fact, every lunatic on social media seems to be doing nothing but talking about this.

It's been a month and a half since the incident took place, and it's showing no signs of slowing down.  You'd think that questions like, "Where have the giant aliens been hiding since January 1?" and "If the powers-that-be are so desperate to prevent anyone from finding out about this, how are there videos and posts by the tens of thousands all over the internet, and no one's doing anything about it?" would come to people's minds.  Not to mention, "Why am I paying any attention to the crazed ramblings of people who obviously have a pound and a half of Malt-O-Meal where the rest of us have a brain?"

But this is social media, where everything's made up, and logic and evidence don't matter.

Anyhow.  You might want to keep an eye out for giant shadowy aliens.  Seems like they'd be hard to miss, but you never know.  I'm going to place my three dogs on High Red Alert Mode, usually reserved for Extreme Danger Situations like the arrival of the UPS guy.  So we'll all be watching for new developments.  If "endtimelady" is right and these are the End Times, I'd actually be thrilled, because I live in rural upstate New York and it's kind of boring around here.  The arrival of the Scarlet Whore of Babylon and the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons and the Beast With Seven Heads And Ten Crowns would be a welcome relief from the monotony.

On the other hand, if my initial take is correct and none of it is real and it is the result of superintelligent beings messing around with the computer simulation we're in, y'all just need to stop.  In the last few years the weirdness dial has already been turned up to eleven, and I think that's about all we can cope with, down here.  So y'all just sober up and simmer down, okay?

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The train to CrazyTown

It always astonishes me how much it takes for people to say to some nonsense-spouting pseudo-pundit, "You are nuttier than squirrel shit, and I am no longer listening to anything you say."

Or, more accurately, I don't know how much it takes, because it almost never happens.  Once people have decided they like someone's views, it seems like it's damn near impossible to get them to change their minds.  Said pundit could go on national television and say, "Scientists have found that the mantle of the Earth is not made of molten magma, it's made of my Grandma Betty's Special Tasty Banana Pudding," and I swear, 95% of the followers would just nod along as if this was a revelation from the Lord Almighty Himself.

It may come as a significant surprise that for once, I'm not talking about Donald Trump.  No, this time the person who has given strong evidence that he's been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars is Tucker Carlson, disgraced ex-Fox News commentator, who despite being too obnoxiously racist even for Fox, is still somehow finding venues for his insane vitriol.  (One of them, unsurprisingly, is The Social Media Platform Formerly Known As Twitter, because Elon Musk appears to be as much of a bigot as Carlson, if arguably a bit saner.)

The latest missive from Tucker Carlson, though, amazingly has nothing to do with how brown-skinned immigrants are coming for all of us white people.  It concerns UFOs (or UAPs, as I guess we're now all supposed to call them), and springboards off the kerfuffle the last few months about government cover-ups of what David Grusch elliptically referred to as "non-human biological entities."  (Fer cryin' in the sink, if you mean the A-word, say the A-word.  And yes, I'm being deliberately ironic by not saying the A-word myself.)

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Carlson, though, has no such sense of delicacy, but he thinks they're not extraterrestrial species -- at least in the conventional sense.  Here's what he said, as part of a two-hour interview which I made it through about fifteen minutes of, before my forehead hurt so much from faceplanting that I decided discretion is the better part of valor and gave up:

It’s my personal belief based on a fair amount of evidence that they’re not aliens.  They’ve always been here, and I do think it’s spiritual,  There are forces that aren’t human that do exist in a spiritual realm of some kind, that we cannot see, and that when you think about it, will sorta make you think we live in an ant farm...  I do know that informed people have said that the U.S. government has an agreement with these entities.

The whole thing smacks of the "prison planet" hypothesis, whose most vocal supporter is Ellis Silver, about whom I wrote here at Skeptophilia a while back.  The idea is that humans evolved elsewhere in the universe, and our ancestors were transported to Earth because we're so violent, and we're stuck here until we learn our lesson.  (Given recent world events, we don't seem to be catching on very quickly.)

In any case, Carlson takes it a step further, hybridizing Silver's ideas with the Book of Enoch and various episodes of The X Files to create a new brand of batshittery all his own.  In short, he seems to have taken on a job as conductor of the Express Train to CrazyTown, and a significant slice of Americans are just thrilled to hop on board.

So I encourage you to watch the interview (linked above), if you've got the stomach for it.  Myself, I have a hard time watching Tucker Carlson even with the sound turned off, because in my opinion he's only beaten out narrowly by Ted Cruz in the contest for the World's Most Punchable Face.  But given that Carlson has been floated seriously as a contender for the vice presidential choice for whomever the Republican nominee is for president in 2024, and a possible candidate for president in his own right in 2028, it behooves us all to be aware that he appears to be a few fries short of a Happy Meal.  To quote skeptic Jason Colavito, "That a leading contender for high office and one of the most influential figures on the right believes in some variation of Nephilim Theory is depressing.  That a powerful network of advocates has infiltrated both political parties to spread ancient mythology as though it were scientific revelation, and government and media cheer them on, is terrifying."

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Angels on ice

I guess it's natural enough to ascribe all sorts of bizarre stuff to places we don't know much about.  And top of the list of places we don't know much about is Antarctica.

The first recorded landing on the shores of Antarctica by humans (you'll see why I added "by humans" in a moment) was in 1821, when the American seal-hunting ship Cecilia, under Captain John Davis, anchored in Hughes Bay, between Cape Sterneck and Cape Murray along the west coast of the continent.  There's a possibility that the Māori discovered it first, perhaps as far back as the seventh century C.E., but that's based only on their legends and at this point is pure conjecture.

Since that time, there's been a good bit of exploration of the place, but there's a ton we still don't know.  The reason for this is not only its inaccessibility, but its ridiculously cold temperatures; the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was on July 21, 1983, when in Vostok Station, Antarctica it reached just this side of -90 C.  (For reference, carbon dioxide freezes at -78.5 C, so some of the white stuff on the ground there was dry ice.)

The mystery and inhospitable conditions just invite speculation, not to mention outright invention.  Perhaps the most famous story set in Antarctica is H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," in which a team of explorers finds the remnants of monumental architecture that predates the earliest humans by a good hundred million years -- at which time Antarctica was a tropical rainforest.  (What's most fascinating about this story is that Antarctica was a tropical rainforest at one point, when the continent was a great deal farther north, and that Lovecraft had conjectured this a good forty years before plate tectonics was discovered.)  Of course, being a story by HPL, it wouldn't be complete without monsters, and the unfortunate explorers discover that the place is still inhabited, and by the time it's over most of them have been eaten by Shoggoths.

Interestingly, this leads us right into the story that spawned today's post, because although most people know that Lovecraft's stories and others of their type are fiction, there are some for whom that distinction has never really taken hold.  I found out about this because a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that had popped up on Ranker called "These Fallen Angels Might Have Been Imprisoned in Antarctica," about a fellow named Steven Ben-Nun who claims that according to the Book of Enoch (a Jewish text dated to somewhere between 200 and 100 B.C.E., which is considered apocryphal by most Christian sects) when the angels fell, they didn't go to hell, they went to Antarctica.

Which, I suppose, is hellish enough.

Ben-Nun (and Enoch) give a great many details.  Apparently there were a bunch of angels called the Watchers, who became enamored of humans, and not just of watching, if you get my drift.  They came down to Earth and immediately taught humans "unholy ways" that apparently involved lots and lots of sex.  This resulted in lots and lots of babies, who were half-angel and half-human, and these are the Nephilim, about whom the conspiracy theorists still babble, lo unto this very day.

If this nineteenth-century marble statue of a fallen angel by Belgian sculptor Joseph Geefs is accurate, you can see why humans were tempted.  I wouldn't have said no either.

But new and fun sexual diversions weren't the only thing the angels taught humans.  According to the article:

Azazel, the leader of the Watchers, taught men to make tools for war and women to make themselves more attractive with jewelry and cosmetics.  Shemyaza taught magical spells; Armaros taught the banishment of those spells; the angel Baraqijal taught astrology; Kokabiel gave humans knowledge of astronomy; Chazaqiel taught them about weather; Shamsiel gave humans knowledge of the sun cycles; Sariel taught them the lunar cycles; Penemuel instructed humanity to read and write, and Kashdejan gave humanity the knowledge [of] medicine.

Well, all this was unacceptable to the Old Testament God, who above all seemed to resent it whenever he saw humans learning stuff or enjoying themselves.  So he and the unfallen angels (who presumably were just fine with humans not knowing about astronomy and weather and reading and writing and sex) waged war, and the Watchers were defeated.  At that point, Ben-Nun says, God looked about for the worst place possible to put them, and decided, understandably enough, on Antarctica.

And there they still reside, frozen underneath Wilkes Land.  Why specifically Wilkes Land, you might ask?  Well, it's because that's where the Wilkes Land Gravitational Anomaly is, the conventional explanation for which is that it's the site of an impact crater from a meteorite that hit about 250 million years ago.

But you can see how that explanation leads directly to the conclusion, "... so there must be a hundred fallen angels frozen under here somewhere."

Other than that, the claim doesn't have much going for it, and I don't think the scientists need to worry about waking up a bunch of Watchers.  The Lovecraftian cyclopean architecture is kind of a non-starter, too.  Too bad, because otherwise, most of Antarctica seems like nothing much more than rocks and ice.  It could use a few Shoggoths or hot-looking scantily-clad angels to liven thing up a bit.

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There were giants in the Earth

So our conspiracy theory of the day is: the US government is hiding living giant humanoids to create a race of hybrid super-soldiers.

This, at least, is the contention of one Steven Quayle, who in has created a video with the entertaining title "GIANT REPTILIAN MAN-EATING DEMONS IN A CITY NEAR YOU (part 1)" (capitalization his) that was sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  If you choose to watch it, please be aware that it's over two and a half hours long.  I made it through about fifteen minutes, which I think is pretty damn good, although by that time I felt like my brain had turned to cream-of-wheat and was leaking out of my ears.  The opening shows Quayle, interspersed with science fiction movie clips and backed up by atmospheric music, delivering the following scary lines:

I believe that the big lie that is going to be placed, hoist [sic] upon the world, is that the aliens created mankind...  Most people do not understand the evil.  Most people can't even embrace the fact that this isn't about old bones.  When I say mind-blowing, it will also be heart-freeing.  If I start talking about fallen angels having sex with Earth women, they snicker.  Well, that snicker tells me they've already made up their minds.  The super-soldier program is one of the most, well, almost unbelievable, yet so believable, programs that the US military is involved in.

Further along in the video, Quayle assures us that he doesn't believe in alien overlords.  Nope.  That would be ridiculous.  The Annunaki, he says, aren't aliens, they're fallen angels.

Which is ever so much more believable.

Worse yet, they're still around.  "They [the scientists] are starting from the premise that all of the giants are gone.  We're starting from the premise that there are modern-day giants now, and they're not suffering from acromegaly or some pituitary disorder, but they're literally going to fulfill the biblical statement of Matthew 24 where Jesus says, 'Just as in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man.'"

The whole thing, Quayle says, is a "multi-thousand-year cover up."

Then, of course, the Smithsonian comes up, because no discussion of archaeological conspiracies would be complete without the Smithsonian being involved.

"It's interesting, Tim," Quayle said to the interviewer.  "There's evidence of the bias of the Smithsonian, and their contempt for out-of-place artifacts -- every time giant bones were found, it didn't matter if it was on the West Coast, the Arctic, the Antarctic believe it or not, the East Coast, the Ohio River Mounds, they always have a fabulous cutoff point, being once the Smithsonian is notified, and those bones are sent to the Smithsonian, they're never heard from again."

A giant skeleton in Brazil, or a clever example of Photoshop, depending on which version you go for

"The point has been to keep this biblically-relevant topic out of the minds of the people," Quayle adds.

Why, you might be asking, would the Smithsonian -- and other scientific research agencies -- go to all of this trouble?  After all, careers are made from spectacular discoveries like these.  If the bones were real, not to mention the Annunaki, you'd think that archeologists would be elbowing each other out of the way to be the first to publish these findings in a reputable journal.

The reason, of course, is that the government is intimidating the scientists into silence so that they can keep secret the fact that these giant dudes are still around, and are being used in sinister genetics experiments to create a race of human/giant super-soldiers.

Shoulda known.

Quayle also tells us that he won't appear on camera unless he gets the final say on video and audio edits, and that "No one has been willing to agree to that."  Which makes it kind of odd that he told us this while on camera.  And that he now has his own video production company and an entire YouTube channel of his own.

Of course, he might have been right to avoid the spotlight.  He says he's afraid for his life, that he's being followed by the Men in Black.

"I'll be lucky not to be killed one day.  People have disappeared, Tim.  People who know about this, who have evidence."

And once again, we could convince ourselves that all we have is a lone wacko with access to recording equipment -- until you start reading the comments, of which I will give you a mercifully short sampling:

• People say that it takes place in the future.  But I think it takes place in the past.  The year is 800 after all.  And it seems to have the message that you can't beat the titans without mixing with them.  Rendering man almost extinct.  No wonder Noah and his sons were the only real men left.
• Do you guys feel the Neanderthals are a creation of fallen angels?
• They are from the Nephilim thats why Neanderthal DNA has only entered the human gene pool through men and why Neanderthal DNA is the source of being white.  Enoch 105 says the children born to fallen angels were white.  Anakim were white blonde giants,  Amorites were white Red heads and some were giants, then the Horites were normal sized white hairy cave men with brow ridges.  Thats why Hitler thought if he just got enough blondes to have children, sooner or later they would get a superman.
• there's stones thousands of years old talking about the ANANANAKI

So there you have it. Giant Anananaki (if I've counted the "Na's" correctly) being hidden by the government so they can have lots of sex with Earth women, who will give birth to a race of immortal super-soldiers, as hath been prophesied in the scripture.

You'd think, though, that if the US has had this super-soldier program for decades (as Quayle alleges), they'd have brought 'em out by now.  Do not try to convince me that if Donald Trump had access to super-soldiers he wouldn't already have deployed them against the DNC headquarters.  This, of course, isn't the most powerful of the arguments against Quayle's contentions; but just based upon that, I think the likelihood of there being ferocious giant half-human, half-fallen-angel dudes is pretty slim.

I think it's much more likely that Quayle and his followers have a screw loose.

But that's just me.  And if I end up being taken prisoner by a troop of white hairy cave men with brow ridges and used in sinister scientific experiments, I suppose it'll serve me right.

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As a biologist, I've usually thought of myself as immune to being grossed out.  But I have to admit I was a little shocked to find out that the human microbiome -- the collection of bacteria and fungi that live in and on us -- outnumber actual human cells by a factor of ten.

You read that right: if you counted up all the cells in and on the surface of your body, for every one human cell with human DNA, there'd be ten cells of microorganisms, coming from over a thousand different species.

And that's in healthy humans.  This idea that "bacteria = bad" is profoundly wrong; not only do a lot of bacteria perform useful functions, producing products like yogurt, cheese, and the familiar flavor and aroma of chocolate, they directly contribute to good health.  Anyone who has been on an antibiotic long-term knows that wiping out the beneficial bacteria in your gut can lead to some pretty unpleasant side effects; most current treatments for bacterial infections kill the good guys along with the bad, leading to an imbalance in your microbiome that can persist for months afterward.

In The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life, microbiologist Rodney Dietert shows how a lot of debilitating diseases, from asthma to allergies to irritable bowel syndrome to the inflammation that is at the root of heart disease, might be attributable to disturbances in the body's microbiome.  His contention is that restoring the normal microbiome should be the first line of treatment for these diseases, not the medications that often throw the microbiome further out of whack.

His book is fascinating and controversial, but his reasoning (and the experimental research he draws upon) is stellar.  If you're interested in health-related topics, you should read The Human Superorganism.  You'll never look at your own body the same way again.

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The naughty naughty Nephilim

In further exploration of beliefs for which there is no evidence whatsoever, today we consider: the Nephilim.

What are the Nephilim, you might ask?  Well, amongst other things, they are the subject of Scott Alan Roberts' book, The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim: The Untold Story of Fallen Angels, Giants on the Earth, and Their Extraterrestrial Origins.  In order to save you the money of buying this book (even the Kindle edition costs $9.34), allow me to explain that the Nephilim are apparently the result of angels having sex with human women, which resulted in a race of giants.  The whole thing seems to have come out of a couple of lines in the bible, especially Genesis 6:4, "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days--and also afterward -- when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them.  They were the heroes of old, men of renown."  They're mentioned in Numbers 13:33 as well: "We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim).  We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them."

So, the Nephilim were big dudes, evidently.  Exactly how big is uncertain.  Be that as it may, Scott Alan Roberts has examined the evidence (two passages from the bible) and come to the only possible conclusion: the "angels" mentioned in Genesis 6:4 as the fathers of the Nephilim were outer space aliens, and the Great Flood happened to destroy these "demonic hybrids" and remove all traces of alien DNA from the human gene pool.

Oh, okay.  I mean, my only question would be: seriously?  You can tell all that from two bible passages? And I thought that angels didn't have sex, given that they don't have the required, um, equipment? I distinctly remember in a highly scientific documentary I saw, the movie Dogma, the angel Metatron drops his drawers and lo, it was revealed unto me that although he hath wings, he hath no wang.

But I digress.

Marcantonio Franceschini, The Guardian Angel (1716) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

A complete lack of evidence, as I've stated before, never seems to discourage some people, and this hasn't stopped various folks from yammering on at length about the Nephilim, not to mention the sex lives of aliens and/or angels.  Take a look, for example, at this passage from the site Return of the Nephilim, which not only claims that the aliens had their way with human women back in the Bronze Age, but omigod it's still happening today:

Dr. John E. Mack, who needs no introduction to UFOlogists, has stated that the alien abduction scenario seems to be a program for the development of a hybrid race.  This very fact lends support to the theory that the abduction scenario is the modern resurgence of the Nephilim breeding program.  Pregnant women are abducted only to find the foetus has been removed from their womb.  In some cases they are reunited with their hybrid child in future abductions.  Men are forced to engage in sexual activity with hybrid females, or have their sperm removed from their bodies.  If there is any truth to theses alien abduction claims of literally thousands of people across the world the demonic plan of creating yet another hybrid race is already in action...  It seems pretty clear we may have entered “the Days of Noah”.

Okay, you biblical scholars correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Noah lived a while back.  So whatever we're entering now, it's not so much the "Days of Noah" as it is the "Days of a Helluva Long Time After Noah Bought the Farm."  And I don't know about you, but this is the first I've heard of guys being forced to have sex with "hybrid females;" and you'd think that if pregnant women suddenly woke up to find their babies had vanished, it would kind of make headlines, you know?  So once again, we run headlong into the speed bump of "no evidence."

Anyway, that's today's post about the naughty Nephilim, sneaking into your house to steal your sperm and/or your hybrid children, lo unto this very day.  The whole thing leaves me wondering if today's Nephilim are as big as the ones in the bible.  I'm thinking in particular of my younger son, who is 6' 7", and next to whom I verily seemeth as a grasshopper.  On the other hand, the hypothesis that he is a human/alien hybrid is confounded by the fact that he looks a lot like me, so the likelihood of his being anyone else's son is pretty slim.  And I can vouch for the fact that his mother is who she claims to be, i.e., not an alien.

At least, as far as I know.  Those aliens are pretty tricky.  Maybe my ex-wife is really from another planet.  Maybe I was abducted in 1982, and was held on board a UFO for sixteen years, and used as part of a captive breeding program.  It's as good an explanation for my first marriage as any other I can think of.

View from the fringe

Call me masochistic, but every so often I like to check in and see what people like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones are saying.

Those two, and various others I could name, always have seemed to me to be seated right at the triple point between true belief, crass commercial pandering, and outright batshit craziness.  Far be it from me to make a determination between the three; I think both of them have some measure of all three.  (Okay, with Jones, there's a bigger proportion of craziness, but still.)  As evidence, let's see what our two pals have been up to this past week.

Rush Limbaugh went on record as saying that President Obama's latest scheme to overturn life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was unleashing hordes of lesbian farmers on the midwest.  The midwest, Limbaugh claims with some degree of accuracy, is the last bastion of the solidly conservative Republican core in the United States (although you might make the same argument for much of the southeast).  So naturally, given a largely right-leaning region, what else should someone like Obama do but search and destroy?

And what better weapon than lesbian farmers?  I guess that "learning to use heavy equipment" is now officially part of the "gay agenda."

Don't believe me?  Here's the quote:

They are trying to bust up one of the last geographically conservative regions in the country; that’s rural America … So here comes the Obama Regime with a bunch of federal money and they’re waving it around, and all you gotta do to get it is be a lesbian and want to be a farmer and they’ll set you up … apparently enough money it make it happen, and the objective here is to attack rural states.

So there you have it.

But that's small potatoes compared to the latest from Alex Jones.  He interviewed Steven Quayle (the guy who thinks that HAARP is still operational, and is what is currently creating hurricanes in the south Atlantic, because that doesn't happen every year or anything) and Gary Heavin (conservative activist and founder of the Curves fitness center chain) to discuss how the descendants of fallen angels are currently running the world.

I kid you not.  Here's the conversation:

Quayle:  Donald Trump, in my opinion, is God’s prosecuting attorney.  He’s laying out the evidence.  It’s like everything evil is swarming upon him.  I think the fascinating thing about this is that, you probably heard this, I gave a word that I really thought was an answer to prayer, God said, "Before I allow America to be destroyed by the Russians and the Chinese, now this is hard to take, I’m going to reveal the sins of America’s leaders to the people and the people’s sins before a Holy God."

Jones:  Doesn't that always biblically happen, that before a country goes under judgment, they're given warning after warning, then one really big warning? 

Quayle:  The big warning is coming.  I believe the ultimate warning is coming. 

Heavin:  Let me just...  Steve's taught me a lot about this.  You know, there's no aliens; there's demons.   And Steve has a great explanation, you know, he's taught me about this.   Where these demons come from.  We know that fallen angels rebelled against god, came down to Earth, and we know they had sex with human women.   We know that the offspring were these entities that Steve will talk about... 

Jones: That's in the bible. 

Heavin:  It's all biblical. 

Jones:  So that's why the elites intermarry, to try to keep that bloodline. 

Heavin:  Absolutely.  The idea is, Satan knew that if he could contaminate the human DNA, he could prevent the coming of Jesus, because Jesus had to be of pure DNA.  A lot of the really awful things that happen in the bible, entire cities being wiped out, driving out the bad guys, was to cleanse the DNA so that Jesus, Satan could not prevent Jesus from coming.

So there you have it.  While the militia composed of lesbian farmers attacks the country's midsection, the elite people with angelic DNA will be having lots of sex to create progeny that will go back in time and prevent Jesus from being born.  Unless Donald Trump does something to avoid the evil swarming upon him, and stop all of that from happening.

Don't forget: you heard it here first.

Anyhow.  I can totally understand why people still listen to Limbaugh and Jones; it's the undeniable attraction of listening to someone who might without provocation say something that's loony enough to be funny.  It'd be nice to get them off the air, though -- the last thing this country needs is to have more people spreading around conspiracy theories.  But since listeners = sponsors = money, it's unlikely to happen any time soon.  I can only hope that the majority of the people paying attention to what they say are not leaning back and thinking, "My god!  That makes total sense!"

Although that would explain a lot about how we get the elected officials we always seem to end up stuck with.

There were giants in the Earth

So our conspiracy theory of the day is: the US government is hiding living giant humanoids to create a race of hybrid super-soldiers.

This, at least, is the contention of one Steven Quayle, who in a video that (should you have fifteen minutes and are not otherwise occupied) you definitely should watch.  The opening shows Quayle, interspersed with science fiction movie clips and backed up by atmospheric music, delivering the following scary lines:

I believe that the big lie that is going to be placed, hoist [sic] upon the world, is that the aliens created mankind... Most people do not understand the evil.  Most people can't even embrace the fact that this isn't about old bones.  When I say mind-blowing, it will also be heart-freeing.  If I start talking about fallen angels having sex with Earth women, they snicker.  Well, that snicker tells me they've already made up their minds.  The super-soldier program is one of the most, well, almost unbelievable, yet so believable, programs that the US military is involved in.

Further along in the video, Quayle assures us that he doesn't believe in alien overlords.  Nope.  That would be ridiculous.  The Annunaki, he says, aren't aliens, they're fallen angels.

Which is ever so much more believable.

Worse yet, they're still around.  "They [the scientists] are starting from the premise that all of the giants are gone.  We're starting from the premise that there are modern-day giants now, and they're not suffering from acromegaly or some pituitary disorder, but they're literally going to fulfill the biblical statement of Matthew 24 where Jesus says, 'Just as in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man.'"

The whole thing, Quayle says, is a "multi-thousand-year cover up."

Then, of course, the Smithsonian comes up, because no discussion of archaeological conspiracies would be complete without the Smithsonian being involved.

"It's interesting, Tim," Quayle said to the interviewer.  "There's evidence of the bias of the Smithsonian, and their contempt for out-of-place artifacts -- every time giant bones were found, it didn't matter if it was on the West Coast, the Arctic, the Antarctic believe it or not, the East Coast, the Ohio River Mounds, they always have a fabulous cutoff point, being once the Smithsonian is notified, and those bones are sent to the Smithsonian, they're never heard from again."

A giant skeleton in Brazil, or a clever example of Photoshop, depending on which version you go for

"The point has been to keep this biblically-relevant topic out of the minds of the people," Quayle adds.

Why, you might be asking, would the Smithsonian -- and other scientific research agencies -- go to all of this trouble?  After all, careers are made from spectacular discoveries like these.  If the bones were real, not to mention the Annunaki, you'd think that archeologists would be elbowing each other out of the way to be the first to publish these findings in a reputable journal.

The reason, of course, is that the government is intimidating the scientists into silence so that they can keep secret the fact that these giant dudes are still around, and are being used in sinister genetics experiments to create a race of human/giant super-soldiers.

Shoulda known.

Quayle also tells us that he won't appear on camera unless he gets the final say on video and audio edits, and that "No one has been willing to agree to that."  Which makes it kind of odd that he's on camera telling us that.  And that he now has his own video production company and has videos on YouTube.

Of course, he might have been right to avoid the spotlight.  He says he's afraid for his life, that he's being followed by the Men in Black.

"I'll be lucky not to be killed one day.  People have disappeared, Tim.  People who know about this, who have evidence."

And once again, we could convince ourselves that all we have is a lone wacko with access to recording equipment -- until you start reading the comments, of which I will give you a mercifully short sampling:

• People say that it takes place in the future. But I think it takes place in the past. The year is 800 after all. And it seems to have the message that you can't beat the titans without mixing with them. Rendering man almost extinct. No wonder Noah and his sons were the only real men left.
• Do you guys feel the Neanderthals are a creation of fallen angels?
• They are from the Nephilim thats why Neanderthal DNA has only entered the human gene pool through men and why Neanderthal DNA is the source of being white. Enoch 105 says the children born to fallen angels were white. Anakim were white blonde giants, Amorites were white Red heads and some were giants, then the Horites were normal sized white hairy cave men with brow ridges. Thats why Hitler thought if he just got enough blondes to have children, sooner or later they would get a superman. 
• there's stones thousands of years old talking about the ANANANAKI

So there you have it.  Giant Anananaki (if I've counted the "Na's" correctly) being hidden by the government so they can have lots of sex with Earth women, who will give birth to a race of immortal super-soldiers, as hath been prophesied in the scripture.

You'd think, though, that if the US has had this super-soldier program for decades (as Quayle alleges), they'd have brought 'em out by now.  Just think what a race of super-soldiers could do about, for example, ISIS.   So my scoffing doesn't mean that I don't think that ferocious giant half-human, half-fallen-angel dudes wouldn't be useful.

It's more that I think Quayle and his followers have a screw loose.

But that's just me.  And if I end up being taken prisoner by a troop of white hairy cave men with brow ridges and used in sinister scientific experiments, I suppose it'll serve me right.

Apocalypse ad absurdum

I just love it when woo-woos try to blend ideas together.

After all, reading about the same crazy claims over and over gets to be a bit of a bore.  So it's wonderful when I find a site that is a marvelous mélange of misguided mishegoss.  (Like that?  I spent ten minutes trying to see how I could make that one (1) multilingual, and (2) alliterative.  Oh, the things that make a linguistic nerd happy.)

Yesterday, I stumbled upon such a bubbling bouillabaisse of bollocks (okay, I'll stop now) that I had to tell you about it.  In it, we find out that there's a connection between the Book of Revelation, Bigfoot, UFOs, El Chupacabra, astrology, the Illuminati, and giant bugs.

So strap yourself in.  It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

The author, one Greg May, starts off with bang.  His piece, entitled "Monsters & Armageddon," begins thusly:

Armageddon – or World War III – is just a matter of a few more political pages being turned when the world sees God destroy the nations that have tormented Israel and her people. Armageddon is the battle the Bible describes where the blood rises to the bridles’ of the horses' mouths and one third of the world’s population is destroyed in a single day (Revelation 9:15).

Which I can say with some authority is a crapload of blood.  How will the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons run around killing people, if their horses have to swim?

Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But then, instead of launching off into the usual End Times craziness, May speculates that there may be some connection to cryptozoology:

Do these fallen angels include Bigfoot and other monsters? 

The Hebrew word for devil or demon is ‘sayer’ meaning ‘hairy ones’. According to the Book of Enoch, the Nephilim were condemned to be evil spirits of the Earth. In his fascinating book THE NEPHILIM AND THE PYRAMID OF THE APOCALYPSE Patrick Heron writes: “We have no knowledge of what happened to the fallen angels who caused the second contamination of the Earth after the Flood. Perhaps they are still wandering the Earth, hiding out in some dark, evil forest, wary of the advance and onslaught of man.”

Does this not describe Bigfoot and other hairy bipeds?

Yes, I suppose you could say that the Nephilim and Bigfoot are similar, in that both of them are nonexistent.  But otherwise, I'm not sure there's much similarity.  Oh, wait... they're both "big."  So if that's sufficient for you, then I guess we have a match.

After this we hear about El Chupacabra in Assyria, and how lunar eclipses (which May calls "blood moons") means that "god is going to pour his wrath out upon us," because apparently lunar eclipses are a new thing.  But by far the most alarming thing May reveals in his post is that the US has ordered "a shipment of between 30,000 and 60,000 guillotines from China" in order to kill everyone who won't take the Mark of the Beast.

When I read that, I was just horrified.  I mean, how are we supposed to get the American economy back on its feet if we're outsourcing guillotine production to China?  We should have our guillotines manufactured right here in the good old U. S. of A.  We have carpenters who can build the frames, and steel plants to manufacture the blades, here on American soil.  Let's stop buying the weapons that the Antichrist will use to cut all of our heads off from overseas sweatshops!  Can I hear an "America, Fuck Yeah!"?

Um, okay.  So there's that.  Then we hear that when the time of Tribulation is upon us, we're going to be attacked by huge bugs:

The Book of Revelation tells us during the Tribulation the Pit (Abyss) will be opened and locusts will be released to ‘torment men for five months’ (Revelation 9:1-5). Don’t you think it is interesting how some ETs appear in the guise of a praying mantis - which is a type of locust? Remember all those conspiracy stories about government employees working side-by-side with aliens - many of them looking like praying mantis - in the undergound base near Dulce, New Mexico?

Well, first, a praying mantis isn't "a type of locust."  And I went through Dulce, New Mexico a while back, and there wasn't an underground base there, just a lot of sagebrush and rocks.  (Of course, that's what I would be, evil disinformation specialist that I am.  I'm making an Illuminati hand gesture in your direction right now, in case you were wondering.)

And the whole thing ends with some references to the Roswell Incident, Mothman, the Church of Satan, and how a story about fig trees somehow caused the Holocaust.

At that point, however, my eyes were spinning so badly I couldn't read any more.  But the link to the page is up at the top of this post, if you're interested in further delving into this delectable decoction of déliriant dreck.

Sorry, I said I would stop.  I'm really done this time.

There were giants in those days

My students, as a final projects, are required to perform an experiment of their choice, and report back the results of their research.  And one of the directions I give them is, "Beware of over-concluding."

It's an easy enough error to slip into.  If you test the effects of increasing concentration of nitrogen-based fertilizers on the growth of marigold plants, and you find that increasing amounts of soluble nitrogen make marigold seedlings grow faster, you cannot extrapolate that and assume that all plants will respond in the same fashion.  It is a difficulty that plagues medical researchers; a drug that has beneficial effects in test animals may not behave the same way in humans.

The woo-woos, however, raise over-conclusion to an art form.  They will take some anomalous observation, and run right off the cliff with it -- coming to some pronouncement that is so ridiculous that the word "unwarranted" doesn't even do it justice.  Take, for example, the conclusion the woo-woos are drawing from the announcement that Italian "anomalist" researcher Matteo Ianneo has discovered the ruins of an ancient city in the Saudi Arabian desert:

If you look carefully, you can see the ancient ruins next to it, even an old profile.  This is a sensational discovery that no one had noticed. In photographs from 2004, one can observe that there was nothing in this place, it was definitely covered by sand...  The strong winds and desert storms have brought to light this discovery that I think is very sensational.  Now archaeologists are to affirm this archaeological area.  Perhaps it is certainly ancient ruins belonging to an ancient and magnificent city, which dates back to a long time ago.  I hope I have given a contribution to science, in order to find a small piece that the story is all redone, and it’s hard to tell.

Well, so far, so good.  And so far, nothing too surprising.  The Saudi Arabian desert is full of ruins, many of them dating to a time when the climate there was far more congenial for human habitation:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

First, though, it bears mention that Ianneo isn't the most credible witness himself.  He is, after all, the guy who announced last year that he'd found an alien base on Mars.  But even leaving that aside for a moment, take a look at what noted wingnut and Skeptophilia frequent flyer Alfred Lambremont Webre had to say about Ianneo's discovery:

Many who know of Matteo Ianneo's fantastic discoveries on the surface of Mars, other planets and earth, know how remarkable his findings are.  As a researcher and investigative journalist myself, I personally believe Matteo has surpassed all others involved with extraterrestrial geophysics... 

The lost cities that are spoken about in our earthly legends may be truth.  Gigantic monuments populate our Earth and it is my belief that they were created by actual giants who were moving in to leave a clear trace of their coming to our planet.  These giants were produced by continuous changes and an evolution in DNA.  It is also quite possible Giants were the very gods narrated in our remote history. The legends are from millions or perhaps billions of years ago.  Most of earth has suffered many cataclysms since then, and it is a misfortune that much of this history was destroyed. 

The gods of these legends existed long ago and at one time, they were very real to our ancestors, these beings of great intelligence and height were to be envied.  They were most likely our actual creators.  They built gigantic monuments so wondrous, many of the ruins still defy logic to this day.  Majestic pyramids and gigantic monuments were created for us, for our humanity.  Their technologies were able to model and mold the rock, to do with it whatever they wanted. 

Their technology had to have been very advanced.  Many of them were been able to save people to help them escape from their dying worlds, by bringing them here to our Earth.  The stories have all been redone and retold over and over throughout the years.  Many men of the earth chose to hide the truth a very long time ago, out of fear.  This history has already taught us.  The truth can have other implications, some truth that most humans cannot accept.

We have an observation: ruins of a city in Saudi Arabia.  Webre's conclusion: there used to be technologically advanced alien giants on the Earth, who created the human race, and whose existence is being systematically covered up by the powers-that-be.

It reminds me of the wonderful quote from Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode called "Heaven and Hell," wherein he describes the wild speculation people indulged in when it became obvious that the planet Venus was covered with a thick layer of clouds:

I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus.  Why not?   Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds.  Well, what are clouds made of?  Water, of course.   Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.  Therefore, the surface must be wet.   Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp.   If there's a swamp, there's ferns.   If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs.  Observation: I can't see anything.  Conclusion: dinosaurs.

But Webre has apparently one-upped even the "anomalists" that Sagan was parodying, with his wild talk of giant aliens and directed evolution and ancient gods.  He even goes on to tell us what the giant aliens felt like when humans turned out to be so difficult:

Atlantis and other cities have existed in the distant past, most of these great civilizations fell and these Gods probably view us with a great sadness.  Ancient peoples in the past were always power hungry, war crazed and violent in nature, some possibly even dealt with nuclear war. 

The possession of the planet was the only important thing to carry on.  But something went wrong. The suspicious and greedy nature of these peoples caused them to rebel and destroy all their knowledge. 

Today, I present my discovery that I’ve kept for a long time. I have made a very complex study of our Earth.  I have gathered images to prove the existence of gods in our past.  Beings who left their prints and pieces of their once great kingdoms behind here on our earth. 

I assure you that the legends are true.

Sure they are.

And there are probably alien bases on Mars, too, and NASA has decided that we naive humans couldn't deal with it if they came clean and told us about it.  Because Matteo Ianneo says so.

And accepting anything Webre and Ianneo say as correct can't be an over-conclusion, right?

Of course, right.

A giant conspiracy

Sometimes accusations of conspiracy can come from unexpected sources -- and can create odd bedfellows.

Just last month, I ran into a TEDx talk by a gentleman named Jim Vieira (now removed from the internet by the powers-that-be).  In this talk, he made some rather curious claims.  To sum up: the Mound Builder cultures of early eastern North America were not just comprised of the ancestors of today's Native Americans, they included a race of red-haired giants.  And I do mean giant -- some of these folks were twelve feet tall... or more:

Oh, and did I mention that they had two, or even three, rows of teeth?

Man, those would have been some seriously scary dudes.

As evidence, Vieira trotted out some newspaper clippings from the early 20th century, one of which I include below:

A few photographs of actual bones were shown, but then Vieira really went into deep water.  Because not only did he claim that such bones were commonly found in burial mounds in eastern North America, he claimed that hundreds of such bones had been sent to the Smithsonian Institution...

... which has, ever since, covered up their existence and denied it ever happened.

Now, my first thought was, "Why would they do that?"  What earthly reason would an institution founded to further knowledge have to arbitrarily pick one interesting archaeological finding, and deny it?  But that's what Vieira thinks; the giants walked the Earth, but the Smithsonian doesn't want you to know about it.

But that was only the beginning.  Vieira's talk spurred an unlikely association between several groups of wackos who normally don't have much to say to one another.  These included:

• Government cover-up types, who just loved having the Smithsonian involved in a conspiracy
• UFO believers, who think this is the result of human/alien hybridization
• Sasquatchers, who think the bones are the remains of Bigfoot
• Fundamentalist Christians, who believe in the whole Nephilim/ "there were giants in those days" thing (Genesis 6:4) and believe that this supports biblical literalism
• Various other wingnuts who just like it when the scientists are put in a bad light

Websites supporting one, two, or all of the above viewpoints began to spring up all over, most citing Vieira's research as if it were the Holy Writ.  Then they began to cite each other, and the whole thing exploded in a giant cloud of woo-woo quantum frequencies, to perpetuate itself lo unto this very day.

The problem is, the evidence for any of this is kind of... non-existent.  As for the photographs, the late 19th and early 20th century were rife with frauds involving skeletons (think Piltdown Man, the Cardiff Giant, and so on).  The newspaper articles aren't any better; I could find you a hundred newspaper clippings from that era that are demonstrably false, so this sort of "evidence" really doesn't amount to much.  As for the Smithsonian participating in a coverup, the following is a quote from an archaeologist who actually has worked for the Smithsonian:

In 2007 I was a visiting scientist at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center, and while it is full of amazing and bizarre material (e.g., an entire herd of elephants that Teddy Roosevelt shot occupies one floor), there is no conspiracy to cover up or hide Native American giant skeletons or artifacts. Like most museums, the Smithsonian displays less than 1% of its collections at any given time, meaning that a lot of material spends decades (or sadly centuries) in its vaults awaiting exhibition. We can debate whether or not this is responsible stewardship (a debate that would also have to include a discussion of the chronic underfunding of public museums and the economics of public education), but to portray the Smithsonian today as part of some sort of a conspiracy of ‘misinformation and corruption’ to cover up Native American history by hiding giant Mound Builder skeletons excavated in the 19th century is ridiculous.

And if that wasn't enough, here's a quote from a spokesperson for the Center for American Archaeology, one of the most respected anthropological research establishments in the world:

I can assure you that the archaeological Woodland and Mississippian populations were not giants. In some cases, one can observe a slight decrease in average height (a few centimeters) with the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. This is a trend that is observed in many cultures that undergo an agricultural transition, and is likely related to shorter nursing times and increased early childhood grain consumption (maximum height is highly correlated to childhood protein consumption, so a high reliance on grain during childhood tends to result in shorter stature).

As a result of all of this, TEDx removed Vieira's talk (read the stinging rebuke Vieira received from TEDx curator Stacy Kontrabecki here). But that hasn't stopped the claims -- far from it. Kontrabecki was promptly accused of caving under pressure from the Evil Cadre That Runs The Smithsonian. Some bloggers claimed she'd been paid to silence Vieira. Virtually all of them agreed that the reason Vieira's talk was taken down was that... we can't just have this information about giants getting out there.

Right.  Because that's plausible.  The government has nothing better to do than to make sure the general public doesn't find out that Hagrid once lived in Ohio.

 It can't just be that Vieira, and the other folks who are putting forth these claims, are just making shit up.  Nope.  It has to be a conspiracy.

So the removal of Vieira's talk that hasn't stopped the aforementioned woo-woos from continuing to quote him, and his "evidence," as hard, cold fact.  If you do a search for "giant skeletons Smithsonian conspiracy" you will get thousands of hits, leading you to websites authored by people who, in my opinion, should not be allowed outside unsupervised.

So, that's it.  Zero hard evidence, a bunch of wild claims, accusations of a coverup, and a very peculiar association of groups arguing for the same thing for different reasons.  Once again illustrating the truth of the saying from South Africa -- "There are forty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense."

Accentuate the negative

I just found out why I (1) love astronomy, (2) have a fascination for UFOs, and (3) like Star Trek: The Next Generation:  My mother had Rh negative blood.

At least, that's the claim of an online book called The Rh Negative Factor, by Roberta Hill.  (You can read it in its entirety here.)

Hill's conjecture, which she claims to analyze in an "unbias" [sic] way, is that people with Rh negative blood have some pretty odd characteristics.  These include:

1. predominance of green or hazel eyes that change color like a chameleon, but also blue eyes.
2. true red or reddish hair
3. low pulse rate
4. low blood pressure and/or high blood pressure
5. keen sight or hearing
6. ESP
7. extra rib or vertebrae
8. UFO connections
9. love of space and science
10. a sense of not belonging to the human race
11. piercing eyes
12. para-normal occurrences
13. physic [sic] dreams
14. truth seekers
15. desire for higher wisdom
16. empathetic illnesses
17. deep compassion for fate of mankind
18. a sense of a 'mission' in life
19. physic [sic again] abilities
20. unexplained scars on body
21. capability to disrupt electrical appliances
22. alien contacts

Well.  My mom certainly was Rh negative; so are a good many people who have ancestry in southwestern France and northeastern Spain (and thus are likely to have Basque ancestry, amongst whom the allele for Rh negative blood is 65-70%).  It is responsible for Rh incompatibility syndrome, which killed my older sister and would have killed me but for the wonders of modern medicine and the RhoGAM shot, which suppresses an Rh negative mother's immune reaction against her Rh positive fetus.  My understanding was that the gene responsible for the condition was the result of a mutation that occurred amongst the ancestors of the Basques, probably something like 15,000 years ago.  But other than that, Rh negative doesn't seem to do much; people with two copies of the allele (like my mom) just don't have the Rh antigenic protein, and I thought that was pretty much that.

Little I know.

It turns out that besides all of the abilities and characteristics listed above, being Rh negative means that we are descended from some combination of: (1) the Merovingian kings; (2) fallen angels; (3) the Nephilim; (4) aliens; or (5) Jesus.

According to Hill, there's all sorts of evidence for this.  For example, let's look at my favorite paragraph from her book:

I can only offer theories as to how this gene deletion could benefit mankind. Perhaps this particular protein that the RHD gene encodes for is a problem somehow and prevents people from receiving hyperdimensional information from the spiritual realm, and that could be why people are saying that RH negatives (& RH negative recessive people +/-) are more psychic. The RHD gene could have been a mutation or could have been put there by the fallen angels (aliens) to control us and keep us from accessing information from God and the spiritual realm. As we know, Jesus proclaimed that he was the new temple, and his body was acting like the Ark of the Covenant and therefore his Pineal gland was acting as a receiver and transmitter of hyperdimensional communication. It has been proven that the Pineal gland has tiny microcrystals that could act much like a radio receiver, or just like a crystal radio. Jesus Christ bloodline could represent a race of people that can act as messengers for God or as beacons of the light, therefore a new race of shepherds to guide souls back to Eden. Perhaps this bloodline could be Magdalene towers of the flock, and thus they emit a higher frequency which actually helps to raise all energy forms into a higher dimension. This would work with the scientific principle of resonance, as towers set the higher frequency tone for the rest of the people, then everyone would start to resonate with higher frequencies. Eventually as more people with the RH negative blood type are born, then they could help to raise the frequencies. This would create the effect of a net that people would start getting caught up within for the harvest or the ascension of the human race. That would explain the mysterious fish story in John 21, because we would be the net that the apostles, under Jesus direction, throw into the cosmic sea to catch fish. That would also explain the Basque marker of R-M153, which is the number of fish that they caught in the story. The number 153 actually is representative of the net, rather than how many fish/people will be caught for the harvest of the souls.

Oh.  Okay.  I mean, my only question would be, "What?"  After reading this (and this is, unfortunately, only one of many passages in this book that left my eyes spinning), I found myself wondering whether she can possibly be serious.  "Catching fish in the cosmic sea?"  "Crystals in Jesus' pineal gland resonating to higher frequencies and allowing hyperdimensional communication?"  The whole thing makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

I always find it simultaneously maddening and amusing when people with (apparently) a slim understanding of science try to use scientific information to explain their favorite slice of the woo-woo pie.  (Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics is a good example, although I have to admit in Capra's defense that his understanding of quantum physics seems to be a good bit better than Hill's understanding of biology; I disagree with his conclusions, however, which are that quantum physics shows that the Zen Buddhists are right.)  Here, we have someone who has bought into the whole weird quasi-biblical Nephilim/aliens thing, and has latched onto a piece of biological research, and used it to support her conjecture that she's a descendent of superpowerful angelic beings.  (Because of course Hill herself is Rh negative; did I even need to tell you that?)

Anyhow, that's today's journey into the deep end of the pool.  I really recommend that you read Hill's book -- it's available free, online, at the site I linked above.  For the record, it reads much better after a liberal consumption of whatever your favorite libation is.  I found that after three pints of beer, it actually was beginning to make sense, which is one of the strongest arguments against consuming alcohol that I can think of.