You're listening to the Archaeology podcast network.

Welcome to digging up ancient aliens. This is the podcast where we examine alternative history and ancient alien narratives in popular media. Do these ideas hold water to an archaeologist, or are there better explanations out there? We are now on episode 71, and this time we are doing something a bit different from our normal programming. My two guests and I are actually watching and reacting to an episode of ancient aliens in real time. And the episode in question is magic.

Of the gods from season six.

I want to thank the lovely patrons and members of the show. Your help and support means a lot and really do help out with a lot of things here. And they also, on top of supporting the show, helping it being created, they get some bonus stuff like ad free episodes and even extended episodes like today. They have almost an hour of additional discussion that you don't find here in the public feed. And if you want to learn how to support the show, stay until the end, and I will tell you exactly where to go. As usual, the show notes include some sources and, well, a bit of suggested readings if you're interested in learning more. And we have a fun and long.

Episode ahead of us.

So let's dig into the episode.

So I want to welcome two guests to the show that's technically been on before, but first time, officially, first we have Michelle Franklin, and then we have Mark, maybe better known as RQ soup. Do you want to introduce and maybe tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your expertise?

My name is Mark, aka Mistersoop. I feel like a fool now for having typed Mister soup on screen, as I said in my actual name. But yes, I have an archaeosup called. I have a YouTube channel called Archaeosoup TikTok and various other bits and bobs. And for the past God knows how long, maybe 14 years, I've been torturing myself with interactions with pseudo archaeology and the public. And today feels like my baptism. It feels like a graduation ceremony. I'm gonna see what happens. And my understanding is, coming from Wales. You've got a little treat for me based on a welsh ish character. So, yeah, here we go.

I'm Michelle Franklin. I'm an author and a scholar of certain periods of history, also a biblical scholar as well. And so this, though, is something I usually shy away from. I mean, on my channel, we usually do talk about myths and legends, but I shy away from looking at them in a modern perspective. And often we talk about things like folk customs and holidays and how, why everything you think is pagan is not, and why everything you think is christian is also not. But ancient aliens is a special sauce that I leave up to Friedrich and to everybody else who had. Mark is already shaking his head to everybody else who has the stomach to deal with the nonsense that goes on in this show. So I run a podcast, also called legends and lectures, which both Frederick and Mark have been on several times. And again, we talk about special history subjects, lots of folklore, what's real, what isn't. And last time Frederick was on, we talked about debunking ancient aliens, which is what we're watching today.

And have any of you seen ancient aliens before?

So I've seen exactly two episodes, and I don't think I made it all the way through either of them, and I know they were in season one that.

So you haven't seen exactly two episodes.

Not all the way through.

I've seen a few. It fascinates me how, actually, I think, and this may be something that Frederick has already discussed previously during his prolonged endurance exercise of watching these episodes, but I'm convinced that there's something going on with the experiment that is ancient aliens and its ability to sort of say everything you know is wrong, you know? And then from there on, that's been applied, I think, since sort of the early two thousands to so many other parts of life. I think they were really. I mean, they weren't. They weren't the first, but they were definitely, the format was very influential, I think. And, yeah, and, of course, it spawned the meme, you know, the aliens. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They really influenced later shows and how you approach this subject from us. I mean, they weren't the first, but it was the first successful, in a sense.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I remember in the eighties, we had things like alien autopsy. Do you remember that? We had a lot. We had lots of conspiracies through that. But they would do is they would make a half an hour special. Everybody kind of knew it was fake, and then they just went on and made another one. But there are quite a lot of these. There was just never a series like this that used unexplained elements from history to just be like, aliens. You never had that?

No, but arguably now, I don't know if this is like predicting what Frederick's destiny is, but obviously, now you. Now you have Gaia, which is like the evolved. You know, it's the final form.

I should have put on my reptilian hat I'm wearing. For those who are just listening, I'm actually wearing my not biblically accurate angel hat. Because they're not angels. But I had, last time I had on the reptilian helmet that I wore just for the bent with all of.

That said, are you ready for your, our indoctrination?

Fire hit me. Okay. Wow.

Okay, so here's, here's again the thing they're saying magic, gods and aliens. And thing is that these three things, nothing to do with each other. That's the thing I just don't understand is how did they get the, how did they decide that the gods were aliens, but they also had magic when there's no technological artifacts that they left behind?

Because you will learn that in this episode.

Okay. Oh, yes. Oh, sorry, sorry.

Yeah, yeah, yes. Yeah.

Las Vegas, Nevada.

Oh, are we going to area 51?

Magician Steve Weirich stuns a circle of 40 onlookers.

Ah, so now we're going to see some magic in action.

Make a three ton hummer.

Raise the curve.

Vanished in an instant. Everyone join hands.

The only an alien says that.

All right, what does 40 people around the Hummer?

Watch this. Do it now.

They do it with mirrors.

Illusions like these speaks to a worldwide fascination with magic that can be traced back thousands of years.

Okay, okay. But magic like what magician? The idea of, like, let's say an egyptian magician, that was a very different thing that, like, they. Anyway, sorry.

In that sense, certainly we know that some of the oldest magic tricks are from ancient Egypt, aren't they?

Yes.

And it was, and there was an acknowledged entertainment element to it.

Yes. That's the thing, is that they saw these things as entertainment.

Yeah.

It wasn't this whole, like, oh, I mean, they had other people who did magic. They had people who looked into the Mazalot, which were the stars and constellations, but that was not considered to be like, parlor tricks. That was considered to be part of their, their core of their beliefs. And so much so that even, you know, certain passages in the Bible, it says, yeah, we acknowledge that looking into the stars is real, is really air quotes, but don't do it. Even a lot of, a lot of biblical passages talk about this kind of magic. Whereas in the by, what they believed to be magic was more like necromancy. All of, like, the parlor tricks, as Mark said, it's just entertainment. And they knew that it's, we in modern days don't know that for some.

Kind of connection to the supernatural. And we can have it for a couple of hours on the price of a ticket by attending a magic show.

And I liked it to have Penn and Teller, especially Penn, who is very, who's very atheist and also very against, you know, the pseudo crowd too well.

And ironically enough, reveals the beauty of the mundane nature of magic in that sense.

Yeah.

Yes. Which I think is very funny that they.

Openly saying that he's deceiving and there's no real magic behind it.

Yeah.

When we go to the theater and see a stage magician, we know supernatural events are not happening before our eyes, no matter how much it seems like they are. We sometimes think of the people of the ancient world as simple. They live in a world saturated with magic.

No, we don't. Sorry. No, we don't have.

Yeah, and that.

See, that's the thing. That's the thing, isn't it? If you set up the premise that people in the past are dumb, then of course you're gonna go, oh, how did they do things? Yeah. No, no.

Yeah. It's like people in the early modern period going, everybody in the Middle Ages was stupid. Really? I don't think so. They invented clocks. They had astrolabes. You're dumb.

But also, you're here, aren't you?

Yeah, like, yeah, exactly. We made it. It couldn't have been that stupid.

Yep.

World as an interconnected whole, as well as a technology through which you could make things happen in the everyday material world. Magic offered people an opportunity to influence the outcome of important events sometimes and to know the will of the gods and to communicate directly with those gods.

This is. This is where it gets. This is where the editing is important, isn't it? Because that's a folklorist. And folklorists. And, you know, related anthropology as well, deals with intangible belief and story and shared cultural artifacts. In that sense, as important, but also as created by people, not as existing outside of our consciousness and creativity. So they've gone from an academic, presumably an academic there, they said, was it University of California? I think. And now they're cutting to author of lost civilization, Enigma, Philip Coppins. But if you're just not paying attention, it just. I mean. And again, this is presumably alien. Ancient aliens editing 101. This is what they do.

Confuse, conflate.

Yeah, yeah, but it's dodgy stuff. Dodgy stuff.

Yeah. And Philip Coppins is one of those who was very prolific before he died, which was a year before this season aired. But they still have his talking heads throughout the series.

Did. It was aliens? Did they kill him for. For giving away their secrets?

I think it was colon cancer.

He's the aliens of.

Oh, I'm not gonna make a probe joke there.

No, no.

Rest in peace, Philip.

Magic in the ancient world was primarily viewed as, in some ways, coercive, which is that people are attempting to control the spiritual realm, to do something in their daily lives.

I just want to make one point. This is a professor of classics, and he is correct. However, here's the thing. When it comes to what we today term as magic, in, let's say, something like the Bible and biblical era, there's a very big difference between folklore and folk magic and what we now call high magic. So in biblical times, there was necromancy, like, you see, like the witch or the necromancer of Endor doing. And then there were charms and other things that people did themselves, like putting inscriptions on a bowl, putting it under their house in order to ward off a spirit like lilitu or lilith. Okay, yeah. Those are two very different things. Apotropaic charms were not considered to be like. They're not considered to be magic. Those were things that anybody could do. And it was just a way for you to think, oh, I'm gonna. I'm gonna protect my house, etcetera. That was not like magic given by the gods. They didn't consult a God to do that kind of thing. Whereas necromancy, like, let's say, the witch of Endor, where she takes somebody's bone and she puts it under her arm, and then she goes, oh, I'm the spirit of soul. That's. That's what they believed. It says it in the text, that that's what they believed was magic. But again, it wasn't necessarily that you were favored by a God or that you were. You were doing the will of a certain God. I just wanted to make that distinction. Not that it matters in this show.

No, no. But also, as well, in that sense. So similar things would be like writing almost a list, a wish list of things you wanted to happen to someone onto, say, a piece of lead in roman, the roman world and chucking it down a well. And I guess you could compare it to almost actually, in a secular sense, writing a wish list to Santa. You know, it's accessible on that level. It doesn't require specialist knowledge, and you don't actually have to.

It does. You need to know his address, Mark.

Okay, hello. But you completely thrown me. But in that sense, the fact that it's so accessible, it's also the sort of thing that you're the. You know, we've all had witchy exes who. Who sort of cast hexes and have.

We, Mark, who have you been dating?

I had a witchy ex who drew a knife on me.

Oh, very nice.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was intense. But it's that sort of accessibility that makes it both. What's the word? Doable. Accessible.

Yes.

Yeah. Doable, accessible. But also makes it actually sort of compelling because everyone also understands the implications of it as well. So I know I'm sort of stating the obvious there, but it's just interesting.

How are you? I don't think anything's obvious on this.

Because, I mean, what, so what, this guy is just saying, this PhD guy from. Was it Brooklyn, I think university. Brooklyn College. Was that magic could be coercive, and that's true. You could be trying to either make someone else do something or try and implore perhaps an entity or a God or a spirit to do something on your behalf. So again, they're mixing in truth. And so what? Okay, should we put a 50 p down that the next clip will be someone who wrote. Wrote a random book about an ancient civilization.

Oh, absolutely. I'll put some money down on that.

Okay. Yeah. Called, like, you know, the dark world.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

Whereas Shanxi province, they get closer.

7Th century AD.

Dragon bones.

The Zhongchao mountain range.

Oh, no. Oh, no. I know where they're going with this. They're going to talk about the immortal eight. Nope, nope, nope.

Are you psychic? Because it's actually what's coming up.

Because he said. He said so. Zhang Guo Lao, first of all, okay, he was a real person. He did live in the Tang dynasty. He was a Taoist. I guess we would call him a monk, but he claimed to be hundreds of years old. He also loved wine and drinking. He claimed to be a qigong master who didn't eat anything. But note, he made all of these claims himself very important. I know exactly where they're going with this here.

Shang Kuo Lao is possibly the most interesting of the eight immortals he's depicted as an old man. He can make himself invisible.

He could go without food for days.

Of his own admission. Remember that? He said that of himself.

Yeah, yeah. Be like, you know. You know, yesterday when you didn't see me, I was there, and they'd be like, when? I'm not going to spoil it for you, but I saw what you did.

I mean, this man just probably went to. Took a really long bathroom trip and went, whoo. It disappeared.

Yep.

I haven't eaten in two weeks, but I haven't seen you in two weeks. Yeah.

I was watching you sleep.

Oh, man, I just love the picture of them all playing mahjong as they're like, these were ancient figures they're playing on modern mahjong tiles.

The mule can ride divine winds and also cross thousands of miles in a single day without ever stopping once for rest.

Okay, so where's the mule?

Jango Lao finds a place that he wants to settle for the night. He actually folds up his mule as one would fold a piece of paper.

Oh, is the mule a spaceship?

It is the size that you can fit in your pocket.

Nice. And then you. It's a tardis.

Reactivate.

Oh, here you go, Mark.

Technology of the gods.

Yeah, I know. That's going.

Technology by sprinkling water on it and.

It would reappear again.

So you have to ask yourself, is this white mule actually some kind of.

Incredible alien technology that allows.

Why? Why do you have to ask yourself that? Why do you have to ask yourself that? Like, so? Okay, observe. Right? I'm no longer visible. Oh, oh, oh. I'm back. Now you have to ask yourself, am I. Am I possessed of alien technology?

I don't know. That rolly chair, that chair that you're sitting on has eyeballs. It does feel like you put it there. Or was it the aliens to spy on you?

Ah, they just, like. I just like the feeling of the. It makes me do things.

The alien powers flowing through you.

Yeah, yeah. It's like a deadline enforcer. No, but, yeah, that's. That's such a weird. So I know this is semi jokey, but semi serious. This is such a weird first question.

Yeah. Like, why would you go from such a fanciful backwards mule? Must be alien technology.

Also, as a genuine point, does he ride it backwards? And. I mean, I know he's on it backwards, but does it go bottom first?

No, it goes forwards, but he sits on it backwards.

Well, that's not a trick. The donkey has eyes. It knows where to go. I mean, like, follow the road. He just. It's not. It's not the donkey's fault. He's looking the wrong way.

His donkey is a transformer, and it comes from. From Unicron. Like that.

Yeah, or unicorn. Oh, my goodness.

You know what? That pun is not the worst part of this episode. Just let it go.

Yeah, but these questions are extremely common with the ancient alien.

I agree.

I agree.

Why would that be your first question? My first question is, is this a myth, or does. Do we have archaeological evidence of the donkey or something similar? Did other people see the donkey?

But also, it's mostly that, you know, they don't believe that people in the past can have imagination or they themselves are quite bad at it. But the mew that folds up, you know, the, you know, spaceship maybe folds up. Not that anybody has seen a folding spaceship, but that's a different question. But the key thing that they again return to is people in the past don't have imagination, it seems like.

Yeah, and, but also given that this show starts out with not a terribly well performed magic trick, granted, but a trick where we see a Humvee disappear and we know it hasn't disappeared, but we can engage with the pretense. There's room for that as well. So it doesn't just require imagination, it can also be a sophisticated sense of he arrives somewhere, let's say he does this, he arrives somewhere and goes and everyone goes, 0000 it's gonna happen. And then the donkey's gone while someone sort of dragged it around behind a house. Everyone kind of knows where it's gone, but he goes, oh, it's in my pocket. Let's all go inside and not look behind the house. Come on.

Why is it that we, in modern times, why is it that we're allowed to accept that magic, or rather our magic tricks are not real, but theirs were real and give it to them by aliens dichotomy doesn't really make sense there.

Maybe in a thousand years they'll be making a series about twitter.

I'd watch that.

Yeah. Was there really a man who went to Mars and came back as a rambling person with interesting views on the world, trying to be polite? Anyway. Sweet. Yeah. Let's go.

It's entirely possible that what they're describing here, some type of a craft.

No.

Himself. May possibly have been an extraterrestrial. And in order to explain his abilities.

Hey. Hey. Georgiou. Georgio. Georgiou. Georgio.

Aliens.

Yeah. Rufio. Yeah, aliens. Do you have a counter as to how many times you've seen him? Frederick?

No. Many times.

She put a little clock on the top. Yeah, just aliens. One, two, three.

What's interesting, I mean, I've seen it so much that I notice his lapel. You see it under the little. He usually has one of those south american space planes, but he seems to have switched this episode for some reason.

Yeah, it's a conspiracy.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe this. Maybe this is one of the real. Yeah, the real theories.

Maybe an alien gave that to him.

Just give me a moment.

Yep. Oh, man. We haven't even made it to Merlin yet and I'm already mad.

This is where Frederick comes back with a folded up horse.

Honestly, like, why would they think that? Like you say, they show us the Humvee in the beginning, and they go, oh, it's not real. So why would they think that the folded up horse would be real?

Well, and the funny thing is as well, in that trick, you had the bad magician going over to someone who looked like he might have been a technology person looking at a.

The army guy.

Yeah, the army guy looking at a scanner, like radar or something, but almost as though implying that it's flown away or. And. Yeah, fascinating, fascinating. But again, as you say, it's the pretty. It's the inability or the refusal to allow people that sort of psychological space and agency, I guess. Yeah, yeah, sorry, go.

Our ancestors described him as a magical being.

But is it possible that extraterrestrials would develop a technology in which you have some sort of machine that can.

We're just asking questions.

I'm just asking questions. Here you go, Mark. Here's your 50 p back. There you go.

Jochenberg. Who said. Who said. It has been a long time since I've watched this and I haven't noticed how many times they just say, is it possible? Is it possible that. Is it possible? Of course it's possible, but you have to say no.

You just have to say no, because that's the problem. It's perfectly worded this way. You can't say no.

Yeah, yeah. The source field investigations.

Uh oh. This man believes in ley lines.

How would you think? Right? Oh, okay. Right.

I smell it. I know.

Okay, okay, okay.

Fold itself into hyperspace. It runs on advanced energy.

Hyperspace. What?

What?

There's no. There's one.

How?

Like, he. It's not a thing. That's not a thing. That's. That's Sci-Fi like, that's actual Sci-Fi what.

Did I say about. About him and ley lines, man, he just took it so far, I thought he was just gonna believe in ley lines, but no, he just whipped out.

Pulled the ship into hyperspace. Wow. Oh, yeah. I. Hyperspace is Star wars, isn't it?

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah.

Well, so I just want to point something out, is that we often. And this is something that I get on my channel a lot. People using phrases and concepts that we have invented in modern times and trying to force them onto ancient peoples. So Mark and I talked about this. We talked about the roman dodecahedron and how people want to say, it's for knitting. And that's been debunked a thousand times. Knitting wasn't even invented at the time. It was brought to Europe by arab peoples in at least 11th century, wasn't even around in the roman times. And yet people will say, it's Bernini again. We're looking at this from, it's a back projection. We're looking at this from a modern perspective and going, oh, I know what that is.

Well, but also, actually, the decahedron actually taps into something very similar to what we see around ancient aliens and around flat Earth and other things. It's this idea that your experience is one of the best yardsticks for reality. And in many ways that is true. Absolutely. You're probably, you know, it's probably a good idea to believe how you feel about the atmosphere when you go out as to whether or not it's about to rain. Don't just trust the weather person on tv or on your phone or something. But just because you experience, for example, your portion of the planet as seeming flat at your scale doesn't mean the planet is flat. Just because you can use this thing to do sort of french knitting doesn't mean it was used for french knitting. And that's, and one of the crucial things is that often some of the circles on this, on these faces of the dodecahedron are so small that you'd struggle to get a baby's finger in there. And at that point, you might as well just knit a tube. And also, actually, I don't know anyone who knits, who would find making the tube of each finger individually using this contraption easier than just knitting, knitting a glide, you know, like it. So it. But it's compelling because, and it always comes with this, this sort of meme of a hypothetical conversation, doesn't it, between the experts.

Yes, that's right.

And like, it could be a grandma or a crafter or whatever. And that's pithy. And it's fun to have expert, I.

Don'T know what this is for, but it's also disingenuous.

It is disingenuous, yeah. And also this idea that, oh, they were only set found in the northern parts of the empire.

Oh, and we know that's not true. They were actually found mostly in the middle and germanic parts of the empire. The only three that we have in the north were near Hadrian's wall, and they came probably with soldiers, and there was no knitting found with them. But there's only three in the north. In the most north.

Yeah. And so I can understand why it feels. It feels almost like. Almost the word. It's a democratizing sense of.

I see yeah.

You know that maybe these experts need to listen to my gran because she knows about knitting.

Well, maybe these experts need to listen to mister over here with his hyperspace, because clearly archaeologists don't know anything about hyperspace.

Yeah, yeah, well, I don't want to be. Fine.

But that's also a thing within the ancient alien narrative that the idea is that the people of the past could not describe advanced technology with their vocabulary. And therefore, hyperspace traveling spaceship turns into a donkey you can fold up and put in your pockets.

Yeah, okay. Okay. Also, why isn't this spaceship white? Yeah, yeah. A a it's meant to be a white donkey.

A no, it was a white bat.

0000 okay. Oh, sorry. Oh, yeah, no, the statue was white. Sorry, apologies.

Now you have to write apology letter.

Also, how did they know that this is what the, this is what the ships look like? This is a very earth.

Ian, that design, that's actually very similar to the ship from the.

Oh, looks like Babylon.

The flight of the navigator.

Oh, yeah, that's right, yeah. The silver. The silver clamshell.

Yeah. Ten out of ten.

Is it possible that Jean Golau really existed? And if so, could his amazing powers.

We just said he was a real person, have been built?

Yeah, exactly the same question. Exactly. He can exist, but he doesn't mean he had a space.

He was a real person in the Tang, that dynasty. Yeah, we know he was real. He was definitely not an alien.

I think the script writer forgot that.

Ancient astronaut theorists believe further clues can be found more than 1700 miles away.

What?

What? That's not how things work. You can't just a globe hop to prove something in China by going to India.

I just want to point something out. If they're going to be talking about Buddha, they're not even in the right place, because Buddha was from Nepal.

Oh, would you find that napalling, Napoling?

I am resisting. You know what?

I'm sure you're not psychic, Michelle.

What else are they going to talk about?

She's got the box set, man. That's what it is. She's got the box set.

I swear in my life, I've never given these people money, and I never will.

On the southern shores of the Ganges river, this ancient city is believed to be the place where the great spiritual leader Buddha embarks on an incredible journey in 483 BC.

They're throwing into. I'm losing my words now into disrepute, into this throwing up in the air. The question as to whether or not someone who seemingly was probably a historical person was where he were. It's like if you throw everything up in the air, then everything looks like a mess. And again, that's another tactic that they're deploying here. But again, I'm presumably disappointed by this because I'm seeing this for the first time in, like, 15 years, whereas you see this every week, I guess. Frederick.

Yeah. Texas sharpshooter, basically. But, yeah, they use a shotgun, and then they go and write circles on all the hits that they perceive that they have found, actually.

I mean, I would say this is quite racist because they're delegitimizing somebody who. I mean, first I understand why they're doing it. We don't know whether Buddha lived. It's very possible that he did. But if he did live, he was born sometime around, like, 500 to 400 bce. We don't really know. He might have been a prince. There's a story, say he was one, that he was somewhere in modern day Nepal. And so I think that them going, oh, the Buddha was really. I don't know if they're going to say this, but it was an ancient alien then. You mean you could say literally any of that? You could say that about Moses. Moses. We don't know he existed. We have literally no evidence that he existed. Oh, but he was an ancient alien, and he used his magical staff to part the seas and take Michelle.

Are you psychic?

Are they really going to talk about Moses?

Yeah.

Are they? Oh, my God. Are you serious? They're really gonna tell. Oh, my God, I'm serious.

It's entering your head via osmosis. Oh, no.

But you know what? Now I'm understanding. I'm understanding the way that they're thinking. They're specific, at least in this episode. They're specifically taking people who may or may not have. I mean, to be fair, Zhang Gualau did exist, but they're taking people who may or may not have existed and just going, I see alien.

Yeah. Well, but also, as well, what's interesting there is they are a little bit like with other similar, more recent tv series on Netflix. What they're doing is they're combining the known with the less well known so as to introduce a certain amount of doubt.

Press X for doubt.

Well, actually, yes. But anyway, what you might have have called previously, sort of the mystery of the Orient, you know, or deepest, darkest.

Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah.

This idea of. Well, you know. Yeah. So you might have heard of Moses, but you hadn't heard of this guy from. From China or this guy from India. And so that gives you the familiarity, gives you a step into, well, I believe Moses existed. If you did, if you do, or I've heard that story at least. And so all of it starts to be sort of, again, as you say. As I say, throw everything up in the air, and it looks like a homogeneous mass, you know? And then, as you say, Frederick, just, you know, take a shotgun and see what.

Now I want to skip to Moses. Just start screaming. I really had no idea.

Okay, let's go for the Buddha. Come on.

The Buddha traveled around India, spreading his teachings. His followers and the monastic community grew increasingly. He was perceived as a human, but an extraordinary human. In the process of gaining enlightenment, he had these realizations that were marked by supernatural powers.

He actually. Here we go.

Projected and built.

Oh, Michelle's dead. I think I heard a shot. Are you okay, Michelle?

He was doing well. We got some facts in there, right? We got some facts in there. I appreciate that. And then I don't know where. Oh, man. I mean, again, it's. They say he had supernatural powers. And I understand. The thing is that this is a legend. It's a legend that, you know, when he reached nirvana, etcetera, Buddha just means the awakened one. That's what it means. And anyway, I'm. Yeah, look at that. They even have, like, early two thousands shine on the freaking mountain in the background. The production values. Come on, guys. If you're spreading misinformation, just make it look pretty.

To be fair, that's the background for every bookmark I've ever been handed by Baptists in prosthetic growing up.

Really?

Yeah.

They'd be like, did you know at that time you thought you were walking alone? Yeah, yeah. I'm not mocking. I'm not mocking their belief. I'm just saying that's the background.

Same stuff.

He paced up and down that walkway filled with jewels for about a week.

Buddha is a golden m and m flying on the space highway.

Near the end of his life, Buddha and his many disciples attempted to cross the Ganges.

And he sees people on one side of the Ganges trying to build up these frail rafts, trying to cross the river. And what he does is in an instant. And the text says that in the time it takes for a strong man to stretch out his bent arm or to bend his outstretched arm, the Buddha appears on the other side of the river.

So he invented teleportation.

But also as well, notice that guy is one of the legit academics. And he's saying. The text says, yes, yes.

He's very clear that he's just repeating what the legend says. It's not true.

Yeah, but that, yeah, that was, that was, that was, that was some early two thousands editing, sort of the fade out. And then you mirror your mask and then you fade it back in on the other side.

Cs two before the days of Photoshop.

Yeah, it was good. It was good. But how does this help other people, though? That's what I want to know next. Does he, does he then make a bridge?

We'll see.

Yeah.

Now, there was no boat, no form of transportation whatsoever. And people witnessed this. So was this some sort of a miracle? Of course not. So are we talking about transportation here? Some type of technology that was misinterpreted as a miracle?

Again, it's disingenuous. Yeah.

I just wonder. I just wonder if Mister Giorgio, I just wonder if he ever went to a mythology class or cracked open a mythology book.

No, he was hosting, what was it? Weightlifting championship before he got into this.

Yeah, I think he did business studies or something, didn't he as well?

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah. But in that sense of. Instead of. Because. Have you come to any conclusions yourself watching all these episodes about the extent to which Giorgio feels that he's asking legitimate questions?

I'm gonna say he doesn't actually believe it. I just think he's putting it on for the show.

Hmm.

I think he believes it. But at the same time, he, even if he would come to a different conclusion, I think he's. Now there's so much money in this, there's no way that you can back off and still maintain that sort of income because you don't have the same money from turning. Oh, and now I not a believer.

Yeah.

I mean, me and Mark could go and make thousands, hundred thousands of dollar just starting to say, oh, we thought we in a big archaeology, but we switched side because they were, of course, correct.

Or maybe the aliens got to.

Yeah. Or start, start selling pieces of paper that say, yes, you are related to Thor, you know, and it comes from all, comes all the way from Sweden.

But Thor was an alien. We know that now. Thor rode through the sky on slip, which was very clearly a spacecraft.

Exactly. The people. Yeah, but that's the thing, I guess. Yeah, I think you're right in that sense. Once you're in, it is hard to get out. I remember was it a documentary on possibly Netflix where there was a Mark Watts's chops, the guy who's one of the heads of. Yes, that is his name. One of the heads of the flat Earth movement who came up with essentially one of the first just asking questions series of videos. He, he's quoted as saying, someone saying, said something along the lines of, do you really believe this stuff? And he said something like, well, I've got to. Right. You know, I can't stop now. That's basically what he says. And the thing is, I don't think this is why I'm asking about Georgiou's sincerity, is that I don't think Georgiou has to believe. I don't think there's a queue of people lined up waiting to take him out if he goes against the true faith.

But you'd be surprised.

But I suspect maybe there's an element of, you can tell yourself, even if this is nonsense, it's harmless, it's entertainment. I get to make a better money, keep myself in the lifestyle that I'm accustomed to, whatever that may be. Yeah. But again, it's the open questions, open questions that are designed never to be answered. Hmm. Yeah. Cool statue, though.

Yeah, that is nice.

Yeah. But the open question is, I think, but open question is a common trope with them because if you ask open question and then are proven wrong, but I'm asking and then continue with the same narrative and you switch out whatever you ask questions about to something else that fits that.

Bill, do you know, there's a related thing that happens in other forms of debate where people will say rhetorically, almost without even knowing that they're deploying rhetoric, they'll sort of say, now, obviously, I'm not an educated person like you, they say to whoever they're speaking to. But, yeah, this is my opinion. This is what I'm going to say. And this is the implication being that they've got this trap door now to get to this escape hatch to bail out of the conversation the moment that they're proven to be incorrect. But the question is, by deploying that rhetoric, do they respect education or not? And no. Well, but the implication is yes. They just also don't want to be wrong.

Ironically, when people say those things, they immediately try to subvert whatever it is in the field that you study.

Yeah.

And they purposely say, well, I don't know much about this, but this is what I think about it. I mean, and then if you actually are speaking to a person who's a scholar or an academic, then you can have a conversation about that. Whereas if you just give the answer, they'll go, well, I don't know if I believe that or I'll have to see how I feel about it or something.

Could they have been the inspiration for what we now call magic? Perhaps further evidence can.

What do we now. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm really sad. But what does that. What does that sentence mean? Could they be the inspiration for what we now call magic? What do we now call magic? Now? What I think what he means by what he said is, is what they did, what they thought of as being magic and what we might now have inherited. There was the notion of it being.

Magic, but there is no correlation. That's the thing I'm just astounded at through this whole thing, is that they're going, this is now what we call magic. Going, no, you just said it was alien stuff 2 seconds ago. It's not magic. And then in the beginning of the program, you said magic was an illusion and that it was fine. But now you're saying that it's real and that it belongs to aliens, because.

What we now call magic is a stage show.

You know what? You know what this is? This was written by a person who's never written an essay. That's what this is. Because their mission statement at the top, their opening statement, does not match the body of the essay.

No.

Yeah, sometimes they get lost. But now we get to the ending.

The stories of a sorcerer whose supernatural powers help to build a mighty nation.

No, no, no.

No.

And they are at the frickin cave, Tintagel. No, no, no. Okay, we need to have a serious discussion between us. We need to have a discussion. First of all, first of all, the very first mention of Merlin as we know him in all of the stories is Ninius in 828, I want to say, or 825. Okay. Story of Bretonnum. That is the first time that he is mentioned. He is not an ancient figure at all. He's literally not prehistoric. He's based on two people, Mark. Do you know who they are?

I don't know, to be honest. My understanding of Merlin starts with Jeffrey.

No.

Okay. No.

Back up the truck. We're going to get to Jeff. Okay? We're going to get to Jeff. Okay. Merlin was originally based on two different characters. The main one is Merthyn Wheat, who is the Orwell, who is the Merlin the mad.

Yeah.

And we only call him Merlin because of good old Jeff of Monmouth. Okay. He changed his name because he. Because Merdin or Merlin means shit in Norman French. So he decided to change the name to Merlin, which. Yeah, there also, there's a lot of etymological things that we can talk about about the fact that Merlin's name might have meant Blackbird. There's a whole thing, but he's based mainly on that character who was a prophet. No magic, no wiggy wooz, just a prophet who prophesied about a battle and then went crazy and then ran away into the woods. That's the whole original story. That's it. No magic, no Arthur. He didn't even live at the same time as Arthur. If Arthur lived in the original mythology, there are a hundred years apart. No way they could have been anywhere. Elfridge. Just drinking.

Are they going to talk about Stonehenge in this?

No.

Oh, you know what? They probably will. They probably will because they'll probably say that Merlin made it, which is what Jeff came up with in 1136. In his stupid book, he said that Merlin made Stonehenge.

Okay, let's get back into it, because I think it will get a lot worse.

Tintagel island.

Nope. Nope.

500 ad.

Nope. We first see Merlin historically in the.

Writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Incorrect. Ninnaeus.

Yeah.

Incorrect. And it's not even historical. We know. We know that Jeff's book is not historical. No point f Inau during the time period of arthur.

I think that there is this tendency to think of him as the beginning.

Why was there. Wait a minute, wait a minute. What the heck iconography was that? Why did they put a manji on Merlin's name? That doesn't make any japanese buddhist symbol.

Yeah. And then they've got this curious kind of face that he's sort of part Darwin, part Lenin, and he's got the third eye of enlightenment, and his cap is sort of falling off because he's got no hair on top. So is this. The thing is that you can really get nitpicky, can't you? And again, we keep on stopping you, Frederick, and I'm terribly sorry, but I'm so mad.

I'm sorry.

Like, why? Why?

The thing is, a lot of these things are based on, obviously, misconceptions. And the biggest misconception here is thinking that Geoffrey of Monmouth is historical. He is not the first to mention Merlin, and he is absolutely not historical. He was, however, the first person to put Merlin and Arthur together. That is what he did do. And again, Merlin's first mention is in eight hundred s. And Arthur's first mention, again, Geoffrey of Monmouth is 1136. That is so far from each other. So far. And Merlin was originally a prophet. Like I said, no magic whatsoever. He went crazy. And it's possible Merlin himself, though, the Merlin we were talking about, was based on a well, I won't say Scottish, because Scotland didn't exist as a nation at the time, but it was based on a northern or Strathclyde person named Lilacan, who was a different prophet who went mad.

It's what happens when you prophet things. When you prophesy things. Yeah, when you prophesy.

Prophecy is a kind of magic. If you look back at ancient Egypt, prophecy end. Magic was kind of tied together, as far as I understand it.

This is true, however, especially when they were looking at Mazalot. But in a northern european context, at least in the British Isles context, usually prophecy was associated with Christianity.

Sorry. As opposed to divination, which tends to. You cut something open, maybe, or you look at something and it tells you mystical things. Also, one final point, just on this picture, pointy hats and magic, they have, well, potentially quite disturbing connotations as well. So it's.

Ah, yeah, it's more middle ages. Yeah, late Middle Ages.

Yeah, it's definitely a middle age. Yeah, middle aged. Middle age. It's definitely a middle aged thing.

Well, I mean, this is the middle ages. This is just technically, this is the very early Middle Ages.

So I'm just laughing because tomorrow I'm turning 40, so, like, I'm gonna have to put.

Welcome.

Exactly. So, yes, come on. The real King Arthur lives around 500 a day, and he was advised by this wise man called Merlin. No, no, sorry. Is he saying that Avalon is in the US?

No, no, he's.

Avalon in the new world.

That's his book, I think, and the New World, I think. And the new world is.

That is part of their grail and connection to the new world. That's very popular within the alternative history community. That's why they want to connect the Kensington runestones and things like that to Scandinavia, middle ages and the Grail and all of that.

So the Grail. So a lot of the things that he just repeated were invented by either Wayce or Robert de Boron. After Geoffrey Edmond, though this is the beginning of the norman cycle, the early norman cycle of arthurian myth. He never. Merlin was never an advisor. In the earliest. At least in the earliest writings of him, he was never an advisor.

Levitate rocks. Oh, see, I knew it. I knew it. I claim my 50 p back went out square.

Thanks, Jeff. Bastard.

Yeah.

God ruined everything. It's like him and him and my good old buddy Gerald of Wales, they really just wrecked everything. I mean, they invented a nice mythology for us, but because of this, people can't tell the difference between. Because the books are called histori Bretonm. Right. So people see the word history, and they think that they're historical. We know they're not. I'm holding it in. I'm holding it.

Okay.

Okay.

I looked up his book. He suggests that Merlin's final resting place was an island in the United States.

You see? Yep.

Actually, it's so. It's funny, when I did my paper on Avery, we were. I was toying with, you know, different ideas about why they picked Avalon, where it was, why, etcetera. And if you just do 4 seconds, 4 seconds of real academic research, you realize that the idea of Avalon, or Ynis Avlach, was actually lifted from irish tales and has absolutely nothing to do with arthurian myth.

Merlin seems to have been based on.

This idea of the Druids.

No.

Druids.

What?

No, no, no, no. Yeah. No, no.

Mark, when did the druids live?

If you. If you. If you believe writings that were. That were not written for conventional historical purposes, we recognize it. You know, when Caesar turned up in Gaul. He's writing about Druids. He's writing about.

And what age was that?

The turn of the first millennium.

Okay, so. And so when did they say. When did they just say that Merlin lived?

It was 800.

500.

Yeah.

Were the druids around in. In the early middle ages?

No.

End of story.

But this guy's got a PhD. Look at him. Professor of anthropology. Where from? Come on. Come on. I dare you. USC. Well, it's getting on my shit list. Okay, what's you got to say? Go on. Yeah. Druids appear as very magical and having various other ways that they could interact with the supernatural world for the benefit of the Monday. To be fair.

Okay, to be fair, he didn't mention Merlin.

No. Probably being quoted out of context. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's forgiven.

It's off my list. There is no manuscript in.

No, no, no. Mark, when was the Annels Cambria written?

Oh, I don't know. I don't know.

12Th century.

Oh, really?

12Th century.

Right.

Okay, this is not. No, this is 12th century. This is already getting into the deep into the Middle Ages. No, I don't care what they say.

After library, everything's known the Annals Cambrai, which means the Welsh Hamils could very well be the same Merlin as the Merlin in the stories of Arthur. That is that, you know.

Okay, so he's. So he's admitting that Merlin's like 400 years old. That's what he has just admitted, that he thinks that Merlin is 400 years old.

Yeah. And. Yeah, could very well, be. Yeah. Also, I wonder, what is that actual. That. Is that actual language there?

I think it's Greek.

Tunam to. I don't know what. There's some curse, 12th century.

And then they go. And then they go back to greek papyrus. Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

I'm not convinced he was able to.

Be a tutor to Arthur in his childhood. Teach him ways of nature.

He makes him king by.

No. Uh uh. No. All right. Who invented the myth of the sword and the stone?

Oh, I can't remember.

I'm still thinking it's Robert de Boron.

Right? Yeah.

He invented the sword and the stone around 1200.

It's also interesting because that you can. You can smell the influence of Judea Christianity there, can't you? Because actually what he's describing is arguably David as well. Yeah.

Who we also don't know was real.

No, exactly. But royal blood from a situation or from a context that's not within the.

But that's fine in there because again, Robert de Baron. I mean, this is already christian Norman myth. This is where we're getting into. And so same thing with Weis and all of these guys that started the norman cycle and that invented the sword in the stone, that invented the myth of the Grail, that invented. These are all. This is all a way to claim Arthur as a christian hero.

But also. So actually, although they don't know it, the sword they portray there is accurate to the story. It's not accurate to the time period that they.

Yes, thank you. Yes, exactly.

So, yes, so it should be. It should look more like a saxon sword or something. But actually, what they've got there is more of a sort of a high medieval, you know, full on cross guard, Errol Flynn.

They gotta have b roll.

Yeah.

What else are they gonna show?

And it seems that he wants to make Arthur into a sort of immortal figure in the eyes of the people so that they will readily follow him and make him their one and only king. In other words, Merlin is the authority really the advisor behind the throne or the authority?

You know what? That's. That's less painful than this.

Always getting worse.

To empower Arthur and in so doing create the british empire.

No, no, no. Even, like, so you guys may not know this, but there's a whole fringe thing here, especially in England. I didn't really know this growing up in Wales, but in England, there's this whole thing of people who try to really push their quote, unquote, celtic, pre roman roots. It's an ethno nationalist thing. And part of what they push. Part of what they claim is that actually the royal family as it is today, and the monarchy, that traces back to William the conqueror. And then before then even actually, because all these people are sort of related, Washington, it has been foisted upon us because actually what they were doing was replacing a true sort of celtic lineage.

I thought you were going to say it was being replaced with aliens.

No, no, no. It's a genuine, sort of, like, weird political ethnonational thing that this sort of germanic notion of kingship has been forced upon people. And actually, often they go back to arthur. And so if they're. Are they about. How can they? But they're showing parliament there and the british flag, which has so many other connotations that have nothing to do with. Sorry. Okay, go on.

It's an important point you bring up there, because the ancient alien narrative and alternative eastern narrative is deeply connected with nationalism and ethnic ideas. That's not really great. I mean, ancient aliens, for example, they even put on in one episode that I did long time ago now, but they actually quote real neo Nazis in the episode without acknowledging they even go so far that they rewrite world War two history. So a guy could just magically disappear and then they just leave out that he. Well, he killed thousands of yous and his staff. That also disappeared, he executed. Because they were jewish.

Right. Yeah.

So there's these deep connections with these nationalistic ideas and ancient alien people never acknowledge this.

Did they say that Hitler was using alien technology? Yeah, of course.

Oh, actually, I think I've seen. There's a show that was much less long lived than ancient aliens here called forbidden archaeology, where a guy goes to visit a UFO launch site, I think, somewhere outside Berlin. Interestingly, it's like a circular concrete structure that they're not claiming is a henge, but they are claiming it's a place where commandeered Third Reich alien technology was being.

Oh, God, not Berlin. That's in Poland. So it would have been german. Yeah, it's polish. It's part of the ethno, also national polish idea about the world War two and how. Yeah, Germany influenced their system. So, yeah, there's a lot of these strange ideas and if you want to hear me talk about it, you should go and see episode 19, aliens and the Third Reich, where we go through the Vril and all of that. But it's a common theme. And we also see with this how the alternative histories were getting more and more radicalized in recent years. They're getting more connected to the alt right movement, for example, you see this, especially online, that there's a crossover that's getting deeper. And this is, sure from 2013, but it started a lot earlier. Now we're starting to see the true aftermath of this.

Not to go off on too much of a tangent, but I was talking about precisely this, actually, with my friend and colleague Andy earlier today. And this is in the context of a conversation that's happening at the moment. You guys may know about this conversation where some archaeologists are trying to get together to have an October conversation about Graham Hancock, Cock and Co. And every time I mentioned to Andy, it's a simple question along the lines of, so Jimmy Corsetti and Gobleki Tepe, what is the danger of this, of this. Of this narrative? He finds it very difficult not to go straight into connections with modern day political systems, the alt right culture wars, so on and so forth. And I do wonder, I mean, obviously the roots are deep. And as I was saying at the beginning, I do believe that ancient aliens was a testbed for that thing of everything, you know, is wrong question everything. But how?

Oh, this is definitely proto Joe Rogan for sure.

Well, it is. But how helpful is it to tell all of that audience or to suspect that a lot of the audience are then susceptible to the alt right? I know that the pipeline is real. I definitely recognize that. But my analogy to him was so there's a thing here in the UK called white lightning. It's terrible cider that you can buy in shops for like 50 p a bottle. It's the stuff that, that kids will try and get and feel like grown ups when they're in the park or something. But the point is, most people don't drink white lightning. And so in that sense, just because there is a, there's access to God awful stuff out there, it. How, how often should we be made drawing these connections between, between the King Arthur story, for example, and ethno nationalism and what we now call alt right, because this is, this is a 20 year story, I guess what we're seeing here in terms of development of thought and connecting ideas, and I'm not asking that because I don't believe that there is a connection, but I'm wondering how helpful is it, do we think, to actually to now say, well, looking back, the pattern is clear. But what is the pattern clear? Was it clear?

No, you never know. I don't think think because, I mean, some people believe, believe, believe in really crazy stuff and it has nothing to do with, you know, alt rightism or.

Anything like that it could have taken another turn. But, yeah, looking for patterns that might be there. I mean, there's, of course, they have to be a foundation they stand on. But at the same time, he's, like talking about through Heyerdahl's writings, he wrote in the thirties and forties, and while his writings is very, I mean, if you look at them from a modern perspective, they are racist. But he necessarily didn't, was holding this idea that we, you know, would say are racist. But, yeah, how much should we apply our own idea on what it is? But, yeah, it's a hard conversation to have and I think.

But I suppose the reason why I bring up the bad alcohol analogy is that, yes, out of, say, millions of people who have watched this tv series, it seems that most people who watch it move on from it. Most of the time when I visit a, like a castle or a historic site, I'm not surrounded by people in that place going, ah, but the truth is I'm looking for the supercomputer buried in the wall. You know, that kind of thing. They're actually engaging. They're actually engaging with the stonework and with the technology that's in front of them in a useful, helpful way. They're reading the information boards, they're listening to the tour guide.

I don't think people who actually believe in this stuff would go to those sites because they would immediately find it. So they would say, oh, it's a cover up. It's like Holocaust, where they go, they go to the site, they go, aha, you see, the door is the other way.

So those are the people who stay in the park and keep on drinking.

And no matter what you say, you could bring them to the site, you could show them everything, but they will immediately think, oh, you're showing me this to keep me from the real stuff.

Yeah. I actually was at Manchester museum last year and actually overheard tutorials asking one of the museum staff question about ancientipian stone masonry that the tour guide or the warcut machine couldn't really answer. He and I jumped in and said, you know, this is what we know and why we know it. And those two went away feeling because they had seen all the ancient alien, you know, Hancock, Corseti, that they went where you saw that they didn't believe, really, but you cannot start to see wheels turning. I think it's important that we talk about it, but when we can't save the hardcore believers, I think these just dip their toes and then maybe they won't, or maybe they will but at this point, like Jeannie Debs, a professor who looks about the radicalization online, especially in the manosphere, say that and more time goes currently with algorithm and social media and all that, the more radicalized people are being, and I think we need to start to work with these behavioral specialists, too, maybe, and not just, yeah. Be couch experts on the radicalization on this.

Yeah.

But yeah, yeah.

I think also the danger for ancient aliens, Washington. I mean, this show started at a time where the Internet was young and it showed up on history. And at the time, people thought that history was a real historical channel and that you could trust the information that you saw on history. And I think this was kind of the beginning of that end.

It's also interesting as well, because when you look at people who actually run things like social media and have written these algorithms, they often don't allow their kids anywhere near technology until they're growing up and their minds are actually fully formed. And so they know what they've done in that sense. And I guess one final anecdote. The other day, it occurred to a friend of mine in conversation that Elon Musk has effectively built for himself the world's most expensive echo chamber by artificially boosting his own presence on Twitter. But also, as well, by clearly feeding an algorithm that's now feeding him nothing. But was it low testosterone and all sorts of racist tropes and so on and so forth? It's very hard, I guess, to know when you're trapped in there yourself, I guess. Yeah. And so, again, maybe, I suppose. I suppose the reason why I ask about this, about this, this intervention almost, is we also guess, I guess we need to be careful not to have a sort of a savior, a savior complex about.

That's very hard for humanity.

Yeah. No, no, it is. In that sense, it's difficult not to think. I'm going to save all of you from watching this nonsense. And looking back at what we've been saying throughout this episode, it's very easy to see, easy to take the piss of what's happening on screen. But also, I think we probably need to allow people, the grownups who are watching this, hopefully enough respect and time to hope, to suspect that most of them will go, is this real? Is this real? Maybe. It may be I'm being naive there. Maybe I'm. Maybe I am. But I would. I would hope that, that by giving people that respect, that's a good place at least to start that conversation, maybe.

Yeah. And I, as I say in this show several times, we definitely won't save everybody. I mean, you can't reach everyone. And I get emails from listener wondering what they can do. And when family members get into this, and it's not much you can. It's a very long and individual process. And I think this is a time where we kind of take a light hearted approach to this. Usually I have more that I give information and all of this, and those who listen know that it's more about giving proper material. So you can look at it and make a decision yourself or go and you get something new out of it. But I think we also need to allow ourselves to make fun of them, in a sense.

Yeah. Yeah.

And we're making fun of the experts who are making money, not those who are believing in this, in a sense.

Yeah. That's the important place.

Yeah.

Also, Mark and I can shout and scream all we want, but we're getting angry at the producers of the show. We are not getting angry at the people who get sucked in by this stuff.

Unfortunately, as well, we're not making any money.

No.

Whereas obviously Georgiou can laugh at us. But I mean, that's it. Yeah. Sorry if this is. That was too serious a question for this particular series.

Oh, don't worry. Martin's gonna get more silly very quickly.

Okay. Okay. Let's go back to the silly. Okay.

It's an important question, and I think it's good that we talk about it, actually. So no hard feelings there, but because we haven't really got into the wild stuff yet. So hold on to your hats.

Okay.

The birth of Merlin is a miraculous tale. His mother was a nun, a virgin.

And his father was a demon.

Erotic dream. And she wakes up just knowing she is pregnant. So Merlin's father could have been an incubuse. That would be a. Oh, I see where they're going with this monstrous figure who in this case, came and had sex with innocent women while they slept in their dreams.

The most common legends about Merlin say that he got his powers through this demonic father. Merlin was baptized and the demonic nature melted away, but he maintained all of.

The magic from the demon father. That's not nuts.

When we're confronted by the story of Merlin, we're looking at a medieval figure who is possibly another example of an otherworldly being who is.

Oh, judgment day device. So, first of all, there was a concept of, especially in early medieval literature, like, what is it called? Cambion, I think, which is somebody who was born out of a holy person and as a demon, parenthood. And there is this idea that they can be somehow cured of their demonicness by just being baptized. We see this a lot in there's a very famous story about the green children of Woolpit. Now, they're not demon children, but this story grows up again in around the same time period where suddenly you have children who are speaking a very strange language and they have green skin, when really. And then suddenly they were baptized and, oh, they can speak our language, and, oh, they don't want to eat beans anymore. It's a very common trope in this kind of literature, for whatever reason. And as we said in Ninnaeus, this is not mentioned. It's Geoffrey Monmouth who talks about this, but it's King Vortigern who is worried about his legacy, and he goes, find me a man who was not born of flesh and blood. And so magically, they just find Merlin. And so this is the excuse that they make for Merlin's miraculous birth.

One of my favorite readings of this story as a child was the boys were playing football outside of town, and the kids go, go away, Merlin. You don't even have a father.

Like the most. Swansea.

Yeah. They go away, and he's like, oh, I want to play football. So it's. Yeah. But again, it's interesting as well. In that sense. The children's story obviously completely overlooks this idea of a demonic father. It's more just that he popped out of nowhere.

Yeah, sorry, I derailed the whole thing.

Again, which was that human extraterrestrial contact did occur, that Merlin was actually.

No, that's not proof. That's not. You've just been. They've just spec. Oh, again, the rhetoric. Rhetorical. I can't even language man with words.

As we said, merlot was based on two different prophets. Neither one of them were mentioned with demonic parents. Neither one of them had magic, and they certainly weren't made by aliens. Again, as I. You know what? I throw their own Reddit back to them, Reddit back to them, and I say, oh, okay, I believe you. Show me their extraterrestrial ships. Show me their artifacts.

Yeah, well, but also, in what, by what measure is Merlin's story revered as a core of british history?

That was an american saying that, so we can disregard it.

Is it possible that Merlin had what many believe to have been otherworldly origins?

No.

If so, might his magic really have been.

That's a sick lab, though.

Not on occult forces, but on advanced extraterrestrial technology.

What's the connection there? What's the lead? They've gone from talking about mythology, to sort of magic, to sort of quasi religious or anti religious sort of demonic influence, and then suddenly it's a leap to alien extraterrestrial technology. And why?

Because Merlin's father was an alien.

Mark, I nearly swore then why the expletive would aliens take an interest in Arthur founding? What they are defining as the beginning.

Of the England, the specially special american exceptionalism.

Mm mm, mm mm.

The british museum acquires an unusual aztec artifact. Thought, magical powers.

Oh, it's John D. Scrying mirror.

Oh, no.

John D's scrying mirror.

They're just hopping about everywhere.

Not only that, but I mean, this is like the most unspecial thing ever. It's just made out of. I think it's just made out of volcanic.

Volcanic glass. Yeah, that's it.

There's nothing.

I mean, it's beautiful.

I mean, it's a Tessa cartel from the Aztec and they used it to contact Tessa Klipocha. And they actually did geological studies on these artifacts in 2019. And it's from par. In Hidalgo in Mexico. But, yeah, that's it. What's interesting is that I saw that this artifact is never associated with John T. In his own writing. It's not associated with John T until Horace Walpole, the fourth of Orford, claim that this was connected to Yeon D. Yeah.

Incidentally, though, that's a really nice pouch that they've made for it back there. Yeah, I like the pouch made of black volcanic glass.

Once belonged to the influential 16th century scholar John Dee.

No.

Was a respected mathematician, astrologer and close advisor to Queen Elizabeth I.

That's right.

He was also considered to be a powerful magician and claimed he used the mirror to communicate with angels.

Not true. He did communicate. He communicated with angels and demons. But that's not what the scrying mirror was for. He had. He had his own system of doing things. He had his own. His own. His own grimoire. He. Anyway, yep, yep, yep.

Believe that there was an angelic language, that there was a sound, a real sound.

No, that language, that angelic. That angelic Alphabet, or the celestial Alphabet was invented long after he was dead. 16th century.

That's a magician.

Yeah.

Now they've just got. They've just got magic. Now, to be fair, he might be a magician who's written on the history of magic, and that is legitimate. That's, you know, but they're just. Now magician. Will the next one be sorcerer?

You know what? They could get Alan Moore in here. He's a wizard. He's a grand wizard. Yeah, I would trust him.

This enochian magic was given to man before, but has been lost throughout the ages. God gave it to Adam, the legend. God first.

Okay, we need to talk about sefer. Enoch, the Book of Enoch.

Okay, yeah.

Enochian. A lot of our concepts of the devil, angels and demons in christian mythology comes from the Book of Enoch or Enoch. And that book is roman period. It's not ancient. It's not ancient biblical mysticism at all. And that's one of the reasons why it's not put into many canons today. Because it was written so late. That's it. That's all we got.

Did early magicians like John Dee really have access to extraterrestrial technology? Technology?

He's not even claiming it. He's not even claiming it. He's not.

Well, what about what happened to the scrying mirror? They showed it for 4 seconds. They're not even. Again, they're not keeping the essay structured.

Don't pay attention.

And I like how they leave out Edward Kelly from all of this. His crying partner and wife Sharer.

I think you do. You did this for your own entertainment, Frederick. Die off screen.

Yeah. Something. Something inside me is shrinking. I'm not sure what it is, but.

It'S my will to live.

Well, I said I was sorry before hitting that record button.

Yeah, but there's no evidence.

Centers of power would have magicians, the courts of the time, whether a king, a caesar, or a pharaoh would have. These are wizards, magicians, advising them, protecting them, using their secret powers to heal, to guide in battle. It was an important part of leadership in ancient times.

Interestingly, Jafar in Aladdin, who is the vizier, isn't he? To the sultan? He actually is, in fact, doing a good job as a vizier. In so much as he gathers intel. He has spies all over the place. He is, in fact, making connections far beyond the kingdom. And that's why he knows that Ali is not from, you know, Ababwa or whatever it is that he claims to be from.

Hashtag Jafar was competent.

Yeah. Hashtag, yeah, Jafar was competent. But that's the thing here, isn't it? And so this, it may be dressed up with anecdotes and with the occasional magic trick and with entertainment every now and then, but at its heart, these people who are advisors, who don't perform, presumably a directly political or certainly not an elected role, have to dress themselves up in something so as to be able to. We might call these people today diplomats. We might. There are various types of back channel communication that occur in modern day political systems that a character like this, wizards, viziers, advisors, can, portraying, can perform. And with that will come, I guess, again, the modern day equivalent would be the ambassador at the banquet going, oh, did you know that in that country over there, they like to eat these fruits upside down? So sharing an anecdote which is bringing something exotic into the room. So it's. Again, it's close. You know, you can see why where. You know where these associations come from.

But then don't forget now all advisors are aliens.

Yeah. Hashtag, advisors are aliens. Yeah.

Ancient astronaut theorists believe that such an audacious notion is, in fact, possible.

That's funny. That's funny. Ancient alien theorists believe that such a notion is, in fact, possible. That's good. That's really good.

It's true, but possible.

According to mythology, Perseus is given a magical helmet that ultimately ensures his success. Called the helm of darkness, the cap belonged to Hades.

So they're saying that Hades was cloaking technology.

Yeah.

I love. That was the whole answer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. With that. Tachyon beams.

Hyperspace magical devices in the distant past offer proof that our ancestors had access to montage even more highly advanced extraterrestrial tools. Panza, Italy.

This isn't how you build an argument. You don't just mark.

They can't even write an essay. They don't even know how to start the conversation, because remember, they started with, magic is an illusion. And then they ended with, no, magic is real. And aliens gave it to us.

Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating. It really. So what's on, Ponza? Go on.

Of the greek goddess oh, Cersei thought to possess a wand with remarkable power, an instrument of magic, can be traced back even farther.

These zoroastrian traditions and rituals. The magi, the priest of that belief system, would use a handful of wands as a magical intercession, a way to connect the unseen world and the seen magicians. And.

That they're not even showing, like, zoroastrian art.

No.

It'S the wands.

It's not even a wand. That's a queen scepter. That's not a magic wand.

Yeah, but it's straight.

I mean, she's holding the holy. The holy hand grenade of Antioch. One, two, five. Right hand.

Yep.

Leaders of all kind use staffs and verges and gods scepters.

That was a mortal blow. Yes. Leaders of all times. You start again. It's. Oh, it's amazing. And again, just to be clear, I think what kills me is there's a way of doing this that could be a legitimate conversation where you ask the question, why are sticks? What's the significance of sticks? Significance. Sorry. Of sticks throughout history for leadership, for coercion, for display and so on and so forth. But that's not what they're doing. And this is why it's so painful, is that it's like people. It's actually. Well, actually, it's like. It's what I often do with. Sometimes jokingly, but sometimes I'm quite upset, actually, with words. And you, Michelle, is things like so alcove and cave. I'll be honest, I was disappointed. I was disappointed they're not connected. But seeing it and asking the question openly is okay, it's fine. But asserting that it's true, that this convergent evolution of iconography, or the sound of a word or the dorsal fin on the back of a shark and the dolphin must mean that they're connected, that they are the same thing is such bad.

There's a concept that I deal a lot with people in my comments called fake lore, and where people either make up folklore and they mistake it for history, not where they think that some folklore elements have to be historical, when. No, the answer is, people make shit up.

That's it.

People make stuff up. They like doing certain. They like holding sticks. That's it. They like holding sticks. And there's no. Sometimes there's no reason behind these things.

That's. But, for example, on screen right now, there's a statue of a bishop holding a shepherd's crook. And that's because of sheep iconography, keeping a flock together. Jesus as both a shepherd and a sheep, a sacrificial lamb, so on and so forth. There's all that stuff going on there. It's nothing to do with magic wands.

Indeed. That'd be a pretty sick state.

It would be. It would, yeah. But it's just so disingenuous.

You know what? I think it's because he has a stave. And that's got to be like one d ten, you know? For sure. Well, look, it's got little knobbly bits on it. It has to be one d ten. It can't be one d eight nobly bubbles.

Plus one.

Yeah, plus one. Definitely. Plus one staff is smiting.

It's magic. So it must be a magic item.

And given to him by aliens.

The idea of transformation is fascinating. There was fear in the ancient world that you could be changed into a wolf or some other animal. And then it was imagined that some people with extraordinary powers could do this to you against your will. And that was greatly feared. And a good deal of magical practice was to try to avoid such a calamity.

Nobody actually shared that simply logical invention.

What did you say? Sorry.

Nobody actually feared that.

Yeah. Having that specific fear. I believe a good deal of magical practice went into lots of things, but that specific fear there was.

I mean, especially if you took go all the way back to things like african folk tales, there's a lot of people who are turned into animals for lessons, and then once they learn their lesson, they often turn back. So nobody. Nobody really feared those things.

One rooted in mankind's primitive imagination and superstition.

And here we have this primitive.

Primitive, primitive, primitive technology. Yeah.

As mainstream scholars suggest. Or might this incredible device have actually existed? Because we all know that all of these myths have a core of truth to them, something that.

Do we. Do we know that? Do we know that? Do we know that?

What Georgios said. Mark, you can't. You can't. You can't. Georgiosa.

Yeah.

You're going to refute him, mister aliens.

Well, but the thing I don't understand. What part of that story do we know? It has an aspect of truth, that there was possibly a woman, was there, called. Was it Cersei?

Yeah. She's very famous.

Possibly. We don't know all that. She was in fact related to Helios or that there was someone who was transforming people into animals.

That was Cersei. She. In the story of Homer. In the Homer stories, there's Cersei appears to. And she turns all the men into swines, as they said. And.

Yeah.

And she could turn other. Into other animals. So she lived on this island with wolves. There's lions, and she can command them as she please. And the island is something like that. Aeae. And they claim in here, that is from Ponza. And some do claim that, based on. Not sure. Others claim it in Mount Circeo. Nobody really knows why.

No one knows.

Yeah.

Although, you know, what I do know is that that dog there looks how I feel.

Swedish lion that was stuffed by someone who never seen a lion.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The other day, I saw in a. What was a stately home that became the natural history museum for Nottingham, a marmoset that was stuffed by someone who'd never seen a marmoset in their life. And it looked like someone had squeezed a tube of toothpaste and put eyes on it. It would just sort of. And you just thought, that poor creature. And all these kids coming over the years since the sixties, just going, oh, marmoset. Yeah, but that guy, that dog is just frowning and staring at the camera.

Just like that dog does look, the.

Way he did not allow to appear in this show. He will talk to this agent about this.

Am I getting paid?

Expect a sternly worded letter. Yeah.

And so when we talk about powerful ones that are used in order to transform people into animals, that's a match. The only thing that something like this could have happened is if it was a technological device.

Is it possible?

However, it's the staff of dysclepius now.

Okay, is this where a little bit. I'm reaching, I'm reaching. But is this where a little bit of that sound comes in? What he's saying there is. If you want to say that this literally happened, that people, people were being turned into animals, that the only way that we now think that could be done would be through some tremendous technological feats. That's true, I suppose, isn't it?

Yeah, to some extent.

No, mark, no, no. Come back. Come back, Mark.

No, no, no.

I'm not even sniffing the Kool Aid. But it is. But you've got, I suppose at the very least, there's a little seed of logical assertion there, which I'm not saying it adds to his argument, but it is.

He has no argument. But I see what he's saying. If these were all true stories, which they're not, we know that they're all mythology. They say, if these are all true stories, the only way this could be done is through alien technology. To which I say, fine, show me the technology.

Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, I'm just thinking, maybe on the level of rhetoric, we can say, fair enough. If you want to imagine, as a thought experiment, what would the technology be to make that happen? That is a legitimate inquiry. But again, that's not what they're doing in the show. That's not what he's saying.

No.

Could actually somehow generate a shapeshifting effect.

Oh, oh, now that. That's disgusting. That's foul taking. Taking an icon of the ancient world and going, it looks a little bit like a molecule that. Oh, naughty, naughty tv show.

Zeus's thunderbolt.

Well, maybe not.

This could very well all be examples of a handheld technology that extraterrestrial humans who look like us did possess.

Extraterrestrials.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, this guy's watched too much stargate.

Yeah, exactly. I expect the poffas to show up, you know, with the gould. Oh, God.

Yeah, but that's part of the ancient alien technology. That we are a hybrid species developed by the ancient.

Why is it that the people with the parasites haven't taken us over yet? Or have they? Is that what they're saying?

Are they controlling us from the distance?

Yeah.

Oh, I see. Okay.

I actually once had this. This conversation in a town square in Morpeth on a very rainy day. A man seemingly came over to me. He said he'd traveled. He said he'd seen that I was there on Facebook and wanted to talk to me so that he could convince me that we're all. I've forgotten. Was it the Akanagi or something that. The word brilliance or this idea. Yeah. Alien people. And that we're all basically alien mixed people. And it's a passionate story that people seem to want to tell, but who knows? I mean, maybe they are controlling us. Do you feel controlled, Michelle?

No. You know why? Because I don't have enough money. Listen, if the aliens want to take over my body and they want to go, hey, let us have your body, we're going to make you a success. You can have it. This is a Parthenon train wreck. So if they. I was talking about this today with somebody, with another neighbor of mine who has recently fallen, and she's not well.

Right.

And so I had said to her very briefly, I said, this is unintelligent design. So if the aliens want it, please, by all means, you can.

Yeah. That. I've forgotten. I've gone. Which. Which comedian it was. It might have been Dara Breen who said, if there's any argument against intelligent design, it's the moment you bite your cheek while trying to eat.

He's absolutely correct. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, go on.

Let's see the ten plagues of Egypt as described in the biblical book of Exodus.

We have the story of the Exodus, which is the story of the hebrew people leaving Egypt. And so Moses, there he is.

Alien scriptures.

Alien scriptures. Wow. I love it.

I have seen. I have seen fundamentalist christians describing the Ofanim, who are the things on my head that they. They describe them as aliens because it is described in certain books saying that they are flaming flying wheels, and therefore they think that there must have been, like, an alien ship. And they came. And I said, are you not afraid? And all that, but I've never. I've never seen somebody claim that, well, technically, it's the. It's. Technically, it's not even in the. In the scripture. It's. It's not even Moses who does most miracles. Aaron takes his staff.

Yeah.

And says. And casts it forward and does. And does it for him. And first, obviously, there's the thing with the snakes, and the snakes eat the other snakes, then there's other magician things. But thing is that there were magicians in the courts of Egypt. So if you want to say that Moses is an alien, then you got to say all those guys are aliens, too.

And also, there are sort of magical prophet offs as well, aren't there? Sort of like we're going to stand here and magic something up.

I just want to be very clear. There is no historicity of Moses. Moses itself is an Egypt name, but it's an incomplete egyptian name. We don't know what the other half of his name was. There are some scholars who link him to Aenkhenaten, but there's really no. There's no way to know. And we just don't know. There are people who believe maybe he was around the time of Ramses II, maybe it was earlier, etcetera. But there is no mention of this. And as for the plagues, yes, there was a. There was volcanic eruption not long far away from the city of Ramses II, which might have made people vacate the place. Was that the.

Pillar of fire?

We do not know. We do not know.

He's going to be the liberator. He's chosen by God, that is, Yahweh, to go to pharaoh and say, let me hold up.

Back up the truck. Stop, stop. First of all, concept of Yahweh. If you want to say that Moses is historical, and if you want to say that he's in this time period, the concept of Yahweh did not exist in the Bible at this time. That's. That is a later israelite thing. They were not called Israelites, at least in the text, until this time. They were called Hebrews, and they were not Israelites yet. And Yahweh came much later.

So it's also not etymologically, phonetically, quite entertaining having him say I e yahweh.

I just love that his book is alien scriptures. I'm sorry. I'm gonna go look it up.

Yeah, yeah. I was tempted to look at the reviews, but I don't want to mock people, you know, I'm curious.

Moses is told by this angel inside the burning bush.

No, no angel, no.

Scriptures are very clear that, first of all, I mean, there's. There's lots of acacia bushes up there. You could have just lit one on fire and had a great time. There's also. I mean, there's also cannabis that was found, you know, in temple remains and things like that. So my man was probably tripping if he was actually. If he was actually around in the text. No, there was no. There was no angel. It just says that it is. It is the voice of God that beamed itself into Moses brain.

Yeah, exodus three. Three. I noticed that, too, before. Interesting. A priest making this.

He must go to pharaoh and convince him to release 700,000 Hebrews.

But we do not know that number.

Yeah, what's the number?

Yeah, we do not know that number. It is very possible, in general, that the exodus was small numbers over a long period of time. And at the most, I believe that at most that it could have been during the time of Ramses II is about 200,000.

Okay, I'm going to Google Bible UFO connection. It says here, founder of the Bible UFO connection. I want to know what this is. Just a second. The Bible UFO connection.

The Bible UFO connection. Oh, so is Jesus an alien then? Is that. What. Is that what?

Yeah, that's part of this. And especially they focusing on Ezekiel, as you say, the wheels within wheels and those type of things. Yeah, there's a lot of Bible going on in ancient aliens, too.

Okay, so maybe. Maybe he's tried to turn it into a movement, but it looks like he's just an author. Basically. Just an author. Sorry, Michelle. He's an authorization. The greatest deception, the Bible UFO connection. The true nature of gods, of the Bible and the world. So, yeah, okay.

The Egyptians had no word for religion.

For them, magic was the religion. It was around them, it was part of them, it was the power. Oh, it's this guy that created their deities.

It was a constant force in their life.

So this, you could say for most ancient civilizations that they were defined by the things they believed, but they didn't have, you know, they didn't call their religions that. We call it that after the fact. Looking back on history.

Yeah. Also as well, in that sense, the. One of the reasons for us having such a. Such a sharp sense of what a religion is, is because of a post reformation, post enlightenment sense of political structures being able to exist as being separate from religious belief. So, I mean, he's not wrong, I guess, is he? But he's also. Again, he's wrong, Mark. He's wrong. Yeah, yeah.

He's very incorporated within the egyptian, but it was not special class, really, who dealt with magic. I mean, everybody could access magic, and they also have magic in medical papyri. You have magic spells for things that you couldn't treat like a broken bone, but unbroken bone. They can give a kind of sound advice, you know, stabilize the bone, just do all that. So, I mean, there's a duality in it.

Something like the lac nunga. Right. When they. They have, like, bone charms in there and things like that, they. They didn't say that that was part of their, like, special religion. It was just something that they did. It was part of their society.

Yeah. And often these things are so old or so habitual that one of my favorite questions I was ever asked, actually, was someone said, why do we take flowers to graves? Why do we do it? And people can come up with ideas. We're maybe taking something beautiful, or we're taking something that is itself dead to a place of the dead. We're communing or we're remembering or so and so forth. But the thing is, we don't know why we do it. And.

Yeah. Actually, and I just want to add to that, in certain modern cultures, or even instead of bringing flowers, you bring a rock with you and you put it on the grave. It's a way of showing that you've been there.

Yeah.

Or somebody was there. Why we do that.

No, exactly. And, yeah, and that's just sometimes I think people leave, will leave this pebble or something on the gravestone on top of it, won't they? Not even in front of it. So it's. It. This sort of. We do still have that interconnected, that interwoven sense of ritual and almost sort of mysticism with everyday life. But it's interesting how the perspective here, and this is something I think we're often guilty of in modern life in general, is this idea that we somehow live in a post historical period.

Yeah.

You know, that we are not subject to the rules of history, and I. Whereas people in the past. Well, you know, and so, yeah, it's. It's interesting because what he's describing is something that we all still do. We just don't. We just don't do it in a religious sense, necessarily, broadly speaking. Yeah.

In the first plague, Moses touches his.

Staff to the Nile river, and it becomes blood. He gives it to Aaron.

The magicians are able to do this as well.

In the second plague, Moses multiplies.

Wow. Even though even the racist images. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Okay.

The magicians, although once they do it.

They can't get rid of the frogs.

First of all. First of all, for the plagues, it says, which means singular frog. We interpret it as many frogs, but Svardea is a singular frog. So there's a lot of people who interpreted saying, bibi Washington, a giant frog. Maybe it was. We don't know. There is no way to know what that exactly means.

I want the giant frog.

I know. I, too. I want the giant frog.

These giant sort of like, you know, dead behind the eyes are sort of black orbs rise and.

Exactly. Yeah.

Giant frogs eating the pharaoh, and everybody would go home.

Yeah.

That would have made for a better story.

Yeah.

And it eventually leads to the death of every firstborn male in Egypt, which finally ends the entire thing. And Moses takes not only the 700,000 Hebrews out, but generally considered to be between one and 2 million Egyptians go with him as well on what we now know as the exodus.

Okay, so when it comes to the whole death of the firstborn thing, that, I mean, that is a motif that we see a lot. It's not just in Egypt about. If you go back to, especially babylonian times, they were very worried about infant mortality in general. And I'm really surprised they haven't mentioned Pazuzu, because even though, obviously, Pazuzu is not Hebrew, is not biblical. But Pazuzu and Lamashtu had this war between each other. And of course, they're. They're ancient babylonian demons, and they. People would put pazuzu in front of the children's beds to this way to ward off Lamashtu, because they believed that Lamashtu was an evil spirit. Came and killed children in their sleep. They didn't know anything about sids. They didn't know anything about immortality. You know, they didn't know any of these things. So infant mortality in general, Washington, obviously extremely high, and people worried about those things. Was it. There are some people who say that, oh, it was volcanic ash, and it just killed all the young people. There were other people who say, oh, if the Jews were really there, they lived in a different place called Goshen, and it was nowhere near where all the Egyptians were dying. So it could have been a plague, like an actual. Not like a godly plague, but like an actual plague or something similar. We have no way of knowing and no idea. Zero.

I have a different theory. I don't think God is mean.

I don't think God goes out and kills.

And so it could have been extraterrestrial.

Wow. Wow.

Okay, so this is. This is actually very interesting and famous things. This is based on a mistranslation that Moses had that said that he had lights out coming out of its head. And so the latin mistranslation was that he has. That he had cones coming out of his head. They meant lights. And so this could. This comes to. I can't believe they use this iconography. And so there's a whole idea that for some reason, like Jews or followers of Moses had horns on their hood.

Yeah, yeah. Is this also possibly linked to Halos as well?

No, that's a different thing.

The idea of enlightenment. No. Okay. Okay.

Halos and glorials are similar, but different.

And later, we're not dealing with two indigenous human cultures battling it out here on earth.

That's a dangerous bloody word to use right there. That's a very dangerous word to use in Egypt. And when we're talking about the Moses story. Oh, indigenous. Oh, interesting, interesting.

People are in a war that they could not win against extraterrestrials.

Sorry. For people listening at home, we just saw an outtake from a pre visualization, I think, for Battlestar Galactica, by the look of it. Wow.

I have to say that the animations in these later seasons is a lot better than in the first season. The first seasons, it looked like it was made by, you know, someone's nephew who really didn't want to do it, but he was good with the computers.

Really. It's done by some kid who has Adobe premiere.

Just copy and paste the spaceships. It'll be fine. It'll be grand. You know, that was amazing. Wow.

That was the best part of the whole episode.

That was pretty good, actually. That was good. I want to see that film.

So the question is, was it really God who unleashed these plagues upon Egypt, or was it, in fact, an extraterrestrial? And according to the ancient astronaut theory, it was a misunderstood, misinterpreted.

What is what. Sorry, Frederick, you might be able to help me with this. Yeah.

What is the theory theorist thing?

Yeah, what is the theorist?

What fits your dios narrative? Because he often, you know, oh, wait.

Is this the idea that we really came from Mars and that, like, in the beginning, like the biblical in the beginning, that they.

It depends on what ancient alien astronaut theorist you're asking, because Bandanaken, who is maybe the most he's often on this show, is not in this episode. But I. His belief isn't compatible with, for example, Zacharias Sitchin's ideas and Zachariah Sitchin's ideas are not really compatible with Powell and Bergere and all of those. So there's no unified ancient astronaut theory. But Georgiou Sukalo says so because it sounds more academic, in a sense, more authoritarian. But if you start to read them, they will, you know, differently. If we go back to French. Lex Luthor. His writings, again, differs from van Daniken, Zechariah, sitchins, but they inspire each other. But there's no, you can't.

It's interesting language that he says. The ancient.

According to ancient astronaut theorists, yes.

Yeah. So he most often he is referring to van Denken, since he was the one who kind of coined the ancient astronaut idea. But not always. Sometimes he's referring other authors, but again, they are not compatible with each other.

We're interested in people like David Blaine because we find those things amazing. It just pushes the boundaries of what human beings are capable of. And I think that we ask ourselves, could we be capable of such a thing?

We will embrace the endurance effects.

Houdini is an alien. He died.

Maybe there's something to this. Maybe there isn't a trick. Maybe I can evolve into a person.

Able to do this kind of. This is borderline Scientology and mormonism.

Yes.

Like, this is.

This is bad.

Yeah.

This is claiming that this is the one speaking. It's our magician, Pendragon, who think he can evolve to do real magic.

Okay. Okay.

So does he think he's an alien?

I'm not sure. I think he can evolve to learn alien technology.

Michelle, my question is, how did Blaine stay in that, uh, essentially Faraday cage suit that he's wearing, directing the energy around his body instead of through it, and pee over the course of 72 hours?

I mean, that's the most.

Be a tube in there.

No, I think the answer is adult diapers.

Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Because actually, having running water in that contraption would be liquid. Would be dangerous, wouldn't it? You know, but not the.

You know, the electricity flowing through them. That's not dangerous at all.

No. You can actually run electricity through your bodies without getting hurt if you take certain precautions. It's when you. I'm not an engineer or anything like that, but you can. That's how people survive. Lightning, for example.

Lightning strikes. Yeah.

Teaching Shigendo means the practice of training and testing this tradition from the 7th century, done up in the mountains with great physical, arduous exercises.

And there are people who still practice this today.

Yeah.

He was not.

No.

And these people are not all aliens.

No. But again, this is your orientalism, isn't it? This is like, here's another culture, another society, doing something which we don't recognize. Therefore, it might be to an access.

To supernatural powers beyond our understanding.

Powers. They literally just sit in cold waterfalls.

Yeah. So it's endurance and. Sorry, go on.

They just walk up mountains, they go cold waterfalls, they have a hike, and then they have a nice meal at the end of it. That's what they do.

Do you know what? And actually, I say there's something which is. Which is incompatible, which is unfamiliar to possibly to the audience that they're presuming that they're pitching to, but actually, that's. People do that in. In Ireland, they'll go and hike up a mountain for religious purposes, hike back down again, have a nice meal at the end. Saints used to sort of stand in cold rivers. Yeah.

But they don't have full demons like this, so therefore, the demons here must be the aliens.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I recently come back from a seven day hike through the mountains of Sweden with cold path and hiking up mountains, so. I don't think so.

You're an alien, Frederick. That's what you did.

Or I have super.

That's why you're so obsessed with the show. Are you trying to phone home? Is that what you're doing?

Yeah. Take me away.

These people are crazy. Save me.

Abort.

Abort.

We gave them the technology, and this is what they make with it. Shitty adobe after effects.

Is it possible that ancient magicians like Ennoyoja were able to tap into incredible extraterrestrial abilities embedded within the human body?

But why is. Hang on, then. That itself is. That's. That's. That's. That's deeply flawed logic. If it's embedded in your DNA, it's not extraterrestrial, of course. Unless, of course. Yes, yes, yes. Unless, of course, you're implying that it's been put there. But that in and of itself, what they described there, is fairly universal, a centering practice brought through physical discipline. We see it in lots of stories of wise people, religious people, people seeking solitude or meditation. And out of that can come a better sense of self and so on, so forth, to sort of wash over that with whirly graphics of double helix DNA strands and say, is this ancient? Is this an extraterrestrial technology is visually a cacophony. It's a confusing image that doesn't match up to what they're saying. And I promise you, dear listener, I'm not expecting them to make sense, but it's fascinating to me how. How. I mean, how do you edit this and not. I get no guess. The thing is, you edit it because you're getting a paycheck. Yeah, that's the thing. This is entertainment, isn't it? As far as whoever's putting this together is concerned, it's not about what is said, what's being said. It's about conveying, I don't know, a sort of a visceral experience.

There's no narrative here. Usually when you see historical documentaries, even if they're pseudo historical, there is some kind. They want to. They have to answer a question.

The supremacy.

Was King Arthur an alien? Right. Then you have to make everything fit that thesis. And so even if it's completely bogus, they do everything they can to fit that narrative. And then you create a two hour narrative about how. Where you slowly break down other people's beliefs and you go with the skepticism. That's a very argumentative narrative. There's no narrative here.

No, no. And it's also diminishing the accomplishments of the people who is doing these feats.

Yeah.

Yeah. They couldn't have done it. It was aliens.

Well, and yet here we have someone on screen right now, presumably a magician. It's a classic escape scenario where you're in a box, there's water, you're chained. Presumably the box is apparently padlocked, and, oh, you know, maybe a curtain will be drawn and somehow you've got to try and escape from the box. We know because of the Humvee trick at the beginning of this episode that this kind of magic happens through trickery, through the skill of being what we call a magician today. But again, the juxtaposition of the imagery along with what's being said along with the. And again, I mean, there's a whole episode. There's a whole podcast somewhere episode that we could talk about the use of the word DNA in modern life and how. And how DNA science is deployed in modern life and talked about as an intrinsic. It implies intrinsic.

How people use it to imply heritage.

Well, heritage, but also they imply it for. You know, I've heard people say it in our DNA to, like, apple pie. You know, that kind of thing. You know, it's just like. No, it's not. It's really not.

It's not.

It's not. It's not. It's an apples. That's not quite the same thing. But this concoction is fascinating to go back and look at, and I can see why you're doing it and why you do it for a. Yeah, but I commend you for being able to do it. I mean, how many more have you got to go, man? How many more episodes?

Oh, there's a lot of them. There's 19 season, I think I've but now I jump.

Oh, my goodness. Wow. You are this. This is your endurance test. You are an alien. You are an alien.

I mean, as I joked with Doctor Kinkela, it's a documentation of a man's descent into madness.

Magic appears to be a derivation of extraterrestrial technology. It's the accessing of the human potential using the technology of the human form.

Magic.

Again, possibly, if you're being generous, you can say, yes, actually.

So the thing is, the biggest issue with this narrative is they contradicted the setup. The setup was that magic is fake and that it's meant to entertain. And now they have just gone, no, it's not. It's actually an alien that gave it to us and all these supernatural, superhuman things are.

But then this guy then says it's about your innate human potential. And actually, there, he's put his finger on something. True. But he's not saying this for that reason. He's saying it in support of this other argument. But in that sense, yeah. The ingenuity it takes to one of my favorite tv shows growing up, Washington, sort of a mystery show where the protagonist was a magician or a magician's assistant, and he would solve these crimes because he had a way of seeing the world that was about the extent to which people go to achieve an illusion. Basically, you just have to. You do things as a magician that seem crazy just to make it look like a pound coin or something has dropped through a table. And that. That ingenuity, if you word it as this guy just did, human potential, that's something to be commended to be. And that is genuinely amazing. That is. That is the closest that you might get to actually seeing in a. In a predictable place and time a miracle light like scenario unfold in front of your eyes. And that is amazing. But that's not what this episode is about. That's not what this episode has been about. No.

Did ancient magic really have another worldly origin? And was it based not on mere trickery, but on advanced knowledge of science?

But we got math powers of the human brain.

Perhaps we will discover the answer.

Hey, credits to the possibility.

I was going to say back up. I want to see who wrote this crap, but I don't. I'm gonna just set fire.

Do you know, there was something that one of the guys there was saying in the. In the upsum that I think was, again, was almost touching on something true, this idea that actually, and we know this is anthropologists, archaeologists, that often, within any situation, any social situation, there will be often there are fantastically useful, sort of almost like pressure release valves that will be objectively ridiculous, but allow things to happen that otherwise might be hard to negotiate between people. So whether that's funnily enough, that sounds like I'm just describing getting drunk at a party. But no, but no, no. It's, you know, whether or not it's like, let's say a party get a party game, actually, where you. You. Everyone arrives and you all agree to abide by certain rules. This would be hell on earth for me, by the way. And you're told you're gonna have to sit next to people you don't know, and you're gonna talk about this, that, and the other. When the whistle goes, you'll move around. You know, this. This sort of conceit, this manipulation of people in an artificial way, both big and small, can be tremendously useful for smoothing over political rivalries, for negotiating interpersonal disputes, for just having a good time. And in that sense, it performs a very real, tangible social function to have someone who is a court jester or a magician or a person who essentially is not performing a formal or earthly role in the room. The problem is, all the way through the episode, the guy's been talking nonsense, but right at the end there, he almost said something, something that I thought was actually quite sensible and describing an intangible truth about humanity. And this is the thing, I think, in these conversations that people get really caught up on, and that is. And lots of our colleagues get caught up on, is. Is the need forever for positivistic evidence of something. You can't prove all human behavior and the reason for it, because humans are messy. But you can, you know, there are. There are spaces in which you can talk about and use wishy washy words like magic that describe and help you to better understand human behavior. And in that sense, it's absolutely part of our. Of our arsenal. People talk about, you know, from medicine to, as I say, political discourse to marriage ceremonies to job disputes. There's. You can. You can use this sort of language to do that and to navigate that. But again, that's. That's the. Don't you think that the ancient aliens would be a much more interesting tv show if they introduced concepts like that? You know, if they. I find myself, it's a missed opportunity.

Then I think about half the people who watch would actually watch.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you're talking about, you know, highfalutin.

Yeah, I would. I would watch that program. This program is like a three Advil problem. As we slowly go on through time, I could feel myself going, this is going to be a one Advil headache and a two Advil headache. And now it's a three advantage. We made it. We made it to the end, though. Oh, my God. That was.

Thank you for having me. Thank you.

We did it. I don't feel good. I don't feel cathartic. I feel. I feel like. I feel like I've just read the worst essay I've ever read and I want to give it an f. Yep.

Yep.

Just not sourced materials. No understanding of anything historical, mythical, or folkloric. Nothing. Just linking random. It's like somebody took. It's like somebody took a chocolate chip cookie out of a chips ahoy pack and another person took a pretzel and just went, these are the same things. Wow.

Yeah.

I think I should have. Should have known when we saw in the beginning when they were talking about Merlin and suddenly there's a manji on Merlin, like the Merlin's name. And I went, how the hell does that even. They're not even the same thing. One is a religious symbol from Japan. And then you have Merlin, who is a fictitious character. That should have been my end. That should have been the basis for the rest of this episode going. Nothing is going to make sense.

No, no. But it's a potent and messy trough that we find ourselves sipping out this evening. And thank you.

I don't know if I want to thank you, Frederick, for inviting.

Well, I'm going to thank both of you for enduring. I mean, it's evidence of human reliance or strength.

Yeah. This has been a feat of our own. Yeah. Yeah.

And if the audience would like to go and hear more from you, where should they go to do that? Michelle, for example.

So if you want to find me, you can find me at author Michelle Franklin on YouTube and the Twitter, if you're still on that and on Patreon and also on TikTok. Or you can just look up legends and lectures, which is my podcast.

Brilliant. For me, it's archaeo soup, more or less everywhere, or mister soup, but mainly on YouTube. You can probably find me there. And also, obviously, I do turn up from time to time on Michelle's podcast as well, where we talk about all manner of things. What's the next festival we're talking about, by the way?

Oh, the next festival we're talking about is at the end of the month, which is going to be the autumn festival cycle of Michaelmas, of Oktoberfest.

Okay.

Yeah.

By aliens.

Yeah. Oh yes, absolutely. Aliens gave beer to the germans 100% I believe it.

But a huge thank you to both of you.

Thank you for putting us through this test of endurance. Oh God I have such a headache.

And again, enormous thank you to Michelle and mister Otto Arkyou soup himself. Make sure to go and check out their content and channels because they make some, well, fun and exciting stuff. And if you want to help out the show, well you can do so by going to patreon.com diggingup ancient aliens or head over to the membership portal on the website found at diggingup ancient aliens.com. again, you get bonus content, extra long episode ad free. All of that and you're also supporting the show. But if you don't want to spend money but still support the show, you can do that by leaving a five star review, well basically everywhere you can. Or tell a couple of friends about this and share one of your favorite episodes with them. Make sure to also visit the archaeological podcast network because there's a lot of great content there too and you might find a couple of new favorite show to listen to. Well I wont keep you any longer than this. We will be back in two weeks with another episode. But before we close out the episode, the intro music was created by Sandra McLaure and the outro is created by the band called Tralsgruv who performed their song Foliat. Links to both of these artists can be found in the show notes. Until then, keep shoveling that science.

Me take it off the song man. I close.