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 73, and I am Frederik, your guide into the world of pseudoarchaeology.

And this time I'm joined by a guest, or I'm actually visiting a guest, and we will discuss Stones, Megalith, and, well, racist dog whistles that Ancient Aliens brings up in the episode titled Monolith.

I want to thank everyone who support the show, like Tim.

You're really helping out producing all of this content, and I'm humbled and grateful for all of your support.

And if you want to help out, I will tell you exactly how to do that and even get some bonus stuff at the end of the episode.

I also want to bring up that over the weekend we had this large online event regarding archaeology, and I think it was a huge success.

And if you want to check out what was going on there, you can go to the website real-archaeology.com and catch up on all the amazing content that was released during the weekend.

There's also an interview I did with Flint Dibble on his channel that you definitely should go and check out.

But yeah, you can go and peruse all of that content after you have listened to this episode.

Now, I think we have finished up our preparation, so let's dig into the episode.

So I want to welcome, or maybe it's Dr.

Charlotte Call, who welcomed me into her home.

But I want to welcome Charlotte to the podcast.

Hello and thank you for having me on the podcast.

And I'm sure, yes, welcome to my house as well.

So, Charlotte, could you maybe tell the audience who you are and maybe a bit about your credentials?

Okay, so I finished my PhD from the University of Manchester about three years ago, give or take.

And I am a historian.

I'm straight historian through and through.

That's undergrad.

MA, PhD.

During my PhD, during my MA, I started to get quite interested in the history of archeology.

And Specifically during my PhD, I started to focus on how people or how archaeologists in the 19th century interacted with stone.

I looked specifically at archaeology, colonial archaeology, British archaeology in India and Egypt throughout the 19th century.

And I was very interested in the concept of stone's agency, because I'm very interested in materiality and how humans interact with material objects, how we interact with the properties of materials, and specifically stone since then.

So, yeah, for the past Three years I've been a public historian.

I lead guided walking tours of the wonderful city of Manchester, uk when it's not raining and often when it is raining too, and we focus on the materiality of the city.

I also have a YouTube channel which kind of tries to tie history to, I guess, current events today and do so in a hopefully an amusing and insightful way.

So that's me.

So I've been doing this ancient alien stuff for nearly 70 plus episodes.

What's your previous?

Well, history with shows like Ancient Aliens or Ancient Apocalypse or Ancient whatever that's on history channel at 2am I have.

Never watched Ancient Aliens at 2am I feel like I.

That's probably a good thing, I'm assuming.

Hopefully.

I will honestly confess that Ancient Aliens, it's been sort of.

I've known about it, obviously.

I know it's out there.

I've seen the memes.

I'm aware of that dude with the crazy hair.

I can't remember his name.

Giorgio Tsoukalos.

That's him.

But I'd never actually watched an episode, a whole episode completely from start to finish until I was prepping for recording this.

So it was an interesting experience.

I will say that that's the cat if he sets himself on fire.

So this was my first.

The first episode I'd watched from start to finish and honestly, I found it at once incredibly frustrating and fascinating and I had to move my phone out of my reach so I didn't pick it up and throw it at the tv.

I got very frustrated.

What I think is really interesting though is how you can sort of track these sort of conspiracy theories and how they all started in the 19th century or give or take, because that's what I focus on.

That's my vibe.

I'm a 19th century gal and you can see the seeds.

So I guess it was great watching it because it's kind of like, ah, this is where all these.

This is where all these things that I've looked at the beginning of this is where they've ended up.

And I don't like where they've ended up.

No, they seem to enjoy it.

But yeah, it's a bit problematic.

Now, you told me before that you have been on a conference called Meglo Megalithomania.

Exactly.

How do you feel that that crowd compared to the little ancient alien exposure you got here?

Of course, you know, how could I forget about that conference?

Yeah, that was a fun experience.

I mean, it was basically the same stuff.

I will say though, that the conference, some of the Talks were more overtly racist than I think would ancient aliens might get away with.

Although to be fair, I haven't seen any other ancient aliens.

Maybe there is more overt racism.

It's all the pretty.

It's the pretty standard stuff, isn't it?

The sort of the.

What's it?

The ancient astronaut theory.

The angels.

Lots of angels.

At the conference, in fact, one woman gave an entire talk about angels.

That was.

That was something else.

I feel like.

Actually, I feel like the ancient alien show is not quite as New age hippie.

It doesn't quite spread the love and light.

It comes and goes.

Yeah, there's definitely a new age influence in the sphere, but what we see on television, we have to remember is filtered through a network publisher and it needs to go on a major network.

So of course they won't put the most overtly racist stuff.

They will try to filter that out because the author has said some incredible nasty things in the past.

But those stuff is usually, you know, toned down.

It's more family friendly.

It's more aiming to be scientific in a sense.

And therefore you don't really get the new age influence as clear as you get in their books and when they write and when you hear them talk in other places.

For example, why we're talking about this conference is because it kind of ties into the episode I had you watch, and I'm sorry for that, but what we watched was an episode called the Megalith, if I remember correctly there.

And it's from season five, episode six, if I'm not mistaken.

But they talk about stone and the alien or magic properties of stone, and it kind of ties into what you're doing and how do you reflect on what you're.

What they were saying in the episode, because you have a not different, but novel approach on how we can look upon stone as a material in our culture, so to say.

Yeah, novel approaches certainly what I was accused of during my viva by two senior professors.

And I fought with them and I won.

So, yeah, I think what I found incredibly frustrating was that they came in the episode tantalizingly close to actually almost my perspective, but they just missed.

They were almost there.

They almost reached the lofty heights of whatever I wrote in my thesis three years ago, but then they just missed it.

So to kind of explain, I guess a little bit where I'm coming from with my theories surrounding materiality in stone is one of the things I'm really interested in is this idea that materials can have agency.

Now I have to be careful when I say that because I can be.

I have been accused of animism, and that's totally not my vibe.

That's not what I'm getting at.

I don't think that there are spirits in objects.

I don't think that objects can obviously get up and move on their own, like, obviously.

But what I mean when I say agency is that an object can act on us, but only sort of if we almost allow it to in conjunction or sort of in relation to our human ideas about that object.

And that's something.

So there's an anthropologist dude called Alfred Gel who wrote about primary agency and secondary agency.

Primary agency is what humans and animals can exhibit.

You act of your own accord.

My cat just walked into the room and wandered around.

He is a primary agent.

He does what he wants.

Secondary agency is an object that cannot act of its own accord, but instead it has a kind of an agency in relation to someone with.

Or something with primary agency.

So a piece of stone that's sitting on your desk is not a primary agent.

It's not going to get up and wander off.

You as a human, though, if you see that piece of stone, if you feel like an emotional connection to it, you are giving that stone agency.

You are giving it the ability to act on you.

I have stuff in my house that I have an emotional attachment to.

And I know why that is.

It's because I like the texture, I like the shape, I like the history.

Those objects don't have primary agency.

They don't have a spirit within them.

But I am, as a human, with my sort of background, with my own kind of sets of emotions and experiences, I am sort of imbuing them with agency.

Now, all this to say to circle back round to ancient aliens is they discuss the idea that stone has particular properties that make it appealing to humans.

That's true.

That is absolutely true.

Because we've chosen to use stone as a building material.

We, you know, it's convenient and it's durable and it has all these practical properties.

But we have chosen to, like, have this emotional connection with it so that that is a kind of a thing that they are acknowledging.

What they then don't do is realize that they are having this emotional reaction.

They are seeing stone almost as a primary agent.

I mean, probably at some point, I'm sure one of them would say that stone could just get up and walk around maybe.

So they come close to realizing that they are co shaping, that's the word, where you kind of create an object's agency.

They come close to that, when they say that they know that stone has properties, but then it just explodes into chaos.

And that I found super interesting.

So close, but yet so far.

Do you have an example of building or building material where we see this kind of, what did you call it?

CO shaping?

CO shaping, Secondary agency, yes.

In fact, in my very own Manchester, my very own city, we have a building in Manchester Central Library.

It's from the 1930s, 1920s.

It's a lovely kind of neoclassical building.

It's made from Portland stone.

Portland stone is a beautiful white stone.

It comes from the south of England.

It comes from an island called Portland, which is near, I want to say, Dorset.

My geography is dreadful.

Portland stone is a lovely, beautiful stone and it's been used in some of our major buildings in the UK and now around the world.

A lot of the government buildings in London are built from Portland stone.

So Whitehall, the Foreign Office buildings, they're all Portland stone.

There's a cat again, a primary agent doing what he does.

Portland stone, it has these inherent material properties.

It's a strong building stone.

It's got a lovely kind of white color to it.

It's pretty pollution resistant as well.

This is kind of like as humans we kind of.

That's what first sort of attaches us to it.

We look at it and we think, oh yeah, that's good, we can use this.

So then we start using it in our buildings.

It starts to be used for buildings that are particularly culturally relevant.

So it becomes associated with that kind of cultural relevance.

It picks up this culture to it.

You start using a stone for political buildings or buildings where there's power, it becomes associated with power.

So London used Portland stone a lot more and earlier than Manchester did.

When Manchester decided to kind of step up its game, so to speak, as a kind of a powerful, influential city, it looked at what London had done and it said, we can use Portland stone for our important buildings.

We will take some of this emotional kind of attachment that people have to Portland stone and we can transfer it over to Manchester.

We can make Manchester look powerful by imitating London.

So and what we have then is Portland stone has been used for all these culturally relevant buildings.

It then gets designated.

I can't remember when I want to say, like quite recently, but I'm not even going to try and guess the date historian.

But with no memory for dates, it was designated a heritage stone by the International Union of Geological Sciences.

Yep, geological sciences.

And it sort of self reinforces, it's this self reinforcing narrative that this stone is good and important.

And that if you build something from the stone, it will sort of have a prestige to it, if that makes sense.

And that's one of my favorite examples, partly because it's right here in Manchester.

Yeah.

And that's interesting from several aspects because you're talking about how we give stone a meaning and it's something we actually see in the ancient alien narrative and start to look at it.

If we would look at several more episodes, which one of us at least have done the mistake of doing.

We see a couple of stones appearing again and again, all with magical properties.

We have granite, we have quartz, it's crystals and it's andesite.

All these dense, heavy stones that they associate with aliens.

Do you see the same kind of connection there?

Yeah.

Oh, yes, entirely.

And actually that's something I would love to chat to you more about, especially quartz in particular.

There's something about it that humans have loved.

Maybe it's the way that it catches the light or something like that.

But then it just, it spirals, it snowballs.

Throughout history, it becomes, ooh, were the crystal skulls made of quartz?

Are there crystals?

Thank you.

I knew that.

So it becomes a self reinforcing thing.

It's exactly the same thing.

And what were the other ones you mentioned?

The very dense ones.

So we have granite and andesite.

That one.

So andesite you find in South America, but ancient have.

They usually claim everything is granite, but andesite is what we find in Pumapunko and sites throughout South America.

And it's a very dense, heavy stone.

And it's some.

In some sense it's similar hardness as granite.

And again, it's a very durable and easy stone to work with.

In that sense.

Something you have to remember when working with stone is that hardness of the stone actually makes it easier to shape.

In a sense, it sounds illogical, but when we look at experiments, especially in experimental archaeology that's been done both in Egypt and in South America, they both come to the conclusion that many work stone, especially with stone tools.

So if you use flint, shade or the volcanic rock, was it a very black.

They made surgery tool over, like obsidian.

Obsidian.

Those tools works better.

The hole, the stone is when you want to shape it.

Okay.

Oh, that's fascinating.

Yeah.

And of course, obviously that's also interesting because the hardness and the durability also presumably make it last longer as well.

Which is, I think, a property that humans really love about stone.

Stuff that lasts for ages is something that really appeals to us as humans.

Yeah.

It shows in our type of buildings.

We see important buildings always being made in stone.

And ancient Egypt is a brilliant example of that.

For example, the royal palaces, we would picture them built in white marble or something like that.

No, they built out of mud bricks because the royal palace wasn't as important as the royal tomb or the temples that need to be for ages, the, you know, radiant, common goals.

But when they pass into the world of the gods is when it's, you know, everlasting.

And therefore, we need an everlasting material to work with.

So they do ascribe properties to the stone and importance to it, but not necessarily stone itself in that sense.

This doesn't carry a magical property, but to them, it symbolize a sort of magic when they use it in a pyramid or in a temple.

Yeah.

And that actually.

Oh, that is an interesting one, is like, when does stone pick up the kind of.

The magic.

If you want to see magic in stone, when does it pick it up?

Does it pick it up?

When do you see it in the quarry?

When you kind of.

You pry it out.

Which I think is literally the words that they use in ancient aliens.

Like, when did mankind.

You start prying stone out from the quarries, like, when does it pick up that magic?

Yeah, that's interesting.

Does it pick up magic also?

Because you're sort of using it in interesting ways, in ways that it's not kind of ways that it's not obvious that a stone can be used in.

I think what I'm getting at is the old kind of megalith structure with the sort of.

Probably know the name, and I don't.

You got stones standing like that, and you got a stone over the top.

Adoleman, thank you.

Very thorough knowledge from me.

And thank you.

Like, what I find really interesting is that one of the properties of stone is that it is very heavy.

And so it doesn't seem like a logical kind of normal thing to be able to do with it, to kind of balance this heavy stone on top of other stones.

So that in itself, if you're going to look at it like this, is when stone starts to pick up that sort of magic.

And I think, going back to ancient aliens, I think one of the things that was mentioned in several of the sites that they talk about is kind of, how did they do this?

And that's like, well, experimental archaeology is a thing.

We kind of know how they did it.

But I find it very interesting that this stone has this property of weight, which makes it difficult to maneuver and manipulate.

Therefore, when you see kind of stones balanced on top of each other in weird configurations.

You're immediately thinking, that's so heavy.

We could never do that.

You're having that emotional response to Stone's property.

And I'm just going to say it.

That's where Stone has this secondary agency.

It's kind of working with us.

And it's interesting because that agency is most likely not the agency it had for people of the time.

If you go back to the dolmen, they.

If you look at dolmens and how they are used, usually used over generation, we can talk, you know, a century or longer, millennia.

We see these places being reused and it doesn't seem as the structure itself is the magic part because they knew how to build it.

That wasn't the, you know, strange.

The magic was going on in there.

That's interesting.

But yeah, so for them the importance wasn't the construction because.

Yeah, we did it.

We, you know, it's not that hard.

You know, have to pull this.

You just levitate it.

Right.

We had this magical bonds from the aliens.

Simple.

Why are you making such a fuss?

Well, yeah, and sorry, I think that goes back to actually something else that ancient aliens kind of type people seem to forget is that they say sort of like, why don't we build pyramids today?

Why don't we do this?

And it's like because we've moved on.

We have our own kind of engineering marvels.

We just, we don't think of them as marvels because we see them every day.

A skyscraper.

Yeah, that's a engineering marvelous selfie.

Exactly.

I mean, it's so sometimes hideous depending on how it looks, but it is kind of.

It's just like our perception of what is miraculous or our perception of what is kind of.

Yeah, miraculous.

I just use that word again.

Has changed over time.

So it's like we're finding things that we could or were just built easily.

We're looking at them and thinking, well, how did we build them?

But yeah, I just went off on one there.

But we still build pyramids today.

We just use different materials.

I mean, go to Los Angeles, you have two, three pyramids.

The Louvre has a pyramid.

Nicolas Cage's tomb, he's built a pyramid shaped tomb in New Orleans in a cemetery.

I'm not that surprised, actually.

Not at all, to be honest.

Love that for him.

He's got his tomb ready and waiting and it's a pyramid.

I mean, I wouldn't mind a pyramid for my tomb, but there's a discussion I have to have with other people.

I Guess do you really want the Nicolas Cage vibe with it though?

Because I mean, he will be the OG pyramid or the modern pyramid too.

Now I could maybe live with a stone ship or something like that.

But when in the episode they talk about all these different approaches and from experience, it's the so called shotgun approach.

They just bombast you with several sites, time periods, locations, everything is spread out and then they try to bind it with a narrative.

How did you react to this?

Did you fall for it?

Or was it just a frustrating experience?

And this is where me being a historian, I probably found it more confusing than I should have done.

Like, I knew it was nonsense, but I don't know that I frankly anything before than the 1800s and 19th century and possibly a little bit into the 1700s if I'm feeling, you know, if I'm having a good day, that's just all eldritch horror time to me.

I don't understand anything back there.

It's darkness.

No, not quite.

But actually that is something that did strike me a bit like I have a rough idea of sort of, you know, prehistoric time periods.

I can get a feel.

I've been around many museums, but for someone who has no idea, I can see that this like it is literally, it's just a bombarding.

It's almost like a kind of a.

Toward the end, at least, it got worse as well.

They were just throwing things at me.

I can see that it would be confusing.

There was stuff that I just.

I don't have much of a reference point for.

So I was just thinking I could really use an archeologist to explain this to me, so.

Hello?

Yeah, definitely.

And I think that's a lot of what they go for, isn't it?

Just throw things at people and see.

What sticks in most times.

So one side to bring up is Avonbury.

And that's something you visited before?

Yeah, I haven't been to Stonehenge, but I have been to Avebury.

Avebury is a really interesting site and people will say that they have a much stronger emotional reaction to Avebury than to Stonehenge, because you can walk among the stones, you can touch the stones, you can feel the vibrations if you are so inclined.

I have touched Avebury stones.

I did not feel any vibrations, but maybe it was because I was not so inclined.

What I found really interesting about Avebury though, is, and this is something that doesn't really get talked about, although it is in the little museum on site, is that some of the stones are not in their original places.

Avery has one of the things, I think they even say it in the Ancient Aliens is that the stone circle is so that it's got a village in it.

It's like, well, okay, that's very cute and all, but the village is really small.

And also they moved the stones to build the village.

Like some of them were knocked down, some of them were moved.

It's not the original site.

So when you go there and you have this emotional reaction to it, what are you reacting to?

Is a question I don't know the answer to and I don't think it needs an answer.

But I think it's a question to ask.

Because you're not reacting to the authentic site.

No.

And I think that's a con, not confusion, but this idea we have about ancient site, that they are all original and many of them aren't, frankly, many of them are reconstructions or some are better, some are worse.

And I mean, if we go to, for example, Athens, the Panthenon people, imagine that, oh, it's been there for ages and look like this for ages.

But almost all of it is reconstructed.

It's not original in that sense.

People have gone back to old painters and tried as best as we could.

But the sites are in a way reborn as archeologists have dealt with it.

And of course, archeologists in the 1800s had a very different approach than we have today.

For example, some excavated sites with dynamites, some didn't.

And I mean, in the best of worlds, they would have just left it as is because the sites would have been in better shape today.

But that's a long, long discussion that I think we will have in another episode.

But there is this imagination of a site being ancient.

And I think many associated with their identity and culture and especially the New age movement, have this idea of nationality and spirituality that can be a bit problematic in a sense.

But again, they associate it with the idea they have, not necessarily what the site was to the ancient people.

And that's an importance we need to have when we discuss the religion of site and people.

Because, well, I'm archaeologist, but with some religion study now, I mean, we kind of have to think about how they felt about the site and we can't really be sure how they felt about it because we associate, like the tombs, we think of how it was built is the nice part.

But for them it was who was associated with what family live resides in here, what spirits or whatever, not necessarily the site itself.

And we see that engraved goods and other sites, things that they put importance reuse they put other monuments around.

So in Sweden, we have one site that's been used since basically the mainland of Gotland, as a little island in the Baltic was started to be populated.

We have very few dolmens.

We have two of them, one still kind of standing, but this is surrounded by a large Viking Age stone ship and three more a bit further away.

We have a lot of Bronze Age graves in the area.

And people have put importance inside this little dolmen.

There's like 23 kilos of human remains we have excavated.

I love that that's a specific.

Someone grouped them and weighed them.

23 kilos of human REM remains.

And if we look at teeth, it's like.

Now, I don't remember exactly, but I think it's like 90 individuals.

Right.

So again, there's importance to decide that the construction.

But how much magic it is I don't think really is in the construction, but more of who's inside it, so to say.

But of course, representing this idea in stones make it eternal, which might be the magic, but it's not as fancy as aliens did it.

Or the stone has a magical proprium.

I think they say that.

I think it's Stone Age to talk about that they go there to be healed.

That quote is from Jeffrey De Mon, French author from Medieval Ages.

Not any scientific base for the claim that you went there to get healed, but we see that in other sides that now.

I lost the thread completely.

Damn Jeffrey De Mamanth.

So it's very medieval of him to come back and haunt you and disturb your.

Yeah, you're thinking, that's very medieval.

Yeah.

And you see, I thought of something as well, but now I've lost it.

Oh, yes.

The idea of the stone being eternal as being the magic or the magic because it's what's left over that we see.

And I think your point about that being not as exciting, possibly as the ancient aliens thing is really interesting because.

Oh, and this is where I'm gonna go.

A bit like psychology.

Oh, no.

Bit of psychoanalysis on the ancient aliens people.

I wonder if.

Because one of the reasons that I think as humans we are attracted to stone and building everlasting monuments is frankly, because humans are very, very finite creatures in world history.

We are not around for long individually and as different eras and also just as a species, we have not been around for long.

I think humans very much feel their mortality.

And I wonder in some way if the ancient aliens people don't want to acknowledge their own mortality.

And that's why they're sort of ascribing these monuments to like a much bigger sort of immortal kind of vibe to them, rather than just sort of.

Rather than just acknowledging that, yes, stone is stone eternal though, that's another issue.

Stone is kind of.

It's long lasting, it has longevity.

You can build something from stone and it might be there in 100 years, probably will be.

Instead of just straight up acknowledging that and acknowledging that it's because of our fallibility as walking meat sacks, essentially, who will decay and turn into dust.

Instead of acknowledging that they have to make it bigger, they have to make it something crazier and more chaotic.

You know, maybe they're just all very, very insecure about death.

Maybe that's it.

I mean, we have these New age elements within the ancient alien sphere that of course ties to your own mortality in a sense.

So, I mean, I think it's quite fair to describe ancient alien similar ideas as a cult because I think it fits better in that narrative because what they're doing is in science.

I think everyone can be quite, can agree, at least those who listen here.

I think we can agree that this is science and they have these strong cult leaders and the idea of afterlife.

If you start to dig deeper down in there, that you have these end of day cults based on ancient aliens and all of that.

So we all ties, or it all ties into a cult mentality.

It's hard to leave it when you get into it.

Radicalization and all of that.

And on that note, I want to, since we were originally talking about Avonbury, I mean, they don't really say much about the place other than it's, you know, weird that they put it up because everything is weird if you don't look into it properly.

But we have this stone circle, of course it's connected to a ufo because UFO is round.

We have stone circle round plus round.

But we have a connection.

And it's Giorgio Suckalosus make a little quote in here that goes something like this.

The mythologies in conjunction with Avebury always point to the sky, to some celestial beings, the Shining Ones, as they were called, descending from the sky.

And educated people in various disciplines.

Agriculture, mathematics, geometry, engineering.

And so the quote is basically he talk about the mythology about Avonbury and the Shining Ones.

I just want to bring up the Shining One connection to, you know, educate someone who might not.

I will say the Shining Ones.

That was.

I'd never heard of them before.

Whoever they are, they are.

They shine.

They're out there and they shine.

That's I didn't even understand.

Honestly, I did.

I could not make sense of his explanation and I wasn't sure if it was worth googling, so I just thought I'd ask you.

Yeah, I mean, luckily I'm here and can answer this question because it's a deep cut.

It's a real deep cut.

So the term the Shining Ones is not connected to any legends, of course, or now it's connected because in modern day it's become associated.

We have modern legends.

That is not part of an ancient historical narrative about the site.

Now, the Shining Ones are lifted directly from two authors who create a book.

They are named Philip Gardner and Gary Olsen.

They wrote a book, the Shining Ones, the world's most powerful secret society revealed.

And can you guess what's on the front of the COVID Is it one of those eyes?

Is it the eye in the pillow?

No, it's worse.

Oh, what's worse?

It's a Star of David.

Oh.

Oh, no.

So of course this is about a secret society and their idea is that the angels from Book of Enoch has come down and they start to take over the world, creating all the structures and the important things to set up governments and control everything in the background.

And then at one point they let the Templars take over that role.

And the Templars might or might not still be around.

And then of course the Freemasons are still doing this behind the curtains.

But this narrative has been adopted by ancient aliens.

So it kind of, you know, this idea of the Reptilians and all of that.

The whole book is basically the.

What's the Russian anti Jewish text, do you remember?

Oh, the Russian one.

I know there was one by Henry.

Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's basically a version of that, but in a new age language.

And what's interesting is there is a connection more here between Gardner and Olsson.

Yeah, Olsson, that's a Swedish name.

So there's also a connection between their narratives because they didn't just make up everything themselves.

In that books we find influence from another source, Mr.

Graham Hancock and his white Aryan supremacy priesthood that he talk about in his book that he wrote with Robert Bal back in the 90s.

Again, the secret cabal controlling everything behind the curtains.

So we have this again, deep, as you said, you don't saw any inherently racist in the episode because they hide it with the keywords like this.

Really getting that impression.

So the Shining Ones is basically a sort of a dog whistle then, isn't it?

It's basically just low Key.

Here we go.

When I say that you're going to conjure all of this up and when.

You Google Shining Wand, you will get to this book and you will get more and more radicalized.

And they use it as a kind of catch all for Reptilians and Atlantis and Freemasons and I can't.

That's too much.

I can't.

I.

Yeah, okay.

Okay.

So again, it looks innocent and good and kind of, you know, smooth on the television, but that's because they don't say the.

Those part out loud when they kind of catch you in it.

So they've never then explained the Shining Ones properly.

And that wasn't the first episode that it.

No, it repeats in several episodes.

Oh, that's creepy.

So you have.

And you have several versions of them too that you catch if you watch it enough of times because we have the Star Shield runs that basically that's most connected to Native American folklore, but not as they really represent it.

Again, it's a bastardization.

Again, they're rewriting Native American legends to fit their preferred narrative.

So it's a plastic shamanist that's going on in there.

And again, it's deeply connected to the New age move.

Right, okay.

And I find it so fascinating that all these, this whole racist world is just built on top of stone and that's the foundation.

And they've just taken it.

They've taken their emotional reaction to walking into a site and not having a clue about it.

They've gone with.

They've basically been, I don't know, you see, I'm searching for an analogy, but I don't want to insult either human toddlers or animals I'm searching for.

They've just basically grabbed onto the first shiny thing they saw, haven't bothered to do the research because research is boring and difficult.

And then they've just added layers and layers of shiny things until they've built this temple out of nothing.

Basically terrifying.

Excellent.

And I mean, stone is an important part of human history in many aspects.

For example, without flint tools, our society wouldn't have gotten to the length as quickly as we did.

And I mean, there is importance and moving heavy stone is difficult, but it's not beyond.

And we've shown again, again, experimental archaeology, moving stones.

And there's videos from.

It's.

I think it's around Indonesia.

There was these people, Nia's people, I think they're called.

And they.

For.

I don't remember exactly why they had this tradition, but once a year they used to move a 50 ton stone block through the village.

They connected this to something important in their culture.

I don't remember exactly what but we have video of them doing this 50 tone stone block by hand.

And this was 1930s or something like that.

So I mean it's before today's been known for a long time that we can do it.

It's just that we said we don't have to do it any longer.

Why would you put yourself at risk of injury and horrificness when you can just get a crane to do it for you?

My favorite example is when they're trying to demonstrate that it's impossible to move with modern machinery.

We see them using the wrong tool for the job.

So they use a crane that's really meant to, you know, pick up some smaller stuff and lift up a couple of meters and then let's lift a 50 ton block up on this truck that's not designed to carry that type of load.

But if you design a truck that's supposed to move this and build it, if we move it just fine.

Or a crane, a proper construction crane instead for that flinky rental that you got to the gas station.

I mean.

Yeah.

Have they not seen like modern mining and quarrying machinery?

It's massive.

It's huge.

It's.

Yeah.

That's ridiculous.

They are ridiculous.

I'm sure they've seen this but they just don't show it in the show.

Are they just walking around?

Just with blinks?

Maybe.

Maybe that's it.

Maybe they just don't.

I guess it's some sort of cognitive dissonance going on there that they know it exists but they don't make the connection.

Or they don't want to.

Don't want to.

Again, we have this sort of cult mentality.

So if the cult leader says this is impossible, then it must be impossible.

And we don't go online to, you.

Know, we only go online to look up the shining one.

Yes.

Yeah.

Not.

Not heavy duty machinery that can move stones.

Yeah.

I mean the largest construction ever moved is an oil platform called Troll 2 weighing something like 5,000 tons.

Some imaginary moved by 20 boats.

Right.

So not impossible.

Just a lot of resources.

But not impossible.

Yeah, yeah.

Slowly and securely.

And that's weigh a lot more.

Or is it 5 million tons?

It's an astronomical amount of weight.

So I mean these ideas, rather silly but again they again put some magic thought to the stone that don't really fit.

But yeah, that's also.

It's just reminding me this idea of going back to the 19th century is my favorite thing to say.

A guy called Belzoni did a lot of work on the pyramids, the Great Pyramid specifically.

I think he was one of the ones who dynamited the pyramids.

So that's kind of awkward, but he describes.

Or he describes kind of coming across the pyramids and sort of like walking across the desert and finding them.

And as with many 19th century descriptions of archaeological sites, one of the things that strikes him is that the stones are so big, they're so heavy, and how did they move them?

So this is something that has been a question for so long, but Belzoni didn't ascribe it to aliens.

Belzoni was an engineer.

The dude he worked with, whose name I cannot remember, was also an engineer as well.

They knew that it was.

I mean, actually.

Ooh, interesting point.

So in the British Museum, where Britain keeps all of its stolen stuff, there is in fact, a colossal granite head of Rameses.

I'm not an Egyptologist.

It's one of the Rameses.

And it's big.

It's very big.

And it must be heavy.

It's not like a kind of a small head.

It's big.

Belzoni moved that out of Egypt.

He moved it.

I can't remember how he did it, but he did it because he was an engineer.

And that's what you do when you're an engineer.

You move things that seem impossible.

And it's actually, now that I think about it, in the 19th century, they moved, transported, and packed so many large bits of stone.

Yeah.

Several obelisks went across Europe.

And same way, if we go back to Roman times, the Romans loved obelisks.

They moved them across the Roman Empire, put it up in different arenas and squares.

I mean, and they moved it with technology they had.

Yeah.

And it's not that far from what the ancient Egyptians would had thousand years earlier.

We hadn't developed.

I mean, they didn't have steam engines in the Romans or whatever, but.

Yeah.

In the 19th century, we moved obelisk from Egypt to New York.

Yeah, we've always done it.

We've always moved heavy things.

It's just.

It is that disconnect of.

We know that this stone is so freaking heavy.

So there is just like.

It just takes a minute to.

When you're standing there as an individual to imagine how you could move it.

Yeah.

And that's.

That's again, that's where the ancient aliens people just don't make that leap.

They don't understand that if they're standing in front of A huge stone kind of construction.

It's not just them as an individual that would have built it or moved it.

It's like a people with knowledge of engineering and like loads of people would have done it.

It's just not.

They're just not that clever, the ancient aliens people, they're just not that self aware.

No, but they kind of look upon people as inferior.

I think that's one of the main issues, that they don't look at these cultures as capable and we see that in how they can't imagine things in their stories and all that.

And I want to move on to a different site.

Palmasur and the stone spheres of Costa Rica.

Those something you've been familiar with before or was this a first?

I did not know that there were round bits of stone lurking in the world.

I mean, I know that stone can be round.

I didn't know that there were these specific sites.

And frankly I'm fascinated because I look at a round bit of stone and maybe this is like my GCSE and geography kicking in.

And I remember stuff about erosion and I think about all the lovely smooth pebbles that I've picked up off the seashore.

And hagstones as well, that's a folklore term, but hagstones, stones with holes bored in them, erosion does magical things.

So I would look at a round stone and think, well, okay, maybe someone did carve it.

But also if it's by a river, it was probably the river.

Apparently, as I learned on Ancient Aliens, that is not the case.

They were not done by rivers.

No.

So in this section they talk about two different sites.

So we have the Palmasur or the Stonehenge Fair of Costa Rica.

And these are actually man made and they belong to a site that was used during the Aguas Buenas period, which is roughly around 300 to 800 CE and later during the Chiricui period, that's 800 to 1550 CE when the Spanish come to Costa Rica.

And from the archaeological evidence we have, this stone sphere seems to have been created earliest 600 CE in the episode.

They want to bring it back a couple of thousands of years, but now most likely 600 CE.

Now it's hard to date because, well, we constantly date stone in that sense.

We could use thermoluminescence dating, but it wouldn't be applicable in this case since they have been, you know, out in the sun for a bit too long.

But in the show they claim that these are 96% perfect spherical.

Do you know where this claim comes from?

No.

So an archaeologist named Samuel Lotharp went around measuring and he had a measuring tape and he measured all the stones and he put down an average by the third decimal.

His measuring tape can't do third decimal.

But that's why this claim comes, because people read that and said, oh, that's very accurate, and didn't read what's before and after.

And that's how we got 96% accuracy.

They are not that.

If you look at them, they look really nice and spherical, but if you would put any sort of, you know, very advanced, more than a measuring tape measuring on, and you would notice that they are often a little bit square.

I mean, it's not to diminish the craftsmanship of the people of the time, but it's not this magical call spherical stone.

But then they go to Bosnia where our friend Osmanos Manegic, the famous Bosnian pyramid guy, steps in and he talks about the Bosnian spheres.

That's again, thousands and thousands of years old.

And here we have a little disconnect and conflict in Ancient Aliens because mere Osmanagids, he claims that these spheres in Bosnia are, you know, proper spheres carved by men.

Scotch.

That you probably saw in the episode.

He's a geologist.

He doesn't agree with that, actually.

Oh, I didn't notice.

I didn't notice that.

So Robert Scott's theologist, he had these weird ideas of the Sphinx and all of that, but.

And he doesn't really like the pyramids in Bosnia either.

You think those are here, but they have a bit of a conflict, but you never see that in the episode.

So there is a little bit of infighting in ancient alien community.

But the spheres in Bosnia, as far as I can tell, are, as you said, erosion.

Right, okay.

Because they were by a river, weren't they?

Yeah, all of them is by a river.

They are by something that might have shaped them.

And we have this idea in the Ancient Alien that nature can't do spheres or straight for some reason.

I think nature would like to disagree with that very much.

Nature disagree with that very much.

And it shows it as often it can.

But, yeah, we have this.

Again, they're trying to explain something that doesn't need explanation without using the proper explanations for it.

And again, I'm just going to keep coming back to this.

It's such an emotional reaction as well, that you're walking through a forest or you're walking somewhere and you see something round and you think, oh, that's out of place.

But you just go with your immediate kind of, ooh, shiny what can I kind of do to make this the most interesting thing?

You don't just kind of say it was a river, but it's interesting if it was a river as well, because isn't that amazing that the river has kind of, like, tumbled this stone and created this thing?

That is amazing in itself.

Why do you need to add the aliens?

Because, again, they want to make it more special.

Yeah, yeah.

And what's interesting is that they put Robert Scotch and Semiros Manag in the same segment and they kind of cut Scotch out of context because we hear him earlier how fantastic all of these is.

And then we cut directly to Bosnia that he doesn't agree with.

I almost wish I'd known that before I watched it, because I would have paid way more because I think the spheres are toward the end, so I was starting to lose my grip on reality a bit.

Oh, I wish I'd known.

I'm going to have to rewatch just those guys now and see if I can.

Yeah, but they want to make this connection that the spheres around Banjalunka and the spheres in.

In Costa Rica are identical.

They were made by the same people for the same reason.

And how would you have it if they are so far away?

But it must have been some connection.

And how do you travel that fast?

And you need to have a spaceship, naturally.

So that's how they get the logical conclusion.

But again, they get there by leaving out all the other steps.

Like every other stuff they leave out.

Yeah, but that's an example of someone again, putting meaning to stone, even if it's not really there.

Because Osman usually had this nationalistic idea of Bosnia, and that's his preferred narrative, that Bosnia once held this super civilization 10,000 years ago.

I have not heard that as a narrative.

Okay, okay.

Evidence for that from him.

The pyramids.

Oh, sorry.

I should have known.

There were pyramids in Bosnia.

There were pyramids in Bosnia.

You've kept referring to this dude as, like, the pyramid man.

I don't even know what.

There were pyramids in Bosnia.

For those interested, there's an episode out a long time ago, episode 20, I think, where I cover the Bosnian pyramids, everything you want to know about them.

But it's basically hills in Bosnia that looks pyramidical if you look at them from a certain angle.

Okay.

So if you get drunk and squint.

Then you don't even have to be drunk.

From a certain angle, it looks very much like a pyramid.

But as someone who hikes a lot in the mountains, that's not a very uncommon mountain shape, to be honest.

It's nature, isn't it?

Nature does amazing things and I'm sure nature does not appreciate the work being, you know, attributed to aliens.

If you think about it, mountains evolve by just things getting pressed against each other.

The pyramid form is quite repressed.

It works, doesn't it?

Yeah, it's the easiest way of stacking loads of things on top of each other and then they don't fall down.

It's literally the easiest way.

Yeah.

But if people want to hear more from you, where should they go?

I would say check out my YouTube channel.

I am the applied historian on YouTube.

Thank you very much for your time.

And again I'm sorry for letting you watching this.

I forgive you.

It's okay.

I might even come back too.

And again, a huge thank you to Charlotte.

And in the show notes you will find links to all of her stuff.

And you should definitely go and check out her channel.

And if you happen to be in Manchester, make sure to catch her tour that she has in the city regarding its stones.

It's a really interesting journey through Manchester and brings up new ways on how to look and engage with your surroundings.

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Until next time, keep shoveling that side.