SPOILER ALERT

Superheroes have taken pole position in the tentpole box office derby, in front of the sci-fi blockbuster. Even an ostensible sci-fi film like Avatar was actually a classic superhero origin narrative. I bet that John Carter would have been a success had it been marketed as a superhero story (which in fact it is) than a sci-fi extravaganza, which modern audiences are a bit weary of.

I saw Prometheus and it was exactly what I knew it was going to be all along- a slick, well-made, and utterly emotionally-empty experience. It was a dazzling display of the latest technology that left me as soon as I took off my 3D glasses. It was rife with X-Files lifts, not surprising given its cowriter. All of the characters were unlikable, with the female lead being only somewhat less unlikable than all of the others.

The mission ends in tears, as all such incursions into the halls of Olympus must. The ultimate message of the film- which I'll get to at the end of this piece- is in fact the ultimate letdown, though it might have escaped most people's notice.

The takeaway of the film is the disappointment and the inevitable backlash it inspired. The film was a hit, but nowhere near the mega-hit you'd expect given the avalanche of hype that preceded it. The danger in the kind of massive pre-release pimping we see these days is that you'd better deliver. If people are left anything less than breathless, you're dead in the water. Read this:

20th Century Fox's "Prometheus" earned $51 million over the weekend with the help of a social media campaign that featured content not appearing in the film -- but the online chatter took a turn for the worse once people actually got a chance to see the movie. Facebook users largely called the movie a disappointment, raising concerns that early social buzz might have created unrealistic expectations for the movie. "You can't build the hype too much. Some fans were so excited about 'Prometheus' that nothing could live up to the movie they already directed in their heads," said Phil Contrino of BoxOffice.com.

The fact that the film has been attacked from every piss-stop on the modern ideological superhighway proves that the reaction to the film is a symptom of a kind of existential malaise, once that can be laid at the doorstop of the movie moguls themselves.



PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CAMERA

Hollywood destroyed the magic of movies by making us all a bunch of mini-moguls. We know now how all the illusion is created before the film is ever released so we unconsciously search for the seams. We go online and check the weekend grosses and determine the value of a film, a near-Kabbalist ritual once the exclusive province of agents, producers and studio heads.

With comedies and romances and kid movies, it doesn't really matter. But with science fiction movies-- the most vulnerable to the laser-beam focus of the overeducated movie-goer-- it makes all the difference in the world. We've lost our innocence and even the most impressive films never leap from the screen and into our lives, like they did in the pre-Internet, pre-hype overload days.

Sci-Fi faces an uphill struggle anyway- its books are hard to write, its films are hard to make and no one believes in Tomorrowland anymore.

Sci-Fi fandom is atomizing into sects, driven by identity politics and scientistic fundamentalism. A lot of the more prominent SF writers escaped into the more forgiving precincts of Fantasy, while are others are toiling away doing movie adaptions or writing for video games. TV sci-fi is a mess, a cultish world of silly X-Files and Lost ripoffs with little or no cultural cache left in the chamber.

Of course, Ridley Scott had the temerity to remind moviegoers that the Alien franchise- like almost every single major sci-fi franchise on Earth-- is based in Ancient Astronaut Theory. This isn't news of course, it was established a couple sequels ago. But you're not supposed to say such things out loud anymore.

"Skeptics" pretend to dismiss AAT but in fact they are terrified of it (and don't believe any different). It's been almost 50 years since it first raised its head in the popular consciousness with Morning of the Magicians, and skeptics are still struggling to explain away all of the growing gaps in the Victorian-era theories of evolution and archaeology they vociferously defend on YouTube but never actually study.

And since being a "Skeptic" is a popular as super-sizing and exercise avoidance with Millennial geeks, reminding them that everything they love is AAT propaganda was not going to go over well.



A MAN CALLED JONES

Scott's little faux pas might have fed into the backlash, but I think the uninspiring script he was saddled with deserves the lion's share of the blame. But born-again Bill Cooper imitator Alex Jones did his best to ignite a preemptory backlash against the film, though I'm not sure he was quite certain why he wanted to do so.

Maybe he wasn't certain if he wanted to do so, or was simply trying to bolster his declining audience by hitching his wagon to a well-publicized Hollywood horse. Given Jones' unfortunate reversion to revival-tent hyperventilating in the past year or so, there are only two possible conclusions we can draw from his Prometheus rant; he either didn't actually read the script as he claimed or he's pimping some other agenda we can only guess at.

Jones thoughtlessly assigns "occult" motivations to the scientific overclass, who have been downright Maoist in their drive to annihilate any thought contagion outside of their rationalist/reductionalist orthodoxy, and have been using fronts like CSICOP (with its links to the international pedophile underground) and the JREF (whose co-founder was recently convicted of fraud in Federal court) to stamp out any traces of occultism since the early 70s.

Jones also dredges up old USENET chestnuts like "Revelation of the Method", an imaginary doctrine invented out of whole cloth by a neo-Nazi of distinctly contemporary vintage, "Illuminati mystery religion", (a ridiculous misnomer given the only significant group we can confidently identify as having called itself the Illuminati professed rationalism) and "Externalization of the Hierarchy", a scare-term from the 70s-vintage conspiracy-theory catalog inspired by the toothless Lucis Trust.

I can't help but wonder who is really pulling Jones' strings these days, because at the same time he's fulminating against that all-powerful, sexy, sorcerous, quite-enviable Illuminati (who has nothing in common with the miserable, workaholic materialists pulling the Globalist stops) he's pimping pure, unalloyed Ancient Astronaut Theory, making special care to let his Fundamentalist Christian fanbase know the Bible itself is ripe to bursting with ancient astronauts (which, of course, it is).

Jones also fails to dismiss or debunk AAT, a major no-no with his predominantly religious following.

He then goes on to let his followers know that those rich, powerful geniuses from the glory days of the British Empire bought into AAT whole cloth, a dubious claim if ever there was one. If this isn't a classic case of reverse psychology, it sure looks like one.

Do androids crap their electric pants?

UNFORTUNATELY...

However, the problem is that this movie is typical anti-elitist, anti-scientist Hollywood popcorn fodder, just like previous blockbusters such as Avatar, Scott's Blade Runner, and the Jurassic Park films. The message is that man's attempt to play God will always end in ruin.

The "Illuminati" is embodied here in the person of Peter Weyland and David, his android son (why Weyland would use a middle-aged man as the model for an android rather than a 20 year-old is a mystery to me). Of course, they are instantly and unceremoniously dispensed with once they meet the sole surviving Engineer, their reward for spending all their time and treasure in search of their alien makers.

The sole survivor of the mission is the good Christian girl, who's next order of business is zoom to the Engineers' homeworld and kick some ancient astronaut ass.

So Jones's so-called "Illuminati" are shown to be fools and dupes, whose goal to equate themselves with the gods is that oldest of sins, hubris. And just as you see in the old Greek tragedies, nothing is more offensive to the gods than hubris. David deigns to speak the language of the gods and has his head ripped off as punishment for his presumptuousness (something many Frenchmen dream of when confronted with American tourists, surely).

Weyland-- who Jones features so prominently-- dies in utter despair. His biological daughter, Meredith Vickers, is crushed under the crashing Engineer spaceship. It's the working class heroes-- one black, one Asian, one played by an actor of Middle Eastern descent-- who destroy the Engineer's ship.

An interesting bit of symbolism, given that the Engineer's are white as ivory.

So everything that Jones is claiming about the film's message is totally debunked; not by me, not by a skeptic or atheist, but by the actual movie itself.

HIGH TECH EXORCISM

The other religious objection to Prometheus is the scene in which Elizabeth performs a caesarean section on herself to extract a xenomorph that her infected boyfriend had impregnated her with. That scene went viral with this news story:

A man named Jorge who attended a recent showing of Prometheus got a politically charged spoiler alert from the employee who was tearing his tickets. "I have to warn you," Jorge recalls the employee telling him and his guest. "Halfway through the movie, the main female character will perform a self-induced abortion."

This happened at Regal Cinemas Thornton Place Stadium 14 in Seattle. "I asked some other people entering the same auditorium if the same guy had warned them about the contents of the movie, and they said he did," says Jorge, who asked that we not use his last name.

Of course, what we are really seeing in the film is not an abortion- the xenomorph was viable and grew to monstrous proportions later in the film-- but a high-tech exorcism.

Elizabeth's boyfriend was possessed with the demon seed which he implanted in her womb. She cast the demon out, and enjoyed a remarkably quick recovery-- but the demon then remained to haunt the "house" (Vicker's sumptuous private pod) of the film.

FINALLY...

What needs to be said about the film is that what's being put onscreen isn't Ancient Astronaut Theory per se, but simply directed panspermia, a considerably more respectable theory.

This distinction goes a long way in explaining why the Engineers want to destroy humanity- they want the planet for themselves. That's the message of the film being told onscreen, despite whatever other interpretations you want to draw from the film.

They seeded it with life for their own purposes and the rise of the human race was probably an unfortunate development in the terraforming process. We are basically the Asian carp in their Mississippi River and the xenomorphs are a kind of antibiotic for the infestation.

I know that interpretation doesn't really lend itself to late night contemplation, but I have to credit Lloyd Pye with putting the idea in my head- and quite possibly the makers of Prometheus' heads- in the first place.

by Christopher Loring Knowles

The controversial History Channel series Ancient Aliens seems to be winding down after four seasons (the fourth has been airing on H2). In my opinion, it's been a net positive overall, in that it brought the topic back into the mainstream and irritated the hell out of all the right people.

I can't say every episode was a barnstormer, but that's TV for you. As I've said before, my quest is for unanswered questions and not questionable answers, and on that count the series has given me lots of grist for my mill.

It made an Internet star out of Giorgio Tsoukalos, who cannily drew fire with his outrageous look and milked his notoriety to the hilt. It gave a lot of hard-working researchers like Nick Redfern and Filip Coppens some well-deserved exposure and concentrated on the countles anomalies that skeptics wish would just go the hell away, since the laws of physics make a mockery of the Establishment's science fiction theories of how so many megalithic structures were constructed.

The show did what it needed to do in the modern media environment- establish a narrative and drive it home with constant repetition. Part of this was out of necessity. Ancient Astronaut Theory was catching on in the 70s until the rise to power of the Religious Right brought it to a dead halt, at least outside the pop culture realm. In order to get the conversation going in this day and age, you have to keep it simple and lather, rinse and repeat, ad infinitum.

IN THE CORRIDORS OF POWER

There's no doubt in my mind that some form of AAT is secretly accepted in the corridors of power, even if their errand boys in the pulpits and the Ivory Tower work so hard to keep a lid on it all.

As I've documented here, every major sci-fi franchise is based on the theory, including this summer's entry in the Alien series, Prometheus. Alex Jones recently unleashed a rant on how Prometheus was part of some eugenics program or something, but the Dominionist puppet strings are showing more and more every time that guy opens his mouth.

The fact remains that starting with Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey, AAT has been at the foundation of most of the big sci-fi franchises that the same geeks who sneer at Ancient Aliens spend all their time obsessing over- Battlestar Galactica, Transformers, the DC and Marvel Universes, Star Wars, and on and on and on. We've been over all of that here, but the basic fact bears repeating.

Having spent most of my life in fandom I can tell you there's a major difference in the beliefs and attitudes between the producers and consumers of geek culture, just as there's a major schism in the psyches of much of fandom itself. They'll pledge allegiance to science-- despite the fact that real science (meaning the science that exclusively serves corporate and government power, not the idealized science of their imaginations) is rife with fraud and deceit, but when you present them with the real, physical science that Ancient Aliens has presented, their brains melt down like one of those ST:TOS androids.

But I do have a problem with Ancient Aliens myself, and it's a not-insubstantial one. It's a problem I have with AAT as it's often presented. So much of it seems determined to debunk religion that it over-simplifies the issue.

I do think that paleocontact was a reality and that what every major religious and mythological tradition is telling us is true- that we had help. We had help becoming who we are, we had help from these beings who taught us how to build things and do things and how to learn about our world.

But I don't think human beings were just mindless drones or passive observers and I don't think that's what the ancient myths were trying to tell us either. I think we were far more important than simple slaves and what's more I don't think modern homo sapiens sapiens would be the best an advanced race could do if they simply wanted to engineer a slave race. I believe AAT explains why human beings are so poorly suited to this Biosphere, but the slave theory (nor Darwinism, in my view, since our intellects often make us poor survivors) fails to explain our astonishing potential as thinking creatures.

BORN TO SERVE

I am very grateful that Ancient Aliens put Zechariah Sitchin's theories on the backburner, not only because I am definitely not a Sitchinite, but because I've come to harbor nagging suspicions about the man's work. Richard C. Hoagland told me that he was summoned to Sitchin's office for what was essentially a fishing expedition, and the office in question was located in Rockefeller Center.

I think The 12th Planet was an important work, the others much less so, but I always resented how Sitchin's slave race thesis not only contradicted many of the ancient accounts but seemed to be tailor-made to fit into the right-wing paranoid mindset that latched on it.

Sitchin's work was later adopted by Tore Dahlin, a lawyer who writes under the name William Bramley for his book Gods of Eden. Dahlin's work was compelling and was instantly adopted in turn by Jim Marrs and David Icke for their conspiracy theorizing, though the late Jim Kieth believed it was essentially a Scientology tract in disguise.

But again, what it boiled down to-- and this is where Alex Jones has a point-- was a deep diminishment of human history, a total scapegoating for all of mankind's problems on absent landlords, and an inherent messianic impulse that empowers the elites by disempowering the rest of us.

Indeed, there's always been something profoundly disempowering about Sitchin's exegesis. It almost seems that the elites understood they couldn't keep AAT under wraps forever but they could poison the well and turn it all to their advantage, using the conspiracy underground as their unwitting dupes. Almost.

And I'll say the same about both Sitchin and Ancient Aliens-- I don't think you can just pull out an ancient myth or religious text, plug in aliens and be done with it. I think these stories are all compilations of a sort, and my intepretation of mythology (and the Sumerian texts in particular) is that stories of human kings and queens were jumbled in with paleocontact accounts, animist beliefs that arose when the Anunaki departed and popular fables and so on.

For me the fun of it is trying to figure out which is which, and what part of the story contains the out-of-place references to DNA splicing or what have you.

MEMENTO DEO

It's also my personal belief that many- not all- of the famous landmarks discussed in the AAT canon were built not as spaceports or whatever but as mementos of ancient contact, and were often built on sacred places or power spots intentionally. This would explain the alignments encoded into these structures and all of the rest of it as well.

It goes like this: the ancient spacegods had a longer view of time, knew they would leave one day --and understanding the incredibly violent world that we live on-- knew that there would be rises and falls of human understanding. They knew that once humankind reached a level of scientific understanding (which we have) and wisdom (which we definitely have not) that we'd decipher and understand the messages encoded in these structures.

This is a process we're undergoing now. Ancient Aliens is a step in that process, but we have a long way to go. But I hope we can get back to the more empowering and mysterious approach that we saw in the several films that people like Rod Serling and William Shatner were involved with in the 70s and not the Sitchinite thesis or the "everything automatically means aliens" thesis, either.

I know all the usual logical fallacies trotted out by heart, but you can't say that humans built all of that stuff with rope and logs on one hand and then claim that what they presented as history was all some childish delusion on the other. Just like you can't claim Egyptians could build giant pyramids without heavy equipment and then wave away Ancient Egyptian culture's universal obsession with magic.

I never thought AAT was demeaning to human beings and I don't think we were created to be a passive slave race either. I do think that we have lost something important and vital-- a basic self-knowledge we can't truly prosper without-- in the sands of time. I think our history is more complex than the Heiserites, Sitchinites or Ivory Tower types would dare have us believe.

I think it ultimately speaks to a potential that the people pulling their puppet strings would very much prefer we never realize. And that's the real threat posed by Ancient Astronaut Theory.

by Christopher Knowles

We've looked at Jack Kirby several times in the past here, most notably in his startlingly accurate (if not often allegorical) predictions of the Face on Mars in 1959, 9/11 in 1984, and the Gulf War and Iraq War in 1974 and 1975. There's also a foreshadowing of the plot of 2001: A Space Odyssey, possible Apollo mission footage chicanery, and the suppressed discovery of obelisks on the Moon by American and Russian surveying missions in the mid-60s.

In ancient times, prophecy was used as an acid test, proof that a prophet or priest was in fact in touch with a god. In the Bible, the punishment for a false prophet was death (the entire EvangeliCIAl movement would be instantly leaderless if that directive were still followed today). If a prophecy came true then the prophet or priest (or priestess, certainly) would be trusted to supply information pertaining to theology, morality, cosmology and so on.

In other words, prophecy was a means to establish authority.

At a time when a near-majority of Americans think a talentless professional athlete is a prophet based on beginner's luck and some cute but garden-variety synchronicities, what do we make of Jack Kirby?

Here's what we know-- when Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) was young, he was struck down with scarlet fever. His parents were poor immigrants from Austria and antibiotics were not widely available. As young Jacob lay dying, a group of Kabbalist rabbis were called in to exorcise the demons that were killing the boy. Whether through mystical agency or through Kirby's inborn toughness, he survived.

After making his name in the comics field, Kirby was drafted into the Army. His friends were lucky or connected enough to get posts stateside or working for the Armed Forces newspapers or whatever, but Kirby wasn't. He was sent to Europe, right into the crucible of the killing fields.

When Kirby's commander found out he was a big deal artist in the funny papers, he decided to use him for recon. This meant Jack had to sneak behind enemy lines, sketch the lay of the land then sneak back and explain to his superiors where the Germans were and what they were doing. Kirby was often so close he could smell the Nazis' aftershave.

He was sent home after contracting a case of frostbite so severe his legs were nearly amputated. Kirby spent the rest of his life drawing, usually so lost in his reveries he couldn't drive a car, balance a checkbook, or do much of anything besides create one indelible character after one classic adventure.

He worked at night, in a tiny, windowless corner in the basement of his Long Island home. In the early 70s he moved to Thousand Oaks, CA, where he struck up an unlikely but close bond with neighbor Frank Zappa, 23 years his junior. Sadly, his star went in decline and his audience steadily began to shrink from the early 70s on.

However, he found a new, more appreciative venue for his work-- animation. He worked on series such as The Fantastic Four and Thundarr the Barbarian while helping to establish the independent comics market as a major force in the early 80s.

Now, I'd always assumed that Kirby's AstroGnosticism was a contact high off the psychic turmoil of the Psychedelic Era. I was wrong. I keep finding out that Jack was plugged into a worldview that Charles Fort, John Keel and Jacques Vallee would feel right at home with earlier and earlier in his career.

Which brings us to Sept 1957, or more accurately June 1957, since comics are post-dated three months in advance.

This was the dawn of the Silver Age of Comics but a distinctly fallow period for Kirby. His partnership with Joe Simon had collapsed and his relationship with industry giant DC/National was iffy since his rough-hewn style was seen as out of step with the times (that problem was fixed when art-god Wally Wood teamed with Kirby on Challengers of the Unknown and produced this writer's favorite comics art ever).

Jack took work whereever he could get it and got work doing sci-fi and "mystery" books for Harvey Comics, home of Casper the Friendly Ghost and Hot Stuff. Joe Simon may or may not have had some involvement in the scripting and inking, but the stories are most definitely Kirby's. In June, Jack released two books of particular interest, Alarming Tales #1 and Black Cat Mystic #59.

Alarming Tales contains two stories that prefigure Kirby's major 70s work. One is "The Last Enemy," a clear predecessor to Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, which plays such a major part in the Iraq War/Stargate conundrum. Kirby took a lot of heat for Kamandi in the 70s, with the fan press accusing him of knocking off Planet of the Apes (DC publisher insisted Kirby feature the ruined Statue of Liberty in the first issue), but Kirby not only beat the Planet of the Apes film by 11 years he beat the original Pierre Boulle novel by 7.

Kind of a pattern with Jack.

...MORE HERE...

My history with Ancient Astronaut Theory is by no means a straight path. Being a child of the 70s who devoured whatever weirdo pop culture he could get his mitts on (sci-fi paperback and magazine covers were to me what the Christian icons were to Byzantium), I couldn't avoid AAT since it was everywhere. Especially in comics, with Jack Kirby's various AAT ruminations, Tragg and the Sky-Gods, and so on and so forth.

It was all over the UFO mags I pored over at the newsstand but could rarely afford. The Reaganism and the religious right put a stop to all of it and sent popcult AAT to the Saturday morning TV ghetto.

I picked it up again during my UFO phase, starting around '88 and lasting up until the first season of The X-Files, when I didn't need to go searching used book stores to get a decent fix, it was on my idiot box every Friday night at 9 (well, more or less). Which is not to forget Sightings, which I watched religiously.

But my big obsession throughout the 90s and beyond was esoterica, secret societies, conspiracies, that kind of thing. That all sort of culminated in Our Gods Wear Spandex, as I realized that nearly everything I was reading about in Gnosis or Paranoia had already been explored in the comics I read in the 70s.

AAT reared its head again during the mid-90s, since it was such a central part of books like The Gods of Eden and Rule By Secrecy as well as some of the more wild stuff on USENET and the like, all of which stemmed from the Sitchin material.

But there was something missing for me-- there were pieces of the puzzle I couldn't find and didn't know where to look for them. So not long after this mini-comic was completed I kind of walked away from AAT. So much so that when The X-Files dived into the AAT lagoon in late '99 I already saw it as something in my past.

This blog documents the process in which I began to re-process the AAT exegesis, although staying removed from it (like here) began to realize it was encoded in the symbolism I was obsessing over (like here) and finally where I kind of put all the pieces together, at least the ones I had at my disposal (like here).

This mini-comic (which I only sent to a small circle of friends) documents a time (early 1997) when I was trying to make sense of the theory using my old technique of explaining something to someone else in order to explain it to myself.

It was drawn at a time when I was too busy with advertising and toy packaging to do any comics work but wanted to stay familiar with the tools (crowquill, brush). I still had designs of doing comic work, not realizing that by exploring these kinds of ideas I had already divorced myself entirely from what fandom had become (as opposed to the hippie/weirdo fandom of my childhood).

I was also obsessed with the work of Larry Gonick at the time and the influence is pretty obvious (and would surely horrify him, which I now relish the thought of). There's also more than a little Crumb here as well, since he was a huge influence on the comic-format letters I used to send friends in the days before you could waste all your time with meaningless nonsense on the Internet.

With all that being said, here's the mini in its entirety. Click to enlarge. My chicken scratch lettering is indecipherable otherwise.