Forbidden History – Michael Cremo & the Cover-ups

First, I announce the next non-fiction book project, Counterknowledge : how we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history by Damian Thompson. I should get into that one mid to late November. I just processed it at work the other day, but we only ordered two copies and I’m third on the request list. Considering how long it takes some people to pick up their flipping holds from the library, and how often people keep their books past due, it’s hard to gauge when I’ll have it in my hands again. I’m not the sort to Priority One myself just so I can have a good book before everyone else, but sometimes it’s tempting. Now back to your irregularly scheduled blogpost…

Michael Cremo gets a nod in J. Douglas Kenyon’s Forbidden History in Chapter 3 (pgs 22-29). His claim to fame, (at least in terms of Atlantis Rising, the publication Kenyon edits) appears to be his theory that academic scientists have “cooked the books” in a cover-up oven. What comes out looks and smells authentic but underneath? It’s only the eyeballs and entrails of something else, something that died for a lie. I guess this means they have to serve it up with one hell of a dinner theatre so everybody looks toward the show instead of their plates.

The article first drops us on a dig in Mexico, 1966, and a geologist named Virginia Steen-McIntyre. Her team’s attempts to date some findings led to radically different results than what was expected for the area. Stone tools should have dated around 20,000 years old but that’s not the number they got. Four different dating methods and they still wound up with a number in the area of 250,000 years. So, what should have influenced the major thinking for the time turned into a media shit storm for Steen-McIntyre instead. She was publicly disgraced and officially washed up in her field.

Cremo’s also interested in stories from gold mines during the California gold rush and their excavations of ancient tools and fossils. Dating them meant figuring out how far down they were found and state geologist J. D. Whitney wrote up extensive reports authenticating dates between nine and fifty-nine million years old. Apparently that aspect of his work has been largely ignored or contested. The Calaveras Skull, for example, was declared a hoax. He’s also known for the controversy of Yosemite Valley. Whitney felt it had to be created by a cataclysmic sinking of the earth. John Muir said it was done by glaciers. Guess which theory made it to geology text books. Whitney did get a mountain named after him, though, and the development of Yosemite into a national park was his idea.

The article next moves into debates about findings in South Africa – “hundreds of small metallic spheres with encircling parallel grooves. Thus far, the scientific community has failed to take note.” (p.23) There’s a picture of a sphere on this site that looks like the Death Star. But I’m sure that’s merely a coincidence and not proof that Star Wars really happened a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. I doubt that aliens in or on Saturn’s moon, Iapetus, have anything to do with their existence either. (I’ve mentioned this moon before.) But, the spheres are still something of a curiosity. As far as Cremo and his associate, Richard Thompson, are concerned, this “failure to take note” indicates a “massive cover-up.” Cremo and Thompson include a lot of evidence to prove it in their book Forbidden Archeology. I have no plans to seek out their book and see what’s all in there, but call it extra-credit if you want to do so.

Here’s what I don’t get with all this — what motive would drive people to lie about the age of humanity? That’s something that would be useful to know, and not just because it would add a few nails to the Y.E.C coffin. It’s not like scientific thought hasn’t been wrong about things before. There have been different theories in a lot of fields and as evidence mounts that supports one over the other, the best supported becomes the leader, right? So why haven’t Cremo and company been supported? Is there not enough evidence for their side, or are they just not liked? What fuels the science bus, proof, or politics?

For Cremo, it comes down to the fact that scientific discovery is not only dominated by the elite, but those who have the money and power to keep them elite. Those who might be right about ancient civilizations, cataclysmic world floods, alien assistance, ESP, or paranormal phenomena get brushed aside. “Real science” refuses to acknowledge the possibilities and continues and will continue to relegate all of that into the mythological junk drawer.

On the subject of myth for next time – Atlantis. Did Plato make it all up, or was he reporting on a real event we’ve never been able to corroborate?