But that was hardly all Night Gallery gave us. It also helped inspire the claim that the world would end in 2012 because the Maya said so. Or, rather, 2011, following an incorrect date first proposed by the Mayanist Michael C. Coe in 1966, misinterpreting the Maya calendar. Coe thought the Maya calendar similar to the cyclical time of Hinduism, and he speculated that the end of the calendar cycle would have been viewed like the end of the Hindu kalpas, when the world was destroyed and reborn.
Coe’s incorrect 2011 date was later corrected to 2012, but not before it showed up in Alan Landsburg’s ancient astronaut film The Outer Space Connection (1975) and its accompanying book. In the documentary, narrator Rod Serling informs viewers that ancient astronauts will return to earth on December 24, 2011, the date predicted by the Mayan calendar:
An inscription tells us that the modern period will end December 24, 2011 A.D. We may presume that they [the aliens] were computing the length of a space voyage and marking the exact date of return. They may return to seek the fate of the colony left on earth. Perhaps at Uxmal they will find answers we have never been able to divine.
As In Search of Ancient Astronauts had done for the ancient astronaut hypothesis, Landsburg’s Outer Space Connection helped spread fictitious Mayan Apocalypse beliefs beyond the New Age fringe since the film, like its predecessor, was broadcast on NBC to an audience comprising around a third of all TV viewers. The result would be a florescence of 2012 beliefs in the late 1970s, lasting down to the inevitable disappointment that followed the failure of the apocalyptic predictions at the end of 2012.
It continues to amaze me how a single writer, making a single claim, can set off a chain reaction that echoes down the ages as later writers repeat, expand, and misunderstand the original. Here Coe is at fault, but his scholarly speculation would have been forgotten if Landsburg hadn’t been casting about for new material to make a sequel to his adaptation of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, which was itself a success because of Rod Serling, who only narrated the film due to the disaster that was NBC’s and Universal’s treatment of his Night Gallery, leading to its untimely cancellation despite strong ratings. So, thanks to the failure of Night Gallery we not only got ancient astronauts and eventually Ancient Aliens but also the 2012 apocalypse myth. Truly, this was the most consequential series cancellations of its time. It’s the law of unintended consequences at work. I for one think we’d have all been better off with more Night Gallery and much less apocalypse and aliens.
7. The Green Children of Banjos
I did not remember the story of the “green children” of Banjos, Spain until I read about them in Jacques Bergier’s Extraterrestrial Visitations (see Chapter 3), but a quick Google search finds that these mysterious beings are apparently a mainstay of the alternative history and mystery-mongering genres. They appear in The Big Book of Mysteries by Lionel and Patricia Fanthope (2010), Charles Berlitz’s World of the Incredible but True (1992), Colin Wilson’s Enigmas and Mysteries (1976), and John Macklin’s Strange Destinies (1965). The story concerns the appearance of two children, green in color, who were found near the village of Banjos in Catalonia in 1887 speaking a strange tongue and refusing to eat anything but beans.
They also appear in Karl Shuker’s The Unexplained (1996), a book I read when I was fifteen, so I must have read the story and promptly cared nothing for it, probably because Shuker provides a correct (though incomplete) solution to the mystery—one we will get to anon. It is, I suppose, a testament to the stupidity of this story that it left no impression on me.
“There is only one, well established case of a green child,” Bergier wrote, referring to the 1887 incident. This, though, is not even close to true. Rather than belabor the point, here’s the reason it isn’t true. It’s a point-for-point duplicate of a medieval legend of the Green Children of Woolpit recorded by Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh:
BANJOS CHILDREN
Location: Non-existent Spanish Village
Date: 1887
Number of children: 2, a boy and a girl
The children were found in a cave by farmers at harvest time
The children spoke a language that was not Spanish
The children wore metallic clothes
The children were taken to the house of mayor Ricardo de Calno
The children refused all food except beans
The color of their skin gradually became white
The boy sickened and died
The girl stated that they came from a land of perpetual twilight
The girl stated that they had heard a loud noise and were pushed through a portal to Spain
The girl died five years later
WOOLPIT CHILDREN
Location: Woolpit, Suffolk
Date: before 1188
Number of children: 2, a boy and a girl
The children appeared in the village at harvest time
The children spoke a language that was not English
The children wore unusual clothes
The children were taken to the house of nobleman Richard de Calne
The children refused all food except beans
The color of their skin gradually became white
The boy sickened and died
The girl stated that they came from a green land of perpetual twilight
The girl stated that they had heard bells and fell into a trance before arriving in England
The girl became a servant and a slut, but eventually married and lived a long life
The Banjos story appears first in Macklin’s Strange Destinies, but not only is it inspired by the Woolpit story, it is a very close paraphrase of Thomas Keightley’s version from The Fairy Mythology (1850), with the geographic details changed. Here’s Keightley’s version:
“Another wonderful thing,” says Ralph of Coggeshall, “happened in Suffolk, at St. Mary's of the Wolf-pits. A boy and his sister were found by the inhabitants of that place near the mouth of a pit which is there, who had the form of all their limbs like to those of other men, but they differed in the colour of their skin from all the people of our habitable world; for the whole surface of their skin was tinged of a green colour. No one could understand their speech. When they were brought as curiosities to the house of a certain knight, Sir Richard de Caine, at Wikes, they wept bitterly. Bread and other victuals were set before them, but they would touch none of them, though they were tormented by great hunger, as the girl afterwards acknowledged. At length, when some beans just cut, with their stalks, were brought into the house, they made signs, with great avidity, that they should be given to them. When they were brought, they opened the stalks instead of the pods, thinking the beans were in the hollow of them; but not finding them there, they began to weep anew. When those who were present saw this, they opened the pods, and showed them the naked beans. They fed on these with great delight, and for a long time tasted no other food. The boy, however, was always languid and depressed, and he died within a short time. The girl enjoyed continual good health; and becoming accustomed to various kinds of food, lost completely that green colour, and gradually recovered the sanguine habit of her entire body. She was afterwards regenerated by the layer of holy baptism, and lived for many years in the service of that knight (as I have frequently heard from him and his family), and was rather loose and wanton in her conduct. Being frequently asked about the people of her country, she asserted that the inhabitants, and all they had in that country, were of a green colour; and that they saw no sun, but enjoyed a degree of light like what is after sunset. Being asked how she came into this country with the aforesaid boy, she replied, that as they were following their flocks, they came to a certain cavern, on entering which they heard a delightful sound of bells; ravished by whose sweetness, they went for a long time wandering on through the cavern, until they came to its mouth. When they came out of it, they were struck senseless by the excessive light of the sun, and the unusual temperature of the air; and they thus lay for a long time.
Being terrified by the noise of those who came on them, they wished to fly, but they could not find the entrance of the cavern before they were caught.”
This story is also told by William of Newbridge,[67] who places it in the reign of King Stephen. He says he long hesitated to believe it, but he was at length overcome by the weight of evidence. According to him, the place where the children appeared was about four or five miles from Bury St. Edmund's: they came in harvest-time out of the Wolf-pits; they both lost their green hue, and were baptised, and learned English. The boy, who was the younger, died; but the girl married a man at Lenna, and lived many years. They said their country was called St. Martin's Land, as that saint was chiefly worshiped there; that the people were Christians, and had churches; that the sun did not rise there, but that there was a bright country which could be seen from theirs, being divided from it by a very broad river.[68]
Note that Keightley writes that “when some beans just cut, with their stalks, were brought into the house, they [the children] made signs, with great avidity, that they should be given to them.” Macklin writes that “beans cut or torn from stalks were brought into the house, and they [the children] fell on them with great avidity.” Garth Haslam discussed this on an older version of his Anomaly Info site, which has unfortunately been taken offline.
The long and short of it is that the evidence shows that Macklin fabricated the 1887 encounter from a medieval fairy story, and later authors simply repeated him point for point without bothering to check the source. (It is possible that Macklin merely copied from another hoaxer, but no earlier version of the Banjos story has emerged.) Ridiculously, when some alternative writers discovered the earlier medieval version, they then concluded that the Macklin account must be true because the aliens were repeatedly testing humanity! Suffice it to say that there are no records of any children being found in Catalonia in 1887, or for the existence of Banjos at all.
It does, however, make me wonder what Jacques Bergier thought “well established” means.
8. Getting It Wrong: When Myths and Legends Lie
According to ancient astronaut pundits, we are supposed to believe that ancient myths and legends are literal records of extraterrestrial intervention, while alternative historians argue that these same myths and legends instead record the intervention in the human past of an advanced, lost civilization on the order of Atlantis. Both groups, of course, selectively interpret myths and legends to support their preconceived points of view.
But what does it really mean to say that we must take myths and legends literally? Let’s look at a few and then compare them to the stories these speculators won’t tell you about.
Before his death in 2012, Philip Coppens of Ancient Aliens made the case that we should take as evidence of extraterrestrial dispensation the Famine Stela, a Ptolemaic-era monument recording a dream supposedly experienced by the architect Imhotep two millennia earlier, in which a god tells Imhotep that he (the god) will give Egypt rocks aplenty. This, Coppens said, is proof of the alien origins of architecture. We are also told by Erich von Däniken and others that the Book of Ezekiel is a literal record of the descent of a flying saucer in Biblical times. Ancient Aliens star Giorgio Tsoukalos tells us that a fourteenth-century Arab text’s description of the supernatural inspiration for Egypt’s Great Pyramid five thousand years earlier is proof of an extraterrestrial master-plan (see Chapter 30).
On the other hand, Atlantis theorists from Ignatius Donnelly on down inform us that Plato’s Timaeus and Critias are to be taken as history, not allegory, and followed to the letter to find Atlantis, except where such literalism interferes with the selective changes they wish to induce to fit Atlantis to their pet theory. Fingerprints of the Gods author Graham Hancock tells us that pre-Columbian legends of savior gods are to be taken as literal records of the lost white race of Atlantis visiting the Americas (whereas ancient astronaut writers prefer to see them as aliens, and earlier Christian missionaries as wandering European saints or the devil in disguise).
While no two theorists agree on exactly what such myths mean, all agree on one thing: ancient people are not capable of making things up, or reporting false information. Their stories are derived from real life and are therefore a reliable guide to the past.
So what do these theorists make of the following stories?
- The Roman walls of southern Germany were believed down to the twentieth century to have been built by the Devil.
- Roman amphitheaters of southern France and Toledo were for many centuries called “palais de Gallienne,” after Galiana, the (fictional) Moorish wife of Charlemagne, who they falsely believe built or lived in them.
- “Caesar’s Camp” in Sussex was traditionally described as a Roman fortress but proved to have been built by the Normans.
These tales misattribute known constructions to wrong builders. But, you may say, so what? This is Roman material, so it isn’t relevant. Let’s have a few more.
- The Bolewa of Nigeria have a tradition that their chief’s sacred sword was carried from Yemen many centuries ago and is therefore extremely valuable. Upon examination, it proved to have been made in Prussia only a few decades before.
- The Arabs of the Sudan, prior to the colonial era, claimed that their chain armor had been captured from the Crusaders and brought by the Arabs from the Holy Land. In fact, was imported from Germany in the late 1700s.
- The Arabs of Jordan had a tradition ascribing the Treasury building at Petra (the one seen in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) to Pharaoh from the Bible, even though Petra’s buildings are obviously later than dynastic Egypt.
Pshaw! Arabs. Not relevant to aliens or Atlantis, despite Jacques Bergier’s claim that the Qur’an’s story of Iram of the Pillars was an extraterrestrial act of explosive destruction.
Fine, let’s have some more, and this time let’s include both prehistory and supernatural power, ancient alien writers’ favorite themes:
- Prehistoric African stone works of known medieval construction are still ascribed to the work of spirits or demons in folk traditions.
- The dolmens of France and Britain, known by archaeological findings to be the tombs of Bronze Age notables, were believed down to the twentieth century to have been built by fairies.
- The hill forts of Ireland were down to the middle twentieth century popularly held by tradition to be the work of the Danes, despite actually being prehistoric in origin.
Stonehenge, a late Neolithic/early Bronze Age construction, was routinely ascribed to the magic powers of Arthur’s wizard Merlin down to the early modern period.
(All of the above examples, excepting Stonehenge, are drawn from Lord Raglan’s The Hero, wherein he provides full citations for each.[69])
So, I ask ancient alien speculators and lost civilization hypothesizers this: If these folktales, myths, legends, and traditions proved wrong in the face of known historical facts, what warrant do we have for assuming that your selections from myth, legend, and tradition are true? If you do not believe the fairies built the British dolmens, or Charlemagne’s wife built Roman amphitheaters, how can we trust a medieval Arab writer that the pyramids were inspired by sky beings, or a Ptolemaic stela that an Egyptian god bequeathed the rocks used to build the first pyramid? In short, why do you get to pick and choose what the rest of us should accept as true, and based on what objective criteria?
9. The Greek Mythic Memory
In the previous chapter, I looked at some of the ways folklore, mythology, legends, and traditions have gotten the facts wrong and asked the question of how we can therefore trust that alternative history writers’ selections are somehow unquestionably true. Today I’d like to continue by examining the work of Sir John Boardman, a retired Oxford professor of Classical archaeology. His 2002 book The Archaeology of Nostalgia[70] explains clearly how the ancient Greeks used the shards left over from the preceding Mycenaean civilization to fabricate an ancient past that never was.
First a few facts: The
Mycenaeans were a Greek-speaking civilization that flourished from roughly 1600 to 1200 BCE. The civilization collapsed, and four hundred years known as the Greek Dark Ages followed. During this period, there was no writing, populations migrated, whole cities vanished or were transformed, and even the gods themselves emerged in new forms. For example, Drimios, the son of Zeus, vanished from the pantheon; Paean, the god of healing, merged with Apollo; and Zeus superseded Poseidon as the most honored of the gods. The exact degree of continuity and change between Mycenaean and Homeric Greece is open to dispute and is one of the most fascinating questions in Greek religion.
Boardman explains that the Greeks did not retain a historical memory of the Mycenaeans in the sense that we would consider history. Nevertheless, they saw around them the ruined cities of the Mycenaeans, whom they considered the Heroes, the men of old, the men of renown. [Note to the literarily impaired: Yes, I am making a Biblical allusion.] They found their artifacts, especially their bronze weapons, armor, and implements.
(In the next chapter, we’ll look at how alternative authors’ efforts to take Greek myth literally result in the actual destruction of historical knowledge, and I’ll discuss the mythic association of specific places with legendary heroes who could not possibly have lived there.)
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