Bunkum & Bullsh*t - Peter Kolosimo, Ancient Aliens, QAnon and the Ur-Conspiracy
When I first embarked upon “Bunkum & Bullshit” - a series looking at con artists, cranks, showmen and bullshit through history - I thought it would be a fun romp, a dizzying journey through some the lives, times, and ideas of a few ambitious liars, hoaxers and fools. In a lot of ways, it still is. But writing about some of this - about lies, bad science, and outright hoaxes - cannot be separated from the world we live in, placed into a little box labelled “daft stories from history”. As I write this paragraph, the BBC are reporting that the winner of the Sony World Photography Award has turned down the prize after revealing that their “photograph” was in fact an AI-generated image. It’s convincing - certainly more so than the majority of AI images out there - but still resides in the uncanny valley, the tell-tale bad hands perhaps the most glaring giveaway.
Whenever I sit down to write about lies, hoaxes and misinformation of the past, there is no temptation to scoff at the gullibility of our ancestors, or to take pride in how we would never fall for such obvious parlour tricks as those peddled at Spiritualist seances in the early years of the 20th Century, or by later “psychics” like Uri Gellar. Or how we’re intelligent, rational people, we wouldn’t listen to Orson Welles on the radio and believe we were being invaded by Martians. There’s a phrase I use in my forthcoming book, about how people have a deep-seated connection to tall stories, hoaxes, and bullshit, we love being fooled, but the one thing we love more is believing ourselves to be uniquely cognizant of the fooling. That’s why dime museum exhibits like P.T. Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid, or the Jersey Devil, drew crowds - not because everyone believed them to be real, but because they believed that the person next to them believed it to be real, while they had the opportunity to feel smugly superior, and above the whole thing. Either way, you’re still lining the same pockets.
There’s a third stage of realisation, beyond the smug sense of superiority, that I sometimes feel when reading or writing about con-men, conspiracies and lies - the realisation that, one way or another, we’re all part of the same game. By even talking about this, I’m just playing into the hands of Big Bullshit. Am I as much a mark or a rube as anyone else?
It’s impossible to look with rational eyes on victims of past hoaxes, and believers of past lies, and see anything other than a mirror. These are the same people who, transplanted into 2023, would repeat a half-remembered fact in the pub or share a post on Facebook without checking its veracity, because it told them something about the world that they instinctively felt to be true. They are the people who believed an outlandish story about a politician or celebrity they dislike, because, well, they would do that, wouldn’t they? They are the people who, harmlessly enough, accepted that photos of the Pope in a white puffer jacket were the real deal. We’ve all fallen for it. We all believe countless untruths every single day of our lives.
—————————————————————————-
The germ of what is now Bunkum & Bullshit actually started a little over ten years ago, as an attempt at a podcast that we tentatively titled “The Moon Is A Crystal Spaceship” - insane ideas about the artificiality of the Moon having apparently been a lingering preoccupation - in which my co-host and I would catalogue, and mostly ridicule, some of the stranger claims from the internet’s weirder, darker corners; faux-news sites, conspiracy message boards, and incomprehensible personal websites dedicated to the obsessive cataloguing of anonymous individuals’ pet theories. In that far-off time of 2012-13, the nascent conspirasphere’s particular obsessions were Mayan predictions of the supposed coming apocalypse of 2012, Smithsonian conspiracies to cover up evidence of giant humans in the Earth’s ancient past, and the mysterious “Planet X”, or Nibiru. That there were undercurrents of racism, antisemitism, Christian fundamentalism and a misguided anti-elitism to many of these, and countless other, theories was always evident, but somehow it felt like something that can be put to one side as we laughed about the more outré arguments. These devotees of Zecharia Sitchin and propagators of long-discredited Victorian pseudoscience, operating in the backwaters of the internet, felt a million miles away from any real world consequence.
We abandoned the whole “The Moon Is A Crystal Spaceship” project, though, when real life became inescapable. In April 2013, I watched as the “news” websites we’d been pulling stories from, the message boards of David Icke’s forum, and the dregs of social media, responded to the horrific events of the Boston Marathon Bombing. While not as high profile as the obscene and indefensible claims made by the likes of Alex Jones about the Sandy Hook school shooting, the bombing was met with a predictable array of responses. Conspiracy theorists claimed, with their usual dubious reasoning, that the attack was a “false flag” or an inside job, or else they pointed the finger at the entire religion of Islam. Armchair detectives - those who would grow into the kind of True Crime podcast obsessives whose distorted view of criminal investigations risks seriously impacting on cases like the death of Nicola Bulley - pored over every detail of CCTV footage, circling anyone they felt looked suspicious and accusing them of complicity; and, more often than not, all that was required to qualify as “suspicious” was brown skin and a backpack. One such “suspect”, 22 year old Sunil Tripathi, may have been hounded to suicide by the allegations.
It was impossible to keep up the pretence that conspiracy theory - and all of the other world-views that correlate to it, whether armchair detective work, pseudo-history, pseudo-science or medical quackery - was just harmless fun when watching all of this unfold. These were people who didn’t just indulge in a few weird ideas, they inhabited an entirely different reality, where nothing happened without a reason, where there was no such thing as coincidence, and where there were shadowy villains lurking behind every corner, pulling the strings behind every world event. These were people who, when confronted with tragic events unfolding in the real world, responded not with sympathy, understanding, or by seeking the knowledge of experts close to the situation, but by perverting the facts to fit their own constructed view of the world. It is the same mindset that leads people to harass the parents or murdered children, to deny atrocities, or to risk undermining criminal investigations. This wasn’t the subject matter of lukewarm comedy podcast banter.
—————————————————————————-
Conspiracy is at least as old as the written word. For as long as there has been an “official account” of world events, there have been dissenting voices, of varying degrees of accuracy. The mistake we made with “The Moon is A Crystal Spaceship” was to assume that conspiracies and “alternative” views of the historical record were relatively self-contained, and largely laughable, rhetorical exercises - the domain of fringe theorists, and lone nutjobs on the internet, at a remove from the real world.
In reality, conspiracy theories are often born of moneyed interests and from positions of power, not from the archetypal slack-jawed yokel who believes that they were abducted by aliens. Conspiracy as a means to garner public support - or weaponise the public against a political opponent - has a long and ignominious history, and the antisemitic and anti-Masonic conspiracies that coloured the politics of the nineteenth century find their ugly echoes resonating through almost every conspiracy of the modern era, magnified through the paranoia of the Cold War years, and the mass propagation of information that came with the social media age.
The most prominent conspiracy of our time is QAnon. To those who never experienced the often head-spinning arguments of the conspiracist fringe, its dizzying array of claims appear to have emerged incomprehensibly out of thin air. To those who have been down amongst the muck, it’s an awkward amalgamation of long-standing conspiracies - the “Clinton Death Counts” of 1990s chain emails meets the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and the antisemitic blood libel myth is dressed up for the TikTok generation as “Pizzagate”. Sprinkle in some JFK assassination memes, every right-wing mass panic of the last two decades, a few dog-whistles seeping in from the white supremacist set, and the bizarre claims of body doubles and human cloning that always lurk somewhere on the outskirts of the conspirasphere, and heat to taste, with just a dash of Gamergate harassment. While it’s unlikely that anybody could have predicted that the movement would have coalesced around a figure like Donald Trump, it should have been depressingly predictable that this world-view would have been allowed to fester and mutate into something uncontrollable. While many on the mainstream looked to QAnon, and to the events of January 6th, and had to ask themselves how it happened, and where these people came from, many of us already knew, and had a different moment of realisation - fuck, we should have been taking these people seriously. Instead, we laughed.
—————————————————————————-
The sine qua non of every conspiracy theory is a distrust in mainstream arbiters of truth and reality. A distrust of government and establishment media narratives can be healthy and sensible - it is always worth looking at any account of events and asking yourself three simple questions, “why are they telling me this? What aren’t they telling me? Who benefits from me believing this?” - but a blanket rejection of all accepted truth, and an eagerness to accept anything that offers an alternative explanation is a path to madness.
That essential quality of distrust and paradoxical trust is why I equate modern day conspiracies with pseudohistory and pseudoscience; why a belief that Alien intervention influenced the development of Ancient Egypt is analogous to an unfounded rejection of election results. Both involve the outright rejection of observable reality, and the accumulated knowledge of experts, in favour of unsupported arguments to the contrary. Both are part of a broader world-view - the accounts I saw on Facebook praising Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse, on the grounds that it “showed how much they don’t want us to know” were the same who argued against vaccinating their children against COVID-19.
It’s the lot of the critic of conspiracy theories to find themselves looking like the biggest conspiracy theorist of all - drawing a mess of connecting lines that explain the rise of Donald Trump through digressions into the 1988 and 2007 Hollywood Writers’ Strikes, the machinations of Cambridge Analytica, and the accumulated damage done to intellectual discourse by the likes of the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens. But while even the most convoluted of conspiracy theories ultimately relies on a linearity of logic - that X occurred because of Y - real life is messier, and every event, conspiratorial or otherwise, has a thousand parents.
Today, I intend to look at one of those parents, the origins of the Ancient Astronaut theory that eventually birthed Ancient Aliens, and that I hold to be the patient zero of that particular trend of modern pseudohistory and the anti-intellectualism that underpins the current political moment. To do so, I will be looking at one book - Peter Kolosimo’s Not Of This World.
—————————————————————————-
The “Ancient Astronaut” theory - essentially, that ancient architecture and mythology contains evidence that the Earth was visited by extra-terrestrials in our distance past, and in most iterations of the “theory” those intergalactic visitors are given credit for directly shaping the development of ancient civilisations - was popularised by the Swiss hotelier, embezzler and author Erich Von Daniken, in his hugely influential 1969 best-seller Chariots Of The Gods?, but it has its antecedents among other writers in the preceding years, and Peter Kolosimo is one of that regretful number, little remembered today.
As with Who Built The Moon?, I stumbled on a copy of Kolisomo’s Not Of This World in my local bookshop, amid a pile of 1960s and ‘70s pulp sci-fi novels. Originally released in Italian, Not Of This World was published the same year as Von Daniken’s magnum opus, but was the fourth of Kolosimo’s works on either pseudohistorical claims about ancient civilisations, or UFOs, and would not be his last.
Kolosimo himself was an Italian journalist, occasional novelist, and a hard-line Communist in the Stalinist tradition; while writing sci-fi novels under a series of pseudonyms, he was foreign correspondent for the Italian Communist Party’s official newspaper, and was fired from his job at a Slovenian radio station for siding with the USSR over the newly independent Yugoslavia. During World War 2, as a staunch anti-fascist student, he apparently joined the ÚVOD resistance movement in Bohemia. Here, clearly, was a man of deeply held ideological principles.
That’s the man, but what of his work? Much of Kolosimo’s early “non-fiction” writing treads familiar ground for anyone accustomed to the claims of pseudohistory - he argues for continuity between civilisations separated by thousands of miles of ocean and hundreds of years of history, draws connections between architectural and artistic achievements across the world, and plays fast and loose with comparative mythology, while overstating the “mysterious” nature of some dusty old favourites - the statues of Easter Island, the magical geometry of the Great Pyramid, and the (largely fictitious) disappearances of the Bermuda Triangle.
By 1968, when writing Not Of This World, Kolosimo’s writing had come to explore not only the spurious connections between ancient peoples, but the growing global obsession with UFOs - of all Forteana and “unexplained phenomena”, UFO sightings in and of themselves are an area I’ve found particularly difficult to care about, or to be convinced by, but suffice to say that for all of pseudohistorians’ efforts to paint them into the pages of history, the idea that unidentified aerial phenomena were manned craft from other worlds was born of a particular series of historical moments, chiefly the massive uptick in manned flight following the Second World War, a surge in pop culture depictions of outer space as the Space Race began in earnest, and the Cold War secrecy around experimental aircraft on either side of the Iron Curtain.
While Kolosimo is quick to dismiss much of contemporary discourse around UFOs, particularly the American Christian UFO cults and the increasingly convoluted and unbelievable claims of 1950s Ufologist George Adamski (a future candidate for this blog, for sure), he finds in the idea of extra-terrestrial contact the glue by which to hold together the otherwise paper-thin claims that had otherwise been his stock in trade. As countless “theorists” and Ancient Aliens believers would do after him, Kolosimo invents the Aliens of the Gaps, a deus ex machina to explain away every discrepancy or unanswered question he encounters.
Perhaps, then, we should look at some of those claims.
—————————————————————————-
Much of Kolosimov’s argument follows the two simple lines common to almost all Ancient Astronaut beliefs - “looks like, so is”, and “unexplained, so aliens”. He cherry-picks evidence from the mythology of India, China, Egypt, the people of Yakutsk, Native Americans, and everything in-between, and finds in every depiction of Gods coming from the sky evidence of aliens descending from space. Every depiction of a flying chariot, a giant bird, a jet of air, or any flying object, is a UFO described by people who simply lacked the language to accurately describe what they saw. Any myth depicting a human being born of an egg is a coded description of stepping out of a UFO. He sees aliens and spacesuits in any artwork showing humans with headgear, unusual features, or any artistic license. He takes literally mythological depictions of human/animal hybrids, and interprets them as aliens. In every scene of fire, destruction and devastation, he sees an ancient atomic bomb - a justified anxiety, admittedly, at the height of the Cold War. Core to all pseudohistory is the implicit assumption that our ancestors were not capable of imagination or creativity, only of dully describing what they saw before them.
So it goes, too, with magical items and artefacts of myth. Invisibility cloaks, ever-renewing sources of food, and weapons that never break, are evidence of advanced alien technology, rather than a very simple act of creativity - it requires little in the way of imagination to either invert or exaggerate the properties of a mundane object; a cup that never drains, a chariot that flies, a sword that never breaks, these are the bedrock on which myth and allegory are built, and to believe them to be literally true would be tantamount to setting out to locate the actual geographic location of Jack’s beanstalk and the goose that laid golden eggs.
It is an unfortunate truth that it’s not only the purveyors of pseudohistorical crankery that assume a complete lack of imagination or creative impulse in our forebears, though. Archaeologists and professional sceptics and debunkers are quick to make suggestions that the idea of the Cyclops was born from the discovery of mammoth or elephant skulls, or that Jason’s Golden Fleece was really a sheepskin used to collect gold in a nearby stream - God(s) forbid that we permit the people of the past an ounce of creative license or metaphor. No artistry, only dull truth is allowed.
The ugly truth of Kolosimo’s arguments, and far from unique to his work, is that he doesn’t end at the suggestion that ancient civilisations were guided and in some ways controlled by intervention from without - already a problematic conceit, reliant as it is on the assumption that “primitive” peoples, invariably non-white and non-European, were incapable of great achievements on their own. No, Kolosimo finds in myth and folklore dubious evidence of the whiteness of these benevolent alien interferers - he misrepresents or invents myth from non-white cultures across the globe of advanced white civilisations handing them the key to their development, their technology, and their greatest achievements. It is a claim with a long and ugly tradition - before they were aliens, these magical white saviours were often imagined as coming from Atlantis, or some other lost, advanced civilisation - and explicitly robs non-white peoples of their history and their agency, and it is this racist rhetoric that underpins all pseudohistory that aims to deny the people of Egypt, of South America, or of Rapa Nui, of their past and their achievements. At one point, paraphrasing W. Raymond Drake, Kolosimo asks, “could an illiterate Chinese of olden times imagine a dragon or have sufficient awareness of the idea to inspire him in art and religion?”.
It is an exercise in white supremacy, born of colonialist writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, and still espoused by talking heads on the History channel and on Netflix “documentary” series to this day.
—————————————————————————-
Much of the book, when not presenting dubious interpretations of ancient myth, is spent rattling through historical “mysteries” of equally dubious provenance. That includes an outright rejection that the statues on Easter Island could have been erected with just wood and ropes (a “mystery” that was long overstated, but in the decades since Kolosimo’s writing has been pretty comprehensively solved), an extensive discussion on the disappearance of the crew of the Mary Celeste, in which (common to many writers in the genre of “unsolved mysteries”) Kolosimo confuses Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictitious account of the ship’s fate with reality, coins found in America that allegedly originated in Atlantis, the already tired claim that giant skeletons had been discovered in America and were hidden by the authorities, and claims of prehistoric bison skulls found with perfectly circular holes in them that could only have been caused by a modern bullet.
That last point can still be found all over the more credulous corners of the internet to this day, and is a favourite of Ancient Aliens regular David Hatcher Childress. The skull in question resides in a museum in Moscow, and photos of it are credited to Sputnik. In a video I’ve not been able to source, seemingly taken from a documentary around the 1970s/80s that was circulating on TikTok earlier this year, Russian philologist Vyacheslav Zaitsev is consulted about the skull - Zaitsev’s usual claims were of ancient flying machines described in Hindu texts, but it wasn’t surprising to see him trotted out in defence of this “evidence”. Kolosimo’s own source is Konstantin Flyorov, described as a palaeontologist, though better known as a paleoartist (that is to say, he painted some pretty great pictures of dinosaurs) - though, with a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand, Kolosimo actually credits claims that the only possible explanation for the “bullet hole” in a skull that predates the invention of gunpowder was “explorers from space” only to unnamed “colleagues” of Flyorov’s. Unsurprisingly, these claims are not referenced.
Indeed, very little of this book is referenced or sourced, and what is referenced is suspicious in the extreme. It can be difficult to tell at times whether the errors are Kolosimo’s own, whether they are intentional efforts to obfuscate and confuse, or whether they are the fault of clumsy translation - many passages that are sourced are all but impossible to cross-reference, because titles and whole passages of books have been translated back into English from Kolosimo’s initial Italian translation, rather than seeking out the original text; this is obvious in cases where I’m familiar with the source material, and incomprehensible where I am not.
Where sources are named, it’s an absolute rogue’s gallery of unreliable narrators. It includes (deep breath) the phony Tibetan T. Lobsang Rama (real name: Cyril Henry Hoskin, from Plympton. Another I hope to cover in greater detail in the future), George Hunt Williamson, an occultist and Theosophist who attempted to contact UFOs via Ouija board, Richard Shaver, a sci-fi comic book artist who came to believe his tales of ancient civilisation, Hollow Earth and ritualistic abuse were literally true, and who was likely a paranoid schizophrenic exploited and taken advantage of by unscrupulous editors, James Churchward, a racist Theosophist who posited the existence of the ancient lost continent of Mu, Georges Barbarin, a peddler of pyramid “mysteries”, Harold T. Wilkins, a serial plagiarist and crank without equal who believed in, and wrote on, UFOs, Mu, Atlantis, White Gods and the mystery of the Mary Celeste…and so on. You get the picture.
Not only that, but many of the “experts” cited are referred to with innocuous or convincing-sounding descriptions that bely their unreliability - Robert Charroux, referred to simply as a “Frenchman”, was in fact one of the progenitors of Ancient Astronaut theory, and was plagiarised heavily enough by Erich Von Daniken as to earn himself a credit in subsequent reprints of Chariots Of The Gods?. Charroux took the mantle laid down by French authors Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in their The Morning Of The Magicians - a collection of occult, new age and sci-fi ideas that inspired much of the subsequent wave of pseudohistory and conspiracy thinking, but which the authors always remained coy about whether they actually believed in any of it, or simply intended it as an intellectual exercise - and not only furthered the idea of alien intervention in Earth’s distant past, but became perhaps the first to tie that idea explicitly to esoteric racism, describing how the “Nordic” race were the direct descendent of alien forebears, and all other human races were deviations and degenerations from that white, blonde and blue-eyed ideal. A full list would be exhaustive, but among the “experts” trotted out with no reference to their background or (lack of) credibility are a British peer who argued that the Garden of Eden was on Mars, and Jimmy Goddard, an advocate of two peculiarly 1960s phenomena - UFO contact and ley lines - who believed himself to be in constant contact with aliens, yet is cited as an expert on Stonehenge.
One story, credited by Kolosimo to John Macklin, struck me as familiar - he recounted a tale of two young children with green skin, who wandered into the Spanish village of Banjos in 1887, claiming to be from a land that nobody had ever heard of. To Kolosimo, the inference could not be clearer that these two were alien children. But I knew that I had encountered this story before, in my childhood. And I had. It was a repurposing of the story of the Green Children of Woolpit, a largely allegorical (though some would argue it has historical truth to it - I don’t particularly think it matters either way) story dating back to England in the 12th century. There is no Spanish village of Banjos, and Macklin simply took the story and updated it for an American audience. It was printed in Grit magazine, a Wild West themed periodical with a regular fiction section. Fiction.
—————————————————————————-
And it’s here that the book passes into the truly bizarre. The repurposing of the Green Children of Woolpit isn’t the only example of fiction being repurposed by Kolosimo and represented as fact.
A reference to a story by “the adventurer De Camp” is in fact - whether through Kolosimo’s own misrepresentation or a confused bit of mistranslation - relating to a bit of science fiction by pulp author Sprague de Camp; this confusion of fantasy and reality has been repeated time and again through the Ancient Astronaut canon, as Kolosimo’s own claims were repeated by subsequent writers, without anyone caring to check what he was referring to. But it gets weirder still, and “weird” is the word.
A story is recounted at length, credited to John Spencer and William Thompson, of how Spencer was guided through the secret tunnels of a Buddhist temple, accessed by a secret switch in a painting of the Pleiades star system, where he saw perfectly preserved bodies of ancient provenance held in floating coffins, the last of which contained a body with a ball of pure silver for a head. The story was taken from Adventure, the 1920s pulp magazine, and is pure fiction, but presented here as fact.
Other such stories abound that I have been unable to trace, but are unmistakably the stuff of early 20th century adventure comics, uncritically repeated as fact. He draws connections between the culture of Easter Island and Stonehenge, based on “evidence” credited to the work of Donald Wandrei, but doesn’t identify Wandrei as a prolific writer of science fiction and weird tales, and the connections in question are taken from his 1948 book The Web of Easter Island, a horror fantasy in the tradition of Wandrei’s friend, H.P. Lovecraft.
This is where it gets really weird.
Chapter 6 opens with extensive quoting from Lovecraft’s In The Mountains of Madness, never explicitly described as fiction, only as “a fascinating book”, with the author being one who “dabbles in fantasies”. He goes on to seemingly argue for the veracity of Lovecraft’s work, suggesting that his tales of ancient alien civilisation predating humanity are, if not literally true, at least contain echoes of the truth - or, as Kolosimo puts it, his writing “bears the stamp”. I found it impossible to follow when Kolosimo argues that Lovecraft’s descriptions of the ancient Cthuloid architecture of Antarctica is convincing despite “never having been there himself”, without resorting to the interpretation that he wanted the reader to see Lovecraft’s writing as non-fiction. In support of that point, he later refers to a supposed collector of antiquities named William Bennett, and says that both he and Lovecraft were aware of Tibetan texts referring to the plateau of Leng - with no mention of the fact that Leng is an invention of Lovecraft’s.
Later in the book, Lovecraft is again cited as evidence, and when making the case for inarguable evidence of artificial structures and monoliths in photographs taken of the Moon’s surface (just one year before man first set foot on the Moon, no less), refers to Lucian of Samasota seeing odd animals and structures on the Moon - making it sound like Lucian was an early astronomer, not a satirist who wrote of a voyage to the Moon, which was, it should go without saying, fiction. More and more examples of this abound.
—————————————————————————-
That brings us, earlier than expected, to the question of Conman Or Crank?
It’s a more complicated proposition than I might have otherwise thought, as I spent a lot of time trying to get my head around what Peter Kolosimo was trying to achieve here by repurposing old pulp fiction to support a narrative that was ostensibly non-fiction. Was this purely a case of poor translation - was Kolosimo using fiction to introduce ideas he believed to be true, and this detail lost? It sometimes reads that way, but some cases make it almost impossible to accept that defence.
One theory to occur to me was that he was aiming for an early version of what some believers in the Illuminati conspiracy theory today call “pre-conditioning”; where a depiction of something in TV or film is actually an exercise in preparing the public for something that the secret rulers of the world intend to do in reality; a handy way to explain away why all the tropes and tenets of your world view are so obviously plucked from popular culture, and yet another example of pseuds and conspiracy theorists failing to understand the creative impulse and imparting purpose and meaning where there is none. In Kolosimo’s case, was he really trying to argue that knowledge of our secret history had been liberally sprinkled through the pages of American genre magazines? That’s a stretch.
The next possible explanation takes me all the way back to our bullet-shot bison. Like many other examples of prehistoric weirdness throughout the book, it is Russian in origin. Many of the scientists and historians that Kolosimo quotes, anonymously or otherwise, are from the USSR. Sputnik, having the rare distinction of being a Soviet magazine that was available in the United States, often included features on “impossible” historical mysteries, Ancient Astronaut theory, and other stories that supposedly called into question our understanding of the history of mankind. During the Cold War, UFOs and alien intervention were a hot topic on either side of the Iron Curtain, with the USA happy to indulge speculation about alien visitors so long as it distracted from their own work with experimental aircraft, while one of the most infamous UFO stories of all time - the supposed alien aircraft shot down in Roswell, New Mexico - was most likely an experimental balloon designed to test the atmosphere for evidence of Soviet nuclear testing. Both the US and the USSR purposefully used the media frenzies about UFOs as a means to spread disinformation, but Russia’s own methods were typically far more obscure in their aim.
It feels like playing conspiracy bingo to start citing Russian disinformation campaigns, but here we go - while American citizens were concerned about alien flying saucers in their skies, and the US government attempted to weaponise those fears to spook the Soviets, Russian citizens weren’t seeing little green men in their airspace at all. Our extra-terrestrial visitors seemingly weren’t interested in the Communist bloc. The Soviets were interested in using the idea of alien intervention to destabilise western society and belief structures, though, and to that end, they wholeheartedly embraced Ancient Cosmonauts. From the mid-1950s, the Soviet media, and the westward-facing Sputnik in particular, was awash with theories that would become familiar to readers of the Ancient Astronaut bibliography - stone circles were evidence of UFO launchpads, famous destroyed cities were the result of atomic bombs in the distant past, and prehistoric fossils bear witness to advanced civilisations impossible in our established understanding of history. These weren’t stories intended for internal consumption, however, they were clearly aimed at a western market. Their aim was to undermine American faith in Christian theology by positing a new, pseudo-scientific explanation for man’s history, while also scaring away Americans from the possibilities of science and technology by shrouding it in a sense of the mystical, occult and unknowable. The photographs Kolosimo cites as evidence of artificial structures on the Moon, just like the bullet hole in the head of a 40,000 year old bison, originated in the propaganda campaigns of Soviet Russia, and were repeated uncritically.
Was Peter Kolosimo, a devoted Communist and avowed supporter of the USSR, doing the Party’s work in helping spread this disinformation, and intentionally sowing confusion between fact and fiction? Or was he a useful idiot, unlikely to question the word of the Party, who could be used to filter ideas through without him even knowing it? He wouldn’t have been the first, and would be far from the last, to be manipulated by the Soviet power structure in that way.
Another theory occurs to me, though. Just as the writers of In The Morning of The Magicians presented their ideas a mixture of disparate influences, and never outright admitted whether they were intended to be taken seriously or not, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Kolosimo was playing something of an intellectual game with his readership. Surely he couldn’t have been stupid enough to have been unable to tell fact from obvious fiction, and I’d hope he didn’t have such a low opinion of his readership as to assume that they wouldn’t be able to tell either.
While first formulating this theory, I was unaware that the anonymous Italian writers’ collective Wu Ming had claimed Peter Kolosimo as one of their own, and that in a 2009 GQ article they had described his work as “fiction disguised as non-fiction”, and that this odd writer who uncritically repeated the words of race scientists, Theosophists, and believers in the ancient lost civilisations of Atlantis, Mu and Lemuria, really believed that occultism and esotericism were “only reactionary by-products for the petty bourgeois”. His aim, apparently, was to marry the ancient past to a utopian future, in service of the Revolution. It’s difficult to match that description to the unscientific, credulous repetition of western, bourgeois and colonialist writers of the nineteenth century that litters Kolosimo’s work, or with its fixation on White Gods.
Oh, and by the way, the last novel written by Wu Ming under their former collective name of Luther Blissett? A story of conspiracy, hoaxes, and rebellion against oppression. It’s name? Q.
—————————————————————————-
My own theory fell short of suggesting that Peter Kolosimo was writing his way towards intellectual enlightenment or the realisation of Communist revolution. To my eye, he was a prankster, in the Discordian tradition.
What is Discordianism? A mock-religion, a mock-conspiracy movement, a counter-culture phenomenon, and a practical joke that went too far. The brainchild of Gregory Hill and Kerry Thornley, Discordianism was an exercise in absurdity, further developed by authors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson in their mammoth Illuminatus! Trilogy, a non-linear masterpiece that ties fictional and “real” conspiracy theories together into one bewildering narrative, and laid the foundations for all subsequent work of conspiracist and “illuminati” fiction - from The X-Files to Foucault’s Pendulum.
One key factor of Discordianism was Operation Mindfuck - the continuing practice of building a network of mutually contradictory conspiracy theories, blaming every major newsworthy event on the continuing actions of the 18th century Bavarian Illuminati, with the intent to “sow the culture with paranoia”. It was a bit of university campus hijinks allowed to grow to unexpected proportions, but the goal was always to paint conspiracy theories as absurd. Unfortunately, more than a few people missed the memo, and before long, one of those people was Kerry Thornley himself. A former friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, Thornley became not only obsessed with the assassination of John F. Kennedy - one of the ur-conspiracies of modern America - but in his increasingly addled mental state even became convinced that he had played a part in it.
Discordianism as a mock-belief structure relied on one simple principle - all conspiracies are simultaneously true and not true. A Discordian’s duty is to reject binary labels, to reject consensus reality, and to sow chaos, discord and, above all, mischief. It is, sometimes to an eye-rollingly self-indulgent extent, a massive post-modern playground in which all ideas are possible. It’s in this space that The Illuminatus! Trilogy is at its self-referential, pop-culture-eating-itself best, and where the inheritors of Discordianism in the sphere of popular music, the mighty KLF, The Justified Ancients Of Mu-Mu, did their best work, pivoting wildly from camp novelty singles and electropop to ambient house and genuinely brilliant dance records, along with collaborations with grindcore band Extreme Noise Terror, and social and political messages that flew over the heads of most of the Great British public. They are absurd, they are geniuses, and I love them.
It was the KLF, and the Discordians, who came to mind when confronted with the sheer audacity of Peter Kolosimo presenting H.P. Lovecraft as Exhibit A for his writing on pseudohistory. This was an intellectual game, a prank of the highest order - sowing confusion and discord by mixing science fiction with science fact, pseudohistory and pseudoscience with the emerging public appetite for mysteries and the paranormal. To what end? Maybe it was, as Wu Ming argued, in the pursuit of some kind of intellectual revolution, or perhaps the old Communist was seized by a more capitalist impulse - the sci-fi books he wrote under the pen name “Omega Jim” weren’t flying off the shelves, but perhaps if he dressed them up as something they weren’t…?
While writing this, with Discordianism on my mind, I looked through one of Discordianism’s core texts, the Principia Entropius, a collection of 1990s posts from Discordian bulletin boards (kids, ask your parents). There, standing alone, devoid of context or supporting argument, before a section on The KLF, sat the following quote;
“And from this springs the extraordinary question, did the Egyptians know about electricity?”
- Peter Kolosimo
Whatever his intentions, it seems the Discordians had recognised a kindred spirit, and claimed Peter Kolosimo as one of their own.
—————————————————————————-
What the partisan Peter Kolosimo - a man who, let’s not forget, fought against the Nazis as a member of the Bohemian Resistance - could not have foreseen is that the ideas he helped popularise would become a hallmark of a new esoteric far-right. I don’t want to excuse the problematic racial politics of Not Of This World with as intellectually dishonest and lazy a defence as “it was of its time”, but it’s possible that Kolosimo was unaware of the racist beliefs of the writers, like James Churchward and H.P. Lovecraft, whose texts he made such extensive use of, and may not have fully recognised the uncomfortable implications of the theories of “White Gods” bringing technology and enlightenment to non-white peoples. Many of the anthropologists whose work he references in his less out-there moments were equally dismissive of the achievements of what they considered to be “primitive” peoples, and yet were highly regarded in their time.
Writers and thinkers after Kolosimo took these racist undertones and brought them to the foreground. Erich Von Daniken, by far the most influential Ancient Astronaut writer there is, openly dabbles in Nazi-esque rhetoric, advocates for racial segregation, and is a cheerleader for eugenics. A prolific plagiarist, Von Daniken was almost undoubtedly aware of Peter Kolosimo writing in a similar field to his own, and one of his most long-lasting claims, that carvings on the sarcophagus of King Pakal in Palenque depict an astronaut at the controls of a spaceship, appeared in Not Of This World before Von Daniken got a hold of it.
Robert Charroux, the sci-fi and comic book writer who pivoted to Ancient Astronaut theory in the mid-60s and was widely plagiarised by Von Daniken, and who Kolosimo simply credited as “the Frenchman”, was, as we saw earlier, even more overtly racist than Von Daniken, with his belief that the white-skinned, blue-eyed “Nordic” race was descended from perfected aliens, and all other races were a degradation of the ideal. Charroux’s work was hugely influential not just on Erich Von Daniken and the Ancient Astronaut canon, but on the thinking of Miguel Serrano, the Chilean author and diplomat who married occultism and sci-fi pseudohistory with Neo-Nazism, crafting a world-view that saw Hitler as a divine prophet who survived World War 2 and escaped to a secret base in Antarctica. Serrano’s work was far-reaching, its influence impacting South American Nazism, the Hindu far-right, and racist “Pagan” movements across the world, and it is inextricable from the writings of Robert Charroux and other Ancient Astronaut theorists. The Hindu nationalist far-right, resurgent today to a far more terrifying extent than during Serrano’s lifetime, regularly mine Ancient Astronaut texts for “scientific” defences of the literal truth of the Vedas and of advanced technology in their own ancient past.
—————————————————————————-
Today, a sizeable percentage of American Republican voters believe that the last presidential election was “stolen”, and that Donald Trump is their rightful president. Some estimates show that as many as one in four Republican voters believe in at least some aspects of the far-reaching QAnon conspiracy; that is to say, that the American government, and much of the world, is ruled in secret by a Satanic cabal of baby-eating paedophiles.
People who believe in conspiracy theories are looking for an answer. They see a world of chaos, and where Discordians might advise embracing and even adding to that chaos, they are afraid, and seek to impose order where none exists. It is perhaps more reassuring to believe that something is in control, even if that something is a reptilian alien elite hopped up on adrenochrome, than that we are all careening rudderless through life, that things happen for no reason at all, and that bad things sometimes happen to good people.
Conspiracy theories have always been with us, but the last twenty-to-thirty years have seen the emergence of a kind of “Conspiracism” as a connected world-view. Where once the idea that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK, or that America had never really landed on the Moon, could be a belief that one held sincerely without giving credence to other outlandish claims, the grand project of conspiracy writers in the last few decades has been to craft a Unifying Theory of Conspiracy. For years the chief proponent was David Icke, who drew a bewildering number of threads through every conspiracy and esoteric belief you could think of, in service of one Ur-Conspiracy, that reality as we understood it was a simulation, created and controlled by a race of shapeshifting alien lizards (who are definitely not an analogy for the Jews) who now populate the elite and ruling classes of every major nation on Earth.
Recent years, though, have seen the Ur-Conspiracy spiral out of the hands of even someone as controlling as Icke. Online, the conspiracy went open source. From there, it mutated and grew exponentially as the most insidious of memes are wont to do. Most rational people, not au fait with the in-jokes and obscure slang and terminology of 4chan and its offshoots, or with the weaponised harassment of the online “alt-right”, were blissfully unaware of how age-old conspiracies were being warmed up and served to new, terminally online audiences. The Satanic Panic of the 1980s was being given a new lick of paint and farmed out to hippies and anti-vaxxers on TikTok, just as it was to the more “traditional” right-wing on talk radio, and on Fox News, until before you knew it, armed vigilantes were storming pizza restaurants to rescue children that weren’t there from a basement that didn’t exist, and disgraced racist pro-wrestling referees were speaking to school boards about how face masks are part of a child-trafficking conspiracy.
It’s not hard to see where UFOlogy - and it’s awkward step-sibling Ancient Astronaut theory - fits into this mess. True believers in UFOs don’t just stop at weird lights in the sky; they need to concoct an explanation as to why the lights they believe are so self-evidently examples of alien visitation aren’t being taken seriously by the world’s governments, and that is fertile ground for conspiracy. Anyone who lived through UFOlogy’s last pop culture boom could tell you about the FBI’s role in covering up the existence of aliens (The X-Files), or the shady government agents whose role is to convince witnesses of alien activity that what they saw was nothing strange at all (Men In Black). If you’re prepared to believe that the government are conspiring to hide evidence of extra-terrestrial activity from the public, not just in the United States but all over the world, then just like the anti-vaxxers impressed by Graham Hancock’s documentary, you start wondering, “what else are they hiding?”. From there, you’ll believe almost anything but the truth.
It’s a perverse sense of open-mindedness that has long been exploited by the paranoid elements of the American right, and it benefits Ancient Astronaut theorists and other peddlers of conspiracy, pseudohistory, and pseudoscience, to allow that right-wing infiltration and propagation of their ideas, whatever their own personal political persuasion, because it widens their audience and gives them greater prominence. It’s to that end that Ancient Aliens regular Nick Pope has shared platforms with Tucker Carlson and Rudy Giuliani, or that Carlson has had Ancient Aliens talking heads appear on his FOX News shows. It all serves the Ur-Conspiracy.
Once you understand the Ur-Conspiracy, how it swallows up conspiracy, hate speech, half-remembered moral panics, psuedoscience and pseudohistory, and how it’s exploited by the right-wing and their media allies for political gain, the emergence of QAnon as its most untamed, deranged branch becomes almost crushingly inevitable - what other outcome could one expect from a political project that elected a man whose presidential ambitions began with the unfounded, conspiratorial allegation that a sitting president was secretly a Kenyan Muslim? QAnon wasn’t born of Donald Trump, they’re just two symptoms of the same intellectual disease that has been festering in our public discourse for decades, and which saw some of its first fruits in the widespread media love-in towards the work of Erich Von Daniken.
It would undoubtedly disgust Peter Kolosimo to see his ideas used in service of a far-right movement, and it would likely amuse Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Shea, and the Discordians to see their “All Conspiracies Are True” fiction increasingly reflected in reality, but when a man calling himself a Shaman, who believes wholeheartedly in secret alien intervention in America’s past and present, stormed the White House in defence of a conspiratorial belief in election-stealing, baby-murdering, Satanic elites in secret control of global affairs, it should have been enough to make the bullshit peddlers of the world sit up, take stock, and reflect on who they had been willingly getting into bed with for the past thirty years. I won’t be holding my breath for that one.
For the rest of us, it was another lesson in the real world consequences of seemingly benign fringe beliefs - that rather than ridiculing these people, or treating them as a sideshow attraction, we should have been taking them seriously all along.
