Video Companion Guide

The purpose of this video companion guide is twofold: (1) to direct the individual reader of Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries to helpful supplementary and complementary video as well as cable and broadcast television treatments of the topics covered in each of the chapters of this book, and (2) to assist the professor who is looking for audiovisual material to accompany this book in a university course. Of course, I fully realize that at twenty or more dollars apiece, the average reader is not going to spring for all of the suggested videos, but university libraries, media centers, or anthropology departments might elect to obtain some of them for classroom use. I have attempted in each case to indicate where these videos are available as of the preparation of this new edition (early 2007). Beyond this, recommended series like National Geographic's Is It Real? and Naked Science, the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters, and Showtime's Bullshit! are currently on-air and cost nothing beyond your monthly cable bill.

It is instructive to place archaeological Frauds, myths, and mysteries into a broader context by examining the popular pseudoscience that plagues other fields. Certainly, there are plenty of television documentaries that investigate topics like UFOs, ESP, and the like by applying a non-skeptical perspective. In contrast to these often rather gullible shows, the PBS science series Nova has produced a number of documentaries that present a more scientific and critical treatment of such issues. Two of the best of these are The Bermuda Triangle: Uncovering the Mystery of a Watery Graveyard and The Beast of Loch Ness. Both are wonderful archetypes of how scientists approach mysteries with minds open, but always demanding of objective evidence and proof. These videos are still available from several online booksellers.

National Geographic currently produces a series called Is It Real? Each episode presents an analysis of extraordinary claims including those made concerning Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts, and crop circles. See http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/isitreal/episodes.html for a listing of Is It Real? episodes. A few of the Is It Real? episodes can be purchased on the National Geographic online store.

Also from National Geographic is the series Naked Science, a quirky set of broadcasts in which the fringes of science are explored. Episodes delve into issues like telepathy, Atlantis, creationism, and the Loch Ness Monster. For a complete episode guide, see: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/nakedscience/episodes.html.

Magicians Penn and Teller have been doing their own television show, called, appropriately enough, Bullshit!, on the Showtime cable network since 2003. The show is all about debunking-in a hilariously merciless way-claims, both extraordinary and pedestrian, that large numbers of people believe. Penn and Teller are loud (well, Penn is) and obnoxious (it's part of their charm for those of us who are fans) and make no claim that their show is fair and balanced (it isn't) or that it is always right (they have, for example, retracted some of what they claimed about the dangers of second-hand smoke; they asserted that the evidence for harm was weak, but they admit to being wrong on that), but many of the episodes, taking on issues like alien abductions, creationism, and ESP certainly do an entertaining job of laying out the skeptical position.

One of my favorite current television shows is Mythbusters. Perhaps more than any show on cable or broadcast TV, Mythbusters exemplifies, in a real "dirt under the fingernails" way, the messy and sometimes explosive (well, okay, in the case of Mythbusters, always explosive) fun of science. Each week, the hosts of this Discovery Channel show, special effects designers Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, along with their eclectic crew of myth-busting assistants, take on popular claims, urban legends, longstanding myths, and some just plain wacky beliefs and through a series of experiments, actually test their plausibility. Can answering a cell phone call while pumping gas lead to a violent explosion? Does the shape of Egyptian pyramids actually serve to preserve the pharaoh's body? Did the Baghdad Battery produce enough electricity to shock people who touched it? Will your stomach really explode if you wash down a kid's candy with a carbonated cola beverage? Savage's and Hyneman's application of the experimental method to test such claims (which occasionally turn out to be true or, at least, plausible) conveys in an incredibly entertaining way how science works. Check out the show's episode guide at http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/episode/episode.html. Individual episodes, specials, and parts of years are available for purchase at the Discovery Channel's online store.

In 1999, the History Channel's In Search of Historydocumentary series aired a weeklong set of shows focusing on great historical hoaxes. One of the five episodes presented the story of the Cardiff Giant (In Search of History: The Cardiff Giant). It is very well done and works well as a supplement to my treatment of the hoax here (and yes, you will see the author of Frauds interviewed throughout the show; I have somehow managed to end up in the digital databases of a bunch of television documentary production companies-filed under, I imagine, "prof who knows a bit about ancient oddities"). It is available at online booksellers.

The History Channel series mentioned above included a show focusing on the Piltdown Man hoax (In Search of History: Piltdown Man). It was another excellent production and again serves well as a companion to the discussion of Piltdown presented in this book.

It may be a rule that every good story can be told again, and the BBC has produced another valuable version of the Piltdown tale. Nova broadcast the program in the United States in January 2005 under the title The Boldest Hoax. A number of the suspects are considered and ultimately Charles Dawson, having the most obvious motive, a personal history of fabrication, and ample opportunity, is determined to be the most likely perpetrator. The documentary is available for purchase from online booksellers.

I highly recommend Mystery of the First Americans. Focusing on the Kennewick Man controversy, it provides valuable context from the field of biological anthropology on the subject of the initial peopling of the New World.

The History Channel's series Histories Mysteries does a pretty decent job of skeptically assessing various revisionist claims about the human past. In one episode, America's Stonehenge, the producers take on the New Hampshire historical site that goes by that name (it is also called Mystery Hill) and that is treated in depth in Frauds. Though proponents of the hypothesis that the site is the settlement of ancient Europeans in the New World are given far too much time in this episode, enough unanswered questions are raised by skeptics (me included) to make the unbiased viewer seriously question that claim of an ancient European connection. America's Stonehenge is available from the History Channel's online store.

To learn more about the ancient Norse and their peripatetic ways, the video titled Vikings in America broadcast by PBS as part of its Nova science series is an excellent source of information, focusing on historical and archaeological evidence confirming the Norse exploration and settlement of the New World five centuries before Columbus.

While the previous documentary shows how widespread Norse exploration was, the next shows that they likely didn't make a map of their visits to the New World. Titled The Viking Deception, this Nova documentary first aired in February 2005. It presents convincing forensic evidence that the Vinland map was a fake, largely supporting Walter McCrone's analysis as discussed in Chapter 5. The Viking Deception is available from the WGBH online store.

A wonderful video that details the work of archaeologists at Cahokia is titled Cahokia Mounds-Ancient Metropolis. Available through the online store at the Cahokia Mounds Web site (http://www.cahokiamounds.com/video.html), the tape focuses on a reconstruction of life at Cahokia during its peak.

The Horizon science series on the BBC is the long-standing equivalent of Nova on PBS. In 1999, Horizon produced a two-part series on the Lost Continent of Atlantis. The two episodes were titled Atlantis Uncovered and Atlantis Reborn. The shows were extremely well produced and meticulously researched-the producers had the supremely good taste (or bad judgment) to include me in a number of segments of the show-and provide a marvelous complement to the Atlantis chapter in this book. In the Atlantis chapter in Frauds, I emphasize the early historical context of Plato's tale. The Horizon productions focus to a greater degree on the use of the Atlantis fiction in the more recent historical past, especially as it relates to the modern writer Graham Hancock and his assertion that the archaeological record bears evidence of a precociously advanced civilization that he dates to more than 10,000 years ago. The shows have been aired in the United States on the Learning Channel. Unfortunately, the series currently is not being marketed either by the BBC or the Learning Channel, but one or both of the episodes occasionally turn up on the Learning Channel. As they say, check your local TV listings for broadcast times.

More recently, Atlantis has been examined in the National Geographic series, Naked Science. Letting those who believe that Atlantis was a real place have their say, the show provides a largely skeptical perspective, and there I am again, the guy who has managed to become the "go to skeptic" in documentaries about Atlantis. By way of full disclosure, I should reveal that while I ordinarily don't get paid for these appearances, in this case I did receive a t-shirt and a National Geographic cap; I'll let you judge whether I earned it or not.

In 1976, Horizon produced one of its episodes on the ancient astronaut hypothesis of Erich von Däniken. The show was re-edited for an American audience and aired in the United States by the Nova science series on PBS. Unfortunately, neither the BBC production nor the Nova version (The Case of the Ancient Astronauts, first aired in the United States in 1978) is currently being sold or rebroadcast, but some university libraries or anthropology departments may own old copies.
Just when you thought it was safe to turn on your television, Erich von Däniken returns-well, sort of-in an episode of National Geographic's Is It Real? titled, simply Ancient Astronauts. Like the other Is It Real? episodes I have seen, Ancient Astronauts gives the proponents plenty of air time to discuss their views, present evidence and, in some cases, come off like raving lunatics. Skeptics (including the author; I look at myself as the voice of sanity in a sea of rather extraordinary madness in this show) are given ample time to refute their claims. You'll need to set your Tivo to record the show if it is rebroadcast; this episode is not being sold by National Geographic at this time.

In 1997, the Arts and Entertainment channel (A&E) produced a four-part series on Egypt that, while a bit long (each volume is about an hour in length) is enormously informative and well done. Called The Great Pharaohs of Egypt, the series does a very nice job, with a reasonable reliance on talking heads, including that of Peter Clayton (1994), author of the marvelous book, Chronicle of the Pharaohs, artists' conceptions of ancient Egypt, and badly acted dramatic reconstructions of events. As might be guessed from the series title, the focus is on the personalities of Egypt's pharaohs and how each contributed to their nation's history. Insofar as it relates to the focus of Chapter 9 of Frauds, Volume 1 is especially valuable in providing a detailed discussion of the evolutionary development of the pyramid. Also of use is Volume 3, which focuses almost entirely on the pharaoh Akhenaten's revolt and the reign, death, and burial of his son, Tutankhamun.

For an extremely informative and entertaining documentary on how a replicative experiment can illuminate the details of pyramid building, my students enjoy the Nova program, This Old Pyramid (re-released as just Pyramid as part of Nova's Secrets of Lost Empires set). One of the key participants was Roger Hopkins, the New England stonemason from the PBS series, This Old House. The archaeologist involved was the very well known Egyptologist Mark Lehner. The video, either singly or as part of the first Secrets of Lost Empires set (which includes the Stonehenge video mentioned below) is available from online booksellers. For a detailed examination of the life-and death-of Tutankhamun, my students greatly enjoy National Geographic's King Tut's Final Secrets. The video highlights the recent forensic analysis of Tut's mummy. The producers spend far too much time trying to explain the alleged curse on Tut's tomb (which they show early in the documentary and needs no explanation since it doesn't exist), but the CT scan images of Tut's body are spectacular. The DVD is available from National Geographic's online store.

There have been a number of videos produced by or for Nova that PBS characterizes as treatments of "unexplained phenomena." That's only a slightly misleading characterization since, in each case, Nova does a pretty good job of presenting a scientific explanation. In this group are documentaries on the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, and psychic power (the video mentioned in this guide for chapter 2). Any of these would be a useful addition to this chapter.

There are at least a couple of worthwhile videos that approach the biblical flood story from a scientific perspective. For example, the Discovery Channel's Noah's Ark: The True Story broadcast in 2003 presents a skeptical approach to the tale almost despite itself. The theme that runs throughout the documentary is that, while the biblical tale of a catastrophic, worldwide deluge is certainly false, it may be based on a locally devestating, historical flood in Mesopotamia. With Noah building what amounts to a small boat rather than an ark and with him saving only about 260 (!) animals on board, there seems not to be much of a story left, but the program does rely on the scientific and historical evidence to make its case. It is available at the Discovery Channel's online store.

In 2001, National Geographic sponsored and filmed Robert Ballard's search for evidence that might bear on the hypothesis of William Ryan and Walter Pitman (1998) that a catastrophic in-filling of the Black Sea more than 7,500 years ago was the inspiration for the biblical flood story. The film shows well the challenges of Ballard's investigation and reveals the obvious excitement of the researchers when they locate what may be wooden structural remains at a depth of 330 feet. The video, The Quest for Noah's Flood and available at the National Geographic online store, downplays, just a bit, the fact that the quest was not terribly successful: Radiocarbon dating revealed that the recovered wood was 200, not 7,500 years old and has no bearing on the Ryan-Pitman hypothesis.

As part of the same series that included Pyramid, Nova aired and distributed a tape called Stonehenge. Its purpose was similar to that of Pyramid: to film a series of trial-and-error experiments aimed at replicating an ancient technology-in this case, moving and erecting one of the features (a trilithon) of Stonehenge. It is available at online booksellers.

Many videos focus on the Maya culture of Mesoamerica. Unfortunately, some of these programs have employed a New Age rather than a skeptical approach. An exception to this and overall a pretty good documentary was produced by National Geographic called Lost Kingdoms of the Maya. A more recent video focuses on the origins of Maya civilization. Called Dawn of the Maya, it reveals the discoveries of Francisco Estrada-Belli at Cival. Both of these videos are available through the National Geographic online store.