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The return of the Moai - Aliens 74
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This time, we will look back at two sites we covered in the past, but with some new information and approaches. Today's excursion is based on the Ancient Aliens episode "Mysterious Structures" from season eight. This is basically a clip show from past episodes. A bit of the issue with Ancient Aliens is that they tend to reuse material over time. But to add some new things, I'll discuss Ancient Aliens, Graham Hancock's latest season of Ancient Apocalypse, and a TikToker, all trying to claim Rapa Nui or Easter Island as either Aliens, Atlantis, or both.
In the second half, we will look at the Coral Castle and if this modern megalithic structure could be an alien intervention. A hint: it's not.
For links, transcript and sources see: https://diggingupancientaliens.com/episode-74-return-of-the-moai
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Transcript
Introduction to Ancient Alien Narratives
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:19
Speaker
Welcome to Digging Up Ancient Aliens. This is the podcast
Evaluating Ancient Alien Theories
00:00:23
Speaker
where we examine alternative history and ancient alien narratives in the popular media. Do these ideas hold water to an archaeologist? What are the better explanations out there?
00:00:34
Speaker
We are now on episode 74, and I am Fredrik, your guide into the world of pseudo-archaeology.
Revisiting Sites with New Perspectives
00:00:42
Speaker
This time we will look back at two sites that we actually have covered in the past, but with some new information and approaches.
00:00:52
Speaker
Today's excursion is based on the Ancient Alien episode, Mysterious Structures, from Season 8. This
Rapa Nui and Coral Castle: Alien Theories vs. Archaeology
00:01:01
Speaker
is basically a clip show from past episodes. A bit of an issue with Ancient Aliens is that they tend to reuse material over time.
00:01:11
Speaker
But to add a few new things to all of this, I'll discuss Ancient Aliens, Graham Hancock's latest season of Ancient Apocalypse, and a TikToker who is trying to say that Rapa Nui, or well, Easter Island that it's more commonly known as, is either Aliens, Atlantis, or both.
00:01:32
Speaker
And in the second half, we will look at the Coral Castle. And if this modern megalithic structure could be alien intervention, a hint, it's not. I want to thank all of you who support the show. It really means a lot to me. And you're really helping out producing this content. And I'm humbled and grateful for all your support. And if you want to help out,
00:01:58
Speaker
I'll tell you how to do that at the end, and how you will also get some bonus stuff out of this.
Engagement and Resources for Listeners
00:02:07
Speaker
Now, remember that resources and the sources and the reading suggestions is available at our web website, diggingupinchidadians.com.
00:02:17
Speaker
There you can also find contact info if you notice any mistakes or have any suggestions. And if you like the podcast, I would appreciate it if you left one of those fancy 5-storey reviews that I heard so much about. Now that we are finished with our preparations, let's dig into the episode.
00:02:41
Speaker
Right,
New Findings on Rapa Nui's Moai Statues
00:02:42
Speaker
so let's return to the Moai statues. Now, we have already visited Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, twice, but apparently it's time to return again to the island. We we first went here in episode 27, where we discussed the Moai statues, and the second time was in episode 34, where we focused more on Thor Heydal's racist this approach to the island,
00:03:08
Speaker
and the 2020 even-out-this-at-all paper claiming a link between the Polynesian islands and Colombia. And like a lazy sitcom, I could make this segment into just a clip show of those two episodes, but let's let's try to avoid this. Instead, I want to grab things from ancient aliens that they bring up, and some of the TikToker named Jenna James and a bit of Graham Hancock's new series, Ancient Apocalypse. So it will be a clip show, but it will contain some new content and maybe a little bit also new information for you. So as we learn, this episode is one of those episodes where the writers have ran out of ideas, basically.
00:03:57
Speaker
There are not many new clips or information in the ancient alien part of this. What's interesting that is that they actually bring up a myth that's actually been studied from an archaeological perspective. According to the oral history of the Rapa Nui, the Moai were moved in a very unusual way.
00:04:20
Speaker
They all reply basically the same thing. The Moai walked to the Ahu, and that's the only explanation that they give. Right, so this is something we did in fact cover in episode 27. Lipo Hunt and Hawa conducted experimental archaeology in 2013 and demonstrated that you can move these blocks by walking them.
00:04:44
Speaker
Here we have a great example on how archaeologists investigate myths and use them for a foundation as ah for an experiment.
Critique of Graham Hancock's Theories
00:04:55
Speaker
They tested the idea of walking a moa statue, and they succeeded. They could prove that well you can get them to actually walk using ropes and a relatively small team of the people doing this basically just rocking it back and forth while moving it forward and the bass then kind of is used as ah to gain momentum and it kind of it looks like it walks and There's a link to that video in the show notes if you want to go and watch it by yourself. It's a really interesting stuff, but this is an experiment that's not covered by at all by the alternative history crowd. And you can ask yourself, why not? Here is precisely what they're actually asking for. Academia using myth as a basis for their x experiments.
00:05:45
Speaker
Now, it so happens that Graham Hancock visits Rapa Nui in Ancient Apocalypse in the new season, and while I've not watched the whole thing, I kinda watched two of the episodes and read the transcript due to a certain TikTok referencing this episode. What struck me was that Hancock never mentioned the movement of the statue or seemed to see that as any is sort of mystery.
00:06:13
Speaker
When the first Europeans arrived in 1722, the Rapa Nui culture had already been nearly wiped out. And few could imagine how such primitive people could have created the Moai.
00:06:28
Speaker
How in the heck did they make these? Where did they come from? And how did they move them? Nobody has the answer. He bring up that they were moved, but he don't really focus on how. He don't really seem to care about that. It can be editing, of course. It can be editing from the producers of the show, and there might have been more to this, but I mean it's strange that the study from 2013 was not brought up because it's something Hancock actively asked him for in his books in this episode. We take this myth and we test them. Instead we get this weird idea that the island has some sort of lost civilization connected to the meteor striking 10,000 years ago. The Polynesian came here and the statue was basically already in place according to Hancock.
00:07:19
Speaker
How he gets to that conclusion is a little bit unclear, especially since there's no evidence of an earlier population of the island, and he suggests it and kind of take it as a fact, because how could you prove it? You can't carve a 14 stone. What we can do is look at the archaeological record, of course, because, yeah, we can't see 14 stone. And what traces can we find of human activity?
00:07:47
Speaker
Well, it can be trash, it can be agriculture, slaughter, burials, fireflies, and the list goes on, it goes on. Of course, we have found evidence of human activity on Rapa Nui or Easter Island, but it doesn't really start until 1200 CE. While some radiocarbon dates have shown older days, they've also far been problematic.
00:08:12
Speaker
Terry Hunt do discuss in The Scientific American that the most likely date for people arriving to the island is around 1200 CE. And while he do humor the idea of an earlier population, he knows that it would have been so small that it would not appear in the archaeological record. So would this small group be able to erect all this statue without leaving a single trace? Well,
00:08:39
Speaker
As we discuss in the episode of the Kensington Runestone, people leave traces, especially if we build or occupy an area for a longer time. But that's kind of the thing here. The Hancock's and the ancient alien proponents of the world are not here to offer answers, but to sell you a mystery in a sense.
TikTok Sensationalism on Rapa Nui
00:08:59
Speaker
It then gets even worse when we go to TikTok where Well, by the source criticism of ancient aliens seems to be a paragon of light in comparison. You should be lucky if you unaware of the quote, comedian unquote Johanna James. It's not a person new to the show really, or at least to my social media.
00:09:20
Speaker
I've done some videos debunking her claims in the past, however, she is a presence on TikTok and has been involved with the Cosmic Summit and similar events in the past. ah Quite recently she put out a video discussing Rapa Nui and she even the went there to investigate in the Maui statue herself because, yeah, that's what you do apparently. And if you find ancient aliens' use of sources frustrating, things do not become better on TikTok. In this video on RapaNu, Jena claims to have read multiple articles and even gave us this quote.
00:09:59
Speaker
Now in one of the papers, this is the carbon dating evidence of human presence and its age. And there is a piece of evidence for human presence 2,400 radiocarbon years old. And I couldn't see in the paper what that was referring to, but it's in there. It's in the test results.
00:10:21
Speaker
On the screen, we see graphs showing the amount of samples and how old they are. The paper is never mentioned, of course, nor is it listed in any source of sources provided by James. In the graph, we see that there is one sample that's 2,400 years old. The issue is it's that the graph is meant to show the numbers of samples taken and the number of reliable samples.
00:10:50
Speaker
Parts of a few bars are in a different color to show samples that were not contaminated or otherwise problematic from a scientific perspective. The 2400 Euro sample is one of those who were very uncertain and showed an extensive range of possible dates it could be applied to, meaning it's not really much of use to us in this case.
00:11:15
Speaker
We should note, though, that this is was not a paper but an article from the American scientists, and if you're curious, the article in question is called Rethinking the Fall of Easter Island, written by Terry Hunt. So if we read the article, we learn that the samples taken in situ and in good condition are more or less 900 years old, indicating that the settlement started around 1200 CE, as we already demonstrated here.
00:11:44
Speaker
Hancock and others have now objected to this relatively late settlement date. um But if you've watched the ancient apocalypse Grand Hancock series 2, he does an episode on Easter Island and he speaks to an archaeologist who found an ancient piece of banana seed that had been planted because you have to plant it. It wasn't from a bird, it wasn't from the sea, they had um planted and harvested bananas like humans had. And the dating that she had was two, 3000 years old.
00:12:19
Speaker
I don't know if this is related to the banana thing or if it's separate. If it's separate, that's cool. If it's the same thing, that's cool. To show that it's possible that people have been on Rapa Nui for a longer time, Hancock in ancient apocalypse talk with Sonia Huwa Cardenale. And she is an archaeologist that's active ah actively working on Rapa Nui. And in episode three,
00:12:45
Speaker
Hawa Cardinali talks about a banana seed with a 3000 BP C14 date. Bit of a red flag is that these seeds and date are not yet published. If Hawa Cardinali gets the data out there it might be an exciting find and might.
00:13:04
Speaker
correlate with the settlement process, for example, of Vanautu. In 2020, a team code based on dental calculus actually showed that bananas made it to the island with a new settlement wave in around 2900 BP. And it might correspond with an earlier settlement of Rapa Nui, but Again, it's not really been shown in the archaeological ah material, and we might or might not have this banana seed that Huacardinola talks about. But from the information we have, there is a case to be made
00:13:52
Speaker
and that we should be a bit cautious regarding this claim, especially since it's announced in ancient apocalypse and not in a scientific journal or even in a scientific newspaper. I've tried to find out where or my where this might have been published previously, but I'm not managed to well find anything in writing where, how,
00:14:20
Speaker
yeah anything about this sample unfortunately but it's interesting to see how these competing ideas regarding aliens versus lost civilization use a site and different narratives in their well coverage of a site they can rely on the same myth and the same stories but one get atlantis and another one gets aliens and it kind of demonstrate how, well, how lofty they are with these claims. It's not really about a scientific approach. It's about sensationalism. It's about the views, getting ideas out there. But let's shift over to the US of A and a site that's not really ancient at all.
Debunking Myths of Coral Castle Construction
00:15:21
Speaker
Welcome back. We've moved quite a bit from Easter Island to Florida during the 1900s, and we're here to visit the Coral Castle, one of the few modern megalithic sites built.
00:15:37
Speaker
And it's a place loved by ancient alien believers, conspiracy theorists, and ah alternative energy people. The backstory for this place goes something like this. He was in love with a woman and he wanted to build this facility in memory of her. And he waited for her to come from Europe. And he waited. And he waited. And she never did.
00:16:02
Speaker
But the big question is, is how did this frail little man move these thousands of pounds of block by himself? Now, if you're not familiar with this site, it's a park built by Edward Ledeskalnin. Construction started in in about 1928 and continued until Ledeskalnin died in 1951.
00:16:30
Speaker
While the place is known as the Coral Castle, it's not really a castle and previously it's been known as Ed's Place or Rocky Gate Park, but the Coral Castle is not really a castle.
00:16:46
Speaker
And the coral is not really coral either, it's actually local oolite limestone. And Ledska Linin started the project as a tribute to his, well, 16-year-old fiancé. He was, ah what was it, 26 at the time or something like that? Not great. Who broke off the engagement a day before the wedding?
00:17:12
Speaker
Edward, originally from Latvia, then decided to move to the US in an attempt to, well, maybe mend his broken heart. But he then instead started to construct this part as, a well, um token of love to, as he called it, his forever sweet 16.
00:17:35
Speaker
barely over five feet tall and weighing just one hundred pounds leet skllman is said to have carved moved and hoisted huge multiton stones using only a makeshift tripod How could this man alone construct this park?
00:17:53
Speaker
Something often left out of the discussion is that Led Scaldin came from a family of, well, stonemasons. He was even trade as a mason who specialized in gravestones. And oolite limestone is a quite porous and soft stone that can be easily quarried and worked with simple tools. So and when it comes to the quarry and masonry at Coral Coast, there's no need for aliens or really specialized laser tools or anything like that. It can be simply explained by Led Skalnin's training and his expertise on how to work with rock as a medium both ah for sculption or even quarrying to some extent.
00:18:40
Speaker
In addition to this, he worked in lumber camps and for cattle drives, so so he wasn't really a frail man so to say. He might have been short or small, but he was not weak as people tend to frame him as. He was used to work hard work and figure things out as he went. There's there's also claims that Ed didn't use tools, but A wide assortment of masonry tools are today on display on in his old tool shed, so make make of that information as you wish. If we go out on alternative history sites, the the focus will often be how this man alone could move these stones.
00:19:24
Speaker
by himself and the answer usually left out from these places are that for most part he seems to have used block and tackle. Something we can see in imaging images of him using these kind of tools. So we have images of Ed Lezkalnin using block and tackle to get these ah these structures and stone blocks up where he want them. and We see these similar methods used by, for example, Wally Wallington, that we have and discussed in a previous episode of Couple of Tiles. Now, this is the man who created his own stone hinge in his backyard.
00:20:09
Speaker
in an attempt to kind of figure out how you could move these giant blocks with very simple tools and wanting to move this very large heavy block by himself. For example,
00:20:24
Speaker
with a simple pebble as a fulcrum. Wallington moves ah blocks weighing about one ton, if as if there was basically nothing, and he raises large, large megalithic blocks up, several meters up into the air, by himself using nothing more than sticks and a bit of wood, and just rocking the block back and forth until he get it up on the height that he wished. it And it seems as Led Scaldin used these similar tricks too. And we even have an example where he actually used not a pebble, but a similar method to move ah very large blocks. For example,
00:21:12
Speaker
in one of the giant stone gates at the park. And this is a massive slab. And from the looks of it, it seemed to weigh a lot. But what was interesting about it was that you could operate it with a finger. This large mega-lithy block could be just opened and closed, moved back and forward with No power, it seems like, at all. Now, the mister of this door was finally revealed in 1986 when it actually broke. And beneath it, well, beneath the slab, or beneath it, it turns out that there was a truck bearing on top of a metal shaft that allowed this block to swing freely on in the gate, so to say.
00:22:02
Speaker
and similar as ah Wally Wallington and his pebble under his large block that he moved across a field. So if it's just a bit of ingenuity and tricks, how how has the park become so connected with aliens and ah alternative technology he had some kind of magnetic machine down in one of his other house areas that has since been dismantled but it had a revolving ability he may have been having that thing spin the whole place could have been anti-gra
00:22:36
Speaker
probably just pushed these into place. This is due to Ledscanning's ability to, well, sell a story, really. As Karen Stolzner points out in an article on the Coral Castle, when Ed was asked about how he moved the blocks, Ed would just say, I have discovered the secrets of the pyramids with a bit of a smirk on his face, apparently. And Suppose someone would suggest some my mystical technique, like Tibetan monk technique, singing to the stones, using extraterrestrial help or even possessing superhuman strength, and in those cases Ed seems to just have none other than gone along with it. all All explanations that seemed fun seemed to be what he preferred to tell to people,
00:23:30
Speaker
and another often heard claim is that he he worked alone at night and this appears to have some truth to it ah according to stalls now and it might not be so much for secrecy but basically escaping the hot florida sun but of course things are more complicated to see in the dark from the distance if you're trying to spy on what that is doing and of course you can get the feeling that he's up to something or trying to hide something in the dark, but in reality it's just comfort in the end. Edward Ledscanin also cultivated his advanced technology myth by publishing pamphlet on magnetism and electricity. And these writings have been adopted by, for example, the free energy movement or the perpetual engine people, for example. And most of these writings seem to not really contain much advanced knowledge in today's measurements, barely in the age of Edward Lescan in two. But
00:24:38
Speaker
It's primarily a bunch of strange ideas on how magnetism influenced the world, and even some darker themes, as Brian Donning mentioned, that these magnetic ramblings also contain a political rant that sounds like Hitler could have written it.
00:24:57
Speaker
And the museum has continued selling this mystical sorrow story today. Benjamin read for mention in an article for Life Science that the museum website wrote, quote, Coral Castle has baffled scientists and engineers and scholars since its opening in 1923.
00:25:18
Speaker
But Coral Corsa is impressive, but not really for any alternative explanations or ancient aliens at the sites. It's impressive because it demonstrates how a single person can build this massive megalithic construction with very little tools, equipment, and um machinery, basically.
00:25:45
Speaker
all they need is a bit of ingenuity, some fulcrum, some levels, and then they get this structure up there. And why is a mystery today is because we don't need to work with stone like this any longer. We don't have to figure these kind of things out. And there's so many ways that you could do this without machinery. If you try to just think about it for a moment and try to experiment. And as Wally Wallington demonstrated, once you figure out how fulcrums and all that works, things get a lot easier. And the people of the past definitely understood these techniques and could utilize them in their construction work.
00:26:31
Speaker
So while it's somewhat a mystery in the sense of the world today for our goal list, it's not really a mystery for people who, as Edward Leskinin put it, figure out how they built the pyramids. And on that note, I will close out this episode. But um until next time, please spread the word by leaving a positive review on platforms like iTunes, Spotify, or to your friend, that's even better. Recommend an episode or two that you really like to one of your friends and, well, it really gets them hooked in most cases and, well, it helps the show grow. And if you want the sources and resources I used to produce this episode, make sure to check out the episode page over at diggingupancientaleons.com.
00:27:21
Speaker
And there you can also find the different routes on how to support the show with money if you like. If you're doing that, you get bonus content, earlier episodes, even extended episodes. And of course they are all ad-free. Either you head to Patreon dot.com slash Thinking of Ancient Aliens, or you head to the membership area on ThinkingofancientAliens.com slash support.
00:27:47
Speaker
And I also recommend you checking out the archaeological podcast network that has a anniversary coming up here at the 25th of November, where there will be a couple of live streams over on Discord. And make sure to check out all the amazing shows on the network if you want more archaeology in your life.
00:28:11
Speaker
If you want to contact me, it can be done through most social media sites, or you can send an email you all in all caps that I suppose that you want to do, and you find my email on the contact page on the website again. Sandra Martelor created intro music and her outro is by the band called Thrallscrew, who sings their song fully hot. Links to both of these artists can be found in the show notes. Until next time, keep shoveling that science!