In Search of Aliens: The Mystery of Loch Ness

Giorgio interviews Nessie to get her opinion on the ancient astronaut question!

Giorgio Tsoukalos' latest adventure is another old tale, like his Atlantis expedition.  However, this time, I really liked it.  Just like Atlantis, I have been reading about Nessie, The Loch Ness Monster, for well near forty years.  I've also seen numerous television shows about it.  Unlike Atlantis though, Nessie has been and remains one of my favorite topics!

Giorgio arrives at the shore of Loch Ness and meets Steve Feltham, one of the monster hunters who used to infest the shores of Loch Ness back in the 1960s and 1970s.  Feltham's own vigil began in 1991, long after Rhines, Holliday, and the other monster hunters had all gone.  In a way, Feltham, living out of a tiny trailer on the shore, made Giorgio seem quite normal and totally sensible while he sat on the edge of the loch and made replicas of Nessie to pay for his expedition. 

Sonar evidence is considered although nothing is mentioned of Operation Deepscan back in the 1980s.  

Adrian Shine is still around and Giorgio actually met him.  Shine was once a monster hunter but long ago turned disbeliever and has been a Nessie debunker ever since.   Shine didn't get a chance to debate with Giorgio or anyone else about the veracity of the monster but I know that Shine has argued that there isn't enough fish to support a breeding population of aquatic monster the size of what Nessie is supposed to be.

The surgeon's photograph came up and Giorgio was forced to admit that it was a hoax.  This was a terrible blow to me as well.  Not only because it was a hoax but this one incident was enough to make the whole subject a laughing stalk, not to be taken seriously again.

In fact, very little of the show occurs at Loch Ness, as Giorgio soon returns to the United States and spends the rest of the show talking about Champ, the creature of Lake Champlain.  He views a picture that supposedly has not been debunked or revealed as a fake and interviews a few people.

Trying to tie it all back to hunting aliens, Giorgio supposes that people in olden times might have been mistaking UFOs (or USOs) hiding under lakes as water creatures or monsters.  Also, he interviews a scientist who speculates that the quartz in the earth, present at Lake Champlain and Loch Ness, may in some way make a time tunnel or distortion, allowing visions or actual creatures of the distant past through for a moment, to be seen and vanish.   This is actually not a new idea and is what Rev. Donald Omand thought was going on at Loch Ness; that people were seeing psychical "recordings" of ancient things and that seeing these things was spiritually dangerous.  He tried to exorcise the Loch back in 1973.

Tsoukalos keeps mentioning cryptids and cryptozoology during this episode and I think that's what this is really about.  He does not say anything about the monsters being brought here by aliens or anything like that.  Seems that if something is going on in Loch Ness or Lake Champlain, Giorgio thinks it is time distortions.

All in all, a very good episode which I enjoyed, mainly because it was about one of my all time favorite topics from when I was a kid: The Loch Ness Monster.  Hopefully, Giorgio finds more original and current things to go after though.  As much as Atlantis and Loch Ness are part of our folklore and mythology, they've really been covered hundreds of times in books and television shows.  Getting Tsoukalos' take on these things is interesting, but he needs to branch off on his own, to really go... In Search of Aliens!

Atlantis calling! Atlantis calling!

Just sit right back and hear a tale...

I totally forgot to say something about Giorgio Tsoukalos's first episode of "In Search of Aliens."  It was called "The Hunt for Atlantis."  There's probably a good reason for this.  As much as I love to watch Giorgio, I was probably trying hard to stay awake.

I've been reading about Atlantis for very nearly forty years, either in books or articles in books.  I've also watched countless documentaries and television programs about it.   For me, Atlantis is a very old, very dead, and very well beaten horse.  I guess that's my problem for being an ancient! :-)

Still, when I saw the title of the first ever program starring Giorgio, I rolled my eyes.  Atlantis?!?  Really?!?  But that's just because, for me, its a topic more overplayed than a Phil Collins song. 

Still, the episode itself is very good.  Giorgio has a lot of energy and seems to really believe in what he's doing.  Hey, if I could be paid to travel the world and babble about aliens and 'ancient mysteries', I'd probably be pretty happy too!  Giorgio's take on Atlantis is that it was in the southwestern Iberian peninsula.  A variant on the 'Tartessos' theory that Atlantis was one of the ancient kingdoms in the region that would later be Spain and Portugal.   

Well, Giorgio ends up thinking that Atlantis itself may have been some sort of alien base on Earth.   It wasn't destroyed so much as left (cue MIB scene "No, Elvis is not dead, he just went home!)  

I enjoyed the program although I probably know as much, if not more, of the various how/who/where/when/what theories of Atlantis than even Tsoukalos himself.   I think that, if Atlantis did exist, it was an ice-age or post-ice age civilization contemporaneous with the builders of Gobeckli Tepe.  If it was anything more than a pure invention of Plato, it could be a distant memory of a prior civilization, probably totally built up by Plato in the telling.  

Raiders of the Lost Nazis

Giorgio Tsoukalos' second venture "In Search of Aliens" takes an unfortunate turn into Nazi-UFO mythology in his second episode "Nazi Time Travelers."  The stories and theories presented are old hat and regurgitated old stories which interested parties such as myself have heard before.   Presented as truth now is Jan Van Helsing's story of the Bavaria UFO crash in the mid 1930s, a Nazi Roswell.  Van Helsing, either a neo-nazi anti-Semite, or just a crazy but harmless conspiracy theorist, depending on who you listen to, is hardly a trusted granite source of information.

I say again that this venture into Nazism is unfortunate.  Now, I seriously doubt Tsoukalos is a crypto-nazi or that the people he interviews are neo-nazis of some stripe.  I very much doubt that the History Channel would broadcast neo-nazi revisionism.  And I do not want to believe Giorgio has any sympathy with them.

It has now been many decades since the Nazi era.  Over seventy years!  Most of the people alive to witness the events are dead now.  So it is only understandable, I guess, to begin to drift into story, fable, and the recreation of history, mythologizing many of the events.  This is a standard historical effect.  For many people, including some very deluded people, the Nazi era is a time of cool uniforms, awesome panzers, big armies conquering certain hated enemies, awesome technological wizz-bangs, and a time when one man 'stood up bravely' against the people he hated and despised (Adolf Hitler or Winston Churchill depending on your side).   World War II was as historically complex as any other time but for many, pro-Nazi and pro-Allies, it was seemingly a very cut and dried, black and white time.  A time when it was easy to take sides, a battle of good versus evil (and that is relative to which side you were on of course).

As Jacques Peretti said in Hitler: The Comedy Years, all the movies about world war II in the post-war period wanted to record all the nostalgia that people had about the war sans the "horrible bit we found out about at the end" (the death camps and the holocaust). 

However, I have read widely on Nazism and their connection to the occult, and on the current Neo-Nazi movements.  One particular author that directly addresses the problems arising from something like this show's enshrining of Nazi science is the late Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.  Other authors I have read on Nazi fringe matters include Dusty Skylar and Peter Levenda, among others.

The danger of shows like this, is that it mystifies and romanticizes the Nazis.  These tales of vimanas and Die Glockes and secret Nazi achievements.  Talking so much about Nazis like this, divorced of the fact of their terror and oppression, their genocide, dehistoricizes them.  It makes them into a caricature that, while scary or even desired, is not really all that bad.  Just some tough guys in cool black uniforms that tried to invent anti-gravity drive, after all.   The effect of a show like this is to attempt to erase the evil legacy and bad memory of the Third Reich and all they stood for.

For instance, during Giorgio's interviews, even he mentions that prisoners of war would have been used to create "The Henge" and the supposed secret bases, but no mention of how many thousands died doing projects like this around Germany.  He mentions that hundreds of tons of coal had been brought into a certain area of Poland without mentioning who would have been doing the transporting and at what horrible human cost. 


Another danger of making shows mystifying the Nazis is that it does indeed recreate Nazism for a new generation of Neo-Nazis.  Neo-Nazi intellectual sources such as Savatri Devi and Julis Evola did quite a bit of work in this area after the war, rewriting the Nazi 'narrative' to try and make them more heroic, more honorable, and more of what all white people should have joined with.   Such people do not need the help of UFO mythology to further remake Nazism into something that it was not, and make it into a springboard for further murder, destruction, and terror. 

I would heartily recommend that UFO researchers read Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke as a beginning point to learn how dangerous it is to make heroes of the Nazis based on mythology and false history.  Unless of course, that's the effect the creators of this program were looking for, then I have a quite different suggestion for them...

Giorgio's a Lefty!

The Left Handed Ancient Astronaut Theorist

I just noticed in his latest show, In Search of Aliens: Atlantis, that Giorgio Tsoukalos is left handed.  That could explain a lot.  Lefties tend to be more artistic and imaginative than us boring analytical Righties.  I still don't buy into ancient aliens totally, myself, although it could be possible.  I have always believed, as Douglas Adams wrote, that "anything's possible.  Its just that some things are highly improbable."