Wide Atlantic Weird

The podcast returns to the topic of flat Earth, and Cian is joined once again by Dr Edward Guimont from snowy New York to cover the history of who exactly believed the earth was flat, when did they believe it, and why did they believe it? A litany of topics are covered in this wide-ranging episode, including:

-the infamous Bedford Level experiment naturalist with Alfred Russell Wallace

-Flat earth belief within Christianity in the 19th century

-Flat Earth belief in Islam, including Boko Haram

-Connections to Qanon and creationism

-Flat Earth, Kruger, and the Boers

-Ronald Reagan's UFO fixation

-Christopher Columbus as a 'proto-Protestant', Washington Irving, and bad history

-The need for pre-Columbian contact and historical revisionism

-Geocentrist belief in China

-The myth of flat Earth belief in the Middle Ages

LINKS

BUY ME A COFFEE! Please and thank you :)

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/wideatlantic

Our Previous Flat Earth Episode

https://anchor.fm/cian-gill/episodes/Sphere-Itself-Getting-Your-Head-Round-The-Flat-Earth-Theory-with-James-Lynch-e4p534

Dr Edward Guimont's Page

https://edwardguimont.com/

My Guest Appearance on Censored Podcast

https://play.acast.com/s/censored/torridtrash-wheatleytothedevilada-1953-

Inventing The Flat Earth, Jeffrey Burton Russell

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/356467

The Light Ages, Seb Falk

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/25/the-light-ages-by-seb-falk-review-banishing-the-idea-of-the-dark-ages

In which Cian & Dónal once again take a headlock to the Hulkster's life and career by taking the claims of his 'auto-biography' to task. In this long-awaited follow-up we tackle:

-Hogan joining the WWF and his relationship with Vince McMahon

-The first Wrestlemania

-Hogan and Mr T visit some kids to promote Wrestlemania

-Rowdy Roddy Piper makes Hogan cry by ripping off his crucifix

-Hogan and Vince bro out making 'No Holds Barred'

-Hogan's relationship with Randy Savage & the Ultimate Warrior

-Hogan pretends to have discovered the Undertaker

-Vince and the WWF are taken to court for steroid scandals

FURTHER LISTENING: THE LAPSED FAN ON THE STEROID TRIAL:

https://www.spreaker.com/user/11348916/tlf-trial-part-1?fbclid=IwAR1RviHgTFD_NAhWpgnpkJw6w9Qe3lnP2ltNPkXHRmW4ZoxH_rBTD9LVwxs

In this episode, Cian and Ali discuss 80s domestic terrorist group who called themselves THE ORDER, in a direct lift from the 1978 white supremacist text The Turner Diaries. The MAGA goons who caused chaos at Washington this month contained at least a core of serious, organised, far-right insurrectionists whose ideas can be traced to this underground 'white supremacist bible' . They committed robberies, murders, and other crimes during the 1980s in order to fund their imagined race war and overturning of the government and were by turns hilariously incompetent and terrifyingly effective. Instead of creating a 'White Redoubt' break-away state in the Pacific Northwest, their reign of terror ended in a shoot-out that only served to further spark off militia groups.

Cian returns to the mystical, mythical, WW1-era pastoral English fairyland only to find that it's become a weird British indie film hellscape of death, hallucinations, and poor life decisions in the SECOND of his Cottingley Fairy film analyses, this time talking about the 1997 movie PHOTOGRAPHING FAIRIES. Plus, as the film section is a bit short this time around, enjoy a bit of background about the extremely weird 'Turanian Dwarf Theory' in which writers and anthropologists came to believe that folkloric dwarfs and fairies are memories of an ancient prehistoric race of subhumans ...

SOURCES:

Britishfairies.wordpress.com

Strange And Secret Peoples, Carole Silver

https://books.google.ie/books?id=3GeN25gJZK0C&pg=PT153&lpg=PT153&dq=turanian+dwarf+theory&source=bl&ots=zuY-wpeZUu&sig=ACfU3U32W4kyakxoirgnKqXVpr3UAf1rAw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjB2MOio6DuAhUVZxUIHcyYCPAQ6AEwEHoECAYQAg#v=onepage&q=turanian%20dwarf%20theory&f=false

Some Backgrounds Of Fairyland, HP Lovecraft

http://www.wikithulhu.com/article:some-backgrounds-of-fairyland

The Watcher By The Threshold, John Buchan

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57402

It's early January at the cabin, before the snow. Cian watches the 1997 movie Fairy Tale: A True Story in the first of two investigations into the 1997 double-bill of Cottingley Fairy films. Grab yourself whatever you may need to get through a schmaltzy 90s kid film. Along the way we'll talk about:

-how Victorians & Edwardians were obsessed with fairies

-why Theosophists, Spiritualists, and Arthur Conan Doyle were so keen to believe in real fairies

-the strange friendship between Conan Doyle and the American magician Houdini

-the importance of ambiguity in films about fraud/belief

-the role of youth, femininity and class in the story of the Cottingley Fairies

SOURCES:

Borderland Forms: Arthur Conan Doyle, Albion's Daughters, and the Politics of the Cottingley Fairies, Alex Owen, History Workshop, 1994

https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article-abstract/38/1/48/643266?redirectedFrom=fulltext

The Coming Of The Fairies, Arthur Conan Doyle, 1922

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/47506/47506-h/47506-h.htm

Princess Mary's Gift Book

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39592/39592-h/39592-h.htm

Join us at the cabin for a semi-seasonal late-December big-budget sci-fi extravaganza as we tackle Spielberg's 1977 film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and its inspirations from the real-life world of UFOlogy. We cover:

-Close Encounters vs Star Wars

-The Paranormal boom of the 70s

-Themes of religion and spirituality in UFOlogy

-J Allen Hynek, 'secular' UFOlogy, and the ETH

-Small-town America as a magical place in film

-Real cases that influenced the film

-Alien abductions

-Spielberg's interest in UFOs

NOTES:

Rolling Stone Interview:

https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/science-fiction-in-steven-spielbergs-suburbia-44190/

Varicose Brains, Martin Kottmeyer:

http://magoniamagazine.blogspot.com/2013/12/varicose-brains-part-1-entering-grey.html

Directed by Steven Spielberg by Warren Buckland:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/directed-by-steven-spielberg-9780826416919/#:~:text=In%20this%20book%2C%20Warren%20Buckland,makes%20in%20structuring%20his%20blockbusters.

Dónal returns to the cabin to discuss Kenneth Branagh's 1994 film 'Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.' It's a spoilerfest so beware - we take the film apart into it constituent elements (it's primarily constructed of hubris and bare chest real estate) to find out whether it's ALIVE or rather a cobbled-together monster. BUT, what if the real monster was John Cleese all along?

Cian is delighted to welcome Dr Edward Guimont to the cabin for a wide-ranging chat about monster hunters and strange beliefs in the context of post-colonial Africa and the American frontier. Dr Guimont teaches at the University of Connecticut and has written about archaeology in Zimbabwe, cryptozoology, myths of living mammoths, and is now working on the Flat Earth idea within the colonial period. Amongst other things, we cover:

-History of Great Zimbabwe and the myth of Ophir

-Nessie and Scottish Nationalism

-The Sirius Mystery

-Arthur C Clarke and Carl Sagan

-Qanon, Bill Cooper as UFO conspiracy

-The origins of the ‘dinosaurs in Africa’ myth

-The Scramble For Africa and Neo-Colonialism and Cryptozoology

-Young Earth Creationists and Ctyptozoology

-The Myth of the Living Mammoth In North America

-The Closing of the Frontier and American Monsters

-EcoGothic Extinction Fiction

-Links to Conspiracy Culture

NOTES:

Dr Edward Guimont’s Twitter

https://twitter.com/edward_guimont

Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa, Dr Edward Guimont

https://contingentmag.org/2019/03/18/hunting-dinosaurs-africa/

Dr Edward Guimont’s Website

https://edwardguimont.com/

The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Sirius-Mystery/Robert-Temple/9780892817504

Africa Is A Country

https://africasacountry.com/

A Living Dinosaur?, Roy Mackal

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Dinosaur-Search-Mokele-Mbembe/dp/9004085432

Thomas Jefferson Monster Hunter, Justin Mullis on the Monster Talk Podcast

https://monstertalk.skeptic.com/webpage/thomas-jefferson-monster-hunter

EcoGothic Extinction Fiction, Jennifer Schell

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315464930/chapters/10.4324%2F9781315464930-12

Floating Coast, Bathsheba Demuth

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393635164

Cian is joined by Emmy & Steve from the Misfits & Mysteries podcast, direct from NYC, to talk about New York state's pet 'window area' and myth cycle, the Montauk Project. The chat features:

-the Philadelphia Experiment

-kidnapped psychic children

-Stranger Things

-the Montauk Monster

-Time travellers

LINKS:

Misfits & Mysteries Blog & Podcast:

https://www.misfitsandmysteries.com/

Cian and Ali return to the American Militia miniseries, and take a look at the life and crimes of Timothy McVeigh, a man who was inspired by the events of Ruby Ridge and Waco to strike against the federal government himself, committing the terrible Oklahoma City Bombing. We cover:

-the Turner Diaries

-the conspiracy that McVeigh was a patsy and was never executed

-McVeigh's military experience

-McVeigh's gun fixation

-Racism in the world of the militia movement

-details of the bombing

-McVeigh's interest in numerology and Star Trek

NOTES:

Check out our patreon here: 

patreon.com/wideatlanticweird

American Terrorist, Lou Michel, Dan Herbeck

https://books.google.ie/books/about/American_Terrorist.html?id=_kPdAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y

Aberration In The Heartland, Wendy Painting

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23281022-aberration-in-the-heartland-of-the-real

Racist Foundation Of Oregon, Oregonlive.com

https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2020/06/oregons-founders-sought-a-white-utopia-a-stain-of-racism-that-lives-on-even-as-state-celebrates-its-progressivism.html