I started out looking for a video of an Amy Grant song and somehow (I can’t for the life of me remember how; which, in itself, is kind of a funny commentary on what is to follow) wound up immersed in a series of inter- and disconnected websites that espoused and debunked (sometimes within the same sentence!) various ideas about the ancient history of our planet in general and the species known as “man” in particular.

What followed was an afternoon that—as I near the end of it—seems less like an enlightening afternoon about archeological truth and more like a long, slow, painful sunburn. The kind where you wake up on your towel thinking, “How long have I been out and—ouch!—when did I exceed the limits of my SPF?”

The principals in this journey of mine were many, but the main entities (I think they’re entities, they may be part of my imagination, according to an incredibly successful shlock salesman named—what else?—Eckhart Tolle) whose “findings” were most influential on my own mental-epidermis abrasions were Jason Colavito (articulate skeptic), David Pratt (articulate believer), Michael Cremo (chronic lecturer and wonderfully annoying denier of “conventional wisdom”) and Graham Hancock (who knows?!).

See, I was looking up the Amy Grant song when I stumbled across reviews on that book by Eckhart Tolle that the Great Madame O has been hawking. The title makes you think it’s about heaven on earth, but really it’s just another rehash of narcissistic philosophy such as makes the rounds every so often. “Believe in yourself because, well, why not?”

Within one of the reviews, I stumbled across a reference to Michael Cremo. He’s written books and has a very elaborately frustrating website about how archeology actually disproves a lot of the conventional wisdom we’ve been taught about man’s history. I know enough about web sites (take this one, for instance!) to know better than to trust what I read on the web, but he does say some interesting stuff. All of what he says may be true, it may all be hooey, but the one thing I’m sure of is: I don’t know.

Somewhere on his website I stumbled across (I think, the chronology of all this is disappearing from my brain like books on Prince Madoc from your local library) a review of a Graham Hancock book by someone named Jason Colavito. Hancock is a journalist (translation: one who makes up things under the guise of information investigation and dissemination) who started researching several years ago an apparent link between the belief systems of the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Aztecs (or Mayans or someone who lived way south in Mexico). By cobbling together several “facts” and treating some “legends” as having some sort of basis in fact, he has put forth the idea in several books that there was a common culture that spread across the world in the far past—then died out in about 12,500 B.C.—that might have been planted, augmented or inspired by space aliens.

Personally, I like the theory that early Mexican culture was brought to the continent by illegal aliens, but he didn’t go into that aspect of it.

Anyway, enter Colavito, a writer and researcher who holds that the whole “civilization was started on earth by aliens" can be traced to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He makes a good case, partly because I have often thought that whole idea silly and was going to agree with whoever went this way, anyway.

And, somewhere in there, was David Pratt. David Pratt has studied the pyramids of Egypt and pieced together many facts that lead him to believe … well, I’m honestly not sure what he believes. It may have something to do with really tall ancient earthlings building the pyramids but I’m not entirely sure. Pratt is an excellent writer if, by “excellent writer” you mean “lots of big words and really long sentences.” But he does include really cool diagrams and I’m pretty sure he believes in something, though it may just be in blueprints.

In movies and on TV, if someone needs to find some information about something or someone on the web, they just type in a couple words and in seconds they have found all they need to know. I, on the other hand, go looking for an Amy Grant song and get sidetracked into this. Probably user error.

Comments? martha917@yahoo.com