James, I have just discovered your site via the article Crackpot Alley. I’m wondering, since you slapped that label on yourself, who are your favorite crackpots?

Jesse

Thanks for checking in, Jesse.

I will approach this question in precisely the way I answer such questions when put to me by a significant utter—which is to say in an ill-considered form which generally disappoints—which is the way my favorite uncle, the crackpot of our family did it, off “the top of his head.”

My Uncle Robert married my maternal grandmother’s middle sister Alice, and is designated in civic archives as “negro.” However, he is either a quadroon or an octoroon, too light even to be a Mulatto. We always thought maybe he was a Latino, perhaps related to Rudolph Valentino. He was lean and muscular all of his life and had boxed in his youth, along with his brother Emanuel. Robert was the smartest man in our extended family, was from New England, and had a stern way about him, with a gravelly voice that is impossible to forget. My two favorite stories about Uncle Robert are second hand.

My cousin Michael related recently, at the funeral of Alice’s youngest sister, Ann, that he was present once as a boy at his Grandfather Robert’s home when missionaries showed up at the door. I forget if he told me they were Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Robert welcomed them in and did some preaching of his own, about how Sodom and Gomorrah had been leveled by atomic weapons dropped by ancient aliens!

My mother recently told me about her questioning her mother as to why Uncle Robert had a tan all year long. My Grandmother Kern, a stalwart Irish-American Kraut if ever there was one, explained. It was well known that Uncle Robert had served in the Pacific aboard a merchant marine ship that was sunk by a Jap sub. Uncle Robert used to drink with Uncle Bernie, who was a diehard racist and often described how all blacks should be made to swim back to Africa with a Jew under one arm and a Dago under the other. In any case, the story behind Uncle Robert’s year-round tan went like so, and was seconded by Uncle Bernie.

Uncle Robert had spent two weeks adrift in the Pacific in a life raft before being picked up, and had, during the course of this harrowing experience, been permanently burned bronze by the cruel sun! That story is so cool you just want to believe it.

As a boy I thrilled to the Ra Expedition and Kon-Tiki, both efforts by the modern Viking captain to prove diffusionist theories of cross-cultural contact in antiquity through experimental archeology.

Immanuel Velikovsky proposed an elaborate theory about human mythology being shaped by a passage of Mars and/or Venus [I forget] close to the earth, causing deluges mythologized as the universal flood legends of antiquity. He explained the Plagues of Egypt brought down by the Hebrew God based on this same theory. Although I eventually lost interest in his theories, the vast amount of lore he gathered between the covers of Worlds in Collision remains inspirational to me.

The grandfather of our current ancient astronaut theorists, Erik Von Daniken, effectively turned me into a crackpot when I was a boy and read Chariots of the Gods. The full movie is available at the link below.

I love this guy, and, more importantly, suffer from Crackpot Hair Jealousy every time I see him.

Ancient Astronaut Theory explained by Giorgio A. Tsoukalous ("Ancient Aliens" compilation)