From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a journey to the fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, where we like to keep our fringe-ness fresh.
So it's almost like a French-ness, which I've now said out loud and it doesn't sound like
a great word.
So we're just going to keep calling it fringe-ness.
We are your fringe podcast hosts, Taylor and Chelsea.
Here today, you know what?
I don't think it's fresh because we actually talked about this topic, so I'm fairly confident
in saying it's an old topic in fact.
Isn't it?
I don't know.
It's up to you, Chelsea, because we talked about it, but you do what you do.
I don't know what you've done in the last week.
So you know what?
I almost changed the topic on you.
That way, this would have all been wrong, but lucky for you.
Fair enough.
Because I didn't want to do that to you.
So...
Okay, Chelsea, just before you move off, it's kind of weird that we pronounce it topic
and not topic.
You're right, because there's other words where it is pronounced topic.
Yeah.
In another word.
Yeah.
That topic.
You don't pronounce that different ways each time, but within other words, sometimes
it's topic.
Anyhow, today, we're not talking about how you pronounce topic or topic depending on,
I don't know, your accent, I guess.
It's how strange you are.
You strange people.
Today I am talking about lay lines.
And if you've never heard of lay lines before, you can think of lay lines as like the opposite
of the equator kind of, but instead of cutting the world in half, it cuts the world into
very random segments because lay lines connect various historic structures, prehistoric sites,
and landmarks that have a sort of otherworldly power to them, or association, maybe, such
as like the pyramids, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, what else would be on there?
I don't know.
Other things?
Hmm.
There are other ones on there that I cannot think of right now.
I'm sure.
I'm sure of this.
Oh, maybe like Coral Castle?
I don't know if that would be on a lay line.
I don't know why that's the only one I'm thinking of right now.
We've never done a Coral Castle episode either.
Oh, anyhow, you get the idea of what I'm saying, even though we're lost for anything other
than those three things, four things, if Coral Castle counts.
I'm pretty sure the pyramids are technically on them, as they say.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I said pyramids.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, that counts as the same one.
There's more than one pyramid.
All the pyramids.
Oh, yeah.
Every single pyramid would be on a lay line.
You're right for that.
Yeah.
So you know what?
Probably Atlantis too.
We just don't know where it is to put it on the lay line.
Yeah.
Let's go with Atlantis too.
I'm sure some of would argue that, and funny enough, it might come up in this episode.
So the general belief...
So Chelsea.
Yeah.
Just before you explain it to us, I just want to make sure it's not a place where you
can just lay down and have a good nap.
I wish, because I would be there so fast, and I would also say that I'm nowhere near
a lay line, if that was the case.
But no.
The idea of a lay line is developed in the early 20th century Europe.
The general belief is that the alignments were recognized by ancient societies, leading
them to build structures along them, perhaps to harness their power, perhaps to guide UFOs,
perhaps that ancient humans were in tune with some ethereal force, largely unobserved
by modern man, and constructed their sacred places in specific spots where that force
was strongest, whether it was to take advantage of the energy, maybe draw on the energy.
I don't know.
I don't know if anybody really knows.
And that's what we think of it now, lay lines, but the idea was developed in the early 20th
century Europe.
Reverend Edward Duke thought up the idea that sacred sites might have been constructed
in alignment with one another in 1846, when he observed that some medieval churches aligned
with each other.
That's kind of the first ever idea of something like this.
And in 1909, Wilhelm Eud in Germany argued that the presence of linear alignments connected
various sites and suggested that they had religious and astronomical function.
And then in Germany, the idea is referred to as insert German name here because I am
not even attempting this one.
Sorry guys.
But those words equal holy lines.
And it was adopted by some proponents of Nazism.
Funny that that is not Nazism is not funny, but just no, but it's it really like to take
up the alternative spirituality.
Like that was Nazism.
They loved like, oh yeah, to bet Shangri-La.
They really liked Atlantis.
They they really just anything that was like alternative history they loved.
It's amazing when we like started this podcast, we had the original idea that we like do the
talking and we had no idea in that general brainstorming session that Nazism would come
up so much on this podcast.
It's crazy.
Yeah, it's you know what?
The one thing I did learn is how much like conspiracy lore is grounded in white supremacy
and Nazism.
Oh yeah.
Well, I shouldn't even see white white supremacy.
Ethnocentricity is probably a better word because every lost continent has had somebody
who's trying to pursue a minority group.
They claim to them as part of that.
Yeah.
And they I mean with all how much esotericism, I think that's how you probably say that
word in that context went on with it.
It makes for some good lore around the Nazis as well with kind of this other worldliness.
But this episode is not about the Nazis.
It just so happened to come up again.
So that's kind of the first rumblings of an idea of what they're going for with laylines
and what it eventually comes to be.
And then along comes Alfred Watkins and he's an English antiquarian, which is someone who
studies old things like artifacts, historic sites, archives, manuscripts, so on.
He was also a successful businessman and an amateur archaeologist.
He also was a big fan of photography.
And he really develops the idea and laid the foundation of laylines.
And he puts this forth in his book titled The Old Straight Track in the 1920s.
He argues that straight lines could be drawn between various historic structures and that
these represented trade routes created by ancient British societies.
And I must say at this time, we're specifically speaking about the UK.
Oh, yeah, yeah, the great British Empire of 3000 BC, of course, of course.
According to his account, he was driving across the hills near Black Warden, her year
forward shire.
I do speak English, but not this kind of English.
No, not English English.
You just speak the regular English, the inferior language that cannot convey what the aliens
want.
Yes.
And when he looked across the landscape, he observed the way that several features lined
up together.
He subsequently began drawing lines across his ordnance survey maps, developing the view
that ancient British people had tended to travel in straight lines using mark points
along the landscape to guide them.
Watkins said that he was unhampered by other theories and that his observations were yielding
astounding results in all districts.
He further theorized that starting at any one point along the line and traveling along
it would also reveal sites not mapped on maps such as forest glades, trenches, or notches
on crested hills.
In his book, The Old Straight Track, he drew upon earlier research citing the work of astronomer
Norman Lockyer, who argued that ancient alignments might be oriented to sunrise and sunset at
solstices.
Watkins referred to these as lays, and the term lay was derived from the old English
term for a cleared space, with Watkins adopting it for his lines because he found it to be
part of the place names of various settlements that were along the lines he traced.
So, Chelsea, just so I'm on the same page as you, does that not mean that the original
guy was just saying that these are basically on the same lateral level because they would
experience sunrise and sunset at the same time, which is what they're connoting?
Yes, I mean, right now, this is literally sites that are within the same area and not
a far distance from each other.
Literally, you could stand on a hill and see that they were all aligned.
Okay, never mind, that they literally are the same line because they're within 20 kilometers
of each other.
Yeah, basically.
And at this point, and for most of this episode, which I find super strange, we don't really
leave Britain.
This whole layline thing has come strictly from Britain, for some weird reason.
Other things don't get tied to it for a while.
It kind of sounds like it's because the British thought it was their way of being superior
to others.
Could be.
So nobody else really wanted to adopt it.
Yeah, either that or they didn't want to think of anything outside of Britain, maybe?
Yeah, they don't tell the cometers about it, just the British folk.
Yeah, it only applies to them.
So Watkins also observes the recurrence of quote, coal and quote, Dodd in English place
names, thus suggesting that the individuals who established these lines were referred
to as Coleman or Doddman.
And so clarify that a little bit.
Here's what I'm talking about with the Doddman paste.
Come on, son of a bitch.
You just want me to Google something?
Oh, sorry, are you sharing your screen?
No.
Oh, OK.
I should have just shared my screen.
Yeah.
If I'm really thinking about it now, I wouldn't be having so many problems.
I could have just showed you the original one.
Here we go.
OK.
It's the second one in.
There's a chalk geoglyph depiction of a man in the side of a hill in Sussex holding what
looks like two sticks called quote, the long man of Wilmington.
Is he or is he just doing a shoulder stretch in a doorway?
I held that pose specifically before.
Yeah.
And then you can't keep your arms down.
Yeah.
Well, no, no, it's more so to stretch out your shoulders like you put your arms on there
and then you lean forward.
See that when I did this, where you go in the doorway and you hold your hands there and
then you leave and then your arms go up.
But no, if you look, his hands are clearly a little bit past the door frame so that he
can hold himself there while he pushes forward to stretch out his shoulders.
This is how you relieve your shoulders tension.
It's in the lay lines, guys.
The long man of Wilmington in which Watkins proposed that this is a depiction of an individual
measuring where the lay lines are.
Oh, man.
The next guy has a very awkward penis.
I need to go look at this.
Yeah, that is very awkward.
We're not going to put this stodman on there.
We're going to put the next guy with the awkward penis.
The CERN Abyss giant?
Okay.
Although Watkins gained a small following, Watkins's ideas were never accepted by a British
archaeological establishment, a fact that frustrated him.
There's a lot of things about this that were frustrating to him.
His critics noted that his ideas relied on drawing lines between sites established at
different periods of the past.
Obviously, his lay lines didn't have any magical connotations to it.
These are literally just, they all seem to be in a straight line and he was saying that
it was for trade routes and stuff like that.
There's nothing mystical about it.
And also, if it's for trade route, that doesn't make any sense why it would need to be a straight
line.
If anything, trade routes, in fact, are not straight lines unless you're on an airplane.
Yeah, that's my next sentence.
They also argued that in prehistory, as in the present, it was impractical to travel
in a straight line across Hillier Mountainous areas of Britain, not that they're, you know,
mountainous, rendering his lays unlikely as trade route.
They also argued that Britons would not have been sophisticated enough to produce such
accurate measurements across the landscape.
In 1926, advocates of Watkins's beliefs established the Straight Track Club.
To assist the scoring body of enthusiasts who were looking for their own lay lines in the
landscape in 1927, Watkins published the Lay Hunters Manual.
And Watkins dies in 1935 and the club went on without him, however, became inactive after
the Second World War and eventually disbanded and lay lines just kind of fade into obscurity
in the 1935s.
So that is until the 60s when Watkins ideas are revived in various forms by the countercultural
Earth Mysteries movement.
What a weird countercultural movement.
Basically just the hippies, right?
Basically, yeah.
So starting sometime in the 40s, did the hippies like need to like stretch out their shoulders
and they found this like giant in Wilmington who's like, oh, I've got to stretch for you.
He never comes up again.
Oh, he is forgotten by time until I bring this up.
Be honest with you.
Nobody's ever talked about him since.
I haven't heard of him.
Even now.
Oh, so starting sometime in the 40s through the 60s, the archaeological establishment
blossoms in Britain just fucking takes off.
And this is due to a variety of university courses coming available on the subject, which
allows the discipline to become professionalized.
Goodbye, amateur archaeologists.
Hello, Earth Mysteries, I presume, but also don't presume because I don't think those
go hand in hand.
So cut to the 60s when a counterculture movement comes in and lay lines go from trade routes
to invisible energy lines of sacred significance or mystical power.
They were lines of power that pass of some form of spiritual force or energy accessible
to our ancient ancestors, but now lost to narrow minded 20th century scientific thought.
So we really have a weird head coming about with archaeology becoming professionalized
and then these Earth Mystery groups coming about, which are like you guys are just like
book nerds that do everything by the book and they're not getting along.
In his book published in 1961, Skyways and Landmarks, Tony Webb published his idea that
Watkins lays were both real and served as ancient markers to guide alien spacecraft
that were visiting Earth.
He came to this conclusion after comparing Watkins's idea with those of French ufologist
Amy Michel who argued for the existence of ortho-tenes.
I've never heard of those.
Neither have I.
Lines along which alien spacecraft traveled.
Webb suggested that either spacecraft were following the prehistoric landmarks for guidance
or that both the lays in the spacecraft were following a magnetic current flowing across
the Earth.
I can just say that makes more sense than a friggin' trade route.
It does.
I can pick this up.
I think the guy was kinda on to something but he didn't know quite what.
But this guy after Watkins, Watkins is the guy to like name lay lines and come up with
it and then Tony Webb comes along and this is the first mentoring of anything mystical
of any sort about the lay lines.
So that's 1961.
You know what?
I'm more behind this theory than just like hey they can see this one so they just tried
to build everything in a straight line and then they can't.
In a straight line and they walked with William, yeah.
It weren't allowed to deviate.
All of Britain is on a straight line.
I mean what is Britain but a straight line of a country?
That's the first guy in the Earth Mysteries movement I guess.
So in comes John Mitchell and he's an esotericist who comes in and promotes these ideas to a
wider audience than even Tony Webb I guess.
I'm not sure why it was so much bigger but John Michelle publishes a book in 1967 so
this is six years after and it's called The Flying Saucer Vision.
Obviously the ancient astronaut theory is brought up in detail and basically just says
this is the time of the ancient astronaut theory.
I mean this is around the time probably that what's his face.
Eric Mondan again published his book and there is just a mess.
This is, this would be it.
Actually now that I'm thinking of it, the huge Earth Mysteries movement.
There is a huge like golden era of ancient astronaut.
I mean we have the TV show now but this was where all these books were published.
They were in the sweet spot of like UFO weirdness and everything at that time and you could
just make shit up.
Oh yeah that was the important part.
There's kind of two things.
One, it's hard to get perfect information from your end to actually research it and
two, nobody's gonna check if you're lying at the time which is fantastic.
Oh no and they just ate it up.
It was like oh people are already talking about this.
I'm gonna jump in on it and I'm gonna say the exact same stuff but I'm gonna make stuff
up along the way and people are gonna fucking love this.
Anyhow he's talking about the ancient astronaut theory and it's brought up in detail and basically
it's just saying that aliens were here assisting humans and were looked at as gods you know
the theory blah blah blah.
They left because we became too materialistic and technology focused but one day they're
gonna return if we reactivate the ancient centers.
Same old story in every freaking ancient astronaut book.
He writes another book in 1969 which is pretty much the same stuff as you do at that time
called The View Over Atlantis.
You probably know exactly what this book is about too.
It's described as one of the founding documents of the modern Earth Mysteries movement.
He becomes quite prominent in the Earth Mysteries movement at the time and get this he comes
from yet another wealthy British family.
I don't know how many times it comes up these people just are filthy rich.
He's actually well connected on his mother's side to like Dukes, someone that was the mayor
of London or like lots of political connections there.
He's just wealthy.
He's just like I wanted on this apparently like a renowned pot smoker for all of his
life dies of lung cancer and he just writes weird books.
He wrote so many books I just have to tell you some of the things he wrote about which
included the Shakespeare authorship question a book on Adolf Hitler quote and a book condemning
Solomon Rushdie during normal things that people do normal things.
It's so weird.
Chelsea to be fair you could have just called it celebrity quotes.
We didn't need to know it was only one celebrity and the celebrity was Hitler.
Yeah, would you call him a celebrity?
He's a celebrity.
Would you not say he's a celebrity?
On the last page it's like surprise these quotes are for me, Adolf Hitler.
He also writes a book condemning Solomon Rushdie during the Satanic versus controversy and
so on which is something I apparently need to learn more about.
Anyhow, back to lay lines.
I just thought it was funny because it comes up so much that these people just take up these
weird hobbies because they're like rich.
Anyhow, back to lay lines.
Here which is his book The View Over Atlantis.
He interpreted lay lines by reference to the Chinese concept of geomagnetic energy lines
which he transliterated as lung may which equaled dragon veins.
He proposed that advanced ancient society that had once covered much of the world had
established lay lines across the landscape to harness this lung may energy.
Translating the term lung may as dragon pass he interpreted tales from English mythology
and folklore and which heroes killed dragons so that the dragon slayers became the villains.
Hutton later noticed that Mitchell's idea embodied a fervent religious feeling which
though not Christian was heavily influenced by Christian models adopting an evangelical
and apocalyptic tone that announced the coming of an age of aquarius in which ancient wisdom
would be restored.
Michelle invented various claims about archeological evidence to suit his purpose and he viewed
archeologists as antagonists seeing them as the personification of the modern materialism
he was railing against.
While John Michelle Mitchell is working on his heavy hitter Atlantis book The Lay Hunting
Community is taking form because there was already kind of the rise with the two books
which was John Michelle's first book and the Tony wed one which kind of burst this lay
hunting community where in 1962 a group of ufologists get to work establishing the Lay
Hunters Club.
Michelle's book being most of the inspiration for it they just get together and travel around
Britain trying to identify lay lines connecting various historic structures and sites and still
at this time it's only Britain.
Despite the fact that we've gotten into Chinese mythology.
Interesting.
I know isn't it?
It's super weird.
It's still like 1962 you would think they'd come out of Britain.
Nope.
Churches were particularly favored by the lay hunters who often worked at the assumption
that such churches had almost always been built atop pre-Christian sacred sites.
Not sure why.
As I'm saying they don't give any reasoning.
In the 70s and 80s there is a huge increase in publications on lay lines just because
of kind of what's going on in the community at that time.
We also see a huge pickup during that time of just like UFO topics as we see with even
Roswell was around that time right?
Yeah the 70s right?
Yeah that's where it comes back.
So I think it's just you know the culture going on at the time.
So Phillip Hesleton, Layline Enthusiast.
He establishes Layhunter magazine in 1965, edited at some points by Paul Screton who
also wrote the book Quicksilver Heritage in which he argued that the Neolithic period
had seen an idyllic society devoted to spirituality but that this was brought to an end through
the introduction of metal technologies in the Bronze Age.
He argued that this golden age could nevertheless be restored.
I guess Laylines and ancient astronauts go hand in hand now that I think about it.
This kind of makes sense right?
Because of the ancient structures that are stowed upon us by the gods that were made
by them and the gods are creating aliens.
Yeah.
And I mean.
Of course what you're going to do is just completely disregard geography and just build
something, go up, drive in a straight line and then build the next one, go up and continue
that straight line and build the next one regardless of geography.
If you think about it in not just Britain but the world, I mean you can connect pretty
much anything with a straight line.
That's the fun thing about a sphere.
You can make straight lines pretty easy.
Yeah.
So part of the popularity of Layhunting was that individuals without any form of professional
training and archaeology could take part in this and feel that they could rediscover the
magical landscapes of the past.
Which I think is hilarious because in this episode we've seen the professionalization
of archaeology and these people are straight up wanting to keep it amateur and not have
any like professionalism or research to back it up at all.
They're just like you guys suck.
You're professionals.
You know what you're doing and you just don't agree with us so we want to have nothing to
do with you.
No.
It's kind of funny when professionalism completely disregards your thing.
So the only people who do do it are not professionals.
Yeah.
No and that's completely it.
So I find that hilarious and they're like we hate you too and we just have this mutual
hatred of each other because we just don't agree that this is a thing.
Layhunting welcomed those who had a strong interest in the past but felt excluded from
the narrow confines of Orthodox academia.
They took you in if you just didn't know what you were doing.
That's an interesting way to put it.
It was a safe spot for the idiots that couldn't get in.
Who got me in front of the geologists.
I got rejected again from the archaeology university and they're like you have a safe
place here.
The Layline's Hunters Group and they fully integrate it with other esoteric practices
like numerology and dosing because you might as well at that point.
And hey I have nothing to say about numerology and dosing.
I just think it's hilarious that they're just trying to make it even less scientific
I guess.
It was also made up of people from all walks of life except those professionals of course.
No if you actually know what you're talking about completely not allowed.
No.
Band.
And there's different classes of people, different political opinions, cryptids.
Just kidding.
Bigfoot wasn't there.
And within such an eclectic variety of individuals of course that meant the understanding of
Layline's very greatly which included everything from Lay's mark of pre-existing energy current
and others believe that what they were building there was to help direct the energy.
And my thought is that these people are way too into this.
Like they built this entire community that's made up of non-professionals because professionals
are not allowed.
Only if you're a professional somewhere else and have no idea what you're talking about
when it comes to this.
Yeah, it honestly feels like somebody was laughed at by a geologist once and they said
screw you I'm gonna start this club because you're not allowed now.
And it's gonna, we're not even gonna have any basis in reality.
No, you told me this is wrong.
Well guess what?
It's the only right thing in the world now.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think it's so funny because when there's no professionals and like they don't even
have an opinion on it, just of course you're gonna get everybody with like every opinion
under the sun about what lay lines are because like why not?
Why not?
And with so many differing opinions, they all do agree on this thing, which is that
the lays were laid out between 5000 BCE and 26000 BCE.
That's the only thing apparently they agree on is where the lay lines are coming into
existence.
Wait, I just want to make sure I have this right then.
They're not all laid out the same time.
They're laid out over a 20,000 year period then, correct?
Yeah, you can interpret it that way.
Okay.
I think that's the more beneficial to their opinion way of laying it out.
I was thinking of it more of like they all came into existence at once in the 20,000
period.
But they just don't know within that 20,000 period when.
Yeah, I mean either way could be interpreted and that's the thing when nobody's a professional
weighing in on this.
Well and they're not gonna specify either.
They just face it.
I just love that there's like this is the only thing they agreed on.
Yeah, that's okay.
They're doing their best.
I gotta say if I was in this club, I wouldn't even agree with this.
I'd be like lay lines are earth energy obviously is what I would think they were.
They're an energy grid within the earth and so they've always been there and these guys
think that they were made within these time frames.
So I don't even know what the fuck they're thinking but they agree on it all of them.
So they just live their lives doing this arguing with the professional archaeologists and taking
a liking to.
I would also like to point out most of the things that I know are on lay lines were not
built prior to 5000 BCE either.
Oh, but they were.
Okay, never mind.
I am mistaken.
You are.
Maybe it's just this one particular club.
I have no fucking idea.
They seem pretty scattered if I was to be honest.
Obviously, nobody's like a professional.
Chelsea, they are doing their best was what they have, which is not a lot of instruction.
There's society's rejects.
They just live their lives doing this arguing with the professional archaeologists and they
take a liking to archaeo astronomers because they like their arguments for a sophisticated
astronomer priest.
And that is that like well priests, I don't know, but from my understanding of that is
that things are connected with solstices and constellations and stuff from these historic
sites.
Right?
Yeah.
In the 1980s, scholars Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy tried to approach lay lines with
a scientific mindset and ultimately their findings highlighted a crucial error with the
theory and this is why they fucking hate professionals.
I am just gonna say it.
Williamson and Bellamy's findings did not outright disprove the existence of lay lines,
but they did cast a fair amount of reasonable doubt.
Essentially, by examining the locations of various archaeological sites across England,
they discovered that there was such a high density of landmarks that it was essentially
possible to draw a straight line in any direction and connect multiple locations.
That is, anyone could create a map of lay lines.
Researcher Tom Brooks argued that keen mathematicians lived in Britain as far back as 5000 years
ago before the Greeks had even invented geometry.
He, like Watkins, examined ancient sites, 1500 to be precise, and found that they had
all been built on a series of isosceles triangles, each one guiding ancient humans to the next.
Okay, I guess technically you could build them on isosceles triangles and still have
them all on straight lines.
I think at this point it's shifting a little from lines to triangles.
Oh, okay, okay.
The more powerful it is.
Which I've never heard of lay triangles.
It doesn't roll off the tongue as nice.
No, but the lines will intersect because at this point there's so many I would assume
places that you're trying to account for that there's gonna be several lines and they will
cross creating triangles.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
In theory, Brooks's findings would support the existence of lay lines.
But to highlight how skewed this data was, Matt Parker of the University of London School
of Mathematics at Queen Mary cheekily applied Brooks's techniques of drawing layline maps
to Woolworth stores.
I like this part.
Quote, we know so little about the ancient Woolworth stores.
He dukely told The Guardian in 2010.
But we do still know their locations.
I thought that if we analyze the sites we could learn more about what life was like in
2008 and how these people went about buying cheap kitchen accessories and discount CDs.
Evidently, three Woolworth stores around Birmingham formed an exact equilateral triangle.
It was a remarkable discovery.
One that fit his hypothesis, he said, by skipping over the vast majority and only choosing a
few that happened to line up.
Parker's tongue and cheek experiment effectively reached the same conclusion as Williamson
and Bellamy's research.
By choosing a limited set of data from a larger pool, it can be used to support just about
any argument.
Well, it bothers me that he chose Woolworth and not places that sells Lay's potato chips.
I think Lay's is Canadian.
No, Frito Lay's is a huge company.
It's international.
Are you sure?
Oh yeah, for sure.
But why wouldn't you do Lay's lines as opposed to Lay's lines?
I feel like he missed out on a really good marketing opportunity.
Oh, it's US based.
Yeah, they own Pepsi too.
Or sorry, Pepsi owns them.
A subsidiary of PepsiCo.
Yeah, also owns Taco Bell and Pizza Hut.
Like, they own a ton, yeah.
That would make sense.
All those big companies own everything.
Yeah.
Anyhow, their book brought about two different responses from the Lay hunters.
In my response, I say only two.
I guess this is another one that they agree on.
So some maintain that this could not be recorded with empirical evidence and rational argumentation
that archaeologists in all their professionalism were too narrow-minded to comprehend the theory.
These guys know too much about this one topic.
They can't even get their mind around it because academics, am I right?
The other was to further engage archaeologists by seeking out new data and arguments to bolster
their beliefs.
The Lay Hunter magazine ceased publication in 1999.
Its last editor, Danny Sullivan, stated that the idea of lays were dead.
Hutton suggested that some of the enthusiasm formally directed towards lays was instead
directed towards Archao astronomy.
He also noted that the Lay hunting community had functioned as an indispensable training
ground for a small but important group of non-academic scholars who have made a genuine
contribution to the study of folklore.
That being said, beliefs in ancient Earth energies have passed so far into the religious
experience of New Age, counterculture of Europe and America that it is unlikely that
any test of evidence would bring about an end to belief in them.
Which is a true enough statement, and I mean by any professional, archaeological, or anything
that studies like the pyramids or anything like that, lay lines are a pseudo-archaeology
and a pseudo-science.
So yeah, that's lay lines.
Do you have any question or anything that you think needs to be added?
No, and I honestly think that lay lines reached their peak right around the time that Dan Brown's
book The Da Vinci Code came out as a movie.
Because I think they're in that, and that's really where they reached their peak, yes.
Well, there's a lot of things, and I couldn't exactly find a list of where lay lines come
up, but I believe...
No, go ahead.
I was just gonna say, I know they've been mentioned even in this podcast before, came
up with that induction case in which one of them received the download of data and...
Oh yeah, Rendlesham Forest.
Rendlesham Forest came up there before.
I think he got the download in like Morse code or something, and eventually he just like
translates it into all these different significant areas that would be on these lay lines.
Yeah, it was binary, he got it in.
Binary, yes.
And like it comes up in Dan Brown's book.
It comes up, it definitely comes up in all these things.
But I personally like the fact that it's a group of people who refuse to be educated
on the topic in which they're researching, who like exclusively do this entire topic.
I wonder if in their research, they just reach a point where they're like, I feel like I'm
getting to know too much about lay lines.
I'm actually too much of a...
Yeah, I'm an archaeologist now, so unfortunately I have to leave the group because now I don't
believe in them.
I'm gonna have to retire.
Yeah.
Like I just know too...
And it's not even like, I don't believe in them, it's probably just that they might
know too much about archaeology or lay lines or something.
They just can't have that.
Yeah, because every now and then you'll hear it in like sophisticated talk, lay lines.
And I shouldn't say sophisticated, that's not quite the right word for it, but it comes
up where you don't expect it.
And nobody really knows enough about it to disprove it.
So I'm glad to hear that it's a group of entirely unsophisticated individuals who have done
everything involved in this.
Well, I wanna say, but people do know enough to disprove it and those people don't believe
in it.
But that's the point that I made in that one of my last sentences there is that now it's
so intertwined in the New Age counterculture that it's unlikely that there would be any
evidence in which people would believe that it's not there because it's also this like,
well, stick it to the band.
They know too much about archaeology and therefore they don't know anything about...
No, they're in too deep.
They're in too deep.
They're just like not of the like higher realm that we're a part of.
Honestly, it was never mentioned, but you know, if you did a little more digging, the
term like Rothschild and like Bilderberg group eventually comes up with the archaeologists
who are educated.
And I mean, Lailines themselves, I think, are kind of an interesting thing to look at
because I guess there's people who are just looking for in the end, a connectedness between
even if you look at the pyramids in Giza, you look at the pyramids and like there's pyramids
on all continents and yes, it's a very popular shape.
But at the same time, it's selectively picking what is in a straight line.
That is always the problem.
Yeah, but I mean, if you take a pyramid in Egypt and a pyramid in Mexico and a pyramid
here, I mean...
Well, no matter what, no matter what, if you pick two things, they're going to be in a
straight line.
It's just picking that third thing which adds to the straight line.
Yeah, in that part, it's making some sort of weird grid.
But I think it's just people looking for an interconnectedness that there's more to what
meets the eye in the end, I guess.
Yeah, and it makes a lot of sense that once again, we add an ethnocentric group who picked
up on this.
It literally no other way.
Nobody else.
On the map.
It's the Nazis and the uneducated.
That's all that go into this.
In Britain and Germany, that's literally the only places we talked about here other than
what I added saying pyramids in Egypt.
Hey, and Chelsea, in fact, you are not an educated archaeologist, are you?
So I'm a part of this group.
Yeah.
Whether you want it or not, you've now officially become part of them.
I guess I have.
I can't argue with that.
I just did an episode on ley lines.
One of them.
And I think with that, I have been Taylor.
You're Chelsea.
We are journey to the fringe.
Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week.
Yeah.
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