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Bob Shell: Ancient Aliens?

Ancient Aliens?

Yes, I admit it, I watch the History Channel’s ‘Ancient Aliens’ programs. Why? Because, even though they are about 60% horse hockey, they do slip in some interesting accurate facts.

But I strongly disagree with their basic premise, which is our ancient ancestors were too stupid to do this stuff, so either: A. They had the help of aliens; or B. The aliens did it. Our ancient ancestors were as intelligent as we are. They just understood things we don’t. They had a lost technology for moving very heavy things with little effort. What was this technology? We simply don’t know.

In Florida there is something called the Coral Castle. It is made of very large pieces of coral rock, pieces weighing tons. One stone, a revolving doorway weighing tons, is balanced so precisely that a child can turn it. I’ve been there and found it astonishing. All of the stones were moved and positioned by one man, working alone at night, with only a wooden tripod. There was a rectangular box mounted atop the tripod. We have no idea what was in it. The man who accomplished this amazing feat claimed he had rediscovered the technology the Egyptians used to build the pyramids. Whatever that secret was, he took it to the grave with him. He certainly did not claim alien assistance. All attempts to duplicate his feat have failed. I’m sure you can find photos and more info by Googling ‘Coral Castle.’ Around the world there are ancient megalithic structures. Megalith means ‘big stone,’ and the stone are big. Some are larger than city buses and weigh hundreds of tons. We’d be hard pressed to move them today with our most advanced machinery. I’m sure the ancient builders used big stones because it was easier for them than using lots of little stones, as later cultures had to do. But I don’t think aliens had anything to do with it.

Ancient humans, and by human I mean Homo sapiens, had brains just as large and developed as ours. Their culture and cultural references were just different. As was their technology. At a time when they supposedly only had tools made of stone or soft copper they created gigantic, polygonal stones, and fitted them together like three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles as though they weighed nothing. Since we find the same building style worldwide, I believe there was once a worldwide civilization that vanished at the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,500 years ago. There is considerable evidence that this Ice Age ended suddenly, causing worldwide flooding that is the root of flood myths in nearly all cultures. Graham Hancock has discussed this idea in his books.

Archeologists say the Giza pyramids and Great Sphinx are only about 3,000 to 5,000 years old. But geologists, who know more about rock weathering say they’re far older, dating to that same 12,500 years ago. I trust the geologists a lot more. This means that the ancient Egyptian civilization we know about did not build them. They were already there when that civilization arose. There is clear evidence that the face of the Great Sphinx was originally different, not the face of a pharaoh. That was changed later during dynastic times. Probably the original face wasn’t human at all, more likely a lion’s face.

Many of the programs in the ‘Ancient Aliens’ series are old, but they keep running them. Stan Friedman, my late friend, has been dead for years, but he still pops up there.
Because many of the programs are old, they don’t reflect the latest discoveries. For example, we now know that those famous cave paintings in France and Spain were painted by Neanderthals. They used their own saliva to mix with the pigments, and left their DNA behind. It’s Neanderthal DNA. The Neanderthals weren’t apelike subhumans. They had red hair and blue eyes. Dress one in a business suit and he wouldn’t attract any attention on Park Avenue. The slouching, bowlegged reconstruction that we saw for years came from a single old man discovered early who suffered severe osteoarthritis and other ailments.

Neanderthals had larger brains than modern humans and considerably larger eyes, so they may have been primarily nocturnal or crepuscular. Because there is no DNA in the megaliths, it is quite possible that Neanderthals were the builders. And Neanderthals are alive today in most of us. Unless your heritage is 100% sub-Saharan African, you carry Neanderthal genes. Apparently they never migrated south of the Sahara, which, to my mind, casts doubt on the ‘out of Africa’ theory of human evolution.
In the 1920s, when the great Roy Chapman Andrews led the American Museum of Natural History’s Central Asiatic Expeditions, the dominant theory was that humans originated in central Asia. Those expeditions were looking for ancient humans. Unfortunately, Andrews found that the rocks of the right age to contain fossils of early humans had weathered away, and he became famous for finding dinosaurs instead. I believe that the reason most early human fossils have been found in Africa is that the rock strata containing the fossils have weathered away everywhere else or are under dense tropical jungles and inaccessible. Fully modern humans lived worldwide millions of years ago, in my opinion.

I do not believe that the various Australopithecines found in Africa are human ancestors, just products of convergent evolution. Unfortunately, they’re far too old to extract DNA and set the record straight. Like gorillas and other apes, they are our distant cousins, not our ancestors. Fully modern human skulls have been found that are older than our supposed ancestors. See ‘Forbidden Archeology’ by Michael Cremo for details. More on this topic later.

About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 17th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia.

On September 16, 2024 Shell’s release date got moved up six years due to new “mixed charges” law to February 2, 2030. It was 2036.

To read additional articles by Bob Shell link here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/bob-shell-robots-and-evolution/

Scarves by Rashid: Winter Collection 2024-25

Commissioned Work: Scarves by Rashid

Roberto Rashid is a Philadelphia based scarf designer who commissioned me recently to photograph his winter scarf collection. We first met in 1974 when we lived in the same dorm at what was then Millersville State College, now Millersville University in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.. We got to know each other during our college days because we were on the same floor in Burroughs Hall and our dorm rooms were just a few yards away from each other. Jenx (nickname) as he was affectionately called was and still is a dapper character with exquisite taste. He was always well dressed even in college and for some that didn’t know him way back when he was one of the colleges DJ’s. Hearing Roberto’s distinctive and soothing voice on the school radio station and in the hallways at our dorm was reminiscent of the same kind of sounds I heard on the Philadelphia radio stations like WDAS fm in college. I thought he was destined to become a radio personality but fate would have it he turned to fashion, influenced by his mother working in the textile industry when he was a young man.

I didn’t have further contact with Roberto after college until a little over a year ago. We bumped into each other on June 12, 2023 at a Jeff Bradshaw album release party hosted by none other than Patty Jackson from WDASfm at a venue in Germantown. After the event we started following each other on social media. Roberto had become keenly aware of the collaborative work I’ve been producing with KVaughn, creative director and legendary scarf designer from Philly. When he called to engage me about photographing his winter scarf collection he made it clear he wanted still lives of the product only, no models. That was a distinction with a difference as I started to plan the shoot and construct a set that would make the shoot with Roberto unique.

In general, people mainly associate my work these days with portraiture as it relates to fashion and erotica, not so much product photography per se, so this was a welcome departure for sure. Roberto put his trust in me, and a pleasure to work with on set. Knowing his musical background, we listened to a variety of tracks to stimulate our collaboration including Mario Lanza, Miles Davis and some R&B mixed in as well played on vinyl.

To learn more about Scarves by Rashid, link here: https://scarvesbyrashid.biz

Contact us for your next shoot! Call: 267-475-0828 or email: Tony@TonyWard.com.

Bob Shell: Robots and Evolution

AI image of robot on factory floor — AI generated image.

Robots and Evolution

Throughout history innovations have been resisted.
There is the possibly apocryphal story that one of the Egyptian pharaohs issued an edict banning steam powered chariots because the noise frightened the horses.
In verifiable history, in the late 1700s a Frenchman named Jacquard invented an automatic loom. Amazingly for its time, it used punchcards to control the mechanism. The automatic loom quickly supplanted weavers, because it could produce fabric far faster and cheaper. The weavers’ guilds objected. Many of the weavers broke into automated factories and threw their wooden shoes into the looms to shut them down. Those wooden shoes were called sabot, thus we get the word sabotage.

In the early 1900s there was resistance to automobiles, largely by carriage makers, buggy whip makers, draft horse breeders, etc. In England, under pressure from these groups, Parliament passed a law saying that any motorcar must be preceded on the road by a man waving a red flag. That law persisted until 1918, when it was finally realized how impractical it was.
In my own case, I was in the magazine business from the early 1980s. I watched the transitions as new technologies made former jobs redundant. Initially I wrote my articles on a typewriter and mailed them in to the magazine, where a typesetter retyped them on a device that wrote them onto the offset plates used to print the magazine. Photos to accompany my articles had to be made on film and the film had to be developed and printed, a laborious process.

I got my first computer in 1986. It was a Heathkit/Zenith that arrived in kit form. I was happily surprised when it worked after I assembled it. It had no hard drive, just ran on the old big floppy disks. The monitor had a black screen on which orange letters appeared as I typed. I wrote my first book on that computer. It worked for text, but could not handle images. My printer was a Kyocera dot matrix device that used long rolls of paper. I mailed my finished articles on floppy disks along with a hard copy and my photographs. Later, I upgraded to a Windows computer and bought a Nikon scanner to scan negatives and color slides. But I still sent my images in on physical media, floppies at first, later CDs.

I won’t go into more detail about the transition. I’ll only say that our typesetters lost their jobs, along with the repro camera operators, but new jobs were created operating the Mac computers used to lay out the magazines. Staff numbers went down, but only slightly, and the new jobs paid well. Of course, printed magazines have pretty much vanished today, gone on the Internet or out of business entirely. Since I don’t have Internet access, my choices of magazines has been severely limited, and those print magazines that survive are mostly priced out of my range. I subscribed to Rolling Stone since the 1960s, but when it jumped to sixty dollars a year I had to drop it. I used to get Professional Photographer, but that’s now only available to Professional Photographers of America members. I used to be a member, even wrote for the magazine, but membership would be useless to me now. I haven’t had a camera in my hands for seventeen years. I was reminded of these transitions by the dockworkers’ strike. One of their demands is protection from automation. They’re just like the weavers. Resisting the advance of technology is futile, it can’t be stopped. Rather than try to stop it we must adapt to it.

In the late 1990s, I’ve forgotten the exact year, on one of my trips to Japan, I toured a fully automated Canon camera factory. It was the size of a football field, but in the entire factory that churned out hundreds of cameras an hour there were only four humans. Dressed in white jumpsuits, they walked around with clipboards writing down readings from gauges.
Robot forklifts ran around the floors following yellow stripes on the floor picking up pallets of parts and carrying them to the big machines assembling the parts into cameras. The factory operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Robots don’t need coffee breaks, food, sleep, medical insurance, etc. That is the future. Human manual labor is disappearing, and the speed is advancing. Rather than trying to stop or slow it down, we humans must learn the present jobs automation cannot do or new jobs that technology is creating.

On September 16, 2024 Shell’s release date got moved up six years due to new “mixed charges” law to February 2, 2030. It was 2036.

To read additional articles by Bob Shell link here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/bob-shell-ufo-nonsense/

The Photo Review: Auction

The Photo Review is a critical journal of international scope and readership. Publishing since 1976, The Photo Review covers photography events throughout the country and serves as a central resource for the Mid-Atlantic region. With incisive reviews, exciting portfolios, lively interviews, the latest in books and exhibitions, The Photo Review biannual journal has earned a reputation as one of the best serious photography publications being produced today. Our writers — including A.D. Coleman, Stephen Perloff, Shelley Rice, Peter Hay Halpert, Barbara L. Michaels, Jean Dykstra, and Mark Power — have weighed in on subjects as varied as the posthumous publication of work by Diane Arbus, women in photography, the growth of digital media, the historical movement from Pictorialism into Modernism, etc., etc. In his ongoing series, “The Censorship Diaries,” Editor Stephen Perloff was in the forefront in covering the controversy over funding for the NEA and censorship of the arts.

The Photo Review has earned a reputation for lucid and incisive writing aimed at an intelligent and informed audience, but free of the cant and jargon that infects much contemporary writing about art. Thus, both arts publications and the popular press have looked to us for interpretations of what’s happening on the photography scene. Articles have been reprinted in such publications as Afterimage, To, Photography in New York, American Photo, and others.

Editor Stephen Perloff, a respected writer, educator and photographer, has been interviewed for The New York Times, The Toronto Globe & Mail, The Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Photo District News, and the New York Observer. He has received two critic’s fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Colin Ford Award for Curatorship from the Royal Photographic Society.

Tony Ward's portrait of four fetish models for famous Wasteland Poster 2005 — Wasteland. Photo: Tony Ward, Copyright 2024. Available at Auction on October 26, 2024.

Bob Shell: UFO Nonsense

AI illustration of a UFO landing in a desert in California

UFO Nonsense

On Friday night, August 23, 2024 News Nation aired a one-hour special program about Lue Elizondo and repeated the program Sunday night. Elizondo is a former US intelligence officer who headed a top secret government program to study UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, what everyone else calls UFOs.

In the program, Elizondo made numerous claims: UAP are real, the US government has retrieved some of them for study and reverse engineering, they’re abducting people and implanting ‘things’ in them, etc. This is all stuff students of UFOs have been studying for ages.

This may have been news to many people, but it was old hat to those of us who have actually studied the UFO phenomenon. I first started studying UFOs in the late 1960s (yeah, I’m old!). My first paid writing gig was writing a column on UFOs for Gnostica News, a new-age publication produced by Llewellyn in the early 1970s. It was edited by P. E. I. Bonewits, author of the book ‘Real Magic.’ He gave me free rein to write what I chose.

I’d inherited my interest in UFOs from my father, Jim Shell, a news anchor at WSLS TV in Roanoke, Virginia. He’d reported seriously on UFO phenomena in Virginia, particularly a UFO ‘flap’ in Wytheville, Virginia, that lasted for several years. After interviewing many eyewitnesses, he’d realized that something real and important was happening.

My interest in UFOs continued for years. While living in Washington, DC, and working for the Smithsonian Institution in the late 1960s I spent time hanging around the NICAP offices (National Investigions Committee on Aerial Phenomena ), studying some some of their files and their extensive library of books about UFOs and other paranormal phenomena. I met and talked with Don Keyhoe, the Director. It is a well-known fact that the CIA infiltrated and destroyed NICAP.

In the mid 1990s I researched the infamous Alien Autopsy film and coauthored the 1996 book ‘Beyond Roswell.’ (My name is not on the cover of the book due to contractual issues, but I am credited as coauthor inside the book. I was Editor in Chief of Shutterbug magazine at the time, the world’s largest circulation photography magazine, and was asked to keep my UFO activities sub rosa.) That book is still considered essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the UFO phenomenon and the Roswell event in 1947. My late friend Stan Friedman said it was the best book ever written about Roswell. It is out of print now, but still readily available on Amazon.

When the book came out I was interviewed by Art Bell on Coast To Coast AM (that interview can be found on the Internet), by Ollie North on his radio show, and was flown to Paris to appear on a two-hour TV special program on TF-1, the main French TV network. I was also a speaker at UFO conferences worldwide. So I know this subject inside-out.

My main criticism of the Elizondo program is that they didn’t do any research into the history of the phenomena they discussed. If they had, they would have known of the work of Dr. Roger Leir. In the 1990s Dr. Leir surgically removed many ‘alien implants’ from abductees. At least one was analyzed. It was metal, and the isotope ratios were not those of any metal found on Earth. It was absolutely extraterrestrial. Dr. Leir’s work and the book he wrote about it seems to have been forgotten. I knew Roger, and I believe he was an honest investigator studying a highly unusual phenomenon.

None of Elizondo’s revelations is anything new. My only criticism is that he and the people who produced the program about him didn’t do their homework. If they had, they’d have added some historical context. Lue Elizondo appears to be just what he claims to be, an insider who believes people have a right to know what’s going on behind the scenes of secret government programs that are breaking the law by not briefing Congress on what they are doing, and what they’ve discovered.

Angry Congressmen have demanded full disclosure, and have passed laws to force it. But, as Elizondo says, ‘religious fundamentalists’ within the Pentagon will do anything to block full disclosure. These paranoid idiots believe UFOs are made and controlled by demons.

Jacques Vallee and Graham Hancock have pretty firmly established that the UFO phenomenon goes back beyond written history and is behind much myth, legend, and folklore. Human encounters with these ‘aliens’ probably predate modern humans.

I had the honor of interviewing Col. Philip Corso not long before his death. Like Elizondo, his credentials were impeccable. He said that he was the man at the Pentagon entrusted with the Roswell debris, and his job was to turn it over, a little at a time, to US industries for reverse engineering. He wrote a book, ‘The Day After. Roswell,’ in which he divulged much, but he told me and other interviewers, “What crashed at Roswell was not a spaceship. It was a time machine.” Perhaps the ‘aliens’ are us from some distant future, or others from some disant past. One NASA scientist claims there is evidence of an ancient prehuman civilization.

Whatever the truth, we deserve to know it.

The Elizondo program was followed by a totally ridiculous program in which Dr. Michio Kaku showed his abysmal unfamiliarity with the subject and Seth Shostak, head of SETI, showed that he has his head firmly buried in the sand. His insistence that advanced alien civilizations would use radio to communicate is absurd. It’s like looking for smoke signals in outer space. As Arthur C. Clarke said, any advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. With all due respect to Seth, I believe SETI is a waste of time and resources. The ‘aliens’ are already here.

About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 15th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read additional articles by Bob Shell, click here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/bob-shell-nasas-nazis-and-alternative-physics/