Michael Tellinger - Botswana Guardian

Tonight, if you're reading this on Thursday, we'll have the privilege of a visit from "scientist, explorer and international author" Michael Tellinger who is due to speak at the Civic Centre in Gaborone. According to the announcement I saw he will be speaking on the "Origins Of Humankind and Ancient Civilisations Of South Africa". Sounds fascinating, don't you think?

Well, it does until you do a little research into Tellinger's theories. Instead of talking about the origins of humankind with the benefits of science, anthropology and those irritating things called FACTS, Tellinger has some rather different ideas, bizarre ones to say the least. In fact his crackpot theories remind me of those from the so-called "Church" of Scientology. Scientology novices are finally taught (after they've coughed up truly vast quantities of cash) that 75 million years ago Xemu, the head of the Galactic Federation, decided to cure his over-population problems by murdering excess aliens by bringing them to Earth and killing them with hydrogen bombs. The souls of these people now haunt us all and cause us all our mental health problems.

You can see why the Scientologists aren't too keen to publicise this hogwash until after they've got your cash, can't you?

I suspect that Mr Tellinger is in a similar position. I think he'd rather get your P100 entrance fee and perhaps even your $18 for his downloadable book BEFORE you discover what exactly he believes. In his book "Slave Species of God" Tellinger tells us that aliens from the planet Nibiru came to Earth nearly half a million years ago to steal our gold. Once they got bored doing all that hard work digging they mixed their DNA with that of primitive earthlings and produced human slaves. These humans, being rather dim-witted, then worshipped the aliens as gods. Telinger claims to have learned all this from translated ancient stone tablets. Curiously nobody else seems to have translated the tablets the same way and the real academic world has missed the spaceships, gold smuggling and all that juicy inter-species cross-breeding.

[Thanks to the 01 and the Universe blog for the book review]

By all means go and hear Tellinger and his delusions but my recommendation would be to go round the corner and spend your money at a certain spicy chicken restaurant instead. At least you'll go home with a tingle on your lips and a full stomach instead of just an empty head.