No. Rather it is addictive. And it is put about by people who have similar motivations to the tobacco industry.

From a young age I enjoyed visiting, and reading "alternative theories" about, the megaliths and other ancient monuments that dot our countryside. Later I regularly subscribed to the Fortean Times. I viewed this as all a bit of harmless fun. (The Fortean approach, for those who are unfamiliar, is to take a skeptical approach to fruit-cake theories, but still enjoy learning about them first.) I even had a short article published in FT, and to my amazement (it was unsolicited) they paid me.

Then one day I found myself spending some time in a cheap guesthouse on Tahiti waiting for various bits of transport, and, as the sandflies chewed my legs, became well acquainted with its small library, mostly in French. But it did include about 100 pages of a ripped up copy of Graham Hancock's "Fingerprints of the Gods". It didn't even have the cover or first few pages, and it took me quite sometime to discover what exactly it was that I was reading. It read like an academic work, with footnotes making references to scientific literature. He was making some fruitcake assertions, but at least they seemed to have some plausibility and had a fairly solid basis. Moreover Hancock was a serious journalist who had previously worked for quality publications such as The Economist and most of the serious British broadsheets, and so had some credibility.

When I got home, I discovered what it was I had been reading, tracked down and read the whole book, and then made some investigations. It was when how dishonest the whole thing was that I became rather less forgiving of this kind of thing as "innocent fun". The whole thing about the footnotes was a con, to give the appearance of serious research, when in fact it was cloak and daggers. The most egregious example (although in fact so many are so bad that I can hardly have a basis for that evaluation) referred to some early and limited seismology of Antarctica which was so consistent with part of his fruitcake hypothesis (that early civilisations mapped Antarctica without its ice), that it looked too good for coincidence; in fact the specific partial conclusion he was using from this was even certified by the US Navy. I thought, surely there must be some more recent and detailed studies, why doesn't he refer to them? In fact there are more recent studies, and much more detailed ones, and he doesn't refer to them because they are deeply inconvenient to his absurd hypothesis. As are later understandings of post-glacial isostasy, which he does not take into account. But most people wouldn't know that, they would only see the apparently positive evidence he places there.

At one point in the book he says that he must demonstrate all of 13 separate things to demonstrate his overall hypothesis, and if any one is wrong then his hypothesis fails. In fact, as academic geologist Paul Heinrich points out on this web page, http://members.cox.net/pyrophyllite/wildside.shtml every single one of them is wrong. In fact Hancock can be plainly heard retracting the basic thesis of this book at one stage, filmed on British television, but later claimed he hadn't meant that, it was out of context or something. No doubt his publisher reminded him the book was still selling very well, and he had to carry on publicly believing it.

What is so clever about his presentation is illustrated from one passage in the book, where he goes to Peru and Bolivia to make various local investigations. He first tells you that he has never heard of the Tiahuanaco civilisation. What, the most important historic Andean civilisation (the Incas barely lasted 100 years, these people were around for over 1000) and he has never heard of it, and he reckons he can change the standard interpretations of Andean civilisation? Then he gathers an impressive collection of things to read about Machu Picchu, still hasn't managed to read them before he gets to Cusco, and finally falls asleep on the train to Machu Picchu and arrives without reading it.

Why is this so clever? Well, most of his readers haven't heard of Tiahuanaco, and most of them haven't read a pile of books on Machu Picchu either. They want to be reassured that it is all right to have this ignorance, you can still understand this without it. Since Hancock can prove all the experts on Andean civilisations wrong even though I know next to nothing about it, they, the readers, can trust their instincts despite having a similar level of ignorance. In any case, those cleverclogs just have their heads full of detail and can't see the woods for the trees, and have a vested interest in keeping their jobs by keeping out new theories. (And in fact that was true in Mayan studies at one time - the established Mayan theorists erroneously believed Mayan writing was pictographic, and thus for a while managed to sabotage the studies of those who were trying to decipher it.)

Most people find scientific study utterly daunting. The idea that all those scientists have got something totally wrong, (probably through some self-supporting cabal that ensures they all keep their jobs and exclude new ideas that could threaten them - where have you heard that before, er string theory?) and in fact some totally cool idea is right, and they can understand it even though they aren't educated, is just very appealing.

Hancock used his impressive credentials and clever diversionary tactics to get a multi-part TV series on undersea archaeological sites (which in fact are mostly natural artefacts) called Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age: it was on one of the respectable UK channels, and gave the impression of being one of those impressive British documentary series on real science. In fact, as one of the world's leading marine archaeologists, Nic Flemming, writes, it is all cleverly presented rubbish, designed to mislead. http://www.thehallofmaat.com/modules...article&sid=36 Flemming originally agreed to take part in these programs, but realised he was just being used to give an aura of respectability and he wouldn't be allowed to put forward any of the massively inconvenient facts that Hancock was deflecting attention from. So withdrew participation.

Curiously, in addition to giving him the money to make this sumptuous series, British TV also published a documentary exposing him as a charlatan (find the details on the wikipedia page on GH). Unfortunately, as journalists do, they went a bit over the top, and over-simplified the arguments for the audience. So when he made an official complaint, some of it was upheld. Although this didn't really actually change any of the devastating arguments against his theories, it was enough to enable him to claim that his reputation has survived.

Anything about this remind you of creationists and intelligent designers, anyone?