The History Channel has been running a show called ‘Apocalypse Island,’ which would be totally mind-blowing and awesome if it represented a real archeological discovery and contained a shred of truth.
The location is ruggedly beautiful and seems far away from the world of problems – until we find out that the small isolated community living there was savaged by a tsunami generated by the massive Chile quake in February 2010…hence, the name of the series.
‘Apocalypse Island’ features Canadian “Explorer,” Jim Turner, who makes the staggering claim that a 150-foot carved “Maya” monument complex exists on a remote coast of Robinson Crusoe Island. Never mind that it’s 450 miles off the coast of Chile and 3,500 miles from the traditional lands of the Maya people, who have never been known for their boating prowess, as say, the Polynesians.
Turner claims that this monument will align with the lunar eclipse of December 21, 2012, during the final moments of the current era, according to the Maya Calendar.
Over the past 15-odd years, New Age entrepreneurs have dubbed this pivotal day “The End of Time” and they’ve succeeded in virally infecting the minds of millions of mostly English-speaking people with the 2012 meme about an imminent doomsday.
Although the show’s narrator concedes that “Time has ravaged the monuments,” these geological structures show no evidence of human – let alone Maya – action, to my eyes, having lived in Mexico and written a book about the 2012 phenomenon. The computer generated images of what the “monuments” might have looked like in their heydey (not featured in this clip) do not resemble any Maya sculpture that I have seen, at all. They look like something out of a videogame! I have to doubt the entries in his Turner’s Bio, that he took Master’s level courses in Mesoamerican anthropology at SUNY (note that he did not receive an MS…)
The scientific consensus, based on the available evidence is that that neither Native Americans nor Polynesians landed on the island before the Spaniards did, in 1574.
‘Apocalypse Island’ is a pathetic attempt to jump on the 2012 bandwagon and for Turner to see his face on TV, using patently ludicrous claims. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the academic advancement in Mayanist Studies. It’s astonishing that the History Channel doesn’t have better-educated people working over there, who could easily have spotted Turner for the con artist that he is – and if the network’s Senior Producers knew his claims were bogus and ran with it, anyway that would be even more disturbing!
As presented in Turner’s test footage here, as well as in the finished product, the claims of “Maya” monuments on Robinson Crusoe Island demonstrate a reckless and unfathomably depraved disregard for history, science, archeology, anthropology and the viewer’s intelligence on the part of both Turner and The History Channel.
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