I sometimes wonder how many people watch the History Channel in the belief that their shows and the stories they tell are real history. Some of their shows are fairly obviously fiction, like shows claiming to be a history of alliances between space aliens, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the Vatican; but many shows that appear to be real are actually faked and staged. The most popular of these is the History Channel’s show Pawn Stars. Pawn Stars appears to be filmed in a real pawn shop in Las Vegas, but it is actually filmed in a fake pawn shop next door to the real one. The people coming into the fake pawn shop are paid actors, and the items they are trying to sell have been researched in advance, which is why the pawn shop owners know so much about them. This show is scripted and rehearsed. Nothing is real. Many other popular History Channel shows appear to be real and unrehearsed but are also staged and scripted, including Mountain Men, American Restoration, American Pickers, and Ancient Aliens.

The Vatican Observatory and Space Lizards. The Vatican owns an astronomical observatory in Arizona. This observatory is the basis of countless conspiracy theories claiming some sort of alliance between space aliens and the Vatican. Several ‘reality TV’ shows claim that the Pope, Hillary Clinton, and Queen Elizabeth are all super-smart lizards from a mystery planet and that they communicate with their home planet through the Vatican observatory. If this subject interests you, you can research it yourself. There are lots of ‘exposes’ on websites, TV, and YouTube videos about reptilian world leaders. Below is a photo that appeared in a newspaper in Scotland claiming to show what Queen Elizabeth looks like with her ‘human disguise’ on and off. The idea that the Pope is a reptile from outer space was frequently parodied on the TV show Futurama; however, on Futurama, the ‘Space Pope’ was a crocodile, not a lizard. It seems hard for me to believe that anyone takes this stuff seriously, but angry pickets show up at the White House every now and then demanding that the president get rid of the space lizards in the government.

Why Does the Vatican Have an Observatory? The Vatican got interested in astronomy a long time ago, but it was for theological reasons, not to communicate with space lizards. For over 1,500 years, Europeans used the Julian calendar, which contained numerous errors. The most serious error in the Julian calendar was that it assumed that every year was exactly 365.25 days long. That overestimated the length of a year by about 1 day per century. That may not seem like a lot, but it meant that by the 16th Century, Christians were celebrating Easter, Christmas, and other holidays 2 weeks earlier than they should. This greatly concerned Pope Gregory XIII, who ordered that a group of Vatican astronomers develop a far more accurate calendar, which they did after years of research and astronomical observations. In 1582, the Catholic church adopted the Gregorian calendar, which is now used nearly everywhere in the world. As I said, this had nothing to do with space lizards.