I like how the text weasels around having to mention the name of "The famous explorer and former director of the USGS". The Egyptians are a nice touch too.
Thank God the conspiracy nuts don't read and aren't good at history or else they might have used some regional native tribes as the source for their special artifacts. The only things they know of as "old" are ancient Egypt and Atlantis.
To be fair, they also think Egyptian artifacts are Atlantian in origin. Obviously the primitive Egyptian empire couldn't possible come up with the concept of things like "stacking rocks" or "smoothing stone with sand" on their own. They needed some mystical forgotten society with no traces to do it for them.
These conspiracies are always racist. They say the cultures in the area were incapable of learning for themselves. They needed the white Atlantian society to teach them everything. It was popularized by Nazis and it's pretty clear what the beliefs of its proponents are.
Unbeknownst to many, the Grand Canyon is where Gene Roddenberry dug up the Dilithium crystals to run the Enterprise ships on, I mean: how else did he film those scenes? There was no CGI in the 70s!
60s. And based on the restorations of TOS that I hate so much, they did have CG in the 60s.
(Apart from anything else, those restorations didn't take into account that the lighting and the makeup were designed for snowy 1960s TVs in both color and black and white. I don't need to see Shatner's lipstick and the seams around Spock's ears.)
"The Grand Canyon is hundreds of years old." "I'm pretty sure it's millions of years old." ...later... "I looked it up, it is hundreds of millions of years old. So we're both right." - King of the Hill
Miners WISH they had deposits the size of the grand canyon.
Imagine the tailings storage facility, lmao. I know, it's the Great Salt Lake! That explains the high metal content from the windblown sands as it dries out
I heard an ancient order extracted the copper from the Grand Canyon in 1645, but there was nowhere to store that much. So they buried it in what we call "copper mines" all over the world. Using forgotten old world technology. Really these are just ancient caches to keep the copper market under control. The order would unearth new caches every few years. All this was discovered by our founding fathers and the locations were recorded in the declaration of independence by Benjamin Franklin. The secret was well kept for years and only shared only within the elite order of Free Masons, called the The Coppers. Just to distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
Other than the vague "big bad gubbmint thinks you're too stupid for their SECRETS" vibe, I almost find this old school X-Files type insanity sort of adorable. They don't wanna hurt people, they just want a more interesting world
They do more damage than you think. They teach people to think that there are conspiracies by scientists to hide information from them. That leads to thinks like antivax beliefs and climate change denial. It's a subtle insidiousness, but it needs to be beaten. People need to be able to understand that it just doesn't happen.