Skeptic Project

I know we're having so much fun debating Zeitgeist and 9/11 inside job lunacy, as well as our occasional forays into Alex Jonestown, but there ARE some other conspiracy theories out there. Here's one you folks may not have heard of. And it actually does involve science, so it's perfect for this site!

This is the "Hungarian Calendar" conspiracy. Some guy named Hunnivari insists that the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582 to reform the Julian calendar, is fake and/or erroneous, and that about 200 years that we think happened actually never happened.

Basic summary of his claims (in English) here: http://hungariancalendar.com/en.html</p>

He has a free e-book you can download which explains his claims in more detail. It's actually pretty interesting. Utter pap, but very interesting.

Basically how he gets there is this. Hunnivari treats as absolutely unimpeachable the historical accounts that a total solar eclipse happened on the date of the death of Roman emperor Augustus, which history records as happening on August 14, 19 A.D. However, going back through astronomical calculations of solar eclipses (that's the science part, you can see the charts here http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEcat5/SEcatalog.html) he can't find a total solar eclipse that was visible in Rome or anywhere in the Mediterranean world on or near that date. However, looking for other total eclipses that were visible in Rome on the date August 19, he finds one: in 212 A.D. Therefore, he concludes that Augustus must have died not in 19 A.D., but 193 years later than that, and all the historical sources that date events differently are all part of some vast conspiracy.

This is similar to another conspiracy theory by some German guy named Illig who makes a similar claim that about 300 years in the early Middle Ages never happened. He gets there not through solar eclipses but by counting (badly miscounting, in fact) the number of leap days that supposedly should have accrued from the beginning of the Julian calendar in 45 B.C. to the modern day. I don't quite follow that logic, or lack thereof.

Has anyone encountered these claims before, or seen any comprehensive debunkings of them?

This is good stuff! I'm surprised I've never heard this one before. I bet that if I showed this to my brother-in-law, he would believe it. He believes that the moon was either towed into orbit from somewhere else or that it was man-made. That's just the tip of the iceberg with him though.

Either way, The Romans were very superstitious (like everyone then) in regards to events like eclipses. That gives plenty of motive to report stuff like that when a political figure dies, comes to power, etc. And well, mistakes happen.

Not that it really matters...

He's not really sure, but I've heard him say things about how history as we know it was completely fabricated, and that the Earth could be very young. Way younger than the 6,000 years we are used to hearing from the Christian "Scientists" (check out Kent Hovind, if you haven't already) so that could explain it I guess. Sometimes I don't think he actually believes stuff like this, but he likes to talk about it. One day it's this, one day it's that.

He owns "The Tenth Planet" by Zecharia Sitchin, and he has some Icke literature.

I kind of boiled him down one time, and it seems like many of his beliefs come from his idea that there are a few SUPER POWERFUL people/lizards/wtf ever who could make the world a better place, but they are doing just the opposite in a concerted effort. It's so simple to him. I always just tell him it is true that there are a ton of very rich dickheads (what's new?) who seek control, capital, profit, resources, etc., but that the list of variables is far too long to encapsulate in such a simple idea.

I'm not completely sure where he got the moon thing from, but I did listen to an Art Bell broadcast where he had on some crazy dude talking about it.