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New Roswell "Alien" Metal Under Investigation By UFO Believers

11/19/2019

First, the good news: I am so close to finishing Legends of the Pyramids that I want to take the rest of the day to close the books on that project, at least until after the holidays, when the publisher will send me the typeset page proofs to proofread and index. Therefore, I will keep the rest of this entry short. Therefore, our second topic for the day: The hunt for “alien” metal is spreading. It was bad enough that To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science convinced the U.S. Army to help them analyze “Art’s Parts,” but now there is a new piece of alleged Roswell wreckage in the care of a new team of researchers.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E20 "The Storming of Area 51"

11/15/2019

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This week, Linda Moulton Howe of Ancient Aliens confirmed that she sold a chunk of the “Art’s Parts” metal slag she claimed fell off the Roswell flying saucer to the brain trust at To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science for $35,000 more than a year ago—before she appeared on Ancient Aliens to discuss To the Stars and its claims about alien metals. She said she cried when she sold it. Needless to say, neither she nor the program disclosed that she had a financial stake in To the Stars when the episodes aired. This kind of undisclosed conflict of interest would be wholly unethical in a newsroom—and Moulton Howe claims to be a journalist—but somehow is just fine for the History Channel, as long as the fake alien claims come fast enough to keep a declining audience (currently 778,000 viewers to In Search Of’s 869,000) entertained. Similarly, tonight’s episode topic, “The Storming of Area 51,” is also a bit of self-dealing since Ancient Aliens was not a neutral party. It heavily promoted the event on social media and streamed live coverage of it online. After helping to drive people to the event, it then produced this show as though it weren’t actively involved in celebrating the alien-themed festival.

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No Blog Until Tonight

11/15/2019

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Because I am formatting my manuscript this week, I will wait to post a new blog this evening when I review Ancient Aliens.

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Charles Fort's "Book of the Damned" Turns 100

11/14/2019

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My deadline for finalizing my Legends of the Pyramids manuscript is December 1, which means that I need to devote extra time over the next two weeks to getting my submission put together. So, today, I will only briefly remark that this year is the centennial of Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned, a seminal work in the world of the bizarre, fringe, and pseudoscientific. In honor of the anniversary, Micah Hanks published an article this week celebrating Fort’s unreadable, gibberish style (“oddly poetic”) and describing “one of my absolute favorite passages” (emphasis in original) in Fort’s book. That he has a favorite passage in Fort, and that it is a list of red rains culminating in a bizarre non sequitur about a “super-dragon” crashing into a comet and bleeding all over the Earth probably says more about Hanks than it does about Fort.

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Steve Quayle Claims Fallen Angels Will Return Soon to Kill Us All

11/13/2019

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This week, Nephilim hunter and Christian bigot Steve Quayle visited the Evangelical extremist broadcaster SkyWatch.tv to discuss UFOs, cataclysms, and giants, as well as the True Legends conference he held in America’s conservative entertainment capital, Branson, Mo., a few weeks ago. The True Legends conference builds on Quayle’s True Legends brand of Christian Ancient Aliens knockoff products, which like much of the Christian entertainment market involves copying something secular, adding sanctimony and hypocrisy, and reducing the quality by 40-50%. Things got off to a great start when Quayle told viewers that he believes that we live in a holographic universe dominated by demons who have created a “hell-ographic” world, and that UFO disclosure is imminent because Satan is using demon-driven flying saucers to undermine believe in Nephilim giants.

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Local Television Behemoth Launches George Knapp-Themed UFO News Site

11/12/2019

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Last week, George Knapp launched Mystery Wire, a paranormal and UFO news service presenting his back catalog of local TV news reports about unidentified aerial phenomena, supplemented with other local news reports from his employer’s sister stations. It’s not a very well done site, and it contains very little original material, so I wouldn’t normally write much about it, except that the more I’ve thought about it, the angrier its existence makes me. The reason is that Mystery Wire isn’t owned by George Knapp but rather by Nexstar Media Group, one of the largest operators of local television stations in the United States. Nexstar and Knapp launched the service on KLAS, the Nexstar CBS affiliate in Las Vegas, last week. Here is how he introduced it to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his first broadcast UFO story, using archival footage and new commentary:

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E19 "Human Hieroglyphs"

11/8/2019

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The night this episode of Ancient Aliens aired marked the fiftieth anniversary of the broadcast of the pilot episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, the horror anthology series that accidentally triggered the chain of events that would culminate in Ancient Aliens. Night Gallery explored the Gothic, the outré, the Lovecraftian, and the bizarre, all while experimenting with ways to stretch the limits of 1970s television’s format, structure, and production values. The results were mixed. Some exceptional, many good, and quite a few awful segments aired, but NBC wasn’t satisfied with the results. When Serling saw the cancelation writing on the wall, he and Alan Landsburg moved on to nonfiction, adapting Chariots of the Gods for American TV, a special that served as the launching pad for In Search of…, a staple of 1970s and 1980s syndication packages. Its success in reruns helped convince the History Channel to adapt Chariots of the Gods anew as Ancient Aliens, which, perhaps ironically, now airs paired with a new version of In Search Of. This Ancient Aliens episode topic—tattoos that have a sinister connection to space aliens—might have made for an interesting Night Gallery segment. Of course, Supergirl is currently doing an evil alien tattoo plot, so that’s … something.

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Ashley Cowie Appropriates Minoan Archaeology for Atlantis

11/8/2019

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Later tonight, Ancient Aliens will explore the profound question of whether aliens invented tattoos. In the meantime, we might as well pile on Ashley Cowie some more since he published yet another crappy article this week trying to spin mystery out of discovery in the belief that ancient history needs to be sexed up with fakery and myths to attract the attention of the public. Today’s subject is Atlantis, which Cowie understands at about the Wikipedia level of research, citing as sources Atlantipedia and an article in National Geographic. It makes me wonder why I bother researching primary sources when, apparently, one can get paid to surf the web and summarize the results like a high school book report.

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"Ancient Aliens" Ratings Bounce Back, But Still Fall Far Short of Multiyear Average

11/7/2019

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Last month, Ancient Aliens hit record low ratings for original broadcasts, spending most of the month drawing a live plus same day audience of fewer than 800,000 viewers. At the time, I suggested that part of the decline could be attributed to the show airing its new episodes opposite postseason baseball games and the World Series. However, I noted at the time that sports couldn’t be responsible for the entirety of the decline since the show almost always airs opposite some sort of sports event. Now, the ratings are in for the November 1 broadcast, and they indicate that the show’s audience has indeed entered a period of substantial decline.

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Ashley Cowie Suggests Bonapartes and Habsburgs Are Conspiring to Be Elite

11/6/2019

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Most readers are aware that I don’t have a terribly high opinion of Ashley Cowie’s work. He is, after all, a guy who made all manner of bizarre claims about secret maps and codes in Rosslyn Chapel. This week, he published a half-assed, pseudo-conspiratorial article in Ancient Origins claiming, with more than a little absurdity, that the pretender to the Napoleonic imperial throne and a minor descendant of the Habsburg emperors married in some sort of mystical attempt to revive the power of the Bonapartist dynasty. Many European tabloids have noted the historical echoes between the union of Jean-Christophe Napoleon Bonaparte, 32, and Countess Olympia von und zu Arco-Zinnerberg, 31, and Napoleon I’s politically motivated marriage to the Archduchess Marie Louise. But to badly paraphrase what Marx once said of another Napoleon, Ashley Cowie has repeated history and made it a farce.

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