All Categories

Review of Ancient Aliens S16E09 "The UFO Pioneers"

3/6/2021

This week, Ancient Aliens again chose to create a putatively “new” episode from recycled parts of earlier episodes. As with last week’s episode, three pundits—this time, Giorgio Tsoukalos, David Childress, and Nick Pope—sit around a conference table and offer blather to connect together prerecorded packages, some from previous episodes. This episode swirls around personalities associated with UFO investigation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These people, some serious, some kooky, are lionized as “pioneers”—but pioneers of what? The fantasy that the unknown must be extraterrestrial, paranormal or something combining both, mostly. The potted biographies offer little you haven’t seen before, even if you hadn’t watched earlier episodes of the series. Since there is little worthy of discussion here, and since the show’s viewership remains under one million viewers, and the readership of these summaries under five hundred readers, I will offer only a brief summary of the highlights of each segment as a record for historical interest.

3 Comments

New Jersey Conspiracy Believer Charged with Vandalism of America's Stonehenge

3/3/2021

18 Comments

After a 15-month investigation, a New Jersey man has been charged with one count of criminal mischief in the vandalism attack on America's Stonehenge that left the New Hampshire colonial cold cellars wrongly believed to be an ancient Old World monument defaced with QAnon slogans. Mark Russo, 50, is currently is in jail in New Jersey waiting for extradition to New Hampshire to face trial.

18 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S16E08 "The Space Travelers"

2/27/2021

21 Comments

Last week, Ancient Aliens rose total audience, climbing to 998,000 viewers, an increase of almost 50,000 viewers over the previous week’s William Shatner special. But the number of younger viewers watching ticked downward, knocking the show out of the top twenty for the night. I continue to remain amazed that about a million Americans will watch Ancient Aliens even when it simply repeats old material from previous episodes and shamelessly copies and pastes. But people also pay good money to stream reruns of The Office they’ve seen many times before, so I guess it’s to be expected. However, since Ancient Aliens is putting no effort into sewing together Frankenstein’s monster episodes from cadaverous parts, I won’t put that much effort into reviewing it. According to my blog traffic statistics, reader engagement with Ancient Aliens has collapsed. In past years, thousands, often tens of thousands, of people would research the show and find their way to my reviews in the first week after publishing them. This past week, 602 people read my review—fewer than read archival reviews! It just isn’t worth the effort.

21 Comments

Proofreading and Indexing "Legends of the Pyramids"

2/24/2021

11 Comments

I wanted to let you know briefly that I will not likely be posting much for the next week. The publisher of my Legends of the Pyramids has returned the typeset manuscript to me for proofreading and indexing. This is a time-consuming process, and they have given me far less time than comfortable to complete this work while also doing my actual job. Since I need to complete at least 15 pages per day to make the deadline, I will not have time to write blog posts on top of everything else. I hate indexing, but I loathe the idea of hiring an indexer who will charge more money to index the book than I will ever make back in royalties.

11 Comments

"To the Stars" Falls Back to Earth, Refocusing as an Entertainment Company

2/22/2021

10 Comments

Since I bothered to make the graphic several years ago, I feel like I need to deploy it one final time to report that this will almost certainly be the last To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science Alien Metals and Poltergeist Update. TTSA, it turns out, is getting out of the alien metals and poltergeist business after successfully poisoning the public discourse by infecting the media with unproven stories of likely industrial waste they pretended was debris from crashed UFOs. According to their latest filing with the SEC last week, TTSA is reorganizing and dropping nearly all of its science and aerospace initiatives in order to focus primarily on entertainment products. The relevant section of the SEC report is copied below:

10 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S16E07 "Impossible Artifacts"

2/20/2021

33 Comments

Last week’s heavily hyped experiment in breaking format did not result in exceptional ratings. William Shatner might have done promotional interviews across the internet, but all the puffery in the world couldn’t lift Ancient Aliens beyond its typical audience. About 950,000 viewers tuned in for last week’s two-hour special “William Shatner Meets Ancient Aliens,” a bit below the show’s usual million-viewer audience and about even with the weekly audience for Shatner’s sister show The UnXplained. This week, Ancient Aliens moves to a new, later time slot, running after Shatner and extending past the top of the eleven o’clock hour and out of prime time. But some thing never change. This is yet another episode made up of recycled material we’ve seen over and over for sixteen seasons.

33 Comments

French Fashion Magazine Repeats Fake Claims about a Dean-Brando Relationship

2/19/2021

9 Comments

Last week, the U.S. edition of the French fashion magazine L’Officiel ran a digital spread about James Dean’s clothes to mark the actor’s ninetieth birthday. The spread, written by the magazine’s digital editor, Italian journalist Simone Vertua, fell victim to fake history, spreading very strange lies from a trashy recent faux-biography and deploying a digitally altered photograph to support untrue claims. Granted, we don’t usually hold fashion magazines to exceptional standards of excellence, but it’s still disturbing to find the plague of fake history infecting yet another medium.

9 Comments

Was Mexico's Pyramid of Cholula Related to the Biblical Tower of Babel?

2/16/2021

51 Comments

Ancient Origins ran a piece recently arguing that indigenous oral traditions from North America are related to the biblical Tower of Babel story. The author seems to have lifted his understanding of the parallel myths from the Tower of Babel’s Wikipedia page, but even so, it is at least mildly interesting to review what are indeed parallel stories in order to understand where author Mark-Andrew Carpenter went wrong. The short version is that he heavily discounted the influence of the Bible on post-Contact America and among the missionaries who recorded—and revised—Native stories.

51 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S16E06 "William Shatner Meets Ancient Aliens"

2/12/2021

22 Comments

In recent interviews, William Shatner claims that he is agnostic on the question of ancient astronauts, or even skeptical of some of the ancient astronaut theorists’ claims. That wasn’t always the case. Almost 45 years ago, Shatner at least pretended to be an enthusiastic ancient astronaut theorist when he stepped into the shoes of the late Rod Serling to serve as host of Mysteries of the Gods—“as incredible as Star Trek”—a film adaptation of Erich von Däniken’s book Miracles of the Gods and a follow-up to the various film versions of Chariots of the Gods, including Serling’s In Search of Ancient Astronauts. Shatner’s former Star Trek colleague Leonard Nimoy was also subbing for Serling on In Search of…, the television continuation of In Search of Ancient Astronauts, and the most successful of von Däniken’s various intellectual offspring.

22 Comments

Read My New Slate Magazine Article on Joe McCarthy, Tucker Carlson, and UFOs

2/12/2021

20 Comments

I have a new article out today in Slate magazine examining Joe McCarthy, Tucker Carlson, and UFOs in light connection with masculinity issues and pop culture.

On a cold December night in 1950, red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy spent a charity dinner at Washington’s Sulgrave Club trading insults with liberal journalist Drew Pearson. McCarthy had attacked Pearson on the floor of the Senate, calling for a boycott of his radio show. Pearson had attacked McCarthy on air and in his newspaper column, accusing the senator of lying about communist infiltration of the American government. McCarthy had recklessly accused the State Department of harboring hundreds of communists, sparking a massive investigation and an ongoing purge. After dinner, the two ran into each other in the cloakroom and their conflict turned physical. McCarthy kneed Pearson in the groin, and Sen. Richard Nixon had to pull McCarthy off Pearson.

Read the rest at Slate magazine by clicking here.

20 Comments