​If you’ve been reading fringe media or even the mainstream news this week, you likely saw one of dozens of articles claiming that a new scientific paper evaluated the evidence for an advanced civilization millions of years ago. They were lying. The paper isn’t about proving such a civilization existed. It was a thought experiment asking us to consider the impact of civilization on the planet and how permanent our footprint will be in the long term. There is no evidence of an ancient lost civilization millions of years ago and the authors even wrote in the Atlantic that they don’t believe there ever was such a civilization, though they suggest that it might be worth looking for any geological traces of one, if only for the accidental discoveries it might produce. It’s about as much proof of prehistoric Old Ones as At the Mountains of Madness.

​Last week, Garry Nolan, the team geneticist for Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy of Science, published results of a DNA test conducted on the so-called “Atacama Humanoid,” a mummified twentieth century stillbirth from the Atacama region of Chile. Ufologists like Steven Greer had promoted the tiny corpse as a potential extraterrestrial for the past fifteen years, but the new study found that the body was fully human, though suffering from genetic diseases. Now the New York Times reports that the Chilean government has condemned Nolan’s study as unethical and is investigating whether the body was illegally exhumed and exported in violation of grave robbing and heritage laws. Nolan denied knowing that the body had been stolen, though it’s sort of hard to imagine how else a human corpse of recent vintage ends up on the UFO sideshow circuit. Few people will their bodies—much less their kids’ bodies—to ufology. That said, the Chilean government only started to care about the corpse when it was proved human; for the fifteen years UFO believer declared it alien, the government took no action. The lesson is pretty clear: Pretend bodies belong to space aliens, and you can do what you want with them. There might just be a market for black market “alien” kidneys, too…

​Dear God, there’s another one. It’s only been a couple of days since I reviewed Xaviant Haze’s Ancient Giants, and now we have an even worse entry in the canon of ancient mysteries books to contend with. This one is especially appropriate because it comes to us from the pen of Frank Joseph, formerly known as Frank Collin, the ex-head of the National Socialist White People’s Party and the National Socialist Party of America. In a month when a former American Nazi Party leader is running unopposed to secure the Republican nomination for an Illinois congressional seat (which he will likely lose since it is a heavily Democratic district), it just seems right to see what the other former Nazi leader in the public eye is up to. Yes, he is still promoting white interests, just more subtly. 

​Late yesterday, Nephilim theorist L. A. Marzulli held a live global symposium in Los Angeles in which he and a team of misfits presented the results of DNA tests they conducted on an elongated skull from Paracas, Peru. Yes, regular readers will remember that Marzulli already conducted DNA tests on a similar skull and released them as part of the Watchers DVD line. The difference is that this time he released the results via a four-hour pay-per-view $9.99 online live stream, with a DVD and companion book available for purchase. Probably the best part of the farce was Marzulli’s admission that they put together the whole event and all of the supplementary materials before they even had the DNA results.

​As we approach the New Year, it’s time to take a final look back at 2017 in fringe history. This was a year when political news overshadowed almost everything else, but 2017 still managed to find new ways to use and abuse history, rivalling the historic low of 2016. This year in fringe history might not have been more extreme than last year, but it was certainly darker. It was the year when fringe historians rejoiced that they had an ally in the White House whose courtiers proudly flew the banner of “alternative facts,” but more than anything, it was the year of Tom DeLonge, the musician turned ufologist who published an ancient astronaut book, launched a UFO research company, was crowned UFO researcher of the year, and took credit for the year’s biggest UFO research flap. Let’s look back at what happened over the past twelve months.

It’s been a big week for Graham Hancock. A South African professor endorsed his lost civilization, and a luxury magazine conducted a fawning interview. Now, Bear & Company is getting ready to publish Spirits in Stone: The Secrets of Megalithic America: Decoding the Ancient Cultural Stone Landscapes of the Northeast by Glenn Kreisberg, and Hancock has his name on the cover as the author of the book’s credulous forward. Of the book itself there is little to say. It is more than 400 pages long and seeks to explore alleged stellar alignments among various rocks and earthworks in the northeastern United States to conclude that an advanced super-civilization once occupied the future United States. Weirder, it is partly the work of Kresiberg and partly an anthology of partially related essays by other writers. It is an odd book.

​One of the themes that I have hit upon more than once is the poverty of “new” ideas in fringe history. The same few topics come up time and again, in a few major variations. Once you’ve mastered Atlantis, hyperdiffusionism, the Nephilim, space aliens, and a handful of conspiracies theories revolving around lost races and tribes, Jews, the Holy Bloodline, and Freemasonry, you have pretty much been exposed to the root form of most of the claims you will encounter. Nevertheless, it surprises me to no end to see how these bad ideas keep seeping into conversation over the centuries. 

​Graham Hancock has a regular feature on his website in which he invites fellow fringe writers to contribute promotional articles that serve as advertisements for their latest books, web projects, etc. This week, Hancock played host to two awful pieces of fringe literature that barely managed to conceal their uncritical worship of Hancock and his friends Robert Bauval, Robert Schoch, and John Anthony West, or to hide their heavy employment of the “looks like, therefore is” method of fringe reasoning

​As almost everyone reading this knows, Robert Bauval, Graham Hancock, Robert Schoch, and their friends have made a career out of claiming that the Great Sphinx of Giza was carved in the time of Atlantis, around 10,500 BCE. This number derives, ultimately, from a combination of a belief in the existence of Plato’s Atlantis prior to 9600 BCE, the dating of the end of the last Ice Age, and, above all, to the idea that the Sphinx’s leonine form was meant to gaze at the constellation Leo on the spring equinox, something which would only have happened during the so-called “Age of Leo,” when the slow drifting of the stars placed Leo in that position from 10,500 BCE to 8,000 BCE.

​After two days of writing long blog posts that required a great deal of energy, I need to step back and take a little bit of a rest. What better way than to take a look at the newly released promotional materials for fringe historian and sometime Ancient Aliens pundit Andrew Collins’s newest book, The Cygnus Key: The Denisovan Legacy, Göbekli Tepe, and the Birth of Egypt, due out next May from Bear & Company. As you can guess from the title, Collins has a bizarre and highly speculative revisionist history of civilization, tracing it back to the as yet poorly understood subspecies or species represented by bones from Denisova Cave in Siberia. The Denisovans, at present, are known only from a few bones from four individuals, and they lived around 100,000 to 45,000 years ago.