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Scott Wolter Gives New Interview, Suggests Second Kensington Runestone Exists

3/25/2020

Scott Wolter did another interview, this time with biophysicist and pyramid conspiracy theorist John DeSalvo on the Science and Paranormal Hour radio show. DeSalvo appeared on an episode of America Unearthed and claims to have lost half his listeners as a result. That’s neither here nor there, nor is the fact that I can’t stand his voice. He sounds like a midcentury children’s show clown, and for me it was like listening to fingernails on chalkboard. His habit of shouting all of his questions made it still worse, his effusive praise of Wolter notwithstanding. (Even Wolter noted that DeSalvo was blowing smoke up his ass.)

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Listen to me on the Hero Paranormal Podcast

3/24/2020

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After two weeks of near record-low timeslot ratings for Rob Riggle: Global Investigator, the Discovery Channel pulled the show from its desirable Sunday timeslot and benched it until next month. The show will return on Thursday nights in April to burn off the remainder of its season. The misbegotten series wasn’t funny enough for comedy fans, and it offered nothing new to fans of fake history, putting it in the uncomfortable position of alienating two audiences at the same time.

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New Owner of Skinwalker Ranch Credits Hal Puthoff for Inspiring Purchase

3/12/2020

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Note: An earlier version of this post noted Brandon Fugal's connection to a Utah-based Ancient History Research Foundation, which listed him as its director on its website. The AHRF, which explored giants, hyper-diffusionism, and other fringe topics, was also affiliated with Wayne May, the patron of infamous figure Frank Joseph, and house Joseph's writings. These references have been removed because Fugal informed me that his affiliation with the foundation ended in 2005, he was not part of the organization when it began housing May's and Joseph's work, and he is not actively investingating anomalous archaeology. I regret the error.

This week, MJ Banias revealed the name of the new owner of Skinwalker Ranch, real estate investor Brandon Fugal, who came out of the shadows four years after purchasing the paranormal property from billionaire Robert Bigelow, just in time to promote his ranch’s new History channel series. But, as always, there is more to the story than meets the eye—and it is weirder than you might imagine.

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Review of "Mysteries of the Tayos Caves" by Alex Chionetti

1/21/2020

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Publishers don’t share all of their new books with me, so I don’t always get to read all of the books that might be relevant to this blog before they are published. Ever since Andrew Collins complained that I gave one of his books a negative review prior to publication, Inner Traditions, one of the biggest purveyors of pseudohistory and New Age claptrap in the publishing industry, has stopped making available for review their books on themes relate to archaeology and ancient history prior to publication, presumably to stop me from reviewing them. Therefore, I had to wait to read a new book published last month by Bear & Company, a division of Inner Traditions. The book is called Mysteries of the Tayos Caves by Alex Chionetti, and it deserves notice for two reasons: First, because of who Chionetti is and second, because of who endorsed his book. The actual content of the book is nothing you haven’t seen before on Ancient Aliens and Expedition Unknown, and for good reason, as we shall see.

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Josh Gates Launches New Show, Same as Old Show

1/17/2020

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Last week, I discussed Expedition Unknown host Josh Gates in his role as a trustee of the Archaeological Institute of America, a nonprofit which “promotes archaeological inquiry and public understanding of the material record of the human past to foster an appreciation of diverse cultures and our shared humanity.” I criticized the AIA for giving a prominent role, both administratively and in terms of public events, to Gates because his program had included some dubious content and awful guests. Gates has occasionally spoken in glowing terms about the ancient astronaut theory, and his show airs on a network owned by Discovery Communications, a conglomerate responsible for some of the most damaging pseudoscientific series of the past few years, such as Legends of the Lost.

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Geologist Robert Schoch Claims to Be Able to "Translate" Alleged "Writing" at Göbekli Tepe

1/11/2020

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So, my hard drive failed for the second time in three months. My computer is still functional, to a point, so I can use it intermittently while I wait for HP to send me a box to ship it back for more repairs, including the fault sound, flickering screen, etc. They informed me that the hard drive has to die three times before they will admit that this computer is a lemon and replace it. So, stay tuned for hard drive failure number three later this spring.

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Review of Unexplained + Unexplored S01E07: "Egypt's Land of the Gods"

12/23/2019

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Note: I am taking time off for the Christmas holiday, so this will be my last post until this weekend.

I will give Unexplained + Unexplored credit for finally breaking out of the America Unearthed mold in episode 7, traveling to Egypt and Ethiopia in search of what they term a “lost civilization” that gave rise to ancient Egypt. Sadly, though, they do so only because they are following a different playbook: Graham Hancock and those in his orbit, such as Robert Schoch, John Anthony West, and Robert Bauval. Following Hancock’s lead, hosts Justin “Baron Ambrosia” Fornal and Emiliano Ruprah claim that ancient Egypt “seemingly rises out of nowhere” and that its development has “baffled” archaeologists. This is, of course, not true. Preceding cultures, particularly the Naqada II and Naqada III cultures that immediately preceded dynastic Egypt, are well-known, and in them we find the elements that gave rise to dynastic Egypt. Early archaeologists thought of Egypt as emerging all at once and fully formed because these prehistoric cultures had not yet been excavated and explored, but that was a century or more ago.

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Review of Unexplained + Unexplored S01E06 "Mystery of the American Maya"

12/16/2019

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Every episode of Unexplained + Unexplored remakes an episode of America Unearthed, for reasons known only to the Discovery Networks and the production companies they pay to remake bad shows time after time. This episode stretches all the way back to the pilot episode of America Unearthed, in which Scott. F. Wolter attempted to find evidence that the Maya colonized the southern United States. Here, our hosts, Justin “Baron Ambrosia” Fornal and Emiliano Ruprah, follow his footsteps in taking a potentially interesting question and turning it into a colonialist-style treasure hunt. I will give them credit, though, for not simply repeating America Unearthed uncritically and instead finding their own, slightly less ridiculous, evidence for American Maya.

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Review of Unexplained + Unexplored S01E05: Hunt for the Ark of the Covenant

12/9/2019

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Watching cable television today, it’s easy to think that the search for the Ark of the Covenant has dominated archaeology and historiography for the past 2,500 years. Yet a review of the Euro-American literature finds that this wasn’t really the case at all. The Ark is rarely mentioned down to the twentieth century except in religious discussions of Old Testament times. Indeed, Anglican clergyman William Henry Havergal’s sixth lecture on the Ark of the Covenant, presented in the 1860s, “In the total loss of the ark, and in the entire demolition of the Jewish system, let us discern the low estimate which God sets upon his most exalted institutions, in comparison with the living realities, which they were intended to foreshadow” (emphasis in original). In other words, Christians believed that the Ark wasn’t important because it was a mere forerunner of Christ, who replaced it. Indeed, in the 1890s, writers made fairly frequent reference to the Ark of the Covenant being kept in Axum, Ethiopia, and basically nobody cared. Even when Fascist Italy conquered Ethiopia, they did not bother to go after the Ark.

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Graham Hancock Reacts to SAA Archaeological Record Articles on "America Before"

11/26/2019

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I’ve told this story before, but it is worth repeating here. When I was in college, a Jewish classmate angrily refused to ride in, or consider purchasing, a Chrysler PT Cruiser because he considered its 1930s-style aesthetics offensive. He thought it looked like a “Hitler car.” Instead, he was inordinately proud to have purchased a brand new, apple green Volkswagen Beetle, ignorant of the fact that it was almost literally a Hitler car. Hitler personally sketched a rough concept for the Volkswagen Beetle, and the Nazis founded Volkswagen to build them (though World War II prevented actual production). I was reminded of this story when Graham Hancock reacted to last week’s special issue of The SAA Archaeological Record, which devoted a lengthy, multi-article section to Hancock’s America Before, including an article by me.

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