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Kesha and Alice Cooper Ask If Interdimensional Space Demons Started COVID-19

11/28/2020

I gather from some of the comments I have received on social media that a good number of my followers think I post too much on Twitter about the material I am researching for my new book rather than my usual diet of UFOs and pyramids. In pre-pandemic times, I imagine I would have bounced ideas off people in real life, but I don't have that luxury as often today. Now, I grant you that it is very different content, and sometimes more explicit, but I do not control history. If people see a significant difference between writing about James Dean's much duller than you would imagine sex life and George Adamski allegedly paying blond teenage boys for sex while telling people they were Venusians visiting his hotel with cosmic secrets, I can only shrug and wonder. But, good news! I have finished more than ten of my book's twelve chapters, and there is not much left. Then I will have nothing to talk about!

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E01 "The Divine Number"

11/13/2020

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Forgive me if the thought of doing this all again is more than I can quite take. Ancient Aliens has been off the air since the pandemic struck, and this is the first episode back since executive producer Kevin Burns died. It’s not a terribly auspicious start. Hell, this episode even features a commercial for penis-straightening, so ugh. Their audience is pretty obvious. The theme of this episode is the “divine” number twelve, and the whole episode is devoted to finding instances of twelves in mythology, architecture, and nature. There is nothing mystical about twelve. It’s special only because it contains a large number of factors—1, 2, 3, 4, and 6—and many significant multiples—24, 60, 72, etc.—making it a fairly obvious candidate for a “special” that can be used to join any number of natural or mystically significant digits. There are twelve months in the lunar year, which is all the explanation you really need.

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"Ancient Aliens," "Oak Island" Producer Kevin Burns Dead at 65

9/28/2020

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Kevin Burns, the prolific Emmy-winning producer of such pseudohistorical and reality television programs as Curse of Oak Island and Ancient Aliens, died yesterday, according to social media posts from friends and colleagues. Burns was 65 years old.

With profound sadness I learned that our great leader and friend Kevin Burns passed away earlier today. Fly high my good friend, fly high. pic.twitter.com/38YiczCAQB
— Giorgio A. Tsoukalos (@Tsoukalos) September 28, 2020

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Review of "War of the Gods" by Erich von Däniken

9/23/2020

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Years go by with the inevitable cycle of the seasons repeating their majestic rounds. After winter, summer. After summer, winter. And with the regularity of the season, so too does Erich von Däniken release a new book, and with the same repetition as the seasons. Each book is the same as all the books before, and each one begins with the ritual of pretending otherwise. War of the Gods, originally published in German 2018 but released in English for the first time this month, starts with a letter in which von Däniken (henceforth EVD) proclaims with great excitement news that he imagines will surprise his readers: “In this book, I present new findings!” Unfortunately, there is an ominous note: “But it is only possible by building on previous experiences.” Each winter brings a different snowstorm but you always know it will snow. So, too, do you know that whatever soupçon of new material appears in War of the Gods will be buried in a blizzard of recycling. He frequently refers to his own books, the books of guests on Ancient Aliens, and to claims made on the Ancient Aliens television show itself, recycling in an endless loop of previous claims tracing back to his own earliest efforts to recycle Morning of the Magicians to his own advantage.

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Weekend Update: CNN Talks Ancient Aliens, Shatner Babbles about Mysteries, and More!

7/11/2020

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On Thursday, CNN’s website ran an article on the ancient astronaut theory by Jen Rose Smith. The piece frames questions about the origins of UNESCO World Heritage Sites like the Giza pyramids and the Nazca lines in terms of Erich von Däniken’s version of the ancient astronaut theory. It then devotes most of the article’s space to describing how “mainstream scientists” reject the ancient astronaut hypothesis, with lengthy quotes from archaeologist Sarah Parcak.

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Review of Forbidden History S06E09 "Mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle"

6/2/2020

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The Bermuda Triangle is a hoax invented by George Sand in Fate magazine in 1952. This fact, however, is the forbidden history that Forbidden History forbids its viewers from learning. I will, however, say that I did not expect this episode to descend into the hellish depths of Ancient Aliens or for one of the stars of that show to make a guest appearance like visiting head of state. This show was always the fringe history and conspiracy theory show, not the alien one. It rarely invoked aliens and instead preferred giants, Templars, and Illuminati. I had expected a dry discussion of famous disappearances, maybe a visit to a stretch of ocean—the kind of stuff all the other Bermuda Triangle shows do all the time. But now, we went full Ancient Aliens. Suddenly, it’s like all of cable fake history is collapsing in on itself toward either a black hole or a singularity where everything becomes Ancient Aliens.

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Journalist Describes Father's Path from "Ancient Aliens" to Q-Anon Obsession

5/23/2020

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On the Narratively website, California college student and journalist Reed Ryley Grable provided a poignant and thought account of his father’s gradual slide into Q-Anon conspiracy madness. Grable describes his father’s growing paranoia and social isolation, and he talks eloquently about how his father’s strident conspiracy theory advocacy has alienated him from his family and his friends. While I am not particularly interested in Q-Anon conspiracies, I was neither shocked nor surprised to read Grable’s account of how Ancient Aliens served as a gateway drug leading his father from a nebulous interest in the mysterious and the bizarre to a raving world of online conspiracies.

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Researcher Discusses How the Media Weaponize Conspiracy Theories and Fake History

5/5/2020

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Last week I receive a request from someone who is consulting on a documentary to take a meeting with a producer who works with Netflix about adapting one of my books into a documentary or potential documentary series. Normally, I don’t let this sort of thing get very far because it is always a huge waste of time, but since I have been stuck in quarantine, I figured it would serve as a bit of a distraction. So, we set up the meeting, and before the appointed day, I suggested that the producer should probably be aware that my work is not pro-alien. Regular readers of this blog can guess the rest. There was no meeting at the appointed hour. It wasn’t unexpected, but even so, it is disconcerting.

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This Week in Paranormal TV Ratings

4/25/2020

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Ancient Aliens is not on tonight, so I am taking the day off. However, before I sign off for the day, I wanted to provide a quick overview of the week in pseudo-historical and paranormal TV. Rob Riggle: Global Investigator actually rose in the ratings for its alien-themed episode, reaching 355,000 live plus same day viewers, its highest viewer haul since moving to Thursdays. What made that more amazing is that the show rose in the ratings while airing out of prime time, in its late-night exile slot. Its total, however, was still only half of what Discovery usually pulls on Thursdays, and it still failed to outdraw the similar Forbidden History, the obscure UK import airing on the little-watched Science Channel. Its latest episode had 400,000 viewers. Curse of Oak Island was up to 3.6 million viewers this week, while Secret of Skinwalker Ranch stubbornly remained at 2.1 million. Last Saturday, Ancient Aliens clocked 1 million viewers, while The UnXplained sank to 852,000. Overall, where we should have expected to see some ratings spikes as more people are trapped indoors watching TV, instead, everything is basically the way it always is, suggesting that these shows have a relatively inelastic audience.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S15E12: "Aliens and the Presidents"

4/18/2020

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There is an amusing anecdote about the early days of television. Near the end of the Twilight Zone’s run, the series broadcast an episode about an evil ventriloquist’s dummy called “Caesar and Me.” That episode aired in 1964, and two years earlier, the show had aired a nearly identical episode, also about a living ventriloquist’s dummy, called, appropriately enough, “The Dummy.” Both episodes used the same dummy to play the dummy. (He’s in David Copperfield’s Las Vegas museum, if you want to see him sometime.) The producers that greenlit the latter episode, Bert Granet and William Froug, started producing the show in 1963 and hadn’t remembered that their predecessor, Buck Houghton, already did the same thing in 1962. Since there was no after-market for TV shows back then, no streaming and little syndication, everyone shrugged when they found out and assumed the audience would never catch on.

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