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Acting Attorney General's Bigfoot and Time Travel Claims; Plus: Kentucky's Governor Blames Zombie TV for Mass Shootings

11/15/2018

Despite the fact that the History Channel and I don’t have the best of relationships, it seems that their publishing partners at the Atlantic Monthly Press didn’t get the message. The publisher just sent me an advance copy of the History-branded The Curse of Oak Island tie-in book by journalist Randall Sullivan, due out just in time for Christmas. I only received the book Tuesday night, so I haven’t had time to read much, but I have to say that the introduction and opening chapter left me baffled. I suppose this must be a book for super-fans of Curse, since my general but not particularly deep knowledge of the “mystery” of Oak Island was not enough to make sense of the barrage of names and dates, or the convoluted history thrust upon me with little authorial guidance.

11 Comments

Review of "Reach": An Unconvincing Teen Drama You've Already Seen Before

10/6/2018

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Steven Turano (Garrett Clayton) and Clarence West (Johnny James Fiore) in "Reach." (Freestyle Digital Media / Voltaire Media)

Sometime between the when I reviewed Natural Selection nearly three years ago and Super Dark Times almost a year ago, the public relations teams representing a certain kind of independent film seem to have gotten it into their heads that I am the right person to review movies about the friendships of teenage boys. I’m not sure how I got pegged into that niche, but I receive an outsize number of screeners for a remarkably similar parade of films exploring the challenges of growing up young, white, and privileged in a world where guns are easy to come by but authenticity and genuine social connections are not. To be honest, the movies are so similar that I have a hard time remembering which act of violence occurred in which one. Was Sins of Our Youth the one where best friends are torn asunder and end up bathed in blood? Trick question. It was all of them.

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Andrew Lawler Responds to My Review of "The Secret Token"

9/28/2018

40 Comments

Six months ago, I reviewed science writer Andrew Lawler’s new book on the lost colony of Roanoke, The Secret Token, and I expressed some concerns about the content of the book. Lawler, who is fresh from a book tour promoting the volume, read the review, and wanted a chance to respond. Today, I present Andrew Lawler’s response to my review. After his comments I will add a few thoughts.

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Review of "The Sky Is Falling" by Peter Biskind

8/9/2018

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During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, commissioned a study to better target the kinds of voters Trump would need to reach to win the election. According to an interview Kushner later gave to Forbes magazine, he learned that Trump voters were most likely to be fans of AMC’s zombie drama The Walking Dead, a show about rugged individualists struggling to beat back hordes of rampaging zombies that constantly breach their border walls after the total collapse of the federal government. Consequently, the Trump team bought air time during the broadcast. It was neither the first nor the last time that The Walking Dead—a rural-themed show with the formal structure of midcentury cowboys-and-Indians movie—has been viewed as a conservative drama. As I wrote in my Knowing Fear a decade ago, horror is almost by definition structurally conservative since it revolves around breaches of the status quo.

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Summer Reruns: How "The O.C." Helped Determine My Career

8/8/2018

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I am taking a couple of days off this week. Please enjoy a classic blog post (lightly edited to bring it up to date) marking fifteen years since I started writing regularly about ancient mysteries. I had launched a website in 2001 but only turned my attention to regular coverage of ancient mysteries in 2003, when I began work on my first book. The post originally ran in August 2013 to commemorate my tenth anniversary regularly covering fringe history.

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"In Search Of" Opens Soft, Loses More than 1 in 10 Lead-In "Ancient Aliens" Viewers

8/3/2018

25 Comments

I wanted to take a moment today to talk about In Search Of. Regular readers will have read my review of the show and know that I wasn’t too taken with the rebooted series’ approach to mysteries, or host Zachary Quinto’s off-brand Leonard Nimoy impression in a program that reinvents the old documentary series as a personality-focused reality show. But I was surprised to see that audiences seem to agree. Despite the massive promotion the History Channel gave the series, and a comfortable berth with an Ancient Aliens lead-in, the show seems to be performing modestly.

25 Comments

The History Channel Revoked My Press Credentials When I Tried to Review "Project Blue Book"

7/25/2018

45 Comments

To build excitement during the geek-fest of ComicCon, the History Channel recently released a trailer for its upcoming UFO conspiracy drama Project Blue Book, which is set to debut sometime in the winter of 2018-2019. Journalists and bloggers across the country and around the world immediately produced puff pieces celebrating the forthcoming series and speculating about the show. To be honest with you, I find it disingenuous since most of those reporters have access to the same press materials I do, and they’ve all seen the screener of the show’s pilot, just like I have. Pretending otherwise is just stupid. Yes, that’s how the sausage is made. The reporters have already seen the shows they pretend to wonder about, and everybody lies about it so the reporters can pretend to have “access” and the networks and producers can build up hype for their product by teasing upcoming revelations that have already been made

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The New York Times Runs Major Feature on "Ancient Aliens," Casts Ancient Astronaut Theorists as Friendly, Lovable Rogues Searching for God

7/21/2018

106 Comments

The New York Times ran a major feature online on Saturday which will appear in print in the July 22 Sunday print edition covering Alien Con and the Ancient Aliens television show. While the article by Steven Kurutz pays lip service to the problems with the ancient astronaut theory, the overall thrust of the article is a celebration of the community that has formed around the Ancient Aliens television show. This was especially disappointing to me because Kurutz interviewed me at length several weeks ago for the piece, and he had told me that he planned to use my interview in the article to discuss the dark side of the ancient astronaut theory, including its ties to racist ideas and white nationalism, as well as the racist, anti-Semitic, and paranoid statements made by the show’s talking heads, including Erich von Däniken (who called Blacks a “failed” experiment), David Wilcock (who blamed the Jews for trying to kill him), and the late Jim Marrs (who alleged that the Jews and Obama were working together to destroy America).

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Friends of David Wilcock Say He Resigned from Gaia TV over Bad Pay, Poor Working Conditions, and Lucifer

7/10/2018

89 Comments

Late Friday night, ufologist Laura Eisenhower released a letter she said that ancient astronaut theorist David Wilcock sent to his employer, Gaia TV, asking to be let out of his contract. According to the letter, Gaia TV has an abusive work environment, unfairly compensates its employees, and deceptively edits its programs to promote what Wilcock described as “Luciferian” beliefs. “This is already starting to cause me significant career damage and it will get far worse if I don’t do something about it, fast,” Wilcock is said to have written. “I have willfully ignored an enormous number of offensive, disrespectful and abusive situations in order to do this job the last six years – primarily out of a sense of financial dependency.” He attributed this to having suffered physical abuse at the hands of his former girlfriend.

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Some Thoughts on the Rebooted "DuckTales" Season 1

6/30/2018

19 Comments

When I was eight years old in 1989, my two favorite TV shows both happened to feature similarly drawn anthropomorphic ducks who traveled the world having adventures inspired by pulp fiction. The first of these was Count Duckula, whose British humor and Gothic aesthetic were a major influence on me. The latter was DuckTales, about a globetrotting Scottish tycoon and his grandnephews. Both shows led me to where I am today by repackaging classic genre stories and offering kid-friendly versions of ancient history, myths, and legends. While DuckTales, which aired from 1987 to 1990 and in reruns thereafter, was a great series for little kids, its most important impact on me was introducing me to the classic Uncle Scrooge comics, particularly those drawn by Carl Barks, which I have loved ever since. DuckTales, however, like so much juvenilia, is something I remembered better than it was.

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<<Previous

Acting Attorney General's Bigfoot and Time Travel Claims; Plus: Kentucky's Governor Blames Zombie TV for Mass Shootings

Review of "Reach": An Unconvincing Teen Drama You've Already Seen Before

Andrew Lawler Responds to My Review of "The Secret Token"

Review of "The Sky Is Falling" by Peter Biskind

Summer Reruns: How "The O.C." Helped Determine My Career

"In Search Of" Opens Soft, Loses More than 1 in 10 Lead-In "Ancient Aliens" Viewers

The History Channel Revoked My Press Credentials When I Tried to Review "Project Blue Book"

The New York Times Runs Major Feature on "Ancient Aliens," Casts Ancient Astronaut Theorists as Friendly, Lovable Rogues Searching for God

Friends of David Wilcock Say He Resigned from Gaia TV over Bad Pay, Poor Working Conditions, and Lucifer

Some Thoughts on the Rebooted "DuckTales" Season 1

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