I am finally approaching the end of proofreading and indexing for my Mound Builder book. I have only a few dozen pages left to go, and I can’t say the end is coming a moment too soon. I hate indexing so much. I am also astonished by some of the strange editing changes that creep into a text as it is formatted and typeset. I had to go back to my manuscript a couple of times to double-check when a word choice just struck me as wrong. My words tend to have a certain rhythm, and an unusual word strikes a discordant note that I can hear in my head. I think they were trying to save space to align the text, but in a couple places it changed the meaning. The joys of editing!

After a brief hiatus, Ancient Aliens returns to goose the ratings for the new season of In Search Of, which aired immediately afterward and covered the decidedly not au courant hunt for the Loch Ness Monster. I mean, seriously: The original In Search Of… did a Loch Ness Monster episode in 1977 and there is actually less evidence for it now than there was back then thanks to the exposure of hoaxes. Anyway, Ancient Aliens is also airing simultaneously with its stars’ participation in Alien Con Dallas. The first Alien Con was an event, and early outings even garnered coverage in the New York Times. But in a case of diminishing returns, each subsequent iteration has become less noteworthy. At this point, it is basically the Antiques Roadshow for the fantasy-prone, or, perhaps more charitably, Comic Con for people who find comics a little too literary and deep. All of this is a long way around saying that Ancient Aliens is airing more as a piece of a corporate marketing strategy than because it has anything at all to say. Well, and it also helps the ancient astronaut theorists score free vacations on History’s dime.

While I am still occupied indexing my new book, I have time for just a brief update on the latest goofball antics from To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which come to us courtesy of Keith Basterfield, who has read through TTSA’s latest SEC filing, which was posted to the SEC website this week. In the filing, TTSA announced that the so-called alien “metamaterials” that it claimed to have acquired over the summer were in fact purchased from none other than the company’s own founder, Tom DeLonge himself, for $35,000. The chunk of metal appears to be similar to (if not the same as) the collection known as “Art’s Parts,” which were sent to the late Art Bell decades ago. Metal from that collection was tested in the 2000s and determined to most likely be industrial waste from here on Earth. But now trash like that is worth $35,000!

​After fourteen weeks of the current season of Ancient Aliens, I confess to feeling fatigued. Each week it becomes harder to muster the energy to find something new to say about the show, particularly when it tries so hard to avoid saying anything new itself. Fortunately, we have a month off before the next new episode. ​The topic of the current episode, “The Nuclear Agenda,” ought to be familiar to any viewer who has seen the show over the past five or six of its fourteen seasons. That’s because it has already covered this material many times over, in greater or lesser detail, and repeating it here doesn’t really do a lot to make it interesting. Worse, since the topic deals with the supposed interest of flying saucers in nuclear weapons after 1945, there isn’t much here to capture my interest in things ancient. All I could think is that this same show suggests that aliens have mastered wormholes and can channel world-destroying dark matter from other dimensions and have piezoelectric space lasers and can direct asteroids to kill whole species, and somehow they are worried about a nuclear bomb? 

​The other day, UFO circuit regular and local Las Vegas TV reporter George Knapp published a statement from Luis Elizondo of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science about recently released emails that Elizondo had sent to the Pentagon requesting permission to share the UFO videos that helped launch TTSA back in 2017. The emails were written in July 2017 while Elizondo was a Pentagon employee but was actively plotting to move to TTSA, which he did in October of that year. While most of the coverage in the UFO community has focused on the question of whether the emails support Elizondo’s claim to have supervised the Pentagon’s pork project UFO-tracking program, I want to highlight a more interesting issue, how Elizondo actually describes the supposed “unmanned aerial vehicle” threat when he isn’t speaking to UFO believers. 

​Each week I try to come up with something new to say about Ancient Aliens, a show that doesn’t try half as hard to deliver new content each week. But in past seasons, they at least tried to vary their topics from week to week. Now, in its dotage, Ancient Aliens latches on to a topic and just keeps cranking out variations on whatever currently obsesses its producers. Case in point: For three weeks now, the show has fixated on the question of aliens hybridizing humanity and engaging in cross-species genetic engineering. Granted, the first time it was subsumed under interest in which aliens were hybridizing people (Reptilians) and the second time it hovered behind a putative interest in the mechanics of hybridization. Now, the third time in three weeks, the focus is nakedly on Our Heroes’ supposed interest in why space aliens would want to modify our DNA. However, the real purpose of the episode is fairly clear: The History Channel pastes together similarly themed episodes into multi-hour Ancient Aliens Declassified specials, so the repeat subject matter makes it that much easier. They just used to space them out better so it wasn’t so much all at once. The audience might be catching on, too. For the past two weeks, the show’s ratings have fallen to season-low viewership under 900,000 per episode, a third below the series’ average. William Shatner’s UnXplained outdrew it both weeks.

​Former U.S. military sniper Tim Kennedy appeared on Fox & Friends this week to make the case that mass shootings by right-leaning white males are not the result of political ideology, mental illness, or easy access to guns but are instead the result of the feminization of American society at the hands of a culture hell-bent on criminalizing masculinity. Kennedy said that “you have to let boys be boys” while wearing a flamboyant pink tie and flowery shirt. He suggested that ADHD medication feminizes boys, and he lauded past eras where insulting the sitting president would result in a violent confrontation to protect the honor of the delicate flower in the White House. I mention this because Kennedy is probably best known to my readers as one of the hosts of Hunting Hitler, the show that furthered a conspiracy that Hitler survived World War II and which identified a photograph of Moe Howard from the Three Stooges as an aging Adolf Hitler.