​The forthcoming Sept. 28 edition of Newsweek magazine features a long profile of Luis Elizondo and his position as spokesperson for Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. The interview and profile contain few new revelations, but it is interesting to note that DeLonge declined to participate in the story, with the academy’s press agent saying that DeLonge isn’t doing any media interviews now, in the wake of the negative publicity he garnered for his loopy appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast last year and his overly grand statements about To the Stars back in the spring. That has made Elizondo the de facto face of To the Stars, for better or worse.

​This week, To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science posted a new YouTube video teasing their investigation of debris that they used to claim had alien origins but are now much less sure about. Have you ever seen The Andromeda Strain? In watching the old men of To the Stars Academy playing with pieces of what they imply could be metal from flying saucers, I kept wondering why the only precautions they took against the possibility of extraterrestrial contamination—radioactive, biological, etc.—were a plastic freezer bag, some bubble wrap, and multicolored latex gloves. It just strikes me that if you genuinely thought you had a piece of a crashed flying saucer, you might want to be a little more cautious that you would be packing a used book to ship to an eBay customer.

​I wanted to start off today with a strange recent tweet from Las Vegas reporter and UFO investigator George Knapp, who alleged that the Pentagon’s research into UFOs, conducted with Bigelow Aerospace, was intentionally sabotaged because of demons, or, rather, the belief that UFOs are Satan’s spaceships. 

On Tuesday, Luis Elizondo, the former head of the unclassified Pentagon program mandated by Congress to explore “unidentified aerial phenomena” who now works as the head of security for Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, posted a blog discussing the importance of UAP research for national security. While it is, at the grossest level, a fairly standard argument that America needs to study any potential threat to guard against it, it contains some interesting contradictions that suggest that Elizondo is making up at least as much as he claims to expose from his time in government. It is worth taking a look at some of the assumptions that seem to undermine the argument Elizondo claims to be making.

​This week, a new report found that Russian trolls and bots helped spread the Pizzagate and Q-Anon conspiracies, conspiracies that have found favor with ancient astronaut theorists affiliated with Ancient Aliens. David Wilcock, who has not appeared on the show for several months, has boasted of receiving “intel” from Russia and continued to endorse the reality of the fake Pizzagate story as recently as last month. Richard Dolan delivered a Facebook Live session in which he refused to denounce the Q-Anon conspiracy theory (he called it “interesting”) and instead said that if Russians were responsible for cybercrimes against Democrats, Americans should thank them. He added that Russian propaganda is good thing as long as its information is “accurate.” Now, for the second time in two years--the first came just weeks before the 2016 election--Ancient Aliens devotes a troubling episode to praising Russia. Following on the heels of a two-hour documentary on Sunday that heavily implied that America needed to ally itself with Russia for the sake of restoring Christendom in preparation for the End Times, this episode left a sour taste in my mouth. Why is the History Channel embracing Russia, if not because its audience of older, white, conservative men now see Putin as a hero?

​I usually try to open a review of Ancient Aliens with some sort of thematic discussion of the week’s topic, but I will confess that it is increasingly hard to find something new to say about topics that the show revisits over and over again. This episode, “The Taken,” explores claims of alien abduction, with a focus on modern abduction claims. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the show has dipped into this well many times over the preceding twelve seasons. Some notable examples include “Strange Abductions” from season five,  “Alien Breeders” from season seven, “The Vanishings” from season nine, and “The Returned” from season eleven. (All numbering follows the post-2016 revised official History Channel listings.) And these were only the episodes that were explicitly about alien abduction; many others touched on it in passing. I have written at length about the dubious origins of the alien abduction trope—from Theosophical-style summits with Nordic space brothers to Betty and Barney Hill’s Outer Limits-induced hypnotic fantasies. This episode isn’t going to change any minds.