​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. 

The Discovery Channel has largely tried to stay above the bottom-feeding alien schlock of other cable channels. It farmed out its supernatural shows to sister stations Destination America and the Travel Channel, its conspiracy shows to American Heroes Channel, and its fringe history to the Travel Channel and even the Science Channel. Of course Bigfoot shows were a large part of Animal Planet’s programming for years. (Discovery’s Josh Gates, of Expedition Unknown came out as an ancient astronaut theorist a few years ago, but largely keeps quiet about it.) But now the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel have leaped onto the alien dreck bandwagon with Contact, a new series debuting August 7 in which a team of “experts” with no real expertise in aliens will attempt to prove that aliens are in contact with humanity. They are a CIA “targeting officer,” a “conflict analyst,” an astrophysicist, two ex-military members, and a journalist. I’m not sure what any of those job titles, other than astrophysicist, have to do with analyzing evidence for aliens. But it’s pretty clear from the information about using “government documents” and “eyewitness” testimony that the show is meant as a copy of History’s Unidentified, which used a similar team and similar evidence to (not) find aliens.

​Earlier this summer, an anonymous poster released online documents claiming to be emails produced in 2001 by Eric Davis and others for Robert Bigelow, and in the emails, we saw the various Legion of Doom members associated with Bigelow, many of whom are now affiliated with or orbit To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, speculate about the infamous Alien Autopsy video (also called the “Santilli film” after its creator, Ray Santilli) that aired on Fox-TV in 1995, with several expressing credulous views that the infamous hoax was either real footage or a recreation of real footage.

Well, my move … went. It’s wasn’t particularly good, and I don’t know that I will ever find everything. The movers lost all of the hardware for my bookshelves, which now can’t be put back together. A few hours after we got to the new house, the washing machine died. And the company doesn’t make parts for it anymore, so it can’t be repaired. And on top of that, the movers broke the stone steps at my old house, so they are now dangerous to walk on and need immediate rebuilding. After shelling out all the cash for the down payment and moving expenses, there isn’t much left for emergency repairs and new appliances. I wish I could just dump the old house fast without having to spend even more getting it ready for sale. Anyway, it’s been a very long week.