Category: Ufos

Contact in the Desert Features Lots of "Ancient Aliens" Pundits, Plus Peter Levenda

5/23/2018

Next week is the annual Contact in the Desert symposium in which the cast of Ancient Aliens and those who profit from association with them will gather to provide audiences with summaries of past episodes of Ancient Aliens, and more extreme claims that are too offensive to make it past network standards and practices over on the History Channel. This year, however, there is something new. In addition to the regular group of Ancient Aliens talking heads, Tom DeLong’s coauthor, Peter Levenda, will be on hand to promote To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science as a major player in the ancient astronaut field.

9 Comments

Robbie Graham Suggests 1980 UFO Movie Might Be Mormon Propaganda

5/18/2018

62 Comments

I received some bad news yesterday. One of the country’s top literary agents had asked to read my mound builder manuscript, but told me that he couldn’t possibly sell it to publishers because no mainstream publisher would take on a book with a topic like that. Now, I know this is not true since Doubleday is publishing The Secret Token by Andrew Lawler in a few weeks, and that book is an almost mirror image of my own, except on the topic of Roanoke instead of mounds. Though now that I think about it, Lawler does offer some words condemning mainstream historians, so perhaps that is my problem. I am relating history rather than attacking it. Whatever the problem, it is depressing to be told time and again how much educated people love my writing but that it can never be published because the public would never buy it. I haven’t decided what to do with the book. It seems like a waste to let it sit unread, but it is also rather pointless to give it to some small press where it will never be seen.

62 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S13E03 "The Alien Protocols"

5/11/2018

35 Comments

In 1968, the NSA commissioned a brief monograph in which popular reports of ancient astronauts and UFOs from newspapers, books, magazines, and Soviet propaganda were used to explore implications for how UFO contact might impact human survival. The author was optimistic: “Perhaps the UFO question might even make man undertake studies which could enable him to construct a society which is most conducive to developing a completely human being, healthy in all respects of mind and body – and, most important, able to recognize and adapt to real environmental situations.” It’s funny to contrast that optimism with the darkness of so much of ufology, particularly the invasion narratives. Tonight, Ancient Aliens asks a question I don’t really care much about: Does the U.S. government have plans for what to do should aliens arrive?

35 Comments

Newsweek Discovers Racism in Ufology; Plus: "Ancient Aliens" Stars Give Depressing Interview

5/1/2018

40 Comments

This weekend, Newsweek ran an interesting article on racism at MUFON and the broader problem of alt-right infiltration in ufology. The magazine basically laid the blame on the fact that ufologists are largely a group of cranky old white men, the same demographic that overlaps heavily with extreme conservative and alt-right beliefs. “The combination of demographics likely to align with far-right viewpoints, and the overlap between UFO researchers and conspiracy theorists, produces an environment that [ufologist Ryan] Sprague and others argue can be toxic to minorities,” the magazine told its readers.

40 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S13E01 "The UFO Conspiracy"

4/27/2018

52 Comments

Welcome the thirteenth season of Ancient Aliens, a depressing milestone that also offers another sad monument to American stupidity. At the conclusion of this season, the show will have been on the air for ten calendar years, a decade of recycling the same claims originally made in the show’s 2009 pilot TV movie. More amazing still: Ancient Aliens has surpassed In Search Of… and all of the other fringe history documentary series in longevity, and even in total episode count. In Search Of… ran 144 episodes, while this season will take the show beyond that total, adding another dozen or so to the 135 episodes that have run so far. Let that sink in as we turn to the new season’s two-hour-long debut, “The UFO Conspiracy,” inspired by the recent disclosure of the Pentagon’s UFO tracking program.

52 Comments

Tom DeLonge Announces New TV Show, Claims to Have Briefed Government Officials on UFO Security Policy

4/27/2018

11 Comments

OK… I have a special treat for you later today. A+E Networks has kindly made the premiere of Ancient Aliens available as a screener on its press site ahead of tonight’s airing, so I have already been able to watch and review the show. I will be posting my review at 9:00 PM ET, the exact moment the show airs, so you can follow along with the program if you so choose. This is the first time that A+E Networks has actually gotten the screener up and available before the show!

11 Comments

Diana Walsh Pasulka Talks UFOs, Claims Truth is Essentially Unknowable

4/25/2018

17 Comments

A few weeks ago, I discussed a lecture and a forthcoming book about UFOs by Prof. Diana Walsh Pasulka, and now Pasulka has given an interview to Robbie Graham of Mysterious Universe, with whom I have also expressed my differences. Their interview is interesting, but perhaps not for the reasons they imagined. So far as I can tell, the two believed they were discussing the UFO phenomenon and its profound effects on society, but beneath that surface they seemed to actually be discussing the will to believe and the efforts that humans go through in order to create meaning from ambiguous inputs.

17 Comments

Top MUFON Official Quits Over Organization's Continued Support of John Ventre a Year After Ventre's Racist Rant

4/17/2018

50 Comments

On Wednesday, the Smithsonian Channel will air the controversial Canadian Ice Bridge documentary that revived claims that the first Americans were Europeans known as the Solutreans who crossed the Atlantic during the Ice Age. The documentary was roundly criticized in Canada for its lack of attention to the racist uses of the Solutrean myth and for its endorsement of a hypothesis for which little evidence exists. While the show aired on the CBC in Canada, the country’s major public broadcaster, here in the U.S. it will screen on digital tier cable, meaning that pretty much nobody will watch it. The Smithsonian Channel is a partnership between CBS-owned Showtime and the Smithsonian Institution, which employs Dennis Stanford, the major advocate of the Solutrean theory and the star of the documentary

50 Comments

Atacama "Humanoid" DNA Test Controversy Unveils Connections between Robert Bigelow and Tom DeLonge's To the Stars

4/11/2018

18 Comments

As much as I don’t want to spend more time talking about the sad case of a 40-year-old stillborn baby girl from the Atacama region of Chile whose corpse was repurposed as an “alien” body, I am increasingly disturbed by the problematic nature of the UFO community’s response to the DNA tests conducted on the body and published recently, tests that showed that the corpse was in fact human. Some recent developments are worth highlighting because of the light they throw on the darker corners of ufology.

18 Comments

Two Credulous Professors Hold Symposium on UFOs as Replacement Religion

4/10/2018

5 Comments

A few days ago, the Ohio State University Center for the Study of Religion held its 4th Symposium on Religion, Narrative, and Media, and the topic was “Taking the UFO Phenomenon Seriously, that is, Religiously.” The symposium was made up of two presentations, one on aliens as gods by Jeffrey Kripal of Rice University and the other on the use of UFO mythology to replace traditional religion by Diana Walsh Pasulka, a professor at UNC Wilmington. The symposium is built around the forthcoming release of Pasulka’s new book American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, due out in December or January from Oxford University Press. It’s sure to be an interesting book, reflecting as it does themes we often discuss here about the use of aliens as substitute gods, but I have reservations about the author and her approach to ufology.

5 Comments

<<Previous

Contact in the Desert Features Lots of "Ancient Aliens" Pundits, Plus Peter Levenda

Robbie Graham Suggests 1980 UFO Movie Might Be Mormon Propaganda

Review of Ancient Aliens S13E03 "The Alien Protocols"

Newsweek Discovers Racism in Ufology; Plus: "Ancient Aliens" Stars Give Depressing Interview

Review of Ancient Aliens S13E01 "The UFO Conspiracy"

Tom DeLonge Announces New TV Show, Claims to Have Briefed Government Officials on UFO Security Policy

Diana Walsh Pasulka Talks UFOs, Claims Truth is Essentially Unknowable

Top MUFON Official Quits Over Organization's Continued Support of John Ventre a Year After Ventre's Racist Rant

Atacama "Humanoid" DNA Test Controversy Unveils Connections between Robert Bigelow and Tom DeLonge's To the Stars

Two Credulous Professors Hold Symposium on UFOs as Replacement Religion

Author

Newsletter

Blog Roll

Categories

Terms & Conditions

Archives