On Tuesday, the History Channel will launch its newest attempt to clone The Curse of Oak Island, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, which will follow Ancient Aliens talking head and former Rocket City Rednecks star Travis Taylor and a team of investigators hired by ranch owner Brandon Fugal as they attempt to probe the Utah property’s supposedly paranormal secrets. The show is the brainchild of Ancient Aliens and Curse of Oak Island executive producer Kevin Burns, and it is produced by Burns’s company, Prometheus Entertainment, which also produces the other two shows. Naturally, Burns couldn’t resist devoting this hour of Ancient Aliens to promoting the new show. However, I am not in the business of providing free advertising or celebrating a new addition the History Channel’s family of anti-science programs, especially not one from an executive who actively put his staff at risk from coronavirus to churn out more pseudohistory with the argument that his young staff shouldn’t be concerned about the disease. Therefore, as I did last week, I will only highlight the bullet points of claims I feel it is important to have a public record of.

California’s statewide shelter-in-place order halted production on most entertainment programs, but Kevin Burns, the aging Prometheus Entertainment executive behind Ancient Aliens, The UnXplained, and Curse of Oak Island, ordered his staff to continue churning out fake history programs from their Los Angeles office or lose their jobs and health insurance, according to a disturbing report in the Hollywood Reporter. Burns, 64, admitted telling staff that he was unconcerned about the virus and told them they shouldn’t be either because they were all much younger. He told many staffers that they could not work from home and their choice was to continue delivering History Channel fake history shows from the office or quit. Several staffers quit rather than risk infection, and even History’s parent company, A+E Networks, expressed concern. “I can only say that this feels like it’s bigger than a basic cable TV show,” a Prometheus employee told THR. “At some point you’re going to be on the wrong side of history.” Well, that ship sailed with the launch of Ancient Aliens.

Only a day before this episode aired, Tim McMillan published an article in Popular Mechanics which, in overblown language, claimed to have blown the lid off of U.S. government efforts to investigate UFOs. The article, however, provided no evidence that flying saucers are real alien spacecraft, but it did confirm what readers of this blog already knew: that the U.S. government, in thrall to Hal Puthoff and his friends, has devoted resources to researching the Puthoff group’s fantasies about space aliens, paranormal phenomena, and the like. From Puthoff’s time as a remote viewing consultant to his work for Robert Bigelow and then To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, he has been the hidden link tying the zany world of UFOs to government contracting. McMillan omitted the questionable research Puthoff has undertaken, and he did not share with readers the close connections between the “sources” he quotes in his article, most of whom are now affiliated with To the Stars, and nearly all of whom are paid conspiracy theorists for the History Channel. Popular Mechanics is owned by Hearst Communications, a 50% owner of A+E Networks, the parent company of the History Channel—not that Popular Mechanics would tell you that.

On Saturday, To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science vice president Hal Puthoff gave a speech in West Virginia in which he discussed the Pentagon’s UFO research. According to a summary provided by Keith Basterfield, Puthoff had a few interesting things to say in the Q-and-A portion of his speech. The rest of the event was apparently a fairly standard Puthoff speech, very similar to the 2018 Las Vegas speech in which he announced TTSA’s investigation into so-called metamaterials, but with some key differences. You can read Basterfield’s summary for yourself, but I want to highlight a few key points.

If you have been following the Twitter discussions among ufologists, you probably saw that Silicon Valley entrepreneur and UFO nut Deep Prasad became quite excited to discover that the so-called “Project Serpo” shares a lot of fictitious DNA with the claims coming out of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, leading him to write a Reddit essay and to launch a lengthy Twitter thread in which he attempted to trace what he implied was a conspiracy involving TTSA executive Hal Puthoff, Project Serpo as promoted by its presumed hoaxer Richard C. Doty, and Ancient Aliens star Linda Moulton Howe. He kind of got it backward.

The Roswell Incident is the most famous UFO encounter in history, largely because of the media, which has hyped the story across books, TV, movies, and more for three decades. At this point, it’s hard to remember that the story itself had been cooked up in the 1970s and 1980s and rapidly expanded into a wild mythology in the 1990s as it acquired spare parts from the X-Files, UFO conspiracy theories, and a lot of old men cosplaying as scientists and whistleblowers. Ancient Aliens has covered Roswell many times before, though it’s surprising to discover that their most sustained discussion of Roswell prior to this episode actually occurred in the spinoff series In Search of Aliens, whose parts were strip-mined and rebuilt into lazy episodes of latter-season Ancient Aliens.