Regular readers will remember George Knapp, the investigative reporter at KLAS-TV in Las Vegas who is closely connected to the story of billionaire Robert Bigelow’s search for interdimensional portals and UFO-driving poltergeists at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. Knapp has covered UFOs for several decades and is a frequent guest host on Coast to Coast A.M., the paranormal overnight radio show. Knapp recently appeared in Hunt for the Skinwalker, a documentary making use of footage from an abandoned documentary project he started about the ranch decades ago but put on hold at Bigelow’s request. In reviewing the documentary and subsequent radio appearance, I criticized Knapp for agreeing to receive secrets about the Skinwalker Ranch investigation and for keeping those from the public for two decades, and Knapp is hopping mad about it, saying that I don’t know my “ass from a hole in the ground, certainly not about investigative reporting.” The crux of the argument is that Knapp is adhering to his employers’ formal ethics policies, while my concern is for the consequences of the decisions that he has made.

​Every once in a while, I’m just not feeling up to writing a lengthy blog post. I have a stack of new books I’ve been asked to review, but none of them has really captured my imagination. Only one seems really worthy of a full-length review, but I’ve been struggling to get it read. The reason for that is sort of funny, really. It’s a beautifully designed coffee-table book about horror movies, but they printed all of the text in black against dark red and dark blue pages, and in the time I have to read after my son goes to bed at night, my eyes are too tired to strain to see the text. There isn’t enough contrast unless I flood the page with light, and that much light in my eyes that late makes it hard for me to go to bed after I’ve finished reading for the night. I also have an advance copy of a new book claiming that Biblical stories of ancient Israel all took place in Egypt and can be confirmed by archaeology, but I am having difficulty bringing myself to care. Too much of our country’s public life is devoted to finding new ways to “prove” the Bible true. The book isn’t out until 2019, so I might manage to plod through it at some point.

​Did something happen to the pseudo-archaeology and pseudo-history writers over the past few months? It seems that one by one, the lights have gone out, and there is increasingly less to write about their follies and fictions. I don’t mean to imply that there is no pseudo-history on offer—YouTube, Sputnik, and the British tabloids see to it that this is never the case—but the high-profile, quasi-professional material seems to be slipping into a fallow period. If I had to guess, I’d say that the current political situation is sucking all of the air out of the room and leaving no space for other topics to gain traction.

​I grew up in what used to be known as the “Burned-Over District,” a place where the flames of the true faith—whatever that was—burned so brightly that they scorched all they touched. In nineteenth-century upstate New York, evangelicals spoke of their conversations with the Holy Spirit to rapturous audiences. Joseph Smith preached about visitation from the angel Moroni, and the Spiritualists vouchsafed that they were in direct contact with ghosts from another plane of existence. What all had in common was an unyielding faith in things unseen, and also an unwavering demand that no evidence be admitted against their beliefs, for faith was, as Jesus said, a blessing for those who believed without proof: “Blessed are those that have not seen yet have believed” (John 20:29). The cynic might argue that this type of faith exists precisely to hide the fact that there are no facts to support it. Even Jesus had to show his wounds to Doubting Thomas.