​Generally speaking, if a book opens by thanking God for his help and assistance, it’s not a very good book. Somehow, God’s literary output has declined markedly in quality since his first few bestsellers. Really, after the Qur’an, it was all downhill, even when he is just consulting, as he did with this book. Our inspired volume under consideration today, Jesse James and the Lost Templar Treasure, begins with the unpromising revelation that the author and his mother and sister were disheartened when the James Farm and Museum refused to endorse their family legend that their alleged ancestor, the outlaw Jesse James, faked his death and lived out his life in Blevins, Texas as James Lafayette Courtney—the man who is Daniel J. Duke’s actual ancestor. Our author describes becoming progressively more strident in his beliefs because of the “many rude encounters” he had with experts who declined to embrace his family’s oral tradition that Courtney was James, traditions detailed in his mother Betty Dorsett Duke’s book, Jesse James Lived and Died in Texas, which Duke expects readers to presume to be both true and correct, mostly because the scholarly elites say no.

​In a new interview with Las Vegas TV journalist and UFO culture-warrior George Knapp, former U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made claims that Russia and China are in a race with the United States to investigate and exploit UFO technology. Knapp frames this as a revelation in an article posted to his TV station’s website, but on closer inspection, it appears that Reid was (a) remarkably incurious about what he now professes to want to see exposed and (b) not really saying anything that hasn’t already been broadcast on Ancient Aliens for everyone in the world to see.

​In a month’s time, Graham Hancock will release his new book, America Before, which attempts to document what he claims to be evidence for a lost civilization that was destroyed when a comet collided with North America at the start of the Younger Dryas period about 12,900 years ago and triggered horrific wildfires that burned much of the continent. Skeptic magazine has commissioned me to review the book, and my review will be published when the book is released in the United States in April. But in the meantime, Hancock tweeted what he said was supporting evidence that his comet holocaust killed off the megafauna of Ice Age America:

The British Express tabloid recently offered up yet another in the endless list of places where the lost continent of Atlantis is alleged to be. Discussing as though it were new a March 16, 2018 appearance on Coast to Coast AM by Ryan Pitterson, an evangelical Christian Nephilim theorist, the Express quoted Pitterson as saying that Atlantis was located in the Holy Land and that its people were identical with the antediluvian giants fathered by the Sons of God in the sixth chapter of Genesis. 

​I’ve been working on writing my book about legends associated with the Giza pyramids, and in so doing, I have, of course, been reviewing material related to the story of the Pillars of Wisdom of the Abrahamic tradition, since the stories about their antediluvian knowledge were later applied to the Great Pyramid. In so doing, I came across a very strange fact that I am not entirely sure what to do with. It seems like it might be possible that these pillars were conceived as being the pyramids of Egypt all along, or at least since Late Antiquity.

​Have you seen that Jim Vieira and Hugh Newman are running a tour of Egypt later this year? For $4,400, you, too, can spend twelve days investigating “earth energies,” “esoteric mysteries,” and “strange accounts of giants being found in prehistoric tombs.” Vieira and Newman advertise the trip as a chance to hobnob with “the stars of History Channel’s Ancient Aliens & Search for the Lost Giants,” but I am more interested in the fact that they plan to frame their adventure around following the footsteps of the “Followers of Horus.” 

​Don Miller filled his Indiana home with parts of around 500 corpses, nearly all belonging to Native Americans, representing a total of more than 2,000 bones. However, because the bones were ensconced in a homemade amateur museum of 42,000 artifacts, half of which were pre-Columbian, and most of which had been obtained illegally, the media considered the morbid piles of human remains to be little more than a curiosity. The CBS News report documenting the FBI’s raid on Miller’s home literally placed the 2,000 bones halfway down the article, having written that the FBI considered the museum itself to be the most surprising part of their investigation, which was handled by the “art crime” unit.

​This weekend Erich von Däniken was in California to give the keynote address to the Conscious Life Expo. At the event, he received the “Integrity Award” for his lifetime of investigation into the ancient astronaut theory. The layers of irony are thick, particularly since von Däniken’s “integrity” involves being convicted of embezzling money to fund his writing of Chariots of the Gods, admitting to fabricating his exploration of a cave full of “alien” artifacts, wholesale reusing of material from book to book while charging readers for “new” content, and the usual laundry list of false and misleading statements that demonstrate his lack of scholarly rigor or even a basic critical understanding of his own material.