​I can do no better than to simply quote Lynn verbatim (starting at 2:49:39), when she begins by making statements about Sitchin’s Judaism before attempting to link me to Israel:

​It’s rather surprising how little Lynn understands. The least important point: I didn’t “add her” on Substack out of deep interest in her work. I had to subscribe to her free tier in order to read her otherwise paywalled article. A shocking mystery, I know, but one she might have realized by … reading her own Substack blog’s membership terms.
 
It’s also clear that she, like most of my critics, has not engaged with my work beyond searching for their own name and whatever topic is of interest to them. To say I do nothing but “take down people and debunk” is ludicrous. It is certainly what I was once known for, but it was never all I do. None of my books, for instance, is a “debunking,” and my work on the medieval Arabic-language pyramid myth may well be my most lasting contribution to scholarship. I proved Alfonso the Great had a real Arabic source for the ancient Egyptian history he attributes to Ibrahim ibn Wasif Shah—something not even the experts who study him for a living had been able to do. But I will concede that most people don’t read my scholarship; they just want the drama. In short: I wrote a major feature in Archaeology magazine this month, and Lynn is on X ranting about Jewish influence.
 
Lynn’s comment that it was “funny” that I helped her case by uncovering “documents” before claiming that I don’t understand historiography is doubly rich. As you might recognize: Scholarship involves a fair appraisal of evidence, not merely one-sided propaganda. I presented what I found because it is the truth, not merely the story I hoped to tell. Lynn conveniently overlooks that I was able to find this information in an afternoon, while she—who claims to be a historian (though, as I understand it, her PhD is not in history)—failed to do even basic historical research into her subject. Yes, I was surprised by what I found, particularly Sitchin’s personal wealth and his corporate history. That is how research works. You learn things you didn’t know. Sitchin has never been a particular fascination of mine, so there was much for me to learn. Again: That’s what research is supposed to be for.
 
That also means having reading comprehension. I did not accuse Lynn of supporting Aryan Jesus. She specifically cited Friedrich Delitzsch, and—in examining the “history of history,” so to speak—I explained that his Babel-and-Bible ideas ended with his student Paul Haupt used them to develop the Aryan Jesus hypothesis. (She also brings it up at 2:43:46, where she both doesn’t realize the idea is Haupt’s, not Delitzsch’s, and seems to misunderstand “Aryan” as a reference to Nazism.) I never attributed this idea to her but instead discussed it in countering her notion that Assyriology was a “Protestant project” intended to disinherit Jews from Chrisitan religious history. As I mentioned, Panbabylonism was only one of many competing ideas floating around Assyriology discourse in the 1900s.
 
That probably reflects the reason she said she did not respond to me. It’s not so much that it is a “waste of time” as she claims but rather because she knows that my research and analytical skills easily outpace hers and one cannot win an argument when one is not in command of the facts. This is a “researcher,” after all, who sought to create a conspiracy theory around Jeffrey Epstein without thinking to consult the Epstein files.
 
Lynn’s final bit about how my supposed love for Israel induced me to make common cause with the dread enemy Zecharia Sitchin both answers her objection to claims of antisemitism with an own-goal and shows how deeply she misunderstands the idea of historical research. First, I can’t recall ever having taken any public position on the state of Israel. Beyond that, there is no contradiction between saying that Sitchin lived a rich, varied, and interesting life and saying that his ancient astronaut research is false and dangerous. To oppose the ancient astronaut idea on evidentiary grounds is not synonymous with automatically demonizing the people who support it. (Some deserve that treatment, to be sure, but thy earn that opprobrium through their odious behavior.) Seconds earlier, Lynn said “just because I'm presenting all of those different viewpoints doesn't mean I’m adhering to any of them” but can’t imagine that anyone else might be able to find someone’s life story interesting without endorsing their conclusions, or their political activities for that matter.
 
I think we can all understand this. I have written about H. P. Lovecraft, a compelling writer and fascinating figure, who was nevertheless a loathsome racist and archconservative, and I have written about Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, who was a humane and liberal leader and a brilliant skeptic of the paranormal, but also an adulterer, borderline pedophile, and murderer.
 
And for the record, I did not accuse Lynn of being antisemitic. I said she “buts up against antisemitic stereotypes” in her piece and pointed to places where she alluded to anti-Jewish tropes alongside places where her feelings about Israel are quite clear. It is, of course, difficult to draw clear lines between antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and political opposition to either the state of Israel or the current Netanyahu government. They are not the same, as Lynn halfheartedly notes here (around 2:33:28), and I cannot begin to know what is in Lynn’s heart. But she chose to address this by going to the forum of a man who started this very X Space event by talking about “the Jewish question, or Jewish supremacy” and opining that America will be “enslaved” by Jews. And she chose to discuss in response to Malcolm’s claims about Jewish “overrepresentation” her conclusion that modern Israel is the product of an evil occult death-worshiping society of archaeologist and Assyriologists, “peppered with Zionism,” whose six-pointed star originated in Sumerian paganism.
 
You know, totally normal stuff people talk about when someone mentions Jews. 

All of which is a long way of saying I have no idea what this week’s segments have to do with each other except that they fit in the time allotted. Putatively, they are about “messages”—a topic that already had its own episode back in 2014 (see below)—but that’s nearly as vague as the last clip show, about “sightings.” Indeed, some of the “messages” covered in this episode are not even messages from aliens but rather messages for aliens, and the show makes no distinction between the two categories.
 
Segments used this week:
 

1. A discussion of stone walls, geoglyphs, and petroglyphs, taken from the first segment from “The Desert Codes” (2018).
2. A discussion of the Badlands Guardian (actually, a natural formation) from the episode entitled “The Badlands Guardian” (2019).
3. A discussion of Peru and the Band of Holes from “Alien Messages” (2014)—a topic now out of date since the recent scholarly evidence that the Band of Holes was in fact an ancient marketplace.
4. A discussion of the Olmec heads from “The Mystery of the Stone Giants” (2020).
5. A discussion of crop circles and cymatic patterns from the fourth segment of “The Crop Circle Code” (2023).
6. A discussion of yet another crop circle, from the second segment of “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (2024).

My biggest problem with the article is that it lacked a strong sense of purpose. Tattoli never quite decided if the article should be a tick-tock of the lead up to a titanic podcast clash (which might have been dramatically compelling with stronger reporting), a cultural evaluation of the lost civilization theme, or a meditation on the question of who represents “truth” in the twenty-first century. As a result, it isn’t really much of anything at all.
 
Tattoli is strongest in providing biographies of Hancock and Dibble, though much of the information is well-known. In Hancock’s case, he tried to get ahead of the elements that might have surprised readers—particularly some of his father’s more unpleasant behavior—by telling the same stories, in nearly the same words, on the Diary of CEO podcast. Tattoli does a good job of tracing both men’s paths toward representing their respective sides of the Atlantis question and the role that their respective upbringings played in shaping their worldviews.
 
However, where Tattoli walks up to insight, she never quite achieves the goal. She discusses, for instance, the similarities between Graham Hancock’s books and those of Ignatius Donnelly. She says that Hancock “discovered” Donnelly in the late 1980s and that “Hancock had found a soul brother.” However, whether due to authorial oversight or editorial negligence, no proof supports these statements, and it is unclear whether Hancock actually believed this or whether Tattoli is speaking metaphorically. We know from the introduction to Fingerprints of the Gods, where Hancock name-checks Donnelly as an inspiration, that he read him, but it would have been nice to have in his own words or from evidence exactly how he felt about Donnelly. As best I can tell, Tattoli never asked and extrapolated two paragraphs about Donnelly from that single sentence in Fingerprints.
 
Similarly, throughout the piece there is an overreliance on previously published interviews, giving the story a dated, half-hearted feeling. Tattoli met with Hancock in person and spent the day with him at Stonehenge, and yet most of what we hear from him in the story comes from other interviews and previously published writings. Since Dibble has much less on record, his half of the story is more clearly rooted in the day they spent together in Athens.
 
Despite the article’s great length, it is oddly hollow. Tattoli’s account of the Rogan debate contains no fresh insights. There are no interviews with Rogan or his staff, very little reference to statistics about viewership, no real reporting into what went on behind the scenes. It’s mostly just a summary of the video as seen on YouTube. — No, that’s not quite right. It talks about the debate without really getting into the weeds of claims involved. Throughout the story, Tattoli references specific claims and bits of evidence, but she paints no overarching picture of the evidentiary case or its underpinnings—particularly what Hancock considers his strongest suit, the use of myths and legends. (Despite Tattoli framing the argument as Hancock vs. archaeology, his books are as much about history, mythology, and folklore as they are about archaeological evidence.) Compare, for example, my review of Hancock’s Magicians of the Gods where I outline the argument and where it goes wrong, showing how Hancock assembles the pieces and how the house of cards collapses under its own weight. Granted, we are writing for vastly different audiences, but without that kind of granular understanding of the intricacies of the evidence, the piece can’t help but portray Hancock as more or less the equal of the archaeology he condemns.
 
It's clear that Tattoli thinks Hancock is wrong and a crank, but the article was far from a full-throated condemnation of pretenders to science. She devoted too much space to personality to do more than sketch the actual stakes involved and why it is that so many are attracted to epic fantasies about the past, and why they care so passionately about an imaginary lost civilization. “While Hancock’s beliefs have not, on balance, changed much since the nineties,” she concludes, “the collective consciousness has edged closer and closer to his frame of mind. In the United States, media and science literacy has collapsed, replaced by the ‘do your own research’ mentality of Facebook antivaxxers, and the valuation of amateurs ‘just asking questions’ above experts.” This is the kind of assertion that ought to be proven from the article, not simply accepted as a truism.
 
All in all, “Bones of Contention” is not a bad article, but also not a good one. It might serve to introduce readers of longform journalism to the personalities involved in a now years-old Joe Rogan podcast, but I expected something more, or at least something new.

​Segment 1
The show opens at Dartmouth in 1956 and the birth of artificial intelligence. A very quick definition and history of A.I. follows, with a slight discussion of the risks of A.I. going rogue. Giorgio Tsoukalos steps in to caution that A.I. can and does make mistakes before, in a separate clip, he talks about the “limitless” potential of A.I. to solve archaeological problems. The show asserts that A.I. is finding “long-hidden secrets,” though it declines to provide any.
 
We then move on to the use of A.I. to translate cuneiform texts, which leads the talking heads to fantasize that new Anunnaki secrets will emerge from the translations—even though they still don’t understand who the Anunnaki actually were in mythology independent of Zecharia Sitchin’s wrongheaded revisionist ideas. A.I. is starting to be used to aid in translating texts because there are not enough scholars who can read the texts—a depressing situation where our culture would rather pay through the nose to have a machine read tablets than pay a living wage for students to learn the languages needed to translate these texts. Despite Andrew Collins’s and Jason Martell’s effusive speculation, the show admits that the texts remain untranslated and no one has uncovered anything new in them.
 
All of the facts in this segment could have been stated in 30 seconds of narration rather than ten minutes of speculative, fact-free blather.
 
Segment 2
The second segment talks about how A.I. is used in searching for Maya cities. A potted history of the Maya is presented to establish how A.I. has been used to identify Preclassic cities that predate the more famous ruins of the Classic period cities. By analyzing LiDAR scans of the forests of Guatemala and Mexico, A.I. led archaeologists to tens of thousands of buildings and many unknown cities a thousand years older than the Classic period. This has opened a window into a lost phase of Maya history, but the show strains to suggest that the Preclassic period is when space aliens visited the Maya. It’s said with a shrug, however, and the majority of the segment is a straightforward discussion of current archaeological research. “A.I. is confirming much of what ancient astronaut theory is suggesting,” David Childress says, though the show is unable to provide any example of this. The closest they come is Childress’s notion that ancient astronaut theory predicted “more evidence” about the human past exists than is currently available to archaeologists. NO WAY! WHAT AN AMAZING CONFIRMATION! More evidence? Really?!?
 
Segment 3
The third segment takes us to Nazca, where A.I. analysis of LiDAR scans identified three hundred new geoglyphs. Tsoukalos mistakenly calls them “figurines,” and the show leaves this in for broadcast, presumably because no one there knows the difference between a figure and a figurine. Lots of words like “maybe” and “possibly” are bandied about to hide the fact that the new geoglyphs offer no evidence of space aliens, unless you think a whale holding a spear is a message from Zeta Reticuli.
 
We then move to Göbekli Tepe, where a potted history of the site is given, similar to descriptions provided in earlier shows that covered the same site. Andrew Collins focuses on Pillar 43, which depicts a vulture and a scorpion. Unfortunately, the show decides to adopt Martin Sweatman’s analysis of the pillar, which as regular readers know is nonsense, and the show fudges that fact that he did not use A.I. for his constellation correlations but plain old computer-aided analysis. Hugh Newman says computer-aided analysis is “A.I.-type technology,” because for this show it’s not that “everything is computer” but that “everything computer is A.I.” When Sweatman published  his most recent claim in 2024, I didn’t even bother reviewing it because it had so little evidence. Martin Sweatman alleged Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe was a calendar filled with the same constellations recognized by the Greeks 10,000 years later—a claim that has no supporting evidence—rooted in an assumption of precision in the carvings that is itself based on assumptions about measurements and mathematics and 2D projections of the 3D dome of the sky for which there is no proof.
 
Anyhow, Sweatman’s date of 10,500 BCE, conveniently matching Graham Hancock’s favorite date, leads Tsoukalos to claim this is proof of Zep Tepi, the term fringe history appropriated and transformed from an ancient Egyptian idea of the earliest of days.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment looks at how A.I. is being used to reexamine the Dead Sea Scrolls, which excites Ancient Aliens because of the scrolls’ connection to the Book of Enoch, which was found among them, and its reports about the Watchers. Naturally, the Watchers-Nephilim story gets trotted out again. William Henry speculates that A.I. can somehow prove that stories of the Watchers are not Second Temple-era pseudepigraphy but rather are contemporary with the age of the patriarchs and thus are firsthand reports of meetings with space aliens. A.I. is not doing that, mind you, but they hope it might. The A.I. is trained to recognize handwriting changes over time and to use those stylistic changes as diagnostic criteria to date manuscripts. This pushes some of the scrolls back to the third century BCE—a far cry from the supposed date of Enoch, who in Biblical chronology lived before Noah’s Flood. Tsoukalos says that the redating of the scrolls demonstrates that “flying chariots” were present in the texts at the earliest phases and therefore “our ancestors” really saw flying craft, even though, of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls only refer to flying chariots as God’s and the angels’ throne-chariots in the heavens, often modeled on Ezekiel’s vision--but ancient astronaut theorists have already decided it is a UFO.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment switches to military UFO videos and the question of whether A.I. can analyze military images better than humans. William Henry says that A.I. can process and straighten shaky videos and thus calculate what the object actually is. Travis Taylor says he hopes to create an A.I. system that, by feeding it every known UFO video, can be used to instantly analyze new videos. Garbage in, garbage out, right? He says “A.I. is a fantastic tool” that “would give you a leg up on any topic known to man,” which is a deeply depressing statement from a man once employed by the government to study UFOs, since we all know that A.I. large language models hallucinate facts and do remarkably poorly at historical interpretation. He does not differentiate between A.I. processing tools and large language models, but says that he uses A.I. every day to do his mathematical calculations for him and for “space science things” and “for the ancient astronaut theory avenue as well.” He alleges that A.I. proved to him that Teotihuacan was constructed to match the Golden Ratio. Unsurprisingly, Taylor overstates this. Similar claims for the Golden Ratio at Teotihuacan were made in the 1970s and 2000s—before A.I., using aerial photos and human brains—and upon analysis was determined to be “trivial” and “not necessarily a reflection of any deeper level of understanding or significance,” as one 2016 academic book on architecture put it.
 
Physicist Michio Kaku shows up to allege that the aliens will actually be A.I.-powered robots when they arrive here because it is “a waste of time, a waste of effort” for living beings to travel between planets.
 
Segment 6
The final segment repeats material from a previous episode about Filippo Biondi’s claim that his A.I.-powered proprietary scanning system discovered giant pillars and a lost city beneath the Giza Plateau, a claim archaeologists dismiss because Biondi has over-processed radar scans that cannot truly penetrate beneath the ground to the depth he claims nor with the detail he claims.  Andrew Collins shows up to claim that Biondi’s imaginary structures go back “forty to fifty thousand years ago,” built by “an enlightened” human population to whom we owe “all knowledge”—“the lost civilization.” There is not a lick of evidence for this claim, but when David Childress tells us that A.I. is “helping” us “find out who were are and where we came from,” you can see how the show is happy to misuse a genuine fact—that A.I. tools are used to expand archaeological knowledge—to give spurious credence to the unproven, unevidenced ancient astronaut theory’s least supportable speculations. 

​This is an old conspiracy theory that dates back decades. Low-resolution early photographs of the lunar surface led to speculation that some of the shapes seen in the images were alien structures. George H. Leonard was the first to make the claim in his 1976 book Somebody Else Is on the Moon in which he used NASA photographs to allege that towers, bridges, and whole cities could be seen on the lunar surface—a claim even the wildest proponents of lunar structures no longer assert.
 
Fred Steckling built on Leonard’s work in 1981 with We Discovered Alien Bases on the Moon. Writers like Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara promoted the conspiracy in the 1990s, but better-quality, high-resolution photos from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter starting in 2009 debunked many of these claims. However, the idea did not fade away quietly, and modern ufologists argue that the new photos depict still other alien structures.
 
Elizondo’s comments seem to reflect a NewsNation interview Ross Coulthart did with physicist Maaneli (Max) Derakhshani a few months ago in which Derakhshani alleged that LRO photos showed sharp-sided, right-angled alien towers but that NASA blurred the images to hide the towers from the public. He uses AI to reconstruct the underlying image, yielding alleged alien structures, though these are more likely to be AI processing artifacts. (Derakshani accidentally conceded the point during his interview with Coulthart, mentioning without prompting that the algorithm he uses to upscale the images may be responsible for the sharp edges.)

Derakshani claimed that he discovered higher-resolution raw originals of some of the NASA images previously seen in less-sharp processed images while he was reviewing the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photo archive. His claim that these photos were accidentally or secretly released recently is the likely the source of Elizondo’s claim.

For his part, Coulthart used the claim of blurred photos to promote his podcast but made no effort to confirm the allegation beyond asking his guest for his opinion. Derakhshani admitted he cannot prove the photos were intentionally blurred, and Coulthart made not attempt to contact NASA for an explanation. when Coulthart repeated the allegation more emphatically than Derakshani supported, Derakshani even reminded Coulthart that it would be useful for a journalist to ask NASA if the blurring were intentional.

​The core of her argument surrounds a fact that I will admit that I did not know. More than a decade before he became an ancient astronaut theorist, Zecharia Sitchin was the chairman of the American-Israel Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, a position he achieved because he had served as a director of the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce and Industry and was a committed Zionist. In this capacity, he visited former President Harry S Truman prior to the Fair in search of artifacts and memorabilia related to the U.S. recognition of the State of Israel in 1948 to display at the pavilion, and Truman autographed for him a photostat copy of the 1948 press release announcing the recognition. This document, which was shown at the Fair, stayed with Sitchin after the Fair and went to auction in 2019, nine years after Sitchin’s death. As best I am aware, it was only with the auction’s catalog outlining the facts above that Sitchin’s role became generally known, and Lynn draws her account entirely from this catalog entry (and, to be fair, a newspaper article describing the catalog entry).
 
I was unable to find any other accounts of Sitchin’s involvement that were not dependent on the story given in the Raab Collection catalog. I was able to confirm some of the details with contemporary documents. Sitchin appears in a 1951 US Department of Commerce publication as a Tel-Aviv and Jaffa Chamber of Commerce official visiting the US to support Israeli-American trade (Sitchin was born in Azerbaijan in 1920 and lived in what became Israel until 1951). At age 34, a Jewish Post report referred to him as “Dr. Sitchin” (though I could find no evidence of a doctorate, and he never claimed one in later life), and he also published academic work on Israeli finances in the 1950s. I found listings for his American-Israel Chamber of Commerce work in various Who’s Who and other directories of the 1960s. 

​He was indeed reported to be the “president” of the American-Israeli Pavilion in the dedication delivered at the groundbreaking for the pavilion published by the Fair. “The American-Israel World's Fair Corporation was therefore formed, and the most important thing in a significant venture such as this, is to get proper management for it. We released Mr. Sitchin from his position as executive director of the Chamber to become full-time president of this corporation,” Nathan Strauss, the chairman of the advisory board to the American-Israeli World’s Fair Corporation said at the groundbreaking.
 
In contemporary news accounts, we also read that Sitchin was called upon to comment on a fight that occurred between a Jewish man and an Arab man at the Fair after his staff was accused of picketing the Kingdom of Jordan’s pavilion. “He deplored the fairground's being turned into a battleground” and denied the picketing, a news report said.
 
It is rather interesting to learn about the apparently rich and varied life Sitchin led before he turned to the ancient astronaut theory in 1976, at the age of 56. By that point, Sitchin was independently wealthy and a corporate executive heading a group of eleven companies. He even bought a page in the New York Times in 1973 to run an essay he wrote about his corporate prowess and advertise his firm’s line of credit cards (!). (To be far, another ad featured an essay by one of his fellow executives.) Sitchin himself had minimized his connections to Israel and eventually his financial background, omitting it from the biographies included in his books and on his website, perhaps because he understood the conspiracy theories that would have emerged had his advocacy for Israel been widely known at the time he published The 12th Planet. Much of this information would never have been accessible until digitization of records in recent years, so it makes sense that he would have assumed he could essentially start a new life as a, well, crazy person speculating wildly about aliens.

​Lynn, for all her academic-sounding prose, doesn’t go into these details and does not stray from the auction house catalog version of events, a version approved by Sitchin’s family. Instead, she links Sitchin’s efforts on behalf of Israel—which, as far as I can tell from all the available evidence were a genuine expression of his support for the Israeli state—to a nefarious conspiracy tied to Jeffrey Epstein and the Jewish elite to control the narrative of ancient history.
 
Her argument is convoluted, and I’m not sure I fully followed all of the parts. In her telling, the decipherment of cuneiform was a “Protestant project” aimed at dethroning the Jewish god, even though Yahweh is the Protestant god, too. Her warrant for this is Friedrich Delitzsch, the early German Assyriologist who argued that the Hebrew Bible was largely stolen from Babylonian myths, was filled with immorality, and should be divorced from Christianity and replaced with German mythology (!); his student Paul Haupt added to this an Aryan Jesus. As should be obvious, his proposal failed and is today considered a classic example of a scholar outracing the evidence. In reality, there was no single project to use cuneiform for religious purposes. Other prominent early Assyriologists had very different ideas. Heinrich Zimmern, for instance, believed Jesus was a fictional character, while George Aaron Barton was an Episcopal clergyman who though Babylonian texts imitated biblical originals.
 
For Lynn, however, the supposed Protestant project was merely an opening salvo. After T. E. Lawrence (don’t ask) proved that being a gatekeeper could control what the public thought of the past, British media mogul Robert Maxwell had an opening to use his control over academic publishing to corrupt the system through the institution of the dreaded peer review, turning academic publishing into a commercial venture. Lynn asserts—falsely, as best I can tell from the available evidence, that his daughter Ghislaine Maxwell, was deeply involved in what she sees as an academic publishing racket and therefore the younger Maxwell is part of the conspiracy to control history. Maxwell, however, was not an active participant in the academic publishing arm of her father’s business (which at any rate began before she was even born) and her biggest contribution seems to be involvement in his purchase of the New York Daily News in 1991. Maxwell was 30 and living in London when her father died that same year, and she then left his company to become a full-time socialite and child sex trafficker in New York.
 
Lynn implies that the elder Maxwell had ties to “powerful people” that connected the younger Maxwell to the nexus of academic publishing, ancient astronaut theory, child sex crimes, and Israel. “The legacy of Robert Maxwell is a cautionary tale about the concentration of power in any form, whether over scientific discourse or over human lives,” she writes.
 
But there is no real connection between these parts of her story other than the fact that Robert Maxwell happened to own an academic publisher. What academic publishing has to do with 12th Planet, a popular book never intended for an academic publisher and written by a man with no academic credentials in its subject, I cannot imagine. The real connection, which Lynn chooses to leave implicit, is that Maxwell was enmeshed with the Israeli political and economic elite, and Sitchin was a member of that same Israeli caste. She does not even bother to mention that Sitchin, a wealthy corporate executive running an international import-export firm, was part of the same elite business world as the Maxwells, nor does she attempt to find any connection between them. (I don’t believe there is one.) It’s clear Lynn does not know much about Sitchin other than what the auction house website told her.

There is however a connection between Jeffrey Epstein and Zecharia Sitchin that Lynn overlooks. Epstein sought to meet with Sitchin in 2010, shortly before the latter died, according to the Epstein files released earlier this year. Maxwell was not involved with this meeting, which was set up by Epstein’s secretary at the suggestion of documentary producer Bill Siegel. It is unclear whether the two met, but the correspondence makes plain that the planned 2010 meeting would have been their first. Epstein and his circle had an apparent interest in the paranormal and occult science, according to the files.
 
However, Lynn does not take this any further and instead, after the break where paid access to her post begins, she jumps wildly into a completely different topic. “Control of translation is control of the past, and control of the past has always been a quiet way of holding the present,” she wrote. In her view, the key issue is whether anti-Jewish academics, Israeli-aligned academic publishers, Jewish ancient astronaut theorists, or artificial intelligence gets to step in an mediate between ancient texts and modern readers.
 
She feels that elite (for which I suppose we are to read “Jewish”) institutions are making choices about how to translate cuneiform and therefore controlling how cuneiform translations produced by machine translation services render documents: “The system now being trained to read its books is its direct heir: a modern intelligence infrastructure funded by states, held by a few institutions, standing between people and knowledge exactly as the temple once stood between people and grain.” But, maddeningly, she is also opposed to fringe history types like Sitchin who create their own “translations” and the ancient astronaut profiteers who sell products based on those translations, writing that “these offerings recycle well-worn snake oil, adding little that is new or substantive while trading on the allure of the mysterious.”
 
If “alternative” researchers are equally bad, then what exactly is she rallying against? Well, she said that she discovered that the world of ancient astronautics had been “infiltrated by the very groups it positioned itself to oppose.” And who are they? Well, her very next line begins with “the Rothschild banking dynasty,” so I think that answer is pretty clear. It’s also a ridiculous claim since ancient astronauts have always been the province of major media. Book publishers enabled its writers to gain fame. Television gave them platforms. Magazines treated them as stars. Erich von Däniken was interviewed by both Playboy and Johnny Carson in the 1970s—something no professional Assyriologist can even claim.
 
Lynn finishes her article with no real ending, just a promotional message for her next article, which will supposedly expose why the Book of Enoch and its fallen angels are big in fringe world right now. (It always has been, going back to Erich von Däniken, so this is nothing new.) But she frames her promo around the question of Judaism, leaving for next time the answer to whether the fringe theories she calls “Anunnaki, Inc.” are a Jewish plot to seize control of history from Christians or a Christian plot to write the Jews out of history.
 
It's all too much, though. The subtext is barely concealed, and her superficial research—her sources rarely run deeper than the most obvious popular works, despite a lengthy, if at times irrelevant bibliography (Crick and Wastson’s DNA paper is particularly pointless here)—gives the appearance of deep scholarship when many of her assertions are without evidence and do not appear in her sources. The connections between what she calls her “threads” are sketched with the thinnest of gossamer and nothing to establish any true cause-and-effect relationship beyond a shared Jewish cultural identity.
 
And I hate to defend anyone who fabricates history, but the idea that there are elites of any kind who exert control over the “official” translation of historical documents is ridiculous. Not only do Sitchin’s eccentric translations give the lie to this, but so too do the controversies over the many recent translations of Greek texts, specifically the online battles over which Odyssey translation belongs to which political ideology. That is only possible if there are multiple, competing ideas about translation. I myself have produced hundreds of pages of translations, which I have made available for free and are freely indexed by search engines, and no one has attempted to exert control over them. Certainly, cuneiform is harder to learn than French, but no one is stopping you from learning it, not even the Rothschild banking family.
 
In reality, Sitchin’s ideas were laughable even in his own day, but fooled non-specialists with a false show of erudition. Indeed, Sitchin’s book received glowing reviews, with the publishing trade press praising what one reporter called his “heavyweight scholarship,” mistaking convoluted and complex arguments for factual accuracy. UPI described him as a “scholar,” though he held no degree in history or linguistics, had published nothing of note on the subjects before his popular book, and could not distinguish Sumerians from Babylonians. Far from reinforcing some elite scholarly view of history, the book publishing industry and its media partners went all-in on Zecharia Sitchin in 1976.
 
Had Lynn done some real research, she could have spun a much better conspiracy theory. One of the early positive trade press reviews of 12th Planet was published in the Library Journal, urging libraries to buy the book. The writer, who called the book “exciting, even credible,” was the librarian at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where the crashed UFOs are rumored to be stored! 

The encounter apparently yielded nothing of value since Loeb said it occurred many years ago, and Loeb never bothered to mention it, nor apparently to provide any information to Congress about it. 

I will add that it is kind of crazy how many high-ranking people show up at Loeb's house for a hang. He has repeatedly claimed that government officials and powerful business leaders randomly come to call at his house, and it's a bit baffling why they show up like that rather than call on the phone or email him. 

Loeb described his UAP committee as his own idea, and he described the members, many of whom are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s and have been involved in ufology for years, as composed of "young people" with "fresh" perspectives. Loeb also praised Donald Trump for his sincerely and not so subtly goaded the president by saying Trump would be remembered for "millennia" if he were to confirm the existence of space aliens. ​

Loeb participated in the podcast with Hal Puthoff, the two chummy as they smiled and joked about what their colleagues described as the interdimensional threat of terror demons that could obliterate humanity at any time. You know, fun times!​

The segments from past episodes that aired include:

1. The first segment from “The UFO Conspiracy” (2018) on government UFO investigations.
2. The second segment from “Aliens in Our Midst” (2025) on the “jellyfish” UFO over Iraq.
3. The second segment from “The Glowing Orb Phenomenon” (2025) on foo fighters.
4. The fourth segment from “The Time Benders” (2022) on the Rendlesham Forest UFO encounter.
5. A clip from the first segment of “Aliens in Our Airspace” (2023) on commercial airline UFO sightings.
6. A clip from the first segment of “The Ultimate Guide to UFOs” (2020) on the Nuremberg sighting of 1561.

“Lue needs to be more forthcoming about his past roles… There are people that bitterly resent that Lue be appointed to a position of power in UAP transparency because they think that he was part of a previous agenda that was to try to control the narrative, to restrict what the public is entitled to know about UAP Disclosure," Coulthart said. "I think a lot of this was an intention by James Clapper to try and impose a narrative on the public domain using Lue as a front man, a highly urbane, articulate, and likable front man to try to restrict what the public was told about crash retrievals.”

I'm not sure I would describe Elizondo as urbane or necessarily all that likable, but that is not really the point, since Coulthart's allegations imply that Elizondo is lying about his government positions as well as his knowledge about UFOs and supposed crash retrievals and has intentionally published false material about both in his book, Imminent, as well as repeating the same false material in the documentary Age of Disclosure​.

The warrant for this is an exchange Elizondo had with Rep. Nancy Mace in the 2024 UFO hearing before a House Committee: Mace asked: "Are you read into secret UAP crash retrieval programs?" Elizondo declined to answer, saying, "We would have to have a conversation in a closed session, ma’am. I signed documentation 3 years ago that restricts my ability to discuss specifically crash retrievals." He then directed her to read his book. He clarified later in the hearing that he had previously talked about crash retrievals between 2017 and 2021 but the government required him to stop talking about that topic. He declined to say why he was given such a document (presumably it was part of his largely secret work as a Space Force contractor) or who in the government required it.

A 2021 gag order on crash retrieval discussion, four years after Clapper left office, hardly seems to align with Coulthart's allegations that Elizondo is fronting a secret conspiracy to misrepresent crash retrievals. Elizondo's claim of being gagged also does not align with his own statements in the summer of 2024, prior to the hearing, in which he discussed at length alleged crash retrieval programs and what they recovered, repeating what he wrote in his book, material he told Congress was not covered by the agreement! If the existence of such programs and their recovery of space aliens is not the secret (or necessarily even true), this implies the actual secret is government's methods for tracking and recovering downed craft.

As of this writing, Elizondo's only comment on Coulthart's allegation was to thank an X user who questioned how Coulthart came to his conclusion and to defend Elizondo.

Coulthart offered unsolicited advice to Elizondo: “I’ve spoken to people in the legacy program who knew Lue — Lue, I know a lot of people and they know you. I know you can’t speak about the role that you’ve held within the legacy program, but you did. I think we’ve got to stop this nonsense because it’s becoming distractive. There are factions and bitternesses beginning to develop within the UAP world and I think it’s in danger of blowing the whole thing apart.”

​Segment 1
The first segment begins with Tall El-Hamam in Jordan, which a dubious scientific paper by some creationists claimed was destroyed by an airburst and was the biblical city of Sodom. I covered this when it was on a different pseudohistory show in 2014 and again in 2021 when the formal paper was published. Since then, the claim has grown only less credible, with Scientific Reports formally retracting the paper due to gross errors. Ancient Aliens neglects to mention the retraction and instead credits Erich von Däniken, who appears posthumously in an interview recorded presumably a year or more ago, with inventing the notion that Sodom was destroyed by angry space aliens. That is patently false, since the claim was first made by Soviet ancient astronaut theorist Matest Agrest in the Moscow Literary Gazette in 1960. Von Däniken borrowed the claim from Agrest via Pauwels and Beriger’s Morning of the Magicians, where it is discussed in detail. The claim angels were aliens is not original to von Däniken either.
 
Much of the segment repeats the claims about Sodom made in earlier episodes, again with the discrete refusal to specify what was going on in Sodom that made it so sinful that the aliens wanted to destroy it.
 
Segment 2
The second segment is a rehash of last week’s false claims about Mohenjo Daro and its supposed nuclear destruction. I didn’t bother to check, but if the same talking head clips aren’t reused, they are close enough to be interchangeable. The segment is point-for-point identical, down to the false claim that the Sanskrit epics (conflated here with Vedic texts) record radiation poisoning from ETs nuclear weapons, and there is no reason for me to repeat myself yet again.
 
From here, the talking heads claim that mythologies around the world record epic wars between the gods in the heavens, but they see no difference between the Christian myth of a massive war in Heaven between Satan’s angels and God’s angels and the Egyptian story of Set murdering Osiris or even the Maya story of the Hero Twins descending into the Underworld. These are not all equivalent “wars.” In their telling, any conflict of any type in a story involving gods is therefore a cosmic war.
 
Segment 3
The third segment discusses the drakospita, or Dragon Houses, of Euboea in Greece, which were first covered on the show in 2022. These megalithic stone structures are of unknown date and their builders are equally unknown. Though a fifth century BCE date has been proposed, they may not be particularly ancient, however, since they are not mentioned in Classical sources. The largest, roofed with massive slabs, stands atop Mt. Ochi, where construction must have been difficult. In legend, Zeus descended onto Mt. Ochi, and the show attempts to cobble together an argument by cutting together three different interviews with Giorgio Tsoukalos (wearing different clothes and appearing noticeably younger in some than others) to stitch together a claim that the Dragon Houses were places were ETs masquerading as Greek gods met with humans. The long and short of it is that this is an excuse to discuss the Titanomachy and claim it represents a war between two “factions of extraterrestrials.” The show preposterously claims that the Dragon Houses were built as protection from the gods’ weapons—both contradicting their own claim from two minutes earlier and defying logic since such buildings patently could not withstand a bomb-blast, let along a nuclear explosion, nor could they have been built quickly enough when a war broke out.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment revisits—again!—the underground city of Derinkuyu in Turkey, covered in 2017 and mentioned several other times. David Childress claims that it is like a bomb shelter. The show repeats the 2017 claims about a connection to Zoroastrian myths point-for-point, and it might even be the original segment pasted in. You can read my original criticism at the link above. As I mentioned at the time, the Zoroastrian myth is about “enclosures” not underground cities, which means that the story is not an account of Derinkuyu.
 
We then move on to a repeat of material about the Great Flood, this time in the Sumerian version, taken, again point-for-point, from a 2024 episode. According to my notes, the show used the same talking head clips, so it appears that new narration has been spliced into recycled excepts. There is very little connection to a “war” of any kind, except that Enki and Enlil had an argument before the Flood.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment rehashes yet again John Brandenburg’s claim that Mars suffered a nuclear war that resulted in the Valle Marinaris, a large gash conventional scientists believe to be tectonic in origin. This claim appeared many times before, including in a 2016 episode devoted to Mars. This show is put together so sloppily that it repeats the same material about Zeus’s thunderbolt and Vedic weapons from earlier in the show but introduces them as though for the first time. According to my notes, the show has gone light on Brandenburg’s nuclear claims since 2016, so this is a bit of a blast from the past. The segment concludes with the popular claim that the asteroid belt is the result of aliens destroying a planet with nuclear bombs. This 1990s-era conspiracy theory traces back to early nineteenth century astronomers’ speculation that the belt represented the remains of an exploded planet. However, modern astronomers instead believe that the belt is in fact the remnants of a ring of cosmic dust that never congealed into a full-sized planet the way the other four rocky planets on the inner solar system did.
 
Segment 6
The final segment rehashes the 2024 US military video of a fighter jet shooting a missile at a “UFO” (mostly likely balloons) near Yemen, which the show covered two weeks ago. The same talking heads make the same tired points, and as best as I can tell the show uses different clips of the talking heads from the same interview saying similar things in slightly different ways. In the original take. Travis Taylor said his team originally believed the object was a balloon, but in this take he says he couldn’t tell whether it was a balloon or an alien spacecraft. That doesn’t really speak well to his analytical skill or judgment. It’s unclear how this relates to a cosmic war, and the show finishes by suggesting that UFOs represent aliens with “competing agendas” who continue in conflict over a “contested” Earth. I’m not sure they are aware that they are essentially endorsing Manichaeism and its mythology in almost all its details, but Ancient Aliens is increasingly Manichaeism by another name.