JASON COLAVITO

What's in a Name? "The Incredible Hulk" and the Secret Meaning of "Bruce"

4/13/2021

I have a new piece about the 1978 Incredible Hulk TV series and its weird connection to homophobic language policing over on my Substack newsletter. Read it here.

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Legendary Entertainment to Develop an "Ancient Aliens" Motion Picture

4/8/2021

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In one of the most depressing developments of the year, Legendary Entertainment, the company behind the so-called MonsterVerse, has announced plans to turn the History Channel series Ancient Aliens into an adventure movie, according to a report in The Hollywood Reporter. The film will be developed by Counterbalance Entertainment, the showrunners behind the Cobra Kai revival series.

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Roundup: Pharaohs' Curse on "Today," Greek Myths in the Bronze Age, and More

4/5/2021

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The following was cross-posted in my Substack newsletter.

This week, I am experimenting with a newsletter format, featuring a longer piece of writing divided into shorter articles rather than separate posts. In this issue, we’ll look at the Today show’s promotion of the curse of the pharaohs, a new article about ancient Greek mythology’s connection to the Bronze Age, and we’ll review a historical piece by a famous writer linking American mounds to Atlantis.

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The Immoralists: André Gide, Michel Foucault, and the Philosophy of Abuse

4/1/2021

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Note: This piece first ran earlier this week in my Substack newsletter. I am cross-posting it here.

A firestorm erupted this weekend in intellectual circles when economic philosopher Guy Sorman told the Sunday Times that the famed—and long dead—French intellectual Michel Foucault was a pedophile who sexually exploited young boys in Tunisia in the late 1960s. Sorman said that he witnessed boys eager to trade sexual favors for Foucault’s money. “They were eight, nine, ten years old, he was throwing money at them and would say ‘let’s meet at 10pm at the usual place’,” a nearby cemetery, Sorman told the Times. “He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn’t even raised.”

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Join Me on Substack

3/27/2021

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Because so much traffic has moved away from blogs and toward new platforms, particularly Substack and its competitors, I launched a Substack newsletter channel this past week to provide an additional outlet for my writing. I cross-posted my previous blog post there and received nearly four times the traffic as I did here on my blog. Given the disparity in audience size, for the time being I will be cross-posting archaeology and alien content both here on my blog and on my Substack newsletter. I will also offer on Substack cultural pieces that are not directly relevant to the topics that are covered here on my blog. You can read a Substack-exclusive article, "The Curse of the Black Widow Spyder," about the recent recovery of a piece of James Dean's Porsche 550 Spyder here.

If you subscribed to my old newsletter prior to Wednesday, you have already been invited to subscribe to my Substack newsletter. If not, you can visit jasoncolavito.substack.com to sign up.

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Syfy's "Resident Alien" to Promote "Ancient Aliens" and Giorgio Tsoukalos

3/24/2021

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Tonight, Syfy’s otherwise delightful series Resident Alien is scheduled to air an episode in which Harry (Alan Tudyk) attends a UFO conference and meets Ancient Aliens star Giorgio Tsoukalos. The series has made sometimes unpleasant use of ancient astronaut theory material in framing the backstory for its lead character’s extraterrestrial history as an alien visitor stranded on Earth. However, it is disappointing and somewhat shameful that the show would openly embrace Ancient Aliens, a series that the Southern Poverty Law Center and a number of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians have decried for its use of racist tropes and Victorian-era arguments born of imperialist and colonialist anti-indigenous narratives.

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Scott Wolter Asks: Did Templar Symbolism "Tap Into" Space Aliens?

3/17/2021

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I am busy working on projects right now, but I wanted to pause and offer this tweet from former America Unearthed host Scott F. Wolter, who has finally gone full ancient astronaut theorist after years of skirting around the edges.

That is interesting and have seen that before. Appears to add another interesting layer of symbolism to the Hooked X! The Templars were definitely onto to something; could they also have tapped into ET’s in some way?
— Scott Wolter (@RealScottWolter) March 15, 2021

Read into that what you will, but I will merely note that Ancient Aliens already covered the supposed connection between Templars and space aliens.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E10 "The Harmonic Code"

3/13/2021

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On Friday, a few hours before this episode of Ancient Aliens aired, The Atlantic magazine informed me that they would not be going forward with a planned article in which I would report on the influence QAnon conspiracies have taken from conspiracy theories airing on cable television shows like Ancient Aliens. (As per an agreement I signed with The Atlantic on March 15, I am contractually restrained from sharing additional information after that date.) They did, however, invite me to write something else for them in the coming months.

And then Ancient Aliens did an hour about sound waves vibrating connections to space aliens. So, it was that kind of a day.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E09 "The UFO Pioneers"

3/6/2021

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This week, Ancient Aliens again chose to create a putatively “new” episode from recycled parts of earlier episodes. As with last week’s episode, three pundits—this time, Giorgio Tsoukalos, David Childress, and Nick Pope—sit around a conference table and offer blather to connect together prerecorded packages, some from previous episodes. This episode swirls around personalities associated with UFO investigation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These people, some serious, some kooky, are lionized as “pioneers”—but pioneers of what? The fantasy that the unknown must be extraterrestrial, paranormal or something combining both, mostly. The potted biographies offer little you haven’t seen before, even if you hadn’t watched earlier episodes of the series. Since there is little worthy of discussion here, and since the show’s viewership remains under one million viewers, and the readership of these summaries under five hundred readers, I will offer only a brief summary of the highlights of each segment as a record for historical interest.

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New Jersey Conspiracy Believer Charged with Vandalism of America's Stonehenge

3/3/2021

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After a 15-month investigation, a New Jersey man has been charged with one count of criminal mischief in the vandalism attack on America's Stonehenge that left the New Hampshire colonial cold cellars wrongly believed to be an ancient Old World monument defaced with QAnon slogans. Mark Russo, 50, is currently is in jail in New Jersey waiting for extradition to New Hampshire to face trial.

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