JASON COLAVITO

"1843 Magazine" Profiles Graham Hancock, "Conspiracy Theorists' Favourite Historian"

5/23/2025

On Friday, 1843 Magazine, the longform arm of The Economist, published a lengthy profile of Graham Hancock, a onetime stringer for The Economist. Journalist Tomas Weber duly noted the darker parts of Hancock’s life story—his years cozying up to African dictators, his raging temper, and his lack of evidence for a lost civilization—but produced a biographical study that seemed intrigued by Hancock’s ability to spin fantasy into the only currency The Economist truly values: cash. After all, in the marketplace of ideas, what idea has value except the one that attracts money and power? Fortunately, Weber centers this in the context of far-right conspiracies, branding Hancock “conspiracy theorists’ favourite historian,” even if Hancock is no historian.

1 Comment

In Brief: Harald Malmgren's History of Serial Fabrication Revealed

5/20/2025

1 Comment

In a social media posting on X today, Lue Elizondo said that he did not attend a classified SCIF meeting with Congressional representatives last week because of a prior commitment to perform at an Oregon UFO festival, tacitly conceding that posing with UFO fans in alien costumes is more important than informing Congress about America's most important UFO secrets. Meanwhile, Douglas Dean Johnson published a definitive takedown of the claims made by the late Harald Malmgren, a former U.S. trade representative who spent the last months of his very long life pretending to have been a top presidential advisor privy to twentieth-century UFO secrets and a vast conspiracy to hide the truth.

Detailed FBI files declassified in May 2025 in response to my Freedom of Information Act requests contain incontrovertible evidence that Malmgren fabricated some of his principal 2024-25 claims about the jobs and authorities he held, and the activities he engaged in, during 1962-64. For example: the FBI files prove that Malmgren never held a security clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission, as he repeatedly claimed in posts on X and in interviews– a key component of his 2024-25 UFO-adventure tales.

Johnson's thorough research into the paper trail of Malmgren's career confirms something I suspected after I was unable to find significant references to him in databases of government records: He was not a terribly important official, and he spent a long time inflating his resume, eventually to cosmic proportions.

Be sure to read the complete report for a breakdown of his many fabrications and exaggerations, which ultimately undermine his claims about flying saucers--and also show how UFO journalism on outlets like NewsNation don't check the facts before running with wild stories.

1 Comment

Zahi Hawass Stumbles Through a Discussion of Occult Egyptology on Joe Rogan

5/16/2025

13 Comments

This week, famed Egyptologist Zahi Hawass was Joe Rogan’s guest on his podcast, and the two spent two hours discussing the history of ancient Egypt and various conspiracy theories that Rogan had heard about Egypt from his friends in the fringe history community. It was Rogan’s first episode with an archaeologist as the sole guest, more than 2,320 episodes and dozens if not hundreds of “alternative” thinker interviews into his run. Unfortunately, it was not the most successful outing for archaeology, as Rogan asked combative questions about conspiracies and Hawass stumbled over some areas he should have recognized after all these years.

13 Comments

In Brief: Whistleblower "Reveals" Ultimate UFO Secret: "God Is Real"

5/14/2025

2 Comments

For the better part of two decades, I have pressed the point the ufology and ancient astronaut theory are attempts to find a quasi-scientific substitute for traditional religious beliefs in an era of declining support for mainstream churches. It was obvious enough when the first ufologists were revealed to be Theosophists back in the 1950s, and it was just as obvious when John Mack and Ancient Aliens both concluded that so-called "abduction" reports proved that aliens were psychopomps who would take souls to a heaven dimension--or when Ancient Aliens told viewers to worship Lucifer. But the more recent wave of ufology, from 2017 until now, has tried to distance itself from the spiritual side, at least in public, and instead coat its faith-based initiatives in the clothing of official government support. Then Jeremy Corbell tweeted.

“You are not free. And this reality, has far more to it than you have been ALLOWED, to believe. And God is real,” so-called UFO whistleblower Matthew Brown is quoted as saying in a posting Corbell made to X yesterday. This is about as clear an example of the underlying spiritual project behind ufology's search for superior alien species as you are likely to get. It is also, unsurprisingly, an unintentional return to the Theosophical ideas about unseen realms and hidden levels to reality that infested early ufology from the very first days of the UFO era.

2 Comments

From Iraq, Graham Hancock Announces New Book on Mesopotamian Mysteries

5/13/2025

6 Comments

Graham Hancock is writing a new book about the history and civilizations of Mesopotamia, according to social media posts by Hancock and by Ammar Karim, an AFP journalist helping Hancock tour Iraq this week. I can’t say I am terribly excited about the book. It’s a natural choice of Hancock, given that Mesopotamian literature contains the oldest extant versions of the Flood myth, his lost civilization ur-text, and the northern reaches of the territory are near enough to Göbekli Tepe for fringe writers like Andrew Collins to conclude that the Sumerians inherited their culture from Göbekli Tepe, whose people were the Nephilim of the Bible.

6 Comments

Goghgobon and the Hermetic History of Giants

5/10/2025

5 Comments

Longtime readers will remember that back in 2018, I struggled my way through the Old Castilian of Alfonso X’s General Estoria—learning the language in order to read it—so that I could explore the Hermetic history of the Giants contained in it. As you may recall, this passage relates the story of Asclepius’s encounter with Goghgobon, the last surviving Giant, who tells him about the accomplishments of the Giants before the Flood and translates for him their book of star wisdom written in a forgotten alphabet. Very few scholars have analyzed this passage in any significant detail, likely because it had never been translated into English before I did so, and even the modern Spanish translation is very recent.

5 Comments

Leo XIV and the End of the "Prophecy of the Popes"

5/9/2025

8 Comments

With the election of Pope Leo XIV yesterday, the Catholic Church not only entered into a new pontificate, but his reign also should mark the end of a longstanding hoax. The popular “Prophecy of the Popes” attributed to St. Malachy (1094-1148) listed what the document claimed to be all of the popes who would reign from 1139 until the end of the world. Books and documentaries have proliferated about the so-called prophecy, including a 2018 documentary starring former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter. However, with the death of Pope Francis last month and the election of Pope Leo, the number of reigning popes has now exceeded the number of popes prophesied to have served before the end of the world.

8 Comments

Misinformation Abounds in a Busy Week for Government UFO Fantasies

5/2/2025

9 Comments

This week in Washington, Lue Elizondo moderated a panel of ufologists, including Chris Mellon and Avi Loeb, sponsored by the UFO Disclosure Fund. The panel discussion, billed as a briefing, took place in Congressional offices, but it was not and official Congressional hearing. During the panel discussion, Eric Davis told Rep. Eric Burlinson that there are four different species of alien visiting Earth regularly: insectoid, reptilian, Grey, and Nordic. These are not serious men. Elizondo then appeared on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation program to discuss UFOs, and by the end of the day yesterday, his “new” evidence for flying saucers had already been debunked. At the panel discussion, Elizondo presented a blurry 2021 photograph of a light-colored and a dark-colored circle on flat land he claimed to be a 60-100 foot craft flying near the Four Corners. Internet users quickly identified the photo as an image of two irrigation circles on farmland in Colorado. The water-filled circle next to the cleared land created the illusion of a shadow. [Update: Elizondo apologized on Saturday for presenting this photograph to Congress without appropriate vetting.]

9 Comments

UFO News Roundup: Jellyfish UFO Balloons, Garry Nolan's Major Interview, and More

4/30/2025

3 Comments

It was a big week for UFOs—or rather, for reality butting heads with UFOs. Yesterday, the Pentagon’s UFO office released its findings on the infamous “jellyfish” UFO video promoted by Jeremy Corbell, and, to no great surprise, they concluded that skeptics were indeed correct and the 2017 infrared video of a blob-like object in Iraq was a cluster of partially deflated balloons. Meanwhile, Lue Elizondo reported that a classified briefing on UFOs he was scheduled to attend with members of Congress was postponed, allegedly due to competing House priorities, but Rep. Anna Maria Luna stated that the real reason was that David Grusch refused to fly to Washington to testify, repeating a pattern where he avoids any situation where he might be asked difficult questions, particularly when required to provide evidence. (Grusch has previously spoken in public forums where he can claim evidence is classified, but he has declined all requests to speak in a classified setting where he would have to provide evidence.)

3 Comments

André Thevet and the "Evidence" for Atlantis in America

4/26/2025

11 Comments

As you know, tracking down primary sources is one of the rabbit holes I can’t escape, so when I started flipping through Lewis Spence’s 1925 book Atlantis in America and came across his evidence that the Native peoples of the Americas had Atlantis traditions, I of course wanted to see the originals for myself. I was particularly taken by a quotation he gave on page 68, which Spence says comes from the “Tupi-Guarani of Brazil” and was recorded by “Thevet.” No other information is given to identify the source of an interesting take about a heavenly fire and a subsequent flood—a story later writers would identify as a comet that destroyed Atlantis:

11 Comments

<<Previous

"1843 Magazine" Profiles Graham Hancock, "Conspiracy Theorists' Favourite Historian"

In Brief: Harald Malmgren's History of Serial Fabrication Revealed

Zahi Hawass Stumbles Through a Discussion of Occult Egyptology on Joe Rogan

In Brief: Whistleblower "Reveals" Ultimate UFO Secret: "God Is Real"

From Iraq, Graham Hancock Announces New Book on Mesopotamian Mysteries

Goghgobon and the Hermetic History of Giants

Leo XIV and the End of the "Prophecy of the Popes"

Misinformation Abounds in a Busy Week for Government UFO Fantasies

UFO News Roundup: Jellyfish UFO Balloons, Garry Nolan's Major Interview, and More

André Thevet and the "Evidence" for Atlantis in America

Author

Newsletters

Categories

Terms & Conditions

Archives