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.
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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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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:
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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