A Dark Carnival: 2025 in Review

​When I started writing year in review columns in 2017, I intended those columns to be an amusing look back at the follies of the year. But somehow, they have grown into a chronicle of an incipient Dark Age, with each year’s rundown becoming a bit gloomier than that of the year before. This year was an especially depressing chronicle of the growing influence of irrational, paranormal, and conspiratorial thought at the highest levels of power, with Congress, the White House, and the billionaire class joining the major media in promoting—and apparently believing—insane notions ranging from space alien visitation to the imminent arrival of the Antichrist. By contrast, the traditional sources of occult and pseudohistorical claims—cable TV and book publishing—all but closed up shop, conceding the ground to Washington, D.C.

​This led to upsetting, but not surprising, survey results by year’s end showing that belief in ancient astronauts and modern alien visitation continued a decade-long trend, rising to the highest levels ever recorded. It would at first blush seem paradoxical that this increase in belief came at a time when cable TV is in terminal decline and reading has all but vanished from American society, removing the traditional outlets for space alien misinformation. But now such claims infest not just mainstream news from the New York Times to NewsNation, but also are nearly ubiquitous across social media, which is now the leading vector spreading these beliefs.

On a more personal note, this year was yet another year of professional challenges. I was fortunate to have made more income from selling the translation and audiobook rights to Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean than I did from the book itself, but as I mentioned in November, sales of the book did not match the media coverage it generated. It was not as tough a year as the last two thanks to those sales rights, but without a similar set of rights to sell this year, 2026 may prove more challenging once again. I am considering moving some of my writing to a paid Substack newsletter if there is sufficient interest from potential subscribers to make the transition cost-effective. Paying for a fairly large website out of my own pocket and writing for it for free doesn’t really pay the bills.

​I have relaunched my line of print-on-demand books collecting rare texts about alternative history, the occult, and speculative fiction. Each volume aims to deliver high quality, interesting, and informative material in an attractive and affordable package. Originally launched more than a decade ago as JasonColavito.com Books, the new releases will appear under a new Jason Colavito Library imprint. The first volume, Hoaxing History: An Anthology of Lost Continents, Fake Cities, Phantom Manuscripts, and Other Historical Fictions, collects primary source texts about historical hoaxes ranging from the Donation of Constantine and the Shroud of Turin to the Cardiff Giant and Franz Ferdinand’s cursed car. It is available in both paperback and Kindle editions.

​Without further ado, here, is a look back at a selection of highlights from the year that was, edited and condensed from my blog and newsletter:
 
January
The year opened on a slow note, with much of the world’s attention focused on the second coming of Donald Trump and his traveling carnival of conspiracy theorists. This sucked most of the air out of the conspiracy culture that would otherwise have promoted aliens, Atlantis, monsters, and the paranormal. Indeed, just before the year started, the big UFO story was Tucker Carlson’s aborted effort to convince Trump to make him his “UFO czar.” “He's convinced that UFOs do exist,” an anonymous “insider” told Radar Online, “and he’s spent an awful lot of time on research, looking into conspiracy theories and cover-ups.” A week later, Carlson declared his love and loyalty to Donald Trump and Elon Musk before discussing Hitler’s alleged occult power to summon demons. He added that Musk had found no evidence of space aliens, so UFOs must be the technology of a secret ancient culture living deep in the hollow earth. NewsNation UFO reporter Ross Coulthart promoted a new “crash retrieval” video that, in an ongoing trend for the year, turned out to be a balloon. Lue Elizondo attempted to forestall criticism of him by having his lawyer threaten those who criticize him with financially ruinous lawsuits, and his lawyer posted to social media that Elizondo was angling to have Trump appoint him to an unnamed position. As of December, Trump had not done so. Canada issued a preliminary UFO report which found no aliens but did find a need for (surprise!) more government funding for ufology. The Atlantic’s David Frum published a defense of the U.S. and Canadian governments’ efforts to destroy Native American peoples and cultures. In contrast to all the goings on in the corridors of power, the History Channel had little to offer, airing repackaged reruns of decade-old episodes of Ancient Aliens under the Ancient Aliens: Origins banner. The network’s British TV partner, Sky History, announced a new series questioning whether Egyptians could have built the pyramids without help from aliens or Atlanteans, but despite the ancient alien-style promotion, it ended in March by concluding that the Egyptians did build the pyramids by themselves after all. Former History Channel TV host Scott Wolter launched the first of many comeback attempts by  issuing a challenge to Minnesota archaeologist David Mather to debate him on the authenticity of the Kensington Runestone. The California wildfires burned down the Theosophical Society’s more than century-old archive.
 
February
Ancient Aliens returned for a new season with the first of a series of clip shows, which would eventually make up one-third of the seventeen-episode season. This season contained the smallest annual original episode count in the show’s history. Politico claimed, on the word of Ryan Graves, who sought ufology funding from the government, that Trump’s purge of FBI agents threatened the integrity of the FBI’s UFO investigation group. The FBI denied any such group existed. The House of Representatives released the written questions representatives submitted to the participants in November’s UFO hearing, along with the responses. We learned that Lue Elizondo told Congress that the U.S. government possessed otherworldly spacecraft and the bodies of dead aliens, and that said aliens were from another dimension, but he had no evidence to prove any of this beyond stories he heard from his ufology colleagues. Days later, at a paid speaking event in Chicago, Elizondo falsely claimed that the CIA leaked so-called UFO whistleblower David Grusch’s “military medical records” within “24 hours” of his public UFO claims as part of a revenge scheme. “That’s the retribution people like us face,” Elizondo said. YouTube star MrBeast traveled to Egypt for a video about the pyramids. He teased ancient astronaut claims before concluding that the pyramids were built by Egyptians. In his continuing attempt at a comeback, Scott Wolter launched an Outlander-themed tour of Scotland with Hayley Ramsey, the woman for whom he left his wife. Ramsey then announced that she was an alien abductee who frequently has contact with space aliens.
 
March
March saw filmmaker Dan Farah tease world-changing, mind-blowing revelations he promised would be included in his documentary The Age of Disclosure, executive produced by Lue Elizondo, featuring as its main attraction an interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. As it turned out, there weren’t any. Despite a glittering red-carpet premiere at the SXSW film festival in March, critics quickly noted that the film offered no convincing evidence and little beyond a “boring” parade of old white male talking heads telling familiar stories. The Sol Foundation, the UFO think tank linked to many of the talking heads who appear in Age of Disclosure, launched $25,000 premium annual memberships for access to leading ufologists and their non-existent revelations. CNN interviewed Lue Elizondo about his UFO-themed speaking tour, and Elizondo praised Donald Trump, claiming that Trump would oversee disclosure of an alien presence on earth. He didn’t. Instead, Trump launched an assault against the Smithsonian to purge it of “woke” history. UFO-curious congressman Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) hired David Grusch to consult on UFO policy, and Grusch immediately announced that Joseph Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer had hired him as a UFO consultant for an upcoming Apple TV UFO disclosure thriller. The movie seemed to stall after Steven Spielberg began filming a similarly themed film. A team of Italian researchers, which included an ancient astronaut theorist, claimed to have discovered a massive set of stone supports and a lost city beneath the Giza pyramids, based on an eccentric interpretation of scans that were scientifically incapable of reliably detecting any such thing. Real Time comedian Bill Maher deliver a bitter rant against Native Americans and Pre-Columbian history in favor of celebrating white, Western civilization.
 
April
The month started with John Greenewald posting a cache of FOIA documents that showed podcaster Lex Fridman secretly tried to join the Pentagon’s UFO office in 2021 while covering government-run ufology on his podcast. In the Before Time, this would have been considered a severe breach of ethics, but today the only public reaction was upset that Fridman wasn’t chosen to clandestinely work for the government without disclosing it to his audience. The Pentagon’s UFO office concluded that the so-called “jellyfish” UFO seen in Iraq in 2017 was, as skeptics maintained, a bunch of partially deflated party balloons. A four-hour interview with the late Harald Malmgren, released in April, saw Malmgren, 89 at the time of the recording, make astonishing claims about his involvement in a government UFO coverup in the 1960s, which assiduous research proved Malmgren had almost certainly made up. A classified UFO briefing to Congress was canceled when David Grusch refused to attend. 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 Burlison that there are four different species of alien visiting Earth regularly: insectoid, reptilian, Grey, and Nordic. Elizondo promoted a photograph of irrigation ditches in Colorado as a picture of a flying saucer. He apologized for failing to research the picture before presenting it to Congress. Avi Loeb asked Congress for $1 billion to hunt UFOs. Ohio State University political science professor Alexander Wendt began promoting a book he had not yet (and has still not) published alleging that UFO disclosure would cause widespread social collapse. Garry Nolan delivered a whiny interview claiming to be on a mission to force people to respect his UFO beliefs, and he conceded that UFO disclosure would not cause social collapse. Hal Puthoff appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and defended psychic powers as a tool for investigating underground alien bases. The Italian researchers who claimed to find a city below the pyramids offered new claims in April, including allegations that the pyramids were 38,000 years old and had been submerged in Noah’s Flood. Scientific Reports retracted a 2021 paper by Biblical archaeologists alleging that a comet destroyed the city of Sodom. Smithsonian Magazine asked if Talos, the Bronze Man of Greek myth, was really a robot. YouTube gadfly Jimmy Corsetti spread accusations that archaeologists are mishandling Göbekli Tepe by letting olive tree roots destroy the site, a conspiracy theory that persisted through the entire year despite repeated explanations from archaeologists on site that the olive trees had done no damage. Miguel Connor published a book claiming Elvis Presley had supernatural powers and practiced occult magic.
 
May
The election of a new pope in May seemed to end the popular cable TV staple conspiracy about St. Malachy’s “Prophecy of the Popes,” now that the number of reigning popes has exceeded the number of popes who would supposedly serve before the end of the world in the popular Renaissance-era forgery—though, of course, believers had arguments and special pleading ready to revive the prophecy. A new so-called UFO whistleblower, Matthew Brown, proclaimed that the ultimate UFO truth is that “God is real.” The director of Jurassic World announced plans to make a biopic of UFO journalist George Knapp. The New York Post reported that a metal sphere found in Colombia was an alien space probe, despite it manifestly looking like the kind of metal sphere we make right here on earth. Skywatcher, a UAP-themed “aerial intelligence” company with military ties, posted video of a flock of birds and called it a UFO. Graham Hancock announced that his next book would focus on Mesopotamia and the Near East. 1843 Magazine gave Hancock a glossy profile as “conspiracy theorists’ favorite historian.” Hancock’s nemesis, Zahi Hawass, appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to face hostile questioning and stumbled through, making several confusing statements and revealing a surprising lack of knowledge about the reception of Egyptology in ancient and medieval times. Shortly after, Rogan went on a bizarre rant about “arrogant archaeologists,” saying he learned from 1993’s Mystery of the Sphinx documentary that archaeologists were the enemy, hiding history from regular folks.
 
June
Ross Coulthart kicked the month off by claiming that his sources inside the Pentagon know that an apocalyptic event, presumably related to aliens or the occult, is coming in 2027. “I cannot begin to emphasize how serious a look I get… They’re saying to me, ‘People have a right to know this’…” he said. Shortly after, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that the Pentagon had a decades-long disinformation program to seed the media with fake UFO stories. This extended to intentionally fooling its own top officers into thinking the government had captured alien spacecraft. Lue Elizondo attacked the report as “disingenuous” just before a report emerged that Elizondo was the source of a photograph of a human fetus provided to Congress and falsely claimed to be a space alien. UFO-promoting Rep. Eric Burlison attended a Nephilim-themed conference, credited reactionary gigantologist Timothy Alberino with radicalizing him against mainstream historians, and said Congress would investigate whether the Smithsonian hid the bones of Bible Giants. The investigation never happened. Producers of the new documentary Atlántica claimed to have found Atlantis off the coast of Cádiz in Spain, where two previous documentaries had already claimed to find it. Graham Hancock speculated that the Epic of Gilgamesh originated in the Neolithic, unintentionally stumbling upon a long-running academic argument he ignorantly accused historians and archaeologists of not having. Archaeologists concluded that a runestone found Canada in 2018 was a nineteenth century fake, bolstering the case that the Kensington Runestone was just one of many such fabrications.
 
July
With federal appropriations season upon us and ufologists looking for funding, UFOs popped up everywhere for a couple of weeks. U.S. soldiers claimed they saw space monsters in England, the Boston Globe reported that Roswell, New Mexico, residents care more about Trump’s broken Disclosure promise than the Epstein files, and a California doorbell camera captured a supposed “alien.” We then entered a long fallow stretch in the summer, once Congress’s annual budgeting process finished and the ufologists discovered that they did not receive the windfall in research funds or the new UFO disclosure laws they had hoped for. As a result, Ross Coulthart thundered that he would shortly “call out” senators who were actively conspiring to suppress UFO truths. He did not. The New York Times then gave American Cosmic author and ufology groupie Diana Pasulka space to opine that ufology is important for ending the tyranny of Enlightenment rationalism because “the world and the cosmos is a really beautiful place with a lot of mystery.” In July, Avi Loeb began claiming that an interstellar object that nearly every astronomer concluded was a comet was instead an alien space probe, and he rode the wave of media publicity for the rest of the year, despite admitting by year’s end in a NewsNation interview that the object was likely natural. Blowhard talk show host Piers Morgan hosted a debate between Zahi Hawass and some of the worst pseudoarchaeologists, including Jimmy Corsetti, to discuss Hawass’s Joe Rogan appearance. Morgan, who wrongly believed that only Arab Egyptians were allowed to be Egyptologists, asked whether debunking false claims about the pyramids, like those of Graham Hancock, is racist against “white guys from England.” A rabbi claimed to find Moses’s own handwritten autograph on cave wall in Egypt.
 
August
Ryan Graves said that he “enjoyed discussing the investment space of the budding UAP industry” on The Vertical Space podcast. Lue Elizondo opened a World War II-themed bar in Wyoming. Artist Trevor Paglen staged a show of allegedly genuine UFO photos at the Pace Gallery in New York, though the Wall Street Journal suspected they were fakes. In an interview with a local Fox affiliate, Avi Loeb compared aliens to the Messiah and said that the arrival of ETs will lead to an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity on Earth.  NPR called out Graham Hancock, Jimmy Corsetti, and Joe Rogan for their Göbekli Tepe conspiracies. Hancock, who became a millionaire many times over from his pseudoarchaeology, recorded a lengthy video presentation attacking what he called “the debunking industry” for profiting off his work. The History Channel’s History’s Greatest Mysteries tried to find places mentioned in the Old Testament, only to expose itself as an apologia for arch-conservative ideas. John Ward, a onetime dowsing enthusiast and pseudohistorian who later transitioned to more mainstream archaeology, died. Scott Wolter tried another route to a comeback by announcing a new book, The Greatest Templar Tale Never Told, based on fake medieval journals. The book is scheduled for release in early 2026.
 
September
In September, the House of Representatives held a third UFO hearing in which five witnesses, originally hyped as providing tangible proof of alien contact, instead offered evidence-free stories, mostly about other people allegedly witnessing UFOs. George Knapp was one of the witnesses, his appearance contributing nothing but footage for a future documentary and a climax for the biopic in development. Former Pentagon UFO office director Sean Kirkpatrick called the hearing’s sponsors “lunatics,” and former deputy director Tim Phillips called the hearing “political theater.” Former Pentagon UFO-hunter James Lacatski published the third volume in the Skinwalkers at the Pentagon series, entitled New Insights: Inside the U.S. Government UFO Program. The book made evidence-free claims about surreal encounters with a range of bizarre monsters. Political blogger Matt Laslo claimed that Rep. Anna Paulina Luna told him that she and former Rep. Matt Gaetz saw the bodies of space aliens but that they are not allowed to say so publicly. Rep. Tim Burchett (who has appeared on Ancient Aliens) ranted on a D.C. street about space aliens living under the sea after coming to Earth untold millennia ago from another dimension, apparently not realizing that he was summarizing the Cthulhu Mythos. Trump-aligned billionaire Peter Thiel delivered a series of bizarre lectures on the Antichrist to sold-out crowds of the ultrawealthy in San Francisco, claiming that insufficient religiosity has caused technological and cultural stagnation and concluding paradoxically that government regulation of A.I. will hasten Satan’s reign. Scott Wolter’s comeback attempts faltered when his X account was hacked and began posting anti-Elon Musk memes and scam links to crypto grifts. On Instagram, Wolter nonsensically alleged that the hacking could be connected to the secret contents of an antique bottle he recently dug up in an undisclosed wooded location.
 
October
In October, the New Yorker tired and failed to discover the world’s oldest layers of mythology. Baraga County, Michigan, broke ground on an expansion to its county history museum that would quadruple its size and use the space to present pseudohistorical claims about ancient Phoenicians stealing Michigan’s copper. The $2 million expansion is funded by Jay Wakefield, 82, and the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society and will be named for Fred Rydholm, a pseudohistory writer, Burrows Cave promoter, and racist who wrote of how Michigan was originally peopled by “the Caucasian race” before the coming of Native Americans. The rightwing takeover of a storied French publisher led to a fall book list dominated by far-right tomes with pseudohistorical claims. Ancient Aliens falsely claimed aliens were behind a UFO sighting they should have known the government’s UFO office had officially debunked as balloons six months earlier. Age of Disclosure producer Dan Farah appeared on Real Time, but even with friendly questioning from UFO-believer Bill Maher, he still could not name a single convincing piece of evidence for aliens. Vice President J.D. Vance told the New York Post that UFOs could be “angels” or “demons,” adding that “I’m a big believer that there are like spiritual forces working on the physical world that a lot of us don’t see and a lot of us don’t understand and a lot of us don’t appreciate.” The Price Is Right gave away a Bigfoot-hunting trip as part of its showcase prize package on October 23, along with a boat that announcer George Gray said could be used to search for the lost city of Atlantis. A week later, the Discovery Channel ran a three-part documentary called Bigfoot Took Her, which advertised itself as claiming that Sasquatch was responsible for the disappearance of a teenager forty years ago. 
 
November
The percentage of Americans who believe that space aliens have visited Earth in the past or are currently visiting reached a new high in 2025, according to a YouGov survey, with 47% of Americans thinking aliens have already visited, while 56% are sure aliens exist, with numbers significantly higher than in comparable surveys from the past decade. The media may be to blame. The Age of Disclosure became available to rent or purchase through Amazon Prime in November. An unprecedented junket featured some of the movie’s talking heads promoting the film on cable news, while Joe Rogan endorsed the film, as did a puff piece in the New York Times by none other than Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, reporters closely aligned with Lue Elizondo et al. Thanks to a massive PR campaign, Age of Disclosure set sales records for a documentary, but it disappointed even many UFO fans with its lack of evidence and dull rehashing of familiar stories. Filmmaker James Fox began promoting his latest UFO documentary, which revolves around rehashing the unproven 1996 Varginha, Brazil alien encounter. Atlántica filmmaker Michael Donnellan claimed to have astonishing new evidence of ancient Egyptian knowledge of Atlantis, but it turned out to be Plato’s Timaeus. He also alleged that the Knights Templar and the Freemasons have secret knowledge of Atlantis. Graham Hancock accused archaeologists of ignoring the Sahara Desert, which he was touring to search for his lost civilization. A weird Malaysian controversy made international headlines when faculty at the International Islamic University Malaysia urged school administrators to investigate professor Solehah Yaacob for a video posted to social media in 2022 in which she claims the Romans learned the art of shipbuilding from ancient Malay people. NBC’s Today show ran a credulous segment falsely claiming that a natural formation in Turkey is the petrified remains of Noah’s Ark.
 
December
As the year came to a close, the Pentagon’s UFO office discovered that a 2023 military UFO sighting that caused chaos and panic was just a flock of birds, raising questions about why trained military pilots and observers cannot reliably identify common skyborne objects like birds and balloons. Secretary of State Marco Rubio distanced himself from The Age of Disclosure, walking back comments about UFO whistleblowers and military coverups and conceding there is no evidence of nonhuman craft. The annual Quest for Ancient Civilizations pseudohistory conference in Scottsdale, Arizona saw remarkably low attendance to see presenters like David Childress and William Henry, and some observers claimed that there were more registered speakers for the event than audience members in attendance. One of the original authors of the first Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis paper revealed that the supposed evidence for the comet strike was just old railroad slag. The pope published an Apostolic Letter praising archaeology, while British Museum scholar Irving Finkel falsely alleged on Lex Fridman’s podcast that archaeologists were hiding evidence of a 10,000-year-old writing system at Göbekli Tepe, prompting rebuttals from the actual archaeologists working there. Scott Wolter was giddy to finally receive permission to view the Michigan Relics, which he had sought to examine for more than a decade. After viewing them, he declared the nineteenth century frauds, which include cartoonish depictions of Egyptians and even Noah’s own diary, to be genuine relics.