A Dull Slog: 2024 in Review

​Each year, it’s a little more difficult to write a seemingly lighthearted review of the year in weird. This year was both personally and professionally a bit of a struggle as A.I. continues to eat away at my day job and the closure or collapse of a number of media outlets has made it more difficult place stories in paying publications. I lost my gig as a CNN Opinion columnist right when it was starting because CNN shuttered the entire division. As the year came to an end, about one-third of my income for the year remains outstanding from businesses that are dragging their feet on payments and have been since early fall. That has made it difficult to devote too much energy to caring about whatever old claims the usual cadre of kooks and weirdos are recycling on any given day.

​But more than that, this was the year where the energy in the world of the weird conclusively passed from television (including streaming) to social media, particularly YouTube and TikTok, where it is now the province of an ecosystem I have limited experience with. I don’t have any idea who many of the people making videos and driving the conversation are. (Sorry, I was not able to keep up with Jimmy Corsetti and his many posts and videos.) But I do know that this year saw remarkably reduced circumstances for the traditional weirdness, outstripped perhaps by the catastrophically bizarre reality we all live in each day.
 
The bizarreness extends in every direction. In November, I released Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean after so many years of work, and the reaction took even me aback. The book made news around the world, covered almost entirely by right-wing publications, from the Daily Mail and the New York Post to Fox News and dozens of European papers. But it received not a single review in any organ of the “respectable” press, a situation so strange that even the publicist working on the book cannot think of another book that made so much news without ever receiving a review, a situation doubly bizarre since the same publications raced to cover Julie Gilbert’s goofy book about Giant author Edna Ferber and the (imaginary) threesome between Dean, Feber, and Mercedes McCambridge that Gilbert fantasized.
 
A feature about Jimmy in Closer magazine seems to explain the problem: In it, the magazine systematically edited my interview and my book to remove LGBTQ+ references and to turn Dean’s boyfriend into his “roommate.” A Spanish newspaper was blunter, openly condemning homosexuality and lamenting that predatory queers “turned” Dean gay.
 
I wrote in chapter 12 of Jimmy how this had happened in the 1970s and especially the 1990s, when the establishment media worked with an almost unified voice to denounce and suppress books that had revealed Dean’s sexual relationships with men. But, truly, I did not think it would happen to me in 2024. 2024! The man’s been dead for seventy years and queer people aren’t scary monsters anymore—whom do you think you’re protecting? Warner Brothers’ movies? The Curtis Management Group’s endorsement deals?

​And like everything else in this degraded year, even the UFOs were a disappointingly threadbare throwback to decades past. We can’t even summon up silver discs anymore. Now it’s just drones, and boring ones at that.
 
Here, then, is a look at a selection of highlights from the year that was, edited and condensed from my blog and newsletter:
 
January
The busiest month of the year for the weird began on a sour note when the New York Times opened 2024 with an uncritical column reporting predictions for the year from a Chinese geomancer and followed it up by turning to none other than Graham Hancock for commentary on the false claim that Gunung Padang is an Ice Age Atlantean pyramid complex. Hancock, of course, told the Times that archaeology was “judge, jury, and executioner,” destroying all alternative claims. The Wall Street Journal weighed in on the “recent” controversy over Graham Hancock’s 2022 series Ancient Apocalypse. . Tucker Carlson embraced pyramid conspiracies and lost white race Mound Builder myths in an interview with Roseanne Barr that achieved virality in January. Michael Paul Masters and Tim Lomas published a journal article claiming that “humility” demands that we entertain the notion that UFOs are probes from a hidden underground race of high-tech non-humans, i.e. the Shaver Mystery. Discover magazine discovered the breaking news that fossils have a connection to Greek myths, 110 years too late.
 
Ancient Aliens returned for a twentieth season (fifteen years after its pilot episode aired), which stretched through most of 2024. The new season featured a bewildering array of members of Congress and other high officials as the series grew into a semi-official mouthpiece for the caucus of lawmakers who have made UFOs their claim to fame. Unfortunately for Ancient Aliens, the bottom fell out of cable TV this year, and the last published ratings before Nielsen stopped publicly reporting cable ratings showed the much-diminished show struggling to attract a fraction of its former viewership. The series made no popular impact this year other than flattering the vanity of several politicians and many academics who should know better than to go on this degrading spectacle. Social media users thought a viral video showed Nephilim in a mall. Richard Hoagland claimed on a podcast that Jews have a special connection to space aliens, thus explaining antisemitism. Scott Wolter launched a new show on the Gaia streaming service to claim the Knights Templar were heirs to the secrets of Atlantis, but no one watched the show or spoke of it, so did the show really happen?
 
On the UFO front, TMZ produced a UFO documentary with the usual suspects (e.g. Jeremy Corbell), but it only streamed on Tubi, so no one cared except Corbell, who reportedly “persuaded” a military witness who disputed the new “UFO” in the video to recant his testimony and embrace the “alien” myth. Eric Davis admitted that he was, indeed, David Grusch’s secret source of UFO information. Lawmakers were frustrated by a “waste of time” UFO briefing. The Peruvian government contradicted enthusiasts in the U.S. Congress and media when it announced that two tiny alleged alien bodies seized enroute from Peru to Mexico were not actual aliens but fakes made from paper mâché and human and animal bones. The recently retired AARO head, Sean Kirkpatrick, announced that the Pentagon’s UFO office found no evidence of aliens during his tenure but that they did find evidence of a small group of UFO advocates who exercised unusual influence over the government and its UFO hunt (as I could have—and did—tell everyone back in 2021). Travis Taylor had a freak out about it on LinkedIn. Chris Mellon tried to counter the idea that ufologists were a small group of mutually reinforcing believers by pointing out how he personally introduced members of the group to each other and they all now work together at Garry Nolan’s Sol Foundation to promote their beliefs. The U.S. media, to their credit, saw this month as a turning point and pulled way back on pro-alien UFO coverage.
 
February
January had set the template for the year—UFOs were officially on the outs while a lost Ice Age civilization was somehow the media’s crackpot cause célèbres—but the month was so action-packed that it was no wonder February saw a lull as thoughts turned spiritual. To combat Sean Kirkpatrick’s devastating conclusions, the core group of UFO believers dispatched Lue Elizondo to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers. Rep. Ralph Norman, a supporter of the infamous “demon sperm” doctor, and Rep. Eric Burlinson, who thinks UFOs are demons and angels, said that Elizondo confirmed David Grusch’s allegations. Of course, there was no evidence, only claims. Avi Loeb of the Galileo Project announced that the Jewish Messiah is likely a space alien, while David Grusch claimed that he had undergone a “spiritual awakening”; both felt that aliens would usher in a secular form of the Millennium with peace and harmony. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna said that as a Christian UFO believer, she is sure they are interdimensional. Ask a Pol claimed that an anonymous source alleged that Luna and sex pest Matt Gaetz had seen photos of alien “bodies.” Tom DeLonge appeared on the To the Stars podcast to discuss his new UFO-themed novel, and he spoke at length of the Djinn and Watchers, claiming they are so-called messengers of deception who are trying to manipulate humanity into using our free will to unconsciously change our own DNA to be more like them. A new study claimed WWII-era “foo fighters” were really just floating balls of aerial plasma.
 
March
March saw the New York Times return to its fixation with all things Graham Hancock, rehashing the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, admitting it lacks evidence, and hoping nonetheless that it was true. Only days later, at the end of a months-long investigation, the journal Archaeological Prospection retracted an article by Hancock colleague and Atlantis advocate Danny Natawidjaja claiming that the Indonesian site of Gunung Padang was a massive pyramid complex that dated back to the Ice Age. The New York Times couldn’t bring itself to acknowledge evidence against Hancock, so they covered the story on March 20 by failing to acknowledge that Gunung Padang is not a pyramid and then extensively quoting Graham Hancock about suppression of science. Natawidjaja took to Hancock’s website to defend his bad science. Chris Mellon finally confessed that he did, indeed, sneak UFO videos out of the Pentagon in 2017 and stage-manage a pro-UFO media campaign. AARO released a report finding no aliens but evidence that media coverage and Mellon’s small group of buddies unduly influenced public attitudes, making people think there were aliens invading. Sean Kirkpatrick called UFO believers in government a national security risk, and Ross Coulthart claimed two senators shared their anti-AARO UFO conspiracy theories with him. A study found Avi Loeb mistook vibrations from a passing truck for an interstellar meteor, a conclusion Loeb angrily denied. Scott Wolter, in a desperate bid for relevance, announced that knows the true secret of Oak Island but won’t reveal it without a new, more lucrative TV deal. He also blacked out whole pages of his new, self-published Oak Island book so the History channel could not use his research until they gave him a TV deal. They did not.
 
April
April began with Rep. Tim Burchett, late of Ancient Aliens, appearing on a Ross Coulthart NewsNation show to talk about space alien UFOs in the Bible. Ancient Aliens had its fifteenth anniversary, but the History Channel chose not to commemorate it. (In the fall, History began rebroadcasting old episodes under the Ancient Aliens: Origins banner, but falsely claimed they celebrated “nearly two decades” on TV because of course ​they would get even that fact wrong.) The government of Peru announced that grave robbers are using American interest in ancient astronauts to goose the market for stolen ancient grave goods. The biggest news of the year happened when Graham Hancock and archaeologist Flint Dibble debated on The Joe Rogan Experience, leading to a shellacking so thorough that Hancock and his fans spent the rest of the year fuming about how conclusively Dibble exposed the unsteady foundations of Hancock’s mountain of speculation. At one point in the debate, Hancock even conceded that no evidence exists for his lost civilization, and this realization so shattered the minds of believers that several made a cottage industry of harassing Dibble on social media and accusing him of lying. Also on Rogan’s podcast in April, Tucker Carlson essentially endorsed the Shaver Mystery when he reaffirmed his belief that UFOs are vehicles belonging to ancient “spiritual entities” that live deep under the earth and in the oceans. John Oliver of Last Week Tonight abandoned his usual careful research and reasoned analysis to devote a bizarre episode to promoting evidence-free UFO mysteries. A new so-called UFO whistleblower, Jason Sands, made big claims about assassinating aliens for the government, was quickly suspected of lying, and ended the year with many ufologists conceding his story was a fake. Chris Mellon released his text messages with an unnamed government employee claiming that a UFO crashed in Kingman, Arizona in the 1950s. AARO released a report on a 2023 UFO incident trumpeted by Rep. Matt Gaetz and concluded it was, in fact, a balloon. MUFON’s John Ventre, who had departed in a 2017 racism scandal, returned for the first of two appearances this year, both times delivering lectures on Hitler’s UFO secrets, because irony is dead. An increasingly whacky Scott Wolter told a podcast that the Knights Templar stole the bones of Jesus and used them to blackmail the Catholic Church with proof that Christ had never risen. 
 
May
The Salt Conference of financial and tech elites announced David Grusch would be their special guest, but after a bruising round of media coverage led by the Black Vault in which it was revealed that Grusch actively attempted to avoid speaking to AARO while publicly claiming AARO had not tried to speak with him, he withdrew and largely disappeared from ufology for the rest of the year. Col. Karl Nell, a UFO believer from the UAP Task Force, took his place and told a bunch of evidence-free just-so stories. Graham Hancock’s research assistant, Holly Lasko Skinner, posted a lengthy complaint on Hancock’s website about YouTuber Milo Rossi for the crime of, basically, being more popular than Hancock. Rossi’s YouTube channel combatting fringe history and his Instagram feed attract more views than any cable TV archaeology-adjacent show. Lue Elizondo told a podcast he was under assassination threat for knowing too much about UFOs, a claim belied by his complete lack of actionable information about UFOs. Tim Gallaudet risked assassination by appearing on Gadi Schwartz’s NBC News Now show to claim otherworldly beings were active on land, under the sea, and in the air. The Vatican released new guidelines for declaring events supernatural. White nationalists discovered the Tartarian conspiracy theory and declared the U.S. Capitol the work of a lost race of white giants. Ross Coulthart jumped on the assassination bandwagon and promised that he left instructions to publish all his UFO secrets should he be rubbed out. May ended with Chris Mellon presaging the year-end drone excitement when he suddenly changed his tune and began talking about UFOs being drones and tweeting that everyone has always known the big problem was drones.
 
June
June began with Ross Coulthart, an Australian who enmeshed himself with Republican legislators, claiming that both he and Donald Trump were under assassination threat because they knew too much about UFOs. Five weeks later, a shooter attempted to kill Trump, but Coulthart did not claim credit for predicting it. Instead, he ranted that the Australian media were laughing at him for being a crackpot. The House of Representatives killed off proposed UFO legislation favored by Coulthart, Mellon, and their small group of UFO influencers. Two months after debating Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Graham Hancock broke his silence and claimed Dibble had “conned” him into losing the debate. Unsurprisingly, Hancock started hitting back right when Netflix announced the renewal of Ancient Apocalypse for a second season to air in the fall. Avi Loeb brought a Netflix crew to a Washington, D.C. party where he pontificated about UFOs and aliens to 75 guests from the U.S. government, media, and other cultural elites. The Discovery Channel launched a new alien documentary series, Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction, which even ufologists conceded was bad. The show faded with no discernible impact. Tim Lomas and Michael Masters released yet another bonkers academic paper, this time claiming, essentially, that the Shaver Mystery needs to be taken seriously. Former race car driver turned paranoid podcaster Danica Patrick ranted about Reptilians taking over the world.
 
July
Ancient Apocalypse pulled production on its new season out of the United States after Native American groups opposed permits to film on Native land and Grand Canyon National Park unsuccessfully sought to block Hancock from filming there due to viewpoints many considered disrespectful to Native peoples. Hancock claimed “archaeologists aren’t going to like” an article a supporter published on Hancock’s website “proving” the Atlantis story was Egyptian in origin, but the piece was riddled with basic errors.  A new academic paper claimed Djoser’s pyramid had been built with a previously unknown hydraulic lift technology. Michael Masters announced that time traveling humans psychically possessed him and had ordered him to create more UFO media. Ross Coulthart immediately interviewed him on NewsNation. AARO released a report confirming that the much-ballyhooed “metamaterials” To the Stars Academy of Sciences publicized several years ago as potential remnants of an alien spaceship were in fact earthly, suggesting the identification I made back in 2018 of the material as likely industrial waste is indeed correct. Sean Kirkpatrick confirmed that AARO had seen David Grusch’s official whistleblower complaint and that it contained no new information and no evidence. Martin Sweatman published an academic paper in Time and Mind arguing on little evidence that that Göbekli Tepe was a calendar filled with the same constellations recognized by the Greeks 10,000 years later. Still struggling for relevance, Scott Wolter claimed some obviously modern engravings of Grey aliens in Egyptian clothing were 17,000 years old.
 
August
In August, Lue Elizondo released his memoir, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller, albeit with one of the lowest sales totals for a #1 hit this year, estimated by Book Scan at fewer than 18,000 copies in its first week of release and fewer than 35,000 over its first month. The book garnered media coverage on CBS, NewsNation, Joe Rogan, and The Daily Show, despite containing no evidence of its alien speculations, and reporters and critics assiduously avoided mentioning Elizondo’s claims to be psychic, to have battled evildoers in astral form, and to have been the most important torturer at Guantanamo Bay. So obsequious were a few big outlets that the New York Times assigned Elizondo’s friends, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, to give the book a glowing (and carefully omissive) review. However, most media outlets ignored the book. Rep. Tim Burchett told a Mexican ufologist that he would push to use American resources to investigate (fake) Peruvian “alien” mummies. PBS presented an odd documentary claiming “amateur historian” Makis Metaxas had found the bones of Odysseus on Kefalonia, the true Ithaca.
 
September
After Lue Elizondo’s book became a bestseller, fellow ex-government ufologist Jay Stratton, who believes werewolves stalked his home, signed a deal with HarperCollins for a memoir. The same film producer, Dan Farah, arranged both Elizondo’s and Stratton’s book deals. Vice presidential candidate (and later vice president-elect) J. D. Vance asked reporters to give him information about what the government is hiding about UFOs. Elizondo appeared on Donald Trump, Jr.’s podcast to praise Trump as a UFO hero, earning unexpected pushback from Trump, Jr. between rants about transgender people. The U.S. Senate killed the UAP Disclosure Act supported by, lobbied for, and partly written by the usual group of UFO advocates. One of those advocates, Travis Taylor of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, claimed UFOs run on cow blood extracts, thus accounting for cattle mutilations.
 
October
In October, Netflix debuted the new season of Ancient Apocalypse, subtitled The Americas, and guest-starring Keanu Reeves. The series failed to live up to the first, either in compelling content or in media outrage. Despite the New York Times and Joe Rogan hyping Hancock all year, the minor-key retread of the first season with nothing new to offer and a dull presentation of what audiences already heard led to almost no media coverage and a much smaller audience. Only 2.2 million people watched, less than a third of the original’s viewership. Who was watching? White supremacists. Hancock rushed to a tabloid to denounce white supremacy when a white nationalist called his program a great recruitment tool. Andrew Collins released a book claiming Karahan Tepe was the Garden of Eden and the center of a Nephilim serpent cult. Expedition Unknown and its star, Josh Gates, came under fire when it was revealed that discoveries inside the Treasury at Petra presented on the show (and in hundreds of news reports) as “new” were nearly twenty years old. Journalist Michael Shellenberger reported on an alleged secret Pentagon UFO program that seems never to have existed. Lue Elizondo went on a paid lecture tour and suffered humiliation when a photograph he promoted of a supposed alien mothership taken at the U.S. embassy in Bucharest turned out the be a snapshot of the reflection of a hotel room light fixture in a window in Arad, a completely different city. Tucker Carlson told a podcast that a demon attacked him in his sleep.
 
November
In November, the House of Representatives proved it had learned nothing and held a public UFO hearing with four useless witnesses, Lue Elizondo, Michael Shellenberger, Tim Gallaudet, and Mike Gold, three of whom had said things this year that would have disqualified supposed “experts” in any other subject and in any other era. But we no longer live in that world. The U.S. Senate held a UFO hearing as well and also heard that there was no evidence of aliens. Netflix released a six-part space alien documentary series from George Knapp, but it merely rehashed old material and made no cultural impact. A Congressionally mandated AARO report found no evidence of space aliens and no new reports of transmedium or submarine vehicles. But it did find plenty of evidence that so-called “trained observers” in the military routinely mistake balloons, birds, and satellites for alien spaceships, as all of the UFO cases submitted to the government that AARO was able to resolve turned out to be prosaic objects that pilots and other observers had mistaken for unknown aerial craft. By month’s end, a new academic paper offered yet another rebuttal to Martin Sweatman.
 
December
In December, the media seemed relieved to have a drone panic to cover as relief from the gathering storm of the next Trump administration. For weeks, news reports claimed an invasion of unknown drones haunted first New Jersey and then the whole northeast. Social media posters jumped to the absurd idea that space aliens were disguising their ships as FAA-compliant drones and the governor of Maryland posted a video mistaking the constellation Orion for a drone swarm. Several government agencies issued a joint statement exposing the flap as a social contagion and the “drones” as nothing more than airplanes, helicopters, and recreational drones viewed at a distance, and as the holidays approached, the national media got bored and went home for Christmas. It was about the perfect end to the year in UFOs—stupid, hysterical, and wrong. Josh Gates launched a new show about the weird and mysterious, Expedition Files, and it, too, was about the perfect end to the year in paranormal archaeology—rehashed, recycled, and wrong.
 
As 2024 came to an end, we learned that Lue Elizondo and David Grusch worked together at Space Force, which paid them to study UFOs, proving that it simply does not matter how wrong you are or how little you know or how much damage you’ve done, the government and the media will keep shoveling opportunities at you once you’ve reached the inner circle where you’re part of the regular Rolodex of semi-famous names.