A Slow Start to the Week

This has been a strange autumn for unusual claims about the past. Typically, by this time of year, there are a stack of new books primed for the holiday gift market and a wave of new fall cable shows are jockeying for what’s left of November sweeps. This year, though, it’s been unusually quiet. Inner Traditions, one of the largest purveyors of pseudohistory books, hasn’t made any ancient history titles available for review. The only books they’ve given me access to are New Age crap like The Wonder of Unicorns and Awakening the Ancient Power of Snake (yes, singular). All of the energy (so to speak) in cable TV has shifted from aliens and Atlantis toward ghosts and demons. Even the usually reliable To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which will be releasing a new book soon, is taking a step back from its ufology. On Twitter this weekend Tom DeLonge walked back the company’s UFO investigation yet another step toward the conventional:

It’s good to point out that @TTSAcademy is NOT a “UFO research group” - we are an advanced Aerospace, Science and Entertainment consortium, run by a FMR Prog Director of Lockheed Martin SkunkWorks, multiple high-ranking Defense and Intelligence Officials / DOD Physicists.

— Tom DeLonge (@tomdelonge) October 26, 2019

Honestly, it’s a strange feeling to have nothing to write about, at least for a day or two. Since 2010, I’ve posted a blog entry between five and seven days per week, with only a few periods of lighter posting. Is it possible that interest in fringe history has entered a fallow period like those of the late 1980s and the mid-2000s? Possibly… but then Curse of Oak Island returns soon, and that usually brings out the crazies.