Blog Archives

New York Times Still Soft on UFOs, Lets Blumenthal and Kean Deliver Pro-UFO Propaganda in Feature on the "Truth" About History's "Project Blue Book"

1/17/2019

Since the New York Times turned over prime real estate in the nation’s most prestigious paper to UFO believer Leslie Kean and credulous former Times reporter Richard Blumenthal to reveal the existence of the Pentagon’s UFO investigation program, the paper of record has taken a noticeably soft stance on UFOs and ancient astronauts. The paper has delivered a series of articles casting ancient astronaut theorists and ufologists in a positive light, and this week they did it again, giving Kean and Blumenthal space to spin opinionated pro-UFO propaganda in the guise of telling the “true” story behind the History Channel’s Project Blue Book TV series, based on the 1960s-era U.S. Air Force investigation of flying saucers and centered on its lead investigator, J. Allen Hynek.

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Travel Channel Adds "America Unearthed" Reruns in Quest to Be as Bad as Rival History Channel

1/16/2019

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On Monday night, the Travel Channel began airing reruns of the 2013-2015 H2 network series America Unearthed, and I’ve heard from several people contacted by the show’s former production company, Committee Films, that they are currently exploring a revival of the series and are looking to book guests for future episodes. The week-long multi-hour airings of America Unearthed seem poised to test the waters of viewer interest for a future revival. America Unearthed was hosted by self-described “forensic geologist” Scott F. Wolter, an expert in concrete, who explored alleged “mysteries” in the United States for evidence that Old World peoples colonized the future United States prior to Columbus on behalf of a vast conspiracy centered on the claim that the Knights Templar guarded the secret that Jesus Christ was not God but rather the father of a line of European nobles, culminating in the Sinclair family, America’s rightful god-kings.

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Review of "Our Cosmic Ancestry" by Chandra Wickramasinghe et al.

1/15/2019

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The idea that life on Earth originated in the stars is an old one, dating back in some sense to the Greeks, and pursued in earnest by a number of twentieth century scientists. It is a distinct possibility, although one for which evidence is currently lacking. In recent years, Chandra Wickramasinghe has pursued this line of thought in extreme and absurd directions, writing a number of books making very broad claims that panspermia isn’t just real but that viruses from space continue to infect and direct the development of Earth life even today. He has taken these claims to Ancient Aliens, where he recently appeared. In reading the new book he cowrote with Kamala Wickramasinghe and Gensuke Tokoro, Our Cosmic Ancestry in the Stars, I expected to read about these things, but I did not expect to read what was basically a New Age manifesto about how capitalism is the fault of evil demon viruses from space or a call to adopt a Buddhist-inflected form of communism as the one true scientific lifestyle.

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Crash and Burn: This Week's UFO TV Disappoints in the Ratings

1/12/2019

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Since this week I had an extra blog post reviewing Project Blue Book and sat through two hours of Ancient Aliens, and my son has an ear infection, I will make only a brief blog post today to report the results of the Nielsen ratings for this week’s premiere of Project Blue Book. The program had a disappointing debut, fumbling 1 million viewers from its Curse of Oak Island lead-in. The show had 2.2 million viewers, with a 0.43 rating in the 18-49 demo. This compares unfavorably to Curse of Oak Island in the preceding hour, which attracted 3.2 million viewers and scored a 0.8 in the demo—all while airing against Pres. Trump’s prime time address in the Eastern Time Zone. Blue Book, which did not have presidential competition, returned remarkably low numbers given its extensive promotion across television, extending even to a fake newspaper wraparound on last Sunday’s New York Times.

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Viking Women, Archaeology, and the Value of Literary Sources

1/11/2019

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For a show that almost literally no one watched—averaging only around 500,000 viewers across its four-episode run, fewer than syndicated reruns of off-network sitcoms—Megan Fox’s Legends of the Lost has inspired a lot of discussion and upset online, particularly around the question of Viking women warriors. Frankly, I find this to be the least interesting “mystery” on Fox’s show, but it raises a fascinating question about archaeological vs. historical knowledge and how an idea does or does not become a consensus concept in the creation of our story of the past.

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David Wilcock Blames Conspiracy for His College Classmates' Wild Lifestyle

1/10/2019

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A member of the alt-right Proud Boys who also professes a belief in the pro-Trump Q-Anon conspiracy murdered his brother with a sword, prosecutors say, because he had become convinced that his brother was a Reptilian lizard person. Buckey Wolfe, 26, exhibited signs of mental illness, according to prosecutors, and had filled his Facebook page with images of conservative politicians and pundits as well as Pepe the Frog. Reptilian lizard people are best known from their appearance in the borderline anti-Semitic works of British writer David Icke, who is popular with far-right audiences because of his conspiracy theories about quasi-Jewish international banking elites. Wolfe made social media postings referencing elements of Q-Anon that endorse Icke’s Reptilians claim—ideas also repeated in media like Ancient Aliens and other “fringe” programs, which helped spread them beyond the fringe of the fringe—and he was reported a fan of Alex Jones, the InfoWars conspiracy theorist who has promoted ancient astronaut and Nephilim conspiracy theories on his far-right talk show.

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In Brief: "To the Stars" Tells Investors about Alien Metals; Plus: Hindu Scientists Make Absurd Claims about Stem Cells and Dinosaurs in the Vedas

1/9/2019

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Having spent four hours over the last few days reviewing Ancient Aliens and offering an extra bonus post to review Project Blue Book, today I have to keep my posting short in order to make time for some other work. I have two quick hits to share, the first surrounding To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and its claims to be testing exotic metals from outer space. The second is about Hindu nationalists’ efforts to revise the history of science to place primacy in the hands of Vedic Indians thousands of years ago.

Let’s start with the recent posting of a transcript of a conference call that To the Stars officials held with investors last month. In the call, Steve Justice explained that the company has “limited” resources for scientific investigation, and he then explained the only actually relevant facts, which were, as expected, disappointing. He references here the so-called Project A.D.A.M. launched last year with splashy YouTube videos heralding the company’s efforts to analyze alleged UFO wreckage:

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Review of Ancient Aliens S13E15 "Return to Mars"

1/7/2019

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Ancient Aliens has long had a bit of a fetish for the planet Mars, one born of the ancient astronaut theory’s historical position as a product of the middle twentieth century, when “space alien” and “Martian” were largely synonymous in pop culture discussions of aliens. In fact, going all the way back to 1898, Martians were the first space aliens given the honor of being named the true builders of Egypt’s monuments, albeit in a novel. However, more directly relevant to our current episode of Ancient Aliens is the fact that this episode reprises material already covered in a Mars-centric 2016 episode, which in turn repeated similar material from a Mars-themed 2014 episode.

With two previous episodes fully devoted to the ersatz mysteries of Mars, not to mention countless segments of other episodes, it’s hard to find anything really original in this latest effort--or at least that part of it that has anything to do with the episode title. Like most episodes now, the title is largely ceremonial, and the real theme was a different repeat, revisiting relatively sedate ideas about colonizing space.

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Review of History's "Project Blue Book": UFO Propaganda as Turgid Drama

1/6/2019

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In the 1950s and 1960s the United States Air Force undertook an investigation into the UFO phenomenon known as Project Blue Book to determine if UFOs posed a threat to national security and to examine the evidence for UFOs. The study ended by concluding that there was no evidence that UFOs were spaceships from another world. This did not stop generations of ufologists from imagining that the Air Force had masterminded a conspiracy to suppress the truth about flying saucers in pursuit of nefarious agendas. The ufologists’ worst fears were dramatized in the 1990s in the 1960s-set X-Files rip-off series called Dark Skies, which sent its main characters into the heart of a government conspiracy to suppress the truth about space aliens in Cold War America.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S13E14 "The Alien Phenomenon"

1/4/2019

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Ancient Aliens has never been a show overly concerned with facts. This is a program, after all, that released its tenth anniversary commemorative DVD set a year early. So, it is unsurprising that this two-hour special edition of Ancient Aliens was designed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, which was actually early last year. It is not as though they could have prepared ahead for such an unexpected event. But Ancient Aliens has always been concerned with creating a celebrity culture around itself. It has assiduously cultivated celebrity fans, and in this episode, we see the series start to draw in other fringe history show hosts to create a sort of extended Ancient Aliens television universe. Thus, tonight’s episode features Star Trek legend William Shatner, who hosted the paranormal program Weird or What?, and actress Megan Fox, fresh off her low-rated Travel Channel series Legends of the Lost, which featured appearances from several regular members of the History Channel’s traveling circus, including Jim Vieira and Graham Hancock. Now they have been beamed to the Ancient Aliens mothership, turning their programs into satellites of the black hole at the center of fringe universe, and implicitly recasting their shows as extensions of the Ancient Aliens theme and brand.

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