Blog Archives

Skinwalker Ranch Staff Share Substandard Poltergeist Encounters

1/31/2020

This week, Vice ran an article by MJ Banias in which he visited Skinwalker Ranch, the onetime site of Robert Bigelow’s hunt for airborne extraterrestrial poltergeists and now the set of a History Channel pseudo-documentary series. Although not explicitly stated, the article serves as a promotional vehicle for the upcoming series and the anonymous owner of the ranch’s proposed efforts to turn the imagined paranormal hotspot into a tourist attraction and vacation destination. I want to say that the article contained dramatic revelations about the ranch and its supposed interdimensional alien portals, but instead all we really got were a few spooky campfire ghost stories and some photographs of a made-for-TV “command center” (built in 2016) that monitors cameras spread across the ranch. Everyone involved teases revelations—but only if you tune in to the History Channel series. If they had anything real to share, we would have heard about it.

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Keystone "University" Claims Ireland Was Atlantis to Sell You $1,100 Seminar Tickets

1/30/2020

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Before we begin today, a quick note about Ancient Aliens: Moving the show to Saturday to get away from heavy competition in the “stuff old guys like” category paid off for the History Channel. The show’s ratings recovered from their 2019 slump, rising by around 200,000 viewers to 1.08 million this past week. However, ratings growth was largely from viewers 55+, a less favored demographic among TV channels and their advertisers.

Meanwhile, a YouTube video claiming that the famous Neolithic Irish tomb at Newgrange is really the temple of Poseidon that Plato alleged stood at the center of Atlantis is making waves in the media. Keystone University of Ireland posted the video, and Irish media picked up the story because of its obvious connection to Ireland. The video utilizes a number of long-debunked claims to allege that Ireland was the legendary continent of Atlantis, but the real story is who posted it and why.

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Faking a Massachusetts Nephilim Giant: A Case of Deceptive Editing

1/29/2020

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Today I’d like to direct you to Rebecca Bradley’s excellent blog post dissecting Ancient Aliens talking head Andrew Collins’s fanciful claims about the Densiovans as civilization-bestowing Bible giants. Her analysis is clear and compelling and shows just how badly Collins misrepresents scientific data in order to develop a fake narrative of a prehistoric empire of overgrown wizard-sages. “Every source that Collins referenced in this paper was either misrepresented, misunderstood, or mangled at the outset,” Bradley concludes, and she has the evidence to prove it.

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History Channel Defends Alien-Themed Programs as an "Iconic Story"

1/28/2020

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There are days when it seems like everyone in cable television is a lunatic, and the more you read about the actual beliefs of the people behind TV’s most propagandistic shows, the more it confirms that impression. Consider the case of David O’Leary and Sean Jablonski, the masterminds behind the History Channel’s UFO drama Project Bluebook, a dramatization of the 1960s-era Air Force investigation into unidentified flying objects. We learned last year that they are true believers in flying saucers and government conspiracies, and they also planned to use their show to evangelize for their beliefs. Now with the show launching its second season, they’re back to spread their misinformation and lies while imagining they have uncovered some secret truth.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S15E01 "The Mystery of Nan Madol"

1/26/2020

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As Ancient Aliens rolls into its fifteenth season only a few weeks after the close of its previous season, there are a few changes. The History Channel moved the series from its longtime Friday at 9 PM berth to a new Saturday at 10 PM timeslot, likely in response to the show’s year-long decline in ratings. This time last year, the show had round 1.2 million viewers. By the end of 2019, that number had fallen to around 800,000 against rival Discovery’s popular treasure-hunting series, which draw three times the audience. With a third of the show’s audience evaporating, History shifted the show to TV’s graveyard, but it hasn’t abandoned its strategy of using the series as the TV equivalent of wallpaper, airing reruns in daylong marathons. With the lower expectations of Saturday night, the show’s core audience can still make it a success if it holds its own against much less potent competition.

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Weekend "Ancient Aliens" Review Plans

1/25/2020

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As many readers know, when I established my Tuesday-Saturday blog posting schedule many years ago, I did so to accommodate the broadcast of Ancient Aliens late Friday night. Over the years, Ancient Aliens has moved earlier on Fridays, but my schedule stayed the same. Now, Ancient Aliens is taking up residence in the television graveyard of Saturday following a year in which a third of its audience evaporated. However, I am not available to work Saturday nights, particularly now that the show is on late Saturday, past when I am too sleepy to write. I am not sure how my weekend schedule will work out. I plan to post a review sometime either later Sunday or Monday, but I am not entirely sure when I will have the time to write one. I will need to see how it goes.

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Review of "October Faction" (Netflix)

1/24/2020

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In its quest to be all things to all people, Netflix releases a lot of content that wouldn’t make the cut at most networks. This filler tends to get dumped on off days, or in the shadow of higher-profile series. October Faction, nominally a supernatural monster-hunting drama, premiered just one day before the release of the next batch of episodes of the similarly themed Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Netflix made it quite clear that October Faction was a dud. The show, filmed more than a year ago, dropped on a weekday with virtually no promotion, and for good reason. It’s bad, at least based on the first half of the season, which was as far as I got before I couldn’t take the inanity any longer.

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Tom DeLonge on Instagram: Angels Might Be Aliens from Atlantis

1/23/2020

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This week, To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science founder and interim leader Tom DeLonge shared a bizarre Instagram post in which he seemed to endorse a number of controversial ancient astronaut and Theosophy-style beliefs about the imagined connection between space aliens, Atlantis and Lemuria, and Biblical angels. DeLonge discussed midcentury ideas favored by Theosophy-inspired “contactees” and UFO preachers, and it appeared that he favors the idea that Biblical angels and space aliens are the same. Here is what he had to say:

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Scott Wolter Embraces Atlantis, Claims Newly Translated Papers Document "Templar" Construction of the Newport Tower

1/22/2020

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Last week, former America Unearthed host Scott F. Wolter appeared on Jimmy Church’s Fade to Black radio show. The first half of the discussion was mainly recaps of Wolter’s usual spiel about the Kensington Rune Stone and Templars, but I was particularly taken by Wolter’s new line that he is moving away from hard science after claiming to discover that there is an “intuitive spiritual aspect” to ancient history that that defies the laws of science. Wolter said that he was not comfortable with this discovery at first but has come to accept and embrace a supernatural aspect to history. Things got weirder and worse from there.

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Review of "Mysteries of the Tayos Caves" by Alex Chionetti

1/21/2020

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Publishers don’t share all of their new books with me, so I don’t always get to read all of the books that might be relevant to this blog before they are published. Ever since Andrew Collins complained that I gave one of his books a negative review prior to publication, Inner Traditions, one of the biggest purveyors of pseudohistory and New Age claptrap in the publishing industry, has stopped making available for review their books on themes related to archaeology and ancient history prior to publication, presumably to stop me from reviewing them. Therefore, I had to wait to read a new book published last month by Bear & Company, a division of Inner Traditions. The book is called Mysteries of the Tayos Caves by Alex Chionetti, and it deserves notice for two reasons: First, because of who Chionetti is and second, because of who endorsed his book. The actual content of the book is nothing you haven’t seen before on Ancient Aliens and Expedition Unknown, and for good reason, as we shall see.

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<<Previous

Skinwalker Ranch Staff Share Substandard Poltergeist Encounters

Keystone "University" Claims Ireland Was Atlantis to Sell You $1,100 Seminar Tickets

Faking a Massachusetts Nephilim Giant: A Case of Deceptive Editing

History Channel Defends Alien-Themed Programs as an "Iconic Story"

Review of Ancient Aliens S15E01 "The Mystery of Nan Madol"

Weekend "Ancient Aliens" Review Plans

Review of "October Faction" (Netflix)

Tom DeLonge on Instagram: Angels Might Be Aliens from Atlantis

Scott Wolter Embraces Atlantis, Claims Newly Translated Papers Document "Templar" Construction of the Newport Tower

Review of "Mysteries of the Tayos Caves" by Alex Chionetti

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