Blog Archives

Review of Ancient Aliens S18E04 "The World on Alert"

1/28/2022

We are only four episodes into the new season of Ancient Aliens, so naturally it’s time to start recycling and repeating. The season premiere covered the events that led up to last year’s report from the awkwardly named Office of the Director of National Intelligence on UFOs, and this episode is basically the same thing a second time, with more discussion of the alleged global reaction to flying saucers and why some people are on alert and afraid of what UFOs might do. I can’t say I’m too excited to be covering yet another version of the same thing. Perhaps I should instead recommend Keith Kloor’s piece in Science this week profiling Avi Loeb and looking into the question of how a Harvard scientist who only a few years ago earned Chris Mellon’s ire for refusing to endorse the Navy UFO videos as anomalous became an all-in UFO nut hunting aliens in Earth’s skies.

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Scott Wolter Claims the Pyramids Ran on Ark Power

1/27/2022

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Last night, the CW's Legends of Tomorrow attempted to thwart the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. Coincidentally, yesterday I traced back the origins of the occult claim that the car carrying the archduke also carried a curse that killed a dozen people or more. It turns out that Smithsonian magazine was wrong about ufologist and Fortean broadcaster Frank Edwards inventing the story, just as occult writers are wrong about the story being true. My findings, with translations and transcriptions of the original documents can be found here.

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Galileo Project Hires Jacques Vallée as It Morphs into BAASS/AAWSAP 2.0

1/23/2022

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The Galileo Project announced this morning that it has hired Jacques Vallée, continuing the Harvard project's descent into Ancient Aliens territory and continuing the UFO industry's move to launder lunatic ideas through the auspices of government, media, and academia. The Galileo Project began as astronomer Avi Loeb's effort to find interstellar objects created by space aliens but has gradually morphed into a full-on effort to hunt flying saucers as Loeb has become enmeshed in the History Channel / Robert Bigelow UFO circle. The Galileo Project recently added Bigelow circle UFO advocates Chris Mellon and Lue Elizondo to its advisory board. Vallée claimed last year that in 1945 the U.S. government recovered an avocado-shaped UFO piloted by tiny space aliens which the aliens had purposely crashed into the Earth to give the United States super technology, a claim Mellon endorsed. Avi Loeb owns this now, even as they praise Vallée for his "wisdom and insights."

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E03: "Beneath the Sacred Temples"

1/21/2022

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It looks like Ancient Aliens is getting some competition. This week CNN announced that it had commissioned a new five-episode nonfiction documentary entertainment series, tentatively titled UFOs. The series, which will rehash the usual material about the government’s investigation of flying saucers and offer the usual incomplete hagiography of Lue Elizondo and Leslie Kean, will be produced by Break Thru Films, the same production company that adapted Kean’s book on the afterlife for Netflix. It has secretly been in production since last fall, and earlier today Kean confirmed that it was the same series she had teased in an interview last week. CNN is a corporate cousin of HBO Max, the streaming service that is producing a drama series about Leslie Kean’s investigation into UFOs. Kean is making bank, and Warner Media, soon to be part of UFO-obsessed Discovery, has made plain that it is all-in on UFOs for the foreseeable future.

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Scott Wolter Claims "Antique" Journal Contains Templar and Oak Island Secrets

1/19/2022

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Yesterday, the former host of America Unearthed, Scott F. Wolter, announced on Twitter that he had taken possession of what he described as a journal containing the secrets of the Templars and Oak Island. He shared pictures of the leatherbound volume, whose pages are filled with English language cursive writing, apparently in pencil. “This journal arrived from Europe today,” Wolter wrote, “and contains shocking Templars in America secrets including the answers to the Oak Island treasure mystery.” However, even Wolter’s fans quickly sensed something was amiss.

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Review of "The Empires of Atlantis" by Marco M. Vigato

1/18/2022

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Everything you need to know about The Empires of Atlantis, a new book by Italian Atlantis research Marco Vigato, can be summed up in one of the blurbs that opens the volume. It’s from Frank Joseph, the former head of the American Nazi Party and a convicted child molester, who can nevertheless only bring himself to tepidly praise the author for having a “different perspective.” That anyone thought this endorsement was a good idea tells you exactly how careful and ethical the brain trust behind Bear & Company’s latest foray into recycling Ignatius Donnelly is. (Bear & Company is an imprint of Inner Traditions, the publisher of occult and pseudoscientific books.) Vigato goes on to thank Graham Hancock, the Ancient Origins website, and conspiracy theory podcasts for inspiring and encouraging him.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E02 "Mystery of the Standing Stones"

1/14/2022

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This week’s episode of Ancient Aliens continues the theme of exploiting stuff you half remember from the last year or so as it presents an episode framed around the so-called “monolith” that caused a stir when the metallic art installation was photographed in the Utah desert in November 2020, sparking allegations that the shiny pillar was the work of space aliens, despite its very earthly rivets. The show has covered various standing stones and pillars many times before, so after last week’s relatively coherent episode with a strong narrative arc and somewhat original content, we return to form with the usual recycling. I will be frank. This episode is almost identical to the Season Five episode called “The Monoliths,” which covered almost all of the material we see tonight, mostly in the same order.

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UFO Twitter Is Talking about an Old Air Force Textbook on Ancient Aliens and UFOs

1/12/2022

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Twitter’s UFO enthusiasts have been abuzz in recent days after the rediscovery of an old textbook used in an elective physics course at the Air Force Academy from 1968 to the early 1970s. The book, volume 2 of Introductory Space Science, edited by Maj. Donald G. Carpenter was an internally developed anthology of chapters on aerospace matters from an assortment of authors. Chapter 33 covered Unidentified Flying Objects and therefore inspired UFO enthusiasts to claim that the Air Force was “teaching” UFOs. But there is so much less here than meets the eye.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E01: The Disclosure Event

1/7/2022

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The biggest surprise about this episode of Ancient Aliens, the first of the series’ eighteenth season, is that it took so long. While other networks were able to churn out special programs to capitalize on the release of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s June 2021 report to Congress on unidentified flying objects within days or weeks of its release, the History Channel was exceptionally slow to capitalize on what should have been its Christmas season. Back in the summer they ran a slightly edited version of an old Unidentified episode, and that was their response. It has taken a full seven months for Ancient Aliens to make an episode about the events of last spring, even though the show operates on a shoestring and shouldn’t require more than a few days to toss together—if the people involved were both knowledgeable and competent. That’s a big if.

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Uri Geller Claims to Have Divined the Location of the Ark of the Covenant

1/5/2022

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Uri Geller, the Israeli spoon-bender who convinced contractors for the U.S. government that he had inexplicable psychic powers in the 1970s, announced yesterday that he had discovered the location of the Ark of the Covenant while dowsing on the ground floor of his new museum of himself in Jaffa.

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