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Discover Magazine Reports 110-Year-Old News about Fossil Origins of Greek Myths

1/30/2024

Something that fascinates me is how ideas percolate through culture and either do or do not become common knowledge. This week, Discover magazine ran a piece exploring the question of whether mastodon, mammoth, or other extinct elephant fossils influenced the Greek myth of the cyclops. An extinct elephant skull’s nasal cavity resembles a gigantic eye socket in the middle of the skull, suggesting the shape of a cyclops skull. The article by Sean Mowbray presents the claim as news, but it’s really, really not.

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Tucker Carlson Embraces Pyramid Conspiracies and Lost Race Mound Builder Myths

1/26/2024

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I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that after just three cobbled-together clip shows to start its new season, Ancient Aliens is already going on a break, substituting an even longer, multi-hour clip show under the Ancient Aliens Declassified brand. Anyhow, it turns out that I missed a bizarre appearance in which Tucker Carlson has some things to say about ancient history after descending further into the Ancient Aliens / Ancient Apocalypse rabbit hole.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E03 “The Top Ten Hidden Alien Bases”

1/19/2024

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In a Scientific American op-ed on UFOs today, former AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick blasted the “whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings of the same” promulgated by “a small group of interconnected believers and others with possibly less than honest intentions.” Kirkpatrick minced no words in laying blame at the feet of the usual suspects—the group that grew out of Robert Bigelow’s Skinwalker Ranch paranormal hunt—and lamented that conspiracy theorists had captured the media and deceived Congress into promoting stories for which no evidence exists. Kirkpatrick said that AARO’s historical investigation into UFO conspiracies turned up no evidence of any aliens or any coverups of spaceships; instead, he plainly stated that UFO conspiracies are a game of telephone in which genuine, if distorted, accounts of U.S. research and development became hopelessly mixed up with alien believers’ sci-fi fantasies. It was heartening to see Kirkpatrick discussing the core UFO group in almost the same language I used in laying out the same case in the New Republic many years ago. I just wish that it didn’t take millions of dollars, a team of experts, and so many years for the Pentagon to see what was always obvious to outsiders like me.

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No, James Dean's Porsche Was Not Cursed

1/16/2024

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It’s been called the most cursed car in history, responsible for a trail of death and injury stretching across the twentieth century. But is James Dean’s Porsche Spyder really possessed by a supernatural evil? I didn’t think it would be necessary to explain why the so-called “curse” of Dean’s Porsche isn’t real, but the persistence of the myth across TV, YouTube, podcasting, and social media, where it is the most popular topic associated with James Dean, suggests that we need a clear explanation of where this false claim came from and why it isn’t true. I’ve discussed elements of the “curse” in various essays and articles, but it’s time to tie it all together and explain how a modern hoax turned into an ancient evil.

(Note: This essay contains some material originally published in my previous Substack essays and on my website. This essay is cross-posted in my Substack newsletter.)

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E02: “The Top Ten Extraordinary Creatures”

1/12/2024

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I’m old enough to remember when sitcoms used to run 22 to 25 episodes a year and how disappointing it was when we’d sit down to watch a favorite show only to discover that they were airing a cost-cutting clip show made up of scenes from past episodes, with a thin little wraparound at the start and the end. Ancient Aliens has taken that disappointment and made it into an expectation as the series moves away from original content toward primarily recycled clip shows. Over the past six months, two-thirds of episodes that aired have been clip shows, and the “original” episodes also contained recycled content. The current episode isn’t just a clip show; it’s also a clip show on a topic I have very little interest in, cryptozoology and other animal mysteries. On a day when Congress had a classified briefing on David Grusch’s claims, yielding the usual mishmash of legislators variously claiming there was merit to Grusch’s allegations or that the briefing was a waste of time that offered nothing of value in evaluating the truth of those claims, pretending that octopuses are space aliens seems positively quaint—and pointless.

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Scott Wolter's New Show Claims the Templars Sought the Secrets of Atlantis

1/9/2024

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Scott Wolter, the former host of America Unearthed on H2 and the Travel Channel and Pirate Treasure of the Knights Templar on the History Channel, has a new streaming series on Gaia that takes Wolter’s previous claims to their illogical conclusion. Mysteries of the Knights Templar, which Wolter co-hosts with so-called “Templar Grandmaster” and esoteric researcher Timothy Hogan, claims that the Knights Templar were secret adepts of Atlantis and devoted their mission to seeking out preserved elements of Atlantean wisdom from before the Noachian deluge.

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Richard Hoagland Blames Antisemitism on Jews' Special Connection to Space Aliens

1/8/2024

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The ongoing war in the Middle East has sparked incidents of Antisemitism and Islamophobia as tensions spill over into protests, counterprotests, and acts of violence and hate worldwide. In this volatile environment, the last thing we need is kooky ufologists opining on the “real” origin of Jews. And yet, that’s exactly what we got last night when Richard Hoagland, once famous for claiming to have found alien monuments on the moon and Mars, claimed on his podcast that Antisemitism is the result of the Jews having a special relationship with space aliens that gave them unique scientific knowledge:

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E01: "The Top Ten Alien Influencers"

1/5/2024

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We are a few weeks out from the fifteenth anniversary of Ancient Aliens, whose pilot special debuted in 2009. The weekly series bowed the next year, and over the course of fourteen years and twenty seasons, the show gradually shifted toward a hybrid model. Where once the series separated its clip shows into distinct programs with different names, like Ancient Aliens Declassified or Ancient Aliens: Ultimate Evidence, now the mothership has absorbed the patchwork episodes into itself to pad its episode count and stretch a typical 12-to-16-episode season into six months of content. But, as best I can tell, the last time Ancient Aliens opened a season with a clip show was back in season 8 in 2014, and even then, it was only on a technicality: The History channel renumbered the episodes after the fact and retroactively made what was originally broadcast as S06E20 into S08E01. (The whole of season 7 was carved from the second half of season 6.) With everything happening in the UFO field over the past year, the idea that Ancient Aliens would open their season with a clip show speaks to the sclerotic bankruptcy of an enterprise that has now subsisted on fumes for the majority of its run.

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On Gunung Padang, the New York Times Turns to ... Graham Hancock?

1/3/2024

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Just hours after the New York Times published an uncritical column reporting on the astrological New Year’s predictions of a Chinese geomancer, the paper of record offered a “fair and balanced” review of the controversy over claims that an Indonesian hill is really a prehistoric pyramid complex by extensively quoting Graham Hancock, who, by his own admission, is not an expert in Indonesia, hills, prehistory, or pyramids.

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Discover Magazine Reports 110-Year-Old News about Fossil Origins of Greek Myths

Tucker Carlson Embraces Pyramid Conspiracies and Lost Race Mound Builder Myths

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E03 “The Top Ten Hidden Alien Bases”

No, James Dean's Porsche Was Not Cursed

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E02: “The Top Ten Extraordinary Creatures”

Scott Wolter's New Show Claims the Templars Sought the Secrets of Atlantis

Richard Hoagland Blames Antisemitism on Jews' Special Connection to Space Aliens

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E01: "The Top Ten Alien Influencers"

On Gunung Padang, the New York Times Turns to ... Graham Hancock?

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