Blog Archives

House of 500 Corpses: FBI Raid of Illegal Artifact Collector's Home Uncovers 2,000 Human Bones in Private Museum

2/28/2019

Don Miller filled his Indiana home with parts of around 500 corpses, nearly all belonging to Native Americans, representing a total of more than 2,000 bones. However, because the bones were ensconced in a homemade amateur museum of 42,000 artifacts, half of which were pre-Columbian, and most of which had been obtained illegally, the media considered the morbid piles of human remains to be little more than a curiosity. The CBS News report documenting the FBI’s raid on Miller’s home literally placed the 2,000 bones halfway down the article, having written that the FBI considered the museum itself to be the most surprising part of their investigation, which was handled by the “art crime” unit.

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Erich von Däniken Receives Award for "Integrity," Gives Keynote Speech Based on Decades-Old Mistakes and False Claims

2/27/2019

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This weekend Erich von Däniken was in California to give the keynote address to the Conscious Life Expo. At the event, he received the “Integrity Award” for his lifetime of investigation into the ancient astronaut theory. The layers of irony are thick, particularly since von Däniken’s “integrity” involves being convicted of embezzling money to fund his writing of Chariots of the Gods, admitting to fabricating his exploration of a cave full of “alien” artifacts, wholesale reusing of material from book to book while charging readers for “new” content, and the usual laundry list of false and misleading statements that demonstrate his lack of scholarly rigor or even a basic critical understanding of his own material.

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Review of America's Lost Vikings S01E03 "War in the New World"

2/26/2019

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With each episode of America’s Lost Vikings, archaeologists Blue Nelson and Mike Arbuthnot move a little further away from L’Anse aux Meadows in their quest to trace the path of the Vikings on their hypothetical exploration of New England and the interior of North America. That means that each episode, in theory, should become a little more speculative and a little more out there. I hate to admit this, but I really wish they would just bite the bullet and try to be a little more extreme, because as it is, the show is so pedestrian and dull that even when confronted with purported evidence of Vikings deep in the interior of America, the hosts do little more than shrug and run off to play dress up. They whiffed playing t-ball, and it is no wonder viewership has sunk down to around 390,000 viewers for this episode.

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Review of "Ten Caesars" by Barry Strauss

2/23/2019

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Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine
Barry Strauss | 432 pages | Simon & Schuster | ISBN: 978-1451668834 | $28.00

The story of the Roman Empire is well-known, its major personalities still celebrities even today. But the fame of the Empire and its emperors makes it a challenge to say something new about a subject that has spawned books both thoughtful and sensational for two thousand years. Cornell University professor Barry Strauss’s Ten Caesars, which will be published on March 5, doesn’t quite manage to say anything new about the ten men it profiles, but it does have the virtue of telling a familiar story well.

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Abraham Loeb Suggests Aliens Will Inspire Us to Return to Nature

2/22/2019

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Abraham “Avi” Loeb is back at it again, continuing down the path to guru status. The Harvard astronomer became famous a few months ago when he published a paper speculating that the Oumuamua interstellar object was an extraterrestrial craft, but since then, he has used the notoriety his declaration engendered to promote a quasi-spiritual philosophy he calls “cosmic humility,” speculating about everything from the godlike nature of ancient astronauts to his self-perception as a hero standing against critical and angry “elites.” Now, in a new Scientific American column, Loeb redoubles his claim to be a lifestyle guru in the style of Jordan Peterson.

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University of New Mexico Revises Reason for Studying Olmec Heads on Trip Exploring "African Presence" in Mexico

2/21/2019

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The University of New Mexico came under fire online from anthropologists, archaeologists, activists, and skeptics after a flyer for an upcoming study abroad trip sponsored by their Chicano Studies department caused outrage by promising to help students learn about the “African presence” in Mexico during Olmec times. The trip, scheduled for May, was intended to explore the African experience in Mexico across time, including in the colonial period and in contemporary Mexico. But it was the decision to follow the Afrocentric claim that Olmec society had an African component that set off alarm bells.

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Study: Flat Earthers Believe Because of YouTube Conspiracy Videos

2/20/2019

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Due to prior commitments this week, some of my blog posts are going to be a bit on the short side. Today I want to discuss a recent presentation discussing the results of interviews with Flat Earth believers at two conferences in 2017 and 2018. Speaking Sunday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting, researchers who spoke with more thirty attendees placed the blame squarely on YouTube for creating a community of Flat Earth believers and providing the means for Flat Earth leaders to propagandize a credulous audience. An article in the Guardian summarized their findings:

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Science Channel Sunday Reviewed: "Finding Atlantis" and "America's Lost Vikings"

2/19/2019

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Today, I thought I’d review the Science Channel’s Sunday night lineup, even though it turned out to be much less interesting or impressive than the marketing made it seem.

My on-screen guide called Sunday night’s Science Channel special by the title Atlantis: The Dark Secrets, which is a lot more interesting than the show’s actual on-screen title, Finding Atlantis: The New Evidence, a show that bears the hallmarks of being a Euro import with new American-accented narration dubbed over it. I watched the whole damned thing until I found out that it was a “BBC/Discovery Channel/France Televisions/Prosieben co-production,” and despite being listed as “new” in my cable guide, it was actually first broadcasted on the BBC in 2011. I feel like it was on before here in the U.S. before, but a Google search doesn’t turn up any immediate evidence of it. Maybe it aired under another name?

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Nevada Author Claims Phoenicians Mistook Maya Cities for Atlantis

2/16/2019

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This weekend, I am devoting my time to working on my new book about the myths and legends of the pyramids, so I have only a short topic to discuss with you today. It concerns a “new” hypothesis about the location of Atlantis that was recently described in the Nevada Appeal, a newspaper in Carson City publishing two weekly editions. The Appeal published a column by local historian and amateur archaeologist Dennis Cassinelli, who has written four books on Great Basin history, including Uncovering Archaeology, in which he attacks the “current system” of science and claims to have found evidence for lost civilizations of an Old World flavor in the Great Basin region, along with Mormon-style evidence of Christ’s visitation.

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Randall Sullivan Returns to "Oak Island" to Promote Book, Conspiracy Theory

2/15/2019

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America’s Lost Vikings didn’t make quite the splash that the Travel Channel had hope for. The debut of the series starring two ex-History Channel hosts hunting for evidence of Viking incursions into North America attracted just 457,000 viewers in its plum Sunday 10 PM timeslot, losing more than 150,000 viewers from its lead-in, a years-old rerun of Expedition Unknown. The next day, six-year-old reruns of America Unearthed, newly renewed by Travel for a fourth season, held about steady at 421,000 viewers. On Tuesday, over on Travel’s competition, the History Channel, The Curse of Oak Island drew 3.7 million viewers, while Project Blue Book, recently renewed for a second season, brought in 1.6 million viewers, losing more than half of the Curse audience.

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