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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E07: “Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind”

2/24/2023

Two seasons back, American Horror Story fantasized for half a season that ufology’s fever dreams of alien contact were all true. In Ryan Murphy’s telling, space aliens crashed their UFO into the Earth, Dwight Eisenhower established the Majestic-12 to negotiate an agreement with the aliens that involved selling humans for experimentation in exchange for technology, and he and Richard Nixon worked with alien ambassador Valiant Thor while keeping the aliens secret from Democrats. Or something like that. It seems that somebody at Ancient Aliens was watching because they decided to make their own version of the same set of familiar lies, recycling claims from earlier episodes into a narrative of U.S. government direct involvement with space aliens—with no concern whatsoever for the blatant contradiction between this set of fantasies and the allegation from past weeks that a Pentagon UFO office is a major achievement because we have no knowledge of or contact with space aliens.

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James Dean Biographer Donald Spoto Dies at 81

2/18/2023

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Last this week, we learned that Donald Spoto, the celebrity biographer, died at the age of 81. Spoto produced many well-regarded biographies, including Rebel, about James Dean. I found that book particularly useful in writing my own manuscript for my James Dean book. Spoto was kind enough to read an early draft of my book before his death and offered both useful critical notes and a blurb as endorsement: “His new book The Rebel and the Fear is sure to evoke spirited debate, not least when he addresses the lure and lore still attached to that hapless young actor, James Dean (1931-1955).” Spoto will be missed.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E06: “Cosmic Impacts”

2/17/2023

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In UFO world this week, the U.S. government said the unidentified objects recently shot down were almost certainly balloons, prompting Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Marco Rubio to take the obvious step of demanding more funding for the Pentagon office they jury-rigged to investigate UFO conspiracy theories, study imaginary superhuman aerial performance vehicles, and “replicate” alien spaceship technology. As you do with balloons. And of course Lue Elizondo and Chris Mellon claimed credit for the new awareness of balloons, disingenuously suggesting they have always been concerned about balloons and not the space aliens they have repeatedly implied were the only real threat. The public, though, seemed less interested in UFOs than politicians are; NatGeo’s splashy new Leslie Kean-fronted documentary series on UFOs, originally made for CNN, attracted only 326,000 viewers, almost all over the age of 50, in its debut hour.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E05: “The MUFON Files”

2/10/2023

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After the United States shot down a Chinese balloon last week, and even before the U.S. shot down an unidentified aerial object over Alaska Friday afternoon, media outlets from the New York Times on down reported that the government had been unaware of certain kinds of aerial incursions because no one had thought to look for them and that the UFO office run by space poltergeist and cosmic werewolf believer Jay Stratton had classified previous incursions as UFOs and failed to identify them as foreign balloons. As we well know, this is because they were looking for alien spaceships and interdimensional ghost monsters. Insiders blamed the “stigma” of UFOs for the military’s incompetent response to foreign incursions, and UFO believers declared it a great victory for ufology, for if ufologists hadn’t convinced Congress to hunt space aliens, no one would have found the evidence of balloons overlooked due to (checks notes) the stigma and humiliation caused by ufology’s ridiculous alien and space ghost beliefs.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E04 “The Power of the Obelisks”

2/3/2023

15 Comments

After a week away, Ancient Aliens returns with another instant rerun episode, this time focusing on obelisks. If it seems familiar, it’s probably because they did more-or-less the same episode way back in season 5, under the title of “The Monoliths.” Back then, ten years ago, the show offered such stupid faux insights as the false claim that a group of monoliths is called a “megalith.” The show remade that episode last year as “Mystery of the Standing Stones.” Have they learned anything in translating the earlier episodes focused on standing stones into a new episode specifying only pointy standing stones? It’s Ancient Aliens. What do you think? At least since season 5, if not earlier, Ancient Aliens has falsely asserted that obelisks were piezoelectrically charged power generators feeding electricity to a wireless atmospheric power grid. Guess what they focus on in this episode.

15 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E07: “Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind”

James Dean Biographer Donald Spoto Dies at 81

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E06: “Cosmic Impacts”

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E05: “The MUFON Files”

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E04 “The Power of the Obelisks”

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