Blog Archives

Review of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator S01E02: "The Holiest of Grails"

3/16/2020

The Holy Grail is a medieval myth whose very form changes in protean fashion as the story passed from one medieval bard to the next. The Grail doesn’t have any role in myth and legend before 1190 CE, and it had only a tenuous connection to the Knights Templar until Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall developed a conspiracy theory in 1818. (Previously, the Grail guardians in medieval poems had been modeled on the Templars, but were not explicitly the knights.) Typically, I’d give a detailed background on the history of the Holy Grail, but there is really no point here, since Rob Riggle: Global Investigator doesn’t have any interest in proving its conspiracy theories. Instead, it simply begins with the premise that fringe history conspiracy theories about the Grail are legitimate history, and it proceeds from there, with no attempt to explain or justify its reasons for adopting these bad ideas.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S15E08 “The Immortality Machine”

3/14/2020

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A wit once commented that none of those who loudly advocate for the existence of a heavenly afterlife ever seem to be in much of a hurry to get there. For many years now, Ancient Aliens has told us that when we die, our souls travel to another planet to live blissfully with space aliens, in a degraded parody of Theosophy’s ideas about ascended masters living on the interdimensional duplicates of the solar system’s planets. However, despite this promise of extraterrestrial immortality, this week Ancient Aliens descended deep into the rabbit hole of crank pseudoscience with an episode devoted to midcentury “contactee” George Van Tassel’s Integraton, a building conveniently located at Joshua Tree, where the Ancient Aliens crew gathers each year for the Contact in the Desert conference. The dome-shaped structure allegedly facilitates time travel and rejuvenation, though it did nothing to provide Van Tassel with eternal life. It did, however, make for a tediously long hour of Ancient Aliens on a subject I cared less than nothing about.

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Changes Are Coming to My Blog Comments Section

3/13/2020

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As much as I don’t want to waste more time on this, the state of the comments section on my blog has degenerated to the point that changes have to be made. For the first ten years I ran this blog, I kept comments open to anyone, for close to real-time conversations. However, the toxic, combative nature of the comments on nearly every blog post have driven away dozens of people who used to make substantive, thoughtful comments. I have tried culling toxic comments, but the flood of them comes faster than I can handle them, given that this is not my actual day job and I can’t spend hours each day reading aggressive, inane, or abusive posts. I have tried IP blocking, but many posters simply generate a new IP address and continue on, while Weebly, which provides my blogging software, has restricted my access to IP addresses in their latest redesign.

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New Owner of Skinwalker Ranch Credits Hal Puthoff for Inspiring Purchase

3/12/2020

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Note: An earlier version of this post noted Brandon Fugal's connection to a Utah-based Ancient History Research Foundation, which listed him as its director on its website. The AHRF, which explored giants, hyper-diffusionism, and other fringe topics, was also affiliated with Wayne May, the patron of infamous figure Frank Joseph, and house Joseph's writings. These references have been removed because Fugal informed me that his affiliation with the foundation ended in 2005, he was not part of the organization when it began housing May's and Joseph's work, and he is not actively investingating anomalous archaeology. I regret the error.

This week, MJ Banias revealed the name of the new owner of Skinwalker Ranch, real estate investor Brandon Fugal, who came out of the shadows four years after purchasing the paranormal property from billionaire Robert Bigelow, just in time to promote his ranch’s new History channel series. But, as always, there is more to the story than meets the eye—and it is weirder than you might imagine.

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Rob Riggle's Pseudohistory Show Tanks in Sunday Ratings with 650K Viewers

3/11/2020

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It was not a good week for ancient mysteries on TV. Ancient Aliens suffered a massive tumble in the ratings, losing around 20% of its viewers as its total viewership fell to just 881,000 for Saturday’s episode, ranking at the seventy-fifth most watched show that day. By contrast William Shatner’s The UnXplained, airing an hour later, cracked the top fifty with 946,000 viewers. Once again, a greater number of viewers under 49 tuned in to Shatner, giving his show the edge. Neither, of course, could hold a candle to Food Network’s 11 AM showing of The Kitchen, which trounced both in total viewers and in the demographic.

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Review of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator S01E06: "The Atlantis Case"

3/9/2020

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Actor and comedian Rob Riggle is an acquired taste, and not one I have ever acquired. You probably know him from The Hangover or his time on The Daily Show, but I have never enjoyed his brand of alpha male aggressive idiocy. He can be effective when cast as a bullying antagonist, a role he has perfected in numerous guest stints on sitcoms like Modern Family, New Girl, and so on. But when he needs to be a sympathetic and likeable presence, as in Rob Riggle: Global Investigator, where he must anchor the series and connect directly with viewers, he fails miserably. Not even an Indiana Jones hat, or liberal application of the Indiana Jones typeface, can save him.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S15E07: "They Came from the Pleiades"

3/7/2020

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Last week, Ancient Aliens held more or less steady in the demographic ratings, and it brought in 1.05 million total viewers. William Shatner’s The UnXplained brought in a few thousand more viewers under 49, but it lost 40,000 total viewers from its lead-in. Perhaps some of the good ratings news for Ancient Aliens comes from its return to “classic” ancient astronaut material last week, a change from its recent and boring focus on modern UFO sightings. This week splits the difference, circling between the ancient and the modern. In UFO mythology, the Pleiades house the planet where the Nordic super-Aryan space gods come from, so naturally Ancient Aliens would want to devote an episode to them. Formally, the episode is similar in form and content to the recent discussion of the constellation Orion, and just as in that episode, the focus on a star cluster is little more than an excuse to recycle old content under the guise of discussing it in a new way. As should be obvious, myths and legends formed around specific constellations because they were prominent and obvious to viewers on the ground.

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The Atlantic Asks If Netflix Teen Dramas "Reject Modernity." They Don't.

3/6/2020

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This week, Sophie Gilbert writes in the Atlantic about the trend for Netflix teen dramas to “reject modernity” by embracing a retro aesthetic deeply at odds with contemporary teen culture. According to Gilbert, this aesthetic choice, seen in shows as diverse as The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Sex Education, and I’m Not Okay with This, isn’t just a creative decision but symptomatic of a cultural psychosis that refuses to deal with our fractured reality and instead wants to escape into an idealized past. However, Gilbert’s conception of history stretches no further than her own lifetime, so she sees the shockingly postmodern and new in cultural trends that have always been with us.

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Sarah Scoles Asks If UFOs Emerged Spontaneously from America's Zeitgeist

3/5/2020

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On Tuesday, Sarah Scoles published They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers (Pegasus, 2020), and to promote the book, which I have not yet read, she published an excerpt in Wired magazine. Mostly the excerpt is a fairly standard description of the first two decades of the modern UFO era, from the Kenneth Arnold sighting to the Air Force efforts to investigate and debunk saucer sightings. I am, however, interested in Scoles’s sociological approach to the question of flying saucers. In the excerpt, she asserts that even without Kenneth Arnold, UFO culture would have emerged anyway:

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British Tabloid Seeks Bigfoot in Mesopotamian Flood Myth

3/4/2020

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Many of you may have seen the sensational headline running this week in The Daily Star, a British tabloid whose priorities lean more toward entertaining readers than informing them. The ridiculous headline proudly proclaimed a world exclusive: “Bigfoot is ‘evidence humans were created from ancient alien slave DNA’.” Aside from being yet another example of the supernatural and the pseudohistorical becoming fodder for the pipeline stretching from the lunatic fringe of the internet through British tabloids to Russian propaganda sites and the mainstream media, there is actually a claim about ancient texts and history underlying the seemingly ridiculous excretion from Ancient Aliens’ infamous Bigfoot episode.

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