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A Plausible Explanation for the Lost City of Manuscript 512

3/27/2024

When the explorer Percy Fawcett vanished in 1925 searching for the mythical Lost City of Z, he was also hunting a fabulous city described in Manuscript 512 in the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. The document, written in 1753, tells of a Portuguese expedition, which discovered a city reminiscent of Classical settlements like Rome and Athens deep in the Brazilian rainforest. It contained arches and domes, statues, and mysterious hieroglyphic engravings. Fawcett thought Z to be the capital of a vast civilization of which the Manuscript 512 city was a mere outpost.

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Scott Wolter Says He Won't Reveal Oak Island Secrets without a Big TV Payday

3/26/2024

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In a lengthy recent interview, former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter said he is releasing a censored copy of his new book with blacked-out maps and missing evidence until The Curse of Oak Island television series either pays him for the “millions of dollars in content” he says his book is worth, or the show is cancelled. Wolter said he tried contacting the History Channel’s top-rated series ahead of the mid-April publication of Oak Island, Knights Templar, and the Holy Grail: Secrets of "the Underground Project" Revealed in the hope of appearing on the show. He said that from a “financial perspective” using the show to promote his book would benefit him; however, Curse producers were not interested. As a result, Wolter decided to black out images of “evidence” in his book, including maps, and censor some of the content because he fears Curse will use his work without paying him for it.

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Weekly Roundup: More Gunung Padang Claims and Chris Mellon's Confession

3/22/2024

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After two months of miserable Ancient Aliens episodes on all but one Friday, I felt more than a little relief to receive a bit of time off from the grind. But that doesn’t mean that the outer edges of pseudoscience fell silent. After John Wiley & Sons retracted the infamous Gunung Padang paper claiming the Indonesian site was an Ice Age mega-pyramid, the author of the paper, Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, published on Graham Hancock’s website what he says is the full text of his team’s communications with the team at Wiley over the retraction. Natawidjaja seems to think that doing so vindicates his claim that nefarious forces of Western orthodoxy ae suppressing his superior science, but reading through the correspondence makes plain that Natawdjaja and his team have no real evidence to support their claims, failed to consider alternative explanations, and relied almost entirely on drawing conclusions from a visual inspection of rocks—basically, “looks like, therefore is.” Natawidjaja seeks to reverse the burden of proof, demanding that critics prove that the natural-seeming formations he identifies as prehistoric constructions are not human-built, rather than offering any positive evidence of their artificiality.

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Journal Retracts Paper Claiming Gunung Padang Is an Ice Age Mega-Pyramid

3/19/2024

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When the journal Archaeological Prospection published an article claiming that the Indonesian site of Gunung Padang was a massive pyramid complex that dated back to the Ice Age, archaeologists sighed and fans of Atlantis-style lost civilizations cheered. The article’s lead author, Danny Natawidjaja, is a fan of Atlantis (and a beneficiary of publicity from Graham Hancock) who made wild claims about Indonesia being Plato’s intended lost continent. His methodology for dating Gunung Padang was so suspect even non-archaeologists like me recognized the problem immediately: Natawidjaja carbon dated random bits of organic material from within the volcanic hill but did not prove that it was associated with human activity, so the dates were worthless as proof that the hill was a human-made pyramid from the Ice Age.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E10 “Mystery of the Stone Spheres”

3/15/2024

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In a busy week for space aliens, a new study reported that Avi Loeb mistook the vibrations of a passing truck for the seismograph signal of an interstellar meteor, a claim Loeb vigorously denied on his blog. Then, former AARO director Shawn Kirkpatrick said in a Zoom interview for the National Security Space Association that ufology believers in government are, essentially, a national security risk: “The thing that is most troublesome to me are the number of people in government that I worked with, that I did not know held those beliefs. And they suddenly came to my office and said ‘I’m not working with you anymore because you're part of the UFO coverup.’ They said this without evidence. But they believe this anyway. This is disturbing. This is a big red flag. How can you trust these people to make rational decisions? How can you trust them with national secrets?” Naturally, key ufologists turned to Congress to try to override the Pentagon’s accurate conclusions, and Ross Coulthart said in his podcast that two senior senators approached him while he was flitting about the Capitol to praise him and share UFO conspiracy theories about an AARO coverup, thus proving Kirkpatrick’s point.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E09: “Mysteries of Scotland”

3/8/2024

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The morning that this episode aired, the government’s UFO office, AARO, released the unclassified version of the first volume of its historical survey of UFOs. Unsurprisingly, AARO concluded that there is no evidence of aliens, has never been any evidence of aliens, and the rumors and conspiracies attributing to the U.S. government a massive cover-up of space aliens are nothing more than fantasies born of science fiction, misunderstandings, and paranoia. “The proliferation of television programs, books, movies, and the vast amount of internet and social media content centered on UAP-related topics most likely has influenced the public conversation on this topic, and reinforced these beliefs within some sections of the population,” AARO wrote. The report went on to report what I have long told you in these pages, that nearly all of the claims made since 2017 about “off-world technology” and “beings” originate with “the same group of individuals” with ties to AAWSAP and To the Stars, i.e. the various phases of the Skinwalker Ranch spook crew. Overall, the report is a massive win for reason, history, and science, and in a sane world it would crush demand for UFO content for a generation. That we now turn to Ancient Aliens’ claim that the Loch Ness monster is a space alien tells you about everything you need to know.

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NYT Magazine Rehashes Younger Dryas Claims, Continues Graham Hancock Fixation

3/5/2024

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I am currently knee-deep in revising and editing my manuscript for my publisher and on deadline for a forthcoming piece for a major media outlet, so I don't have the time to break down today's New York Times Magazine piece about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis point-for-point. I will just observe that it is another entry in the Times' ongoing fascination with all things Graham Hancock and Ancient Apocalypse a year and a half after the show aired. I am not sure why the Times is still rehashing Ancient Apocalypse speculation, or spending so many words to say that the show's claims have no value but they want to hope they could be true anyway. I do recommend that you read the full piece, but the conclusion is sadly quite correct: People want to believe things that are just a bit beyond true to experience the frisson of transgressive excitement, and when these claims are repeated often enough, they become a maker of group identity, frequently in opposition to a perceived oppressive mainstream that has ill-served them:

In a recent paper, two psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Spencer Mermelstein and Tamsin German, have argued that pseudoscientific beliefs, which range from the relatively harmless (astrology, dowsing) to the deeply malignant (eugenics, Holocaust denial), tend to find cultural success when they hit a sweet spot of strangeness: too outlandish, and the epistemological immune system will reject it; too banal, and no one passes it on. [...] The [Younger Dryas Comet Impact] hypothesis has already penetrated deeply, and perhaps indelibly, into the public imagination, seemingly on its way to becoming less a matter of truth than a matter of personal and group identity. Nobody I spoke with seemed to think it would go away soon, if ever.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E08 “The UFO Superhighway”

3/1/2024

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Back in 2016, Harvard-educated nonfiction author Ben Mezrich, best known for writing the book Aaron Sorkin turned into The Social Network as well as the books that became the films Dumb Money and 21, published The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America’s UFO Highway. Mezrich courted controversy in his books with an unfortunate tendency toward composite characters and what several of his subjects claimed were falsifications. Ufology was, of course, a natural fit. His 37th Parallel related the claim of ufologist Chuck Zukowski that cattle mutilations and UFO sightings happened with statistically significant frequency along that line of latitude. Zukowski had speculated about a latitude connection to UFOs on the Science Channel’s Unexplained Files, and a movie producer saw the show and told him to turn it into a book, helping connect him with Mezrich. As later research showed, the claim was bullshit.

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A Plausible Explanation for the Lost City of Manuscript 512

Scott Wolter Says He Won't Reveal Oak Island Secrets without a Big TV Payday

Weekly Roundup: More Gunung Padang Claims and Chris Mellon's Confession

Journal Retracts Paper Claiming Gunung Padang Is an Ice Age Mega-Pyramid

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E10 “Mystery of the Stone Spheres”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E09: “Mysteries of Scotland”

NYT Magazine Rehashes Younger Dryas Claims, Continues Graham Hancock Fixation

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E08 “The UFO Superhighway”

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