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Who Was "Phanophis"? Unearthing Bar Hebraeus's First King of Egypt

3/31/2026

This is a weird little rabbit hole I found myself in this weekend, and I hope that you find it interesting, too. I have been working with a number of medieval Arabic histories of Ancient Egypt, and for a change of pace, I thought I would look at the medieval Syriac histories of Egypt to see how they differ. I translated the sections of Gregory Bar Hebraeus’s Chronography (c. 1284 CE) on Egypt (since the standard translation is under copyright until January), and this raised a question. Bar Hebraeus gave the name of the first king of Egypt as “Phanophis,” which was otherwise unknown to me, and scholarly analysis in the literature on Bar Hebraeus was about as useless as you would expect. Very little had ever been done, most of it old, little of it extending beyond Bar Hebraeus and his immediate source, and a lot of it obviously wrong. So where did this name come from? Little did I know how hard it would be to find out.

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JD Vance Settles on "Demons" as the Explanation for UFOs

3/30/2026

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Over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance sparked a bit of a social media storm when he told rightwing podcaster Benny Johnson that he believes UFOs to be demons. Vance added that he has long been obsessed with UFOs, but despite the presence of Satan’s minions in America’s skies, he has simply been too busy to take measures to prevent the infernal forces from buzzing military bases and abducting hapless Christian farmers.

“I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a long discussion,” Vance said. “When I came in, I was obsessed with the UFO files, and you start getting really busy worrying about the economy and national security, and things like that. But I’ve still got three years left as vice president,” Vance explained, without explaining why demons invading the sky is not a serious national security issue.

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Bill Maher: UFO Skeptics Are the Real "Conspiracy Theorists"

3/28/2026

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Last night, in the “New Rules” essay that ends episodes of HBO’s Real Time, comedian Bill Maher made his most direct and public statement yet about his belief that space aliens are currently visiting the Earth. Maher told his audience that the real conspiracy theorists are the skeptics who doubt an alien presence: “if at this point you don’t believe aliens are here and observing us, maybe you’re the conspiracy theorist.” He cited as proof the statements of “serious people” with military haircuts and the ambiguous musings of politicians like Barack Obama and Marco Rubio, both of whom later walked them back. Maher had previously implied a belief in alien visitation in January on his Club Random podcast.

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Al-Idrisi's Legend of Hermes' Antediluvian Temple in Akhmim

3/27/2026

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I had long known that Muhammad al-Idrisi, the famed twelfth-century geographer, had written a brief passage about the pyramids in his masterpiece, the Tabula Rogeriana (1154 CE). It was almost wholly descriptive and of relatively little interest. (It should not be confused with the book by the other al-Idrisi, Abu Jafar, who wrote a treatise on the pyramids, which has never been translated.) However, I discovered yesterday that the surrounding chapter on Egyptian geography was actually only one of two chapters on Egypt in the book, and the other contains a surprising treasure that provided a little bit more evidence for my longstanding thesis that the myth of antediluvian pyramids was originally told of the Temple of Akhmim as a local adaptation of Enoch’s Pillars of Wisdom.

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Filippo Biondi Claims to Have Found Second Sphinx Under Giza

3/26/2026

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Regular readers will remember Filippo Biondi, the Italian researcher who claims to have discovered massive structures beneath the Giza pyramids using a controversial scanning technique that archaeologists say can’t yield the results he claims for it. Well, Biondi appeared this morning on The Matt Beall Podcast to discuss his claims, and he added a new one. He now claims to have discovered a second Sphinx buried beneath the Giza plateau.

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Diana Pasulka Says Pentagon Believes Various UFOs Are Angels, Demons, and ETs

3/25/2026

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In a new interview with El País to promote the release of the Spanish edition of her 2019 book American Cosmic, Diana Walsh Pasulka described the culture surrounding UFOs as an incipient religion and compared it to the earlier believers in Christianity. To be completely honest, there’s not a lot to disagree with in her interview, which tended to avoid any of the more controversial ideas Pasulka has espoused and steered clear of her worshipful praise of her favorite ufologists. Instead, she made rather basic observations about ufology essentially being a faith in things unseen and how many interpret UFOs through their own spiritual lenses. She related a story of a Baptist UFO witness who had to change churches because he insisted the flying saucer was an angel while his church disagreed and alleged it was a demon.

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Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam and the Secret Source of the "General Estoria's" History of Egypt

3/23/2026

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After several weeks of investigation, I am happy to provide the closest possible solution to the mystery of where Alfonso X got his history of Ancient Egypt in the General Estoria (c. 1270 CE)—and it’s a solution that none of the experts, including the modern editors of both editions of the General Estoria as well as Juan Udaondo Alegre, who wrote about it in his 2024 book The Spanish Hermes, discovered. And now you can see it for yourself for the first time here.

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Round Up: Trump Alien Website, Debunking "Professor Jiang," and Medieval Sources

3/18/2026

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Yesterday, according to reporting from Steven Greenstreet of the New York Post, the White House registered the domain names alien.gov and aliens.gov, presumably in conjunction with Pres. Trump’s executive order mandating the release of documents related to space aliens.

But I want to start today by pointing you toward Flint Dibble’s new video on “Professor Jiang,” a Chinese pseudohistorian who claims to use something called “predictive history” to foretell world events. Jiang Xuequin is not actually a professor in the Western sense—he teaches secondary school in Beijing—nor is he trained as a historian. In his videos, he says that he does not do research but instead relies on vibes. This has led him to conclude that Roman history never happened, putting him in the company of Jean Hardouin (1646-1729), who was the first to argue that ancient Rome was a hoax, and the Russian nationalist pseudohistorian Anatoly Fomenko, who similarly argued that ancient Rome had been fabricated from Byzantine history. Dibble debunks Jiang’s claims and his approach to history.

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Why Scott Wolter's Scroll Claiming Jesus Confessed to Being a Space Alien Is a Hoax

3/14/2026

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During his appearance on A. J. Gentile’s The Basement podcast, Scott Wolter claimed that he had uncovered an old prune juice jar from the 1940s within which he found a nineteenth-century scroll wrapped in a 1950s-era napkin. This scroll allegedly contained an Italian headnote and six pages of scripta continuua cypher representing an English translation of an Aramaic text forming the autobiography of Jesus Christ, who confessed to being a hybrid between a human and a space alien from Arcturus and predicted that he would be cloned. Wolter said that he uncovered a Victorian cypher within the document that allowed him to discover that the cloning and/or the Second Coming of Christ may occur on June 6 of this year (at 6 in the evening!).

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Scott Wolter Can't Keep His Pseudohistory Claims Straight

3/13/2026

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Scott Wolter is back with another bizarre claim about supposed Templar influence in North America. On Facebook and in a YouTube short, posted in conjunction with a lengthy podcast interview on the much-watch The Basement podcast from Why Files host A. J. Stiles to promote his new book The Greatest Templar Story Never Told, Wolter posted a conspiracy theory (in the third person, no less) about Ralph de Sudeley (1133-1192), an English patron of the Knights Templar. The story he tells is straight out of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, down to humility of the worthy:

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<<Previous

Who Was "Phanophis"? Unearthing Bar Hebraeus's First King of Egypt

JD Vance Settles on "Demons" as the Explanation for UFOs

Bill Maher: UFO Skeptics Are the Real "Conspiracy Theorists"

Al-Idrisi's Legend of Hermes' Antediluvian Temple in Akhmim

Filippo Biondi Claims to Have Found Second Sphinx Under Giza

Diana Pasulka Says Pentagon Believes Various UFOs Are Angels, Demons, and ETs

Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam and the Secret Source of the "General Estoria's" History of Egypt

Round Up: Trump Alien Website, Debunking "Professor Jiang," and Medieval Sources

Why Scott Wolter's Scroll Claiming Jesus Confessed to Being a Space Alien Is a Hoax

Scott Wolter Can't Keep His Pseudohistory Claims Straight

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