Blog Archives

White Bear's Ancient Astronaut Theories Return in the Guise of Hopi Mythology

4/30/2020

Over on Graham Hancock’s website, Hancock has published the latest in a series of articles by Shawn Hamilton making some extreme claims about the Hopi. Hamilton is nothing special as far as fringe history believers go. Forty years ago, he worked with Oswald “White Bear” Fredericks, a Hopi who was heavily influenced by postwar pop culture and New Age ideas when he told an idiosyncratic version of Hopi mythology to Frank Waters in the 1960s. I have discussed White Bear’s ideas many times, but the issue, as I wrote previously, is that his version of Hopi mythology does not correlate with versions recorded prior to the 1960s, but does correlate with pseudohistory books of the preceding years. He talks about Atlantis by name, for Pete’s sake, so it’s fairly clear that he wasn’t drawing on unadulterated ancestral truths. His mythology, I wrote in 2016, was:

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Israeli Researchers Claim Hidden Geometry and Secret Symbolism at Göbekli Tepe

4/29/2020

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Before we begin today, it’s worth noting that the Pentagon officially published the Navy’s UFO videos first released by Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and the New York Times in December 2017. The news media freaked out about this again, either not realizing that these were the same videos or desperate for something other than COVID-19 to discuss. Most media outlets treated the videos as evidence of alien spacecraft, though there is, of course, no evidence that the objects seen in the videos are vehicles of any kind, let alone from the depths of space.

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Scott Wolter Appears on Freemason Podcast, Talks Goddess-Worship and "Bling"

4/28/2020

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This past week, former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter appeared on a Freemason podcast to discuss his usual round of nonsense, devoting most of the time to reminiscing about his favorite America Unearthed episodes from the previous decade and his beloved Kensington Rune Stone claims from the decade before that. However, there were a few interesting highlights, mostly surrounding his enhanced view of goddess worship and his growing acceptance of outdated early twentieth century views of Christianity as an astrological myth.

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This Week in Paranormal TV Ratings

4/25/2020

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Ancient Aliens is not on tonight, so I am taking the day off. However, before I sign off for the day, I wanted to provide a quick overview of the week in pseudo-historical and paranormal TV. Rob Riggle: Global Investigator actually rose in the ratings for its alien-themed episode, reaching 355,000 live plus same day viewers, its highest viewer haul since moving to Thursdays. What made that more amazing is that the show rose in the ratings while airing out of prime time, in its late-night exile slot. Its total, however, was still only half of what Discovery usually pulls on Thursdays, and it still failed to outdraw the similar Forbidden History, the obscure UK import airing on the little-watched Science Channel. Its latest episode had 400,000 viewers. Curse of Oak Island was up to 3.6 million viewers this week, while Secret of Skinwalker Ranch stubbornly remained at 2.1 million. Last Saturday, Ancient Aliens clocked 1 million viewers, while The UnXplained sank to 852,000. Overall, where we should have expected to see some ratings spikes as more people are trapped indoors watching TV, instead, everything is basically the way it always is, suggesting that these shows have a relatively inelastic audience.

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Review of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator S01E06: "Really Close Encounters"

4/24/2020

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When Rob Riggle: Global Investigator premiered on March 8, the Discovery Channel had high hopes. The combination of proven audience-bait and a celebrity host seemed to guarantee success. But there were already signs of trouble. The network hastily replaced the original pilot episode with the season finale in the hope of goosing ratings with a sexier investigation, Atlantis. But it wasn’t enough. Ratings were awful, and Discovery put the show on a month’s hiatus before relaunching it on Thursdays, where it failed catastrophically. Ratings fell from 652,000 viewers on Sundays to fewer than 500,000 on Thursdays, and then just 271,000 for its fifth episode. The show averaged just 33-50% of the ratings for the same timeslot the month before when literally anything else aired on Discovery. Fewer people watched Rob Riggle by the end than watched Megan Fox’s low-rated Legends of the Lost on the Travel Channel, or even the U.K. import Forbidden History on the Science Channel. Now in exile outside of prime time, the last episode of Rob Riggle to be broadcast led us to the only possible place that a cable show about mysteries could possible go: space aliens and ancient astronauts. Even UFOs couldn’t save Rob Riggle.

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"Ancient Origins" Praises Genocidal Hohenzollern Dynasty, Dismisses Democracy

4/23/2020

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As we continue to wade through a fallow period due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, I am consequently cutting back the length of my blog posts until there is something more substantive to write about. As a reminder, the finale of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator is scheduled to run overnight tonight, so my review will run later on Friday than my usual posting time, after I have had a chance to watch it.

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Praise for "The Mound Builder Myth" in the Midwest Book Review

4/22/2020

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With many of the popular pseudo-historians silent and conspiracy theorists focused on COVID-19, there is not a whole lot to talk about relevant to this blog today. I thought I would instead share a rave review of my Mound Builder Myth by Jack Mason that ran in the Midwest Book Review this month. The review excerpt is reprinted by permission of MBR.

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David Wilcock Says Democrats Should Love Baphomet: "He's a Trans. He Has Boobs."

4/21/2020

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Do you remember David Wilcock, the erstwhile ancient astronaut theorist from Ancient Aliens and Gaia-TV, who unceremoniously parted ways with both? Wilcock’s right-wing patter turned out to be too extreme for Ancient Aliens, which prefers a softer rightist message, as with Saturday’s praise of Republicans for their supposed special access to extraterrestrial truths. Well, during a live chat in which Wilcock asked his followers to give him cash money to hear him rant—up to $100 a pop—Wilcock showed once again why he is the world’s worst cam-boy.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S15E12: "Aliens and the Presidents"

4/18/2020

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There is an amusing anecdote about the early days of television. Near the end of the Twilight Zone’s run, the series broadcast an episode about an evil ventriloquist’s dummy called “Caesar and Me.” That episode aired in 1964, and two years earlier, the show had aired a nearly identical episode, also about a living ventriloquist’s dummy, called, appropriately enough, “The Dummy.” Both episodes used the same dummy to play the dummy. (He’s in David Copperfield’s Las Vegas museum, if you want to see him sometime.) The producers that greenlit the latter episode, Bert Granet and William Froug, started producing the show in 1963 and hadn’t remembered that their predecessor, Buck Houghton, already did the same thing in 1962. Since there was no after-market for TV shows back then, no streaming and little syndication, everyone shrugged when they found out and assumed the audience would never catch on.

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Review of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator S01E05: "The Mysterious Disappearance of the Lost Legion"

4/17/2020

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Do you ever get bored watching middle aged men fruitlessly hunt for treasures and secrets they’ll never find? I know I do. I couldn’t help but contrast the slow, dull slog of cable TV treasure hunts with this week’s new Netflix series, The Outer Banks, which coincidentally enough also told the story of a generations-long treasure hunt. The Outer Banks is fiction, of course, but we could just as easily describe cable reality pseudo-documentaries as badly staged fiction, too. In both, the actual treasure is a MacGuffin, an engine to hang another story on. Rob Riggle: Global Investigator uses it as a frame for Riggle’s ego and some very poor improvised insult comedy. The Outer Banks uses it for some The O.C.-style class-based teen drama and an aesthetic that even Vanity Fair noted seems unusually centered on teenage boys who are allergic to shirts.

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<<Previous

White Bear's Ancient Astronaut Theories Return in the Guise of Hopi Mythology

Israeli Researchers Claim Hidden Geometry and Secret Symbolism at Göbekli Tepe

Scott Wolter Appears on Freemason Podcast, Talks Goddess-Worship and "Bling"

This Week in Paranormal TV Ratings

Review of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator S01E06: "Really Close Encounters"

"Ancient Origins" Praises Genocidal Hohenzollern Dynasty, Dismisses Democracy

Praise for "The Mound Builder Myth" in the Midwest Book Review

David Wilcock Says Democrats Should Love Baphomet: "He's a Trans. He Has Boobs."

Review of Ancient Aliens S15E12: "Aliens and the Presidents"

Review of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator S01E05: "The Mysterious Disappearance of the Lost Legion"

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