Blog Archives

Graham Hancock Pulls Out of Cosmic Summit, Replaced by Scott Wolter

4/25/2023

[Update: George Howard said the dispute revolved around contract negotiations and concerns about payments and the ownership of the rights to material presented at the conference.]

In a surprise move, Graham Hancock pulled out of June’s Cosmic Summit, a meeting of catastrophists in support of the theory that a comet hit the Earth at the end of the last Ice Age and destroyed a high-tech lost civilization. Atlantis speculator Jimmy Corsetti, who was also scheduled to speak, also said he would not be attending. Corsetti claimed he had been “removed” against his will from the list of speakers, leaving the conference in chaos.

103 Comments

A Dispiriting Project Update

4/22/2023

29 Comments

Over the last year, my former literary agent sent me outlandish descriptions of the various reasons publishers gave for rejecting my book. Frankly, I always had it in the back of my mind that he was making them up. When publishers told him that in “this political climate” a book about a queer topic was inadvisable, or when an editor claimed that there was no reason to ever mention James Dean’s sexuality again because it had been discussed in 1975, I wondered if this could possibly be serious. Then this week I received the most dispiriting of rejections, one that left me flabbergasted.

29 Comments

In Brief: At UFO Hearing, Senate Subcommittee Told No Evidence of Aliens

4/19/2023

13 Comments

This morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities held a hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena, i.e. UFOs. The most newsworthy statement came from the director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Sean Kirkpatrick, who told senators: “I should also state clearly for the record, that in our research AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics.” Kirkpatrick made this statement after writing a paper with Galileo Project director Avi Loeb speculating that these same UFOs that show no evidence of extraterrestrial, physics-defying traits nevertheless could be probes sent by an alien “mothership.” After the hearing ended, members of the public watching the hearing offered Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the driving force behind the Senate’s UFO efforts, stories about their own UFO interests and encounters, and one man gave her a copy of his UFO book.

The bottom line from Sean Kirkpatrick, head of AARO

"I should also state clearly for the record that, in our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, offworld technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics." pic.twitter.com/FYAtj8mKIc
— Mick West (@MickWest) April 19, 2023

13 Comments

Ralph Blumenthal Publishes "Nonfiction" UFO Children's Book

4/14/2023

22 Comments

Regular readers will remember that former New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal published a book about alien abduction researcher John Mack two years ago in which Blumenthal concluded, preposterously, that Mack was a heroic figure whose transcendent greatness would transform humanity—by talking about aliens probing people’s butts. Blumenthal’s current claim to fame is his role in writing the 2017 Times story that set off the current round UFO mania that will see the U.S. Senate take up another UFO-themed hearing next week as the Pentagon’s new UFO office continues its interviews of looney tunes ufologists at the behest of a handful of UFO-addled legislators.

22 Comments

Author Claims Ancient Sites and Myths Connect to Global Bird Cult

4/6/2023

5 Comments

Two centuries ago, the clergyman and antiquary John Bathurst Deane published The Worship of the Serpent (1830), which attempted to explain the entirety of non-Abrahamic religions worldwide as a unified, prehistoric serpent cult descended from the first idolaters, who worshiped the Serpent from the Garden of Eden, i.e. Satan. To make the claim, Deane took an exceedingly common motif—serpents, after all, can be found everywhere and appear regularly in myths and art as a result—and abstracted from it a unified faith that didn’t exist.

5 Comments

Project Update

4/1/2023

12 Comments

This week, I took the difficult step of separating from my literary agent after he was unable to place my book with a publisher and had fallen out of a communication with me since late last year. I did not take this step lightly, but going forward, I realize that I need more aggressive and supportive representation for my manuscript if I am to make a success of it. My now-former agent said, in his parting message, that he surveyed other agents who agreed that publishers are not interested in the “Americana” field and have difficulty seeing a book about celebrity as “serious,” which tells me that my agent was probably not selling my book on its strongest or most relevant points. I have some potential plans and options for moving forward, but in the meantime, I will be taking some time to revise the manuscript to make it the best-documented book about James Dean every written, not least so no one can challenge my conclusions on the facts.

Note: This blog post also appears in this week's weekly newsletter.

12 Comments

Graham Hancock Pulls Out of Cosmic Summit, Replaced by Scott Wolter

A Dispiriting Project Update

In Brief: At UFO Hearing, Senate Subcommittee Told No Evidence of Aliens

Ralph Blumenthal Publishes "Nonfiction" UFO Children's Book

Author Claims Ancient Sites and Myths Connect to Global Bird Cult

Project Update

Author

Newsletters

Categories

Terms & Conditions

Archives