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A few days after John Greenewald’s FOIA request for Chris Mellon’s messages to Sean Kirkpatrick revealed David Grusch had misrepresented his efforts to avoid speaking to AARO about his crashed saucer claims, Chris Mellon coincidentally released messages he exchanged with an allegedly high-ranking government official about a crashed saucer in Kingman, Arizona—messages he sat on for more than three years. The new messages, sent through a government text-messaging service, sent a tizzy of excitement through a ufology community reeling from accusations that this week’s new whistleblower, Jason Sands, told inconsistent stories about working for the UFO Task Force that suggested he was making his story up.
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(UPDATED 4/23/24) John Oliver devoted the main story on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight to UFOs, with more than twenty minutes of commentary that reportedly took more than a year to produce. The result was a disappointing attempt to play both sides, deriding skeptics as “killjoys” and believers as lunatics and positing, with neither evidence nor argument, that the truth must be somewhere in between.
In an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, rightwing personality Tucker Carlson reaffirmed his belief that UFOs are vehicles belonging to ancient “spiritual entities” that live deep under the earth and in the oceans. Building on comments he first offered a few months back, Carlson suggested that supernatural beings operated alongside ancient humans, echoing the infamous 1940s Shaver Mystery that has become a bedrock belief of fringe conspiracy culture. New government documents obtained by John Greenewald of The Black Vault show that so-called “UFO whistleblower” David Grusch repeatedly refused offers to provide testimony and evidence to the Pentagon’s UFO office, AARO, even while Grusch publicly stated that AARO had refused to meet with him. The documents show that Grusch initially expected that AARO would simply rely on previous statements Grusch had made to the intelligence community inspector general, not realizing that because he raised a potential criminal matter (about hiding programs from Congress) the material was not accessible to AARO during the investigation. When asked to repeat his testimony to AARO, he refused, raising false concerns that AARO wasn’t legally entitled to classified information and refusing to show up for scheduled interviews. Even after AARO and Congress informed Grusch he was wrong about the law, he did not speak to them.
On The Joe Rogan Experience, archaeologist Flint Dibble debated Graham Hancock for more than four hours about the existence of a lost civilization. You will forgive me that I did not have the time to watch the full podcast—it is simply too long—but you are of course welcome to watch below. I watched about half, from various segments of the podcast. I noticed in the parts I did see that Hancock seemed a bit underprepared to encounter the nuts and bolts of how archaeology is actually done, leaving him to complain that archaeologists have simply missed all of the evidence for a lost civilization, despite Dibble’s clear presentation of how archaeology actually works and the methodology of science and the signatures of large-scale settlements, such as evidence of agriculture, that should survive even the most thorough cataclysm.
 No one marked the fifteenth anniversary of Ancient Aliens, not the History Channel, not the ancient astronaut theorists, and not me. In honor of the show’s most lasting legacy, I am going to take a page from its playbook of constant recycling and pay tribute to the show in its most familiar form: by lightly revising and repackaging the piece I ran on its tenth anniversary.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. 
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