Blog Archives

"Jurassic World" Director to Helm Area 51-Themed George Knapp Biopic

5/31/2025

George Knapp is the kind of self-dealing hack who gives journalists a bad name. Across a lengthy career as a local newsman at NexStar’s Las Vegas station, Knapp has moved effortlessly, and with dubious ethics, between provincial journalism, working for or with wealthy ufologists, secretly advocating for UFO and Skinwalker Ranch spending in Congress for thirty years, and profiting from ufology across his range of media products—all while pretending to be an objective journalist. He is also rather unpleasant toward those who dare to criticize his transgressions. He has lobbed more than a few nasty insults at me, for instance. But now, as his career continues to fail upward toward ever more success, he can add another accolade: Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow has signed on to tell his life story and is planning a biopic set in the 1980s covering Knapp’s most famous reports, when he credulously introduced the world to Bob Lazar’s fantasies about aliens at Area 51. The untitled film will follow the thrilling intellectual adventure as Knapp develops “theories” about alien incursions in the Las Vegas area—all without a shred of evidence! Ryan Reynolds is reportedly interested in playing Knapp, which gives me hope that the film will either be a comedy making Knapp the butt of the joke or will bomb as hard as Reynolds’s most famous foray into alien-themed science fiction, Green Lantern. But it might be nice if Hollywood would stop trying to propagandize for fakery.

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Joe Rogan Rants About "Arrogant" Archaeologists While Interviewing Luke Caverns

5/28/2025

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YouTuber, podcaster, and TV talking head Luke Caverns appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience today to discuss ancient history and lost civilizations. Caverns, who counts Graham Hancock as a key inspiration, tries to take a middle ground approach between mainstream archaeology and its popular cable TV alternatives, but undoubtedly more people will have heard him speak through Rogan’s show than from any other format. He is neither an author nor the producer of original research, so there are few ideas we can consider distinctly his own, which makes discussing an interview based on his mostly secondhand claims somewhat challenging. But I do want to point to something Joe Rogan said near the top of the show, when he explained his view of history, which is deeply rooted in disappointment with the modern world (i.e., with politics), a populist anger at elites, and an inability to distinguish between strong evidence and weak evidence.

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"1843 Magazine" Profiles Graham Hancock, "Conspiracy Theorists' Favourite Historian"

5/23/2025

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On Friday, 1843 Magazine, the longform arm of The Economist, published a lengthy profile of Graham Hancock, a onetime stringer for The Economist. Journalist Tomas Weber duly noted the darker parts of Hancock’s life story—his years cozying up to African dictators, his raging temper, and his lack of evidence for a lost civilization—but produced a biographical study that seemed intrigued by Hancock’s ability to spin fantasy into the only currency The Economist truly values: cash. After all, in the marketplace of ideas, what idea has value except the one that attracts money and power? Fortunately, Weber centers this in the context of far-right conspiracies, branding Hancock “conspiracy theorists’ favourite historian,” even if Hancock is no historian.

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In Brief: Harald Malmgren's History of Serial Fabrication Revealed

5/20/2025

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In a social media posting on X today, Lue Elizondo said that he did not attend a classified SCIF meeting with Congressional representatives last week because of a prior commitment to perform at an Oregon UFO festival, tacitly conceding that posing with UFO fans in alien costumes is more important than informing Congress about America's most important UFO secrets. Meanwhile, Douglas Dean Johnson published a definitive takedown of the claims made by the late Harald Malmgren, a former U.S. trade representative who spent the last months of his very long life pretending to have been a top presidential advisor privy to twentieth-century UFO secrets and a vast conspiracy to hide the truth.

Detailed FBI files declassified in May 2025 in response to my Freedom of Information Act requests contain incontrovertible evidence that Malmgren fabricated some of his principal 2024-25 claims about the jobs and authorities he held, and the activities he engaged in, during 1962-64. For example: the FBI files prove that Malmgren never held a security clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission, as he repeatedly claimed in posts on X and in interviews– a key component of his 2024-25 UFO-adventure tales.

Johnson's thorough research into the paper trail of Malmgren's career confirms something I suspected after I was unable to find significant references to him in databases of government records: He was not a terribly important official, and he spent a long time inflating his resume, eventually to cosmic proportions.

Be sure to read the complete report for a breakdown of his many fabrications and exaggerations, which ultimately undermine his claims about flying saucers--and also show how UFO journalism on outlets like NewsNation don't check the facts before running with wild stories.

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Zahi Hawass Stumbles Through a Discussion of Occult Egyptology on Joe Rogan

5/16/2025

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This week, famed Egyptologist Zahi Hawass was Joe Rogan’s guest on his podcast, and the two spent two hours discussing the history of ancient Egypt and various conspiracy theories that Rogan had heard about Egypt from his friends in the fringe history community. It was Rogan’s first episode with an archaeologist as the sole guest, more than 2,320 episodes and dozens if not hundreds of “alternative” thinker interviews into his run. Unfortunately, it was not the most successful outing for archaeology, as Rogan asked combative questions about conspiracies and Hawass stumbled over some areas he should have recognized after all these years.

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In Brief: Whistleblower "Reveals" Ultimate UFO Secret: "God Is Real"

5/14/2025

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For the better part of two decades, I have pressed the point the ufology and ancient astronaut theory are attempts to find a quasi-scientific substitute for traditional religious beliefs in an era of declining support for mainstream churches. It was obvious enough when the first ufologists were revealed to be Theosophists back in the 1950s, and it was just as obvious when John Mack and Ancient Aliens both concluded that so-called "abduction" reports proved that aliens were psychopomps who would take souls to a heaven dimension--or when Ancient Aliens told viewers to worship Lucifer. But the more recent wave of ufology, from 2017 until now, has tried to distance itself from the spiritual side, at least in public, and instead coat its faith-based initiatives in the clothing of official government support. Then Jeremy Corbell tweeted.

“You are not free. And this reality, has far more to it than you have been ALLOWED, to believe. And God is real,” so-called UFO whistleblower Matthew Brown is quoted as saying in a posting Corbell made to X yesterday. This is about as clear an example of the underlying spiritual project behind ufology's search for superior alien species as you are likely to get. It is also, unsurprisingly, an unintentional return to the Theosophical ideas about unseen realms and hidden levels to reality that infested early ufology from the very first days of the UFO era.

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From Iraq, Graham Hancock Announces New Book on Mesopotamian Mysteries

5/13/2025

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Graham Hancock is writing a new book about the history and civilizations of Mesopotamia, according to social media posts by Hancock and by Ammar Karim, an AFP journalist helping Hancock tour Iraq this week. I can’t say I am terribly excited about the book. It’s a natural choice of Hancock, given that Mesopotamian literature contains the oldest extant versions of the Flood myth, his lost civilization ur-text, and the northern reaches of the territory are near enough to Göbekli Tepe for fringe writers like Andrew Collins to conclude that the Sumerians inherited their culture from Göbekli Tepe, whose people were the Nephilim of the Bible.

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Goghgobon and the Hermetic History of Giants

5/10/2025

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Longtime readers will remember that back in 2018, I struggled my way through the Old Castilian of Alfonso X’s General Estoria—learning the language in order to read it—so that I could explore the Hermetic history of the Giants contained in it. As you may recall, this passage relates the story of Asclepius’s encounter with Goghgobon, the last surviving Giant, who tells him about the accomplishments of the Giants before the Flood and translates for him their book of star wisdom written in a forgotten alphabet. Very few scholars have analyzed this passage in any significant detail, likely because it had never been translated into English before I did so, and even the modern Spanish translation is very recent.

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Leo XIV and the End of the "Prophecy of the Popes"

5/9/2025

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With the election of Pope Leo XIV yesterday, the Catholic Church not only entered into a new pontificate, but his reign also should mark the end of a longstanding hoax. The popular “Prophecy of the Popes” attributed to St. Malachy (1094-1148) listed what the document claimed to be all of the popes who would reign from 1139 until the end of the world. Books and documentaries have proliferated about the so-called prophecy, including a 2018 documentary starring former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter. However, with the death of Pope Francis last month and the election of Pope Leo, the number of reigning popes has now exceeded the number of popes prophesied to have served before the end of the world.

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Misinformation Abounds in a Busy Week for Government UFO Fantasies

5/2/2025

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This week in Washington, Lue Elizondo moderated a panel of ufologists, including Chris Mellon and Avi Loeb, sponsored by the UFO Disclosure Fund. The panel discussion, billed as a briefing, took place in Congressional offices, but it was not and official Congressional hearing. During the panel discussion, Eric Davis told Rep. Eric Burlinson that there are four different species of alien visiting Earth regularly: insectoid, reptilian, Grey, and Nordic. These are not serious men. Elizondo then appeared on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation program to discuss UFOs, and by the end of the day yesterday, his “new” evidence for flying saucers had already been debunked. At the panel discussion, Elizondo presented a blurry 2021 photograph of a light-colored and a dark-colored circle on flat land he claimed to be a 60-100 foot craft flying near the Four Corners. Internet users quickly identified the photo as an image of two irrigation circles on farmland in Colorado. The water-filled circle next to the cleared land created the illusion of a shadow. [Update: Elizondo apologized on Saturday for presenting this photograph to Congress without appropriate vetting.]

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"Jurassic World" Director to Helm Area 51-Themed George Knapp Biopic

Joe Rogan Rants About "Arrogant" Archaeologists While Interviewing Luke Caverns

"1843 Magazine" Profiles Graham Hancock, "Conspiracy Theorists' Favourite Historian"

In Brief: Harald Malmgren's History of Serial Fabrication Revealed

Zahi Hawass Stumbles Through a Discussion of Occult Egyptology on Joe Rogan

In Brief: Whistleblower "Reveals" Ultimate UFO Secret: "God Is Real"

From Iraq, Graham Hancock Announces New Book on Mesopotamian Mysteries

Goghgobon and the Hermetic History of Giants

Leo XIV and the End of the "Prophecy of the Popes"

Misinformation Abounds in a Busy Week for Government UFO Fantasies

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