​In a new article this week, Graham Hancock speculates that the Epic of Gilgamesh may date back more than 10,000 years. His speculation is based on carvings at Sayburç in Turkey which date back to 8,500 BCE, one of which depicts a man engaging with a bull and another shows a man standing between two lions. In Gilgamesh, the hero fights the Bull of Heaven and kills lions, among other adventures. “There is,” Hancock writes, “no a priori reason why the Epic of Gilgamesh shouldn’t be much older than its oldest-surviving written recensions, no reason why it shouldn’t have begun life around 8500 BC, the date of the Sayburç reliefs, no reason why it shouldn’t already have been ancient when the reliefs were made, and no reason why the story behind the reliefs should have been confined to the Sayburç area.”

Hancock’s speculation is a mix of somewhat plausible and obviously incorrect, seemingly built without a deep understanding of either the epic or the academic study of mythology. If he knew more about academic studies of myth, he would realize he has stumbled upon an academic proposal that dates back decades.

​You wouldn’t know it from a Popular Science article deploying the familiar “archaeologists remain baffled” trope, but a recent analysis of a carved stone found in the Canadian wilderness in 2018 helps to bolster the case that the Kensington Runestone was part of a broader nineteenth-century trend of fake inscriptions. 

​Last week, I wrote a bit about the origins of the name of the first pharaoh in medieval Arabic traditions, Naqrāūs. Well, that led me to the first pharaoh in the Greek tradition, which is a bit of a confusing mess. Herodotus, of course, famously named the first (human) king of Egypt as Menes, but in later Greek traditions, from roughly the fourth century BCE onward, the story changed and Sesostris took that position, establishing a kingship in Egypt after the first king in history, Ninus, did the same in Assyria. Sesostris, in the Greek tradition, was a world-conquering hero whose dominion stretched from Europe to Scythia and whose power was unrivaled. 

​For well over a decade now, I’ve had a special interest in the medieval Arabic-language legends of ancient Egypt, particularly their mysterious origins. While the particular story of Sūrīd and his building of the Great Pyramid has received more scholarly attention than the rest, for the most part, it is not a subject that attracts a lot of deep analysis. I was surprised to discover an old 1903 analysis that provided me with an interesting insight into one of the odder parts of the story, at least in a somewhat roundabout way.

​Sean Cahill is involved with yet another new UFO organization, following the failure of Skyfort and whatever followed that one. His new venture, announced this week on social media, for which he severs as a project advisor, is called Project Nanu, a social media space for everything from UFOs to cryptids to ancient history. Whether intentional or not, its risible name immediately calls to mind Robin Williams’s catchphrase from Mork & Mindy, in which his extraterrestrial character often yelled “Nanu, nanu!” 

​Late on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported ex-AARO administrator Sean Kirkpatrick learned in his time in office that UFOs had been the subject of a Pentagon disinformation campaign for decades, with military offices doctoring photos and seeding fake flying saucer stories to cover up secret research programs and encounters with foreign craft. The Journal also reported that Kirkpatrick concluded that many of the men in the Air Force who claimed knowledge of secret reverse engineering UFO programs were in fact the subject of a “hazing” effort from high-ranking officers who, for decades, had new intelligence agents view doctored UFO photos and sign and NDA after being convinced they were going to study UFOs. Most never learned the program was a joke. (The discovery reportedly shocked Biden-era Director of National Intelligence Avrill Haines, who had a hard time believing it.) AARO does not understand why the deception occurred, speculating it might have been a loyalty test. The paper also reported that the so-called Malmstrom Air Force Base incident, when a “UFO” allegedly shut off nuclear weapons, was actually a Pentagon-sanctioned test using an exotic electromagnetic pulse generator. In short: AARO found everything skeptics always assumed to be true was in fact true, and the UFO phenomenon is mostly smoke and mirrors. In fact, it is worse than skeptics thought, since the self-deluding Pentagon officials ended up doing actual damage by creating a false belief that undermined the ability of the government to understand real, non-alien threats thanks to a self-inflicted wound.

By the way, full disclosure: I spoke with Joel Schectmen, one of the authors of the article, a few months ago when he was working on this story and provided some background information into the UFO cabal orbiting the Pentagon.

​A new three-part documentary series claims to have found the lost continent of Atlantis, but producers say that they won’t tell you where they found it until the film series premieres at some unspecified future date. “I’ve seen documentaries that are conjectures,” one member of the film team said. “We have something physical, which matches what Plato described.” Atlántica producers plan to present their film at the Cosmic Summit 2025, taking place on June 20. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait that long because the team behind Atlántica already shared their findings in 2018 and again in 2023, and they were, let’s say, not conclusive.

​This weekend, NewsNation UFO correspondent Ross Coulthart prophesied an apocalyptic event for 2027, just far enough in the future for his fans to forgive and forget when it doesn’t come to pass. He claims that government officials are hiding doomsday from us: “I cannot begin to emphasize how serious a look I get… They’re saying to me, ‘People have a right to know this’… They are all constrained by their national security oaths. They want the public to know.” Meanwhile, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch returned for a new season this evening, which makes it all the more appropriate that the infamous “Ten Month Report” that Robert Bigelow’s team at BAASS delivered to the Pentagon in 2009 while studying alleged spooks on the ranch for AAWSAP leaked to the internet this past weekend.