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Wednesday Roundup: Tsoukalos Condemns Area 51 "Invasion", DeLonge Raises Cash

7/17/2019

Moving has turned out to be a much bigger time-sink than I had anticipated, and I have found myself way behind on paperwork. Today’s post is a bit short to give me time to watch next week’s America Unearthed today, assuming Travel Channel makes it available as they have done with previous episodes.

It turns out that Giorgio Tsoukalos is a voice of reason in what passes for the UFO community. A satirical petition asking readers to travel to Area 51 in the hope that a mass “invasion” of UFO believers could overwhelm Air Force security and reveal government UFO secrets led to more than a million people digitally signing their names, and the Air Force issued a warning to potential participants not to cross into the restricted air field. Tsoukalos posted on Twitter yesterday that he did not endorse the effort.

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Ex-CIA "Weird Desk" Official Kit Green Claims "Alien Autopsy" Emails from the Future "To the Stars" Crew Are Authentic

7/16/2019

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Earlier this summer, an anonymous poster released online documents claiming to be emails produced in 2001 by Eric Davis and others for Robert Bigelow, and in the emails, we saw the various Legion of Doom members associated with Bigelow, many of whom are now affiliated with or orbit To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, speculate about the infamous Alien Autopsy video (also called the “Santilli film” after its creator, Ray Santilli) that aired on Fox-TV in 1995, with several expressing credulous views that the infamous hoax was either real footage or a recreation of real footage.

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Tom DeLonge Talks Ancient Astronauts, Claims "No One Really Cares" about UFO Sightings

7/13/2019

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Well, my move … went. It’s wasn’t particularly good, and I don’t know that I will ever find everything. The movers lost all of the hardware for my bookshelves, which now can’t be put back together. A few hours after we got to the new house, the washing machine died. And the company doesn’t make parts for it anymore, so it can’t be repaired. And on top of that, the movers broke the stone steps at my old house, so they are now dangerous to walk on and need immediate rebuilding. After shelling out all the cash for the down payment and moving expenses, there isn’t much left for emergency repairs and new appliances. I wish I could just dump the old house fast without having to spend even more getting it ready for sale. Anyway, it’s been a very long week.

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Review of America Unearthed S04E08 "Drake’s Lost Treasure"

7/11/2019

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America Unearthed recovered some in the ratings on Tuesday after a disastrous holiday week outing that hit a low for the new run of the series. On Tuesday, its new episode reached 523,000 viewers. I can’t help but wonder if airing episodes a week early online isn’t cutting into the live TV audience. It’s hard to believe that America Unearthed has burned through almost the entire season—eight out of ten episodes—with very little of interest to show for it. At least once a season, Scott Wolter goes in search of a lost treasure, part of America Unearthed’s efforts to keep up with what was in the early 2010s a popular wave of treasure-hunting TV series on cable. This episode sends Wolter in search of Sir Francis Drake’s lost treasure. He doesn’t find it.

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I'm Moving This Week!

7/9/2019

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After finishing the renovations at my new home, it is now moving day! Today the movers are coming to box up and load everything, and tomorrow it all arrives at the new house. I will be largely offline and away from blogging during the move. If everything goes well, I hope to be able to resume my normal schedule after the move is complete. I am not sure if the new cable package includes the Travel Channel, so we will see how it goes in reviewing the upcoming America Unearthed episode when (or if) it debuts online this week.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E06 "Secrets of the Maya"

7/5/2019

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Originality has never been the strong suit of Ancient Aliens, a show that was born as a TV adaptation of Chariots of the Gods and has spent most of its decade on the air finding new ways to repeat claims that were already hoary with age when Chariots author Erich von Däniken copied them from earlier authors in his own books in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the marketing for this episode took a certain degree of chutzpah that this lazy show rarely rises to. For a week before this episode aired, the History Channel and Ancient Aliens promoted an online streaming playlist of the show’s fifteen best episodes about the Maya ahead of this episode’s Maya reprise. Conceding that you have covered the same topic at least fifteen times before while remaining confident that your core audience will tune in to watch the same thing yet again provides a delicate cameo of the Ancient Aliens phenomenon. Now, if only the episode had anything to do with the Maya and was not just another racist bait-and-switch.

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Review of America Unearthed S04E07: "Bigfoot of the Bayou"

7/3/2019

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This episode airs July 9.

It turns out that Expedition Unknown can only do so much. The rerun airing before America Unearthed this week brought in 523,000 viewers, but many did not stick around for the main event, presumably having sampled Scott Wolter and found him no Josh Gates. America Unearthed collapsed to just 329,000 viewers for episode 6, down 32 percent from episode 5. I suggested that the topic of that episode, the true identity of George Washington’s female spy, was about as far from my area of interest as possible. It turns out I was wrong. This week, Scott Wolter goes in search of Bigfoot in a swamp because the producers seem to have seen The Legend of Boggy Creek or Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues and decided that they wanted to remake it with Wolter. I can’t say that I am the least interested in Bigfoot, so this will be a slog, much like Wolter’s earlier effort to find the Yeti, which at least benefited from an exotic location. Oh, well. Let’s begin.

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Reminder: I Reviewed America Unearthed "The Spy Who Saved America" Last Week

7/2/2019

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If you are looking for my review of the episode of America Unearthed that aired on July 2, I reviewed it last week when it debuted online. If the Travel Channel releases the following episode at midweek as they have been doing, I will review it this week. Otherwise, I will be taking off a couple of days for the holiday and will return Friday to review the next episode of Ancient Aliens.

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David Wilcock Claims YouTube Is Part of an Anti-Trump, Population-Reduction Plot

7/2/2019

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David Wilcock hasn’t been having a very good couple of years. Only a few years ago, he was the third most prominent ancient astronaut theorist on Ancient Aliens, behind Giorgio Tsoukalos and David Childress, and he was one of the biggest stars of the Gaia TV streaming service, which featured hundreds of hours of programming from him. He also had a lucrative line of books and DVDs and a speaking tour. But then Wilcock made the critical error of turning subtext into text. With the exception of Tsoukalos, nearly all of the Ancient Aliens crew and their colleagues are right-wingers, but they manage to keep their conservative ranting mostly confined to short asides in YouTube videos and tweets. Wilcock, on the other hand, has been outspoken in his embrace of the most extreme pro-Trump conspiracy theories, including both Pizzagate and Q-Anon, and he has proudly declared himself a recipient of Russian propaganda, which he repeats uncritically. Between this and his contentious departure from Gaia, even the brain trust behind Ancient Aliens finally cut ties with Wilcock, who has not appeared on the show since Wilcock refused to participate in their episode interviewing John Podesta, whom Wilcock considers part of an anti-Trump, child-raping alien death cult.

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Forward>>

Wednesday Roundup: Tsoukalos Condemns Area 51 "Invasion", DeLonge Raises Cash

Ex-CIA "Weird Desk" Official Kit Green Claims "Alien Autopsy" Emails from the Future "To the Stars" Crew Are Authentic

Tom DeLonge Talks Ancient Astronauts, Claims "No One Really Cares" about UFO Sightings

Review of America Unearthed S04E08 "Drake’s Lost Treasure"

I'm Moving This Week!

Review of Ancient Aliens S14E06 "Secrets of the Maya"

Review of America Unearthed S04E07: "Bigfoot of the Bayou"

Reminder: I Reviewed America Unearthed "The Spy Who Saved America" Last Week

David Wilcock Claims YouTube Is Part of an Anti-Trump, Population-Reduction Plot

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