Blog Archives

Djoser's Pyramid Was Built with Giant Hydraulic Works, New Paper Claims

7/30/2024

A preprint of a new scientific paper to be published in an upcoming edition of PLOS One made news this week when a team of interdisciplinary researchers led by Xavier Landreau of the Paleotechnic research firm claimed to have evidence that Djoser’s step pyramid at Saqqara had been built using a hydraulic lift. The authors claim that a large stone enclosure near the pyramid, known as Gisr el-Mudir, was a water treatment facility and served as a dam, allowing purified Nile water to travel along channels to the site of the pyramid, where, in “volcano” fashion, the water mover through a series of shafts and pushed stones up to the top of the pyramid while it was under construction.

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Lue Elizondo Memoir: Dubbed "King of Torture," Haunted by Bubbles, Talks Nephilim

7/26/2024

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Since Ancient Aliens is on hiatus to avoid competing with the Olympics, I thought it would be safe to take my on to the local aquarium. Surely a display of tropical fish must be free of the insidious mythology of space invaders. Ah, but I was wrong. Since last we visited, the aquarium opened a hall of animatronics offering, in either promise or threat, dinosaurs and “legendary creatures.” The disappointing attraction featured credulous displays about griffins and Bigfoot before reaching a crescendo in a hall where Ancient Aliens clips played on a big screen beside this janky diorama of extraterrestrials. It was not worth the upcharge.

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Lue Elizondo Claims Psychic Powers in Excerpt from New Memoir

7/23/2024

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In recent days, former America Unearthed host and current ancient astronaut theorist Scott Wolter alleged that some very cheesy engravings of Grey aliens in Egyptian clothing and poses were as much as 17,000 years old, despite being obvious fakes in an amateurish contemporary art style. But more importantly, Lue Elizondo’s publisher released his forthcoming memoir Imminent to Google Books a month ahead of publication, and extensive excerpts appeared on the platform for about 24 hours before they disappeared and were replaced with a “No Preview” announcement. It was easy to see why Lue Elizondo and his publisher wanted the Google Books preview pulled: In the excerpts, Elizondo claims to have supernatural powers and to have appeared as an angel while engaging in psychic attacks on America’s enemies.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E14 “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”

7/19/2024

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As has been my refrain in this new batch of episodes, Ancient Aliens seems intent on remaking old episodes, like an ouroboros consuming its own tail. This episode, which discusses the scientific (and quasi-scientific) search for extraterrestrial life is quite similar to 2017’s episode about “Alien Hunters,” 2018’s exploration of “The Alien Protocols,” and of course 2022’s clip show on the scientific search for ET, “Evidence of Alien Life.” You will, I trust, forgive me if Avi Loeb’s probe for phantom aliens isn’t really of much interest to me anymore. Given how far afield his episode is from the ancient astronaut topic—after all, if you’ve already met and been in contact with culture-dispensing cosmic being here on Earth, who needs to search for radio signals from the stars?—I’ll only summarize the highlights.

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Graham Hancock Defender Claims Proof of the Atlantis Myth's Egyptian Origin

7/18/2024

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In a posting on X today, Graham Hancock announced that “archaeologists aren't going to like” a new article Hancock posted to his website, implying that the argument convincingly challenges scholarly views. Written by Manu Seyfzadeh, a dermatologist who hunts for the Atlantean Hall of Records, the article seeks to prove that Plato drew on a genuine ancient Egyptian tradition of Atlantis when he ascribed the allegory of Atlantis to a story the Egyptians told his distant ancestor Solon in the sixth century BCE. However, Seyfzadeh admits to having no training in Classics or Egyptology, and his arguments are rather transparently ignorant of the broader context of Near Eastern cultures.

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In Brief: You’ll Never Guess What This “Crashed UFO” Debris Isn't: Extraterrestrial

7/13/2024

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Regular readers will remember the many claims To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and its affiliated ufologists made about pieces of metal they claim to be likely debris from crashed flying saucers. TTSA ufologists like Hal Puthoff claimed that one of the most important pieces of supposed evidence, the infamous magnesium-bismuth fragment of a crashed 1947 flying saucer (pictured at left), had impossibly advanced properties, including “inertial mass reduction” and may have a “metamaterial” used for interdimensional travel as a “terahertz waveguide.” When TTSA first hyped the piece, I suggested it was a chunk of industrial waste, accounting for its unusual composition.

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office sent it to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for testing in 2022. The report recently came back—yes, it took two years—and determined that the material was not able to function as a “terahertz waveguide,” and its isotopic composition was completely normal for Earth, not, as TTSA claimed, extraterrestrial. They could not identify a purpose for the uncommon composition of the earthly, heat-damaged fragment, but that’s probably because it never had a purpose. They suggest it is consistent with experiments of the time, without naming them. In short, it's probably a piece of scientific or industrial waste.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E13 “The Whistleblowers”

7/12/2024

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I wonder sometimes if the core audience for Ancient Aliens ever gets tired of hearing the same thing over and over again, or if it is more like the Bible readings at church, where repetition and familiarity are both the appeal and a reinforcement mechanism. This week’s episode, “The Whistleblowers,” explores people who claim to be revealing government UFO secrets. You’ve seen them all on Ancient Aliens before. Indeed, Bob Lazar not only had his own dedicated episode in 2019 but has appeared in segments of other episodes on Area 51, Area 52, UFO investigators, etc. over the years. Even David Grusch had his own Ancient Aliens segment last year. But, hey, this is great promotion for Lue Elizondo’s new book, or would be if we had any idea how many people still watch this show. Nielsen stopped releasing cable ratings last year because they are so low now, and History hasn’t volunteered to share.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E12: “Unlocking the Stargates”

7/5/2024

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Ten years ago, Ancient Aliens delivered an episode entitled “Aliens and Stargates,” and now we are back at it, rehashing the same material the show has covered repeatedly over the intervening decade. What is there even to say about a rehash of a rehash that, even in its first titular episode, wasn’t original but had previously been covered by the show? I’d ask them to get some new ideas, but in this particularly dark intellectual climate, where propaganda and hate has poisoned every well, I’d be too worried that they’d follow their former colleague David Wilcock straight into the bowels of QAnon and Russian propaganda.

As most of you remember, star gates (or stargates, as the show prefers) entered ancient astronaut lore from the 1997 movie Stargate and the subsequent TV series, and Ancient Aliens retrofitted old ancient astronaut claims to conform to movie myths.

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In Brief: "Ancient Apocalypse" Pulls Out of U.S. After Opposition

7/2/2024

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No wonder Graham Hancock has been testy. An article yesterday in The Guardian says that the U.S. filming on the new season of Ancient Apocalypse was scuttled after the production ran into difficulties with obtaining permission to film at some locations. Hancock’s program received permits to film at Chaco Canyon and the Grand Canyon for an episode on the peopling of the Americas. Several days of filming had already been completed at Chaco Canyon, but ITN, the company behind the series, pulled out of the U.S. and will scrap the episode in favor of a non-American location. The Guardian piece implies that the difficulty was with Native tribes, who spoke out against Hancock’s hijacking of their history and opposed efforts to film at ancestral sites. Grand Canyon National Park sought to deny Hancock a permit based on objections from Native groups, but federal officials in Washington overrode their objections to issue the permit—since the government can’t pick and choose permits by viewpoint. Tribal locations, though, can do what they like. Read the full story at the Guardian.

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Is Alexander the Great's Body in St. Mark's Basilica in Venice?

7/1/2024

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Recently, Expedition Unknown sent Josh Gates to follow radiation expert Andrew Chugg as he retraced his research into the lost tomb of Alexander the Great. Chugg has published many articles and books over the past twenty years arguing that Alexander’s corpse is current in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. His speculative conclusions are intriguing, and possible, but I keep getting hung up on the details.

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Djoser's Pyramid Was Built with Giant Hydraulic Works, New Paper Claims

Lue Elizondo Memoir: Dubbed "King of Torture," Haunted by Bubbles, Talks Nephilim

Lue Elizondo Claims Psychic Powers in Excerpt from New Memoir

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E14 “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”

Graham Hancock Defender Claims Proof of the Atlantis Myth's Egyptian Origin

In Brief: You’ll Never Guess What This “Crashed UFO” Debris Isn't: Extraterrestrial

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E13 “The Whistleblowers”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E12: “Unlocking the Stargates”

In Brief: "Ancient Apocalypse" Pulls Out of U.S. After Opposition

Is Alexander the Great's Body in St. Mark's Basilica in Venice?

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