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Rabbi Who "Proved" God Wrote the Bible Says He Found Moses's Autograph ... Maybe

7/29/2025

A new paper claims that some 3,000-year-old inscriptions found in Sinai not only make reference to the Biblical character of Moses but may have been written by him. The claim comes from a draft thesis by retired rabbi Michael S. Bar-Ron, now studying biblical archaeology at Ariel University in Israel. Bar-Ron, who is no stranger to self-promotion, published his draft thesis on Academia.edu before it was submitted to his university, and he took to the Patterns of Evidence podcast to publicize his claims. The Daily Mail reported on the claim this week.

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In Brief: The New York Times Lets Diana Pasulka Spread UFO Mystification

7/24/2025

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New York Times columnist Ross Douthat interviewed American Cosmic author Diana Pasulka for one of the paper's podcasts, and the result was about what you would expect. The two commiserated about the lack of UFO disclosure, shared similar blind spots about flying saucer research, and reveled in the alleged overlap between alien encounters and medieval religious experiences. The conversation was rather infuriating since Douthat seemed constitutionally unable to see the faulty assumptions UFO researchers like Pasulka make (namely, trusting sources she admits have withheld information) and Pasulka repeatedly comes so very close to understanding that UFO mythology is a modern derivative of (one particular strand) of religious mysticism but is repeatedly stymied by her acceptance, without evidence, that if a man in uniform cannot understand what he sees, it must therefore be beyond all human knowledge.

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In Brief: Ross Coulthart Says He Will "Call Out" Senators Who Hide UFO Truths

7/23/2025

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In a NewsNation YouTube video on July 20, UFO correspondent Ross Coulthart said that Donald Trump and members of the United States Senate have secret knowledge of space alien incursions on the Earth and are actively conspiring to hide this from the public. Coulthart claims that he will "call out" the senators "shortly."

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Piers Morgan Asks If Debunking Bad Pyramid Ideas Is Racist Against “White Guys”

7/18/2025

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Earlier this week, Zahi Hawass appeared on Piers Morgan’s streaming show Uncensored to discuss his stumbling appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, and Morgan brought in social media gadflies Jimmy Corsetti and Dan Richards to question Hawass with him. Nearly a million people watched the bizarre exercise in contrarians chasing fantasies up their own asses, and things got off to a pretty bad start when Morgan revealed just how much of a hall of mirrors we had entered with his first question: “What was your reaction to the reaction you got when you appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast?” He started out at least three degrees of separation from the real archaeology of Giza to focus on the “reaction to the reaction.” Very social media of him.

(The show aired last weekend, but I was unfortunately otherwise occupied and have only just gotten to review it.)

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In Brief: Avi Loeb Teases Discovery of New Alien Spaceship, But It's Just a Comet

7/17/2025

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Avi Loeb is back again with new claims about alien spaceships. Loeb recently claimed that an interstellar object detected on July 1 named 3I/ATLAS has a number of anomalies that suggest that it may be artificial in origin. Loeb claims that the object is “anomalously bright” and that the object is too large for a typical interstellar object. In a lengthy post on his blog, Loeb admitted that the object may well be a comet but that he wanted to hold out hope that it is not a comet but that it “was sent towards the inner solar system by design.” Loeb tellingly noted that his own hypothesis is “reminiscent of the science-fiction novel `Rendezvous with Rama,’ in which Arthur C. Clarke described the entry of a cylindrical 50-by-20 kilometers alien spaceship, not far from the inferred size of 3I/ATLAS, to the inner solar system.”

Well, can you guess what happened? As Penn State professor of astronomy and astrophysics Jason Wright noted in a thread on Bluesky, the object is very obviously a comet. Astronomers have observed and clearly reported the telltale coma, the gaseous atmosphere that envelops the nucleus, proving that Loeb overstated the anomalous nature of the object’s origin and overestimated its size, mistaking the coma for the surface. Loeb and his team, as Wright notes, misrepresents both the papers they cite and the science: “The cited papers are clear and conclusive, but they assert, without evidence, that they are inconclusive for reasons directly contradicted by the papers.”

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Movses Khorenatsi and the Sibyl of Berossus

7/15/2025

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In researching the legends of Semiramis and Ninus recently, I encountered an unusual academic dispute that emerged due to a quirk of grammar. As you will recall, last week I wrote a bit about the legend that the medieval Armenian historian Movses Kohrenatsi recorded about Semiramis and Arai. Well, this prompted me to read a bit more of his History of Armenia, which is where I discovered a strange ambiguity. The problem revolves around a passage (Book 1, chapter 6) discussing what happened when the first kings divided the world after the Flood. Movses cites a source, but scholars can’t agree on who it is.

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The Forgotten Legend of How Semiramis Built the Egyptian Pyramids

7/11/2025

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In my reading this week on the myths of Ninus and Semiramis, I encountered an unusual reference in a footnote claiming that there was a Greek story to the effect that the Assyrian queen was believed to be the builder of the Egyptian pyramids. I had never heard this claim before, and it is missing from every book about pyramid legends I could find. The story occurs, as best I can tell, in only three places. In chronological order, these are a papyrus fragment from Egypt dating to around 300 CE, the tenth-century Byzantine Suda, and the eleventh-century Synopsis historion of George Cedrenus. None of the accounts is complete enough by itself to say much about the story, and the papyrus was only published in 2016, and attracted little attention at the time.

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On the Doomed Lovers of Queen Semiramis

7/10/2025

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The new book Graham Hancock is writing is based on the history and mythology of Mesopotamia and the Levant, so I have been brushing up on my knowledge of Near Eastern literature. I recently read through the fragments of Ctesias’ Persica, the early fourth-century BCE account of Assyrian, Median, and Persian history that was more or less the defining version of Mesopotamian history for the Greeks, overshadowing Berossus’ more accurate work, which was written in response to Greek romances like those of Ctesias.

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"Jimmy" Audiobook Now Available!

7/8/2025

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"A BOMBSHELL book." — Daily Mail.

Today is the release day for the audiobook of Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, read by Daniel Henning! Get it wherever you buy your audiobooks or direct from the publisher.

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What Richard Dolan Got Wrong about the Spanish "USO" of 939 CE

7/1/2025

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This is a bit of a fun one since it casts everyone in an unusual role. Jeff Knox posted on social media a medieval so-called “USO” incident I wasn’t familiar with, along with an excerpt from ufologist Richard Dolan’s new book A History of USOs: Unidentified Submerged Objects, Vol. 1, released earlier this year. In it, Dolan gives the story and then offers a skeptical (or, rather, rationalized) version of the story that goes in an unexpected direction for a talking head from Ancient Aliens. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that Dolan, unfamiliar with the source texts or prior literature, actually went too skeptical in his analysis.

Here's how he gives the story:

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Rabbi Who "Proved" God Wrote the Bible Says He Found Moses's Autograph ... Maybe

In Brief: The New York Times Lets Diana Pasulka Spread UFO Mystification

In Brief: Ross Coulthart Says He Will "Call Out" Senators Who Hide UFO Truths

Piers Morgan Asks If Debunking Bad Pyramid Ideas Is Racist Against “White Guys”

In Brief: Avi Loeb Teases Discovery of New Alien Spaceship, But It's Just a Comet

Movses Khorenatsi and the Sibyl of Berossus

The Forgotten Legend of How Semiramis Built the Egyptian Pyramids

On the Doomed Lovers of Queen Semiramis

"Jimmy" Audiobook Now Available!

What Richard Dolan Got Wrong about the Spanish "USO" of 939 CE

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