Blog Archives

Review of Ancient Aliens S14E11 "The Trans-Dimensionals"

8/16/2019

Some weeks it is harder than others to find something new to say about Ancient Aliens, and clearly it has become difficult for them to find something worth blathering about for an hour as well. This week, the putative topic is “the trans-dimensionals,” beings that come to Earth from a parallel universe or from the fifth dimension, beyond those which are known to man. Oh, wait. I did it again. That’s part of Rod Serling’s intro to the Twilight Zone, which Ancient Aliens rips off for the current season’s intro. Having previously declared supernatural beings like angels and poltergeists to be space aliens, this time the same talking heads pivot to a new speculative idea, that the supernatural is really nothing but beings and forces from other dimensions leaking into our own. Perhaps only a cynic would point out that this is the operating hypothesis that Hal Puthoff of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and formerly of the U.S. government’s UFO and paranormal research efforts has advocated officially and unofficially since the 1970s, or that Ancient Aliens and Hal Puthoff are connected to each other through the History Channel, which pays their bills by funding both the current show and Puthoff’s Unidentified. No, they just happened to decide one day that ghosts and aliens happened to pop into Skinwalker Ranch from another dimension. Complete. Coincidence.

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Professor Claims Skeptics Just Want to Experience Belief Vicariously

8/16/2019

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In Aeon magazine, English professor Emily Ogden from the University of Virginia has a disturbing piece in which she argues that “debunking” is not a quest for truth but rather a scene in the grand drama of defending modernity against the alternative ways of knowing that populate our postmodern world. According to her published CV, this is the only subject to which she has devoted significant attention over the nine years since she earned her PhD in English, and, to be frank, her argument is a load of postmodern bunk with a small kernel of correct observation that goes too far toward demonstrating why those outside the academy are suspicious of its sophistry. You might expect me to disagree with the thesis that “debunkers” are biased performance artists, but instead I am going to disagree with the limited view she takes of epistemology as psychodrama.

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Review of Code of the Wild S01E03 "Lost Race of Giants"

8/15/2019

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This episode airs August 20.

On Tuesday, the Travel Channel aired the second episode of its series Code of the Wild, in which ex-hunting show hosts Casey and Chris Keefer investigate “mysteries” of history and the supernatural by running around outside and finding no proof. Tuesday’s episode ticked up a notch, scoring 437,000 viewers, but it still lost nearly 100,000 viewers from the Expedition Unknown rerun that preceded it. I did not review the second episode, which focused on a plane crash in Alaska, because it has little to do with my areas of interest, but next week’s episode is much more relevant. In “Lost Race of Giants” the interchangeable Keefer brothers travel to Ecuador to hunt what they hope is a lost colony of giants, though the legend of giants in South America comes to us from a biblically influenced Peruvian story of cannibal giants who had homosexual beach orgies, a story recorded in early colonial Spanish accounts. Most of the claims for giants in the Americas were influenced by European myths and beliefs.

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"Ancient Aliens" Ratings Are Falling While Paranormal Shows Draw Bigger Crowds

8/14/2019

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Even I would not have guessed that swapping out To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science’s show Unidentified for William Shatner’s The UnXplained would produce such dramatic results—for Ancient Aliens. The UnXplained has run even with or outpaced Unidentified, and in its latest outing it brought in 1.127 million viewers in live plus same day viewing, according to Nielsen figures. But the effect on Ancient Aliens, one of the History Channel’s tentpole series, has been devastating. Yet again this week, Ancient Aliens viewership came in well below one million viewers, racking up the show’s consistently lowest ratings for new episodes since it returned to the History Channel from H2 several years ago. (It previously hit a similar low during a special one-off showing on a Monday, when viewers weren’t aware it would be on.) This past week, just 865,000 people watched in live plus same day viewing.

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"Barnes Review" Claims "White Leadership" from Ancient Egypt Ruled the Maya

8/13/2019

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Originally, I planned to spend today’s blog post discussing Tom DeLonge’s recent interview in the British music magazine NME, in which he claimed to have secret knowledge that he has adjudged too dangerous for public consumption: “Believe it or not, we have very long conversations about what we’re going to talk about publicly, not because we don’t have the facts – but because people aren’t ready for the facts,” he said. This seems transparently false. If an aging rock star whose sum total of knowledge of UFOs, ancient history, and the occult is derived, by his own admission, from reading old paperback ufology books has experienced “the facts” and emerged unscathed, surely we mere mortals can hear whatever it is DeLonge thinks he knows (but probably doesn’t). I also thought it worth mentioning that Luis Elizondo, who two Pentagon spokespeople have denied served as the head of the Pentagon’s UFO tracking program, declined to provide evidence that he did head it when asked. “I don’t want to make anyone look foolish,” he said. Sure, that’s the reason.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E10 "Project Hybrid"

8/9/2019

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Each week I try to come up with something new to say about Ancient Aliens, a show that doesn’t try half as hard to deliver new content each week. But in past seasons, they at least tried to vary their topics from week to week. Now, in its dotage, Ancient Aliens latches on to a topic and just keeps cranking out variations on whatever currently obsesses its producers. Case in point: For three weeks now, the show has fixated on the question of aliens hybridizing humanity and engaging in cross-species genetic engineering. Granted, the first time it was subsumed under interest in which aliens were hybridizing people (Reptilians) and the second time it hovered behind a putative interest in the mechanics of hybridization. Now, the third time in three weeks, the focus is nakedly on Our Heroes’ supposed interest in why space aliens would want to modify our DNA. However, the real purpose of the episode is fairly clear: The History Channel pastes together similarly themed episodes into multi-hour Ancient Aliens Declassified specials, so the repeat subject matter makes it that much easier. They just used to space them out better so it wasn’t so much all at once. The audience might be catching on, too. For the past two weeks, the show’s ratings have fallen to season-low viewership under 900,000 per episode, a third below the series’ average. William Shatner’s UnXplained outdrew it both weeks.

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Friday Roundup: "Hunting Hitler" Star Blames Shootings on Feminization; Plus: Jimmy Church Comes Out Against To the Stars

8/9/2019

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Former U.S. military sniper Tim Kennedy appeared on Fox & Friends this week to make the case that mass shootings by right-leaning white males are not the result of political ideology, mental illness, or easy access to guns but are instead the result of the feminization of American society at the hands of a culture hell-bent on criminalizing masculinity. Kennedy said that “you have to let boys be boys” while wearing a flamboyant pink tie and flowery shirt. He suggested that ADHD medication feminizes boys, and he lauded past eras where insulting the sitting president would result in a violent confrontation to protect the honor of the delicate flower in the White House. I mention this because Kennedy is probably best known to my readers as one of the hosts of Hunting Hitler, the show that furthered a conspiracy that Hitler survived World War II and which identified a photograph of Moe Howard from the Three Stooges as an aging Adolf Hitler.

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Review of Code of the Wild S01E01 "El Dorado"

8/8/2019

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Code of the Wild is a new series taking the timeslot formerly occupied by America Unearthed on the Travel Channel. It follows a similar quest format in which “history buff” Casey Keefer and his brother, “technology enthusiast” Chris Keefer—they are actually outdoorsmen by trade and former hosts of a hunting show—travel to a remote location and hunt for an unexplained mystery. Some episodes will deal with (nonexistent) historical mysteries such as El Dorado and lost giants, while others will look for supernatural and cryptozoological mysteries. I will not be reviewing every episode since the show will not consistently focus on topics of special interest to this blog. Also, the show has very little to discuss. Viewers seem to agree: Only 365,000 people tuned in to the premiere episode, losing more than 150,000 viewers from its lead-in, a rerun of Expedition Unknown.

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Philosopher Compares UFO Investigation to the Hunt for the Holy Grail

8/7/2019

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The Los Angeles Review of Books has a lengthy and very positive review of D. W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic, the recent volume from the Oxford University Press in which the author investigates UFO culture and compares it to religious practice and belief. The review, by Samuel Loncar, a scholar of religion who describes himself as “healing the divide” between mind and matter, is overly credulous (he falls into the fallacy, for example, of thinking that government interest in a subject equates to its scientific importance and reality) but he makes a few interesting points that are worth discussing

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Martin Sweatman Claims Göbekli Tepe Was a "University" Teaching Civilization to Africa, Europe, and Asia

8/6/2019

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Look who’s back… again. Martin Sweatman wrote an academic journal article back in 2017 alleging that the ancient temple site of Göbekli Tepe contained carvings recording the impact of a comet at the end of the Younger Dryas and that its iconography is derived from the zodiac, a set of constellations first seen in the historical record 10,000 years later in Babylon. In December Sweatman expanded his claims into a full-length book, PreHistory Decoded, which he is promoting this month on Graham Hancock’s website. Despite the passing of the years, the quality of the evidence for Sweatman’s position has yet to grow more convincing since it remains founded on speculative (pseudo-)astronomy and the books of Andrew Collins and Graham Hancock, whom he praises by name as “closer to the truth” than actual scholars.

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