Blog Archives

Review of "Odysseus Returns," a PBS Quest to Find the Tomb of Odysseus

8/31/2024

Promotional image for "Odysseus Returns" featuring Makis Metaxas (PBS)

This week, PBS presented Odysseus Returns, a documentary following the three-decade quest of “amateur historian” Makis Metaxas as he attempts to convince the world that Odysseus was real, that Homer’s island of Ithaca was in fact the neighboring island of Kefalonia in northwest Greece, and that he had seen both the tomb of Odysseus and the Greek hero’s bones. It’s a tall order for a ninety-minute film, and I was disappointed that the somewhat meandering documentary presents only one side of the argument, leaving the audience with the impression that not only is Metaxas right but that the Greek government and archaeologists are conspiring to prevent Odysseus’ tomb from being identified. So much does the film endorse Metaxas’s perspective that PBS affixed a disclaimer to the beginning of the documentary noting that the film’s claims are not the views of the Greek government. Typically, such as disclaimer says something like “not necessarily,” implying some wiggle room, but this one is simply “not.”

38 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E18: “The Linda Moulton Howe Files”

8/30/2024

9 Comments

Continuing this season’s new effort to repackage old material by recasting it as biographies of ancient astronaut theorists, this episode follows the life and career of Linda Moulton Howe. If much of this episode seems familiar, it’s probably because the show has presented all of this material before and has profiled Howe’s life and career several times before. For example, a 2015 episode on crop circles contained a segment tracing Howe’s initial conversion from a young television news reporter to alien enthusiast when she became obsessed with crop circles. Similarly, a 2014 In Search of Aliens spinoff episode offered a description of Howe’s career, as did its 2020 recycling on the Ancient Aliens mothership, where the show added in Howe’s involvement with Art’s Parts. Other notable repeats include a 2019 episode about Howe’s “investigation” of aliens in Antarctica and of course last year’s episode on Howe’s efforts to prove the government is hiding a massive ancient pyramid in Alaska.

9 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E17: “Egypt’s Giant Tombs”

8/23/2024

24 Comments

So long ago that everyone eventually forgot the story had to be invented, early Christians claimed that the monstrous, seemingly supersized animal-headed gods depicted on the walls of Egyptian temples were the infamous Nephilim of Genesis 6, understood to be giants, much as pagan writers had speculated that the carvings represented the Titans. Due to the influence of the Book of Enoch, Late Antique Christians believed Egypt to have been the home of the Watchers and the Nephilim, whom Enoch visited in the far deserts, a claim the monk Annianus seemingly placed in his now-lost fifth-century world history. Stories spread in medieval times that Moses had slain a giant in Egypt whose body became a bridge over the Nile. Islamic writers spoke vaguely of two races of Egyptian giants, the native descendants of Cain (i.e. Nephilim) and a branch of the family from Arabia, called the ’Ādites, who invaded under Shaddad ibn ’Ād and built pyramids. However, Muslim writers, insisted, Egypt’s native Christians, the Copts, denied that the ’Ādites had ever conquered Egypt.

24 Comments

Review of "Imminent" by Luis Elizondo

8/20/2024

27 Comments

IMMINENT: INSIDE THE PENTAGON’S HUNT FOR UFOs
Luis Elizondo | William Morrow | August 2024 | 304 pages | $29.99

Memoir, as a literary genre, sits somewhere between autobiography and creative writing, often sacrificing strict accuracy for deeper emotional truths. At its best, memoir can reveal the inner life behind the façade of an individual. A great memoir cuts deep, revealing the innermost secrets, and the dark parts of the soul, that make a person who they are. A bad memoir is an exercise in self-aggrandizement, begging the reader to agree with the author’s awesomeness. Luis “Lue” Elizondo’s Imminent is not a good memoir. Others will pick apart its factual foundations (nothing in the book would qualify as scientific evidence) and hold up his firehose of UFO lore to specific scrutiny, but I want to talk about his book as a piece of literature and how it fails both as art and as a piece of persuasive UFO propaganda.

27 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E16: “The Teachers”

8/16/2024

9 Comments

After twenty seasons, it took me a bit by surprise that Ancient Aliens had never done an episode dedicated solely to aliens teaching humans science, culture, and spirituality. It’s certainly not because they’ve never covered the topic before, though most prominently in the year before I started reviewing the show. Early episodes from seasons 1 and 2 such as “The Visitors” (S01E02) and “Gods and Aliens” (S02E02) covered much of the same material, and references to aliens teaching humans pepper any episode that actually remembers this show is called “Ancient” Aliens and not UFO, Conspiracy Theory, and Popular Astronomy Review. Nevertheless, for a show that has leaned so heavily into aliens as life coaches and spiritual guides, I was taken a little aback that they hadn’t done this topic before.

9 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E15: “Jacques Vallée: UFO Pioneer”

8/9/2024

21 Comments

I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I don’t really like Jacques Vallée. For most UFO fans, he is an éminence grise whose stature as a philosopher of ufology has made him a respected thinker and eternal consultant for the federal government on UFOs. But, for me, he’s a sloppy scholar who coasts by on a French accent and ambiguous verbiage that allows readers to project their own beliefs onto his words. A decade ago, I went through the “cases” of ancient and medieval UFO sightings he had published in Wonders in the Sky (2009), many of which had previously appeared in his classic book Passport to Magonia (1969), and I found a collection of erroneously translated, deceptively edited, and ignorantly misunderstood material that he had long passed off as serious scholarship simply because most ufologists can’t read ancient languages. (For example, Vallée once claimed Charlemagne ordered UFO witnesses put to death; instead, he ordered the “reform” of “weather-magicians.”) Vallée’s more recent support for the ridiculous Trinity hoax—which made it all the way into Congressional legislation on Vallée’s reputation—only confirmed my opinion.

21 Comments

Review of "Odysseus Returns," a PBS Quest to Find the Tomb of Odysseus

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E18: “The Linda Moulton Howe Files”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E17: “Egypt’s Giant Tombs”

Review of "Imminent" by Luis Elizondo

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E16: “The Teachers”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E15: “Jacques Vallée: UFO Pioneer”

Author

Newsletters

Categories

Terms & Conditions

Archives