Blog Archives

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E09: “The Legacy of J. Allen Hynek”

8/29/2025

Sigh. We’re back again—if you can say that, since Ancient Aliens has only aired two original (non-clip-show) episodes this entire calendar year. Ancient Aliens returns from a five-month hiatus with a new episode devoted to the life and legacy of J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who became the face of Project Blue Book’s UFO debunking efforts before veering off into the weeds to become a UFO advocate. Regular reader will remember that Hynek was close friends with Jacques Vallée and with him developed the hypothesis that UFOs were interdimensional poltergeists. While this was no secret—Hynek stated it in a speech and published it with Vallée in a book—Hynek publicly downplayed this conclusion in order to seem more credible and serious when he claimed UFOs were real and extraterrestrial, so it is no surprise that Ancient Aliens prefers the public image to the actual man.

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Graham Hancock Posts New Video Attacking So-Called "Debunking Industry"

8/28/2025

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Graham Hancock posted a new video to his official YouTube channel today in which he attempts to “debunk the debunking industry” by accusing archaeologists of working to enforce dogma that prevents alternative ideas from getting a fair shake. The idea that there is a “debunking industry” is laughable, given that (a) debunking pays nothing and (b) the amount of misinformation grossly outweighs the amount of accurate information across the popular press, cable TV, and social media. Hancock spent the majority of the presentation, however, complaining specifically about archaeologists John Hoopes and Flint Dibble, to the point of appearing, dare I say, obsessed with them.

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Getting to the Bottom of Jimmy Corsetti's Göbekli Tepe Olive Tree Conspiracy

8/28/2025

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Many of my readers have likely encountered social media pseudohistory gadfly Jimmy Corsetti’s claim that archaeologists were negligent about olive trees that were planted atop Göbekli Tepe prior to the Turkish government seizing the land and these trees have damaged the ruins still buried beneath the ground. Corsetti has hammered this claim across the media for months, leading to a conspiracy theory that archaeologists purposely allowed the trees to damage the site, either through malice or incompetence that only the heroic Corsetti could expose. It’s worth putting on record that Corsetti’s conspiracy theory is based on a mistranslation he has never checked against the original.

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Read My New Piece on the GOP's Attack on the Smithsonian in "The New Republic"

8/21/2025

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My new piece for The New Republic out today looks at the super-weird origins of the Right's hatred of the Smithsonian, tying in the Enola Gay, Bible Giants, the History Channel, and racism. I also take a moment to point out the dark side of Rep. Eric Burlinson's close connection to Timothy Alberino and the "Nephilim hunters."

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Review of History’s Greatest Mysteries S06E20 “Lost Places of the Old Testament”

8/20/2025

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I’m not much of a fan of History’s Greatest Mysteries, Laurence Fishburne’s History Channel series that rather pompously recycles stories familiar from History Channel series going back to History’s Mysteries (which launched in 1998) and sister channel A+E’s earlier versions like Ancient Mysteries—all the way back, indeed, to In Search of… from the 1980s. I tuned in to S06E20, which aired Monday, because it promised to explore whether locations found in the Hebrew Bible have archaeological evidence of their existence. It was, let’s say, a bit of rough going that left me feeling like I just watched a commercial trying to sell me on converting to a kind of fundamentalist Christianity that somehow dispensed with all that God-and-Jesus stuff.

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Rep. Eric Burlinson Wants to Find the Smithsonian's Bones of Bible Giants

8/14/2025

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UFO-believing Christian congressman Eric Burlinson (R-Mo.) suggested that as a member of the House Oversight Committee, he could open an investigation into claims that the Smithsonian is hiding the bones of Bible giants. Burlinson, who spoke about his belief in Nephilim at a Nephilim conference this summer, credited Christian podcaster and gigantologist Timothy Alberino with radicalizing him to believe in the giant bone conspiracy, a popular but false belief among evangelical Christian extremists who oppose the evolutionary theory.

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A New Video Asks: How Bad Is Graham Hancock at Research? Worse Than You Know

8/13/2025

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Last week, the Veritas et Caritas YouTube channel posted a video exploring reasons Graham Hancock is bad at research and calling out Dan “Dedunker” Richards for his defense of Hancock’s bad research. The video is worth a watch, but I want to quibble a bit with the complaint that Hancock is at fault for citing Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries on the Incas in his discussion of whether Moctezuma believed that Cortez was the returning “white god” Quetzalcoatl.

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Trump Administration to Review Smithsonian Exhibits for Ideological Purity

8/12/2025

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The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump Administration will begin "reviewing" Smithsonian exhibits under a new Orwellian policy that will see the executive branch impose the president's "interpretation" of history onto the Smithsonian museums, which operate under charter and are not formally a part of the U.S. government. Trump officials said they would withhold funding unless the Smithsonian participated in a plan to align their exhibits and their collections with the president's stated goals of ending support for diversity and removing "divisive" content.

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Comet Research Group Claims New Evidence of Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

8/9/2025

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A new scientific paper from the Comet Research Group claims to have found evidence that a comet hit the Earth around 12,800 years ago, causing the Younger Dryas Ice Age. The peer-reviewed study, published August 6 in the journal PLOS One, claims that iron and silica microspherules were found in ocean floor sediment cores in Baffin Bay, along with an unusually high amount of platinum, all of which the researchers determined were likely induced by a comet strike. They used what they described as “a novel application of single-particle inductively coupled plasma time-of-flight mass spectrometry” to reach their conclusions, and the article devotes much of its space to explaining and arguing for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis rather than reporting on the findings.

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In Brief: Scott Wolter Preps New Book about (Fake) Medieval Journals

8/6/2025

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I should start today by acknowledging the passing of John Ward, the National Geographic Explorer and Explorers Club Fellow who excavated in Egypt with his wife, Dr. Marial Nilsson. Readers with long memories will remember Ward as an eccentric figure from a decade ago who tried sell a bizarre TV pilot called History Trippers during the heyday of cable pseudohistory shows, promoted psychic powers and dowsing, and favored fringe pseudohistory. I can’t say I had heard or thought much about him over the last decade, which he spent doing more legitimate archaeological work with his wife, but I am sorry to learn that he is no longer with us.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E09: “The Legacy of J. Allen Hynek”

Graham Hancock Posts New Video Attacking So-Called "Debunking Industry"

Getting to the Bottom of Jimmy Corsetti's Göbekli Tepe Olive Tree Conspiracy

Read My New Piece on the GOP's Attack on the Smithsonian in "The New Republic"

Review of History’s Greatest Mysteries S06E20 “Lost Places of the Old Testament”

Rep. Eric Burlinson Wants to Find the Smithsonian's Bones of Bible Giants

A New Video Asks: How Bad Is Graham Hancock at Research? Worse Than You Know

Trump Administration to Review Smithsonian Exhibits for Ideological Purity

Comet Research Group Claims New Evidence of Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

In Brief: Scott Wolter Preps New Book about (Fake) Medieval Journals

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