Blog Archives

Scott Wolter Claims to Have Absolute Proof of Templars in America, Says He Won't Share It Until Someone Gives Him a New TV Series

9/30/2017

Since the last of former television personality Scott Wolter’s TV shows went off the air, I haven’t paid a lot of attention to his musings, mostly because without a cable TV platform, he’s just another cranky voice on the internet with an amateur blog and little to say. That’s probably why it’s taken me two weeks to notice that Wolter appeared on Jimmy Church’s Fade to Black radio program, as he does frequently. I find these appearances to be exhausting because the show is three hours long, and who has that kind of time to listen to someone rant? If I wanted to hear three hours of crankiness and complaint, well, I have an infant son, so I already get enough of that. But now Wolter says he is plotting ten years of new television content, which I suppose means that I should pay at least some attention.

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L. A. Marzulli Blasts YouTube for Not Monetizing His Videos, Claims Horny Fallen Angels Are Seducing Men into Transgender Identity

9/29/2017

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Earlier this week, the Express reported the exclusive news that Gaia.com has been making a ton of money off a fake mystery concocted from the mutilation of human corpses to feed the internet’s and cable TV’s obsession with ancient astronauts. Or, to be more exact, the Express reported that DNA tests on the so-called three-fingered Nazca mummies promoted on Gaia.com as evidence of alien contact with Earth confirmed that the bodies are human, or at least started out as real human corpses before they were manipulated to appear like stereotypical space aliens.

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Attack of the Nephilim! "Skeptic" Takes on Graham Hancock's Watchers, While Jim Vieira Explores Psychic Connections to Giants

9/28/2017

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This week eSkeptic and Skeptic published the final version of Mark J. Defant’s review of Graham Hancock’s Magicians of the Gods, an earlier draft version of which stoked Hancock’s ire in a radio debate featuring Hancock, Defant, and Sketpic publisher Michael Shermer on Joe Rogan’s podcast earlier this year. The review, while very good, represents one of the major problems I have had with skeptical activism: Graham Hancock published Magicians of the Gods almost exactly two years ago, and at this point the criticisms and the arguments lack a certain impact, largely because fringe history has already moved on (Hancock is working on a new book about North American “mysteries”) and anyone who might have stood to gain from reading the review has already read Magicians (or never will), and the damage has been done. That’s one reason that I worked my ass off to review the book in time for its initial release. Two years on, it has almost become moot. Almost.

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The Final Episode of MTV's "Teen Wolf" Brings to an End the "Twilight" Era

9/27/2017

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It’s funny to think that it’s been a full decade since I published my book Knowing Fear, my study of the development of the horror genre. (The book was released a few months ahead of its official 2008 publication date.) Time goes by fast, but it’s more amazing to think that I used to be so deeply enmeshed in the horror genre that I once wrote a whole book about it. Maybe it was the weight of the explosion of media over the past decade, or my waning enthusiasm about devoting my decreasing free time to intentionally seeking out horror, but I’ve found it harder and harder to keep up, or to care.

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Jason Reza Jorjani's Efforts to Expand Alt-Right to the Alt-White End in Predictable, but Satisfying, Failure

9/26/2017

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Fringe history, ancient astronauts, and UFOs have a long history with Nazis. A recent booklet explored how some of the earliest UFO researchers (who also wrote ancient astronaut material under the guise of ufology) were connected to Neo-Nazi groups. Jacques de Maheiu was a Vichy official who later headed a Neo-Nazi group and Miguel Serrano literally worshiped Hitler. Frank Joseph headed the American Nazi Party, and even Chariots of the Gods, officially credited to Erich von Däniken, was in reality largely rewritten and edited by Wilhelm Utermann, a Nazi author and editor who worked at the Nazi party’s official newspaper. It’s pretty much Nazis all the way down

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An Early UFO Mystery: Where Did Gen. Curtis LeMay Get His Ancient Astronaut Information in 1950?

9/23/2017

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Since there was no new episode of Ancient Aliens this week, I am left with a bit of space to fill. Here in Albany, we’re enjoying some unusual summerlike weather on this first weekend of fall. I will confess to feeling a bit lazy, and the fringe history crew seems to be unusually quiet this week. I guess I could write about David Wilcock’s recent claim that unknown forces attempted to murder him by cutting his brake lines, but then I’d have to discuss his claim that this was related to alleged UFO contactee Corey Goode’s allegation that these same forces are responsible for Child Protective Services investigating his admittedly unstable household—after all, he pretends that he spends half his time traveling from his living room to outer space while his kids are presumably sleeping upstairs. (Nothing resulted from the investigation, according to Wilcock, and both men allege that one of their many enemies made a false report to CPS as a malicious attack on Goode.) But the whole thing is just so sad in light of Wilcock’s discussions of his mental health issues that I do not feel comfortable giving this story too much space. Wilcock, for what’s it worth, also now claims that the Jewish world conspiracy tried to recruit him as a double agent against Goode, through the offices of the Rothschild Jewish world controllers. It just gets sadder and worse from there, and the folie à dieux of Wilcock and Goode two depresses me greatly.

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Former Head of Texas Board of Education Claims Greek Myths Are Really Misunderstood Bible Stories

9/22/2017

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Call it a case of motivated reasoning, if you will. Or maybe call it a case of opportunism married to capitalism. But whatever you think of Christian apologist and former chairman of the Texas Board of Education Robert Bowie Johnson’s merchandising motives, there is little to commend his half-assed, misunderstood idea that the ancient Greeks depicted Jewish mythological characters in their art. While it would be easy to simply dismiss Johnson’s entire thesis as the mad ramblings of Bible-drunk fundamentalist, his argument fails on a subtler level, by neglecting to include the actual research to help understand the real and complex relationship between Greek mythology and Near Eastern myths.

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My Effort to Learn the History of an Austro-Hungarian Imperial Envelope Seal Stamp

9/21/2017

35 Comments

So, you will remember Jason Reza Jorjani, the so-called alt-right “intellectual” who loudly pretended not to support Nazism. I read his book, Prometheus and Atlas, and identified not just fringe history themes (including ancient astronaut claims) but an underlying pattern of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent material in it. Now, the New York Times reports on a Swedish student’s encounter with Jorjani when he thought no one was looking. The Swedish student went undercover as a member of the alt-right and caught Jorjani making exactly the kind of statements that I knew that Nazi-loving weasel would make as soon as he thought that he was speaking only to a sympathetic ear:

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Jacques Vallée Discusses UFO Isotope Ratios and the Nature of Reality on "Grimerica"

9/20/2017

21 Comments

This morning the Daily Grail published an article describing an interview that writer Red Pill Junkie had with Jacques Vallée on Friday’s Grimerica podcast, and it was an embarrassing exercise in hero worship. RPJ, in fact, wrote that “I was just too 'starstruck' and intimidated by being in the presence of such a legend, anyway” to speak to him coherently. I swear I will not understand that. What I do understand is RPJ’s claim that his views on UFOs would change when “I would start rewatching the whole series of [Star Trek:] The Next Generation, available in its entirety on the Netflix platform.” The cross-pollination of science fiction and ufology, presence from the opening moments of the UFO era, is too well established to surprise

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Eight "Bros" Live as Roman Gladiators in ITV's Reality Show "Bromans"

9/19/2017

10 Comments

This season, Ancient Aliens has given one ancient astronaut theorist per week an episode spotlight. The talking head gets to go on an all-expenses-paid vacation to a tourist destination, and gets to be the featured on-location contributor discussing his favorite pet subject. While this might seem like a cute way to revitalize an aging franchise by shaking up the talking head formula a little bit, it is also an efficient way of squeezing more money out of the fringe history circus.

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<<Previous

Scott Wolter Claims to Have Absolute Proof of Templars in America, Says He Won't Share It Until Someone Gives Him a New TV Series

L. A. Marzulli Blasts YouTube for Not Monetizing His Videos, Claims Horny Fallen Angels Are Seducing Men into Transgender Identity

Attack of the Nephilim! "Skeptic" Takes on Graham Hancock's Watchers, While Jim Vieira Explores Psychic Connections to Giants

The Final Episode of MTV's "Teen Wolf" Brings to an End the "Twilight" Era

Jason Reza Jorjani's Efforts to Expand Alt-Right to the Alt-White End in Predictable, but Satisfying, Failure

An Early UFO Mystery: Where Did Gen. Curtis LeMay Get His Ancient Astronaut Information in 1950?

Former Head of Texas Board of Education Claims Greek Myths Are Really Misunderstood Bible Stories

My Effort to Learn the History of an Austro-Hungarian Imperial Envelope Seal Stamp

Jacques Vallée Discusses UFO Isotope Ratios and the Nature of Reality on "Grimerica"

Eight "Bros" Live as Roman Gladiators in ITV's Reality Show "Bromans"

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