Blog Archives

My Computer Is Dead

9/11/2019

I am sad to report that my computer is dead. The hard drive on the six-month-old machine gave out Sunday night, taking with it most of my multimedia files. Fortunately, my book files were backed up to the cloud, and older data are on my external hard drive, but I lost a lot anyway. Beyond this, the computer has to be returned to the manufacturer for repair under the terms of the warranty, so I am without a computer for the next week or more. This is going to make it very difficult to work, let alone to write, since I don’t do well trying to type on my tablet, and I can only borrow a computer for so long per day. As a result, my blog will likely be spotty and short until I have a working machine again.

Meanwhile, there was some good news for Ancient Aliens and its fans. After a month of near-record-low ratings, the series bounced back across the million-viewer line, though just barely, for its final summer broadcast. The show brought in 1.027 million viewers and even edged out The UnXplained, which had only 976,000 viewers, though the latter show outdrew the former in the all-important 18-54 demographic.

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Review of "Denisovan Origins" by Andrew Collins and Gregory L. Little

9/10/2019

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Denisovan Origins: Hybrid Humans, Göbekli Tepe, and the Genesis of the Giants of Ancient America
Andrew Collins and Gregory L. Little | 432 pages | Bear & Company | ISBN: 1591432634 | $21.60

Denisovan Origins is a team-up between Andrew Collins and Greg Little, two authors whose combined oeuvre includes wild and extreme claims about history ranging from Atlantis and space aliens to giants and Nephilim. Their new book carries an endorsement from no less than Graham Hancock, who claims that the book uncovers a “missing chapter” of American history that supplements “my own book, America Before.” Normally, a publisher will give me a copy of a book and I will write a detailed review that—and this should surprise no one—also serves the publisher’s purpose of promoting the book. I didn’t get an advance copy of Denisovan Origins, in large measure because Andrew Collins reportedly was upset that the publisher had sent out copies of his last book several months ahead of publication, and I am not terribly interested in giving too much space over to promoting a book that the author and publisher wanted to hide from me. But in the interest of the public good, I will look at it anyway, even though it contains very little new material that isn’t repeating claims from the authors’ earlier books

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E14 "The Nuclear Agenda"

9/6/2019

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After fourteen weeks of the current season of Ancient Aliens, I confess to feeling fatigued. Each week it becomes harder to muster the energy to find something new to say about the show, particularly when it tries so hard to avoid saying anything new itself. Fortunately, we have a month off before the next new episode. The topic of the current episode, “The Nuclear Agenda,” ought to be familiar to any viewer who has seen the show over the past five or six of its fourteen seasons. That’s because it has already covered this material many times over, in greater or lesser detail, and repeating it here doesn’t really do a lot to make it interesting. Worse, since the topic deals with the supposed interest of flying saucers in nuclear weapons after 1945, there isn’t much here to capture my interest in things ancient. All I could think is that this same show suggests that aliens have mastered wormholes and can channel world-destroying dark matter from other dimensions and have piezoelectric space lasers and can direct asteroids to kill whole species, and somehow they are worried about a nuclear bomb?

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Taking a Book-Writing Break; Plus: An Unexpected Clarification

9/4/2019

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I need to get serious about finishing my book on pyramid legends, so I am going to be taking some time off this week to try to get some writing done. It seems like a good time to do it. Code of the Wild will devote its remaining episodes to hunting modern treasures, so it is of no concern to me. Andrew Collins has a new book out, but the publisher didn’t share it with me or other reviewers, so it might as well not exist. (The publisher offered some crap called The Wonder of Unicorns for review instead.) I’m sure I’ll eventually acquire a copy, but I’m not going to waste money on it. Tom DeLonge tried teasing more claims about testing “metamaterials,” but the photos showed what looks like the same types of material previously tested and determined to be industrial waste. So, until Ancient Aliens airs on Friday, it seems that I am safe to take a couple of days off.

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The Strange Tale of Cursed Mummies and the Ship They Nearly Destroyed

9/3/2019

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As I am nearing the end of writing my book about legends of the pyramids (just two chapters left!), I have unfortunately come to more recent history, and this is the period when things get really weird—not just because of crazy legends that writers felt free to make up but also because of the completely bonkers misunderstandings of everything that turn even the simplest research questions into days-long quests into the heart of obscurity. This one vexed me for far too long, but it is too weird to let go.

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