Blog Archives

Marking the 70th Anniversary of James Dean's Death: His Final Days

9/30/2025

In commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of James Dean’s death, I am publishing an excerpt from my biography of James Dean, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean (Applause, 2024) on the final days of the Hollywood legend.

The last picture of James Dean, taken on the morning of his death.

0 Comments

James Lacatski Publishes Book with New List of Skinwalker Ranch Monster Sightings

9/29/2025

9 Comments

On Saturday, former Pentagon UFO-hunter James Lacatski published the third volume in the Skinwalkers at the Pentagon series, entitled New Insights: Inside the U.S. Government UFO Program. As with previous books in the series, this one is an amateur affair, from the awkwardly designed cover to the bizarre choice to open the book with a first line reading, “Welcome! Congratulations! and Thank You!” According to Lacatski, the book draws on official Defense Intelligence Agency documents related to the now-defunct AAWSAP investigation of Skinwalker Ranch that were subsequently cleared for publication.

9 Comments

Read My New TNR Piece: "The James Dean Deification of Charlie Kirk"

9/27/2025

2 Comments

Ahead of the 70th anniversary of James Dean's death, my new piece for The New Republic, "The James Dean Deification of Charlie Kirk," looks at the uncanny parallels between the personality cults surrounding Charlie Kirk and James Dean and, crucially, the important way they differ. Be sure to compare and contrast my rather sour take on Kirk's attempted deification as a far-right James Dean with Mark Whitaker's more laudatory piece in The Atlantic claiming Kirk will be the new Malcolm X.

Whitaker believes that Kirk will grow in stature and popular acceptability over time, as Malcolm X was, but I see some key building blocks missing from the creation of a true cult of personality--namely, the personality, but also the works of lasting substance that exist beyond the man's memory. Malcolm X was a powerful rhetorician and created a compelling personal mythology and image. His speeches are still studied today. James Dean, too, created a powerful and iconic image for himself, and he left behind powerful films still watched today. But Kirk does not have the substantive body of work, the distinctive image, or even the kind of rhetorical fireworks that would sustain interest over the long term.

2 Comments

Peter Thiel Delivers Bizarre Lecture on the Antichrist

9/26/2025

3 Comments

Billionaire conservative tech mogul Peter Thiel had once been interested in UFOs and ancient aliens, sponsoring a paranormal conference where ufologists and ancient astronaut theorists plied their trade. Now, however, he has traded secular monsters for religious ones and claims to seriously believe that Satan, demons, and the Antichrist are on the verge of seizing power. In a recent lecture, Thiel spoke about the Antichrist and claimed that government regulation of artificial intelligence technology will hasten Satan’s conquest of the Earth.

3 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E12 “The Abduction Files”

9/19/2025

9 Comments

Of all the genres of Ancient Aliens episodes, those focused on modern ufology are my least favorite. Those that focus on ancient history or mythology at least have the benefit of allowing for some meaty critical analysis by reviewing the original sources and artifacts and evaluating how the ancient astronaut theorists distort facts to create their claims. By contrast, ufology episodes tend to lack even the patina of argument and are instead dull exercises in listening to people relate their subjective experiences and claim them as fact.

This is not the first time Ancient Aliens has devoted an episode to alien abduction. Some notable examples include “Strange Abductions” from season five, “Alien Breeders” from season seven, “The Vanishings” from season nine, “The Returned” from season eleven, “The Taken” from season thirteen, and “The Chosen” from season twenty. I am not sure what more I can add to any discussion of abduction than I have already covered in these reviews.

9 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E11: “The Birdman Mystery”

9/12/2025

0 Comments

At the most basic level, the ancient astronaut theory is a form of euhemerism, the philosophy proposed by Euhemerus in the fourth century BCE which held that the wonders of mythology and the various divinities were corrupt and misunderstood retellings of the deeds of real people. Euhemerus himself tended to myths as masking very human truth—so, for him, the gods were simply human kings deified. However, his successors became increasingly fanciful in an attempt to take myths literally while eliminating the supernatural. Dionysius Scytobrachion, for instance, imagined that the Golden Ram that carried Phryxus and Helle through the air was a boat with a ram-shaped prow and the Golden Fleece the flayed skin of a man named Krios (Mr. Ram). Ancient astronaut theorists take this tendency in a sci-fi direction by attempting to be even more literal and find creatures—i.e. aliens—that can allow them to keep even more of the stories unchanged.

0 Comments

Third Congressional UFO Hearing Bores with Same Old Stories, Little Evidence

9/9/2025

14 Comments

In a mostly empty congressional hearing room today, five witnesses offered evidence-free stories about witnessing UFOs or hearing about other people’s experiences allegedly examining otherworldly artifacts. It was the third House UFO hearing since 2022, when David Grusch claimed the government had alien “biologics.” When Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) directly asked U.S. Air Force veteran Jeffrey Nuccetelli to name a piece of solid evidence, Nuccetelli straightforwardly admitted, “There is no evidence.” (He was trying to imply the government is hiding it all.) He then cited the current hearing as his evidence.

Dylan Borland testified that he witnessed a giant triangular UFO made of a “fluid” or “dynamic” material hovering 100 feet above him at a military base for fifteen consecutive minutes, though no one else on the base saw it and it went unrecorded by any instruments.

14 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E10 “The Volcano Factor”

9/5/2025

7 Comments

There is a secret myth about aliens and volcanoes whose revelation is apparently so sensitive that only the highest-ranking members of a controversial sect are allowed to hear of it. Millions of years ago, a space alien named Xenu brough billions of extraterrestrials to Earth in a spaceship shaped like a DC-8 airplane, affixed them to volcanoes, and then killed them all with H-bombs, releasing their souls to pester humans. Of course, this is the secret teaching of Scientology, in Operating Thetan Level III, so there is no chance that Ancient Aliens would risk the wrath of the alien gods’ lawyers by talking about the most notorious story of aliens and volcanoes on a show dedicated to … checks notes … aliens and volcanoes.

No, this episode is about public domain volcano myths and legends, along with a retread of the episode about why UFOs are attracted to mountains, rebranded with volcanoes.

7 Comments

In Brief: Congressional UFO Hearing Witness List Revealed

9/3/2025

4 Comments

The witness list for next week's House UFO hearing was released today, and it was underwhelming. Rep. Eric Burlison had promised that this hearing would feature witnesses who had "touched" the "bodies," but three of the four witnesses at the Sept. 9 hearing of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets are current or former military personnel who only claim to have seen a UFO. They are Jeffrey Nuccetelli, Dylan Borland, and Alexandro Wiggins. Wiggins claims that in addition to spotting a UFO on radar in 2023, his father also worked at Area 51. The fourth and highest profile "witness" is local news reporter, sometime Coast to Coast host, and UFO podcaster George Knapp, who has repeatedly claimed to have no direct knowledge of UFOs beyond what other people have told him. It's an open question what Knapp can possibly testify to, since (a) as a reporter he supposedly has already shared what he "knows" in public, in which case he has nothing new to say, and (b) if he has been withholding things, then he would be admitting that he has been lying to his audience for years or even decades.

4 Comments

Marking the 70th Anniversary of James Dean's Death: His Final Days

James Lacatski Publishes Book with New List of Skinwalker Ranch Monster Sightings

Read My New TNR Piece: "The James Dean Deification of Charlie Kirk"

Peter Thiel Delivers Bizarre Lecture on the Antichrist

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E12 “The Abduction Files”

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E11: “The Birdman Mystery”

Third Congressional UFO Hearing Bores with Same Old Stories, Little Evidence

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E10 “The Volcano Factor”

In Brief: Congressional UFO Hearing Witness List Revealed

Author

Newsletters

Categories

Terms & Conditions

Archives