Blog Archives

I Finally Finished Indexing

10/17/2019

Truth be told, it’s been a bit of slow week in the world of pseudohistorical zaniness. At the end of the month To the Stars will launch the new volume in Tom DeLonge’s and Peter Levenda’s God, Man and War series, War, but I don’t imagine they’ll be sending me one. As I write this on Wednesday evening, I just finished proofreading and indexing my Mound Builder book—which took me longer than expected and was much more work than I had anticipated. The older I get and the more responsibilities I have, the harder it is to cram several extra hours of work into each day. When I got close to the end, I decided to just take the day and push through to get it done. I wrapped it up Wednesday morning and then spent the afternoon formatting the final document, which I sent in to the publisher just before close of business yesterday. To be frank, I’m tired and decided to take the day to decompress before I resume work trying to push out the last few pages of my pyramid legends book.

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Steven Pinker Says Historians "Historicize Everything" and Hate Science

10/16/2019

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For a few minutes, I thought I would write a lengthy analysis of Steven Pinker’s recent Twitter rant in which the Harvard psychologist and popular writer alleges that historians of science are biased against science and are actively working to destroy science’s claim to objectivity by forcing people to read about the history of science rather than its conclusions.

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Whitley Streiber Confirms "To the Stars" Alien Metal Is Just 1990s-Era "Art's Parts"

10/15/2019

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I am finally approaching the end of proofreading and indexing for my Mound Builder book. I have only a few dozen pages left to go, and I can’t say the end is coming a moment too soon. I hate indexing so much. I am also astonished by some of the strange editing changes that creep into a text as it is formatted and typeset. I had to go back to my manuscript a couple of times to double-check when a word choice just struck me as wrong. My words tend to have a certain rhythm, and an unusual word strikes a discordant note that I can hear in my head. I think they were trying to save space to align the text, but in a couple places it changed the meaning. The joys of editing!

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E16 "The Alien Brain"

10/11/2019

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At some point in the 2000s, the handbook of cable TV production got swapped with a bottle of shampoo, and producers have been following the dictum of lather, rinse, and repeat ever since. How else to explain why In Search Of this week is devoting a second episode to the old chestnut of the Loch Ness Monster, which the show’s original version first covered in 1977? Or how Ancient Aliens has managed to spin its original two-hour pilot into fourteen seasons of adding nothing significant to those initial hours? Occasionally, though, Ancient Aliens tries to rope in some new material, and then we get an episode like this, where they are basically just digging out whatever discredited old paranormal crap they can find to fill air time. It’s not the first time they’ve discussed telekinesis, precognition, and other various ESP claims, but it is a case where they have leaned farther than usual into paranormal “mysteries” that have little to do with ancient astronauts. I can’t help but remember that their frenemy Hal Puthoff over at To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science devoted much of his career to exactly this question, spending his life hunting for psychic powers and their putative connection to space ghosts.

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Ex-Skinwalker Ranch Employees Reveal Underwhelming Supernatural Experiences

10/10/2019

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At Mysterious Universe, Nick Redfern alleges that writing about the supernatural induces supernatural experiences in both author and reader. “We’re talking about occult backlash, synchronicities of the jaw-dropping kind, weird phone-calls, and ominous runs of bizarre bad luck that appear to have been orchestrated by things that are foul and malignant.” He also said he had bad dreams. This isn’t really much by way of supernatural power. It sounds more like scaring yourself silly and then interpreting your everyday experiences through a paranormal lens. He cites, however, the case of Buffy Clary, who was twice by lightning just for reading about the Djinn. Imagine if she had watched the Netflix series. Of course, there is no evidence given to support the claim, nor any connection to the Djinn. “Yes, some books really can be dangerous,” Redfern writes. Well, I’ve read, written about, and even translated some of the most “dangerous” books, including those that explicitly have curses written in them for anyone who dares read or share them. I even translated the real-life inspiration for the forbidden Necronomicon, the Akhbar al-zaman, which is also a book about Djinn, Nephilim, giants, etc. So far, the paranormal entities haven’t much cared.

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Frank Joseph and the Conference of the Crystal Skull

10/9/2019

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I am indexing again today, but I wanted to share with you this post from the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society annual meeting in Michigan this week. In the picture, you’ll see the former head of the American Nazi Party, Frank Joseph, posing with a fake crystal skull that he and his friends believe dates back to the Atlantean age. For all the Indiana Jones cosplaying that you see in the world of pseudoarchaeology, it’s rare to see a real-life Indiana Jones villain. I think, though, that the movies got a bit mixed up. I’m pretty sure the communists were the villains in the Crystal Skull movie.

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Vandal Damages "America's Stonehenge" Cider Press Known as "Sacrificial Table"

10/8/2019

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I am really starting to feel the pressure of trying to proofread and index one book while writing a second as the deadlines for both loom. I find indexing and proofreading to be slow-going, particularly squeezing it in among other work. I hate to do it, but I’m going to have to rely on computer assistance to index proper nouns to save time. It’s problematic because it can introduce mistakes due to spelling and/or random similar names that then have to be manually reviewed, but it’s the only way to get through the book quickly enough given the minuscule time given to me. I have to learn to write books that are less fact-dense so each page has fewer indexable terms.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E15 "The Alien Mountain"

10/4/2019

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After a brief hiatus, Ancient Aliens returns to goose the ratings for the new season of In Search Of, which aired immediately afterward and covered the decidedly not au courant hunt for the Loch Ness Monster. I mean, seriously: The original In Search Of… did a Loch Ness Monster episode in 1977 and there is actually less evidence for it now than there was back then thanks to the exposure of hoaxes. Anyway, Ancient Aliens is also airing simultaneously with its stars’ participation in Alien Con Dallas. The first Alien Con was an event, and early outings even garnered coverage in the New York Times. But in a case of diminishing returns, each subsequent iteration has become less noteworthy. At this point, it is basically the Antiques Roadshow for the fantasy-prone, or, perhaps more charitably, Comic Con for people who find comics a little too literary and deep. All of this is a long way around saying that Ancient Aliens is airing more as a piece of a corporate marketing strategy than because it has anything at all to say. Well, and it also helps the ancient astronaut theorists score free vacations on History’s dime.

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To the Stars Academy Pays Premium Price for Metamaterial -- to Tom DeLonge

10/3/2019

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While I am still occupied indexing my new book, I have time for just a brief update on the latest goofball antics from To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which come to us courtesy of Keith Basterfield, who has read through TTSA’s latest SEC filing, which was posted to the SEC website this week. In the filing, TTSA announced that the so-called alien “metamaterials” that it claimed to have acquired over the summer were in fact purchased from none other than the company’s own founder, Tom DeLonge himself, for $35,000. The chunk of metal appears to be similar to (if not the same as) the collection known as “Art’s Parts,” which were sent to the late Art Bell decades ago. Metal from that collection was tested in the 2000s and determined to most likely be industrial waste from here on Earth. But now trash like that is worth $35,000!

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Is Payton Hobart from Netflix's "The Politician" Too Unrealistic? Not Really. I Used to Be Him

10/2/2019

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Last week, Netflix debuted producer Ryan Murphy’s new satirical dramedy The Politician, which tells the story of a high schooler named Payton Hobart (Ben Platt from Dear Evan Hansen) who will stop at nothing to win the student government presidency as part of a thirty-year plan to reach the presidency of the United States. Subsequent seasons will chart his progress to the White House. The series produced polarizing reactions, with many major critics arguing that the show is a tonally inconsistent mess anchored by a protagonist whose unlikable, over-mannered persona was unrealistic and off-putting. Willa Paskin of Slate, for example, called Payton not a real person but “a mannered cartoon of one.” TV Guide’s Matt Roush called him “a chilly antihero it's hard to muster much empathy for,” and “more robot than human.” I think that these critics are wrong, and as someone who was basically that person in high school, I can speak to where they err.

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