Blog Archives

Avi Loeb Teams Up with Lue Elizondo and Chris Mellon to Hunt UFOs

10/30/2021

Avi Loeb made quite the splash when he claimed to have scientific evidence that an interstellar object was actually a piece of alien technology, and he got a free pass from the mainstream media as he steadily pushed into the fringe of ufology. He headlined this year's ancient astronaut conference Contact in the Desert alongside lunatics and racists like Erich von Däniken, and he started a project at Harvard to hunt UFOs with the explicit aim of trying to prove some of them were craft from other worlds. As a reward, he is speaking at the National Cathedral next week on a panel with the Director of National Intelligence and the administrator of NASA on the future of humanity in space and how UFOs will impact our religious ideas--you know, science. Surely, we want an astronomer with a fetish for existentialism and high government officials (seriously: the DNI?!?) speculating about aliens and religion. Now Loeb is thumbing his nose at science and reason yet again.

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Jacques Vallée and George Knapp Discuss Their Wacky New Books

10/22/2021

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Fresh off his cameo appearance this week as a newscaster on CSI: Vegas, paranormal journalist George Knapp published an interview with paranormal investigator Jacques Vallée in which the two discussed the topic of their mutual interest—self-publishing badly written, bonkers books about investigating supernatural UFO mysteries. Both Knapp and Vallée recently put out their own books, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon and Trinity: The Best Kept Secret, respectively, both alleging to reveal secrets about UFOs and their connection to government investigations of the paranormal. Oddly enough, Knapp chose not to disclose in the interview or the accompanying article that Vallée served on the board of the organization that investigated Skinwalker Ranch, or that Knapp wrote a book about said ranch at the behest of, and with the support of, their mutual friend, Robert Bigelow.

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Repetitive UFO News Conference Tries to Frighten over Half-Century-Old Incidents

10/20/2021

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I feel like I should say something about the press conference held at the National Press Club yesterday in which several very old men shared familiar stories alleging that UFOs deactivated American nuclear missiles in the 1960s. But what, really, is there to say about it? The press conference, similar to one that UFO researcher Robert Hastings held at the same venue in 2010 to promote his 2008 book about UFOs and nukes, included some of the same people who gave the same accounts in 2010, including Robert Salas, who has spent decades alleging that he witnessed a UFO deactivate missiles in Montana in 1967. Salas arranged this week’s news conference but offered nothing new beyond attempting to link events from 1967 to the more recent Navy videos of blurry blobs alleged to represent superior technology.

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New Book from the Bigelow Circle Alleges Lue Elizondo Claims Psychic Powers

10/12/2021

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This week, three of the members of Robert Bigelow’s circle of hacks, flacks, and crackpots self-published a book intended to set the record straight about the Pentagon’s involvement in the investigation into the alleged paranormal mysteries of Skinwalker Ranch. Skinwalkers in the Pentagon: An Insiders’ Account of the Secret Government UFO Program arrived on Amazon Sunday with little fanfare but carrying an endorsement from former senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.). James T. Lacatski is credited first, but co-authors Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp have names familiar to anyone following the governments bizarre involvement with supposed supernatural shenanigans, and now these three Bigelow-adjacent advocates of the occult secrets of UFOs want to set the record straight about just what the Pentagon funded. Knapp published an article about it this week.

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A Medieval Italian Chronicle Might Offer Insight into the Zeno Hoax

10/10/2021

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Over the summer, Paolo Chiesa published an article in Terrae Incognitae describing a passage in a medieval Italian chronicle briefly mentioning the land west of Greenland which the Norse had named Markland, and it made the rounds of online news sources a couple of weeks ago. Chiesa said that this passage, from around 1340 CE, is the oldest mention of North America known from the Mediterranean region. On its own, this is not earth-shattering news since the northern European peoples had been speaking of these lands since Adam of Bremen described Vinland around 1035 CE. But it does have interesting implications for the notorious Zeno Narrative and its role in fringe history’s elaborate narrative about Henry Sinclair learning of and visiting North America.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E07: "Top Ten Alien Artifacts"

10/8/2021

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Once again this week, Ancient Aliens is devoting an hour to clips of past episodes arbitrarily arranged into a top-ten list. Audiences have noticed, and ratings for the series have fallen. Last week, Ancient Aliens attracted only 674,000 live-plus-same-day viewers, down nearly a third from last season’s average. This number is still much larger than most other non-news programs airing on Fridays—AMC’s History of Horror, for example, had only half as many viewers—but the audience exodus from Ancient Aliens indicates that even the notoriously loyal Ancient Aliens audience is less tolerant of reruns that it is of the usual policy of rehashing in slightly different words.

This week, my son came down with a virus, which left us taking care of a sick kid while trying to arrange doctor visits and COVID testing so he could qualify to return to school. He’s fine now, and the COVID test came back negative, but it’s been an exhausting week, so, like last week, I am simply going to list the topics covered and, where I remember the source, direct you to my prior reviews.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E06 "The Top Ten Alien Encounters"

10/1/2021

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As Ancient Aliens grows older and lazier and struggles to produce new episodes during the coronavirus pandemic, despite the show traditionally featuring little more than talking head interviews intercut with off-the-rack b-roll, we’ve been getting more and more episodes made up of rerun segments from earlier seasons. So far, half of season 17’s episodes have been “top 10” lists of segments from past episodes. Tonight’s theme is “Top 10 Alien Encounters.” Since there is nothing new in the episode and Ancient Aliens is putting no effort into their show, I have no interest in wasting my time reviewing segments I’ve discussed in my reviews over the past decade. Therefore, for the sake of completion, I will list the “encounters” the show covered and direct you to my archives for previous discussion of them.

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