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The Year in Review: 2020 in Ancient Mysteries, Modern Conspiracies, and Aliens

12/28/2020

For years now, I have ended each trip around the sun with a summary of the preceding twelve months in fringe history, space aliens, and the weird. Most years, these summaries run into the thousands of words because so much happened. This year, the COVID-19 pandemic and the American presidential election severely curtailed the number of extreme claims made about ancient history, as conspiracy theorists turned their attention toward disease and politics. Last year, I said I was ready for a long, difficult year to end, and now those look like the good old days. This year I published a new book and wrote two more, and I look forward to what I hope will be big things next year when publishers get a look at my newest manuscript. In the meantime, we can look back in sadness and anger.

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Big Names Leave "To the Stars" While Alien Claims Swirl Around Remaining Star

12/22/2020

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This week, I am finishing the last few pages of my book, and I am also on deadline for an article that a national magazine has asked me to write for next month. So, I will not be writing too much this Christmas week. However, I did want to note in passing the big goings on over at To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, where three of its big names abruptly quit to start their own competing UFO company. Lue Elizondo, Chris Mellon and Steve Justice all left the company, with Elizondo concerned that TTSA had focused too much on UFO entertainment and not enough on crashed flying saucer wreckage analysis.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E05 "The Forbidden Bible"

12/18/2020

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This week, the former director of the CIA from 2013 to 2017, John Brennan, appeared on a podcast to say that he was intrigued by the Navy UFO videos promoted by To the Star Academy of Arts and Science. He said that we cannot exclude the possibility that flying saucers are vehicles driven by beings from other worlds and that we must keep an open mind. He wasn’t speaking from official knowledge, only from his personal speculation about otherworldly life, conflating the scientific probability of life somewhere in the universe with the improbable idea that large numbers of such beings are visiting us to pose for blurry selfies and sodomize the unwary. This depressing speculation from a former high official helps explain why cable TV thinks the 927,000 weekly Ancient Aliens viewers are a desirable and powerful demographic of senior citizens (the vast majority of viewers are over 50) worth catering to.

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Scott Wolter and Richard Hoagland Accuse CIA, Aliens of Monolith Meme Conspiracy

12/14/2020

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On December 12, former America Unearthed host Scott F. Wolter appeared on Mars conspiracy theorist Richard Hoagland’s amateurish podcast The Other Side of Midnight. It was weird. Much of it was the same repetitive blather about Wolter’s greatest hits, particularly the Kensington Rune Stone, but listening to him try to discuss his ideas with a man who thinks the universe is filled with ancient alien ruins makes it an unusual exercise in mutual delusion.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E04: Giants of the Mediterranean

12/11/2020

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More than two hundred years ago, the naturalist Georges Cuvier published his Memoir Upon Living and Fossil Elephants in which he correctly explained that the skeletons reported around the Mediterranean region as those of a lost race of giants had, in fact, belonged to fossilized elephants. Nearly a century earlier, Sir Hans Sloane had drawn the same conclusion in a paper read before the Royal Society. In 1835, Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville examined the skeleton of the famed giant Teutobochus and discovered that it belonged to a mastodon, a truth that confirmed an assessment by Jean Riolan the Younger a century before. Hell, in 1827 Edmond Temple even watched a “giant” being excavated in Bolivia in the presence of men of science, and he gawked in wonder as they completely refused to believe it an Ice Age elephant, despite having tusks. I could list dozens of similar accounts and analyses. In fact, I have. The truth about “giants” has been known for centuries, but here we are watching Ancient Aliens party like it’s 1699.

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Mainstream Media Jump on Ex-Israeli Official's Familiar Space Alien Claims

12/9/2020

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I feel like I need to take note of the bizarre statement from former head of Israel’s defense ministry space directorate made recently alleging that the United States is touch with space aliens and that Donald Trump considered breaking the news before the election. Haim Eshed is 87 years old and currently promoting a new book about the cosmos. He served as the head of the space directorate from the early 2000s to 2010. Prior to that, he worked on Israel’s satellite program, beginning in 1980, and was one of the founders of Israel’s space agency in 1983.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E03 "The Galactic Keyhole"

12/4/2020

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What is there to say about this episode’s topic? Having previously aired episodes about triangles and circles, the show has now combined both into an episode about “keyhole” shapes, or a circle overlapping a triangle. More prosaically, the shape is formed when any two converging lines approach a circle. In a pinch, parallel lines will do. It should take no genius to see how ancient people might strike on the notion of intersecting a circle with a triangle or a rectangle, or why a causeway might lead to a circular enclosure. For Ancient Aliens, however, the very notion of shapes toddlers master at the age of two is a cosmic leap that could only descend from the stars. Whatever would they make of the fact that my three-year-old has mastered dodecahedrons? Oh, right. They did an episode about them, too.

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New Article Claims Military Has "Clear" Photo of Flying Triangle Rising from Ocean

12/3/2020

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As most of you probably know, Tim McMillan has an article in the new online news site The Debrief in which he outlines the continued Pentagon interest in the question of flying saucers, or "unidentified aerial phenomena" as they have been known among the military on and off for the past seven decades or so. The article, which is a bit shaggy and at times somewhat unclear, contains some new details about previously reported interactions between the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and lower-level staffers for the U.S. Senate:

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A Literary Echo Chamber: Did James Dean Actually Read Books?

12/1/2020

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After so much work and so much effort, it’s hard to believe that I am closing in on the end of my new book. As I come to the end, though, I have a few areas where I have to come to some decisions about how to present contradictory information. One particular question that keeps coming up revolves around the role that books played in James Dean’s life. I’ve mentioned this before, but the insistence in the literature that he didn’t actually read books sticks in my craw. I’m not sure why. It doesn’t really make a lot of difference, but the insistence against what seems to me to be plain fact bothers me. Since I can’t reconcile quite clearly opposed testimonials, I had to decide which to throw out.

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The Year in Review: 2020 in Ancient Mysteries, Modern Conspiracies, and Aliens

Big Names Leave "To the Stars" While Alien Claims Swirl Around Remaining Star

Review of Ancient Aliens S16E05 "The Forbidden Bible"

Scott Wolter and Richard Hoagland Accuse CIA, Aliens of Monolith Meme Conspiracy

Review of Ancient Aliens S16E04: Giants of the Mediterranean

Mainstream Media Jump on Ex-Israeli Official's Familiar Space Alien Claims

Review of Ancient Aliens S16E03 "The Galactic Keyhole"

New Article Claims Military Has "Clear" Photo of Flying Triangle Rising from Ocean

A Literary Echo Chamber: Did James Dean Actually Read Books?

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