​Early this morning, NBC’s Today show broadcast a piece profiling “Christian researcher” Andrew Jones, who has long claimed that a natural formation in Turkey is Noah’s Ark. The “Today In-Depth” report, broadcast during the 7:30 ET half hour, saw international correspondent Keir Simmons deliver a one-sided live report from the Durupinar formation near Mount Ararat, claiming the site to be the Ark. “A group of American Christians believe they have new evidence that that is the wreckage of Noah's Ark here in these mountains,” Simmons told Today anchors Savannah Guthrie, Craig Melvin, and Carson Daly.

​Professors at the International Islamic University Malaysia are urging the school’s administrators to investigate associate professor Solehah Yaacob, claiming the lecturer in Arabic brought the school into disrepute by claiming that the Romans learned the art of shipbuilding from the ancient Malays in a social media video originally shot in 2022 but which went viral last month. “The credibility of our institution depends on the integrity, accountability and professionalism of its academic staff,” faculty wrote in a social media post last week.

​Giorgio Tsoukalos recently started referring to the December 2017 New York Times story that launched the current wave of Congressional UFO interest as “the Pentagon Papers,” and that wasn’t even the dumbest thing a fringe pseudo-historian said this past week. When I saw the Daily Mail headline promising “Astonishing New Evidence of Atlantis Reveals Advanced Civilization Preserved by Ancient Egypt’s Priests,” I will admit that I did not have terribly high hopes. It is the Daily Mail after all. But, truly, the article, available only to premium subscribers (a free version is archived here), boggles the mind. You will never believe that the Mail considers “new”—or pretends to, since it’s obvious that reporter Stacy Liberatore understands that it’s bullshit but had to write it anyway.

​My first and most influential book, The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, was published twenty years ago this coming week. If I felt old when I heard music from my college years playing in on the local “oldies” station, I feel doubly old realizing that I wrote my first book half a lifetime ago. I started writing it two years before its publication, when I was half as old as I am today. Soon enough, I will have been an author longer than I was not, and that still strikes me as absurd. Has so much time passed? It was so long ago that I sent out manuscripts on paper and received page proofs in a cardboard box marked up with a proofreader’s red pen!

Vance made the comments to the Post's Pod Force One podcaster Miranda Devine, who described herself as a "mad UFO-lunatic," a description Vance said also applied to him. Vance, a Catholic convert, added that he does not know the origin of UFOs but interprets them through a religious lens.

“Is it aliens or is it our guardian angel, or is it aliens or is it a not so guardian force that doesn’t care about us or in fact actively wishes us harm?” Vance continued. “I don’t know the answer to that question. What I try to do is I try to say my prayers, I try to be as good of a person as I can be and I try to do a good job. And, hopefully, that’s all I need to do.”

Religious believers have interpreted UFOs as demons or angels since 1947, when Kenneth Arnold reported that a pastor had warned him that flying saucers were demonic only days after his famous UFO sighting kicked off the flying saucer craze. Derived from the Biblical description of Satan as the "prince of the power of the air" (Ephesians 2:2), the idea of flying sky demons traces back to the Nephilim, whose souls, in the apocryphal texts like the Book of Enoch and Jubilees, were turned to demons and allowed to fly through the air to menace humanity.

​In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a controversy is brewing over the expansion of a local museum because of its connection to bizarre fringe theories. Last week tiny Baraga County, with a population of just 8,000 people, broke ground on a massive expansion of their local historical museum. The $2 million expansion would quadruple the size of the 2,200-square-foot museum is ostensibly in service of presenting the history of the local Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, as the L’Anse Indian Reservation of the Ojibwa is located within the county.

However, the 6,400-square-foot expansion is funded with a donation from Jay Wakefield, 82, and the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society, who stipulated that the museum must present the fringe theory that millions of pounds of copper is “missing” from Michigan and had been removed by Phoenicians in pre-Columbian times. (Readers with a long memory will remember that America Unearthed did an episode about this fictitious allegation back in 2013.)

​The expanded copper-themed section of the museum, which will feature dubious “artifacts” alongside genuine ones, will be named for Fred Rydholm, a former middle school teacher who wrote several books promoting fraudulent archaeological claims, including the Burrows Cave hoax and the “missing” Phoenician copper of Michigan. Rydholm wrote in a 1993 Ancient American article, reprinted in his book Michigan Copper: The Untold Story (2006), that Michigan had originally been inhabited by “the Caucasian race” and “another group of inferior culture, resembling the Indians of today” who fought each other until the extinction of the white race. (This, of course, is an early nineteenth century pseudohistorical fantasy.) But money talks, so Baraga is getting a museum of fake history named for a man with Victorian ideas about prehistoric race wars.

​This week, the New Yorker ran a lengthy piece asking whether it is possible to reconstruct the oldest myths. Writer Manvir Singh, an associate professor of anthropology at UC Davis and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, frames the investigation around the character of Edward Casaubon from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), a clergyman who sought to find the key to prove all world mythologies were related and descended from Christian truth. Singh teases the idea that such a key, minus the Christianity, has finally been found, but his article turned out to be a rather bland summary of fairly well-known studies that were already considered standard when I read and used them in writing my 2013 book Jason and the Argonauts Through the Ages.