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California Fires Destroy Priceless Theosophical Archive

1/9/2025

According to Prof. Wouter Hanegraff, writing on social media this morning, the apocalyptic fires devastating the Los Angeles area have completely destroyed the archives of the Theosophical Society, one of the largest collections of material on nineteenth-century esoteric beliefs in the world:

I was just told that the entire property of the Theosophical Society in Altadena near Pasadena has been completely destroyed by the fires in Los Angeles. This was the world's largest archive of Theosophical materials, including a library with 40.000 titles, the entire archive of the history of the TS, including ca. 10.000 unpublished letters, pertaining to HPB, the Mahatmas, W.Q. Judge, G.R.S. Mead, Katherine Tingley, and G. de Purucker, membership records since 1875, art objects, and countless other irreplaceable materials. The archives also contained works of Boehme, Gichtel, donations from the king of Siam including rare Buddhist scriptures, and so on.

News photographs showed the burned shell of the Theosophical Library Center, which housed the Society's collection. This is a devastating intellectual loss that only compounds the tragedy unfolding in California. Ironically, the first Theosophical Society headquarters in Altadena also burned to the ground in 1894.

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Tucker Carlson for UFO Czar? Plus: David Frum's Descent into Historical Revisionism

1/6/2025

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It seemed silly enough when, a few minutes before New Year’s, the Daily Star announced that UFO documentary producer Mark Christopher Lee wants singer Robbie Williams, who recently confessed to encountering a supposed flying saucer, to serve as the U.K.’s UFO ambassador. It was doubly silly that Lee made the recommendation via UFO journalist George Knapp, who is friends with Williams (!).

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"Ancient Aliens" Finds New Way to Recycle Old Episodes ... Again

1/1/2025

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The year that ended on December 31 marked a significant shift in American TV viewing habits. This past year, 75 of the 100 most-watched telecasts were sports, according to a Variety analysis, up from roughly half over the past several years. The only scripted series to make the list were CBS’s Tracker (fifteen times!) and the series finale of Young Sheldon. This reflects the broader trend of Americans watching significantly less traditional TV as they opt for social media videos. This, of course, creates a downward spiral as viewers watch less TV, are exposed to fewer promotions for new shows, and become less aware of what’s airing and thus watch less. This is a long way around me saying that since I cut my cable subscription last fall, I haven’t been as aware of the History Channel’s offerings and had no idea there was a new Ancient Aliens spinoff show—or that it had been airing for three months!

Ancient Aliens: Origins is a repackaging of the show’s early episodes with a new roundtable discussion featuring talking heads from the show at the beginning and the end. The first episode featured commentary from Giorgio Tsoukalos, William Henry, and Jason Martell. It was not a terribly exciting way to recycle the same material yet again. The material has previously been recycled as Ancient Aliens Declassified, Ancient Aliens: The Ultimate Evidence, etc., not to mention its reuse in other episodes of Ancient Aliens itself. The wraparound commentary was of no particular value, more self-congratulatory than informative. Narrator Robert Clotworthy, however, continued the show’s bold tradition of always being wrong by proclaiming that Ancient Aliens has been on the air “for nearly two decades.” The correct number (as of the launch of Ancient Aliens: Origins this past fall) was 14 years, 15 if you count the 2009 pilot special broadcast a full year before the first season.

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A Dull Slog: 2024 in Review

12/27/2024

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Each year, it’s a little more difficult to write a seemingly lighthearted review of the year in weird. This year was both personally and professionally a bit of a struggle as A.I. continues to eat away at my day job and the closure or collapse of a number of media outlets has made it more difficult place stories in paying publications. I lost my gig as a CNN Opinion columnist right when it was starting because CNN shuttered the entire division. As the year came to an end, about one-third of my income for the year remains outstanding from businesses that are dragging their feet on payments and have been since early fall. That has made it difficult to devote too much energy to caring about whatever old claims the usual cadre of kooks and weirdos are recycling on any given day.

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A Christmas Mystery: Hancock, Bauval, and the "Three Kings of Orion"

12/20/2024

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An interesting little Christmas mystery, inspired by a recent post Graham Hancock made on social media praising his “great friend” Robert Bauval and his Orion Correlation Theory from the 1990s. Back in 1997, when Hancock and Bauval teamed up for The Message of the Sphinx (a.k.a. Keeper of Genesis), the two authors presented a variant version of the Christmas carol “We three kings” that replaced “Orient” with “Orion,” rendering the first line as “We three kings of Orion are.” They provided no source, and for a long time I wondered if they had just made it up.

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Watch Me on Fox News!

12/19/2024

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It's been a quiet week as we head into the holidays. If you haven't seen it, Fox News Digital interviewed me about my book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, and the segment ran this week. Be sure to check it out here!

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Josh Gates's "Expedition Files" Covers King Tut, Sodom, and Stonehenge Badly

12/12/2024

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I don’t typically watch Josh Gates’s Discovery channel documentary series, and Expedition Files, the latest spinoff of Expedition Unknown, didn’t really appeal to me. Gates expends minimal effort standing in front of a screen and narrating segments comprised of b-roll and the occasional expert interview, and the topics are such hoary rehashes that In Search Of… had already done many of the same segments forty years ago. I decided to check out a couple of segments this week, however, because Gates touched on two topics that are extremely familiar to me.

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In Brief: A New Paper Again Rebuts the Younger Dryas Comet Impact Hypothesis

12/5/2024

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I appeared today on the Forgotten Hollywood podcast to discuss my new book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean. You can listen below, at this link, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Review of "Karahan Tepe" by Andrew Collins

11/29/2024

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Karahan Tepe: Civilization of the Anunnaki and the Cosmic Origins of the Serpent of Eden
Andrew Collins | Bear & Company | October 2024 | ISBN: 9781591434788 | $26

I will confess that when I learned Andrew Collins had recently published a new book on Karahan Tepe, an ancient site of enclosures and statues similar to and coeval with those of nearby Göbekli Tepe (collectively, the Taş Tepeler peoples, after the region where the sites are located), I was not particularly excited about reviewing it. Collins’s books are never wild enough to be fun to discuss, but they also fall just enough outside of the scholarly consensus to make it a slog to work through his reams of information, mostly accurate but outstripping the evidence.

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"Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean" Now Available!

11/19/2024

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Today is the publication day for Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean. It’s been a long road to publication, from the first inklings of an idea for the book in the pandemic spring of 2020 to the finished product, hitting retailers today. I am immensely proud of this book, and I am excited for all of you to have the opportunity to read it.

As I celebrate my book’s release, I want to extend my thanks to my agent, Lee Sobel, who believed in Jimmy when no one else did; to Chris Chappell and Emily Burr, my editors at Applause Books, whose insightful editing and tireless work on behalf of this project made it possible; to Dave Holmes and Kelly Stout at Esquire, who allowed me to write about James Dean for the magazine as proof of concept; and to everyone else who contributed in ways large and small to the research that went into Jimmy.

To help launch the book, I’ve made the introduction available for free on my website in the new Jimmy section of the site. I have also compiled a page which I will continue to update with media coverage of the book, including recent stories in The Daily Mail, The New York Post, and more.

You can buy your copy of Jimmy at your favorite retailer or by using the links below.