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Some Interesting New Insights into Medieval Legends about Ancient Egypt

2/11/2026

I wanted to call your attention to some new additions to my Library. As most of you know, I have spent more than a decade researching the medieval Arab-Islamic pyramid myth, which told of how either Hermes Trismegistus or Surid built the temples and pyramids of Egypt before Noah’s Flood to preserve scientific knowledge. I have finally completed some of the translation work I had long mean to do but hadn’t quite gotten around to, as a supplement to the many translations I had already posted, and the material contains some interesting insights into the growth and development of the myth, which I had previously discussed in my book The Legends of the Pyramids (2021).

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Epstein Files Describe Billionaire's Secret Supervillain-Style Library of Relics

2/9/2026

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A February 9, 2014, email in the Epstein files describes a secret billionaire dinner on the premises of a major defense contractor that reads like the kind of dark conspiracy you would find in the browning pages of a twentieth-century occult thriller or in a knockoff James Bond movie. The dinner was hosted by ultra-wealthy internet pioneer Rick Adams, who founded UUNET, and featured fellow internet pioneer Vint Cerf, a cast of unnamed “famous people,” and skeptical activist James “The Amazing Randi” eating in what sounds very much like a villain’s lair from a bad movie, stuffed with ancient relics, Nazi memorabilia, and priceless historical artifacts.

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In Brief: Pentagon Calls George Knapp’s Russian UFO Files “Disinformation”

2/8/2026

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For the past thirty years, Las Vegas TV reporter and UFO advocate George Knapp has teased a cache of Russian KGB UFO files that he claims to have removed from the country in 1993. He has told different stories about obtaining Russian files. In 1993 Knapp and in 1994 ABC News Primetime Live both claimed to have purchased the files after the fall of the Soviet Union from former KGB operative Boris Sokolov. More recently, he claimed to have “commandeered” the newly posted files, which may or may not be from the same original set (the files previously made public covered 1978-1988, while the new set also covers 1989-1993), and absconded with them. Last month he quietly released the files online on his local news channel’s website, leading to a glowing report in the New York Post this weekend. However, according to New York Post reporter Steven Greenstreet, who did not participating in the writing of the Post’s Knapp article, a senior source in the Pentagon confirmed that the documents are part of a known Russian disinformation campaign and that Congress received a classified briefing on the documents and their Russian disinformation. Naturally, Knapp’s supporters, including podcast partner Jeremy Corbell, have promoted the Post story without acknowledging the disinformation. Interestingly, the files contained a description of a real 1953 Moscow Radio broadcast, which said that “American imperialists had invented a stupid tale for stirring up a war, for intimidating taxpayers and the Congress in order to confirm an excessively high budget.” Some things never change.

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Capsule Review of Ancient Aliens S22E04 “Extraterrestrial Engineering”

2/6/2026

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It’s become a running joke that Ancient Aliens has run out of ideas, but after three “original” episodes of Ancient Aliens this season, we have slipped into the show’s favorite comfort zone: clip show mode! I was starting to worry that we might almost have had a real season of Ancient Aliens this year, but fear not: This episode is listed as S22E04 but is technically labeled “Special Edition,” which features Giorgio Tsoukalos introducing rerun segments. In past years, “Special Edition” clip show episodes were not considered part of the mothership’s episode tally, but this year they seem to be. Unlike the past few years where such shows were organized around a “Top 10” theme, this episode makes no pretense of even trying. It does, however, take inspiration from my previous reviews of their clips shows and helpfully labeled each segment with the original episode title. This cut my workload for this capsule review down to nothing, since I didn’t even have to try to remember where I saw each segment before! The segments, which I previously reviewed, are drawn from:

Segment 1 is from “Resurrecting Puma Punku” (2024), about the Andean site.
Segment 2 is from “The Giants of Malta” (2023), about legends surrounding megaliths there.
Segment 3 is from “Mystery of the Stone Spheres” (2024), about the golden spheres beneath Teotihuacan.
Segment 4 is from “The Mystery of Nan Madol” (2020), about the titular site’s blocks.
Segment 5 is from “The World Before Time” (2020), about Noah’s Ark as a pyramid and medieval pyramid legends.
Segment 6 is from “The Star Gods of Sirius” (2019), repeating the fifth segment, which covered Newgrange in Ireland.

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In Brief: Italian Ancient Astronaut Theorist Claims Radical New Date for Giza

2/4/2026

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An Italian engineer claims that his own personal methodology for studying erosion has proved that the Great Pyramid of Giza is as much as 40,000 years old. The claim circulated last week thanks to a report in The Daily Mail, Alberto Donini claims to use his own "relative erosion method" to compare stones and estimate how long they have been eroding, which led him to the conclusion. His erosion study assumes linear erosion rates, which probably cannot be assumed given that the original surfaces he measured, mostly flat paving stones, were in use for thousands of years, whereas the inner blocks exposed when the cladding fell off around 700 years ago were not subject to the same level of daily wear. Donini's claims are not doubtful on their surface, since he is not a geologist, his area of expertise is machines and concrete, and he is also an ancient astronaut theorist who also claims to have found evidence for space alien contact in Mexico on stones he dug up (on a half-day trip!) with pictures of UFOs and aliens on them, i.e. modern fakes.

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Tucker Carlson and A. J. Gentile Spread Rehashed Archaeological Conspiracies

2/3/2026

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This week, UFO-curious right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson, a former guest on Ancient Aliens, devoted a ninety-minute episode of his eponymous streaming show to the threadbare “mysteries” of giants, pyramids, psychic spies, lost civilizations and the other detritus of History channel pseudo-documentaries. Carlson interviewed A. J. Gentile of The Why Files and the two began the discussion by complaining about the “extreme hostility against alternate (sic) archaeology,” with Gentile expressing outrage at archaeologists for opposing the claims of Graham Hancock, “whose work I admire.” The two men defended Hancock against charges that his work supports white supremacy and then claimed that the accusation was a “slur” designed to “destroy” Hancock as part of a “sinister” effort by archaeologists. This set the tone for the rest of the discussion.

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Tabloids Revive an Old Claim That an Ancient Egyptian Text Mentions Bible Giants

2/2/2026

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An article in the New York Post went viral yesterday for claiming an Egyptian papyrus supposedly is proof that the Nephilim of Genesis 6:4 were real flesh-and-blood giants. The Post piece from Sunday summarizes a Daily Mail article from earlier in the day breathlessly reporting the contents of Papyrus Anastasi I, an Egyptian papyrus scroll found in 1839 and translated into English in 1911 (several partial translations, and a full translation taken from a German edition, had previously appeared). While the reports call it a “lost” scroll that had just been “rediscovered,” the text is well-known and is frequently discussed in academic literature. It will surprise no one to discover that the claims for Bible giants in the Egyptian text are overblown.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S22E03 “Islands of the Gods”

1/30/2026

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(For reasons that are beyond me, this episode is listed as S21E19 on the History website and S22E03 everywhere else.)

The settlement of Polynesia is one of the great stories of human achievement, full of incredible feats of sailing across almost incomprehensible distances. Those voyages carried a cultural matrix that included cyclopean walls and megalithic statues across the Pacific, the from the Marquesas to Nan Madol and from Hawaii to Easter Island. It’s also been a frequent subject for Ancient Aliens. In the past eight years, they have devoted entire episodes to Easter Island and the Marquesas (2018), Hawaii (2019), and Nan Madol (2020) in addition to frequent segments in other episodes. Now we are doing it all again because it’s been a few years, and they probably figure that the audience has forgotten since they reused so much material from these previous episodes, including b-roll footage.

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Bill Maher Claims Aliens Visiting Earth, "Want Us to Know That They're Here"

1/29/2026

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Bill Maher has long been UFO-curious, and in recent years he increasingly implied that he believes space aliens are currently visiting the Earth. Nevertheless, it was especially shocking to see him state his acceptance of the unevidenced mythology of ufology as directly as he did on the January 26 episode of his Club Random podcast, while interviewing Age of Disclosure filmmaker Dan Farah:

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Review of Ancient Aliens S22E02 Egypt’s Lost Pyramids

1/23/2026

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As colorful and inventive as the medieval Arabic legends of ancient Egypt were—originating many of the tropes used in sci-fi stories about ancient cultures even today, such as impossibly advanced ancient technology, otherworldly magic, hidden scientific secrets, booby-trapped pyramids, etc.—there are times I wish that these legends had never arisen. The medieval stories of fallen angels and Hermetic alchemists building temples, pyramids, and vanished cities full of astounding technology fed directly into modern claims about extraterrestrial intervention. Indeed, the late Erich von Däniken made a half-understood account of the most prominent of these legends, the story of the construction of the Great Pyramid first given in the Akhbār al-zamān, but known to him from a later plagiarist, the foundation for his ET claims about the pyramids, repeated from Chariots of the Gods straight through to his death.

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<<Previous

Some Interesting New Insights into Medieval Legends about Ancient Egypt

Epstein Files Describe Billionaire's Secret Supervillain-Style Library of Relics

In Brief: Pentagon Calls George Knapp’s Russian UFO Files “Disinformation”

Capsule Review of Ancient Aliens S22E04 “Extraterrestrial Engineering”

In Brief: Italian Ancient Astronaut Theorist Claims Radical New Date for Giza

Tucker Carlson and A. J. Gentile Spread Rehashed Archaeological Conspiracies

Tabloids Revive an Old Claim That an Ancient Egyptian Text Mentions Bible Giants

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E03 “Islands of the Gods”

Bill Maher Claims Aliens Visiting Earth, "Want Us to Know That They're Here"

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E02 Egypt’s Lost Pyramids

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