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André Thevet and the "Evidence" for Atlantis in America

4/26/2025

As you know, tracking down primary sources is one of the rabbit holes I can’t escape, so when I started flipping through Lewis Spence’s 1925 book Atlantis in America and came across his evidence that the Native peoples of the Americas had Atlantis traditions, I of course wanted to see the originals for myself. I was particularly taken by a quotation he gave on page 68, which Spence says comes from the “Tupi-Guarani of Brazil” and was recorded by “Thevet.” No other information is given to identify the source of an interesting take about a heavenly fire and a subsequent flood—a story later writers would identify as a comet that destroyed Atlantis:

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Smithsonian Magazine Asks if Talos Was an Ancient A.I.-Powered Robot

4/22/2025

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Ancient myths and legends have a protean quality that makes them applicable to almost any current event, but that same quality has a downside: From the time of the euhemerists down to this very morning, there is a tendency to try to find the “real” story behind the myth by projecting today’s world back into the past. Earlier today, Smithsonian Magazine asked whether Talos, the bronze giant of the Argonautica, is in fact an early example of artificial intelligence. This question is, of course, patently absurd because Talos did not exist.

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Review of "The Occult Elvis" by Miguel Connor

4/11/2025

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Elvis Presley deeply admired James Dean to the point that he modeled much of his persona as a singer and an actor on Dean’s, especially in the early years of his career. The two men had much in common, and it is unsurprising that Elvis (I’ll use the mononym here, in deference to the subject) and Dean also shared both voluntary and involuntary associations with the occult. As I discuss in my book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, Dean came out of a somewhat mystical Christian background (encouraged by his friend, the Rev. James DeWeerd) and believed himself supernaturally destined for greatness, despite believing himself to be cursed with an inner evil. He studied books of ancient wisdom and Eastern mysticism and developed a rather Gnostic view that reality was itself an illusion. After his untimely death, he became a cult idol, spiritual guide, and psychopomp—and the subject of countless conspiracy theories. Many claimed to see his ghost, or that he had never died, or would return in glory, and one young woman even claimed his angelic form had supernaturally impregnated her virgin womb. Such stories presaged suspiciously similar anecdotes that swirled around Elvis decades later.

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Italian Researchers Now Claim Pyramids 38,000 Years Old, Submerged in Great Flood

4/7/2025

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A couple of weeks ago, an Italian team claimed to find a massive set of underground structures far beneath the Giza pyramids, a claim quickly dismissed by archaeologists, who pointed out that the sensing technology used to identify the structures cannot, in fact, be used to identify objects so far beneath the surface. Now the same team, calling itself the Khafre Project, has fully embraced Graham Hancock’s Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and has gone all-in on bizarre claims that the pyramids were once submerged beneath Noah’s Flood.

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FOIA Documents Reveal Lex Fridman Sought to Join Pentagon UFO Office

4/3/2025

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John Greenewald of The Black Vault posted a cache of documents recently released through FOIA, and in the collection of emails and memoranda we learned the podcasted Lex Fridman secretly tried to involve himself in developing a UFO office for the Pentagon all while covering UFOs on his podcast.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E08 “The Glowing Orb Phenomenon”

3/28/2025

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This week, my family and I had to say goodbye to our beloved cat Dakota, a couple of months shy of his seventeenth birthday. He had a big personality and strong opinions about everything. He was active, friendly, and loving and was brave throughout his battle with cancer. After his diagnosis, the vet had given him two weeks to live; however, he survived for four months and enjoyed his final weeks as much as he could, with plenty of affection and all of his favorite foods. He is loved and will be missed.

As you can imagine, it’s a difficult time, and I’m mostly writing this review of Ancient Aliens to distract myself after a very long day. Unfortunately, Ancient Aliens did not give me much worth writing about tonight. The topic—glowing orbs—is one of those vague, UFO-themed subjects I have no interest in. You will forgive me if I am not particularly inspired to opine in depth about whether blurry blotches caught on tape are really dust, bugs, balloons, or alien spaceships.

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Apple Lands UFO Disclosure Thriller with David Grusch Attached as Producer

3/25/2025

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Deadline reports that Apple Productions has acquired a UFO disclosure thriller movie from producers Joseph Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer, on which so-called UFO whistleblower David Grusch will serve as an associate producer and consultant. Grusch is also now an employee of Republican congressman Eric Burlinson of Indiana, who hired Grusch to advise him on UFOs after the House Oversight Committee rejected an effort to have Grusch hired as a staffer.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E07: “Mysteries of the Aztecs”

3/21/2025

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After six weeks of clip shows, Ancient Aliens returns with original—well, let’s say “newly filmed”—material this week. Since the show has already done episodes devoted to the Maya, the Tiwanaku people, the early peoples of South America, and Teotihuacan, it’s only natural that they would eventually get around to the Aztecs. I am surprised that it took sixteen years, but I guess there isn’t as much to say about a culture that flourished for only two centuries and overlapped the start of the Renaissance in Europe. They seemed a little too recent and too well-known from the records of the Spanish conquest, which is probably why they were more likely to show up on History’s treasure-hunting shows than on its alien shows.

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Italian Fringe Researchers Claim to Find Massive Structures Beneath Giza

3/20/2025

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Social media blew up over the last two days with a wild claim that Italian archaeologists discovered a massive underground series of structures beneath Khafre’s pyramid on the Giza Plateau. Numerous postings alleged that ground-penetrating radar had discovered eight cylindrical spiral structures stretching around 650 meters beneath the pyramid and are connected to two vast cube-shaped rooms eighty meters on each side. On the upper end, they connect to a series of five chambers identical to the King’s Chamber in Khufu’s pyramid, but hidden in Khafre’s. According to the researchers behind the claim, this was merely a part of a massive underground city.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E06: “The Top Ten Mysterious Mountains”

3/14/2025

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This episode isn’t even worth the effort of writing a full introduction. We’ve reached the point in Ancient Aliens clip shows when they are clipping parts of clip shows that recently aired and showing us the clips again. This week’s episode is putatively about mountains. This, however, is also the subject of a 2013 episode with nearly the same title—“Aliens and Mysterious Mountains”--and many of the sites featured here appeared in that episode or in a 2024 clip show which had previously recycled the same material, including some of the same clips.

For the sake of completion, here are this episode’s clips:

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<<Previous

André Thevet and the "Evidence" for Atlantis in America

Smithsonian Magazine Asks if Talos Was an Ancient A.I.-Powered Robot

Review of "The Occult Elvis" by Miguel Connor

Italian Researchers Now Claim Pyramids 38,000 Years Old, Submerged in Great Flood

FOIA Documents Reveal Lex Fridman Sought to Join Pentagon UFO Office

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E08 “The Glowing Orb Phenomenon”

Apple Lands UFO Disclosure Thriller with David Grusch Attached as Producer

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E07: “Mysteries of the Aztecs”

Italian Fringe Researchers Claim to Find Massive Structures Beneath Giza

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E06: “The Top Ten Mysterious Mountains”

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