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Another Government UFO Hunter Signs a Major Book Deal

9/11/2024

Two weeks ago, former Pentagon official turned UFO infotainment personality Lue Elizondo’s memoir Imminent debuted at #1 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. Now, another Pentagon UFO personality has inked a book deal for a similar memoir. Jay Stratton, who investigated UFOs as director of the UAP Task Force, appeared on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, believes a werewolf haunted his home, and plays in a garage band named Hitchhiker (after the alleged Skinwalker ghost) with fellow cast member UAP Task Force personality Travis Traylor. He signed with HarperCollins this week for an undisclosed sum to write a memoir about his time hunting flying saucers and paranormal oddities.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E19: “The Chosen”

9/6/2024

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In an interview this week with The Guardian, Jeffrey Kripal, the religious scholar with wild opinions on UFOs and ancient aliens, claimed that during an incident of food poisoning in Kolkata in 1989, supernatural forces “downloaded” what he described as “massive amounts of information” into his body, making him a believer in otherworldly powers. By coincidence, today’s episode of Ancient Aliens is called “The Chosen” and involves people who feel they have been in contact with angels, aliens, or divine beings and received messages from them. If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because the show already did this episode back in season five, with their show on “Prophets and Prophecies.” This time, they mix and match material from that show with modern abduction claims, which … oh, yeah, they also did in “Strange Abductions” in season five, two weeks after “Prophets and Prophecies.”

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Review of "Odysseus Returns," a PBS Quest to Find the Tomb of Odysseus

8/31/2024

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Promotional image for "Odysseus Returns" featuring Makis Metaxas (PBS)

This week, PBS presented Odysseus Returns, a documentary following the three-decade quest of “amateur historian” Makis Metaxas as he attempts to convince the world that Odysseus was real, that Homer’s island of Ithaca was in fact the neighboring island of Kefalonia in northwest Greece, and that he had seen both the tomb of Odysseus and the Greek hero’s bones. It’s a tall order for a ninety-minute film, and I was disappointed that the somewhat meandering documentary presents only one side of the argument, leaving the audience with the impression that not only is Metaxas right but that the Greek government and archaeologists are conspiring to prevent Odysseus’ tomb from being identified. So much does the film endorse Metaxas’s perspective that PBS affixed a disclaimer to the beginning of the documentary noting that the film’s claims are not the views of the Greek government. Typically, such as disclaimer says something like “not necessarily,” implying some wiggle room, but this one is simply “not.”

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E18: “The Linda Moulton Howe Files”

8/30/2024

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Continuing this season’s new effort to repackage old material by recasting it as biographies of ancient astronaut theorists, this episode follows the life and career of Linda Moulton Howe. If much of this episode seems familiar, it’s probably because the show has presented all of this material before and has profiled Howe’s life and career several times before. For example, a 2015 episode on crop circles contained a segment tracing Howe’s initial conversion from a young television news reporter to alien enthusiast when she became obsessed with crop circles. Similarly, a 2014 In Search of Aliens spinoff episode offered a description of Howe’s career, as did its 2020 recycling on the Ancient Aliens mothership, where the show added in Howe’s involvement with Art’s Parts. Other notable repeats include a 2019 episode about Howe’s “investigation” of aliens in Antarctica and of course last year’s episode on Howe’s efforts to prove the government is hiding a massive ancient pyramid in Alaska.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E17: “Egypt’s Giant Tombs”

8/23/2024

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So long ago that everyone eventually forgot the story had to be invented, early Christians claimed that the monstrous, seemingly supersized animal-headed gods depicted on the walls of Egyptian temples were the infamous Nephilim of Genesis 6, understood to be giants, much as pagan writers had speculated that the carvings represented the Titans. Due to the influence of the Book of Enoch, Late Antique Christians believed Egypt to have been the home of the Watchers and the Nephilim, whom Enoch visited in the far deserts, a claim the monk Annianus seemingly placed in his now-lost fifth-century world history. Stories spread in medieval times that Moses had slain a giant in Egypt whose body became a bridge over the Nile. Islamic writers spoke vaguely of two races of Egyptian giants, the native descendants of Cain (i.e. Nephilim) and a branch of the family from Arabia, called the ’Ādites, who invaded under Shaddad ibn ’Ād and built pyramids. However, Muslim writers, insisted, Egypt’s native Christians, the Copts, denied that the ’Ādites had ever conquered Egypt.

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Review of "Imminent" by Luis Elizondo

8/20/2024

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IMMINENT: INSIDE THE PENTAGON’S HUNT FOR UFOs
Luis Elizondo | William Morrow | August 2024 | 304 pages | $29.99

Memoir, as a literary genre, sits somewhere between autobiography and creative writing, often sacrificing strict accuracy for deeper emotional truths. At its best, memoir can reveal the inner life behind the façade of an individual. A great memoir cuts deep, revealing the innermost secrets, and the dark parts of the soul, that make a person who they are. A bad memoir is an exercise in self-aggrandizement, begging the reader to agree with the author’s awesomeness. Luis “Lue” Elizondo’s Imminent is not a good memoir. Others will pick apart its factual foundations (nothing in the book would quality as scientific evidence) and hold up his firehose of UFO lore to specific scrutiny, but I want to talk about his book as a piece of literature and how it fails both as art and as a piece of persuasive UFO propaganda.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E16: “The Teachers”

8/16/2024

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After twenty seasons, it took me a bit by surprise that Ancient Aliens had never done an episode dedicated solely to aliens teaching humans science, culture, and spirituality. It’s certainly not because they’ve never covered the topic before, though most prominently in the year before I started reviewing the show. Early episodes from seasons 1 and 2 such as “The Visitors” (S01E02) and “Gods and Aliens” (S02E02) covered much of the same material, and references to aliens teaching humans pepper any episode that actually remembers this show is called “Ancient” Aliens and not UFO, Conspiracy Theory, and Popular Astronomy Review. Nevertheless, for a show that has leaned so heavily into aliens as life coaches and spiritual guides, I was taken a little aback that they hadn’t done this topic before.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E15: “Jacques Vallée: UFO Pioneer”

8/9/2024

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I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I don’t really like Jacques Vallée. For most UFO fans, he is an éminence grise whose stature as a philosopher of ufology has made him a respected thinker and eternal consultant for the federal government on UFOs. But, for me, he’s a sloppy scholar who coasts by on a French accent and ambiguous verbiage that allows readers to project their own beliefs onto his words. A decade ago, I went through the “cases” of ancient and medieval UFO sightings he had published in Wonders in the Sky (2009), many of which had previously appeared in his classic book Passport to Magonia (1969), and I found a collection of erroneously translated, deceptively edited, and ignorantly misunderstood material that he had long passed off as serious scholarship simply because most ufologists can’t read ancient languages. (For example, Vallée once claimed Charlemagne ordered UFO witnesses put to death; instead, he ordered the “reform” of “weather-magicians.”) Vallée’s more recent support for the ridiculous Trinity hoax—which made it all the way into Congressional legislation on Vallée’s reputation—only confirmed my opinion.

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Djoser's Pyramid Was Built with Giant Hydraulic Works, New Paper Claims

7/30/2024

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A preprint of a new scientific paper to be published in an upcoming edition of PLOS One made news this week when a team of interdisciplinary researchers led by Xavier Landreau of the Paleotechnic research firm claimed to have evidence that Djoser’s step pyramid at Saqqara had been built using a hydraulic lift. The authors claim that a large stone enclosure near the pyramid, known as Gisr el-Mudir, was a water treatment facility and served as a dam, allowing purified Nile water to travel along channels to the site of the pyramid, where, in “volcano” fashion, the water mover through a series of shafts and pushed stones up to the top of the pyramid while it was under construction.

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Lue Elizondo Memoir: Dubbed "King of Torture," Haunted by Bubbles, Talks Nephilim

7/26/2024

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Since Ancient Aliens is on hiatus to avoid competing with the Olympics, I thought it would be safe to take my on to the local aquarium. Surely a display of tropical fish must be free of the insidious mythology of space invaders. Ah, but I was wrong. Since last we visited, the aquarium opened a hall of animatronics offering, in either promise or threat, dinosaurs and “legendary creatures.” The disappointing attraction featured credulous displays about griffins and Bigfoot before reaching a crescendo in a hall where Ancient Aliens clips played on a big screen beside this janky diorama of extraterrestrials. It was not worth the upcharge.