As we move toward Christmas, it’s been a relatively slow week for news from the fringe. However, I do want to briefly mention that Tucker Carlson announced on Blaze TV that he is now “open” to the flat earth theory and said that after the “deception” that he encountered from stories such as the UFO conspiracies he previously said had “bothered” him, he can no longer be sure that scientists aren’t conspiring to hide the true shape of the earth. While his comments were somewhat tongue-in-cheek, his implication that elites are deceiving us on even the most basic facts about the world continued his flirtation with science denial.
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This morning, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called for alleged UFO “whistleblowers” to put up or shut up in their seemingly endless quest to tease alien revelations that are always on the verge of arriving but never actually come. Douthat, who says he doubts any multi-generational conspiracy to hide extraterrestrial technology exists, also called out senators like Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for being “superweird” about UFOs. But if only Douthat knew just how weird. Only a few hours earlier, Josh Boswell published a sensationalized story in the Daily Mail alleging that the team of lunatics, grifters, and profiteers behind the recent resurgence in ufology secretly wrote the very legislation they attempted to launch a media and public protest campaign to pass.
The recent National Defense Authorization Act, nearing passage, contains a watered-down UFO provision that eliminates many of the most dramatic and controversial elements of the Senate amendment pushed through by majority leader Chuck Schumer. The resulting legislation, and the more limited windfall it provides to UFO contractors and think tanks like Garry Nolan’s Sol Foundation, prompted so-called UFO whistleblower David Grusch, an executive at Sol, to tell News Nation this week that stripping the government’s ability to seize any materials ufologists deemed “alien” was “the greatest legislative failure in American history.” I imagine that would be a surprise to, say, those who died as a result of the Indian Removal Act. But Grusch’s comments were far less interesting than offhand remarks conservative firebrand Tucker Carlson made about UFOs.
This week, Graham Hancock posted to YouTube video of a ninety-minute lecture he gave at a rented hall at University College in London in which he repeated arguments from his previous books and offered his usual bevy of attacks on archaeologists and what he sees as a nefarious conspiracy to suppress his claims about a lost Ice Age civilization. Because the majority of the lecture is simply a rehash of his past books, there is little purpose in going through it point for point (see my reviews of Magicians of the Gods, America Before, and Ancient Apocalypse for more detailed breakdowns). However, I do want to highlight a few key points in the evolving arguments Hancock uses.
A couple of weeks ago, the Wiley journal Archaeological Prospection raised eyebrows by publishing a paper by Daniel Natawidjaja, the geologist who wrote Plato Never Lied: Atlantis in Indonesia, and his team claiming that the volcanic hill of Gunung Padang was a 27,000-year-old pyramid. Natawidjaja did not provide any evidence that the radiocarbon dates he took from organic material within the hill were deposited by humans, or that there had been any human occupation beyond the relatively recent surface structures. Now the journal and its publisher have launched an ethics investigation into the flawed paper, according to a report in Nature:
In a new piece for the Debrief published yesterday, Chris Mellon offered an incoherent set of thoughts on UFO disclosure that accidentally revealed more than he probably meant to about the campaign behind the scenes to pressure government to embrace space aliens and also repeated the utopian fantasy that undergirds the UFO mythos.
In a blog post this week, Harvard astronomer and alien-hunter Avi Loeb completed his metamorphosis, achieving the final form of pop culture ufologists: He’s now into ancient mysteries and prehistory’s lost civilization secrets. Loeb announced that UFOs may be a technological relic of a lost prehistoric civilization destroyed by a geological catastrophe, with only their orbiting spacecraft to mark their passage:
UFO journalist Ross Coulthart expanded his conspiracy theory repertoire in a new direction this weekend when he produced a special for NewsNation about JFK assassination conspiracy theories. As is inevitable, association with one conspiracy theory leads down the primrose path toward the broader conspiracy culture. It's also a savvy move for the ambitious Coulthart, who saw his stock rise in the U.S. after a series of controversies had damaged his reputation in his native Australia. Parlaying success in one conspiracy theory into a more general role as a conspiracy journalist for a second-tier cable news network allows him to keep building an audience, even during downturns in the UFO story.
Several online retailers posted what they say is the promotional copy for UFO celebrity Lue Elizondo's long-delayed memoir, apparently titled Disclosure. Elizondo signed a deal two years ago with William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, to write an account of his time hunting UFOs on the government's dime, and the book has had a couple of potential release dates that never happened, the most recent being October of this year. The new promotional copy suggests that Elizondo won't be bringing much new to the table since the promo copy has nothing to plug but hoary old chestnuts and familiar favorites:
A year ago, Netflix sent the media into a frenzy of consternation with the release of Graham Hancock’s series Ancient Apocalypse, one of the most-watched shows about ancient mysteries in a generation. Dozens upon dozens of articles decried Netflix for producing a one-sided argument for pseudoscience and Graham Hancock for attacking archaeologists and educators for an alleged conspiracy to suppress Hancock’s belief that Atlantis seeded ancient cultures. I was one of the writers who produced a think piece on the series, for the New Republic.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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