​In a new interview with Randall Carlson, Graham Hancock claimed that “secret societies” survived the Great Flood, maintain the traditions of the antediluvian world, and continue to influence civilization today. “The mysteries in our past that remain to be exposed do concern secret societies,” Hancock said. “They do concern a behind-the-scenes organization that is somehow involved in making civilizations.” Carlson and Hancock agree that “someone” had “foreknowledge” of the Flood and therefore took precautions to save knowledge.

​An object claiming to be one of the most famous “out of place artifacts,” or OOPARTS, in the ancient mysteries genre went up for sale on January 5 at an online auction and brought a surprisingly low $330. However, the object is almost certainly a fake.

​On social media last week, there was a periodic burst of interest in Geoffrey Drumm’s allegation that the Egyptian pyramids were chemical factories after Drumm appeared on the Danny Jones Podcast to discuss a version of a claim he first made in a 2020 book. According to Drumm’s speculation, which he promotes under the name “Land of Chem,” the various pyramids were all designed to focus piezoelectric charges into their inner chambers to create chemicals, which each pyramid’s slope and chamber position “tuned” to produce a different chemical. Drumm suggests that the pyramids were built thousands of years earlier than conventional archaeology assumes—8500 BCE to 5300 BCE—during a wet period when thunderstorms could “power up” the pyramids by striking them with lightning.

​When I started writing year in review columns in 2017, I intended those columns to be an amusing look back at the follies of the year. But somehow, they have grown into a chronicle of an incipient Dark Age, with each year’s rundown becoming a bit gloomier than that of the year before. This year was an especially depressing chronicle of the growing influence of irrational, paranormal, and conspiratorial thought at the highest levels of power, with Congress, the White House, and the billionaire class joining the major media in promoting—and apparently believing—insane notions ranging from space alien visitation to the imminent arrival of the Antichrist. By contrast, the traditional sources of occult and pseudohistorical claims—cable TV and book publishing—all but closed up shop, conceding the ground to Washington, D.C.

​Last week, Irving Finkel, the British Museum Assyriologist who made headlines in 2014 when he discovered a cuneiform text describing the Mesopotamian version of Noah’s Ark as round, appeared on Lex Fridman’s podcast and made a controversial claim that a small carved stone found at Göbekli Tepe is evidence that the people who built the site had a writing system. In so doing, Finkel, who is now a contributor to Ancient Aliens, implied that archaeologists are blind to the writing system he sees so easily and that they don’t want to admit that a Mesopotamian-style social organization and set of cultural tools would be necessary to build the enclosures at the site. However, it turns out that Finkel is the one who is blind to archaeologists’ conclusions.

​In social media postings earlier this week, Graham Hancock said that his new book, set to be published in the spring of 2027, will explore the claim that evidence for an advanced lost civilization can be found beneath the Sahara Desert, which was a fertile plain five thousand years ago. “I'm baffled by mainstream archaeology’s lack of curiosity regarding the prehistory of the Sahara,” Hancock wrote following a trip to the Egyptian Sahara this month. After opining that the desertification of the Sahara correlated with the beginning of Dynastic Egypt, Hancock added that “there are many mysterious connections -- to ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia, India, China and South America -- that make this part of a much bigger story.”

​Early this morning, NBC’s Today show broadcast a piece profiling “Christian researcher” Andrew Jones, who has long claimed that a natural formation in Turkey is Noah’s Ark. The “Today In-Depth” report, broadcast during the 7:30 ET half hour, saw international correspondent Keir Simmons deliver a one-sided live report from the Durupinar formation near Mount Ararat, claiming the site to be the Ark. “A group of American Christians believe they have new evidence that that is the wreckage of Noah's Ark here in these mountains,” Simmons told Today anchors Savannah Guthrie, Craig Melvin, and Carson Daly.

​In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a controversy is brewing over the expansion of a local museum because of its connection to bizarre fringe theories. Last week tiny Baraga County, with a population of just 8,000 people, broke ground on a massive expansion of their local historical museum. The $2 million expansion would quadruple the size of the 2,200-square-foot museum is ostensibly in service of presenting the history of the local Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, as the L’Anse Indian Reservation of the Ojibwa is located within the county.

However, the 6,400-square-foot expansion is funded with a donation from Jay Wakefield, 82, and the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society, who stipulated that the museum must present the fringe theory that millions of pounds of copper is “missing” from Michigan and had been removed by Phoenicians in pre-Columbian times. (Readers with a long memory will remember that America Unearthed did an episode about this fictitious allegation back in 2013.)

​The expanded copper-themed section of the museum, which will feature dubious “artifacts” alongside genuine ones, will be named for Fred Rydholm, a former middle school teacher who wrote several books promoting fraudulent archaeological claims, including the Burrows Cave hoax and the “missing” Phoenician copper of Michigan. Rydholm wrote in a 1993 Ancient American article, reprinted in his book Michigan Copper: The Untold Story (2006), that Michigan had originally been inhabited by “the Caucasian race” and “another group of inferior culture, resembling the Indians of today” who fought each other until the extinction of the white race. (This, of course, is an early nineteenth century pseudohistorical fantasy.) But money talks, so Baraga is getting a museum of fake history named for a man with Victorian ideas about prehistoric race wars.

​Graham Hancock posted a new video to his official YouTube channel today in which he attempts to “debunk the debunking industry” by accusing archaeologists of working to enforce dogma that prevents alternative ideas from getting a fair shake. The idea that there is a “debunking industry” is laughable, given that (a) debunking pays nothing and (b) the amount of misinformation grossly outweighs the amount of accurate information across the popular press, cable TV, and social media. Hancock spent the majority of the presentation, however, complaining specifically about archaeologists John Hoopes and Flint Dibble, to the point of appearing, dare I say, obsessed with them.