​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.

​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.

​Each year, it’s a little more difficult to write a seemingly lighthearted review of the year in weird. This year was both personally and professionally a bit of a struggle as A.I. continues to eat away at my day job and the closure or collapse of a number of media outlets has made it more difficult place stories in paying publications. I lost my gig as a CNN Opinion columnist right when it was starting because CNN shuttered the entire division. As the year came to an end, about one-third of my income for the year remains outstanding from businesses that are dragging their feet on payments and have been since early fall. That has made it difficult to devote too much energy to caring about whatever old claims the usual cadre of kooks and weirdos are recycling on any given day.

​An interesting little Christmas mystery, inspired by a recent post Graham Hancock made on social media praising his “great friend” Robert Bauval and his Orion Correlation Theory from the 1990s. Back in 1997, when Hancock and Bauval teamed up for The Message of the Sphinx (a.k.a. Keeper of Genesis), the two authors presented a variant version of the Christmas carol “We three kings” that replaced “Orient” with “Orion,” rendering the first line as “We three kings of Orion are.” They provided no source, and for a long time I wondered if they had just made it up. 

​I appeared today on the Forgotten Hollywood podcast to discuss my new book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean. You can listen below, at this link, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

​I will confess that when I learned Andrew Collins had recently published a new book on Karahan Tepe, an ancient site of enclosures and statues similar to and coeval with those of nearby Göbekli Tepe (collectively, the Taş Tepeler peoples, after the region where the sites are located), I was not particularly excited about reviewing it. Collins’s books are never wild enough to be fun to discuss, but they also fall just enough outside of the scholarly consensus to make it a slog to work through his reams of information, mostly accurate but outstripping the evidence. 

It isn't your imagination: Fewer people are talking about Ancient Apocalypse in its second season, nearly two years after the show's first season smashed viewership records for a streaming archaeology series. According to viewership statistics released by Netflix this week, viewership for the series is down more than two-thirds from the show's debut season. According to Netflix's Global Top Ten list for the week of October 14 to 20, just 2.2 million people watched the second season in its debut week. The 8.9 million hours viewed last week were about one-third of the 27.7 million hours viewed in the first season's first week in 2022. (Netflix did not estimate viewership in the figures it released in 2022, but using a similar conversion formula would estimate between 6 and 7 million viewers in 2022.) Similarly, with the media focused on the U.S. election and the Middle East, the number of news stories this past week discussing Ancient Apocalypse pales in comparison to 2022 stories about the first season.

This season's viewership collapse might be due to the timing of the release, in the heart of the busy season for new TV (Netflix viewers flocked to the streamer's Outer Banks instead of Ancient Apocalypse), or competition from world events ahead of the U.S. election. It may also be due to a lack of compelling narrative this season--there was nothing new, just a rehash of season one. (Of course, that never hurt Ancient Aliens.) But more likely, Netflix simply waited too long between seasons. Two years is an eternity when it comes to a flash in the pan, and the failure to capitalize on momentum led to viewers drifting away and forgetting why they cared. There were a lot of missed opportunities. I would have thought with all the time they had, Hancock, Netflix, and show producer ITN would have put together a tie-in book, for example, to build excitement. Instead, Hancock spent his promotional time on grievance tour complaining about Flint Dibble, and the whining likely did little to attract viewers to the show.

The Express reported today that Graham Hancock has denounced white supremacy as "a stupid cult" after a Neo-Nazi was seen on video explaining the value of Hancock's Ancient Apocalypse as a white nationalist recruitment tool. According to the Express, Neo-Nazi Harold Lloyd said that Hancock's work was "like listening to Third Reich archaeology, without the baggage" and could introduce viewers to the idea that indigenous people were unable to develop high culture absent outside help, without the explicit appeals to racism found in Nazism. "It's actually a good way of introducing people to white superiority.... It's a nice little intro to Racialism," Lloyd said.

​Two years after Ancient Apocalypse caused a media firestorm by putting on Netflix claims Graham Hancock had been making in print and online for decade, the show returned with a second season focused on the Americas. While the first season sparked outraged because elite media types were finally forced by the Netflix algorithm to see on a screen what they paid no attention to in print, the second season seems positioned to avoid some of the same backlash. Netflix released Hancock’s second foray into arguing that a comet destroyed a lost civilization in mid-October, after the first came out in late November 2022. This seems purposely chosen to drop while the mainstream media are focused on the upcoming election, limiting the time and attention they will devote to bashing Hancock’s show.
 
And, as we all know, the sequel is never as good as the original.

​Archaeologist Ed Barnhart appeared on Lex Fridman’s podcast this week to spend more than three hours (!) discussing “lost civilizations” and ancient history. During the conversation, Barnhart called Graham Hancock a “great researcher,” agreed with the idea that the Amazon rainforest had been intentionally planted by a lost civilization, and dissembled when asked directly about the ancient astronaut theory. I suppose there isn’t much one can do to respond to questions about aliens when your entire claim to fame rests on your regular appearances as a cast member on Ancient Aliens, but asserting that Hancock is a great researcher is so silly—Hancock’s sources are often wildly outdated, he misrepresents material at will, and he is highly selective in his cherry-picking—that this can only be either an attempt to jump on the Ancient Apocalypse bandwagon or a preview of an appearance on that show later this month. And if you are wondering: Recent research found that parts of the Amazon were altered by ancient agriculture, resulting in a nutrient rich terra preta soil in and around ancient settlements, but this is a far cry from assuming the entire Amazon basin was artificially planned and planted by Atlantis. The best estimates are that terra preta covers less than 3% of the Amazon, and probably closer to 0.3%, though some put the figure as high as 10%.