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In Brief: Vance on UFOs, Elizondo on the Daily Show, and Ancient Apocalypse Returns

9/18/2024

It’s been a busy week so far. At a rally in Eau Claire, Wisc., Republican vice-presidential nominee Sen. J. D. Vance injected UFOs into the presidential campaign and inadvertently punctured the claim that Congress is deeply informed and concerned about extraterrestrial incursions. After incorrectly summarizing the past seven years of UFO interest as a “story from a couple years ago that, like, the Defense Department had declassified the UFO stuff,” Vance added, “I don’t talk about that because I don’t know what’s going on. […] So, to all the journalists there: If you do know anything about the UFO story, please tell us because we’re very, very fascinated by it.” Vance, a sitting senator, admits to knowing nothing and not even being informed enough to know what he doesn’t know, giving the lie to claims that UFO terror has gripped anything but a very small minority of legislators.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E20: “Resurrecting Puma Punku”

9/13/2024

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This season of Ancient Aliens has been more backward-facing than most as the series becomes an ouroboros eating its own tail, revisiting past episodes and celebrating the lives of ufology’s octogenarian heroes. This episode is no different, returning to one of Ancient Aliens’ most infamous episodes, 2012 “The Mysteries of Puma Punku” (where David Childress confidently asserted that an obviously irregular block was a perfect right-angle), parts of which were first revisited in a 2014 episode of the spinoff series In Search of Aliens entitled “The Mystery of Puma Punku.” Both drew on a lengthy segment about Puma Punku in the original 2009 Ancient Aliens pilot episode. Over the past fifteen years, Ancient Aliens has learned nothing about Puma Punku and continues to repeat false claims that were indefensible in 2014, 2012, and 2009. But, on the plus side, there is no new episode next week, and this might be the end of the season. It seems like an appropriate way to take leave of Ancient Aliens, at least for a while.

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In Brief: "Ancient Apocalypse" Pulls Out of U.S. After Opposition

7/2/2024

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No wonder Graham Hancock has been testy. An article yesterday in The Guardian says that the U.S. filming on the new season of Ancient Apocalypse was scuttled after the production ran into difficulties with obtaining permission to film at some locations. Hancock’s program received permits to film at Chaco Canyon and the Grand Canyon for an episode on the peopling of the Americas. Several days of filming had already been completed at Chaco Canyon, but ITN, the company behind the series, pulled out of the U.S. and will scrap the episode in favor of a non-American location. The Guardian piece implies that the difficulty was with Native tribes, who spoke out against Hancock’s hijacking of their history and opposed efforts to film at ancestral sites. Grand Canyon National Park sought to deny Hancock a permit based on objections from Native groups, but federal officials in Washington overrode their objections to issue the permit—since the government can’t pick and choose permits by viewpoint. Tribal locations, though, can do what they like. Read the full story at the Guardian.

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Graham Hancock Says Flint Dibble "Conned" Him; Plus: Avi Loeb's Big Night Out

6/17/2024

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Months after debating archaeologist Flint Dibble on The Joe Rogan Experience, Gaham Hancock broke his silence about the encounter, writing on X (formerly Twitter) that he had been “conned” and endorsing a YouTube video alleging that Dibble lied five times over the multi-hour debate in order to humiliate Hancock with false information. Hancock did not explain how he failed to recognize the allegedly false information, which was directly relevant to the information he claimed to have researched for more than thirty years. The arguments used by YouTuber “DeDunker” were not terribly convincing, but even if taken at face value would hardly rise above slight misstatements or minor confusion when speaking extemporaneously for many hours. More concerning is that Hancck jumped on the “conned” bandwagon to save face after having no other response to Dibble dominating the debate for three months.

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Graham Hancock Associate Attacks Archaeology YouTuber in Rambling Rant

5/15/2024

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â€‹In case you were keeping score, so-called "UFO whistleblower" David Grusch pulled out of the SALT conference following the flap over revelations he's been ducking invitations to testify to AARO and was replaced with another UFO speaker, Col. Karl E. Nell, who claims credit for influencing Congressional UFO legislation. Meanwhile, there are some dustups occurring as both archaeologists and fringe figures take aim at the popularity of YouTube ancient history videos, whose audiences have outstripped traditional cable TV documentaries and book publishing.

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Graham Hancock and Flint Dibble Offer Few Fireworks in Joe Rogan Debate

4/16/2024

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On The Joe Rogan Experience, archaeologist Flint Dibble debated Graham Hancock for more than four hours about the existence of a lost civilization. You will forgive me that I did not have the time to watch the full podcast—it is simply too long—but you are of course welcome to watch below. I watched about half, from various segments of the podcast. I noticed in the parts I did see that Hancock seemed a bit underprepared to encounter the nuts and bolts of how archaeology is actually done, leaving him to complain that archaeologists have simply missed all of the evidence for a lost civilization, despite Dibble’s clear presentation of how archaeology actually works and the methodology of science and the signatures of large-scale settlements, such as evidence of agriculture, that should survive even the most thorough cataclysm.

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A Plausible Explanation for the Lost City of Manuscript 512

3/27/2024

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When the explorer Percy Fawcett vanished in 1925 searching for the mythical Lost City of Z, he was also hunting a fabulous city described in Manuscript 512 in the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. The document, written in 1753, tells of a Portuguese expedition, which discovered a city reminiscent of Classical settlements like Rome and Athens deep in the Brazilian rainforest. It contained arches and domes, statues, and mysterious hieroglyphic engravings. Fawcett thought Z to be the capital of a vast civilization of which the Manuscript 512 city was a mere outpost.

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Scott Wolter Says He Won't Reveal Oak Island Secrets without a Big TV Payday

3/26/2024

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In a lengthy recent interview, former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter said he is releasing a censored copy of his new book with blacked-out maps and missing evidence until The Curse of Oak Island television series either pays him for the “millions of dollars in content” he says his book is worth, or the show is cancelled. Wolter said he tried contacting the History Channel’s top-rated series ahead of the mid-April publication of Oak Island, Knights Templar, and the Holy Grail: Secrets of "the Underground Project" Revealed in the hope of appearing on the show. He said that from a “financial perspective” using the show to promote his book would benefit him; however, Curse producers were not interested. As a result, Wolter decided to black out images of “evidence” in his book, including maps, and censor some of the content because he fears Curse will use his work without paying him for it.

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Weekly Roundup: More Gunung Padang Claims and Chris Mellon's Confession

3/22/2024

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After two months of miserable Ancient Aliens episodes on all but one Friday, I felt more than a little relief to receive a bit of time off from the grind. But that doesn’t mean that the outer edges of pseudoscience fell silent. After John Wiley & Sons retracted the infamous Gunung Padang paper claiming the Indonesian site was an Ice Age mega-pyramid, the author of the paper, Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, published on Graham Hancock’s website what he says is the full text of his team’s communications with the team at Wiley over the retraction. Natawidjaja seems to think that doing so vindicates his claim that nefarious forces of Western orthodoxy ae suppressing his superior science, but reading through the correspondence makes plain that Natawdjaja and his team have no real evidence to support their claims, failed to consider alternative explanations, and relied almost entirely on drawing conclusions from a visual inspection of rocks—basically, “looks like, therefore is.” Natawidjaja seeks to reverse the burden of proof, demanding that critics prove that the natural-seeming formations he identifies as prehistoric constructions are not human-built, rather than offering any positive evidence of their artificiality.

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Journal Retracts Paper Claiming Gunung Padang Is an Ice Age Mega-Pyramid

3/19/2024

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When the journal Archaeological Prospection published an article claiming that the Indonesian site of Gunung Padang was a massive pyramid complex that dated back to the Ice Age, archaeologists sighed and fans of Atlantis-style lost civilizations cheered. The article’s lead author, Danny Natawidjaja, is a fan of Atlantis (and a beneficiary of publicity from Graham Hancock) who made wild claims about Indonesia being Plato’s intended lost continent. His methodology for dating Gunung Padang was so suspect even non-archaeologists like me recognized the problem immediately: Natawidjaja carbon dated random bits of organic material from within the volcanic hill but did not prove that it was associated with human activity, so the dates were worthless as proof that the hill was a human-made pyramid from the Ice Age.

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