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As many of you know, the problems with fabricated history are not confined to the United States. Over in France, there is growing concern about the increasingly extremist tomes that the once-prestigious Librairie Arthème Fayard publishing house has put out since the publisher’s parent company saw control pass to far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré. I am indebted for this story to the Histoire Medievale account on X, which wrote about this at length.
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One of the original authors of the 2007 paper that introduced the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis provided evidence this weekend that some of the evidence used to support the claim was not, in fact, ancient traces of a comet strike but rather modern railroad slag. Scott Harris coauthored the original comet impact paper but is now taking his coauthors Allen West and Ted Bunch to task, posting a video to Facebook reels showing that material from South Carolina claimed in 2012 to be samples from the comet strike was in fact railroad slag and noting that even in 2007, some of the authors knew that the area where they claimed to have found evidence of a comet strike had been contaminated with modern railroad slag and was in fact an old railroad bed. In short, the material used as evidence of melting and burning from a comet strike was, instead, melted and burned in an industrial furnace. I have a feeling that Graham Hancock is not going to be posting an excited video celebrating honesty in science in this case.
Last week, the Veritas et Caritas YouTube channel posted a video exploring reasons Graham Hancock is bad at research and calling out Dan “Dedunker” Richards for his defense of Hancock’s bad research. The video is worth a watch, but I want to quibble a bit with the complaint that Hancock is at fault for citing Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries on the Incas in his discussion of whether Moctezuma believed that Cortez was the returning “white god” Quetzalcoatl. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump Administration will begin "reviewing" Smithsonian exhibits under a new Orwellian policy that will see the executive branch impose the president's "interpretation" of history onto the Smithsonian museums, which operate under charter and are not formally a part of the U.S. government. Trump officials said they would withhold funding unless the Smithsonian participated in a plan to align their exhibits and their collections with the president's stated goals of ending support for diversity and removing "divisive" content.
I should start today by acknowledging the passing of John Ward, the National Geographic Explorer and Explorers Club Fellow who excavated in Egypt with his wife, Dr. Marial Nilsson. Readers with long memories will remember Ward as an eccentric figure from a decade ago who tried sell a bizarre TV pilot called History Trippers during the heyday of cable pseudohistory shows, promoted psychic powers and dowsing, and favored fringe pseudohistory. I can’t say I had heard or thought much about him over the last decade, which he spent doing more legitimate archaeological work with his wife, but I am sorry to learn that he is no longer with us.
It seemed silly enough when, a few minutes before New Year’s, the Daily Star announced that UFO documentary producer Mark Christopher Lee wants singer Robbie Williams, who recently confessed to encountering a supposed flying saucer, to serve as the U.K.’s UFO ambassador. It was doubly silly that Lee made the recommendation via UFO journalist George Knapp, who is friends with Williams (!).
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.
 Karahan Tepe: Civilization of the Anunnaki and the Cosmic Origins of the Serpent of Eden Andrew Collins | Bear & Company | October 2024 | ISBN: 9781591434788 | $26  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.
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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. 
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