Category:

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

7/2/2024

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.

9 Comments

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

4/16/2024

59 Comments

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.

59 Comments

Tucker Carlson Embraces Pyramid Conspiracies and Lost Race Mound Builder Myths

1/26/2024

21 Comments

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that after just three cobbled-together clip shows to start its new season, Ancient Aliens is already going on a break, substituting an even longer, multi-hour clip show under the Ancient Aliens Declassified brand. Anyhow, it turns out that I missed a bizarre appearance in which Tucker Carlson has some things to say about ancient history after descending further into the Ancient Aliens / Ancient Apocalypse rabbit hole.

21 Comments

A Dismal Revelation: 2023 in Review

12/28/2023

20 Comments

Another year has passed us by, and it seems that each one is somehow a little bit darker than the one before. I’ll be honest: I had a hard time bringing myself to write this year-end wrap-up this year. It’s been a hard twelve months. At the beginning of the year, the release of generative A.I. completely destroyed my career, wiping out virtually the entire industry of business writing that was my bread and butter. It happened so quickly and so destructively that CBS’s 60 Minutes came out to Albany to interview me about losing my job to a machine, and then I experienced a double humiliation when the venerable newsmagazine called me a few hours before my interview was scheduled to air to tell me that they cut me from the story and replaced me with an interview with a generative A.I. chatbot.

20 Comments

Graham Hancock Tells Russell Brand Archaeologists "Despise" Ordinary People

1/11/2023

61 Comments

In case you didn’t see it, Graham Hancock appeared on Russell Brand’s podcast this past week to promote Ancient Apocalypse and to attack archaeologists yet again for being mean to him by asking for evidence for his claims. Hancock looks tired and angry during the interview, and even Brand notes that he seems unduly dejected and downtrodden for a man with one of the world’s most popular streaming nonfiction series.

61 Comments

New Evidence Points to a 19th Century Origin for Kensington Runestone Alphabet

12/17/2022

89 Comments

The probable origin of the Kensington Runestone's runes has been found: The runic alphabet from the stone, with its distinctive "hooked X," was taught in a mid-19th century Swedish calligraphy school and the textbook its instructor published. It includes "Masonic" characters like those used by the Larsson brothers, whose runic writing had previously been the only other known runic use of the "hooked X."

Magnus Källström of the National Antiquities Office in Sweden published the results of his investigation last week. The key was in an 1876 textbook published by Eric Ström, an itinerant calligrapher (!):

89 Comments

Netflix Releases Data About Who Is Watching "Ancient Apocalypse"

11/23/2022

12 Comments

Netflix released the first viewership figures for Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse, and the numbers were less impressive than I expected. Netflix reported that for the week of Nov. 14-20, the show’s first full week of release, viewers of Netflix’s English-language services worldwide watched 24.61 million hours of the show. By contrast, the comedy series Dead to Me had 30.3 million hours viewed in half the time (it was released mid-week) and Warrior Nun, released the same day as Apocalypse, had 27.74 million hours viewed. All of them paled before 1899, which had nearly 80 million hours viewed in its first few days of release.

12 Comments

Review of The UnXplained S03E08 "Mysterious Ancient Ruins"

4/1/2022

5 Comments

William Shatner’s The UnXplained comes to us from the same brain trust that bring us Ancient Aliens, so I did not have much faith that its episode on ancient ruins would have much value. If the show isn’t quite Ancient Aliens, it is also something a bit more dangerous. Shatner personalizes its argument—claiming that it shows the world “through my eyes”—and because it lacks an obvious sci-fi angle, its pseudoscience and extreme nonsense take on an insidious air of mainstream consensus simply because the show presents even the wildest claims without dissenting opinion, without acknowledging (as even Ancient Aliens does) that mainstream scientists have different ideas, and without Ancient Aliens’ goofy lunacy, allowing it to pass lies off as not just respectable but self-evidently true. This episode was particularly dangerous in representing extreme and false historical claims as uncontroversial fact.

5 Comments

Beam Me Up: The Year in Review 2021

12/27/2021

7 Comments

Writing my annual year in review article used to be amusing, if not actually fun, because there was at least some entertainment value in seeing the wild claims and fantastical speculations that passed for history and science. But each year has been a little darker than the one before, and the job is less an exercise in tut-tutting foolishness than it is a depressing reminder that wealthy and powerful people are pushing conspiracies whose real-life consequences are no longer hypothetical but manifest every day in ways large and small, from the halls of Congress to hospital ICUs.

7 Comments

Scott Wolter Claims to Have a Lost Book of the Bible with Aliens Inside

12/18/2021

29 Comments

In a recent podcast interview, former television personality Scott Wolter made a bizarre assertion about prehistoric space aliens, a part of his ongoing conversion to full ancient astronaut theorist. Wolter discussed the documents he has asserted to be medieval records from the Knights Templar for the past several years, and in “new” Templar documents conveniently mirroring his own conversion to ancient alien enthusiast, he claims to have discovered evidence that space aliens intervened in human history.

29 Comments

<<Previous

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

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

Tucker Carlson Embraces Pyramid Conspiracies and Lost Race Mound Builder Myths

A Dismal Revelation: 2023 in Review

Graham Hancock Tells Russell Brand Archaeologists "Despise" Ordinary People

New Evidence Points to a 19th Century Origin for Kensington Runestone Alphabet

Netflix Releases Data About Who Is Watching "Ancient Apocalypse"

Review of The UnXplained S03E08 "Mysterious Ancient Ruins"

Beam Me Up: The Year in Review 2021

Scott Wolter Claims to Have a Lost Book of the Bible with Aliens Inside

Author

Newsletters

Categories

Terms & Conditions

Archives