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A New Video Asks: How Bad Is Graham Hancock at Research? Worse Than You Know

8/13/2025

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.

7 Comments

Trump Administration to Review Smithsonian Exhibits for Ideological Purity

8/12/2025

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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.

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In Brief: Scott Wolter Preps New Book about (Fake) Medieval Journals

8/6/2025

28 Comments

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.

28 Comments

Tucker Carlson for UFO Czar? Plus: David Frum's Descent into Historical Revisionism

1/6/2025

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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 (!).

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A Dull Slog: 2024 in Review

12/27/2024

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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.

21 Comments

A Christmas Mystery: Hancock, Bauval, and the "Three Kings of Orion"

12/20/2024

4 Comments

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.

4 Comments

In Brief: A New Paper Again Rebuts the Younger Dryas Comet Impact Hypothesis

12/5/2024

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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.

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Review of "Karahan Tepe" by Andrew Collins

11/29/2024

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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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Review of "Ancient Apocalypse: The Americas"

10/16/2024

51 Comments

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.

51 Comments

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

7/2/2024

9 Comments

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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<<Previous

A New Video Asks: How Bad Is Graham Hancock at Research? Worse Than You Know

Trump Administration to Review Smithsonian Exhibits for Ideological Purity

In Brief: Scott Wolter Preps New Book about (Fake) Medieval Journals

Tucker Carlson for UFO Czar? Plus: David Frum's Descent into Historical Revisionism

A Dull Slog: 2024 in Review

A Christmas Mystery: Hancock, Bauval, and the "Three Kings of Orion"

In Brief: A New Paper Again Rebuts the Younger Dryas Comet Impact Hypothesis

Review of "Karahan Tepe" by Andrew Collins

Review of "Ancient Apocalypse: The Americas"

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

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