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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E10 “The Giants of Malta”

3/17/2023

The success of last fall’s Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix cast a shadow over Ancient Aliens, and it’s only natural that the History Channel dumpster fire would attempt to imitate its better-watched competitor. We’ve seen a couple of episodes this season that seem to be riffing on parts of Ancient Apocalypse, and this episode is the clearers copy yet, expanding Graham Hancock’s Apocalypse segment about the prehistory of Malta and its “giants” into an hour recycling Ancient Aliens’ previous explorations of the temples and mythology of the Mediterranean island.

If you’ve been watching the History Channel for any length of time, you’re already familiar with the topics discussed in this episode. The Ancient Aliens extended universe has recycled this content many times over the last decade and a half, particularly in the spinoff series In Search of Aliens, which devoted an entire episode to the supposed “giants” of Malta back in 2014 and then returned to it a second time before the end of its first and only season. Material from In Search of Aliens found its way into many Ancient Aliens episodes over the past decade, such as its “Giants of the Mediterranean” episode from 2020.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E06: “Cosmic Impacts”

2/17/2023

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In UFO world this week, the U.S. government said the unidentified objects recently shot down were almost certainly balloons, prompting Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Marco Rubio to take the obvious step of demanding more funding for the Pentagon office they jury-rigged to investigate UFO conspiracy theories, study imaginary superhuman aerial performance vehicles, and “replicate” alien spaceship technology. As you do with balloons. And of course Lue Elizondo and Chris Mellon claimed credit for the new awareness of balloons, disingenuously suggesting they have always been concerned about balloons and not the space aliens they have repeatedly implied were the only real threat. The public, though, seemed less interested in UFOs than politicians are; NatGeo’s splashy new Leslie Kean-fronted documentary series on UFOs, originally made for CNN, attracted only 326,000 viewers, almost all over the age of 50, in its debut hour.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E03: “Mystery of the Lost Civilization”

1/20/2023

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This week Politico reported that Enigma Labs would begin working with the Pentagon’s new UFO office on UFO sighting analysis. The mysterious company vowed to keep its employees a secret to protect their “privacy.” Indeed, CEO Alex Smith takes this so seriously that she apparently uses a false name and is probably in reality venture capitalist Alice Lloyd George, whose name appears in place of Smith’s as CEO on trademark application documents. The company is associated with UFO journalist Alejandro Rojas and has partnered with Discovery+ UFO personality Ben Hansen. This certainly fills me with confidence when they say they want to create a database of UFO witnesses’ personal data.

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This Was the Year That Was: 2022 in Review

12/26/2022

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This year wasn’t quite as bad as 2021, so I can’t be too upset at a year that, if nothing else, did not get appreciably worse. On the other hand, nothing really improved either. Between inflation and further work cuts in my failing industry, it’s been hard. When a prominent astrologer said this year would be the best of my life, I wasn’t sure whether that was a promise or a threat. It’s a good thing astrology is bunk, or else I would be painfully depressed to think this was the best things will ever get.

In a more general sense, this was a year devoted mostly to UFOs, which dominated the paranoid paranormal discourse for the first ten months, until Atlantis made a late run for the crown.

Here, then, is the year that was, edited and condensed from my blog posts and newsletter.

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"Sirius Mystery" Author Claims Universe Is a Giant Living Alien Species

12/15/2022

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Sirius Mystery author Robert Temple has a new book out, A New Science of Heaven, claiming that 99% of the universe is plasma and that plasma is a sentient form of extraterrestrial life.

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Scott Wolter: Space Aliens Helped Templars Found America

12/3/2022

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Former America Unearthed host Scott F. Wolter recently announced plans to deliver a lecture at February’s Conscious Life Expo in which he’ll be expanding his Templar conspiracy theories, fully merging them with his growing involvement with the ancient astronaut theory. Get a load of the lecture description, combining his previous false claims with Jesuit assassins, the hoax documents he promotes as genuine, and space aliens:

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Review of "How Antigravity Built the Pyramids" by Nick Redfern

9/14/2022

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It’s telling that Nick Redfern starts his book purportedly covering supposed sonic levitation used to build the Egyptian pyramids not with the original medieval Arabic legend of self-moving stones but with ancient astronaut theorist Peter Kolosimo’s reference to it decades ago, in Timeless Earth (1964): “According to an Arab legend, the Egyptians used scrolls of papyrus with magic words written on them, on which blocks for the pyramids came flying through the air!” Redfern frames his story around Kolosimo’s speculative revision of Arab lore and Bruce Cathie’s strange ideas about levitation and antigravity (derived from his own UFO encounter and reluctance to believe lazy humans would drag big stones) rather than the actual primary sources that previous generations of kooks built upon, often secondhand, from still other summaries.

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Turkish Official Claims Göbekli Tepe Depicts Space Aliens

4/27/2022

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The mayor of the town where the ancient site of Göbekli Tepe is located claimed that the temple complex's stylized carvings of human figures are so unusual that they may depict space aliens, according to the Hurriyet Daily News. Zeynel Abidin Beyazgül, the mayor of Şanlıurfa, said that the clothing worn by the T-shaped carvings resembled outfits he associated with space creatures.

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Lue Elizondo Embraces Ancient Astronaut Theory, Fascinated by Ica Stones Hoax

3/22/2022

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When Kenneth Arnold saw the first flying saucers seventy-five years ago, it took very little time for fantasists to cherry pick pieces of history to create the ancient astronaut theory as a sort of prehistory for UFOs. Arnold saw his saucers on June 25, 1947, and on July 3 San Francisco theosophical occultist Ole J. Sneide became the first known person to connect flying saucers to ancient astronauts. Since then, the two ideas, UFOs and ancient astronauts, have revolved around one another, and eventually most ufologists come to embrace some version of the ancient astronaut theory. Therefore, it was no surprise that the man with the U.S. Senate’s ear on UFOs, Lue Elizondo, came out as an ancient astronaut theorist in a recent interview, as The Daily Grail recently reported.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E10: “The Time Benders”

3/18/2022

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This week, during a podcast interview, Lue Elizondo claimed that while he served as the director of AATIP, he successfully “baited” UFOs and was able to attract them largely at will because “it turns out that these things can be pretty successful, if you know what you’re doing.” This bizarre claim raises some important questions. If, as the Navy pilots claimed, they encountered UFOs every day for two years, why did Elizondo need to bait them like Wile E. Coyote leaving out bird seed for the Road Runner? More importantly, if this tactic is so successful, why has he not demonstrated his ability to summon flying saucers, either on his History Channel TV show or his countless network and cable news performances? Surely, his new colleague Avi Loeb could have used his services to lure UFOs to the Galileo Project’s cameras. And yet, all we get are podcast interviews and teasers for a book.

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