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

1/20/2023

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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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E09: "Decoding the Dragon Gods"

3/11/2022

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The classic dragon is a bit of a late invention, a case where a range of previously unrelated creatures got thrown into the same category and started influencing one another. In the European tradition, dragons were originally envisioned as large snakes, as ancient Greek art attests, and Indo-European linguistic studies find that the most ancient Indo-European speakers thought of them as being in the category of worm, not reptile. Only much later did medieval Europeans start to assign the wings and feet. By contrast, the dragons of East Asian lore originated in fantasy combinations of a variety of animals, and may have originated in stories of extinct types of crocodile. The point is that there is no universal “dragon” myth, nor any consistency to dragon stories.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E07: Alien Air Force

2/25/2022

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Note: Due to technical problems, half of this review did not display properly. I have (finally) fixed the technical errors.

On That UFO Podcast this week, American Cosmic author Diana Pasulka said that scientists she is working with believe that they have pierced the veil between dimensions and are in communication with entities from alternate realities. “They believe they’re in contact, and they’re doing this through “technology” (which, in UFO circles, can mean anything from a machine to psychic powers) in order to tether into these other worlds.” This bizarre claim comes only days after UFO advocate Lue Elizondo delivered a strange digression about consciousness during a podcast interview, alleging that the human soul is independent of body and part of another reality, a claim he illustrated with geometric shapes invoking medieval alchemical symbolism for the Philosopher’s Stone.

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