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

9/14/2022

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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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E06: "Secrets of the Star Ancestors"

2/18/2022

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This week, Wired magazine gave Jacques Vallée the glamour treatment, with a glossy profile praising the aging deacon of ufology for his six decades of failure to find the answer to UFOs. Vallée made some mouth noises about “the phenomenon” being too smart for humanity, claiming that the entities purposely embrace humor and absurdity in order to break down humanity’s rational mind. At a certain point, it stops being anything even science-adjacent and instead becomes an expression of philosophy and faith. Vallée admits that his UFO obsession originated in an adolescent interest—but of course—and Wired treated far more respectfully than you’d think his bizarre claim from last year that the U.S. government recovered an avocado-shaped UFO staffed by miniature space aliens in 1945. His image makeover as grand master of science and worthy future recipient of government patronage is a rather amazing turnaround from a man denounced as dotty and past-his-prime by his own ufology colleagues just last year.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E05: "Recovering the Ark of the Covenant"

2/11/2022

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Ancient Aliens is going in search of the Ark of the Covenant. … Again. If the topic sounds familiar, it should. Back in 2013, Ancient Aliens did this same episode under the title “Aliens and the Lost Ark.” This time, they justify the repeat by skewing the focus a tiny bit, shifting a bit more to the hunt for the Ark rather than its alleged electrical alien superpowers. But that material has already been covered in the last two segments of the previous version, so I’m not sure that there is enough of a difference to warrant a whole other episode repeating the same material.

Since the episode both repeats the same claims and also recycles footage from the earlier episode, I will not be discussing each claim in detail, since I have already covered the same material. Below are the highlights of this bizarre instant-rerun.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E03: "Beneath the Sacred Temples"

1/21/2022

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It looks like Ancient Aliens is getting some competition. This week CNN announced that it had commissioned a new five-episode nonfiction documentary entertainment series, tentatively titled UFOs. The series, which will rehash the usual material about the government’s investigation of flying saucers and offer the usual incomplete hagiography of Lue Elizondo and Leslie Kean, will be produced by Break Thru Films, the same production company that adapted Kean’s book on the afterlife for Netflix. It has secretly been in production since last fall, and earlier today Kean confirmed that it was the same series she had teased in an interview last week. CNN is a corporate cousin of HBO Max, the streaming service that is producing a drama series about Leslie Kean’s investigation into UFOs. Kean is making bank, and Warner Media, soon to be part of UFO-obsessed Discovery, has made plain that it is all-in on UFOs for the foreseeable future.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E02 "Mystery of the Standing Stones"

1/14/2022

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This week’s episode of Ancient Aliens continues the theme of exploiting stuff you half remember from the last year or so as it presents an episode framed around the so-called “monolith” that caused a stir when the metallic art installation was photographed in the Utah desert in November 2020, sparking allegations that the shiny pillar was the work of space aliens, despite its very earthly rivets. The show has covered various standing stones and pillars many times before, so after last week’s relatively coherent episode with a strong narrative arc and somewhat original content, we return to form with the usual recycling. I will be frank. This episode is almost identical to the Season Five episode called “The Monoliths,” which covered almost all of the material we see tonight, mostly in the same order.

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