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Beam Me Up: The Year in Review 2021

12/27/2021

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.

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

12/18/2021

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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.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E07: "Top Ten Alien Artifacts"

10/8/2021

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Once again this week, Ancient Aliens is devoting an hour to clips of past episodes arbitrarily arranged into a top-ten list. Audiences have noticed, and ratings for the series have fallen. Last week, Ancient Aliens attracted only 674,000 live-plus-same-day viewers, down nearly a third from last season’s average. This number is still much larger than most other non-news programs airing on Fridays—AMC’s History of Horror, for example, had only half as many viewers—but the audience exodus from Ancient Aliens indicates that even the notoriously loyal Ancient Aliens audience is less tolerant of reruns that it is of the usual policy of rehashing in slightly different words.

This week, my son came down with a virus, which left us taking care of a sick kid while trying to arrange doctor visits and COVID testing so he could qualify to return to school. He’s fine now, and the COVID test came back negative, but it’s been an exhausting week, so, like last week, I am simply going to list the topics covered and, where I remember the source, direct you to my prior reviews.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E06 "The Top Ten Alien Encounters"

10/1/2021

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As Ancient Aliens grows older and lazier and struggles to produce new episodes during the coronavirus pandemic, despite the show traditionally featuring little more than talking head interviews intercut with off-the-rack b-roll, we’ve been getting more and more episodes made up of rerun segments from earlier seasons. So far, half of season 17’s episodes have been “top 10” lists of segments from past episodes. Tonight’s theme is “Top 10 Alien Encounters.” Since there is nothing new in the episode and Ancient Aliens is putting no effort into their show, I have no interest in wasting my time reviewing segments I’ve discussed in my reviews over the past decade. Therefore, for the sake of completion, I will list the “encounters” the show covered and direct you to my archives for previous discussion of them.

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Review of "Confessions of an Egyptologist" by Erich von Däniken

9/25/2021

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Confessions of an Egyptologist:
Lost Libraries, Vanished Labyrinths and the Astonishing Truth Under the Saqqara Pyramids
Erich von Däniken | trans. Bernard Sulzer | September 2021 | New Page Books | ISBN: 978-1-63265-191-4

Confessions of an Egyptologist is at least somewhat unusual by ancient astronaut theorist Erich von Däniken’s standards. It is framed not as his usual grab-bag of medieval, Victorian, and midcentury pseudoscience but as a discussion of an Egyptian tour guide he calls Adel H., who died in the 1997 Luxor terrorist attack near the temple of Hatshepsut. His full name, in standard English transliteration (rather than the German used in this book) was ‘Adil Hummam, and the pair had been friends since 1984. I will refer to the man in the book as Adel, however, because it is never clear how much the literary version resembles the actual man. This conceit lasts barely a page before von Däniken (henceforth EVD) winds off on a tangent, asking if Hatshepsut was the “world’s first transgender person.” He can’t write a sustained discussion of anything, even the death of his friend.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E05 "The Human Experiment"

9/24/2021

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On the day this episode of Ancient Aliens aired, the new UFO think tank Skyfort associated with Lue Elizondo released its plans for “Phase II” of its efforts to influence the government, academia, and media to investigate UFOs. The plans were heavy on assuming UFOs are otherworldly technology and short on any effort to probe the psychological or perceptional issues associated with sightings. Not long before, the House of Representatives passed the first-ever legislation referencing “unidentified aerial phenomena” by name as part of a directive creating a permanent office of UFO investigation. Also on Friday, Ralph Blumenthal, the ex-New York Times reporter who broke the 2017 AATIP story, published his new article on alien abductees that Blumenthal claimed the Times had refused to run because its new editors are biased against UFOs. The resulting piece was an embarrassment—rehashed UFO stories from old books, biased and uncritical thinking, and poor and unclear writing. It only served to reinforce the degree to which Blumenthal has become a UFO believer who thinks himself immune to conventional standards of evidence, reasoning, and reporting.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E04 "The Mystery of Mount Shasta"

9/17/2021

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been eight years since Ancient Aliens devoted a significant segment to Mt. Shasta in California, a New Age hotspot that has long been associated with supernatural, antediluvian, and extraterrestrial phenomena. While there had been stories about mystical mountain mysteries associated with Mt. Shasta, the modern conspiracy theory version comes directly from A Dweller on Two Planets by Frederick Spencer Oliver, a late nineteenth century book inspired by Theosophy that identified Mt. Shasta as a secret base for Atlanteans who had a base in tunnels beneath the mountain:

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E01 "The Lost City of Peru"

8/6/2021

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It has been nearly five months since Ancient Aliens signed off for its sixteenth season, and over those months, the field of fantastical alien conspiracies has changed markedly. With the New Yorker and 60 Minutes leading the way, the mainstream media burned through a major UFO flap, and the U.S. government made a lot of noise about flying saucers right up until the release of the intelligence community UFO report Congress ordered last year. Its noncommittal, largely half-assed summary of America’s lack of UFO knowledge wasn’t enough to sustain a media and political frenzy that saw high-profile journalists openly fantasizing about alien revelations.

The flap fizzled, even before more pressing concerns turned media focus toward the delta variant of COVID-19. Cable TV and streaming efforts to cash in on the frenzy saw little success.

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Erich von Däniken Blasts Cable TV Shows for Pilfering Claims He Stole First

8/5/2021

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Last week, viewers fled Hunting Atlantis, with the show's ratings falling even as its lead in, Expedition Unknown, gained viewers. Last Wednesday's episode drew just 605,000 live plus same-day viewers, down 45,000 from the week before. The demo collapse was worse. Only 90,000 adults 18-49 watched. By contrast, Expedition Unknown rose significantly, to nearly a million viewers. It's clear: Viewers aren't into Atlantis.

Another discontented viewer of cable pseudo-documentaries was none other than Erich von Däniken, the Chariots of the Gods author who is feeling a little ignored these days, as his protégé Giorgio Tsoukalos reported:

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Scott Wolter Tries to Psychically Contact E.T., Claims U.S. Has Treaties with Aliens

7/29/2021

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Since losing his Travel Channel TV series, former America Unearthed host has been on a downward slide into the depths of conspiracy culture in search of revelation and relevance. Because he no longer has a media platform, I haven’t been covering his antics as much as in the past, but because he is a former three-time cable TV show host and likely to return to TV in some capacity in the future as the demand for filler content grows among streaming services, it’s worth noting some of the extremes Wolter embraced in his latest podcast interview.

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