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Review of The UnXplained S02E10 "The Search for Atlantis"

1/23/2021

William Shatner’s The UnXplained comes from the same producers that gave us Ancient Aliens, In Search of Aliens, Curse of Oak Island, and The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. Bad ideas, poor research, and lies are original sin indivisible from the program’s halfhearted attempts to be slightly less outrageous than its loudmouthed sister shows. Shatner himself is a longtime enthusiast for the paranormal, lending his voice to programs about the extraterrestrial and supernatural since the 1970s. I don’t regularly watch The UnXplained because it rarely covers topics of interest to me. This episode, however, explored Atlantis, an I was disappointed to see that Prometheus Entertainment, the company behind so many bad shows, simply pasted this together from spare parts of other bad shows—citing them as evidence that “some” believe extreme idea that Prometheus’s own shows promoted!

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The New Yorker Interviews Erich von Däniken, Whitewashing His Bigotry

1/22/2021

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So, this week the New Yorker interviewed racist author Erich von Däniken, the elderly ancient astronaut theorist who once wrote that the Black race was a “failure” and who has included transphobic and Islamophobic commentary in his most recent books. Why would one of America’s premiere publications give a platform to a man whose claim to fame was arguing that nonwhite people couldn’t stack rocks without help from rapists from outer space? It’s because a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist seems to have relied on her adolescent memories of ancient astronaut rather than researching current controversies—current being anything after, say, the late 1970s.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E05 "The Forbidden Bible"

12/18/2020

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This week, the former director of the CIA from 2013 to 2017, John Brennan, appeared on a podcast to say that he was intrigued by the Navy UFO videos promoted by To the Star Academy of Arts and Science. He said that we cannot exclude the possibility that flying saucers are vehicles driven by beings from other worlds and that we must keep an open mind. He wasn’t speaking from official knowledge, only from his personal speculation about otherworldly life, conflating the scientific probability of life somewhere in the universe with the improbable idea that large numbers of such beings are visiting us to pose for blurry selfies and sodomize the unwary. This depressing speculation from a former high official helps explain why cable TV thinks the 927,000 weekly Ancient Aliens viewers are a desirable and powerful demographic of senior citizens (the vast majority of viewers are over 50) worth catering to.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E04: Giants of the Mediterranean

12/11/2020

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More than two hundred years ago, the naturalist Georges Cuvier published his Memoir Upon Living and Fossil Elephants in which he correctly explained that the skeletons reported around the Mediterranean region as those of a lost race of giants had, in fact, belonged to fossilized elephants. Nearly a century earlier, Sir Hans Sloane had drawn the same conclusion in a paper read before the Royal Society. In 1835, Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville examined the skeleton of the famed giant Teutobochus and discovered that it belonged to a mastodon, a truth that confirmed an assessment by Jean Riolan the Younger a century before. Hell, in 1827 Edmond Temple even watched a “giant” being excavated in Bolivia in the presence of men of science, and he gawked in wonder as they completely refused to believe it an Ice Age elephant, despite having tusks. I could list dozens of similar accounts and analyses. In fact, I have. The truth about “giants” has been known for centuries, but here we are watching Ancient Aliens party like it’s 1699.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E03 "The Galactic Keyhole"

12/4/2020

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What is there to say about this episode’s topic? Having previously aired episodes about triangles and circles, the show has now combined both into an episode about “keyhole” shapes, or a circle overlapping a triangle. More prosaically, the shape is formed when any two converging lines approach a circle. In a pinch, parallel lines will do. It should take no genius to see how ancient people might strike on the notion of intersecting a circle with a triangle or a rectangle, or why a causeway might lead to a circular enclosure. For Ancient Aliens, however, the very notion of shapes toddlers master at the age of two is a cosmic leap that could only descend from the stars. Whatever would they make of the fact that my three-year-old has mastered dodecahedrons? Oh, right. They did an episode about them, too.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E01 "The Divine Number"

11/13/2020

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Forgive me if the thought of doing this all again is more than I can quite take. Ancient Aliens has been off the air since the pandemic struck, and this is the first episode back since executive producer Kevin Burns died. It’s not a terribly auspicious start. Hell, this episode even features a commercial for penis-straightening, so ugh. Their audience is pretty obvious. The theme of this episode is the “divine” number twelve, and the whole episode is devoted to finding instances of twelves in mythology, architecture, and nature. There is nothing mystical about twelve. It’s special only because it contains a large number of factors—1, 2, 3, 4, and 6—and many significant multiples—24, 60, 72, etc.—making it a fairly obvious candidate for a “special” that can be used to join any number of natural or mystically significant digits. There are twelve months in the lunar year, which is all the explanation you really need.

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Review of "War of the Gods" by Erich von Däniken

9/23/2020

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Years go by with the inevitable cycle of the seasons repeating their majestic rounds. After winter, summer. After summer, winter. And with the regularity of the season, so too does Erich von Däniken release a new book, and with the same repetition as the seasons. Each book is the same as all the books before, and each one begins with the ritual of pretending otherwise. War of the Gods, originally published in German 2018 but released in English for the first time this month, starts with a letter in which von Däniken (henceforth EVD) proclaims with great excitement news that he imagines will surprise his readers: “In this book, I present new findings!” Unfortunately, there is an ominous note: “But it is only possible by building on previous experiences.” Each winter brings a different snowstorm but you always know it will snow. So, too, do you know that whatever soupçon of new material appears in War of the Gods will be buried in a blizzard of recycling. He frequently refers to his own books, the books of guests on Ancient Aliens, and to claims made on the Ancient Aliens television show itself, recycling in an endless loop of previous claims tracing back to his own earliest efforts to recycle Morning of the Magicians to his own advantage.

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Weekend Omnibus: Younger Dryas Volcano, Elon Musk's Ancient Astronaut Tweet, Steve Quayle's Plagiarism, and More!

8/1/2020

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Yesterday was an extraordinary day for news of interest to my readers. Let’s take a brief survey of just some of the things that happened.

I’ll put the science first. A new study in Science Advances concludes that the global cooling triggered during the Younger Dryas was not the work of a comet or meteor but was instead brought on by volcanic activity. From the press release announcing the study late yesterday:

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James Dean, Ancient Astronaut Theorist?

7/18/2020

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I had intended to write a full blog post today, but this week turned into a series of bad news leading to worse. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken its toll on my household's employment and finances, and a literal midnight email about mandatory pay cuts and furloughs will only make it worse. I was not in the mood to blog. However, I did feel up to working on the proposal for a new book I have decided to write, based on my recent article about Rebel without a Cause and the three 1947 national panics over communists, gays, and UFOs that turned out to be deeply interconnected.

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Weekend Update: CNN Talks Ancient Aliens, Shatner Babbles about Mysteries, and More!

7/11/2020

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On Thursday, CNN’s website ran an article on the ancient astronaut theory by Jen Rose Smith. The piece frames questions about the origins of UNESCO World Heritage Sites like the Giza pyramids and the Nazca lines in terms of Erich von Däniken’s version of the ancient astronaut theory. It then devotes most of the article’s space to describing how “mainstream scientists” reject the ancient astronaut hypothesis, with lengthy quotes from archaeologist Sarah Parcak.

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