Category: Atlantis

Filmmaker Claims "New Evidence" of Egyptian Atlantis Knowledge, But It's Just Plato

11/5/2025

Giorgio Tsoukalos recently started referring to the December 2017 New York Times story that launched the current wave of Congressional UFO interest as “the Pentagon Papers,” and that wasn’t even the dumbest thing a fringe pseudo-historian said this past week. When I saw the Daily Mail headline promising “Astonishing New Evidence of Atlantis Reveals Advanced Civilization Preserved by Ancient Egypt’s Priests,” I will admit that I did not have terribly high hopes. It is the Daily Mail after all. But, truly, the article, available only to premium subscribers (a free version is archived here), boggles the mind. You will never believe that the Mail considers “new”—or pretends to, since it’s obvious that reporter Stacy Liberatore understands that it’s bullshit but had to write it anyway.

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Another New Documentary Claims to Reveal the True Location of Atlantis ... Again

6/4/2025

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A new three-part documentary series claims to have found the lost continent of Atlantis, but producers say that they won’t tell you where they found it until the film series premieres at some unspecified future date. “I’ve seen documentaries that are conjectures,” one member of the film team said. “We have something physical, which matches what Plato described.” Atlántica producers plan to present their film at the Cosmic Summit 2025, taking place on June 20. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait that long because the team behind Atlántica already shared their findings in 2018 and again in 2023, and they were, let’s say, not conclusive.

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André Thevet and the "Evidence" for Atlantis in America

4/26/2025

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As you know, tracking down primary sources is one of the rabbit holes I can’t escape, so when I started flipping through Lewis Spence’s 1925 book Atlantis in America and came across his evidence that the Native peoples of the Americas had Atlantis traditions, I of course wanted to see the originals for myself. I was particularly taken by a quotation he gave on page 68, which Spence says comes from the “Tupi-Guarani of Brazil” and was recorded by “Thevet.” No other information is given to identify the source of an interesting take about a heavenly fire and a subsequent flood—a story later writers would identify as a comet that destroyed Atlantis:

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A Dull Slog: 2024 in Review

12/27/2024

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Each year, it’s a little more difficult to write a seemingly lighthearted review of the year in weird. This year was both personally and professionally a bit of a struggle as A.I. continues to eat away at my day job and the closure or collapse of a number of media outlets has made it more difficult place stories in paying publications. I lost my gig as a CNN Opinion columnist right when it was starting because CNN shuttered the entire division. As the year came to an end, about one-third of my income for the year remains outstanding from businesses that are dragging their feet on payments and have been since early fall. That has made it difficult to devote too much energy to caring about whatever old claims the usual cadre of kooks and weirdos are recycling on any given day.

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Graham Hancock Defender Claims Proof of the Atlantis Myth's Egyptian Origin

7/18/2024

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In a posting on X today, Graham Hancock announced that “archaeologists aren't going to like” a new article Hancock posted to his website, implying that the argument convincingly challenges scholarly views. Written by Manu Seyfzadeh, a dermatologist who hunts for the Atlantean Hall of Records, the article seeks to prove that Plato drew on a genuine ancient Egyptian tradition of Atlantis when he ascribed the allegory of Atlantis to a story the Egyptians told his distant ancestor Solon in the sixth century BCE. However, Seyfzadeh admits to having no training in Classics or Egyptology, and his arguments are rather transparently ignorant of the broader context of Near Eastern cultures.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E19 “The Top Ten Mysteries of the Deep”

9/8/2023

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After a week off for the Labor Day holiday, Ancient Aliens returns with … another clip show. I could try to vamp for a paragraph or two about the philosophical background of claims of underwater civilization, draw connections to Atlantis, or even cite the influence of the 1936 Saturday morning movie serial Undersea Kingdom and its vision of subaquatic high technology and a hostile civilization beneath the waves. But I’ve done all of that before, and so has Ancient Aliens, and so did sister show The UnXplained last year in a very similar underwater-themed episode. This clip show contained previously broadcast segments surrounding ten topics vaguely connected by having something to do with water.

Not all of the segments match notes I have made about past episodes. It is possible some might include new talking head clips, or else the excerpts are from minor segments I did not mention in my reviews.

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Graham Hancock Tells Russell Brand Archaeologists "Despise" Ordinary People

1/11/2023

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In case you didn’t see it, Graham Hancock appeared on Russell Brand’s podcast this past week to promote Ancient Apocalypse and to attack archaeologists yet again for being mean to him by asking for evidence for his claims. Hancock looks tired and angry during the interview, and even Brand notes that he seems unduly dejected and downtrodden for a man with one of the world’s most popular streaming nonfiction series.

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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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Review of Netflix's Ancient Apocalypse

11/11/2022

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Graham Hancock has made this show before. Netflix’s Ancient Apocalypse is in substance and style very much like the Channel 4 / TLC series Quest for the Lost Civilization that Hancock made nearly twenty-five years ago, albeit with different archaeological sites. In the intervening decades, all that has really changed is the use of drones for better aerial footage, a lot more dramatic music to paper over gaps in logic, and a growing bitterness behind Hancock’s carefully rehearsed enunciation. Each episode, for example, starts with an angry rant about Hancock’s greatness and his critics’ meanness. He opens time and again with some variation on “many archaeologists hate me” and poses as a truth-teller who will singlehandedly overturn archaeology.

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Review of The UnXplained S04E03: "What Lies Below"

4/11/2022

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Normally I put an episode number here, but the show is listed as both S03E11 and S04E03. History appears to have started a new season last week, but production codes listed the new episodes as a continuation of season 3.

Since I am not a robot, I was not able to review the latest episode of The UnXplained this weekend, but it was certainly a doozy. I hadn’t expected the show to return to the well of lost prehistoric super-civilizations quite so quickly, but here we are again. I guess that explains why William Shatner has been so insistent on battling archaeological criticism on Twitter this past week with petty insults. This time, the Ancient Aliens remix hour in which Shatner presides over recycled material from Prometheus Entertainment’s other nonsense fake science shows goes hunting for lost continents and sunken civilizations. Not a word is spoken about the many hoaxes and frauds that undergird the show’s claims, and if you think anyone involved will so much as whisper that the modern versions of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu were born in racism and celebrated a white master race that civilized the world, you don’t know how propaganda works.

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<<Previous

Filmmaker Claims "New Evidence" of Egyptian Atlantis Knowledge, But It's Just Plato

Another New Documentary Claims to Reveal the True Location of Atlantis ... Again

André Thevet and the "Evidence" for Atlantis in America

A Dull Slog: 2024 in Review

Graham Hancock Defender Claims Proof of the Atlantis Myth's Egyptian Origin

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E19 “The Top Ten Mysteries of the Deep”

Graham Hancock Tells Russell Brand Archaeologists "Despise" Ordinary People

This Was the Year That Was: 2022 in Review

Review of Netflix's Ancient Apocalypse

Review of The UnXplained S04E03: "What Lies Below"

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