Category: Mythology

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E01 “Skulls of the Gods”

1/16/2026

After a break of more than two months, Ancient Aliens returned Thursday night, as it has each January, for the start of a new season, its twenty-second over seventeen calendar years, counting from the 2009 pilot episode. I suppose that it is only appropriate that Ancient Aliens returns the same week that its guiding spirit, Erich von Däniken, died at the age of ninety. As long as the series, which was originally an adaptation of Chariots of the Gods, remains on the air, it’s almost like von Däniken is still with us, lying and fabricating shamelessly. Unlike the past two seasons, this one opens with an “original” episode rather than a “Top Ten” clip show. I suppose that is something like progress. On the other hand, the series began its new season with a rehash of familiar material about elongated skulls that the show has repeated for a decade and a half. In a week where Giorgio Tsoukalos was actively posting on X that the supposed “alien” mummies of Peru were nothing but desecrated human bodies made into “dolls,” it is a bit ironic that he is also appearing here to declare some skulls from Peru are in fact extraterrestrial. But that’s where we stand.

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Human Sacrifice and the Death of Antinous

1/8/2026

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In Ancient World Magazine, British researcher Andrew Michael Chugg has a new piece about the death of Hadrian’s lover Antinous and his subsequent promotion to a constellation in Ptolemy’s Almagest. Most of the article concerns the early modern history of the now-forgotten constellation of Antinous, which is beyond my interest or scope. But Chugg promoted his piece on social media as the “unexpurgated” story of Antinous, so it is worth giving a bit of consideration to the evidence for Antinous’s life and death.

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NBC's "Today" Show Runs Credulous Report Claiming "Proof" of Noah's Ark

11/10/2025

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Early this morning, NBC’s Today show broadcast a piece profiling “Christian researcher” Andrew Jones, who has long claimed that a natural formation in Turkey is Noah’s Ark. The “Today In-Depth” report, broadcast during the 7:30 ET half hour, saw international correspondent Keir Simmons deliver a one-sided live report from the Durupinar formation near Mount Ararat, claiming the site to be the Ark. “A group of American Christians believe they have new evidence that that is the wreckage of Noah's Ark here in these mountains,” Simmons told Today anchors Savannah Guthrie, Craig Melvin, and Carson Daly.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E17: “Secrets of Japan”

11/7/2025

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The History channel moved Ancient Aliens yet again following its week off, shifting the show from 8 PM to 9 PM, sandwiched between reruns. I suppose there must be some ratings reason for it, but since Nielsen stopped reporting cable ratings (highlights for sports and cable news are released a week after), I’m not sure how Ancient Aliens currently performs. Not that many people would notice much of a difference between new episodes and reruns anyway. This week’s episode is a case in point. “Secrets of Japan” follows the season’s pattern of organizing episodes by geographic region but otherwise remaking past productions. “Secrets of Japan” calls to mind the 2017 episode “A Spaceship Made of Stone,” which similarly was devoted to Japan, though the former episode leaned more into ancient material and this week’s episode into modern UFO sightings. (Some of the same Japanese talking heads even appear in both.)

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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E16: “Mysteries of the Norse Gods”

10/24/2025

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After several weeks of episodes themed around modern ufology, this week Ancient Aliens returned to its classic style in two ways—Not only was this episode centered on the old-fashioned ancient astronaut theory but it was also a remake of a previous episode the covered the exact same subject. You would need a long memory to remember that back in 2013, Ancient Aliens devoted an episode to “The Viking Gods” and spent that hour doing what they do in this hour, claiming that the Norse gods were extraterrestrial beings. As I mentioned at the time, this is a deeply problematic claim because the texts they ask us to take literally as historical records of the gods’ activities also are euhemerizing texts that explicitly state that the gods were human kings wrongly worshiped as gods. You can’t have it both ways; either we take them literally or we don’t.

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The New Yorker Goes in Search of the Oldest Layer of Mythology

10/14/2025

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This week, the New Yorker ran a lengthy piece asking whether it is possible to reconstruct the oldest myths. Writer Manvir Singh, an associate professor of anthropology at UC Davis and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, frames the investigation around the character of Edward Casaubon from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), a clergyman who sought to find the key to prove all world mythologies were related and descended from Christian truth. Singh teases the idea that such a key, minus the Christianity, has finally been found, but his article turned out to be a rather bland summary of fairly well-known studies that were already considered standard when I read and used them in writing my 2013 book Jason and the Argonauts Through the Ages.

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Peter Thiel Delivers Bizarre Lecture on the Antichrist

9/26/2025

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Billionaire conservative tech mogul Peter Thiel had once been interested in UFOs and ancient aliens, sponsoring a paranormal conference where ufologists and ancient astronaut theorists plied their trade. Now, however, he has traded secular monsters for religious ones and claims to seriously believe that Satan, demons, and the Antichrist are on the verge of seizing power. In a recent lecture, Thiel spoke about the Antichrist and claimed that government regulation of artificial intelligence technology will hasten Satan’s conquest of the Earth.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E11: “The Birdman Mystery”

9/12/2025

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At the most basic level, the ancient astronaut theory is a form of euhemerism, the philosophy proposed by Euhemerus in the fourth century BCE which held that the wonders of mythology and the various divinities were corrupt and misunderstood retellings of the deeds of real people. Euhemerus himself tended to myths as masking very human truth—so, for him, the gods were simply human kings deified. However, his successors became increasingly fanciful in an attempt to take myths literally while eliminating the supernatural. Dionysius Scytobrachion, for instance, imagined that the Golden Ram that carried Phryxus and Helle through the air was a boat with a ram-shaped prow and the Golden Fleece the flayed skin of a man named Krios (Mr. Ram). Ancient astronaut theorists take this tendency in a sci-fi direction by attempting to be even more literal and find creatures—i.e. aliens—that can allow them to keep even more of the stories unchanged.

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Review of History’s Greatest Mysteries S06E20 “Lost Places of the Old Testament”

8/20/2025

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I’m not much of a fan of History’s Greatest Mysteries, Laurence Fishburne’s History Channel series that rather pompously recycles stories familiar from History Channel series going back to History’s Mysteries (which launched in 1998) and sister channel A+E’s earlier versions like Ancient Mysteries—all the way back, indeed, to In Search of… from the 1980s. I tuned in to S06E20, which aired Monday, because it promised to explore whether locations found in the Hebrew Bible have archaeological evidence of their existence. It was, let’s say, a bit of rough going that left me feeling like I just watched a commercial trying to sell me on converting to a kind of fundamentalist Christianity that somehow dispensed with all that God-and-Jesus stuff.

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Rabbi Who "Proved" God Wrote the Bible Says He Found Moses's Autograph ... Maybe

7/29/2025

23 Comments

A new paper claims that some 3,000-year-old inscriptions found in Sinai not only make reference to the Biblical character of Moses but may have been written by him. The claim comes from a draft thesis by retired rabbi Michael S. Bar-Ron, now studying biblical archaeology at Ariel University in Israel. Bar-Ron, who is no stranger to self-promotion, published his draft thesis on Academia.edu before it was submitted to his university, and he took to the Patterns of Evidence podcast to publicize his claims. The Daily Mail reported on the claim this week.

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<<Previous

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E01 “Skulls of the Gods”

Human Sacrifice and the Death of Antinous

NBC's "Today" Show Runs Credulous Report Claiming "Proof" of Noah's Ark

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E17: “Secrets of Japan”

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E16: “Mysteries of the Norse Gods”

The New Yorker Goes in Search of the Oldest Layer of Mythology

Peter Thiel Delivers Bizarre Lecture on the Antichrist

Review of Ancient Aliens S21E11: “The Birdman Mystery”

Review of History’s Greatest Mysteries S06E20 “Lost Places of the Old Testament”

Rabbi Who "Proved" God Wrote the Bible Says He Found Moses's Autograph ... Maybe

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