Category: Occult

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E18 “The Power of the Talisman”

8/25/2023

Avi Loeb told Michael Shermer that he was very upset about a New York Times Magazine profile depicting him as an out-of-touch scientific pariah who makes basic analytical mistakes and is increasingly unmoored from reality due to his obsession with space aliens. He ran to Shermer’s podcast to complain about the magazine alleging that he is thin-skinned and uses the media to retaliate against criticism rather than produce strong science. But what else should we expect from a man who is now a regular on Ancient Aliens? Loeb’s quest for aliens is a bit of magical thinking according to his peers, so it’s appropriate that this episode of Ancient Aliens is devoted to the magic of talismans.

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New York Times Praises Uri Geller for Profiting from "Benign" Post-Truth "Fraud"

7/8/2023

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This morning, the New York Times ran a puff piece in its business section claiming that 1970s-era spoon-bender Uri Geller has “won” the war against his debunkers by monetizing his fraudulent powers and attaining greater celebrity than his detractors. The story, by business reporter David Segal, praises what Segal describes as Geller’s repudiation of conventional standards of truth, substituting entertainment for evidence and using his postmodern attacks on evidence and reason to generate millions in revenue:

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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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Midweek Update: "Ancient Apocalypse," UFOs, and Ghosts--Oh, My!

11/16/2022

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The success of Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse surprised me greatly. The show reached #2 on Netflix’s viewership rankings in the U.S. and U.K. and was in the top 10 worldwide. Consequently, it has become the most-watched speculative history series in a decade, likely outstripping the viewership for previous ratings titans in the genre, like History’s Curse of Oak Island (3 million at its peak), Ancient Aliens (2 million at its peak), and America Unearthed (1.5 million at its peak) and easily leapfrogging similar series on the Discovery, Travel, and Science channels, which averaged around 600,000 viewers. (Netflix does not release exact viewership figures.) Part of the reason is likely due to Netflix itself. Cable channels narrowcast. Viewership for the History or Science channels is primarily older white men, while Netflix, which has found success with other New Age shows like the Gwyneth Paltrow Goop series, can put Ancient Apocalypse in front of all four quadrants: men and women, young and old. Thus, they can appeal to a wider anti-establishment audience that would not tune in on cable.

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The Magician Who Raised James Dean from the Dead

9/23/2022

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This week did not run according to plan. My hot water heater broke down, and my internet service went out for half a day, so I did not manage to produce the blog posts I intended to write this week. But I did manage to get one thing written. In one of the biographies/memoirs about James Dean, there was a passing reference to a stage show that purported to call up James Dean’s ghost. I found a 1957 advertisement for this show, and it is so much weirder and more Gothically bizarre than the brief reference deigned to indicate. Take a look at this:

Read my full article about this oddity in my Substack newsletter.

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Georgia Guidestones Bombed; Plus: Congressmen File UFO Amnesty Amendment

7/6/2022

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I am in the middle of rewriting and revising my book manuscript, so I have not been devoting much time to writing my blog. However, I did want to point to two important news stories today. First, someone bombed the Georgia Guidestones this morning, taking out one of the large slabs which bear controversial advice about population reduction and other prescriptions for a future in harmony with the environment. Authorities do not have a suspect or suspects yet, but the destruction comes after then-Georgia gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor called for their destruction at a campaign event earlier this year.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E08 “The Shadow People”

3/4/2022

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Today marks the 100th anniversary of Nosferatu, the horror masterpiece that illegally adapted Dracula and as a result came within a hair’s breadth of being lost to the world when Bram Stoker’s heirs sued and a court ordered the movie destroyed. I suppose it is fitting that the anniversary falls on the night Ancient Aliens debuts an episode devoted to “The Shadow People,” a vampire-like group of supernatural monsters accused of harming sleeping people. Of course, the “shadow people” are nothing more than internally generated figments of the brain generated during periods of sleep paralysis. I’ve experienced one myself—and punched it in the face in my dream, making it disappear. They have been the subject of works of classic art, but Ancient Aliens, true to form, tries to imagine that dream monsters are creatures from another dimension torturing us in our sleep.

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Discovery+ and Travel Channel Claim Vampires Are Real, Control the Media

2/2/2022

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The Discovery+ and Travel Channel two-hour special Vampires in America is one of those pieces of garbage media that reaches such depths of awfulness that it crosses over into unsavory, potentially dangerous territory. According to Discovery, the show is intended as a serious documentary about vampire hunters in Arizona who believe that missing persons and victims of violent crime have actually been seized by a hive of newly awakened vampires who descend from a blood-drinking hominid species that evolved 68,000 years ago before settling in Translyvania. They intend to find and kill the vampires. With a sword.

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Uri Geller Claims to Have Divined the Location of the Ark of the Covenant

1/5/2022

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Uri Geller, the Israeli spoon-bender who convinced contractors for the U.S. government that he had inexplicable psychic powers in the 1970s, announced yesterday that he had discovered the location of the Ark of the Covenant while dowsing on the ground floor of his new museum of himself in Jaffa.

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Beam Me Up: The Year in Review 2021

12/27/2021

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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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