Category: Occult

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

11/16/2022

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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Mormon Group Seeks Lost Ancient Jewish Super-City in Iowa

12/9/2021

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It was a big week for Mormon news. The owner of Skinwalker Ranch, Brandon Fugal, discussed how his Mormon faith in infinite populated worlds helps to shape his investigation of Skinwalker Ranch, which culminated in his assertion that the ranch is inhabited by a noncorporeal “precognitive” intelligence that adapts its supernatural manifestations to the subconscious “intentions” of each visitor. “It can anticipate and even be aware of your thoughts and consciousness and react according to your intention that you bring to the property,” Fugal told Salt Lake Magazine. That sounds a lot like people are seeing what they want to see and are experiencing their own expectations reflected back at them through the mirror of their own minds. In other words, there is no interdimensional intelligence, just people scaring themselves with their own fantasies.

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The Ghost in the Machine

6/5/2021

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Note: This article first appeared earlier this week in my Substack newsletter.

Not long ago, I wrote an essay about the supposed “curse” of James Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder, inspired by the recent announcement of the rediscovery of one of the few original parts of the car to have survived since the crash that killed Dean and totaled the car in 1955. The transaxle assembly went up for auction at the end of May, and the auction ended in the most predictable and disappointing way possible—with all of my various intellectual interests colliding into a flaming mass of stupidity. Paranormal cable TV star Zak Bagans purchased the part for $382,000 in order to install it in his Las Vegas museum dedicated to horror and the paranormal, where he will present the “cursed” car part in an exhibit room dedicated to James Dean and the occult.

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New York Times Puff Piece Celebrates Robert Bigelow's Hunt for Life after Death

1/21/2021

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Recently, UFO propagandist Leslie Kean had her book on the afterlife adapted as a Netflix series. Her writing partner, Ralph Blumenthal, is about to publish his long-gestating biography of alien abduction researcher John Mack, endorsing Mack’s ideas about reaching a transcendent afterlife through aliens. The pair came to renewed national attention in December 2017 when they revealed the existence of a Pentagon UFO office, a report instigated through the offices of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, staffed by refugees from both the government office and its major contractor, wealthy UFO believer and hotelier Robert Bigelow’s flying saucer research organization. The relationship between these various data points wasn’t entirely clear until now. Today, the New York Times ran a new piece by Blumenthal rhapsodizing over Bigelow’s newest venture, an effort to prove life continues after death.

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