Graham Hancock Associate Attacks Archaeology YouTuber in Rambling Rant

​In case you were keeping score, so-called "UFO whistleblower" David Grusch pulled out of the SALT conference following the flap over revelations he's been ducking invitations to testify to AARO and was replaced with another UFO speaker, Col. Karl E. Nell, who claims credit for influencing Congressional UFO legislation. Meanwhile, there are some dustups occurring as both archaeologists and fringe figures take aim at the popularity of YouTube ancient history videos, whose audiences have outstripped traditional cable TV documentaries and book publishing.

​First up: British archaeologist Paul Barford took on fringe-adjacent YouTuber Luke Caverns. I won't spend much time on this one because Caverns's YouTube channel is relatively small, with fewer than 40,000 subscribers and videos that average around 20,000-30,000 viewers. Caverns dresses like Indiana Jones and wants to occupy a middle ground between scientific archaeology and fringe speculation. He posted a video calling for an end to "toxic archaeology," which wasn't really about that, and you are welcome to read the lengthy analysis Barford provides of Caverns's weird effort to defend the authenticity of a friend's vase that Barford feels is a likely forgery. As of this writing, the two are still arguing on X.
 
Even longer, but more important, is the excruciatingly long complaint on Graham Hancock's website by freelance researcher Holly Lasko Skinner, who has worked for years as one of Hancock's research assistants. Last year, Skinner delivered a chaotic attack on archaeology as the real racist in defense of Graham Hancock against accusations his show Ancient Apocalypse repeated racist tropes. Now, she is on the attack against Milo Rossi, a YouTuber on archaeological topics under the name MiniMinuteMan. 

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​Rossi graduated from the University of Maine in 2022 and appears to be in his early to mid-twenties. He describes himself as an environmental scientist and archaeologist, though he holds no advanced degree in either field, and as best I can tell is primarily a content creator. He shouldn't be advertising himself as an archaeologist if he lacks credentials in the field and also is not working in it. (It's a bit like how Josh Gates touts his bachelor's in archaeology to imply he is an archaeologist when he isn't.) Rossi's photogenic looks have earned him nearly two million followers on YouTube, with equal numbers on TikTok and Instagram. His biggest YouTube videos have broken 4 million views. By comparison, Ancient Aliens has fewer than 700,000 viewers, mostly over the age of 50. Only the biggest TV shows in the field--Curse of Oak Island (3.3 million U.S. viewers) and Ancient Apocalypse (perhaps 10 million global viewers)--draw comparable audiences on TV as Rossi does on YouTube.
 
And when you reach those numbers, you start to make some serious money. I don't buy the SpeakerJ analysis Skinner cites (to paint him as a grifter) estimating that Rossi pulls in $1 million per month from YouTube, but monetized videos bring in $0.01 to $0.03 per view, which could net him around $20,000 per video. (The average YouTuber with 1 million subscribers earns $5,000 per month—around the average U.S. salary.) At any rate, it's probably fair to say his main vocation is content creation.
 
Skinner's rather unhinged article--approved by Graham Hancock and praised by him in a May 10 tweet--is a nasty attack on a very young man. Dollars to doughnuts, he is younger than I was when I published The Cult of Alien Gods at age 24 and received similar attacks from the big names in the fringe field for a much milder critique of their sham claims. Skinner attacks Rossi for making factual errors, for overlooking paywalled academic literature, and for not following proper archaeological procedure when exploring ancient ruins—all things Hancock and his colleagues in the fringe community do in spades, as do more "serious" TV hosts like Discovery's Josh Gates. Who can forget the time Gates and alien/giant theorist Brien Foerster reached in to a Peruvian sandpit on Expedition Unknown and yanked a skull out of a burial site without documenting the context and then reburied it in a different position? But Skinner is very upset that Rossi picked a pottery sherd up off the ground. Similarly, Skinner, writing on behalf of Hancock, might want to go easy on accusing others of relying on outdated sources. Fingerprints of the Gods was an extravaganza of pre-World War II material.
 
Skinner's real purpose reveals itself thousands of words into her attack, when she complains about Rossi's year-old analysis of Hancock's Ancient Apocalypse at great, if not always coherent, length. She takes issue, bizarrely, with Rossi saying that Graham Hancock is a "scientist"--ignoring the context that Rossi is (correctly) using the basic definition of science to explain that Hancock has a hypothesis and is attempting, however poorly, to gather evidence to evaluate it. He doesn't mean that Hancock is a credentialed and employed member of a scientific profession. Instead, she argues that Hancock cannot be a scientist because he doesn't "conduct" research but instead merely repeats others' claims. (Great defense!) Many of her criticisms come down to stripping Rossi's words of the contextual level of meaning and then arguing pedantically about definitions. We can quibble about definitions and whether Rossi was right to credit Hancock with wanting to evaluate his own hypothesis, but Skinner is clearly simply looking for things to complain about.
 
Similarly, when she attacks Rossi for summarizing Hancock's speculation as involving a "master plan" handed down by "aliens or Atlanteans" she is again being extremely pedantic:

Hancock has never claimed that aliens could be responsible for ancient monuments on Earth, and at no point in Ancient Apocalypse are aliens implied. That Rossi brings aliens into his so-called "evaluation" of Ancient Apocalypse says a lot of his integrity and calls his self-entitled role of "science communicator" into question.

​Note that she limits her reply to Ancient Apocalypse, because any other attempt at rebuttal would fail. In Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), Hancock describes a "master plan," further elaborated in Heaven's Mirror (1998), in which the lost civilization planned out various monuments at significant points of the Earth and instituted a 10,000-year plan to build monuments to the night sky of 10,500 BCE. (Frankly, 10,000 years seems a bit long for a construction project--even Boston managed to finish the Big Dig a bit quicker.) By 2019, he specifically referenced this master plan as the lost civilization's "'outreach programs' to hunter-gatherer tribes." In The Mars Mystery (1997), Hancock did indeed suggest an ancient alien connection between Earth's monuments and "pyramids" on Mars involving a geometric and iconographic plan, though he later backtracked on it in Magicians of the Gods (2015), without quite ruling it out altogether. (Hancock has appeared many times on Ancient Aliens.) In America Before (2019), he identified his lost civilization with Atlantis and both with North America.  
 
Skinner similarly tries to take Rossi's facetious remarks about Hancock's verbiage about defining a pyramid at face value, despite him literally saying he was being facetious, but there is no point in belaboring this. Hancock and his entourage are still mad about Ancient Apocalypse a year and a half after everyone else forgot about it.
 
Skinner, for all her bad-faith arguments, is correct that Rossi doesn't always get everything right. No one does, not even me. I am fully aware that the book I published at 24 doesn't reach the level of quality one I write today would, and I suspect that Rossi's videos a decade from now would be different from those he makes today. The problem is that we are outsourcing so much of the conversation to social media. There are fewer levels of review, editing, and checking. That's not to say the old days of books and TV were particularly rigorous--Chariots of the Gods wasn't exactly a model of fact-checking--but having more eyes on material and more gatekeepers tended to weed out more of the obvious, basic errors and produce more coherent and concise copy.