I'm on to My Next Book; Plus: To the Stars Fools Army Into Investigating Art's Parts

Now that I have finished indexing and proofreading The Mound Builder Myth, which is due to be available for purchase sometime in the second or third week of February, there is just one more thing for me to finish for now, the last five pages of my book on legends of the pyramids. I have finished all twelve chapters and only have the conclusion to turn out. Then… Well, then I’m free until the copyediting, proofreading, and indexing hit for that one. If there is anything I have learned from the process, it is this: I am never again working on two books at the same time. This past nine months or so have been almost impossibly overstuffed trying to cram the needs of two books into days already filled with everything else I have to do. I can handle one at a time, but two at one is too much.

While I was working on these books, I also wrote an article for the Society of American Archaeology’s The SAA Archaeological Record as part of a special section examining Graham Hancock’s America Before organized by John Hoopes. The journal will be published next month, and the articles are supposed to be made available as open-access documents, so the whole section, including my piece, will be available for everyone to read. I will also be publishing a copy here on my website after the initial publication in TSAR. My article, not surprisingly, focuses on Hancock’s book in relation to the mound builder myth.
 
So, for the next couple of days, I’m going to be working on the conclusion to my book so I can get the pyramid manuscript complete before the November 1 deadline. Before I sign off to write, however, I would be remiss if I did not note that Tom DeLonge and To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science signed a deal with the U.S. Army to provide nebulous support for some sort of investigation into novel uses of technology to enhance ground combat vehicles. As best I can tell from the announcement, they aren’t getting paid except in publicity but are getting free use of Army labs to do the expensive part of their metamaterial PR work for them.

The bigger scandal, as John Greenewald reported this weekend, is that To the Stars has fooled the Army into thinking that it possesses super-technology in the form of Art’s Parts, the slag that early testing in the 2000s determined was likely industrial waste but which has been promoted as remnants of the Roswell crashed saucer for two decades. TTSA refers to the slag as metamaterials, and its members used their connections to the military to enter into an agreement to use Army labs to test the slag in the hope of proving it has amazing properties. Neither TTSA nor the Army will pay each other for the testing, and both will receive any reports that result. TTSA has been looking for ways to cut costs on testing imagined UFO wreckage, and this agreement helps them to do so. But it also means that the Army, claiming to be interested in the metamaterials, is basically admitting that these rocks are not from any Roswell UFO since, as you would guess, the military would already have had that UFO to test had it actually recovered a flying saucer in 1947.