News Roundup: Second Sphinx, Ancient UFOs, North Korean Alien Tech, and More!

​It’s been a busy couple of days across across the world of lost civilization, ancient astronaut, and UFO conspiracies. Scott Wolter put out a new conspiracy theory on Facebook, bringing in the dubious Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis to now claim that the comet that believers imagine struck the earth in the Ice Age separate a unified European-North American antediluvian civilization. It was this prehistoric foundation of shared symbols, he said, that let the Knights Templar communicate with Native Americans when Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney arrived among the Mi’kmaq in the 1100s CE—an event that, of course, never happened but was invented by Johann Reinhold in the 1700s and promoted by Richard Henry Major in the 1800s.

​But that wasn’t all that happened this weekend.

The Second Sphinx a Second Time
Filippo Biondi is still on about the so-called “Second Sphinx” he claims to have identified on the Giza Plateau. As I wrote in March, the claim has no historical support and derives from a 1997 speculative book by an Egyptian tour guide. The place Biondi says his super-technology has indicated as the site of the Second Sphinx features a mound beneath which he says it is buried. Biondi will present his evidence at a news conference in Bologna on June 21, and in the meantime, he is using facial recognition technology (!) to try to identify the pharaoh whose face he says may be on the Sphinx. Unfortunately for his hypothesis, the mound in question is not a buried Sphinx and did not exist prior to 1930, when it was formed from excavation materials transported there during work elsewhere on the Giza Plateau. And, as should be obvious, it’s ridiculous to try to use facial recognition technology on an unseen face that, at best, would be heavily stylized in keeping with the conventions of Egyptian art. 

The Shadow Out of Time
Meanwhile, Jesse Michels, the paranormal YouTuber with ties to Peter Thiel, posted a three-hour interview with Eric Haseltine, a technologist who served as the head of the NSA’s research division almost twenty-five years ago. Now around 75 years old, he joins a number of other former government officials in his age bracket in developing an obsessive interest in UFO conspiracy theories and using his long-ago government job to imply a seriousness to his claims that belies the utter lack of direct experience with space aliens in his career. 

​Haseltine and his wife and writing partner, Chris Gilbert, cowrote the novel The Shadow of Time (2024) imagining that UFOs emerged from a lost civilization in the deep past. Any similarity to H. P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time is, of course, entirely coincidental, I’m sure.
 
During the interview, Michels pressed Haseltine on whether the book’s story is based in something true that he discovered at the NSA. The pair speculated about an ancient civilization existing on the primitive Earth, discovering faster-than-light space travel, returning in the present, and possibly living under the sea or deep in the Earth. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the plot of the Shaver Mystery, the ur-text of ufology conspiracies.
 
While Michels described this as “the most credible” explanation for UFOs and used it to promote the podcast across social media, here is what Haseltine and Gilbert actually said about it during the podcast: “Is it likely? No. But is it impossible? We can't say.”
 
North Korean Alien Invasion
Finally, Ross Coulthart told his NewsNation viewers that the United States invaded North Korea to seize space alien technology: “I am aware of a U.S. retrieval team that has gone into North Korea to retrieve nonhuman technology. That’s caused some mischief here.” Coulthart said that “special forces” entered the country to grab the tech, and he suggested it happened more than once. This is patently absurd, especially since the North Koreans would in all likelihood not hesitate to trumpet their space alien connections and make use of alien tech, and any U.S. breach of North Korean territory would almost certainly trigger a massive international incident and be seen as an act of war that Kim Jung Un would not likely let pass in silence. 

​Coulthart cited no named sources and provided no documentary evidence. He only cited anonymous sources, and no serious news organization would run a story with no evidence to prove it. Coulthart seemingly will believe anything that a man in uniform tells him.