News Roundup: William Shatner Is Mad at Archaeologists, Nick Pope Says Will Smith's Slap Stopped an Alien Invasion, and Bryan Bender Finally Says I'm Right

​It’s been a busy week in the world of the pseudoscientific fringe, so busy in fact that I don’t even have time to do more than mention that Graham Hancock has a new book out, Visionary, a revised and expanded “definitive” edition of his 2005 book Supernatural. Yesterday, William Shatner got upset because archaeologists and proponents of science took to Twitter to complain about the hogwash his The UnXplained offered as archaeology on Friday.

□Who knew that there was such outrage in the archaeological community on a show on ancient artifacts? From butt hurt types, to school yard bullies to trash collectors. □□‍♂️□□ #theUnXplained pic.twitter.com/um0LXlUPEQ

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) April 4, 2022

​Shatner seemed surprised, but to be fair to him, he had some reason to be. His show broadcasts pseudoscientific nonsense on a wide range of topics every week, mostly with little pushback. This particular episode garnered more online criticism because, more or less, I publicized it online due to its archaeology topic when it aired Friday, and many others joined in criticizing it over the weekend.
 
Also this week, Nick Pope alleged that after the infamous Oscars incident in which Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, space aliens probably called off their invasion of Earth because they are now afraid of Will Smith, conflating him with his Men in Black character. 

“If extraterrestrials are watching Earth - either monitoring us as part of a scientific study of emerging civilisations or maybe as reconnaissance, ahead of an alien invasion - they'll get a lot of their information about us from our TV broadcasts.
 
“What will they make of the fiasco at this year's Oscars ceremony?
 
“Aliens will already know Will Smith from Independence Day, where he punched out an alien and uttered the immortal line ‘welcome to Earth’
 
“They'll also know him from the Men in Black movies, so if aliens are planning an invasion, they'll think Will Smith is often the person we put up to defend ourselves.
 
“Aliens may also think he's one of Earth’s ruling elite, if they’ve heard the phrase Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
 
“All this depends on whether aliens understand the concept of fiction.”

​The Mirror tabloid reported Pope’s words and insisted that they were not an April Fool’s joke.
 
But the most interesting bit of news this week was the astonishing series of tweets that Politico reporter Bryan Bender made in which he admitted to reporting misleading information about the Pentagon’s UFO program, while conceding, after a year, that everything I wrote in The New Republic about the kooks hunting interdimensional space poltergeists on the government dime wasn’t just true but also the real story behind the veneer of UFO research. The discussion was prompted by the release of new Pentagon documents showing that Harry Reid pushed the AAWSAP Skinwalker Ranch/paranormal investigation program despite receiving no formal briefs on its progress, while referring to it under the incorrect name of AATIP, under which Lue Elizondo apparently continued its work informally when it was terminated. 

I believe strongly the paranormal drove Reid to create the program as much — if not more than — UFOs. He told me as much. Skinwalker especially. I think it’s disingenuous for them to say otherwise. But I am not intimately familiar with what the precursor to AATIP actually did.

— Bryan Bender (@BryanDBender) April 1, 2022

I think they have all downplayed how much the paranormal interest drove a lot of this. For pretty logical reasons, I guess.

— Bryan Bender (@BryanDBender) April 1, 2022

Bender blocked me on Twitter last year and spent weeks purposely wasting my time with fake interview requests because he thought I was insufficiently respectful of the paranormal enthusiasts he now admits were misleading him and lying about their UFO research.
 
That he spent so much time harassing me about a subject he now openly admits to not being familiar with is astonishing. That he then tweeted this is incomprehensible:

Not a single news story in 2017 mentioned the Skinwalker role in the whole thing coming into existence. I think that was purposely left out. There is no AATIP without AAWSAP.

— Bryan Bender (@BryanDBender) April 2, 2022

​Bender was one of the reporters who broke the AATIP story in 2017, along with the New York Times team, which included UFO enthusiast Leslie Kean and alien abduction enthusiast Ralph Blumenthal. It was his job to do the research to learn about the Pentagon’s various UFO research programs before reporting the story, but he instead chose to be Lue Elizondo’s and Chris Mellon’s stenographer, while now blaming them for not spoon-feeding him the lunatic side of their research program.