Blog Posts

Review of "Imminent" by Luis Elizondo

8/20/2024

IMMINENT: INSIDE THE PENTAGON’S HUNT FOR UFOs
Luis Elizondo | William Morrow | August 2024 | 304 pages | $29.99

Memoir, as a literary genre, sits somewhere between autobiography and creative writing, often sacrificing strict accuracy for deeper emotional truths. At its best, memoir can reveal the inner life behind the façade of an individual. A great memoir cuts deep, revealing the innermost secrets, and the dark parts of the soul, that make a person who they are. A bad memoir is an exercise in self-aggrandizement, begging the reader to agree with the author’s awesomeness. Luis “Lue” Elizondo’s Imminent is not a good memoir. Others will pick apart its factual foundations (nothing in the book would qualify as scientific evidence) and hold up his firehose of UFO lore to specific scrutiny, but I want to talk about his book as a piece of literature and how it fails both as art and as a piece of persuasive UFO propaganda.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E16: “The Teachers”

8/16/2024

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After twenty seasons, it took me a bit by surprise that Ancient Aliens had never done an episode dedicated solely to aliens teaching humans science, culture, and spirituality. It’s certainly not because they’ve never covered the topic before, though most prominently in the year before I started reviewing the show. Early episodes from seasons 1 and 2 such as “The Visitors” (S01E02) and “Gods and Aliens” (S02E02) covered much of the same material, and references to aliens teaching humans pepper any episode that actually remembers this show is called “Ancient” Aliens and not UFO, Conspiracy Theory, and Popular Astronomy Review. Nevertheless, for a show that has leaned so heavily into aliens as life coaches and spiritual guides, I was taken a little aback that they hadn’t done this topic before.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E15: “Jacques Vallée: UFO Pioneer”

8/9/2024

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I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I don’t really like Jacques Vallée. For most UFO fans, he is an éminence grise whose stature as a philosopher of ufology has made him a respected thinker and eternal consultant for the federal government on UFOs. But, for me, he’s a sloppy scholar who coasts by on a French accent and ambiguous verbiage that allows readers to project their own beliefs onto his words. A decade ago, I went through the “cases” of ancient and medieval UFO sightings he had published in Wonders in the Sky (2009), many of which had previously appeared in his classic book Passport to Magonia (1969), and I found a collection of erroneously translated, deceptively edited, and ignorantly misunderstood material that he had long passed off as serious scholarship simply because most ufologists can’t read ancient languages. (For example, Vallée once claimed Charlemagne ordered UFO witnesses put to death; instead, he ordered the “reform” of “weather-magicians.”) Vallée’s more recent support for the ridiculous Trinity hoax—which made it all the way into Congressional legislation on Vallée’s reputation—only confirmed my opinion.

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Djoser's Pyramid Was Built with Giant Hydraulic Works, New Paper Claims

7/30/2024

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A preprint of a new scientific paper to be published in an upcoming edition of PLOS One made news this week when a team of interdisciplinary researchers led by Xavier Landreau of the Paleotechnic research firm claimed to have evidence that Djoser’s step pyramid at Saqqara had been built using a hydraulic lift. The authors claim that a large stone enclosure near the pyramid, known as Gisr el-Mudir, was a water treatment facility and served as a dam, allowing purified Nile water to travel along channels to the site of the pyramid, where, in “volcano” fashion, the water mover through a series of shafts and pushed stones up to the top of the pyramid while it was under construction.

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Lue Elizondo Memoir: Dubbed "King of Torture," Haunted by Bubbles, Talks Nephilim

7/26/2024

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Since Ancient Aliens is on hiatus to avoid competing with the Olympics, I thought it would be safe to take my on to the local aquarium. Surely a display of tropical fish must be free of the insidious mythology of space invaders. Ah, but I was wrong. Since last we visited, the aquarium opened a hall of animatronics offering, in either promise or threat, dinosaurs and “legendary creatures.” The disappointing attraction featured credulous displays about griffins and Bigfoot before reaching a crescendo in a hall where Ancient Aliens clips played on a big screen beside this janky diorama of extraterrestrials. It was not worth the upcharge.

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Lue Elizondo Claims Psychic Powers in Excerpt from New Memoir

7/23/2024

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In recent days, former America Unearthed host and current ancient astronaut theorist Scott Wolter alleged that some very cheesy engravings of Grey aliens in Egyptian clothing and poses were as much as 17,000 years old, despite being obvious fakes in an amateurish contemporary art style. But more importantly, Lue Elizondo’s publisher released his forthcoming memoir Imminent to Google Books a month ahead of publication, and extensive excerpts appeared on the platform for about 24 hours before they disappeared and were replaced with a “No Preview” announcement. It was easy to see why Lue Elizondo and his publisher wanted the Google Books preview pulled: In the excerpts, Elizondo claims to have supernatural powers and to have appeared as an angel while engaging in psychic attacks on America’s enemies.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E14 “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”

7/19/2024

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As has been my refrain in this new batch of episodes, Ancient Aliens seems intent on remaking old episodes, like an ouroboros consuming its own tail. This episode, which discusses the scientific (and quasi-scientific) search for extraterrestrial life is quite similar to 2017’s episode about “Alien Hunters,” 2018’s exploration of “The Alien Protocols,” and of course 2022’s clip show on the scientific search for ET, “Evidence of Alien Life.” You will, I trust, forgive me if Avi Loeb’s probe for phantom aliens isn’t really of much interest to me anymore. Given how far afield his episode is from the ancient astronaut topic—after all, if you’ve already met and been in contact with culture-dispensing cosmic being here on Earth, who needs to search for radio signals from the stars?—I’ll only summarize the highlights.

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Graham Hancock Defender Claims Proof of the Atlantis Myth's Egyptian Origin

7/18/2024

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In a posting on X today, Graham Hancock announced that “archaeologists aren't going to like” a new article Hancock posted to his website, implying that the argument convincingly challenges scholarly views. Written by Manu Seyfzadeh, a dermatologist who hunts for the Atlantean Hall of Records, the article seeks to prove that Plato drew on a genuine ancient Egyptian tradition of Atlantis when he ascribed the allegory of Atlantis to a story the Egyptians told his distant ancestor Solon in the sixth century BCE. However, Seyfzadeh admits to having no training in Classics or Egyptology, and his arguments are rather transparently ignorant of the broader context of Near Eastern cultures.

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In Brief: You’ll Never Guess What This “Crashed UFO” Debris Isn't: Extraterrestrial

7/13/2024

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Regular readers will remember the many claims To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and its affiliated ufologists made about pieces of metal they claim to be likely debris from crashed flying saucers. TTSA ufologists like Hal Puthoff claimed that one of the most important pieces of supposed evidence, the infamous magnesium-bismuth fragment of a crashed 1947 flying saucer (pictured at left), had impossibly advanced properties, including “inertial mass reduction” and may have a “metamaterial” used for interdimensional travel as a “terahertz waveguide.” When TTSA first hyped the piece, I suggested it was a chunk of industrial waste, accounting for its unusual composition.

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office sent it to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for testing in 2022. The report recently came back—yes, it took two years—and determined that the material was not able to function as a “terahertz waveguide,” and its isotopic composition was completely normal for Earth, not, as TTSA claimed, extraterrestrial. They could not identify a purpose for the uncommon composition of the earthly, heat-damaged fragment, but that’s probably because it never had a purpose. They suggest it is consistent with experiments of the time, without naming them. In short, it's probably a piece of scientific or industrial waste.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E13 “The Whistleblowers”

7/12/2024

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I wonder sometimes if the core audience for Ancient Aliens ever gets tired of hearing the same thing over and over again, or if it is more like the Bible readings at church, where repetition and familiarity are both the appeal and a reinforcement mechanism. This week’s episode, “The Whistleblowers,” explores people who claim to be revealing government UFO secrets. You’ve seen them all on Ancient Aliens before. Indeed, Bob Lazar not only had his own dedicated episode in 2019 but has appeared in segments of other episodes on Area 51, Area 52, UFO investigators, etc. over the years. Even David Grusch had his own Ancient Aliens segment last year. But, hey, this is great promotion for Lue Elizondo’s new book, or would be if we had any idea how many people still watch this show. Nielsen stopped releasing cable ratings last year because they are so low now, and History hasn’t volunteered to share.

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