Blog Posts

A Dull Slog: 2024 in Review

12/27/2024

Each year, it’s a little more difficult to write a seemingly lighthearted review of the year in weird. This year was both personally and professionally a bit of a struggle as A.I. continues to eat away at my day job and the closure or collapse of a number of media outlets has made it more difficult place stories in paying publications. I lost my gig as a CNN Opinion columnist right when it was starting because CNN shuttered the entire division. As the year came to an end, about one-third of my income for the year remains outstanding from businesses that are dragging their feet on payments and have been since early fall. That has made it difficult to devote too much energy to caring about whatever old claims the usual cadre of kooks and weirdos are recycling on any given day.

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A Christmas Mystery: Hancock, Bauval, and the "Three Kings of Orion"

12/20/2024

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An interesting little Christmas mystery, inspired by a recent post Graham Hancock made on social media praising his “great friend” Robert Bauval and his Orion Correlation Theory from the 1990s. Back in 1997, when Hancock and Bauval teamed up for The Message of the Sphinx (a.k.a. Keeper of Genesis), the two authors presented a variant version of the Christmas carol “We three kings” that replaced “Orient” with “Orion,” rendering the first line as “We three kings of Orion are.” They provided no source, and for a long time I wondered if they had just made it up.

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Watch Me on Fox News!

12/19/2024

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It's been a quiet week as we head into the holidays. If you haven't seen it, Fox News Digital interviewed me about my book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, and the segment ran this week. Be sure to check it out here!

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Josh Gates's "Expedition Files" Covers King Tut, Sodom, and Stonehenge Badly

12/12/2024

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I don’t typically watch Josh Gates’s Discovery channel documentary series, and Expedition Files, the latest spinoff of Expedition Unknown, didn’t really appeal to me. Gates expends minimal effort standing in front of a screen and narrating segments comprised of b-roll and the occasional expert interview, and the topics are such hoary rehashes that In Search Of… had already done many of the same segments forty years ago. I decided to check out a couple of segments this week, however, because Gates touched on two topics that are extremely familiar to me.

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In Brief: A New Paper Again Rebuts the Younger Dryas Comet Impact Hypothesis

12/5/2024

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I appeared today on the Forgotten Hollywood podcast to discuss my new book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean. You can listen below, at this link, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Review of "Karahan Tepe" by Andrew Collins

11/29/2024

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Karahan Tepe: Civilization of the Anunnaki and the Cosmic Origins of the Serpent of Eden
Andrew Collins | Bear & Company | October 2024 | ISBN: 9781591434788 | $26

I will confess that when I learned Andrew Collins had recently published a new book on Karahan Tepe, an ancient site of enclosures and statues similar to and coeval with those of nearby Göbekli Tepe (collectively, the Taş Tepeler peoples, after the region where the sites are located), I was not particularly excited about reviewing it. Collins’s books are never wild enough to be fun to discuss, but they also fall just enough outside of the scholarly consensus to make it a slog to work through his reams of information, mostly accurate but outstripping the evidence.

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"Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean" Now Available!

11/19/2024

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Today is the publication day for Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean. It’s been a long road to publication, from the first inklings of an idea for the book in the pandemic spring of 2020 to the finished product, hitting retailers today. I am immensely proud of this book, and I am excited for all of you to have the opportunity to read it.

As I celebrate my book’s release, I want to extend my thanks to my agent, Lee Sobel, who believed in Jimmy when no one else did; to Chris Chappell and Emily Burr, my editors at Applause Books, whose insightful editing and tireless work on behalf of this project made it possible; to Dave Holmes and Kelly Stout at Esquire, who allowed me to write about James Dean for the magazine as proof of concept; and to everyone else who contributed in ways large and small to the research that went into Jimmy.

To help launch the book, I’ve made the introduction available for free on my website in the new Jimmy section of the site. I have also compiled a page which I will continue to update with media coverage of the book, including recent stories in The Daily Mail, The New York Post, and more.

You can buy your copy of Jimmy at your favorite retailer or by using the links below.

B U Y T H E B O O K
Applause Books | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org

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Boring UFO Hearing Featured UFO Advocates Saying Nothing of Substance

11/13/2024

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Although overshadowed by President-Elect Trump’s cabinet announcements today, the House of Representatives held a hearing on UFOs featuring witnesses who bring to ufology the same quality and qualification that Trump’s cabinet picks bring to the executive branch. The hearing had no dramatic revelations and no disclosure of aliens, but it did feature people claiming not to have firsthand knowledge, lots of secondhand stories, and dissembling about being unable to speak publicly about secret things. A new “whistleblower” document about the so-called Immaculate Constellation program was revealed, but it was even less impressive than David Grusch’s testimony last year.

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Congressional Hearing to Feature Lue Elizondo and Other UFO Kooks

11/8/2024

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While obviously not the biggest news in a week that delivered a devastating blow to the rights and freedoms of American minorities, nevertheless, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives released the lists of witnesses for a November 13 hearing on UFOs entitled “Exposing the Truth”—and it’s every bit as bad you’d expect in an era dominated by conspiracy theories, fanatical supernatural beliefs, and fraud. Steven Greenstreet did a great job outlining just how stupid the hearing is going to be with this helpful infographic:

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My Copies of "Jimmy" Arrived

11/7/2024

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It's finally here! After four years of research, writing, revising, and editing, this week I received two boxes of Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean from my publisher. The book looks beautiful, and I am excited for all of you to be able to buy copies on November 19!

The inspiration for the Jimmy dust jacket was an homage to, but not an exact copy of, William Bast's original 1956 James Dean biography. My first edition is a bit faded, but it was originally the same shade of red. Bast's cover showed Dean draped in shadow, mine bathed in light, symbolizing the difference between his biography, which hid the truth and mine, which exposes it.