Wednesday Roundup: Robbie Williams Loves "Coast to Coast," "Ancient Aliens" Sees Ratings Rise, and More!

Coronavirus has blasted almost everything else out of the news, including what would otherwise be a big push to promote History’s new Secret of Skinwalker Ranch series, which aired its first episode last night. I have no interest in reviewing the show weekly since its paranormal investigation is beyond my area of interest. I will review the pilot episode and post either later today or tomorrow, since it aired too late for me to watch and review last night and still get up when my toddler wakes before 6 AM. I thought it was cute that George Knapp tried to piggyback on the show by running clips on his Mystery Wire paranormal news service from an unaired year-old interview with singer Robbie Williams in which Williams talks about loving Coast to Coast A.M. and George Knapp. Knapp also writes about Williams being a guest at Skinwalker Ranch (with Knapp, though Knapp declined to share that fact on Mystery Wire despite crowing about it in social media) to hunt for ghosts or aliens or whatever.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 lockdown has goosed ratings for ancient aliens by about 50% over its 2019 ratings. Last week’s episode topped 1.2 million viewers, up from just 800,000 before the virus trapped people in their homes. The number of young viewers under age 49 has nearly doubled as well, rivaling the 10 AM showing of Food Network’s Pioneer Woman cooking show. William Shatner’s The UnXplained had almost exactly the same ratings, indicating that homebound viewers tune in for one show and just keep watching. He beat out HGTV this week.
 
Meanwhile, a new article in Edge Science by Mark J. Calotto, a fringe writer famous for advocating the so-called Face on Mars, attempted to find correlations between ancient buildings and either the cardinal directions or solar, lunar, or stellar phenomena. He had hoped to prove that most ancient structures had clear geographic or celestial alignments. Instead, he managed to prove the opposite: “Perhaps the most unexpected finding is that the alignment of about half of the sites could not be explained in terms of any of the reasons considered.” I had to laugh. To think: Sometimes people built things for other reasons! At least we can award some points for honesty.
 
With little else happening right now due to the virus, that’s about it from the fringe world.