Weekend Omnibus: Younger Dryas Volcano, Elon Musk's Ancient Astronaut Tweet, Steve Quayle's Plagiarism, and More!

Yesterday was an extraordinary day for news of interest to my readers. Let’s take a brief survey of just some of the things that happened.
 
I’ll put the science first. A new study in Science Advances concludes that the global cooling triggered during the Younger Dryas was not the work of a comet or meteor but was instead brought on by volcanic activity. From the press release announcing the study late yesterday:

Texas researchers from the University of Houston, Baylor University and Texas A&M University have discovered evidence for why the earth cooled dramatically 13,000 years ago, dropping temperatures by about 3 degrees Centigrade.
 
The evidence is buried in a Central Texas cave, where horizons of sediment have preserved unique geochemical signatures from ancient volcanic eruptions — signatures previously mistaken for extraterrestrial impacts, researchers say.
 
The resolution to this case of mistaken identity recently was reported in the journal Science Advances.
 
“This work shows that the geochemical signature associated with the cooling event is not unique but occurred four times between 9,000 and 15,000 years ago,” said Alan Brandon, Ph.D., professor of geosciences at University of Houston. “Thus, the trigger for this cooling event didn’t come from space. Prior geochemical evidence for a large meteor exploding in the atmosphere instead reflects a period of major volcanic eruptions.”

It goes without saying that there remains no evidence for Atlantis associated with the cooling event.
 
From here, things just got weird.
 
Early Friday morning, billionaire industrialist Elon Musk attempted to generate distraction and controversy on Twitter by tweeting that space aliens built the pyramids. Regardless of how seriously Musk meant the tweet—which immediately attracted denunciations for its implied racism—it became another sad entry in the growing cadre of celebrities who have used their public platforms to help mainstream the ancient astronaut theory.

Aliens built the pyramids obv

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 31, 2020

Meanwhile, late yesterday an article in the Washington Examiner accused UFO documentary maker and exploiter of stillborn fetuses Steven Greer of faking a UFO sighting in 2015 by using flares during a weeklong, $3,500-per-person UFO-hunting expedition. Read it and judge for yourself, but the evidence is fairly convincing.
 
At the same time, Q-Anon believers and Pizzagate aficionados gathered in Los Angeles to protest for “freedom” and “justice” in front of CNN’s L.A. offices. The crowd didn’t wear masks but did make a number of baseless claims about an official network of pedophiles, apparently inspired by the ongoing revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s large cadre of high-powered enablers.  

In a different sort of protest, yesterday we learned that several fantasy authors asked that their work be removed from a new anthology by Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price after discovering that Price penned a vile introduction to the book complaining that feminists were secretly lesbians who want to eliminate masculinity and men, among other offensive statements. He also complained about what he sees as an unwelcome “epidemic” of transgender youths, claiming that young adults who transition do so because of the “poison” of “propaganda” spread by LGBTQ+ people and the media.
 
And also yesterday, Nephilim hunter and homophobic bigot Steve Quayle is facing new controversy after a fellow Christian writer exposed a fairly clear-cut case of industrial-grade copy-and-paste plagiarism in Quayle’s Genesis 6 Giants, a book written in 2005 and revised and updated in 2015. According to Ken Ammi, Quayle copied, usually verbatim, from Charles DeLoach’s infamous 1995 book Giants: A Reference Guide from History, the Bible, and Recorded Legend, a book I have previously consulted in debunking claims of giants in ancient history.
 
Ammi’s evidence is damning. Quayle, who tried selling sculptures of scenes from his book for as much as $50,000, can be seen copying and pasting whole sentences, paragraphs, and pages from DeLoach’s book, sometimes rearranging sentences, and other times pasting DeLoach’s footnotes into the body of the text. He seems to copy OCR errors, as well. Ammi also found that Quayle used large chunks of a public domain text, Edward J. Wood’s Giants and Dwarves.
 
I encourage you to visit Ammi’s website and read the evidence for yourself.
 
Now, who would have thought that a guy like Steve Quayle, a friend of Alex Jones who has expressed his desire for a genocide to eliminate liberals and gays, would also be intellectually dishonest? I feel like that God fellow whose genocidal soul Quayle claims to know so well said something about not lying or stealing. But what would heathen me know about that?