Recently, Expedition Unknown sent Josh Gates to follow radiation expert Andrew Chugg as he retraced his research into the lost tomb of Alexander the Great. Chugg has published many articles and books over the past twenty years arguing that Alexander’s corpse is current in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. His speculative conclusions are intriguing, and possible, but I keep getting hung up on the details.
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I am proud to share the cover of my new book Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, out this fall from Applause Books, and imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. It was a long, challenging road to develop an attractive cover that captured the feel of the book, but I think this one more than succedeed.
A new academic paper is challenging folklorist Adrienne Mayor’s identification of the dinosaur Protoceratops as the inspiration for the legendary griffin of mythology. Mayor’s claim, first made more than thirty years ago and most famously outlined in her turn-of-the-century book The First Fossil Hunters, posits that Central Asian merchants observed the exposed bones of Protoceratops, some with their nests, and passed these tales on. As they traveled westward, the creature turned into a winged lion with an eagle’s head, resembling the beaked skull of the Protoceratops.
We don’t get as many alien-themed cable quasi-documentaries as we used to. Part of it is the shifting taste of the public, which prefers to freebase its conspiracy theories straight from the internet’s darkest corners. Part of it is due to the collapse of the cable TV industry, which has dramatically slashed programming. And part of it is due to the cyclical nature of kooky programming, which toggles between the paranormal, the extraterrestrial, and ancient mysteries with a numbing regularity. Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction probably wasn’t destined to dethrone The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch as the top paranormal program, but it’s a pretty dire affair for a supposedly professional production from one of Warner Bros. Discovery’s crown jewel networks.
Months after debating archaeologist Flint Dibble on The Joe Rogan Experience, Gaham Hancock broke his silence about the encounter, writing on X (formerly Twitter) that he had been “conned” and endorsing a YouTube video alleging that Dibble lied five times over the multi-hour debate in order to humiliate Hancock with false information. Hancock did not explain how he failed to recognize the allegedly false information, which was directly relevant to the information he claimed to have researched for more than thirty years. The arguments used by YouTuber “DeDunker” were not terribly convincing, but even if taken at face value would hardly rise above slight misstatements or minor confusion when speaking extemporaneously for many hours. More concerning is that Hancck jumped on the “conned” bandwagon to save face after having no other response to Dibble dominating the debate for three months.
This past weekend, NewsNation UFO journalist Ross Coulthart gave an eyebrow-raising speech at a meeting of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies in which Coulthart suggested that both he and former president Donald Trump were under assassination threat because they know too much about UFOs. However, the speech had even more disturbing undertones.
A few hiccups in the copyediting process meant that I spent most of this week dealing with book-related issues. It was just as well. This was a slow week in the world of space aliens and fringe history. Members of Congress made the usual noises about passing new laws to demand more UFO accountability, and the usual legislators spoke about new UFO hearings, and the usual UFO influencers demanded action, but it was all pretty much the same as it has been. A couple of interesting UFO year-in-review-style pieces ran in the Washington Spectator and the U.K. magazine The Skeptic, though these, too, had little in them we haven’t seen before. Over on NBC News Now, Gadi Schwartz invited oceanographer and retired rear admiral Tim Gallaudet on to opine that, “There are non-human intelligences visiting us in all domains: of the sea, the sky, and we see reports over land.” His argument, however, was more of the usual, which is to say, “I don’t know; therefore, aliens.” The claim amounted to arguing that if someone can’t immediately identify a shadow in the sky or a signal on sensor, it is therefore a space demon from another dimension.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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