NEW: When Propecy Fails is one of the most famous social psychology books of all time, a look at a small group of UFO believers when the “spacemen” failed to land. I wrote about a new study from an independent researcher who says the book is not what it seems. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Few things bug me more than higher ed leaders saying that we lost our mission and lost the trust of the public, when we have actually been the target of a decades-long smear campaign by the right wing that worked. The moment we’re losing our mission is right now, in capitulation.

Got a Black Hebrew Israelite history book at the airport bookstore on the way to #HSS2025

Can anyone recommend a good text / source for sea monsters and imagined marine life in early modern period? Niche request. Cheers!

Trump: "Nobody knows what magnets are."

My article on Mark Twain's interest in astronomy, written with research done at @marktwain.bsky.social, is now out:

I've got an article in November's @historytoday.com on the remarkably durable hypothesis that Earth is hollow, from Halley to Symmes to underground feminist utopias to UFOs. You know the drill — to the centre of the Earth (I've probably used that one before).

A call for 🦕🦖🦣 contributors! With Victor Monnin, I'm editing a collection about extinct animal parks—it's a field guide, of sorts, that turns a critical eye on places real, imagined, and yet to be. Find the full CFP for LANDS OF THE LOST here: tinyurl.com/dinoparks #PaleoSky #HistSci #EnvHist #STS

In honor of today’s holiday in the US, I present an article I wrote for @eclasproject.bsky.social on how Columbus came to be seen as the one who disproved the Flat Earth: eclas.shorthandstories.com/lent/flat-ou...

When the Soviet Union fell, Russians lost their sense of past and future at once. Collective hallucinations flourished in the void. In the United States, our reality is now disintegrating in a similar way.

From Journal of UFO History Vol. 1 No. 3 (Jul/Aug 2004). The man in the goatee between Fuller and McDonald is Richard C. Hoagland, of Space Shuttle Enterprise, Face on Mars, and Hale-Bopp fame.

This week, I had a wild chat with Dr Jerrold Coe about the weirdness of paperback forteana in the 50s, 60s, and 70s- the pulpy madness of recycled stories, crazy cover art, and myth making for fun and profit. Coe writes about these titles on his blog, Paperbacks 🧵 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

🚨THIS IS NOT A DRILL🚨 #batw2026 is celebrating two decades over two weeks! Join us online 18-19 April 2026 or in person in Boston 24-25 April 2026! Check out and share the CFP. You won’t want to miss it! britainandtheworld.org/2026-20-year...

Important to remember that everyone involved in renaming the DoD to the Department of War is afraid to take the subway.

Dogs are getting vaccinated less and rabies rates are rising, in part because 37% of Americans think vaccines will give their dogs... pawtism. www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

Beginning the journey of reading through the APRO Bulletin for a project related to the history of ufology for next year’s plate.

Words/phrases Democrats should never use: * bipartisan * my Republican friends * real, valid, legitimate, serious, important (to describe issue raised by Republicans) * yea (when voting on Republican bills) * distraction (to describe bad thing Republicans did) * woke (in derogatory sense)

Okay I guess I can see why this new logo is controversial

My new piece for @newrepublic.com looks at the super-weird origins of the Right's hatred of the Smithsonian, tying in the Enola Gay, Bible Giants, the History Channel, and racism. newrepublic.com/article/1992...

the thing everyone is going to have to accept is that the post-trump period, whenever it comes, will not and cannot be a project of national unity, it must be a project of partisan project of renewal, in the same way that reconstruction and the new deal were partisan projects of renewal.

Researchers Determine Coelacanth Faked Own Extinction To Escape Massive Gambling Debt theonion.com/researc...

lol it actually happened

How many Democrats who made a career of saying “vote blue no matter who” for the last decade will now endorse an independent running against the winner of the Democratic primary?

After almost six years of work, my manuscript on the political history of the Flat Earth movement has been sent in to the publisher.

nathan fielder (narrating): to understand what it’s like to be in a plane crash, i needed to experience one myself. but i would have to defeat the god of death to return to the world of the living. so in a studio warehouse, i recreated the shadow realm of duat and the twelve gates of the underworld,

The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site 🔗 www.404media.co/the-cia-secr...

Very thankful this came out in time to include in the final edits of my Flat Earther political history manuscript.

The second of a three-parter; in this post I look at the cinematic spaceship DISCOVERY, hero ship of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and the real-world 1960s gas-core nuclear rocket plans that might have made it possible. From No Shortage of Dreams. 🛰️🔭🧪🚀🪐🌏🌔👩‍🚀 spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2016/07/coul...

We're back on Monday with a fresh episode of Posting Through It. @michaelehayden.bsky.social and I talk about Kanye West ("Ye") and his pro-Hitler rap song, the Shiloh Hendrix fundraiser, South Africa "refugees" -- all things that embarrassed conservatives are blaming on the “woke right” Out Monday

I wrote about the widespread adoption of AI in education, and why there needs to be more resistance to it open.substack.com/pub/irinadum...

"Just as there is no single way to start a historical narrative, there is no single way to research it, craft it, share it . . . Diverse perspectives and practitioners only enrich our understanding of the past." A Contingent story from our new editor @dinostalgia.bsky.social

A section titled what?? In a chapter titled WHAT????

[NEW VIDEO] Archaeology is under siege from popular anti-intellectual influencers. I document threats and harassment and provide actionable strategies for promoting public educational content Watch, like, comment, and share to boost visibility 🧪🏺 #AncientBlueSky youtu.be/F5PvwzgfKKw

Nature Scientific Reports has finally decided to retract the faulty paper that claimed a comet destroyed Sodom. The people behind the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis are hopping mad. cosmictusk.com/nature-scien...

🌐✨ Join us in supporting open access in archaeology! We want to support researchers who have no institutional backing to cover publishing and archiving costs, especially those whose data may be at risk of being lost. Find more information on how to apply via this link: buff.ly/Ix1hqXN

George Lucas right now is hunched over a Wayback Machine mirror of a bunch of 1999 fan forums going wild over how no one wants to hear about trade policy, sipping wine from his California wine farm, just giggling

ANOTHER popular mokele-mbembe article, this one with a more open-ended conclusion than I would like. I'm quoted alongside Loren Coleman and Eddy Guimont .... www.popularmechanics.com/science/anim... #cryptozoology

This Saturday (22nd March), join me and others involved in #palaeontology for an afternoon / evening pop-up exhibition and discussion event. We'll discuss the public role of the palaeontological sciences, and celebrate the launch of the book Palaeontology in Public www.kcl.ac.uk/events/palae...

Stopped by to see H. P. Lovecraft’s grave today, and found there was already a small commemoration underway.

Some interesting acknowledgments on the town plaque of the Narragansett Rune Stone.

It feels worth just, like, saying this, but every major social media company in the country is now frantically sucking up to Trump. I'm sure this won't have any particular consequences www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

On February 13, I'll be giving a public talk on 'Dragons of the Prime - Dinosaurs in the Victorian Literary Imagination' at the @geolsoc.bsky.social. The occasion, you ask? Why, the 200th anniversary of Gideon Mantell's GSL paper on the Iguanodon, of course: www.geolsoc.org.uk/02-25-Dragon...

The Pizzagate gunman has died after allegedly pulling a gun on police officers during a traffic stop. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/u...

Regardless of your feelings about the Theosophical Society, this is a huge loss.

A newspaper drawing of the Nandi bear, a cryptid from Kenya. Note the long donkey-like tail, despite the name the Nandi bear has wide variety of descriptions, leading some to speculate that it's a type of primate or hyena.

“The Joker Bombs Brazil” — where to even begin… so much delirium in this episode of QAA podcast I did with @caioalmendra.bsky.social. If Brazil doesn’t win the 2024 Batshit Crazy Awards I’ll be disappointed. open.spotify.com/episode/5Bqs...