​This weekend, I worked on translating chapters from ibn ’Abd al-Hakam and al-Mas‘udi on the foundation of Alexandria. These chapters contain a mixture of history, legends associated with the Alexander Romance, and fossilized bits of more ancient mythology, particularly references to the Arabian (…)

​Social media user Scott Whitehead made headlines earlier this month when he posted a short video to Facebook and YouTube falsely claiming that Roman helmets had been discovered in North Carolina. Whitehead has 877,000 followers, so his prank, which was posted April 1, spread faster than many (…)

I wanted to share with you a little of what I have been working on this week. In my Library, you'll find a number of new entries, including a brand new section devoted to the Alexander Romance, the Late Antique novel that changed literature forever. I have included a number of public domain (…)

​Disgraced former congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida claimed that the U.S. government is forcibly mating captive humans with space aliens in order to breed beings capable of communicating with extraterrestrials. Gaetz, who is currently an OANN talk show host, made the claim Tuesday in an (…)

This is a weird little rabbit hole I found myself in this weekend, and I hope that you find it interesting, too. I have been working with a number of medieval Arabic histories of Ancient Egypt, and for a change of pace, I thought I would look at the medieval Syriac histories of Egypt to see how (…)

​I had long known that Muhammad al-Idrisi, the famed twelfth-century geographer, had written a brief passage about the pyramids in his masterpiece, the Tabula Rogeriana (1154 CE). It was almost wholly descriptive and of relatively little interest. (It should not be confused with the book by the (…)

Regular readers will remember Filippo Biondi, the Italian researcher who claims to have discovered massive structures beneath the Giza pyramids using a controversial scanning technique that archaeologists say can’t yield the results he claims for it. Well, Biondi appeared this morning on The (…)

In a new interview with El País to promote the release of the Spanish edition of her 2019 book American Cosmic, Diana Walsh Pasulka described the culture surrounding UFOs as an incipient religion and compared it to the earlier believers in Christianity. To be completely honest, there’s not a lot (…)

​After several weeks of investigation, I am happy to provide the closest possible solution to the mystery of where Alfonso X got his history of Ancient Egypt in the General Estoria (c. 1270 CE)—and it’s a solution that none of the experts, including the modern editors of both editions of the (…)

​Yesterday, according to reporting from Steven Greenstreet of the New York Post, the White House registered the domain names alien.gov and aliens.gov, presumably in conjunction with Pres. Trump’s executive order mandating the release of documents related to space aliens. But I want to start (…)