An almanac of the alternative-theory field as of Q1 2026
I've had some free time in Q1 2026 and decided to catch up on what's going on in the alternative history field. Watching the latest clips, I noticed I was very behind on the names, theories, and places. Almost every podcast I watched or listened to mentioned something I had no idea about. Like Natawidjaja, Dibble, Sweatman, Davidovits, Gunung Padang, the Carolina Bays. So I figured: if you are not tracking this field as a full-time job, you are at least three names behind the conversation.
So I decided to quickly catch up on the whole field and use AI to do the heavy lifting.
The data set I selected was:
- Ten Graham Hancock books in English.
- Thirty-two Andrey Sklyarov books in Russian (the technical-measurement wing of the heterodox camp, mostly unknown to English readers).
- The full Cosmic Summit YouTube channel (the broadest survey of what is currently in play in the field).
- The full Dedunking YouTube channel (Dan Richards, skeptical of alternative claims and academic gatekeeping with equal energy).
- The full Antropogenez YouTube channel in Russian (the funniest and most diligent institutional rebuttal in this space; they don't just talk, they run replications and field experiments, and they publish their findings).
Altogether about 8.3 million words, 1,052 sources, two languages. I could have scraped other books and channels but drew the line there; it was already big and expensive in AI tokens.
Eight million words would not fit into any current LLM context window. So I had Claude build an MCP server: chunk the corpus, index it in SQLite FTS5, expose it as a searchable tool. Then me and Claude worked out the book structure: thirty-six chapters organized around named concepts.
The result is a free book on Github, "Alternative Theories Almanac Q1 2026", that contains most of what is currently in the alternative-theories zeitgeist in a digestible form. Not encyclopedia. Almanac. The word matters. An encyclopedia pretends permanence; an almanac admits a shelf life. By Q3 something will have shifted, somebody will have pivoted, a fresh dig will bring new evidence, new theories, new rebuttals, and new dedunking.
I read the book after it was created. That is the strange part of this AI workflow: you design the book, the AI builds it, and only then do you read it. Then I decided to share it here in case ten or so other people find it useful.
The book has no editorial position by design. It is even. The mainstream record is less complete than the science institutions present it as. The alternative framework is less supported than its advocates claim. Both are true at the same time. The book does not tell you which side to pick.
GitHub link in the comments.