​After fourteen weeks of the current season of Ancient Aliens, I confess to feeling fatigued. Each week it becomes harder to muster the energy to find something new to say about the show, particularly when it tries so hard to avoid saying anything new itself. Fortunately, we have a month off before the next new episode. ​The topic of the current episode, “The Nuclear Agenda,” ought to be familiar to any viewer who has seen the show over the past five or six of its fourteen seasons. That’s because it has already covered this material many times over, in greater or lesser detail, and repeating it here doesn’t really do a lot to make it interesting. Worse, since the topic deals with the supposed interest of flying saucers in nuclear weapons after 1945, there isn’t much here to capture my interest in things ancient. All I could think is that this same show suggests that aliens have mastered wormholes and can channel world-destroying dark matter from other dimensions and have piezoelectric space lasers and can direct asteroids to kill whole species, and somehow they are worried about a nuclear bomb? 

​When Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert published The Orion Mystery in 1994, their claim that the Egyptians had laid out the Giza pyramids to represent the stars of the constellation Orion sparked a cottage industry among so-called “alternative archaeologists” looking for constellation “alignments” at ancient sites around the world. Locations as diverse as the Hopi Mesas and the temples of Angkor Wat have seen themselves reimagined as “heaven’s mirror.” But like most modern myths, the constellation alignments are a contemporary fiction created through the selective application of imagination to sites that bear little to no resemblance to the constellations they supposedly depict.

​The claim that ancient sites reflected the stars, however, did not originate with Robert Bauval. In Antiquity, writers had noted that the Nile flood was associated with Sirius and the constellation of Leo. In the Middle Ages, the Arabs believed that ancient Egyptian temples and tombs had all been dedicated to the “stars”—by which they meant the seven planets of astrology (i.e., the five visible planets, plus the sun and moon)—and they had a bewildering array of legends about the connections between temples and stars. One medieval Arabic poem preserved by Al-Maqrizi pointedly asks if the Giza pyramids were “observatories for the planets.” The poet then added—pointedly, for our purposes—that they might also be “descriptions of planetary calculations” preserved in stone.