This week, Linda Moulton Howe of Ancient Aliens confirmed that she sold a chunk of the “Art’s Parts” metal slag she claimed fell off the Roswell flying saucer to the brain trust at To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science for $35,000 more than a year ago—before she appeared on Ancient Aliens to discuss To the Stars and its claims about alien metals. She said she cried when she sold it. Needless to say, neither she nor the program disclosed that she had a financial stake in To the Stars when the episodes aired. This kind of undisclosed conflict of interest would be wholly unethical in a newsroom—and Moulton Howe claims to be a journalist—but somehow is just fine for the History Channel, as long as the fake alien claims come fast enough to keep a declining audience (currently 778,000 viewers to In Search Of’s 869,000) entertained. Similarly, tonight’s episode topic, “The Storming of Area 51,” is also a bit of self-dealing since Ancient Aliens was not a neutral party. It heavily promoted the event on social media and streamed live coverage of it online. After helping to drive people to the event, it then produced this show as though it weren’t actively involved in celebrating the alien-themed festival.

The night this episode of Ancient Aliens aired marked the fiftieth anniversary of the broadcast of the pilot episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, the horror anthology series that accidentally triggered the chain of events that would culminate in Ancient Aliens. Night Gallery explored the Gothic, the outré, the Lovecraftian, and the bizarre, all while experimenting with ways to stretch the limits of 1970s television’s format, structure, and production values. The results were mixed. Some exceptional, many good, and quite a few awful segments aired, but NBC wasn’t satisfied with the results. When Serling saw the cancelation writing on the wall, he and Alan Landsburg moved on to nonfiction, adapting Chariots of the Gods for American TV, a special that served as the launching pad for In Search of…, a staple of 1970s and 1980s syndication packages. Its success in reruns helped convince the History Channel to adapt Chariots of the Gods anew as Ancient Aliens, which, perhaps ironically, now airs paired with a new version of In Search Of. This Ancient Aliens episode topic—tattoos that have a sinister connection to space aliens—might have made for an interesting Night Gallery segment. Of course, Supergirl is currently doing an evil alien tattoo plot, so that’s … something.

Here is how little thought anyone gave to tonight’s episode of Ancient Aliens: The official History Channel episode description, as of the East Coast airing of the show at 9 PM ET, read, in its entirety, “Texts, archaeology and legend contain evidence of past human-extraterrestrial contact.” The title of tonight’s episode derives from an Indo-European legend that the gods ate and drank special comestibles that preserved and protected their immortality. Cognate legends can be found from Europe to India (hence, Indo-European!), including the Greek nectar and ambrosia and the Hindu amrita. “Amrita” and “ambrosia” share an etymology, so this is not particularly shocking. The title of “food of the gods” ended up in an H. G. Wells novel about giants, not one of his better, and the B-movie based on it—also awful. But for our purposes it is best known from Terrence McKenna’s use of the title for one of his books, in which he argued that Homo erectus involved into Homo sapiens thanks to the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Somewhere in all that is a lesson about Ancient Aliens, a hallucinogenic fantasy in the style of an awful B-movie that pretends to the dignity of ancient faith.

Stonehenge. It’s old. It’s been associated with bonkers ideas about who really built it at least since medieval people imagined that Merlin the Magician flew it in to Britain after a group of antediluvian giants had first set it up in Ireland. It’s perhaps a little surprising that Stonehenge isn’t featured on Ancient Aliens more often, but they tend to favor areas that aren’t England. That said, there is little that can possibly compare to the utter inanity of claiming that Stonehenge functions as a portal through which the entire culture of people who built the site got sucked in and transported to another planet. It’s the culmination of the whole season’s gradually building claims about magic stones and interdimensional beings, but even so, it still scans as bonkers at a level beyond even their usual stupidity.

At some point in the 2000s, the handbook of cable TV production got swapped with a bottle of shampoo, and producers have been following the dictum of lather, rinse, and repeat ever since. How else to explain why In Search Of this week is devoting a second episode to the old chestnut of the Loch Ness Monster, which the show’s original version first covered in 1977? Or how Ancient Aliens has managed to spin its original two-hour pilot into fourteen seasons of adding nothing significant to those initial hours? Occasionally, though, Ancient Aliens tries to rope in some new material, and then we get an episode like this, where they are basically just digging out whatever discredited old paranormal crap they can find to fill air time. It’s not the first time they’ve discussed telekinesis, precognition, and other various ESP claims, but it is a case where they have leaned farther than usual into paranormal “mysteries” that have little to do with ancient astronauts. I can’t help but remember that their frenemy Hal Puthoff over at To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science devoted much of his career to exactly this question, spending his life hunting for psychic powers and their putative connection to space ghosts.

After a brief hiatus, Ancient Aliens returns to goose the ratings for the new season of In Search Of, which aired immediately afterward and covered the decidedly not au courant hunt for the Loch Ness Monster. I mean, seriously: The original In Search Of… did a Loch Ness Monster episode in 1977 and there is actually less evidence for it now than there was back then thanks to the exposure of hoaxes. Anyway, Ancient Aliens is also airing simultaneously with its stars’ participation in Alien Con Dallas. The first Alien Con was an event, and early outings even garnered coverage in the New York Times. But in a case of diminishing returns, each subsequent iteration has become less noteworthy. At this point, it is basically the Antiques Roadshow for the fantasy-prone, or, perhaps more charitably, Comic Con for people who find comics a little too literary and deep. All of this is a long way around saying that Ancient Aliens is airing more as a piece of a corporate marketing strategy than because it has anything at all to say. Well, and it also helps the ancient astronaut theorists score free vacations on History’s dime.

​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?