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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E06 "Secrets of the Maya"

7/5/2019

Originality has never been the strong suit of Ancient Aliens, a show that was born as a TV adaptation of Chariots of the Gods and has spent most of its decade on the air finding new ways to repeat claims that were already hoary with age when Chariots author Erich von Däniken copied them from earlier authors in his own books in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the marketing for this episode took a certain degree of chutzpah that this lazy show rarely rises to. For a week before this episode aired, the History Channel and Ancient Aliens promoted an online streaming playlist of the show’s fifteen best episodes about the Maya ahead of this episode’s Maya reprise. Conceding that you have covered the same topic at least fifteen times before while remaining confident that your core audience will tune in to watch the same thing yet again provides a delicate cameo of the Ancient Aliens phenomenon. Now, if only the episode had anything to do with the Maya and was not just another racist bait-and-switch.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E05 "They Came from the Sea"

6/28/2019

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Ancient Aliens has an unusual relationship with the undersea world. From the early episode “Underwater Worlds” to season eight’s “Creatures of the Deep” down to this one, the show has tried a little harder than you might imagine to tie fish to space aliens. Maybe it’s the influence of Atlantis stories, or maybe it’s the fact that the undersea world is relatively unfamiliar to most audiences, making it easier to imagine as an alien hotspot. But, really, how can the show ever top the claim that aliens entered into a treaty with fish? “I think it is possible that the coelacanth survived due to a direct guarantee by extraterrestrials,” Tsoukalos said in season four’s “Aliens and Dinosaurs.” Tonight’s episode is basically “Creatures of the Deep” all over again.

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This Week in UFO Infotainment: To the Stars Manipulates the Media

6/24/2019

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Note: I am taking some time off to work on other projects this week. My plan is to review next week’s episode of America Unearthed midweek if the Travel Channel releases it online early, as it has with past episodes. I will then return on Friday night to review Ancient Aliens.

It has been a ridiculously busy week for fringe history, UFOs, and space aliens, which of course had to happen the week I was planning to take off for a bit of summer vacation. Atlantis Rising magazine, one of the premiere publishers of anti-historical garbage for almost three decades, folded due to what the publisher described as “extreme financial difficulties.” It’s hard to get people to pay for recycled written fringe history content when TV and the internet give it away for free.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E04 "The Star Gods of Sirius"

6/21/2019

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After a decade on the air, it’s surprising that Ancient Aliens has not devoted a whole episode to Robert Temple’s classic ancient astronaut tome The Sirius Mystery (1976). The show has made reference to claims from the book many times, including episodes from 2012, 2015, and 2016, but this is the first time I can recall in which the show has chosen to look at the fake mystery of the Dogon tribe’s supposed special knowledge of the Sirius star system for a complete hour. It would seem a surprising omission except that Ancient Aliens began life as an adaptation of Chariots of the Gods, and Erich von Däniken and Robert Temple never quite saw eye to eye on ancient space aliens. It goes without saying that the show made it through the whole episode without mentioning Temple.

It is likely no news to regular readers of this blog that the Sirius Mystery is a pack of lies dressed up with a thin veneer of pseudo-scholarship. I’ve written the same summary so many times that it isn’t worth rewriting it again. Since Ancient Aliens basically copies and pastes its episodes and has for years, I might as well copy and paste my review:

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"America Unearthed," "Unidentified" Rise in Ratings Again This Past Week

6/20/2019

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I am doing moving-related tasks today and don’t have a lot of time for writing, so today I’d like to share the ratings results for the past week in fringe history TV. On Friday, the History Channel and To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science collaboration Unidentified reached 1.158 million viewers (0.26 in the advertiser-preferred adults 18-49 demographic), beating its lead-in Ancient Aliens (1.1 million, 0.19 adults 18-49) for the first time. Both were trounced by HGTV’s My Lottery Dream Home. It’s interesting to see that Unidentified is growing its audience beyond that of Ancient Aliens, particularly in the younger demographic, though the small variance from week to week suggests that this isn’t yet a pattern and can be attributable to any number of factors, including the relatively dull topic for this past week’s Ancient Aliens. The ’90s throwback to Bob Lazar probably alienated some viewers who consider him old news. Last year’s In Search Of briefly topped its Ancient Aliens lead-in for a small part of its run, but the overall pattern has been for the 10 PM ET show to lose viewers since the 10 PM audience is smaller than earlier in prime time.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E03 "Element 115"

6/14/2019

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The History Channel is all-in on UFO conspiracies, and Ancient Aliens is doing its dutiful best to coordinate their conspiracy theories with developments on lead-out series Unidentified, in which former Pentagon employee and current To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science employee Luis Elizondo claims that the U.S. government is hiding UFO secrets. Tonight’s Ancient Aliens plunges into Unidentified territory by taking seriously the fantastical claims of Bob Lazar, the self-described Area 51 whistleblower who orbits around the same cast of characters that populate To the Stars. Interviewing Lazar helped make Las Vegas TV newsman George Knapp famous in UFO circles, and Knapp helped convince then-Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to fund Robert Bigelow’s pipe dream of a Pentagon UFO bureau, eventually known as AATIP, the same group where Elizondo claimed not just to work but to have served as leader.

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Giorgio Tsoukalos Begins Promotional Push for Upcoming Alien Con

6/14/2019

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Last week, History’s sister network Viceland renewed Action Bronson’s Traveling the Stars, in which Bronson and his friends smoke marijuana and watch reruns of Ancient Aliens. This coming week is the semiannual History Channel Alien Con, the fan convention for Ancient Aliens and extraterrestrial/science fiction pop culture. As part of the promotional rollout for the convention, the History Channel arranged for Giorgio Tsoukalos to do interviews with California TV stations from a History Channel studio in Los Angeles. This is a step up for Tsoukalos, who last year had to physically schlepp out to local news studios. From History’s cushy digs, he spoke yesterday with Simone de Alba of Fox 40 in Sacramento.

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UFOs in "The Week"; Plus: "Ancient Aliens" and "Unidentified" Lose Viewers

6/11/2019

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I’m holding off on any major writing today until I review America Unearthed this evening. I just closed on a new house, and as you might imagine, there is a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. As a result, I will be blogging intermittently for the next few weeks. I intend to continue reviewing America Unearthed and Ancient Aliens, but the days in between may be a bit spotty until I am set up in the new house. In the meantime, I thought that this week’s cover of The Week magazine was worth sharing. It points to the Navy’s recent revision of reporting guidelines for pilots who see unidentified objects in the sky, and it inflates that to the more grandiose idea of “Taking UFOs Seriously,” in keeping with the spin put on the story by the team at To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science in conjunction with their History Channel series Unidentified.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E02 "The Badlands Guardian"

6/7/2019

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I’d say that Ancient Aliens is scraping the bottom of the barrel, but to be frank, we dug down through the barrel year ago and are now somewhere past the Earth’s crust and deep into the mantle. This week’s episode is named for the “Badlands Guardian,” a geological formation in Alberta, Canada created by the action of wind and water on the soft soil. It takes on the appearance of a human face in profile only in certain lighting, when an optical illusion makes the concave feature appear convex, in what is known as the Hollow-Face Illusion, as the feature’s Wikipedia page notes. It’s an interesting optical illusion, but that’s all it is, a bit of pareidolia discovered with Google Earth. It was discovered 13 or 14 years ago and became an online sensation a few times, most recently last fall, but now optical illusions are evidence of space aliens as this series struggles to come up with new ways to repackage old material, sometimes for the third or fourth time.

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Godzilla in Atlantis; Plus: 1.3 Million Watch History's Friday UFO Shows

6/4/2019

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Let’s start today with the ratings for Friday’s UFO programming. Ancient Aliens was close to its week-to-week and year-to-year average. The first new episode of the fourteenth season drew 1.3 million people, with a 0.26 rating among the advertiser-covered demographic of adults 18-49. It ranked seventh in the cable ratings for Friday. Unidentified, the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science UFO series, debuted with 1.286 million viewers and a 0.22 rating among adults 18-49, retaining most of its lead-in’s audience and outperforming most of the other shows that have followed Ancient Aliens over the past ten years in that regard. It ranked eleventh among all cable shows airing on Friday. But don’t despair! Both were outdrawn by HGTV’s My Lottery Dream Home, which had 1.6 million viewers and a 0.29 rating among adults 18-49. So, in the hierarchy of American life, lottery fantasies easily outdraw mind- and soul-shattering “truths” about time, space, and reality.

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