​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.

​So, here we go again. With Ancient Aliens facing a steep decline in ratings, losing nearly one third of their viewers since the start of season fourteen, we’re facing down yet another episode that repeats the show’s maniacally narrow interests this season. They’ve really latched on to the occult idea that aliens are really interdimensional beings who genetically altered humanity in the distant past. This week, the same theme is visited upon the Hawaiian Islands, but to be frank, this really seems like an excuse to give this week’s ancient astronaut theorist of focus a free vacation. A lot of the episodes recently have seemed like fine excuses for luxury vacations.

​Some weeks it is harder than others to find something new to say about Ancient Aliens, and clearly it has become difficult for them to find something worth blathering about for an hour as well. This week, the putative topic is “the trans-dimensionals,” beings that come to Earth from a parallel universe or from the fifth dimension, beyond those which are known to man. Oh, wait. I did it again. That’s part of Rod Serling’s intro to the Twilight Zone, which Ancient Aliens rips off for the current season’s intro. Having previously declared supernatural beings like angels and poltergeists to be space aliens, this time the same talking heads pivot to a new speculative idea, that the supernatural is really nothing but beings and forces from other dimensions leaking into our own. Perhaps only a cynic would point out that this is the operating hypothesis that Hal Puthoff of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and formerly of the U.S. government’s UFO and paranormal research efforts has advocated officially and unofficially since the 1970s, or that Ancient Aliens and Hal Puthoff are connected to each other through the History Channel, which pays their bills by funding both the current show and Puthoff’s Unidentified. No, they just happened to decide one day that ghosts and aliens happened to pop into Skinwalker Ranch from another dimension. Complete. Coincidence.  

​Each week I try to come up with something new to say about Ancient Aliens, a show that doesn’t try half as hard to deliver new content each week. But in past seasons, they at least tried to vary their topics from week to week. Now, in its dotage, Ancient Aliens latches on to a topic and just keeps cranking out variations on whatever currently obsesses its producers. Case in point: For three weeks now, the show has fixated on the question of aliens hybridizing humanity and engaging in cross-species genetic engineering. Granted, the first time it was subsumed under interest in which aliens were hybridizing people (Reptilians) and the second time it hovered behind a putative interest in the mechanics of hybridization. Now, the third time in three weeks, the focus is nakedly on Our Heroes’ supposed interest in why space aliens would want to modify our DNA. However, the real purpose of the episode is fairly clear: The History Channel pastes together similarly themed episodes into multi-hour Ancient Aliens Declassified specials, so the repeat subject matter makes it that much easier. They just used to space them out better so it wasn’t so much all at once. The audience might be catching on, too. For the past two weeks, the show’s ratings have fallen to season-low viewership under 900,000 per episode, a third below the series’ average. William Shatner’s UnXplained outdrew it both weeks.

​​When Christopher Columbus reached the Americas and introduced European diseases into the western hemisphere, the result was catastrophic. By some estimates, as many as 90% of the Native peoples of the Americas died in the two centuries that followed. In Michael Crichton’s novel The Andromeda Strain, a microbe from beyond the stars wreaks havoc on Earth, and in the classic novel The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells imagined Martians succumbing to the diseases of Earth, to which they had no immunity. Somehow, however, Ancient Aliens believes that space aliens would have much better luck harnessing the power of viruses for more constructive purposes. In this episode, the show takes it as a given that space aliens have elaborate plans for genetically engineering humanity, and they speculate that viruses are the method through which aliens manipulate human DNA. While that might have been a semi-coherent topic, naturally, the show decides to speculate that major pandemics like the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 were alien population management efforts.

​It’s hard to come up with much new to say about the ancient astronaut theory after fourteen seasons of Ancient Aliens, but recent episodes have gone above and beyond in repeating ideas from previous episodes, almost to the point that each new show is an instant rerun. I could talk about how the Reptilians are a reflection of pulp fiction snake people or the way that these snake people reflect Theosophy’s reptilian root race, or how these concepts all originate in a pre-Victorian hypothesis that Satan had seeded all of the pagan faiths of the Earth with ophiolatreia, or serpent-worship, in remembrance of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. But doing so would waste much more intellectual energy than is really needed to evaluate a collection of repetitive material about snakes and Reptilians seen in a dozen or more past episodes.