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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E09 "The UFO Pioneers"

3/6/2021

This week, Ancient Aliens again chose to create a putatively “new” episode from recycled parts of earlier episodes. As with last week’s episode, three pundits—this time, Giorgio Tsoukalos, David Childress, and Nick Pope—sit around a conference table and offer blather to connect together prerecorded packages, some from previous episodes. This episode swirls around personalities associated with UFO investigation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These people, some serious, some kooky, are lionized as “pioneers”—but pioneers of what? The fantasy that the unknown must be extraterrestrial, paranormal or something combining both, mostly. The potted biographies offer little you haven’t seen before, even if you hadn’t watched earlier episodes of the series. Since there is little worthy of discussion here, and since the show’s viewership remains under one million viewers, and the readership of these summaries under five hundred readers, I will offer only a brief summary of the highlights of each segment as a record for historical interest.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E08 "The Space Travelers"

2/27/2021

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Last week, Ancient Aliens rose total audience, climbing to 998,000 viewers, an increase of almost 50,000 viewers over the previous week’s William Shatner special. But the number of younger viewers watching ticked downward, knocking the show out of the top twenty for the night. I continue to remain amazed that about a million Americans will watch Ancient Aliens even when it simply repeats old material from previous episodes and shamelessly copies and pastes. But people also pay good money to stream reruns of The Office they’ve seen many times before, so I guess it’s to be expected. However, since Ancient Aliens is putting no effort into sewing together Frankenstein’s monster episodes from cadaverous parts, I won’t put that much effort into reviewing it. According to my blog traffic statistics, reader engagement with Ancient Aliens has collapsed. In past years, thousands, often tens of thousands, of people would research the show and find their way to my reviews in the first week after publishing them. This past week, 602 people read my review—fewer than read archival reviews! It just isn’t worth the effort.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E07 "Impossible Artifacts"

2/20/2021

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Last week’s heavily hyped experiment in breaking format did not result in exceptional ratings. William Shatner might have done promotional interviews across the internet, but all the puffery in the world couldn’t lift Ancient Aliens beyond its typical audience. About 950,000 viewers tuned in for last week’s two-hour special “William Shatner Meets Ancient Aliens,” a bit below the show’s usual million-viewer audience and about even with the weekly audience for Shatner’s sister show The UnXplained. This week, Ancient Aliens moves to a new, later time slot, running after Shatner and extending past the top of the eleven o’clock hour and out of prime time. But some thing never change. This is yet another episode made up of recycled material we’ve seen over and over for sixteen seasons.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E06 "William Shatner Meets Ancient Aliens"

2/12/2021

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In recent interviews, William Shatner claims that he is agnostic on the question of ancient astronauts, or even skeptical of some of the ancient astronaut theorists’ claims. That wasn’t always the case. Almost 45 years ago, Shatner at least pretended to be an enthusiastic ancient astronaut theorist when he stepped into the shoes of the late Rod Serling to serve as host of Mysteries of the Gods—“as incredible as Star Trek”—a film adaptation of Erich von Däniken’s book Miracles of the Gods and a follow-up to the various film versions of Chariots of the Gods, including Serling’s In Search of Ancient Astronauts. Shatner’s former Star Trek colleague Leonard Nimoy was also subbing for Serling on In Search of…, the television continuation of In Search of Ancient Astronauts, and the most successful of von Däniken’s various intellectual offspring.

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William Shatner: Moving Large Rocks Is an Inexplicable Cosmic Mystery

2/10/2021

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This Friday, Ancient Aliens presents a two-hour special in which The UnXplained host William Shatner meets with the various talking heads from Ancient Aliens and interviews them about space aliens, science, and futurism. The crossover between Ancient Aliens and sister program The UnXplained is made possible by the two shows’ shared production company. The special runs more than two hours, and it continues well past how late I can stay up as the father of an energetic three-year-old. As a result, I won’t review it until sometime Saturday, when I have had a chance to watch it.

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Ex-QAnon Conspiracy Theorist Discusses Interdimensional Alien Beliefs on CNN

1/30/2021

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Sen. Lindsey Graham warned this week that calling the so-called QAnon Shaman, Jake Angeli (a.k.a. Jacob Chansley), to testify in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial would be a circus, while last night CNN aired footage from tonight’s QAnon conspiracy special of anchor Anderson Cooper interviewing a former QAnon believer about the extreme delusions that he accepted as true while in the mouth of madness. Just as Angeli posted YouTube videos detailing his belief that he was a psychic space warrior working for a secret U.S. military program to destroy alien spaceships from another dimension, his fellow QAnon believers have some pretty strange—but very familiar—ideas.

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Review of The UnXplained S02E10 "The Search for Atlantis"

1/23/2021

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William Shatner’s The UnXplained comes from the same producers that gave us Ancient Aliens, In Search of Aliens, Curse of Oak Island, and The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. Bad ideas, poor research, and lies are original sin indivisible from the program’s halfhearted attempts to be slightly less outrageous than its loudmouthed sister shows. Shatner himself is a longtime enthusiast for the paranormal, lending his voice to programs about the extraterrestrial and supernatural since the 1970s. I don’t regularly watch The UnXplained because it rarely covers topics of interest to me. This episode, however, explored Atlantis, an I was disappointed to see that Prometheus Entertainment, the company behind so many bad shows, simply pasted this together from spare parts of other bad shows—citing them as evidence that “some” believe extreme idea that Prometheus’s own shows promoted!

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Fashion Designer Creates Map of QAnon / History Channel History Conspiracies

1/10/2021

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In the wake of the Capitol insurrection and renewed interest in QAnon and its web of conspiracy theories, Q-believers have been trading images of a map of "hidden history" that, not coincidentally, maps exactly onto the fake history deployed by Ancient Aliens, Scott Wolter, and the History Channel, Science Channel, and Travel Channel band of speculators. To the best of my knowledge, the map was first developed in 2018 by fashion designer Dylan Louis Monroe, a Q-curious artist who displayed it at both the History Channel's AlienCon and a special 2018 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to conspiracies theories as art. The Met called it a way to "oppose political corruption, bureaucracy, and media manipulation." You know, by accusing all of history of being a Jewish-Catholic Satanic conspiracy. As you do. Seriously, how could the Met not have considered the consequences?

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Capitol Invader "Q-Shaman" Claims to Be Secret Military Psychic Space Warrior

1/7/2021

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It should surprise no one that yesterday’s siege of the United States Capitol by a pro-Trump right-wing mob included close connections to right-wing conspiracy theories, and not just the putative election fraud claim Pres. Donald Trump used to incite the violence at a rally yesterday afternoon. Many of the thugs who invaded the Capitol sported QAnon clothing, and at least one brandished a flag printed with a “Trump—JFK Jr.” slogan, a reference to a QAnon conspiracy theory imagining that the late son of John F. Kennedy is both secretly alive and about to become Trump’s second vice president. On Fox News Channel, Tucker Carlson spun a conspiracy theory that Antifa agitators had infiltrated the mob, while actual journalists identified several of its members as known white nationalist and right-wing extremists.

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The Year in Review: 2020 in Ancient Mysteries, Modern Conspiracies, and Aliens

12/28/2020

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For years now, I have ended each trip around the sun with a summary of the preceding twelve months in fringe history, space aliens, and the weird. Most years, these summaries run into the thousands of words because so much happened. This year, the COVID-19 pandemic and the American presidential election severely curtailed the number of extreme claims made about ancient history, as conspiracy theorists turned their attention toward disease and politics. Last year, I said I was ready for a long, difficult year to end, and now those look like the good old days. This year I published a new book and wrote two more, and I look forward to what I hope will be big things next year when publishers get a look at my newest manuscript. In the meantime, we can look back in sadness and anger.

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