​The question of whether people from the British Isles reached America is almost as old as the European colonization of the Americas after Columbus. John Dee, for example, helped promote the idea that the Welsh prince Madoc colonized America, all part of his scheme to justify British colonization by alleging that it predated Columbus and the Spaniards. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, claims of Irish or Celtic explorations of the Americas became popular as precedent for the then-current mass migration of Irish people to the Americas. In the nineteenth century, Eugène Beauvois brought the theme to its racist climax when he argued in a series of papers—on the flimsiest of evidence—that the Irish had not only colonized the Americas before Columbus but also converted the Natives from Mexico to Hudson’s Bay to Catholicism and civilized the lot of them, until the Natives’ savage natures undid their hard work. When challenged that the “true” discoverers of America might be Norse rather than Irish, he nonchalantly replied that it didn’t matter because the answer “will always be European.” Adding aliens to the mix doesn’t really change the underlying racist origins of the ideas under discussion in this episode.

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.

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.

​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.

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:

​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.

​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.