On Tuesday, the History Channel will launch its newest attempt to clone The Curse of Oak Island, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, which will follow Ancient Aliens talking head and former Rocket City Rednecks star Travis Taylor and a team of investigators hired by ranch owner Brandon Fugal as they attempt to probe the Utah property’s supposedly paranormal secrets. The show is the brainchild of Ancient Aliens and Curse of Oak Island executive producer Kevin Burns, and it is produced by Burns’s company, Prometheus Entertainment, which also produces the other two shows. Naturally, Burns couldn’t resist devoting this hour of Ancient Aliens to promoting the new show. However, I am not in the business of providing free advertising or celebrating a new addition the History Channel’s family of anti-science programs, especially not one from an executive who actively put his staff at risk from coronavirus to churn out more pseudohistory with the argument that his young staff shouldn’t be concerned about the disease. Therefore, as I did last week, I will only highlight the bullet points of claims I feel it is important to have a public record of.

California’s statewide shelter-in-place order halted production on most entertainment programs, but Kevin Burns, the aging Prometheus Entertainment executive behind Ancient Aliens, The UnXplained, and Curse of Oak Island, ordered his staff to continue churning out fake history programs from their Los Angeles office or lose their jobs and health insurance, according to a disturbing report in the Hollywood Reporter. Burns, 64, admitted telling staff that he was unconcerned about the virus and told them they shouldn’t be either because they were all much younger. He told many staffers that they could not work from home and their choice was to continue delivering History Channel fake history shows from the office or quit. Several staffers quit rather than risk infection, and even History’s parent company, A+E Networks, expressed concern. “I can only say that this feels like it’s bigger than a basic cable TV show,” a Prometheus employee told THR. “At some point you’re going to be on the wrong side of history.” Well, that ship sailed with the launch of Ancient Aliens.

A wit once commented that none of those who loudly advocate for the existence of a heavenly afterlife ever seem to be in much of a hurry to get there. For many years now, Ancient Aliens has told us that when we die, our souls travel to another planet to live blissfully with space aliens, in a degraded parody of Theosophy’s ideas about ascended masters living on the interdimensional duplicates of the solar system’s planets. However, despite this promise of extraterrestrial immortality, this week Ancient Aliens descended deep into the rabbit hole of crank pseudoscience with an episode devoted to midcentury “contactee” George Van Tassel’s Integraton, a building conveniently located at Joshua Tree, where the Ancient Aliens crew gathers each year for the Contact in the Desert conference. The dome-shaped structure allegedly facilitates time travel and rejuvenation, though it did nothing to provide Van Tassel with eternal life. It did, however, make for a tediously long hour of Ancient Aliens on a subject I cared less than nothing about.

Last week, Ancient Aliens held more or less steady in the demographic ratings, and it brought in 1.05 million total viewers. William Shatner’s The UnXplained brought in a few thousand more viewers under 49, but it lost 40,000 total viewers from its lead-in. Perhaps some of the good ratings news for Ancient Aliens comes from its return to “classic” ancient astronaut material last week, a change from its recent and boring focus on modern UFO sightings. This week splits the difference, circling between the ancient and the modern. In UFO mythology, the Pleiades house the planet where the Nordic super-Aryan space gods come from, so naturally Ancient Aliens would want to devote an episode to them. Formally, the episode is similar in form and content to the recent discussion of the constellation Orion, and just as in that episode, the focus on a star cluster is little more than an excuse to recycle old content under the guise of discussing it in a new way. As should be obvious, myths and legends formed around specific constellations because they were prominent and obvious to viewers on the ground.

This week, the History Channel moved Ancient Aliens forward an hour to accommodate the return of William Shatner’s The UnXplained in the 10 PM spot Ancient Aliens had formerly occupied. This week’s topic is at least something of a return to form to the show’s traditional subject matter. The show attempts to look for evidence of a lost civilization buried deep in prehistory. It’s an interesting subject, but not for the reason the show thinks. The subject of these ancient civilizations emerged from a logic puzzle created by another story. The myth of the Great Flood necessitated a question: What came before the Flood? The earliest surviving accounts, from Mesopotamia, speak of a civilization much like what came after, when culture was restored from hidden tablets of knowledge. Even Atlantis was not significantly more advanced than the Greek civilization that imagined it. Only later, in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, did the pre-Flood world become associated with a super-civilization far exceeding, often through evil teachings of the fallen angels, the world that followed. All of this debate about the pre-Flood world of the Nephilim giants eventually became conflated with Islamic speculation about pre-Adamite races—separate creations before Adam—yielding Theosophical speculation in the Victorian era about advanced civilizations hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago.