At the end of the day, maybe the ancient astronaut theory and ufology are all about daddy issues. The concepts come pre-loaded with the notion that punitive and/or loving parental figures will descend from the sky to teach all of Earth’s naughty children important lessons, but it seems that the emotional need for parental validation in the form of government “disclosure” of UFO secrets represents another facet of the same mindset. The same people who tirelessly assert that government is an evil nasty punitive asshole who takes away all our toys and always treats our siblings better than us are also the same people who so desperately want daddy’s love that they believe only a government endorsement will validate their belief in the UFO faith. This is prima facie absurd since government endorses so many ideas that they clearly have no faith in and which they denounce as lies, but deep in their shriveled hearts they still think that if government agrees to something it must be true.

This week, Linda Moulton Howe of Ancient Aliens confirmed that she sold a chunk of the “Art’s Parts” metal slag she claimed fell off the Roswell flying saucer to the brain trust at To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science for $35,000 more than a year ago—before she appeared on Ancient Aliens to discuss To the Stars and its claims about alien metals. She said she cried when she sold it. Needless to say, neither she nor the program disclosed that she had a financial stake in To the Stars when the episodes aired. This kind of undisclosed conflict of interest would be wholly unethical in a newsroom—and Moulton Howe claims to be a journalist—but somehow is just fine for the History Channel, as long as the fake alien claims come fast enough to keep a declining audience (currently 778,000 viewers to In Search Of’s 869,000) entertained. Similarly, tonight’s episode topic, “The Storming of Area 51,” is also a bit of self-dealing since Ancient Aliens was not a neutral party. It heavily promoted the event on social media and streamed live coverage of it online. After helping to drive people to the event, it then produced this show as though it weren’t actively involved in celebrating the alien-themed festival.

It’s always been pretty obvious that To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science has been focused on revenue. Its incorporation papers made the company’s primary obligation to pay a minimum of $100,000 per year to founder Tom DeLonge, and its only consistent activity has been to raise money by selling functionally worthless stock to UFO enthusiasts. (DeLonge and his partners control the company through their ownership stakes.) Nevertheless, when DeLonge told Twitter last week that the company was not a “UFO research group,” it took many by surprise, particularly since DeLonge launched the company with insinuations of UFO disclosure and has made its only visible products, its book series and History Channel TV series, UFO-themed.

Here is how little thought anyone gave to tonight’s episode of Ancient Aliens: The official History Channel episode description, as of the East Coast airing of the show at 9 PM ET, read, in its entirety, “Texts, archaeology and legend contain evidence of past human-extraterrestrial contact.” The title of tonight’s episode derives from an Indo-European legend that the gods ate and drank special comestibles that preserved and protected their immortality. Cognate legends can be found from Europe to India (hence, Indo-European!), including the Greek nectar and ambrosia and the Hindu amrita. “Amrita” and “ambrosia” share an etymology, so this is not particularly shocking. The title of “food of the gods” ended up in an H. G. Wells novel about giants, not one of his better, and the B-movie based on it—also awful. But for our purposes it is best known from Terrence McKenna’s use of the title for one of his books, in which he argued that Homo erectus involved into Homo sapiens thanks to the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Somewhere in all that is a lesson about Ancient Aliens, a hallucinogenic fantasy in the style of an awful B-movie that pretends to the dignity of ancient faith.