​For more than two centuries, scientists, historians, and treasure hunters have sought proof that Mesoamerican peoples visited or even colonized the lands now part of the continental United States. In the nineteenth century, this line of speculation tended to focus on the Aztecs, who had a myth of coming to Mexico from Aztlán, a land to the north of Mexico. Baron von Humboldt infamously placed Aztlán in the Great Lakes region on the evidence of a painting of a palm tree (don’t ask) and what amounted to some guesswork about how fast they might have walked across the 416 years of their wanderings from Aztlán to Mexico. “It is almost certain,” Humboldt wrote in Researches Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America (1810), “that we must look for the first country of the Mexican nations, Aztlan, Huehuetlapallan, and Amequemecan, at least North of the 42d degree of latitude” (trans. Helena Maria Williams). Humboldt’s claim was so persuasive that he succeeded in getting scholars to speak of the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan as “Aztecs” from Aztlán instead of the Mexica of Mexico.

​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.

​The other day, UFO circuit regular and local Las Vegas TV reporter George Knapp published a statement from Luis Elizondo of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science about recently released emails that Elizondo had sent to the Pentagon requesting permission to share the UFO videos that helped launch TTSA back in 2017. The emails were written in July 2017 while Elizondo was a Pentagon employee but was actively plotting to move to TTSA, which he did in October of that year. While most of the coverage in the UFO community has focused on the question of whether the emails support Elizondo’s claim to have supervised the Pentagon’s pork project UFO-tracking program, I want to highlight a more interesting issue, how Elizondo actually describes the supposed “unmanned aerial vehicle” threat when he isn’t speaking to UFO believers. 

​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.