Review of Ancient Aliens S18E10: “The Time Benders”

​This week, during a podcast interview, Lue Elizondo claimed that while he served as the director of AATIP, he successfully “baited” UFOs and was able to attract them largely at will because “it turns out that these things can be pretty successful, if you know what you’re doing.” This bizarre claim raises some important questions. If, as the Navy pilots claimed, they encountered UFOs every day for two years, why did Elizondo need to bait them like Wile E. Coyote leaving out bird seed for the Road Runner? More importantly, if this tactic is so successful, why has he not demonstrated his ability to summon flying saucers, either on his History Channel TV show or his countless network and cable news performances? Surely, his new colleague Avi Loeb could have used his services to lure UFOs to the Galileo Project’s cameras. And yet, all we get are podcast interviews and teasers for a book.

​Ancient Aliens can’t really compete with that, so they recycle a bunch of claims about whether space aliens can manipulate or travel through time, but somehow still mix it all up with suspended animation, standard Einsteinian relativity, and “missing time” UFO reports.
 
Segment 1
This segment discusses the myth of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, who went to sleep for centuries. It’s one of many similar myths, as I discussed a long time ago. The discussion here is more or less the same as one Micah Hanks gave a few years back, and just as dumb. Usually described as a story of suspended animation by ancient astronaut theorists, it is here used to illustrate time travel without evidence of any time travel involved. Then the show discusses H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, as though a novel is somehow science, and Andrew Collins falsely credits Wells with inventing the idea of space-time later developed by Einstein. While Einstein talked mathematically of the connection between space and time, Wells only said that to locate an object in the past, present, or future, you need to know where it is and when it is. This isn’t quite the same thing. From there, a physicist’s theoretical proposal for bending time to create a time machine is discussed, though the show acknowledges that it would require nearly impossible amounts of energy to work. Michio Kaku credits space aliens with being able to harness more power than an entire star possesses to create, apparently, each time machine in their endless fleets.
 
Segment 2
The second segment says that when astronaut Scott Kelly went to space while his twin Mark Kelly stayed on Earth, their ages diverged by 0.5 milliseconds. The show tries to imply that this is related to the physical impact Scott Kelly experienced from being in space, but it’s just Einstein’s theory of relativity. The same thing happens when someone flies in an airplane while another person waits on the ground. Big deal. This is what happens when people who don’t understand science try to explain science to people who don’t understand science. The show then compares the story to a Hindu myth of a king who visited a god and returned to Earth only to find that centuries had passed. They say that this is ancient knowledge of relativity, but it is instead the standard belief that the gods lived in godly time, being immortal. Having all of time before them, they moved faster than humans, and therefore a thousand years were like a day to them, as the Bible says of Yahweh (2 Peter 3:8). Nonsensically, the show then claims that the mythical gods said to have rule Egypt and Mesopotamia for thousands of years in primordial times are actually space travelers who went to space and back. So who was doing the actual governing for all these absentee kings? Would you even remember that Osiris was still king if he hadn’t been on Earth for a few centuries?

Segment 3
The third segment discusses Victor Goddard’s claim to have time traveled into the future for a few minutes. A lifelong paranormal enthusiast and UFO believer, his various claims of clairvoyance and time travel famously occurred after the fact. Bruce Gernon’s claim of missing time in the Bermuda Triangle follows, repeated from a season 13 episode, itself repeating claims from the second season’s first episode all the way back in 2010. The Bermuda Triangle is a well-known hoax, invented by Victor Gaddis in Argosy in 1964, melding together a handful of earlier 1960s stories about missing planes, many of which were misrepresented or false. Nevertheless, the show alleges that the Bermuda Triangle is a portal, and the infamous U.S. Navy UFO videos depict ET spacecraft popping in and out of these portals.

​Segment 4
The fourth segment rehearses the familiar tale of the Rendlesham Forest UFO encounter yet again (having covered it at least four times to my recollection, but probably more), but this time alleges that it involved time travel because one of the men who claims to have encountered an anomalous artifact says he collected a secret alien message from the downed ship dated to the year 8100—when, apparently, future entities still use the Gregorian Calendar. One of the experiences said he had psychic dreams about time travelers from 40,000 years in the future and felt that they needed to return to the past to correct something that went wrong. Cool fantasy, bro, but just another typical twentieth century sci-fi fantasy indistinguishable from the many, many others—all of which have no evidence to support their reality outside the experiencer’s mind.

​Segment 5
The fifth segment brings in Michael P. Masters, the University of Montana anthropologist who self-published a book claiming that Grey aliens are human time travelers. Masters tweeted on February 18 about how “honored” he was to appear on Russian propaganda channel RT to spout conspiracy theories about time travel just before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The tweet is still up, so presumably he is still honored. The show claims Greys are highly evolved future humans, big in brain and small in body. This contradicts their episode claiming the Greys were evil engineered slaves of the Reptilians or space brothers, but whatever. Consistency is for pussies. After all, that season 4 episode threw in the time travel hypothesis in its last segment to see if that spaghetti might stick.
 
Segment 6
The final segment tells us that time is a social construct and therefore not truly linear. Therefore, they claim, while we experience only the now, all of the past, present, and future exist simultaneously so space aliens will be able to see through the veil of linear time and experience eternity in order to “guide the evolution of humanity”—whatever that is supposed to mean. The segment is a mix of half-understood science, bastardized philosophy, and sci-fi fantasy—which, I guess, is Ancient Aliens in a nutshell.