Blog Archives

Review of Ancient Aliens S14E05 "They Came from the Sea"

6/28/2019

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.

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Review of America Unearthed S04E06 “The Spy Who Saved America”

6/26/2019

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Note: The Travel Channel is releasing episodes of America Unearthed online about a week before their broadcast air date. This review is for the episode airing July 3.

This week has not been kind to fringe TV. Ancient Aliens and Unidentified were both down heavily in the ratings, sinking to 1.032 million viewers for the former and 1.005 million for the latter, declines of nearly one in ten viewers since last week and a full twenty percent since their season premieres. Last week’s spike in the ratings for America Unearthed proved to be an anomaly, and the ratings for the “Phoenicians in America” episode settled back down to 486,000 viewers and a 0.11 in the advertiser-preferred demographic of adults 18-49. The Travel Channel’s addition of an Expedition Unknown lead-in has given the show a boost over the past two weeks, but it looks like the lower draw for the Expedition Unknown rerun this week (465,000) fed directly into a lower America Unearthed rating, thus suggesting that Unearthed’s ratings are heavily tied to the strength of its lead-in and not to any great draw it holds for the audience.

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Reminder: I Reviewed America Unearthed "Phoenicians in America" Last Week

6/25/2019

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If you are looking for my review of tonight's episode of America Unearthed, "Phoenicians in America," I reviewed it last week and you can find it here.

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This Week in UFO Infotainment: To the Stars Manipulates the Media

6/24/2019

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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.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E04 "The Star Gods of Sirius"

6/21/2019

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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:

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Review of America Unearthed S04E05 "Phoenicians in America"

6/21/2019

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Note: The Travel Channel has been offering episodes of America Unearthed for online streaming a week before their air date. I don’t feel like waiting for Tuesday since I plan to take some time off next week, so I am going to post both this review of next week’s episode and my review of this week’s Ancient Aliens this weekend.

Claims for Phoenicians in America date back centuries. One of the first crazes for Phoenician colonists in America swirled around eighteenth-century speculation that the Native American petroglyphs on Dighton Rock in Massachusetts were of Phoenician origin. The claim grew in popularity because of the close connection nineteenth century believers in the idea that Native Americans were the Lost Tribes of Israel saw between the Jews and the Phoenicians, who were both Semitic peoples. The idea of a Phoenician presence in ancient America was born in anti-Native American racism and the desire to deny Natives rights to their own culture and their land. Though now shorn of this rationale, the claim remains inexorably tied to ethnocentric views and especially quasi-Biblical speculation about Nephilim and Lost Tribes. This, of course, makes it perfect fodder for America Unearthed to engage in some clueless speculation, ignorant of the long history of how Phoenician theories have been used in the past.

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"America Unearthed," "Unidentified" Rise in Ratings Again This Past Week

6/20/2019

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I am doing moving-related tasks today and don’t have a lot of time for writing, so today I’d like to share the ratings results for the past week in fringe history TV. On Friday, the History Channel and To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science collaboration Unidentified reached 1.158 million viewers (0.26 in the advertiser-preferred adults 18-49 demographic), beating its lead-in Ancient Aliens (1.1 million, 0.19 adults 18-49) for the first time. Both were trounced by HGTV’s My Lottery Dream Home. It’s interesting to see that Unidentified is growing its audience beyond that of Ancient Aliens, particularly in the younger demographic, though the small variance from week to week suggests that this isn’t yet a pattern and can be attributable to any number of factors, including the relatively dull topic for this past week’s Ancient Aliens. The ’90s throwback to Bob Lazar probably alienated some viewers who consider him old news. Last year’s In Search Of briefly topped its Ancient Aliens lead-in for a small part of its run, but the overall pattern has been for the 10 PM ET show to lose viewers since the 10 PM audience is smaller than earlier in prime time.

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A Grandiose Historical Claim for a Humble Folk Art Humidor

6/19/2019

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Fake history is everywhere and often quite difficult to root out. Today, I’m going to break format a little bit to look at an inflated historical claim that is a little unusual. I came across this listing for an antique brass humidor for sale at a wildly inflated price of $795, and I had a hard time believing it.

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Review of America Unearthed S04E04 "The Ripper Unmasked"

6/18/2019

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Note: Normally, I wait to review an episode until it airs because that is when I see it, but this episode is already available on streaming video sites, so I am posting my review ahead of tonight’s airing.

Jack the Ripper terrorized London’s Whitechapel district in 1888, and for more than 130 years, he has loomed as an archetypical serial killer monster, largely because his identity remains unknown. Every year a new suspect is proposed, and each time a lack of evidence leaves the world outside the small community of so-called “Ripperologists” shrugging their shoulders. If 130 years of speculation has found no generally accepted candidate for the Ripper, it is too much to ask that Scott Wolter of America Unearthed would find him, but this episode was disappointing on so many other levels.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E03 "Element 115"

6/14/2019

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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.

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