Yesterday I examined a question of journalistic ethics surrounding Ancient Aliens, which purports to be a “documentary” series. The July 28 broadcast, “Aliens and the Old West,” featured a movie tie-in with Cowboys & Aliens from the History Channel’s corporate cousin, Universal Studios, but the program did not acknowledge this relationship or explain how closely the program’s producers and talking heads worked with the movie’s marketing campaign.

This raised questions about the objectivity of the program, and whether those involved purposely manipulated their supposedly scientific theories to work with the movie’s marketing machine. One piece of evidence in favor of that hypothesis is the program’s strange effort to reclassify Ohio and Illinois as “the Old West,” suggesting that producers purposely manipulated or altered a previously-planned program to conform to the movie’s theme.

I would like to discuss this a little more.

A few weeks ago, when Cowboys & Aliens was new in theaters, the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens devoted an hour to “Aliens and the Old West” on July 28. This was, in fact, the first episode of its third season. Not coincidentally, the show used clips from the movie as a springboard for some (very) tangentially related speculation about extraterrestrial visitation in the Old West, lands abutting the Old West, lands on the same continent as the Old West, and places that simply existed at the same time as the Old West. (I’ve never thought of Ohio as the Old West, but what do I know?)

This week, the killer-virus movie Contagion hit theaters, and—surprise of surprises--Ancient Aliens had an hour on aliens and, yes, killer viruses, speculating that extraterrestrials were behind a series of devastating ancient plagues. Needless to say, the hour was complete nonsense (the connection is that ancient people blamed the gods for disease, and the gods were “really” aliens, so aliens cause disease); however, that is merely par for the course with the sorry excuse for a “documentary” series. But unlike the earlier Cowboys-themed episode, the virus edition did not include promotional material for or scenes from the movie Contagion.

The bigger question is this: How can we trust a program that is allegedly presenting serious truths when these supposedly nonfiction truths are carefully manipulated to coincide with Hollywood’s movie release schedule?

An article published yesterday on Cracked attempted to make a forced correlation between American electoral politics and horror genre monsters. The article first presented a chart that purported to correlate zombie movies with Republican administrations and vampires with Democratic administrations, suggesting that filmmakers use those monsters to comment on each administration’s priorities. In my Knowing Fear (2008), I presented an appendix with the following chart showing how major movies in the zombie and vampire genres had no correlation whatsoever to the current occupant of the Oval Office:

In my latest round of updates to the site, I have strived to bring together all of my published pieces for which I have reprint rights. You can now find my complete set of articles from Skeptic and eSkeptic here on JasonColavito.com, whereas before they were divided between this site and my old site. Additionally, I have begun transferring some of the most important articles from my old website to this one so that all of my most important explorations of ancient astronauts and alternative archaeology will be housed under one roof. More good things to come soon!

I thought it was worth highlighting something I mentioned in passing in my previous blog post. In an article on the Legendary Times website carrying the official byline of the Archaeology, Astronautics & SETI Research Association, and therefore representing the official position of the premiere Paleo-SETI research society, the ancient astronaut theorists' own organization announced that Atlantis did not exist!

And there could not have been any Atlantis (i.e. a very advanced civilization comparable to ours) either, or else we would find traces of its infrastructure worldwide - not to mention the untenable theory of a geologically recently sunken continent.

Now, I agree with this statement 100%, but I suspect it comes as news to many ancient astronaut theorists, especially David Hatcher Childress, whose bread and butter has been promoting extreme claims that imaginary civilizations like Lemuria, Mu, Atlantis, and the "Rama Empire" reigned in the deep past, mostly on vanished continents. Additionally, the "alternative archaeologists" who appear on Ancient Aliens, including Fingerprints of the Gods author Graham Hancock, must be shocked to learn that the leading ancient astronaut research organization considers their research moot.

Of course, the ancient astronaut theory, being no theory in the scientific sense, refuses to simply reject findings (however ridiculous) that contradict the theory. Instead, they are incorporated in a completely different form:

Whenever findings, imitations of findings or descriptions thereof [i.e. of an Atlantis-like civilization] appear in old cultures, they seem to come up suddenly as if "dropped from the sky". But where were the manufacturing sites if not on Earth?

Thus, after rejecting Atlantis for lack of evidence, the AAS-RA simply relocates it into the depths of space. The very fact that no evidence for it exists somehow has become evidence that a force not from this earth was responsible!

But here's the really interesting thing. The AAS-RA is run by Giorgio Tsoukalos, who is a consulting producer on the History Channel's Ancient Aliens, on which he appears as the primary talking head. Season 2, episode 3 of that series (Nov. 11, 2010) was devoted to "Underwater Worlds," including a long discussion of aliens and Atlantis, primarily discussed by Childress and UFO Magazine publisher Bill Birnes. The narrator begins the episode asking: "Are underwater monuments examples of mankind's earliest civilizations, or is there evidence of skills far beyond that (sic) of primitive man, and if so where did it come from?" The episode's talking heads make plain their belief in Atlantis.

Tsoukalos himself argued in the episode that Atlantis did not "sink" but rather "lifted off" as a UFO, but his was the minority opinion in this episode, which went on to identify many proposed "Atlantis" sites underwater. But even Tsoukalos' view contradicts the AAS-RA's online article, since Tsoukalos' position is that Atlantis existed (presumably for centuries) and therefore would (and should) have left "infrastructure" and "traces" of its trade networks and acquisition of raw materials. (After all, even aliens must obey the laws of physics and would need some kind of energy input, be it food, fuel, etc.)

So which is it, ancient alien theorists? Is your cable series right that there are underwater ruins of Atlantis and fabulous, advanced lost cultures, or is your website right that Atlantis and its ilk could not have existed?

I was trying to research Giorgio A. Tsoukalos’s Legendary Times magazine, the publication he uses as his sole credential for appearing as the primary talking head on Ancient Aliens. Unfortunately, Tsoukalos’s Legendary Times website stops indexing the magazine with the 2008 calendar year, and his Legendary Times Books online bookstore lists no issues published after volume 10 in 2009. I was unable to find any listings for issues published since then, or mentions of the publication either in the media or online except as Tsoukalos’s journalistic affiliation. WorldCat.com lists no libraries that hold the publication. As the privately-published newsletter of a private club, I suppose they wouldn't carry it; but is "publisher of a club newsletter" a serious, History Channel credential now?

In poking around the Legendary Times site, I found an article, “Paleo-SETI: Interdisciplinary and Popularized,” that contained some rather stunning statements that are a master class in obfuscation and circular reasoning. The current version attributes authorship only to the AAS-RA as a body, but the use of the first-person singular narrative voice (unusual for an organization) and the lack of any other author for articles hosted on the AAS-RA website strongly indicate Tsoukalos was the author.

The article is endless, and I have space and the stomach to touch on only some of the scientific illiteracy in the piece. The article begins by suggesting that Ancient Astronaut Theorists uphold the highest levels of scientific rigor, leavened only by a surfeit of imagination: