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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E10 “The Giants of Malta”

3/17/2023

The success of last fall’s Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix cast a shadow over Ancient Aliens, and it’s only natural that the History Channel dumpster fire would attempt to imitate its better-watched competitor. We’ve seen a couple of episodes this season that seem to be riffing on parts of Ancient Apocalypse, and this episode is the clearers copy yet, expanding Graham Hancock’s Apocalypse segment about the prehistory of Malta and its “giants” into an hour recycling Ancient Aliens’ previous explorations of the temples and mythology of the Mediterranean island.

If you’ve been watching the History Channel for any length of time, you’re already familiar with the topics discussed in this episode. The Ancient Aliens extended universe has recycled this content many times over the last decade and a half, particularly in the spinoff series In Search of Aliens, which devoted an entire episode to the supposed “giants” of Malta back in 2014 and then returned to it a second time before the end of its first and only season. Material from In Search of Aliens found its way into many Ancient Aliens episodes over the past decade, such as its “Giants of the Mediterranean” episode from 2020.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E09: “Aliens in Our Airspace”

3/10/2023

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The longer Ancient Aliens has been on the air, the less time they spend on “ancient” material. It’s been many years since the title accurately described the series, and at this point, the show is more or less a catch-all garbage dump for whatever UFO or paranormal material they can shovel into the void. This week’s episode revolves around supposed mysteries involving airplanes, ranging from pilots witnessing UFOs to the disappearance of whole planes. As you might notice, airplanes are not terribly ancient (the show’s claims about prehistoric flying contraptions notwithstanding), and I am growing increasingly tired of UFO stories. Forgive me, but I don’t have the energy to detail every UFO sighting in this week’s episode. Aerial paranormal paranoia is not my area of expertise, so this review may be more of a list than an analysis.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E08 “The Mysteries of Alasksa”

3/3/2023

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Maybe we aren’t supposed to remember Missing in Alaska, a History Channel series about paranormal happenings in Alaska from almost a decade ago. Or the episode of The Proof Is Out There from last year in which Ancient Aliens’ sister show looked at the so-called paranormal “Alaska Triangle.” Or maybe we were also supposed to forget The Alaska Triangle, a Travel Channel series from 2020. And we probably aren’t supposed to remember Aliens in Alaska, a 2021 Discovery+ series. Alaska’s paranormal UFO mysteries are growing a little stale after so many televised romps through their fraudulent fantasies, and everyone knows that overripe fake mysteries are exactly the sweet spot for Ancient Aliens, which consistently brings up the rear of the supernatural circus train. This episode, though, is more of a clown car, stuffed with made-up mysteries that aim to be amusing but come across as unpleasant.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E07: “Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind”

2/24/2023

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Two seasons back, American Horror Story fantasized for half a season that ufology’s fever dreams of alien contact were all true. In Ryan Murphy’s telling, space aliens crashed their UFO into the Earth, Dwight Eisenhower established the Majestic-12 to negotiate an agreement with the aliens that involved selling humans for experimentation in exchange for technology, and he and Richard Nixon worked with alien ambassador Valiant Thor while keeping the aliens secret from Democrats. Or something like that. It seems that somebody at Ancient Aliens was watching because they decided to make their own version of the same set of familiar lies, recycling claims from earlier episodes into a narrative of U.S. government direct involvement with space aliens—with no concern whatsoever for the blatant contradiction between this set of fantasies and the allegation from past weeks that a Pentagon UFO office is a major achievement because we have no knowledge of or contact with space aliens.

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James Dean Biographer Donald Spoto Dies at 81

2/18/2023

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Last this week, we learned that Donald Spoto, the celebrity biographer, died at the age of 81. Spoto produced many well-regarded biographies, including Rebel, about James Dean. I found that book particularly useful in writing my own manuscript for my James Dean book. Spoto was kind enough to read an early draft of my book before his death and offered both useful critical notes and a blurb as endorsement: “His new book The Rebel and the Fear is sure to evoke spirited debate, not least when he addresses the lure and lore still attached to that hapless young actor, James Dean (1931-1955).” Spoto will be missed.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E06: “Cosmic Impacts”

2/17/2023

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In UFO world this week, the U.S. government said the unidentified objects recently shot down were almost certainly balloons, prompting Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Marco Rubio to take the obvious step of demanding more funding for the Pentagon office they jury-rigged to investigate UFO conspiracy theories, study imaginary superhuman aerial performance vehicles, and “replicate” alien spaceship technology. As you do with balloons. And of course Lue Elizondo and Chris Mellon claimed credit for the new awareness of balloons, disingenuously suggesting they have always been concerned about balloons and not the space aliens they have repeatedly implied were the only real threat. The public, though, seemed less interested in UFOs than politicians are; NatGeo’s splashy new Leslie Kean-fronted documentary series on UFOs, originally made for CNN, attracted only 326,000 viewers, almost all over the age of 50, in its debut hour.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E05: “The MUFON Files”

2/10/2023

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After the United States shot down a Chinese balloon last week, and even before the U.S. shot down an unidentified aerial object over Alaska Friday afternoon, media outlets from the New York Times on down reported that the government had been unaware of certain kinds of aerial incursions because no one had thought to look for them and that the UFO office run by space poltergeist and cosmic werewolf believer Jay Stratton had classified previous incursions as UFOs and failed to identify them as foreign balloons. As we well know, this is because they were looking for alien spaceships and interdimensional ghost monsters. Insiders blamed the “stigma” of UFOs for the military’s incompetent response to foreign incursions, and UFO believers declared it a great victory for ufology, for if ufologists hadn’t convinced Congress to hunt space aliens, no one would have found the evidence of balloons overlooked due to (checks notes) the stigma and humiliation caused by ufology’s ridiculous alien and space ghost beliefs.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E04 “The Power of the Obelisks”

2/3/2023

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After a week away, Ancient Aliens returns with another instant rerun episode, this time focusing on obelisks. If it seems familiar, it’s probably because they did more-or-less the same episode way back in season 5, under the title of “The Monoliths.” Back then, ten years ago, the show offered such stupid faux insights as the false claim that a group of monoliths is called a “megalith.” The show remade that episode last year as “Mystery of the Standing Stones.” Have they learned anything in translating the earlier episodes focused on standing stones into a new episode specifying only pointy standing stones? It’s Ancient Aliens. What do you think? At least since season 5, if not earlier, Ancient Aliens has falsely asserted that obelisks were piezoelectrically charged power generators feeding electricity to a wireless atmospheric power grid. Guess what they focus on in this episode.

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Graham Hancock Issues Response to Archaeology Association's Open Letter

1/31/2023

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This Thursday, I will be appearing on the CBC Radio Ideas program at 9 PM ET as part of their series Ideas to discuss pseudoarchaeology for an episode entitled “Aliens and Obelisks.” The episode should be available as a downloadable podcast worldwide shortly after. Here is the episode description:

A new Netflix series called Ancient Apocalypse shot to the top of the streaming service's rankings the week it was released. It claims that an advanced civilization which thrived during the Ice Age was wiped out by comets and floods, but left humanity with science and technology. In the world of archaeology, such claims aren't new, and are referred to by experts as "pseudo-archaeology." This episode of IDEAS unearths the long history of pseudo-archaeology, how it's been deployed to advance political and cultural ideas, and where it crosses over from pseudo-science to religious myth-making.

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Read My New Piece for CNN

1/25/2023

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I wrote an opinion column for CNN about the recent controversy over museums renaming mummies with more person-centered language. I survey briefly the history of displaying dead bodies and analyze a bit what kinds of messages these displays send. You can read the complete story at CNN: "Why it’s time to stop displaying human bodies in museums."

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