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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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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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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E03: “Mystery of the Lost Civilization”

1/20/2023

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This week Politico reported that Enigma Labs would begin working with the Pentagon’s new UFO office on UFO sighting analysis. The mysterious company vowed to keep its employees a secret to protect their “privacy.” Indeed, CEO Alex Smith takes this so seriously that she apparently uses a false name and is probably in reality venture capitalist Alice Lloyd George, whose name appears in place of Smith’s as CEO on trademark application documents. The company is associated with UFO journalist Alejandro Rojas and has partnered with Discovery+ UFO personality Ben Hansen. This certainly fills me with confidence when they say they want to create a database of UFO witnesses’ personal data.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E02 “The Crop Circle Code”

1/13/2023

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You will have to forgive me if this review comes in a little shorter than usual. Unfortunately, my shoulder froze up on me due to shifting calcium deposits in my torn rotator cuff, causing inflammation and pain. While I have regained most of my range of motion, my arm is sore, and typing is hard. As a result, I didn’t get to write all of the pieces I intended to post this week. You’ll have to settle for a quick note that the New York Times published a credulous story today about Jacques Vallée’s ridiculous claims about the Trinity UFO crash of 1945, with no contrary views, giving credence both to the tall tales about an avocado-shaped UFO piloted by tiny beings recalled seven decades after the fact by people who were first graders at the time, and to Vallée’s claim that federal UFO legislation was purposely altered to incorporate these asinine ideas. Chris Mellon pops in to the piece and is the obvious instigation for the Times’ return to uncritical UFO propaganda—just in time for Mellon and friends to use the new legislation to put pressure on the Pentagon to give them lucrative sinecures.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E01 “The Hotspots Connection”

1/6/2023

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Videos circulating on social media contrasting what alleged “Secret Space Program” space cadet Corey Goode said on cable TV and streaming services with his statements under oath in footage from a September legal deposition provided plenty of laughs. Goode said that he could “create any reality.” Goode stated on the record that he never claimed to have lived on Mars, for example, a claim that he not only made at the Conscious Life Expo, as a viral tweet notes, but one that was also discussed right here on Ancient Aliens in a 2017 episode. The footage came out during the hiatus, but the way exposed Goode as a serial fabricator who does not believe many of his own claims is fairly emblematic of the Ancient Aliens ethos, and as of this writing, Ancient Aliens and the History Channel have neither noted Goode’s legal backtracking, nor corrected the falsehoods they broadcasted, nor apologized for celebrating Goode’s fantastical claims.

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