Category:

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E20: “The Top Ten Alien Petroglyphs”

9/15/2023

Yesterday, NASA released a report about UFOs and made plain that there was no evidence of space aliens. NASA administrator Bill Nelson said that he didn’t know what some UFOs were and that more investigation is necessary; however, the report agreed with the Pentagon’s AARO that nearly all of them are aerial junk, drones, optical illusions, etc. The report added that the sensors that ufologists insist provide the best evidence for alien spaceships simply do not produce the right kind of information to draw effective conclusions, particularly when distance can’t be established. As with so many of these types of reports, funneling everything in the sky into the “UFO” bottle disguises the real issue: We aren’t studying alien spaceships but human perception—why it’s so hard to make sense of blobs on the edge of vision. And speaking of perception, this Ancient Aliens clip show is focused on just that, showing us ten examples of ancient astronaut theorists imagining science fiction stories in ambiguous rock art they lack (or ignore) the information to understand in its cultural context.

11 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E19 “The Top Ten Mysteries of the Deep”

9/8/2023

11 Comments

After a week off for the Labor Day holiday, Ancient Aliens returns with … another clip show. I could try to vamp for a paragraph or two about the philosophical background of claims of underwater civilization, draw connections to Atlantis, or even cite the influence of the 1936 Saturday morning movie serial Undersea Kingdom and its vision of subaquatic high technology and a hostile civilization beneath the waves. But I’ve done all of that before, and so has Ancient Aliens, and so did sister show The UnXplained last year in a very similar underwater-themed episode. This clip show contained previously broadcast segments surrounding ten topics vaguely connected by having something to do with water.

Not all of the segments match notes I have made about past episodes. It is possible some might include new talking head clips, or else the excerpts are from minor segments I did not mention in my reviews.

11 Comments

The Return of the Stasis Tomb of the Red-Haired Giants

9/5/2023

14 Comments

Ufologist Michael Salla presented an interview with “JP,” who allegedly serves in the United States military, about the discovery of a dimensional portal to an ancient temple housing the slumbering body of a dead-but-dreaming red-haired, presumably white-skinned, Giant. Here’s how Salla describes JP’s claims:

14 Comments

George Knapp Speculates That "God" Might Be an Evil Space Alien

9/1/2023

15 Comments

Ancient Aliens is taking the week off for the holiday, and I spent part of this week at work finalizing a project, which will be announced next week. I am taking the next few days off to enjoy the last week of my son's summer vacation before I get back to the grind next week. In the meantime, enjoy George Knapp's bizarre speculation about the space aliens' evil agenda and its connection to conservative efforts to promote Intelligent Design, from yesterday's Joe Rogan Experience. It doesn't tell you much about aliens but tells you a lot about the mindset of the people pushing bizarre claims about space aliens.

What could be so terrible that they can't tell us about it? Let's say, these aliens, wherever they're from, made us, that we're a genetic experiment. That they created our religions, our religious figures. That we are an agricultural product that somehow they harvest us. That our time is limited, that once the experiment is over, poof, we go away. […] Be careful what you wish for because you might find out that the intelligent designer isn't God that you're thinking of, it might be some alien science project or something like that. You can imagine a lot of different things that would be really disturbing to people to come out.

15 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E18 “The Power of the Talisman”

8/25/2023

12 Comments

Avi Loeb told Michael Shermer that he was very upset about a New York Times Magazine profile depicting him as an out-of-touch scientific pariah who makes basic analytical mistakes and is increasingly unmoored from reality due to his obsession with space aliens. He ran to Shermer’s podcast to complain about the magazine alleging that he is thin-skinned and uses the media to retaliate against criticism rather than produce strong science. But what else should we expect from a man who is now a regular on Ancient Aliens? Loeb’s quest for aliens is a bit of magical thinking according to his peers, so it’s appropriate that this episode of Ancient Aliens is devoted to the magic of talismans.

12 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E17: “The New UFO Hunters”

8/18/2023

13 Comments

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand raised the ire of social media UFO advocates when she appeared to pivot away from space aliens during a recent event with constituents. Referring to so-called UFO whistleblower David Grusch only as “the second guy” at last month’s House UFO hearing, Gillibrand giggled along with her laughing audience at claims of “dead aliens.” Instead, Gillibrand said that the real concern with UFOs was Russian, Chinese, and Iranian spying. Naturally, believers in visitation by non-human intelligence responded by accusing Gillibrand of being a traitor to the cause or of being compromised by the Deep State. Meanwhile, Galileo Project head Avi Loeb suggested in a Fox News Digital interview that space aliens may have the technology to create entire universes and therefore have the attributes we associate with God or a god. He is rapidly moving toward the final stage of UFO belief, making a religion of aliens.

13 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E16: "The Gods of Greece"

8/11/2023

10 Comments

This month, pseudohistory writer Graham Phillips has a new article on Graham Hancock’s website, based on his new book, claiming that Doggerland, the sunken territory that connected Britain to Northen Europe nine millennia ago, was the home to an advanced lost civilization (sigh) and that the memory of it persisted in Celtic memory for nine thousand years. His evidence, however, is misrepresented. In the article he uses the unusual spelling “Tu-lay” to obscure the fact that he bases his analysis on Classical and post-Classical references to the island of Thule. However, in Classical literature Thule is not a sunken island but instead is described as a real and still-extant land north of Britain. To make the texts match Doggerland, Phillips purposely conflates them with wholly separate Irish legends about an unnamed sunken island, for which there is no historical evidence that the story is particularly ancient or that it is true. Sunken islands are a dime a dozen in ancient literature after all. For Phillips to be right, we have to accept that the Greek and Romans were completely wrong about all the important facts but nevertheless preserved correct information, while the Irish remembered the sinking of the island but forgot everything else about it, including the fact that Doggerland wasn’t actually an island.

10 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E15: "Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet"

8/4/2023

18 Comments

It’s depressing that I still need to review Ancient Aliens each week because the series feeds into an actual multipronged Congressional inquiry into space aliens. This week, Ancient Aliens star David Childress appeared on NewsNation to discuss the Vatican’s role in suppressing space alien information, a claim that Ross Coulthart, the journalist who interviewed David Grusch for NewsNation, is also pushing on social media. The return of anti-Catholic conspiracy theories stretching back to the nineteenth century (when Protestants claimed Catholicism hid demons and paganism) would seem to be a case of the cat that ate the canary. Now that the U.S. government has given ufologists everything they claimed to want, and there are still no aliens, they need a new villain preventing the truth from coming out.

18 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E14 “The Top Ten Alien Craft”

7/21/2023

43 Comments

I can’t think of an Ancient Aliens topic I could care less about than a list of the ten most popular shapes for alien spaceships. Triangles! Circles! Rectangles! Maybe this will be a helpful primer for the legislators busy preparing for next week’s UFO hearing in the House of Representatives. Or maybe it will just be another reminder that Ancient Aliens is less sophisticated than Sesame Street and spends more time repeating the same material over and over again than any given children’s program. Maybe Congress can use the remedial help. Rep. Tim Burchett, an erstwhile Ancient Aliens talking head who will co-chair the hearing, accused “the intelligence community” of somehow scuttling an amendment he offered to require the FAA to prepare a UFO report, only to have it come out that Burchett helped accidentally spike his own amendment by voting for a change in rules that prohibited a vote on it. We have real geniuses working on UFOs.

43 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E13: “The Top Ten Mysterious Islands”

7/14/2023

11 Comments

In a week when the House of Representatives appointed Rep. Tim Burchett, who has actually appeared on Ancient Aliens as a talking head, to run a hearing into crashed saucers and dead aliens, and Congress worked to incorporate an almost verbatim copy of an old To the Stars Academy list of Lue Elizondo’s so-called “five observables” (plus Garry Nolan’s claims about UFO health effects) into the National Defense Authorization Act while nationalizing all privately held space alien bodies (!), should any exist, the Ancient Aliens mothership has nothing to say about the apotheosis of its paranoid vision of extraterrestrial infiltration. Instead, we have another hour of cobbled-together reruns, this time focused on islands. Why? Because back in 2013 the show did an episode about “Forbidden Islands” and the theme of the newest batch of episodes this season has been to rehash shows from ten years ago with minimal changes and minimal effort. Even NBC Nightly News had more information about crashed saucers and dead aliens tonight than Ancient Aliens!

11 Comments