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Capsule Review of Ancient Aliens S22E06: “Mysterious Monuments”

3/6/2026

Another week, another Ancient Aliens clip show. As with the past few episodes, this “Special Edition” episode is composed of clips from episodes that aired over the last few years. Consequently, there isn’t much to say about this episode other than to note that the segments are vaguely themed around the idea of stone monuments, though the word “monument” is used a bit loosely, especially for sarcophagi. The segments recycled were as follows:

A segment from “Mystery of the Lost Civilization” (2023) on Göbekli Tepe.
A segment from “Mystery of the Stone Spheres” (2024) on Bosnian stone “spheres.”
A segment from “Egypt’s Giant Tombs” (2024) on the Serapeum in Egypt.
A segment from “The Secrets of Japan” (2025) on the Ishi-no-Hōden of Japan.
A segment from “Mysteries of the Aztecs” (2025) on the so-called “La Venta astronaut.”
A segment from “Beneath the Sacred Temples” (2022) on Sacsayhuaman.

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Capsule Review of Ancient Aliens S22E05 “UFO Hot Spots”

2/27/2026

2 Comments

On Thursday, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton sat for a deposition with members of Congress about her, her husband’s, and their foundation’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. Following the deposition, Clinton held a news conference in which she said that the questioning went off the rails, with investigators asking Clinton about “UFOs” and “Pizzagate” instead of Epstein. At the same time in the United Kingdom, Spyros Melaris lost a court bid to assert copyright over the infamous 1995 Alien Autopsy hoax video in order to quash an upcoming documentary about the hoax. Ray Santilli, who produced the 1995 Alien Autopsy special, is assumed to be the copyright holder, not Melaris. A few hours later, Ancient Aliens returned from an unplanned two-week hiatus to resume its new season in a new timeslot, now airing at 10 pm on Thursdays. The episode, however, was yet another “Special Edition” clip show, with segments cut and pasted from past episodes:

Segment 1 is from “The Hotspots Connection” (2023) about San Diego.
Segment 2 is from “The UFO Superhighway” (2024) about the area around Trinidad, Colorado.
Segment 3 is from “Destination Chile” (2020) about Santiago, Chile.
Segment 4 is from “Britain’s UFO Files” (2025) about Yorkshire, England.
Segment 5 is from “The Hotspots Connection” (2023) about New Castle, New York, and the Hudson Valley.
Segment 6 is from “The Volcano Factor” (2025) about Colombia.

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In Brief: History Channel Pulls New Episodes of "Ancient Aliens"

2/13/2026

4 Comments

The History channel pulled at least two new episodes of Ancient Aliens that were set to air on February 12 and February 19 from their schedule, replacing them with reruns of Dan Akryod’s The UnBelievable on February 12 and Danny Trejo’s Mysteries Unearthed on February 19. The network did not offer a reason for the schedule change, and they have not rescheduled the episodes, which were scheduled to be clip shows assembled from segments of previous episodes.

The schedule change was abrupt, coming just four weeks into the show’s twenty-second season and sudden enough that the History channel’s website still contains the original air dates on the Ancient Aliens page, though their published schedule has been updated. The stars of the series made no mention of the schedule change on their social media feeds, most of which have not been updated in weeks.

The schedule change was made prior to Ancient Aliens star Nick Pope announcing yesterday that he is currently in the final stage of esophageal cancer and has stepped back from his work on Ancient Aliens and as moderator of Ancient Aliens Live, the traveling stage show featuring the program’s talking heads.

Tickets are still being sold for Ancient Aliens Live shows this month.

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Capsule Review of Ancient Aliens S22E04 “Extraterrestrial Engineering”

2/6/2026

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It’s become a running joke that Ancient Aliens has run out of ideas, but after three “original” episodes of Ancient Aliens this season, we have slipped into the show’s favorite comfort zone: clip show mode! I was starting to worry that we might almost have had a real season of Ancient Aliens this year, but fear not: This episode is listed as S22E04 but is technically labeled “Special Edition,” which features Giorgio Tsoukalos introducing rerun segments. In past years, “Special Edition” clip show episodes were not considered part of the mothership’s episode tally, but this year they seem to be. Unlike the past few years where such shows were organized around a “Top 10” theme, this episode makes no pretense of even trying. It does, however, take inspiration from my previous reviews of their clips shows and helpfully labeled each segment with the original episode title. This cut my workload for this capsule review down to nothing, since I didn’t even have to try to remember where I saw each segment before! The segments, which I previously reviewed, are drawn from:

Segment 1 is from “Resurrecting Puma Punku” (2024), about the Andean site.
Segment 2 is from “The Giants of Malta” (2023), about legends surrounding megaliths there.
Segment 3 is from “Mystery of the Stone Spheres” (2024), about the golden spheres beneath Teotihuacan.
Segment 4 is from “The Mystery of Nan Madol” (2020), about the titular site’s blocks.
Segment 5 is from “The World Before Time” (2020), about Noah’s Ark as a pyramid and medieval pyramid legends.
Segment 6 is from “The Star Gods of Sirius” (2019), repeating the fifth segment, which covered Newgrange in Ireland.

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Tucker Carlson and A. J. Gentile Spread Rehashed Archaeological Conspiracies

2/3/2026

6 Comments

This week, UFO-curious right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson, a former guest on Ancient Aliens, devoted a ninety-minute episode of his eponymous streaming show to the threadbare “mysteries” of giants, pyramids, psychic spies, lost civilizations and the other detritus of History channel pseudo-documentaries. Carlson interviewed A. J. Gentile of The Why Files and the two began the discussion by complaining about the “extreme hostility against alternate (sic) archaeology,” with Gentile expressing outrage at archaeologists for opposing the claims of Graham Hancock, “whose work I admire.” The two men defended Hancock against charges that his work supports white supremacy and then claimed that the accusation was a “slur” designed to “destroy” Hancock as part of a “sinister” effort by archaeologists. This set the tone for the rest of the discussion.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S22E03 “Islands of the Gods”

1/30/2026

5 Comments

(For reasons that are beyond me, this episode is listed as S21E19 on the History website and S22E03 everywhere else.)

The settlement of Polynesia is one of the great stories of human achievement, full of incredible feats of sailing across almost incomprehensible distances. Those voyages carried a cultural matrix that included cyclopean walls and megalithic statues across the Pacific, the from the Marquesas to Nan Madol and from Hawaii to Easter Island. It’s also been a frequent subject for Ancient Aliens. In the past eight years, they have devoted entire episodes to Easter Island and the Marquesas (2018), Hawaii (2019), and Nan Madol (2020) in addition to frequent segments in other episodes. Now we are doing it all again because it’s been a few years, and they probably figure that the audience has forgotten since they reused so much material from these previous episodes, including b-roll footage.

5 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E02 Egypt’s Lost Pyramids

1/23/2026

3 Comments

As colorful and inventive as the medieval Arabic legends of ancient Egypt were—originating many of the tropes used in sci-fi stories about ancient cultures even today, such as impossibly advanced ancient technology, otherworldly magic, hidden scientific secrets, booby-trapped pyramids, etc.—there are times I wish that these legends had never arisen. The medieval stories of fallen angels and Hermetic alchemists building temples, pyramids, and vanished cities full of astounding technology fed directly into modern claims about extraterrestrial intervention. Indeed, the late Erich von Däniken made a half-understood account of the most prominent of these legends, the story of the construction of the Great Pyramid first given in the Akhbār al-zamān, but known to him from a later plagiarist, the foundation for his ET claims about the pyramids, repeated from Chariots of the Gods straight through to his death.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S22E01 “Skulls of the Gods”

1/16/2026

1 Comment

After a break of more than two months, Ancient Aliens returned Thursday night, as it has each January, for the start of a new season, its twenty-second over seventeen calendar years, counting from the 2009 pilot episode. I suppose that it is only appropriate that Ancient Aliens returns the same week that its guiding spirit, Erich von Däniken, died at the age of ninety. As long as the series, which was originally an adaptation of Chariots of the Gods, remains on the air, it’s almost like von Däniken is still with us, lying and fabricating shamelessly. Unlike the past two seasons, this one opens with an “original” episode rather than a “Top Ten” clip show. I suppose that is something like progress. On the other hand, the series began its new season with a rehash of familiar material about elongated skulls that the show has repeated for a decade and a half. In a week where Giorgio Tsoukalos was actively posting on X that the supposed “alien” mummies of Peru were nothing but desecrated human bodies made into “dolls,” it is a bit ironic that he is also appearing here to declare some skulls from Peru are in fact extraterrestrial. But that’s where we stand.

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Remembering Erich von Däniken, 1935 – 2026

1/12/2026

8 Comments

When Erich von Däniken died in Interlaken, Switzerland, at the age of 90 on January 10, I was offline for the weekend. My parents had come to visit their grandson after a major snowstorm had delayed their usual Christmas trip, and we were busy celebrating a somewhat belated holiday. I did not find out about the ancient astronaut theorist’s death until twelve hours after his daughter announced it in conjunction with his disciple, Giorgio Tsoukalos.

It was, perhaps, appropriate that my parents were in town when Erich von Däniken died since it was due to my father that I had any idea who von Däniken was in the first place.

8 Comments

Erich von Däniken Dead at 90

1/11/2026

0 Comments

Ancient astronaut theorist Erich von Däniken has died in Switzerland at age 90. The author of Chariots of the Gods (1968) and dozens of other bestselling books died of natural causes in a Swiss hospital, according to his daughter Cornelia. In reporting the controversial author's death and the 70 million copies he sold, the Associated Press credited him with "spawning a literary niche in which fact and fantasy were mixed together against all historical and scientific evidence," In addition to his books and his failed ancient astronaut theme park, von Däniken's legacy includes the adaptation of Chariots of the Gods in 1973 that launched the In Search of... franchise and the adaptation of Chariots of the Gods in 2009 that launched the Ancient Aliens franchise.

I will have a longer write-up about von Däniken and his dubious influence on history and pop culture later in the week.

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Capsule Review of Ancient Aliens S22E06: “Mysterious Monuments”

Capsule Review of Ancient Aliens S22E05 “UFO Hot Spots”

In Brief: History Channel Pulls New Episodes of "Ancient Aliens"

Capsule Review of Ancient Aliens S22E04 “Extraterrestrial Engineering”

Tucker Carlson and A. J. Gentile Spread Rehashed Archaeological Conspiracies

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E03 “Islands of the Gods”

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E02 Egypt’s Lost Pyramids

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E01 “Skulls of the Gods”

Remembering Erich von Däniken, 1935 – 2026

Erich von Däniken Dead at 90

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