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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E04 "The Mystery of Mount Shasta"

9/17/2021

It’s hard to believe that it’s been eight years since Ancient Aliens devoted a significant segment to Mt. Shasta in California, a New Age hotspot that has long been associated with supernatural, antediluvian, and extraterrestrial phenomena. While there had been stories about mystical mountain mysteries associated with Mt. Shasta, the modern conspiracy theory version comes directly from A Dweller on Two Planets by Frederick Spencer Oliver, a late nineteenth century book inspired by Theosophy that identified Mt. Shasta as a secret base for Atlanteans who had a base in tunnels beneath the mountain:

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Leslie Kean Claims Current UFO News Coverage "Unprecedented"

8/27/2021

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There is no new episode of Ancient Aliens tonight, which is a relief to me, since previous episodes from this season have been nothing but repackaged reruns. It seems that viewers are noticing, since each episode for season seventeen has seen a ratings decline. After hovering around the one million viewer mark, last week’s episode fell to just 810,000 viewers, with only 130,000 in the 18-49 demographic. Slightly more young people actually watched the 12 AM rerun.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E03 "Top Ten Alien Cover-Ups"

8/20/2021

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Tucker Carlson, the rightwing, dictator-hugging provocateur and former Ancient Aliens guest star, has a new UFO special on Fox Nation, the Fox News online streaming service. In a clip posted on Twitter and since deleted, Carlson’s cameras capture Skinwalker Ranch owner—and History Channel personality—Brandon Fugal flying in his helicopter en route to the ranch. He spots an American flag flying on a house below. “These are freedom-loving people here. Not a bunch of fucking pussies,” Fugal says. “They don’t make many people like Brandon Fugal,” Carlson’s voiceover enthuses. But, of course, Carlson isn’t tying UFO and paranormal beliefs to rightwing politics or anything like that. Of course not.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E02 "Top 10 Mysterious Sites"

8/13/2021

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Earlier this week, Matthew Taylor Coleman, 40, confessed to the FBI that he took his two children, one two years old and the other ten months, to Mexico where he murdered them with a spearfishing gun. He told the Bureau that he killed them because he believed that they had “serpent DNA” and that they would grow up to be monsters who would destroy the world. Coleman is a follower of QAnon, and it was through Q conspiracies that he became enraptured by allegations that Reptilians have secretly infiltrated humanity, are experimenting on humans, and rule the world.

If these claims sound familiar to those of you reading a review of Ancient Aliens, it’s because these views aired on Ancient Aliens, more than once, most notably in the 2019 episode “The Reptilian Agenda.”

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E01 "The Lost City of Peru"

8/6/2021

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It has been nearly five months since Ancient Aliens signed off for its sixteenth season, and over those months, the field of fantastical alien conspiracies has changed markedly. With the New Yorker and 60 Minutes leading the way, the mainstream media burned through a major UFO flap, and the U.S. government made a lot of noise about flying saucers right up until the release of the intelligence community UFO report Congress ordered last year. Its noncommittal, largely half-assed summary of America’s lack of UFO knowledge wasn’t enough to sustain a media and political frenzy that saw high-profile journalists openly fantasizing about alien revelations.

The flap fizzled, even before more pressing concerns turned media focus toward the delta variant of COVID-19. Cable TV and streaming efforts to cash in on the frenzy saw little success.

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Elizabeth Weiss Claims Protecting Native Graves Violates First Amendment

4/16/2021

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Controversy erupted at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology yesterday when Prof. Elizabeth Weiss of San Jose State University delivered a presentation based on her recent book in which she attacked the federal law mandating the return of Native American objects and remains for repatriation and protecting Native graves. According to social media posts after the event, Weiss also attacked Native people as lacking the objectivity to perform archaeology and said they should not participate the scientific study of the past. Weiss is also the wife of Ancient Aliens star Nick Pope, whose show similarly takes a dim view of Native peoples, arguing that they are not-fully-human alien hybrids who only clawed their way up from the dirt with the help of powerful, superior outsiders.

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Legendary Entertainment to Develop an "Ancient Aliens" Motion Picture

4/8/2021

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In one of the most depressing developments of the year, Legendary Entertainment, the company behind the so-called MonsterVerse, has announced plans to turn the History Channel series Ancient Aliens into an adventure movie, according to a report in The Hollywood Reporter. The film will be developed by Counterbalance Entertainment, the showrunners behind the Cobra Kai revival series.

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Syfy's "Resident Alien" to Promote "Ancient Aliens" and Giorgio Tsoukalos

3/24/2021

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Tonight, Syfy’s otherwise delightful series Resident Alien is scheduled to air an episode in which Harry (Alan Tudyk) attends a UFO conference and meets Ancient Aliens star Giorgio Tsoukalos. The series has made sometimes unpleasant use of ancient astronaut theory material in framing the backstory for its lead character’s extraterrestrial history as an alien visitor stranded on Earth. However, it is disappointing and somewhat shameful that the show would openly embrace Ancient Aliens, a series that the Southern Poverty Law Center and a number of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians have decried for its use of racist tropes and Victorian-era arguments born of imperialist and colonialist anti-indigenous narratives.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E10 "The Harmonic Code"

3/13/2021

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On Friday, a few hours before this episode of Ancient Aliens aired, The Atlantic magazine informed me that they would not be going forward with a planned article in which I would report on the influence QAnon conspiracies have taken from conspiracy theories airing on cable television shows like Ancient Aliens. (As per an agreement I signed with The Atlantic on March 15, I am contractually restrained from sharing additional information after that date.) They did, however, invite me to write something else for them in the coming months.

And then Ancient Aliens did an hour about sound waves vibrating connections to space aliens. So, it was that kind of a day.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E09 "The UFO Pioneers"

3/6/2021

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This week, Ancient Aliens again chose to create a putatively “new” episode from recycled parts of earlier episodes. As with last week’s episode, three pundits—this time, Giorgio Tsoukalos, David Childress, and Nick Pope—sit around a conference table and offer blather to connect together prerecorded packages, some from previous episodes. This episode swirls around personalities associated with UFO investigation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These people, some serious, some kooky, are lionized as “pioneers”—but pioneers of what? The fantasy that the unknown must be extraterrestrial, paranormal or something combining both, mostly. The potted biographies offer little you haven’t seen before, even if you hadn’t watched earlier episodes of the series. Since there is little worthy of discussion here, and since the show’s viewership remains under one million viewers, and the readership of these summaries under five hundred readers, I will offer only a brief summary of the highlights of each segment as a record for historical interest.

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