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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E07: “Mysteries of the Aztecs”

3/21/2025

After six weeks of clip shows, Ancient Aliens returns with original—well, let’s say “newly filmed”—material this week. Since the show has already done episodes devoted to the Maya, the Tiwanaku people, the early peoples of South America, and Teotihuacan, it’s only natural that they would eventually get around to the Aztecs. I am surprised that it took sixteen years, but I guess there isn’t as much to say about a culture that flourished for only two centuries and overlapped the start of the Renaissance in Europe. They seemed a little too recent and too well-known from the records of the Spanish conquest, which is probably why they were more likely to show up on History’s treasure-hunting shows than on its alien shows.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E05: “The Top Ten Secret Projects”

3/8/2025

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It’s been a slow year for UFO news, with very little action on Capitol Hill thanks to the chaos of Donald Trump. The military is currently more focused on purging photos of Black and gay people from its archives than with strange objects in the sky. (Hey, ufologists: If you want to get the government to hunt down UFOs again, tell Sec. Pete Hegseth that the aliens are diverse and queer.) Congress’s top ufologists are busy doing other things. Rep. Luna is seeking out superannuated JFK assassination witnesses. Rep. Burchett was in the Oval Office laying on hands to cast out demons. Sen. Gillibrand is still looking for the moral courage to say Andrew Cuomo’s sexual harassment was bad. Even the History Channel’s parent company, A+E Networks, rebranded this week as A+E Global Media and announced a pivot away from cable TV toward prioritizing short-form internet videos.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E04 “The Top Ten Unexplained Technologies”

3/1/2025

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Ancient Aliens clip shows are boring, but what gets my goat is that this show has been on the air for more than 15 years (Robert Clotworthy’s narration misleadingly says it was merely “over a decade”) and yet the clip show episodes, which have been running for five years under the Ancient Aliens banner (previous clip shows were officially a separate spinoff series) keep using the same clips from previous clip shows! Why don’t they just go all the way up their own asses and run a clip show of their best clip shows? Anyway, this week’s episode about the “Top Ten Unexplained Technologies,” which somehow include living beings and an entire city on the list. The episode bears a strong resemblance to a 2021 clip show with which is shares four of the same clips.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E03: “The Top Ten UFO Crashes”

2/22/2025

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When the House of Representatives announce a conspiracy theory task force to investigate the JFK assassination, UFOs, and other paranoid bugaboos beloved of the internet and the antigovernment right, it seemed like a waste of time. After Rep. Anna Paulina Luna announced on Friday that the taskforce would be using taxpayer dollars to fund trips to conspiracy hotspots for its members, it also appeared to be a waste of money. First up: Dallas, to speak to “first-hand witnesses” of the assassination 62 years ago. So, with the government once again descending into paranoid conspiracy theories, what better time to check in with Ancient Aliens? This week, the show once again delivers a recycled clip show devoted to the very theme Luna so loves—UFO crashes!

Here are the clips presented in this episode:

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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E02 “The Top Ten Mysterious Monoliths”

2/15/2025

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It’s been a miserable week in which the current administration in Washington devastated what remains of American science with indiscriminate cuts that will compromise everything from disease detection to cancer research to weather forecasting. So it’s entirely appropriate, I guess, that the same day that saw a governmental attack on science happened as the History channel launched another broadside against public knowledge and the integrity of knowledge with yet another Ancient Aliens clip show larded with commercials for still more programs promising “mysteries” upon “mysteries”—because, apparently, nothing can be known for certain except about the Confederacy and the Nazis.

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YouTube Megastar Mr. Beast Explores Giza, Asks about Ancient Astronauts

2/10/2025

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This weekend, Jimmy Donaldson, better known as Mr. Beast, posted a 21-minute YouTube video documenting the 100 hours he spent at the Giza pyramids with the permission of the Egyptian government, which closed the site for his video shoot. Donaldson toured the pyramids, the Sphinx, and the associated temples with the help of Ramy Romany from Ancient Aliens and Zahi Hawass and he repeatedly referenced the ancient astronaut theory and/or a lost civilization in discussing the pyramids.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S21E01: “The Top Ten Extraordinary Discoveries”

2/8/2025

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Ancient Aliens has been off the air since September, when the last new episode aired. The intervening months were filled with Ancient Aliens: Origins, in which the series rebroadcast old episodes of the show and let its talking heads share their thoughts about how much better the show was in the good old days. It is therefore entirely appropriate that the new season of Ancient Aliens opens with a clip show of segments from old episodes. As has been my policy since Ancient Aliens began padding its episode order with these clip shows, I will simply list the segments that are rerun and link to my original reviews of the episodes excerpted where I can identify them.

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"Ancient Aliens" Finds New Way to Recycle Old Episodes ... Again

1/1/2025

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The year that ended on December 31 marked a significant shift in American TV viewing habits. This past year, 75 of the 100 most-watched telecasts were sports, according to a Variety analysis, up from roughly half over the past several years. The only scripted series to make the list were CBS’s Tracker (fifteen times!) and the series finale of Young Sheldon. This reflects the broader trend of Americans watching significantly less traditional TV as they opt for social media videos. This, of course, creates a downward spiral as viewers watch less TV, are exposed to fewer promotions for new shows, and become less aware of what’s airing and thus watch less. This is a long way around me saying that since I cut my cable subscription last fall, I haven’t been as aware of the History Channel’s offerings and had no idea there was a new Ancient Aliens spinoff show—or that it had been airing for three months!

Ancient Aliens: Origins is a repackaging of the show’s early episodes with a new roundtable discussion featuring talking heads from the show at the beginning and the end. The first episode featured commentary from Giorgio Tsoukalos, William Henry, and Jason Martell. It was not a terribly exciting way to recycle the same material yet again. The material has previously been recycled as Ancient Aliens Declassified, Ancient Aliens: The Ultimate Evidence, etc., not to mention its reuse in other episodes of Ancient Aliens itself. The wraparound commentary was of no particular value, more self-congratulatory than informative. Narrator Robert Clotworthy, however, continued the show’s bold tradition of always being wrong by proclaiming that Ancient Aliens has been on the air “for nearly two decades.” The correct number (as of the launch of Ancient Aliens: Origins this past fall) was 14 years, 15 if you count the 2009 pilot special broadcast a full year before the first season.

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A Dull Slog: 2024 in Review

12/27/2024

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Each year, it’s a little more difficult to write a seemingly lighthearted review of the year in weird. This year was both personally and professionally a bit of a struggle as A.I. continues to eat away at my day job and the closure or collapse of a number of media outlets has made it more difficult place stories in paying publications. I lost my gig as a CNN Opinion columnist right when it was starting because CNN shuttered the entire division. As the year came to an end, about one-third of my income for the year remains outstanding from businesses that are dragging their feet on payments and have been since early fall. That has made it difficult to devote too much energy to caring about whatever old claims the usual cadre of kooks and weirdos are recycling on any given day.

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In Brief: "Ancient Aliens" Talking Head Praises Graham Hancock on Lex Fridman

10/3/2024

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Archaeologist Ed Barnhart appeared on Lex Fridman’s podcast this week to spend more than three hours (!) discussing “lost civilizations” and ancient history. During the conversation, Barnhart called Graham Hancock a “great researcher,” agreed with the idea that the Amazon rainforest had been intentionally planted by a lost civilization, and dissembled when asked directly about the ancient astronaut theory. I suppose there isn’t much one can do to respond to questions about aliens when your entire claim to fame rests on your regular appearances as a cast member on Ancient Aliens, but asserting that Hancock is a great researcher is so silly—Hancock’s sources are often wildly outdated, he misrepresents material at will, and he is highly selective in his cherry-picking—that this can only be either an attempt to jump on the Ancient Apocalypse bandwagon or a preview of an appearance on that show later this month. And if you are wondering: Recent research found that parts of the Amazon were altered by ancient agriculture, resulting in a nutrient rich terra preta soil in and around ancient settlements, but this is a far cry from assuming the entire Amazon basin was artificially planned and planted by Atlantis. The best estimates are that terra preta covers less than 3% of the Amazon, and probably closer to 0.3%, though some put the figure as high as 10%.