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Review of Ancient Aliens S22E11: “Alien A.I.”

7/10/2026

I suppose it was inevitable that Ancient Aliens would eventually get around to artificial intelligence. It’s a bit surprising that it took this long, but it takes time for the lazy producers at Prometheus Entertainment to wait around until they can rip their copy from online articles without having to do any real work. The conceit of this episode is that the A.I. tools that archaeologists and historians have begun to use to analyze artifacts and data might also be used to identify evidence of an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. But most of the show is devoted to discussing recent A.I. analysis of archaeological sites without any real alien connection until the end of the episode. It’s a fine line Ancient Aliens needs to walk in this episode since it might encourage its audience to ask ChatGPT about the show and discover it is B.S., which makes it all the stranger that Ancient Aliens doesn’t bother to distinguish between ChatGPT-style large language models and machine learning—or just “computers,” for that matter.

7 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E10: UFO Sightings (Special Edition)

7/2/2026

5 Comments

I’ll confess that I have nothing to say here. “UFO Sightings” as a title is Ancient Aliens giving up completely: a mish-mash of previously aired UFO segments without even the half-hearted framework of “The UFO Conspiracy” from 2018, “The Ultimate Guide to UFOs” in 2020, “The UFO Investigations” of 2022, or even the last time the show revisited sightings, in “UFO Hot Spots,” a similar clip show that aired earlier this season. So, instead I will point you to the open letter archaeologist Flint Dibble published challenging Ancient Aliens’ star Giorgio Tsoukalos to a debate after Tsoukalos lashed out at Dibble on X following Dibble’s YouTube video (which complimented Tsoukalos!), writing “Fuck you and your cuntish demeanor” and questioning Dibble’s sexual prowess. Dibble wrote that “I am assuming you will decline this offer after seeing my performance against Graham Hancock.” Giorgio Tsoukalos has never done any original research and has never published a book. Everything he says on Ancient Aliens he has borrowed from his mentor Erich von Däniken. He likely won't agree to a debate because he doesn't have the knowledge to go beyond glib generalizations.

The segments from past episodes that aired include:

The first segment from “The UFO Conspiracy” (2018) on government UFO investigations.
The second segment from “Aliens in Our Midst” (2025) on the “jellyfish” UFO over Iraq.
The second segment from “The Glowing Orb Phenomenon” (2025) on foo fighters.
The fourth segment from “The Time Benders” (2022) on the Rendlesham Forest UFO encounter.
A clip from the first segment of “Aliens in Our Airspace” (2023) on commercial airline UFO sightings.
A clip from the first segment of “The Ultimate Guide to UFOs” (2020) on the Nuremberg sighting of 1561.

5 Comments

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E09 “The Wars of the Gods”

6/26/2026

6 Comments

Do you remember last week’s Ancient Aliens? Well, the show sure hopes you don’t, since they repeat a chunk of last week’s episode in this one, rehashing the same material about Vedic texts and nuclear bombs from last week. In fact, most of this episode is made up of repeats, rehashes, and outtakes from previous episodes, sometimes featuring dead people and sometimes strung together so poorly that Giorgio Tsoukalos occasionally changes clothes and his age while he talks! If putatively the topic is the “wars of the gods,” it is treated as nothing more than a vague theme, with “war” taken to be anything from an all-out nuclear battle to two beings having a disagreement to popping a balloon. One gets the feeling that the producers needed an extra episode and decided to construct one out of leftovers.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S22E08 “Secrets of the Vedas”

6/19/2026

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One week ago, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day opened to modest box office returns but massive media coverage. This has apparently excited all of the worst people in ufology, who spoke to the Wall Street Journal about how excited they are to see their favorite UFO lore up on the big screen, right down to the tabloid story about Richard Nixon taking Jackie Gleason to see some aliens. Danny Sheehan even claimed, preposterously, that this movie would finally get Congress to take “disclosure” seriously. The comment amused me since multiple members of Congress have now appeared on Ancient Aliens, which is the gold standard for taking nothing seriously, and it would entirely appropriate for the debased and degraded rump of a legislative branch we still possess to take its cues from a sci-fi film and a cable TV pseudo-documentary. It is the fruit of our era of cultural decline.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S22E07 “Underwater Alien Bases”

6/12/2026

11 Comments

Oh, my, we’re back again. After a months-long hiatus, Ancient Aliens resumed its twenty-second season with … well, another episode that rehashed material from a decade ago. You can pretty much guess what the topics of an Ancient Aliens season will be based on what topics were in the news and on social media about nine months before air time. Underwater bases were a big theme for a time in ufology last year, until the conversation shifted to orbs and now “sentient plasma.” (Coming next year to Ancient Aliens!) Viewers with a long memory might remember that Ancient Aliens did an episode on “Underwater Worlds” back in Season 2 in 2010, but the closer similarity is to the 2019 episodes “They Came from the Sea,” which covered underwater alien bases better than the episode bearing the name of “Underwater Alien Bases,” an episode with almost no underwater bases in it.

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Reports: David Wilcock, Former Star of "Ancient Aliens," Dead at 53

4/22/2026

10 Comments

In the wake of an FBI investigation into the statistically unremarkable deaths and disappearances of a handful of government scientists linked to nuclear secrets and UFOs, I sarcastically observed in an earlier blog post that proportionally more cast members from Ancient Aliens had died this year than government scientists. Sadly, my prescient comment became still more accurate with the news that David Wilcock, an early cast member of Ancient Aliens, who left the show following controversy, died April 20 at the age of 53, according to social media posts from Wilcock’s friend and onetime media partner Corey Goode and from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a congressional UFO advocate who has also posted ancient astronaut content. [UPDATE: The Boulder County Sheriff's Department confirmed the deceased was Wilcock on Wednesday evening.]

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Capsule Review of Ancient Aliens S22E06: “Mysterious Monuments”

3/6/2026

3 Comments

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.

3 Comments

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.

2 Comments

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

2/13/2026

7 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.

7 Comments

Capsule Review of Ancient Aliens S22E04 “Extraterrestrial Engineering”

2/6/2026

2 Comments

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.

2 Comments

<<Previous

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E11: “Alien A.I.”

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E10: UFO Sightings (Special Edition)

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E09 “The Wars of the Gods”

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E08 “Secrets of the Vedas”

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E07 “Underwater Alien Bases”

Reports: David Wilcock, Former Star of "Ancient Aliens," Dead at 53

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”

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