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Demi Lovato Joins Gaia TV, Begins Promoting Noxious Reptilian Conspiracies

11/9/2021

A few months ago, NBC's Peacock streaming service gave Demi Lovato a UFO series in which the streamer presented Lovato as a goofy, cuddly conspiracy theorist gawking in wonder at lights in the sky. Gaia TV saw the publicity that Lovato gained and appointed them a brand ambassador, and Lovato began telling their 118 million social media followers to watch hand-picked promoting extreme fringe history ideas, including lizard people conspiracies.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E07: "Top Ten Alien Artifacts"

10/8/2021

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Once again this week, Ancient Aliens is devoting an hour to clips of past episodes arbitrarily arranged into a top-ten list. Audiences have noticed, and ratings for the series have fallen. Last week, Ancient Aliens attracted only 674,000 live-plus-same-day viewers, down nearly a third from last season’s average. This number is still much larger than most other non-news programs airing on Fridays—AMC’s History of Horror, for example, had only half as many viewers—but the audience exodus from Ancient Aliens indicates that even the notoriously loyal Ancient Aliens audience is less tolerant of reruns that it is of the usual policy of rehashing in slightly different words.

This week, my son came down with a virus, which left us taking care of a sick kid while trying to arrange doctor visits and COVID testing so he could qualify to return to school. He’s fine now, and the COVID test came back negative, but it’s been an exhausting week, so, like last week, I am simply going to list the topics covered and, where I remember the source, direct you to my prior reviews.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E06 "The Top Ten Alien Encounters"

10/1/2021

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As Ancient Aliens grows older and lazier and struggles to produce new episodes during the coronavirus pandemic, despite the show traditionally featuring little more than talking head interviews intercut with off-the-rack b-roll, we’ve been getting more and more episodes made up of rerun segments from earlier seasons. So far, half of season 17’s episodes have been “top 10” lists of segments from past episodes. Tonight’s theme is “Top 10 Alien Encounters.” Since there is nothing new in the episode and Ancient Aliens is putting no effort into their show, I have no interest in wasting my time reviewing segments I’ve discussed in my reviews over the past decade. Therefore, for the sake of completion, I will list the “encounters” the show covered and direct you to my archives for previous discussion of them.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S17E05 "The Human Experiment"

9/24/2021

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On the day this episode of Ancient Aliens aired, the new UFO think tank Skyfort associated with Lue Elizondo released its plans for “Phase II” of its efforts to influence the government, academia, and media to investigate UFOs. The plans were heavy on assuming UFOs are otherworldly technology and short on any effort to probe the psychological or perceptional issues associated with sightings. Not long before, the House of Representatives passed the first-ever legislation referencing “unidentified aerial phenomena” by name as part of a directive creating a permanent office of UFO investigation. Also on Friday, Ralph Blumenthal, the ex-New York Times reporter who broke the 2017 AATIP story, published his new article on alien abductees that Blumenthal claimed the Times had refused to run because its new editors are biased against UFOs. The resulting piece was an embarrassment—rehashed UFO stories from old books, biased and uncritical thinking, and poor and unclear writing. It only served to reinforce the degree to which Blumenthal has become a UFO believer who thinks himself immune to conventional standards of evidence, reasoning, and reporting.

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

9/17/2021

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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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