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

10/3/2024

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on Ancient Aliens, but asserting that Hancock is a great researcher is so silly—Hancock’s sources are often wildly outdated, he misrepresents material at will, and he is highly selective in his cherry-picking—that this can only be either an attempt to jump on the Ancient Apocalypse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%.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E20: “Resurrecting Puma Punku”

9/13/2024

10 Comments

This season of Ancient Aliens has been more backward-facing than most as the series becomes an ouroboros eating its own tail, revisiting past episodes and celebrating the lives of ufology’s octogenarian heroes. This episode is no different, returning to one of Ancient Aliens’ most infamous episodes, 2012 “The Mysteries of Puma Punku” (where David Childress confidently asserted that an obviously irregular block was a perfect right-angle), parts of which were first revisited in a 2014 episode of the spinoff series In Search of Aliens entitled “The Mystery of Puma Punku.” Both drew on a lengthy segment about Puma Punku in the original 2009 Ancient Aliens pilot episode. Over the past fifteen years, Ancient Aliens has learned nothing about Puma Punku and continues to repeat false claims that were indefensible in 2014, 2012, and 2009. But, on the plus side, there is no new episode next week, and this might be the end of the season. It seems like an appropriate way to take leave of Ancient Aliens, at least for a while.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E19: “The Chosen”

9/6/2024

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In an interview this week with The Guardian, Jeffrey Kripal, the religious scholar with wild opinions on UFOs and ancient aliens, claimed that during an incident of food poisoning in Kolkata in 1989, supernatural forces “downloaded” what he described as “massive amounts of information” into his body, making him a believer in otherworldly powers. By coincidence, today’s episode of Ancient Aliens is called “The Chosen” and involves people who feel they have been in contact with angels, aliens, or divine beings and received messages from them. If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because the show already did this episode back in season five, with their show on “Prophets and Prophecies.” This time, they mix and match material from that show with modern abduction claims, which … oh, yeah, they also did in “Strange Abductions” in season five, two weeks after “Prophets and Prophecies.”

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E18: “The Linda Moulton Howe Files”

8/30/2024

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Continuing this season’s new effort to repackage old material by recasting it as biographies of ancient astronaut theorists, this episode follows the life and career of Linda Moulton Howe. If much of this episode seems familiar, it’s probably because the show has presented all of this material before and has profiled Howe’s life and career several times before. For example, a 2015 episode on crop circles contained a segment tracing Howe’s initial conversion from a young television news reporter to alien enthusiast when she became obsessed with crop circles. Similarly, a 2014 In Search of Aliens spinoff episode offered a description of Howe’s career, as did its 2020 recycling on the Ancient Aliens mothership, where the show added in Howe’s involvement with Art’s Parts. Other notable repeats include a 2019 episode about Howe’s “investigation” of aliens in Antarctica and of course last year’s episode on Howe’s efforts to prove the government is hiding a massive ancient pyramid in Alaska.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E17: “Egypt’s Giant Tombs”

8/23/2024

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So long ago that everyone eventually forgot the story had to be invented, early Christians claimed that the monstrous, seemingly supersized animal-headed gods depicted on the walls of Egyptian temples were the infamous Nephilim of Genesis 6, understood to be giants, much as pagan writers had speculated that the carvings represented the Titans. Due to the influence of the Book of Enoch, Late Antique Christians believed Egypt to have been the home of the Watchers and the Nephilim, whom Enoch visited in the far deserts, a claim the monk Annianus seemingly placed in his now-lost fifth-century world history. Stories spread in medieval times that Moses had slain a giant in Egypt whose body became a bridge over the Nile. Islamic writers spoke vaguely of two races of Egyptian giants, the native descendants of Cain (i.e. Nephilim) and a branch of the family from Arabia, called the ’Ādites, who invaded under Shaddad ibn ’Ād and built pyramids. However, Muslim writers, insisted, Egypt’s native Christians, the Copts, denied that the ’Ādites had ever conquered Egypt.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E16: “The Teachers”

8/16/2024

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After twenty seasons, it took me a bit by surprise that Ancient Aliens had never done an episode dedicated solely to aliens teaching humans science, culture, and spirituality. It’s certainly not because they’ve never covered the topic before, though most prominently in the year before I started reviewing the show. Early episodes from seasons 1 and 2 such as “The Visitors” (S01E02) and “Gods and Aliens” (S02E02) covered much of the same material, and references to aliens teaching humans pepper any episode that actually remembers this show is called “Ancient” Aliens and not UFO, Conspiracy Theory, and Popular Astronomy Review. Nevertheless, for a show that has leaned so heavily into aliens as life coaches and spiritual guides, I was taken a little aback that they hadn’t done this topic before.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E15: “Jacques Vallée: UFO Pioneer”

8/9/2024

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I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I don’t really like Jacques Vallée. For most UFO fans, he is an éminence grise whose stature as a philosopher of ufology has made him a respected thinker and eternal consultant for the federal government on UFOs. But, for me, he’s a sloppy scholar who coasts by on a French accent and ambiguous verbiage that allows readers to project their own beliefs onto his words. A decade ago, I went through the “cases” of ancient and medieval UFO sightings he had published in Wonders in the Sky (2009), many of which had previously appeared in his classic book Passport to Magonia (1969), and I found a collection of erroneously translated, deceptively edited, and ignorantly misunderstood material that he had long passed off as serious scholarship simply because most ufologists can’t read ancient languages. (For example, Vallée once claimed Charlemagne ordered UFO witnesses put to death; instead, he ordered the “reform” of “weather-magicians.”) Vallée’s more recent support for the ridiculous Trinity hoax—which made it all the way into Congressional legislation on Vallée’s reputation—only confirmed my opinion.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E14 “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”

7/19/2024

5 Comments

As has been my refrain in this new batch of episodes, Ancient Aliens seems intent on remaking old episodes, like an ouroboros consuming its own tail. This episode, which discusses the scientific (and quasi-scientific) search for extraterrestrial life is quite similar to 2017’s episode about “Alien Hunters,” 2018’s exploration of “The Alien Protocols,” and of course 2022’s clip show on the scientific search for ET, “Evidence of Alien Life.” You will, I trust, forgive me if Avi Loeb’s probe for phantom aliens isn’t really of much interest to me anymore. Given how far afield his episode is from the ancient astronaut topic—after all, if you’ve already met and been in contact with culture-dispensing cosmic being here on Earth, who needs to search for radio signals from the stars?—I’ll only summarize the highlights.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E13 “The Whistleblowers”

7/12/2024

2 Comments

I wonder sometimes if the core audience for Ancient Aliens ever gets tired of hearing the same thing over and over again, or if it is more like the Bible readings at church, where repetition and familiarity are both the appeal and a reinforcement mechanism. This week’s episode, “The Whistleblowers,” explores people who claim to be revealing government UFO secrets. You’ve seen them all on Ancient Aliens before. Indeed, Bob Lazar not only had his own dedicated episode in 2019 but has appeared in segments of other episodes on Area 51, Area 52, UFO investigators, etc. over the years. Even David Grusch had his own Ancient Aliens segment last year. But, hey, this is great promotion for Lue Elizondo’s new book, or would be if we had any idea how many people still watch this show. Nielsen stopped releasing cable ratings last year because they are so low now, and History hasn’t volunteered to share.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E12: “Unlocking the Stargates”

7/5/2024

4 Comments

Ten years ago, Ancient Aliens delivered an episode entitled “Aliens and Stargates,” and now we are back at it, rehashing the same material the show has covered repeatedly over the intervening decade. What is there even to say about a rehash of a rehash that, even in its first titular episode, wasn’t original but had previously been covered by the show? I’d ask them to get some new ideas, but in this particularly dark intellectual climate, where propaganda and hate has poisoned every well, I’d be too worried that they’d follow their former colleague David Wilcock straight into the bowels of QAnon and Russian propaganda.

As most of you remember, star gates (or stargates, as the show prefers) entered ancient astronaut lore from the 1997 movie Stargate and the subsequent TV series, and Ancient Aliens retrofitted old ancient astronaut claims to conform to movie myths.

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<<Previous

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

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E20: “Resurrecting Puma Punku”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E19: “The Chosen”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E18: “The Linda Moulton Howe Files”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E17: “Egypt’s Giant Tombs”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E16: “The Teachers”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E15: “Jacques Vallée: UFO Pioneer”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E14 “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E13 “The Whistleblowers”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E12: “Unlocking the Stargates”

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