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Review of The UnXplained S04E03: "What Lies Below"

4/11/2022

Normally I put an episode number here, but the show is listed as both S03E11 and S04E03. History appears to have started a new season last week, but production codes listed the new episodes as a continuation of season 3.

Since I am not a robot, I was not able to review the latest episode of The UnXplained this weekend, but it was certainly a doozy. I hadn’t expected the show to return to the well of lost prehistoric super-civilizations quite so quickly, but here we are again. I guess that explains why William Shatner has been so insistent on battling archaeological criticism on Twitter this past week with petty insults. This time, the Ancient Aliens remix hour in which Shatner presides over recycled material from Prometheus Entertainment’s other nonsense fake science shows goes hunting for lost continents and sunken civilizations. Not a word is spoken about the many hoaxes and frauds that undergird the show’s claims, and if you think anyone involved will so much as whisper that the modern versions of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu were born in racism and celebrated a white master race that civilized the world, you don’t know how propaganda works.

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Lue Elizondo Embraces Ancient Astronaut Theory, Fascinated by Ica Stones Hoax

3/22/2022

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When Kenneth Arnold saw the first flying saucers seventy-five years ago, it took very little time for fantasists to cherry pick pieces of history to create the ancient astronaut theory as a sort of prehistory for UFOs. Arnold saw his saucers on June 25, 1947, and on July 3 San Francisco theosophical occultist Ole J. Sneide became the first known person to connect flying saucers to ancient astronauts. Since then, the two ideas, UFOs and ancient astronauts, have revolved around one another, and eventually most ufologists come to embrace some version of the ancient astronaut theory. Therefore, it was no surprise that the man with the U.S. Senate’s ear on UFOs, Lue Elizondo, came out as an ancient astronaut theorist in a recent interview, as The Daily Grail recently reported.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E10: “The Time Benders”

3/18/2022

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This week, during a podcast interview, Lue Elizondo claimed that while he served as the director of AATIP, he successfully “baited” UFOs and was able to attract them largely at will because “it turns out that these things can be pretty successful, if you know what you’re doing.” This bizarre claim raises some important questions. If, as the Navy pilots claimed, they encountered UFOs every day for two years, why did Elizondo need to bait them like Wile E. Coyote leaving out bird seed for the Road Runner? More importantly, if this tactic is so successful, why has he not demonstrated his ability to summon flying saucers, either on his History Channel TV show or his countless network and cable news performances? Surely, his new colleague Avi Loeb could have used his services to lure UFOs to the Galileo Project’s cameras. And yet, all we get are podcast interviews and teasers for a book.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E09: "Decoding the Dragon Gods"

3/11/2022

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The classic dragon is a bit of a late invention, a case where a range of previously unrelated creatures got thrown into the same category and started influencing one another. In the European tradition, dragons were originally envisioned as large snakes, as ancient Greek art attests, and Indo-European linguistic studies find that the most ancient Indo-European speakers thought of them as being in the category of worm, not reptile. Only much later did medieval Europeans start to assign the wings and feet. By contrast, the dragons of East Asian lore originated in fantasy combinations of a variety of animals, and may have originated in stories of extinct types of crocodile. The point is that there is no universal “dragon” myth, nor any consistency to dragon stories.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E08 “The Shadow People”

3/4/2022

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Today marks the 100th anniversary of Nosferatu, the horror masterpiece that illegally adapted Dracula and as a result came within a hair’s breadth of being lost to the world when Bram Stoker’s heirs sued and a court ordered the movie destroyed. I suppose it is fitting that the anniversary falls on the night Ancient Aliens debuts an episode devoted to “The Shadow People,” a vampire-like group of supernatural monsters accused of harming sleeping people. Of course, the “shadow people” are nothing more than internally generated figments of the brain generated during periods of sleep paralysis. I’ve experienced one myself—and punched it in the face in my dream, making it disappear. They have been the subject of works of classic art, but Ancient Aliens, true to form, tries to imagine that dream monsters are creatures from another dimension torturing us in our sleep.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E07: Alien Air Force

2/25/2022

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Note: Due to technical problems, half of this review did not display properly. I have (finally) fixed the technical errors.

On That UFO Podcast this week, American Cosmic author Diana Pasulka said that scientists she is working with believe that they have pierced the veil between dimensions and are in communication with entities from alternate realities. “They believe they’re in contact, and they’re doing this through “technology” (which, in UFO circles, can mean anything from a machine to psychic powers) in order to tether into these other worlds.” This bizarre claim comes only days after UFO advocate Lue Elizondo delivered a strange digression about consciousness during a podcast interview, alleging that the human soul is independent of body and part of another reality, a claim he illustrated with geometric shapes invoking medieval alchemical symbolism for the Philosopher’s Stone.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E06: "Secrets of the Star Ancestors"

2/18/2022

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This week, Wired magazine gave Jacques Vallée the glamour treatment, with a glossy profile praising the aging deacon of ufology for his six decades of failure to find the answer to UFOs. Vallée made some mouth noises about “the phenomenon” being too smart for humanity, claiming that the entities purposely embrace humor and absurdity in order to break down humanity’s rational mind. At a certain point, it stops being anything even science-adjacent and instead becomes an expression of philosophy and faith. Vallée admits that his UFO obsession originated in an adolescent interest—but of course—and Wired treated far more respectfully than you’d think his bizarre claim from last year that the U.S. government recovered an avocado-shaped UFO staffed by miniature space aliens in 1945. His image makeover as grand master of science and worthy future recipient of government patronage is a rather amazing turnaround from a man denounced as dotty and past-his-prime by his own ufology colleagues just last year.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E05: "Recovering the Ark of the Covenant"

2/11/2022

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Ancient Aliens is going in search of the Ark of the Covenant. … Again. If the topic sounds familiar, it should. Back in 2013, Ancient Aliens did this same episode under the title “Aliens and the Lost Ark.” This time, they justify the repeat by skewing the focus a tiny bit, shifting a bit more to the hunt for the Ark rather than its alleged electrical alien superpowers. But that material has already been covered in the last two segments of the previous version, so I’m not sure that there is enough of a difference to warrant a whole other episode repeating the same material.

Since the episode both repeats the same claims and also recycles footage from the earlier episode, I will not be discussing each claim in detail, since I have already covered the same material. Below are the highlights of this bizarre instant-rerun.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E04 "The World on Alert"

1/28/2022

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We are only four episodes into the new season of Ancient Aliens, so naturally it’s time to start recycling and repeating. The season premiere covered the events that led up to last year’s report from the awkwardly named Office of the Director of National Intelligence on UFOs, and this episode is basically the same thing a second time, with more discussion of the alleged global reaction to flying saucers and why some people are on alert and afraid of what UFOs might do. I can’t say I’m too excited to be covering yet another version of the same thing. Perhaps I should instead recommend Keith Kloor’s piece in Science this week profiling Avi Loeb and looking into the question of how a Harvard scientist who only a few years ago earned Chris Mellon’s ire for refusing to endorse the Navy UFO videos as anomalous became an all-in UFO nut hunting aliens in Earth’s skies.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E03: "Beneath the Sacred Temples"

1/21/2022

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It looks like Ancient Aliens is getting some competition. This week CNN announced that it had commissioned a new five-episode nonfiction documentary entertainment series, tentatively titled UFOs. The series, which will rehash the usual material about the government’s investigation of flying saucers and offer the usual incomplete hagiography of Lue Elizondo and Leslie Kean, will be produced by Break Thru Films, the same production company that adapted Kean’s book on the afterlife for Netflix. It has secretly been in production since last fall, and earlier today Kean confirmed that it was the same series she had teased in an interview last week. CNN is a corporate cousin of HBO Max, the streaming service that is producing a drama series about Leslie Kean’s investigation into UFOs. Kean is making bank, and Warner Media, soon to be part of UFO-obsessed Discovery, has made plain that it is all-in on UFOs for the foreseeable future.

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