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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 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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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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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%.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E20: “Resurrecting Puma Punku”

9/13/2024

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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 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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<<Previous

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

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

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

A Dull Slog: 2024 in Review

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 S20E17: “Egypt’s Giant Tombs”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E16: “The Teachers”

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

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