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Review of Ancient Aliens S22E07 “Underwater Alien Bases”

6/12/2026

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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News Roundup: Second Sphinx, Ancient UFOs, North Korean Alien Tech, and More!

4/27/2026

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It’s been a busy couple of days across across the world of lost civilization, ancient astronaut, and UFO conspiracies. Scott Wolter put out a new conspiracy theory on Facebook, bringing in the dubious Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis to now claim that the comet that believers imagine struck the earth in the Ice Age separate a unified European-North American antediluvian civilization. It was this prehistoric foundation of shared symbols, he said, that let the Knights Templar communicate with Native Americans when Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney arrived among the Mi’kmaq in the 1100s CE—an event that, of course, never happened but was invented by Johann Reinhold in the 1700s and promoted by Richard Henry Major in the 1800s.

But that wasn’t all that happened this weekend.

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Capsule Review of Ancient Aliens S22E06: “Mysterious Monuments”

3/6/2026

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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.

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Lue Elizondo Claims Vatican Showed Him an Ancient UFO Account (But It Didn't)

2/25/2026

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Glenn Beck interviewed Lue Elizondo by phone for his podcast yesterday, and Elizondo made an unfounded claim that the Vatican showed him evidence of ancient flying saucers. Beck—who has used his platform in the past to claim a lost white race inhabited ancient America—promoted the supposed revelation online with hyperbolic headlines: “Former UFO official saw ANCIENT EVIDENCE of aliens at the Vatican?!” Meanwhile, the supposed “evidence” is (a) not secret, (b) well-known, and (c) has nothing to do with aliens except in the minds of ufologists, as I will show you below. This, though, is yet another example of what ignoramuses who don’t know what they are talking about do not actually create knowledge by bouncing their ignorance off one another.

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Check Out My Article in the March Issue of "Fortean Times"!

2/20/2026

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I wrote the cover story for the March 2026 issue of Fortean Times (no. 468), examining the life and legacy of Erich von Däniken in the wake of the recent death of the most famous ancient astronaut theorist in the world. Across the eight-page retrospective, I look at how von Däniken transformed ideas from other authors into a palatable and popular form that reached more people around the world than any pseudohistorical theory since Ignatius Donnelly wrote Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.

I also consider what made his ideas so exciting for his readers, how his populist tone and infectious enthusiasm impacted science writing, and why even the most egregious of errors had little impact on his fame or his followers.

Be sure to check it out wherever you get your magazines or directly from the publisher on their website.

A small note: It is a little ironic that Fortean Times gave my last word on von Däniken the same headline as my first piece about him, in Skeptic magazine back in 2004.

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In Brief: Italian Ancient Astronaut Theorist Claims Radical New Date for Giza

2/4/2026

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An Italian engineer claims that his own personal methodology for studying erosion has proved that the Great Pyramid of Giza is as much as 40,000 years old. The claim circulated last week thanks to a report in The Daily Mail, Alberto Donini claims to use his own "relative erosion method" to compare stones and estimate how long they have been eroding, which led him to the conclusion. His erosion study assumes linear erosion rates, which probably cannot be assumed given that the original surfaces he measured, mostly flat paving stones, were in use for thousands of years, whereas the inner blocks exposed when the cladding fell off around 700 years ago were not subject to the same level of daily wear. Donini's claims are not doubtful on their surface, since he is not a geologist, his area of expertise is machines and concrete, and he is also an ancient astronaut theorist who also claims to have found evidence for space alien contact in Mexico on stones he dug up (on a half-day trip!) with pictures of UFOs and aliens on them, i.e. modern fakes.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S22E03 “Islands of the Gods”

1/30/2026

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(For reasons that are beyond me, this episode is listed as S21E19 on the History website and S22E03 everywhere else.)

The settlement of Polynesia is one of the great stories of human achievement, full of incredible feats of sailing across almost incomprehensible distances. Those voyages carried a cultural matrix that included cyclopean walls and megalithic statues across the Pacific, the from the Marquesas to Nan Madol and from Hawaii to Easter Island. It’s also been a frequent subject for Ancient Aliens. In the past eight years, they have devoted entire episodes to Easter Island and the Marquesas (2018), Hawaii (2019), and Nan Madol (2020) in addition to frequent segments in other episodes. Now we are doing it all again because it’s been a few years, and they probably figure that the audience has forgotten since they reused so much material from these previous episodes, including b-roll footage.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S22E02 Egypt’s Lost Pyramids

1/23/2026

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As colorful and inventive as the medieval Arabic legends of ancient Egypt were—originating many of the tropes used in sci-fi stories about ancient cultures even today, such as impossibly advanced ancient technology, otherworldly magic, hidden scientific secrets, booby-trapped pyramids, etc.—there are times I wish that these legends had never arisen. The medieval stories of fallen angels and Hermetic alchemists building temples, pyramids, and vanished cities full of astounding technology fed directly into modern claims about extraterrestrial intervention. Indeed, the late Erich von Däniken made a half-understood account of the most prominent of these legends, the story of the construction of the Great Pyramid first given in the Akhbār al-zamān, but known to him from a later plagiarist, the foundation for his ET claims about the pyramids, repeated from Chariots of the Gods straight through to his death.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S22E01 “Skulls of the Gods”

1/16/2026

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After a break of more than two months, Ancient Aliens returned Thursday night, as it has each January, for the start of a new season, its twenty-second over seventeen calendar years, counting from the 2009 pilot episode. I suppose that it is only appropriate that Ancient Aliens returns the same week that its guiding spirit, Erich von Däniken, died at the age of ninety. As long as the series, which was originally an adaptation of Chariots of the Gods, remains on the air, it’s almost like von Däniken is still with us, lying and fabricating shamelessly. Unlike the past two seasons, this one opens with an “original” episode rather than a “Top Ten” clip show. I suppose that is something like progress. On the other hand, the series began its new season with a rehash of familiar material about elongated skulls that the show has repeated for a decade and a half. In a week where Giorgio Tsoukalos was actively posting on X that the supposed “alien” mummies of Peru were nothing but desecrated human bodies made into “dolls,” it is a bit ironic that he is also appearing here to declare some skulls from Peru are in fact extraterrestrial. But that’s where we stand.

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Remembering Erich von Däniken, 1935 – 2026

1/12/2026

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When Erich von Däniken died in Interlaken, Switzerland, at the age of 90 on January 10, I was offline for the weekend. My parents had come to visit their grandson after a major snowstorm had delayed their usual Christmas trip, and we were busy celebrating a somewhat belated holiday. I did not find out about the ancient astronaut theorist’s death until twelve hours after his daughter announced it in conjunction with his disciple, Giorgio Tsoukalos.

It was, perhaps, appropriate that my parents were in town when Erich von Däniken died since it was due to my father that I had any idea who von Däniken was in the first place.

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<<Previous

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E07 “Underwater Alien Bases”

News Roundup: Second Sphinx, Ancient UFOs, North Korean Alien Tech, and More!

Capsule Review of Ancient Aliens S22E06: “Mysterious Monuments”

Lue Elizondo Claims Vatican Showed Him an Ancient UFO Account (But It Didn't)

Check Out My Article in the March Issue of "Fortean Times"!

In Brief: Italian Ancient Astronaut Theorist Claims Radical New Date for Giza

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E03 “Islands of the Gods”

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E02 Egypt’s Lost Pyramids

Review of Ancient Aliens S22E01 “Skulls of the Gods”

Remembering Erich von Däniken, 1935 – 2026

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