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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E19: “The Chosen”

9/6/2024

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

21 Comments

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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Lue Elizondo Memoir: Dubbed "King of Torture," Haunted by Bubbles, Talks Nephilim

7/26/2024

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Since Ancient Aliens is on hiatus to avoid competing with the Olympics, I thought it would be safe to take my on to the local aquarium. Surely a display of tropical fish must be free of the insidious mythology of space invaders. Ah, but I was wrong. Since last we visited, the aquarium opened a hall of animatronics offering, in either promise or threat, dinosaurs and “legendary creatures.” The disappointing attraction featured credulous displays about griffins and Bigfoot before reaching a crescendo in a hall where Ancient Aliens clips played on a big screen beside this janky diorama of extraterrestrials. It was not worth the upcharge.

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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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Weekend Roundup: My New CNN Piece, Coulthart on Divine Aliens, and More!

4/6/2024

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Just in time for Monday's total solar eclipse, I have a new piece for CNN on the history of eclipses, the superstitions that surround them, and the slow progress of public education in correcting erroneous eclipse beliefs. It's remarkable to realize that in relatively recent times, there were still people in industrialized countries who thought they had gone blind because the light in the sky went out. You can read the complete piece over at CNN Opinion: "Ancient Superstitions about Eclipses Paved the Way for This Scientific Truth."

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E10 “Mystery of the Stone Spheres”

3/15/2024

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In a busy week for space aliens, a new study reported that Avi Loeb mistook the vibrations of a passing truck for the seismograph signal of an interstellar meteor, a claim Loeb vigorously denied on his blog. Then, former AARO director Shawn Kirkpatrick said in a Zoom interview for the National Security Space Association that ufology believers in government are, essentially, a national security risk: “The thing that is most troublesome to me are the number of people in government that I worked with, that I did not know held those beliefs. And they suddenly came to my office and said ‘I’m not working with you anymore because you're part of the UFO coverup.’ They said this without evidence. But they believe this anyway. This is disturbing. This is a big red flag. How can you trust these people to make rational decisions? How can you trust them with national secrets?” Naturally, key ufologists turned to Congress to try to override the Pentagon’s accurate conclusions, and Ross Coulthart said in his podcast that two senior senators approached him while he was flitting about the Capitol to praise him and share UFO conspiracy theories about an AARO coverup, thus proving Kirkpatrick’s point.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E07: “Secrets of the Sumerians”

2/23/2024

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Well, here’s a change of pace. After a streak of six weeks of clip shows—embedded in more than six months of clips shows and reruns--Ancient Aliens returns with a putatively “new” episode. We have to take this with a big grain of salt, of course. Even “new” episodes have contained heavy doses of repeat material for most of the past decade or so. They ran out of “new” material back in the early 2010s. This episode, for example, covers the Sumerians and Zecharia Sitchin’s various fantasies and overlaps rather heavily with a 2013 episode that was similarly devoted to Sumerians and the Anunnaki. Of course, back in those wild days, before Ancient Aliens became an adjunct to Congress, they would make wild claims, like Jason Martell accusing the U.S. government of invading Iraq and looting museums to suppress alien evidence. Now, with the respectability afforded by government patronage, we get a mostly boring hour of forgettable televisual wallpaper.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S20E06 “The Top Ten Alien Disasters”

2/16/2024

9 Comments

I’m not sure why I bother with these reviews anymore. Ancient Aliens doesn’t seem interested in producing actual content, so I don’t see much reason to review the clip shows they have substituted for a real season of television. This episode’s theme is disasters, which is what Ancient Aliens has been for most of its run. The idea of aliens being associated with world-changing catastrophes is a very old one. As Chris Aubeck noted in his 2022 book Alien Artifacts, one of the very first ancient astronaut theorists, the Baron d’ Espiard de Colonge, made similar claims in his 1865 book Le Chute de Ciel (The Fall of the Sky). He wrote that meteors had devastated the ancient earth and brought space aliens down. Ancient humans remembered these aliens as the monsters, demons, giants, and gods of mythology. These alien gods gave humanity sophisticated science and interbred with humans until another cataclysm destroyed Atlantis and the world of the Nephilim/aliens. And even at that early date, the good baron had already mixed his ideas with significant racism, claiming the white race was the most intelligent and the only one with divine alien ancestors, and thus the only one with real science.

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<<Previous

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”

Lue Elizondo Memoir: Dubbed "King of Torture," Haunted by Bubbles, Talks Nephilim

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E12: “Unlocking the Stargates”

Weekend Roundup: My New CNN Piece, Coulthart on Divine Aliens, and More!

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E10 “Mystery of the Stone Spheres”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E07: “Secrets of the Sumerians”

Review of Ancient Aliens S20E06 “The Top Ten Alien Disasters”

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