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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E10 "The Harmonic Code"

3/13/2021

On Friday, a few hours before this episode of Ancient Aliens aired, The Atlantic magazine informed me that they would not be going forward with a planned article in which I would report on the influence QAnon conspiracies have taken from conspiracy theories airing on cable television shows like Ancient Aliens. (As per an agreement I signed with The Atlantic on March 15, I am contractually restrained from sharing additional information after that date.) They did, however, invite me to write something else for them in the coming months.

And then Ancient Aliens did an hour about sound waves vibrating connections to space aliens. So, it was that kind of a day.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E08 "The Space Travelers"

2/27/2021

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Last week, Ancient Aliens rose total audience, climbing to 998,000 viewers, an increase of almost 50,000 viewers over the previous week’s William Shatner special. But the number of younger viewers watching ticked downward, knocking the show out of the top twenty for the night. I continue to remain amazed that about a million Americans will watch Ancient Aliens even when it simply repeats old material from previous episodes and shamelessly copies and pastes. But people also pay good money to stream reruns of The Office they’ve seen many times before, so I guess it’s to be expected. However, since Ancient Aliens is putting no effort into sewing together Frankenstein’s monster episodes from cadaverous parts, I won’t put that much effort into reviewing it. According to my blog traffic statistics, reader engagement with Ancient Aliens has collapsed. In past years, thousands, often tens of thousands, of people would research the show and find their way to my reviews in the first week after publishing them. This past week, 602 people read my review—fewer than read archival reviews! It just isn’t worth the effort.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E07 "Impossible Artifacts"

2/20/2021

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Last week’s heavily hyped experiment in breaking format did not result in exceptional ratings. William Shatner might have done promotional interviews across the internet, but all the puffery in the world couldn’t lift Ancient Aliens beyond its typical audience. About 950,000 viewers tuned in for last week’s two-hour special “William Shatner Meets Ancient Aliens,” a bit below the show’s usual million-viewer audience and about even with the weekly audience for Shatner’s sister show The UnXplained. This week, Ancient Aliens moves to a new, later time slot, running after Shatner and extending past the top of the eleven o’clock hour and out of prime time. But some thing never change. This is yet another episode made up of recycled material we’ve seen over and over for sixteen seasons.

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William Shatner: Moving Large Rocks Is an Inexplicable Cosmic Mystery

2/10/2021

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This Friday, Ancient Aliens presents a two-hour special in which The UnXplained host William Shatner meets with the various talking heads from Ancient Aliens and interviews them about space aliens, science, and futurism. The crossover between Ancient Aliens and sister program The UnXplained is made possible by the two shows’ shared production company. The special runs more than two hours, and it continues well past how late I can stay up as the father of an energetic three-year-old. As a result, I won’t review it until sometime Saturday, when I have had a chance to watch it.

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Erich von Däniken Puts Out Official Statement Attacking Me by Name

2/5/2021

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On February 4, Chariots of the Gods author Erich von Däniken put out an official statement attacking me by name and disputing accusations that his history of using phrases like “failure” to describe the “Black race” constituted racism. The statement appears to be a reaction to tweets I made in response to a recent New Yorker article which interviewed von Däniken to comment on Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb’s claim that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua was a piece of technology from an alien world. I noted at the time that von Däniken had a history of making statements that were racially insensitive or which expressed transphobic and homophobic views. That did not sit well with him.

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Avi Loeb Imagines Existentialist Aliens in His New Book "Extraterrestrial"

1/26/2021

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Today, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb’s new book Extraterrestrial was released. It was mostly as I expected it to be, though even I wasn’t quite expecting it to contain so much discussion of the author’s obsession with middle-twentieth-century existentialist philosophy, of the Camus variety, or his apparent inability to understand that this was neither the culmination of all human intellectual achievement, nor an exceptionally influential school of thought in terms of modern intellectual history. I am not reviewing Extraterrestrial as a book because, frankly, its discussion of the evidence that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua is an extraterrestrial space probe is simply beyond my ability to evaluate, being neither an astronomer nor a physicist. Those with much more training than I have found reason to doubt Loeb’s conclusions, and even Loeb frames his conclusions as a “wager,” like Pascal’s, claiming that it’s better to assume it’s E.T. and be wrong than doubt and be right, since finding aliens will give humanity a philosophical orgasm of sorts. I can do little more than shrug and say that the non-specialist reader will likely see in the arguments a reflection of whatever idea he or she brings to them.

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Review of The UnXplained S02E10 "The Search for Atlantis"

1/23/2021

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William Shatner’s The UnXplained comes from the same producers that gave us Ancient Aliens, In Search of Aliens, Curse of Oak Island, and The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. Bad ideas, poor research, and lies are original sin indivisible from the program’s halfhearted attempts to be slightly less outrageous than its loudmouthed sister shows. Shatner himself is a longtime enthusiast for the paranormal, lending his voice to programs about the extraterrestrial and supernatural since the 1970s. I don’t regularly watch The UnXplained because it rarely covers topics of interest to me. This episode, however, explored Atlantis, an I was disappointed to see that Prometheus Entertainment, the company behind so many bad shows, simply pasted this together from spare parts of other bad shows—citing them as evidence that “some” believe extreme idea that Prometheus’s own shows promoted!

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The New Yorker Interviews Erich von Däniken, Whitewashing His Bigotry

1/22/2021

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So, this week the New Yorker interviewed racist author Erich von Däniken, the elderly ancient astronaut theorist who once wrote that the Black race was a “failure” and who has included transphobic and Islamophobic commentary in his most recent books. Why would one of America’s premiere publications give a platform to a man whose claim to fame was arguing that nonwhite people couldn’t stack rocks without help from rapists from outer space? It’s because a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist seems to have relied on her adolescent memories of ancient astronaut rather than researching current controversies—current being anything after, say, the late 1970s.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E05 "The Forbidden Bible"

12/18/2020

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This week, the former director of the CIA from 2013 to 2017, John Brennan, appeared on a podcast to say that he was intrigued by the Navy UFO videos promoted by To the Star Academy of Arts and Science. He said that we cannot exclude the possibility that flying saucers are vehicles driven by beings from other worlds and that we must keep an open mind. He wasn’t speaking from official knowledge, only from his personal speculation about otherworldly life, conflating the scientific probability of life somewhere in the universe with the improbable idea that large numbers of such beings are visiting us to pose for blurry selfies and sodomize the unwary. This depressing speculation from a former high official helps explain why cable TV thinks the 927,000 weekly Ancient Aliens viewers are a desirable and powerful demographic of senior citizens (the vast majority of viewers are over 50) worth catering to.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E04: Giants of the Mediterranean

12/11/2020

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More than two hundred years ago, the naturalist Georges Cuvier published his Memoir Upon Living and Fossil Elephants in which he correctly explained that the skeletons reported around the Mediterranean region as those of a lost race of giants had, in fact, belonged to fossilized elephants. Nearly a century earlier, Sir Hans Sloane had drawn the same conclusion in a paper read before the Royal Society. In 1835, Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville examined the skeleton of the famed giant Teutobochus and discovered that it belonged to a mastodon, a truth that confirmed an assessment by Jean Riolan the Younger a century before. Hell, in 1827 Edmond Temple even watched a “giant” being excavated in Bolivia in the presence of men of science, and he gawked in wonder as they completely refused to believe it an Ice Age elephant, despite having tusks. I could list dozens of similar accounts and analyses. In fact, I have. The truth about “giants” has been known for centuries, but here we are watching Ancient Aliens party like it’s 1699.

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