David Childress: Aliens Living in the Hollow Moon Created Bigfoot to Serve as Missing Link Between Humans and Apes

​I had to laugh when I read Inverse magazine’s admission that in a 21-minute interview with Ancient Aliens star David Childress, Childress spoke for 21 straight minutes, barely letting the interviewer get a word in edgewise and making it impossible, as Inverse writer Jake Kleinman said, to create a “coherent” story from his verbal ramblings. Clearly, ancient mysteries are the type of pet topic that allows Childress to monologue in unbroken streams, regardless of whether his listeners are interested, and one might speculate as to the reasons for that, but I would never offer an armchair diagnosis. Instead, I think it serves as a fair warning to future interviewers to be less open-ended in questioning him. In the interview, Childress made a number of statements that lacked the usual qualifiers that the producers of Ancient Aliens routinely force their talking heads to include to provide legal and ethical fig leaves. 

​(The complete text of the interview is not available, so far as I can tell. Inverse published excerpts that were not always clearly in context, which might affect the meaning of some statements. But when has context ever mattered to an ancient astronaut theorist?)
 
In the interview, Childress bluntly asserted that the U.S. government knows space aliens to be real and “they’re prepping us in a social way to think, we’re not alone in the universe,” he said. This is some remarkably subtle work from a government that can’t manage to convince more than 40% of the public to support the president and couldn’t convince Americans to adopt the metric system.
 
Naturally, Childress supports his Ancient Aliens colleague David Wilcock in asserting that science fiction movies and TV series are carefully planned messages designed to manipulate human thought. Showing his age, his contemporary references are all twenty years old. “In my mind, Hollywood is part of it,” Childress said. “Star Trek, sci-fi movies, television shows, many of the films like Independence Day or Mars Attacks. The message is clear: Aliens are here, be afraid.” In fact, this message is so consistent that it becomes impossible to ignore. After all, it’s not like there are ever movies or TV shows about good aliens, like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Alf, 3rd Rock from the Sun, etc.—going back 60 years or more. What I can’t quite fathom, though, is how Childress can say this while working for a TV show broadcast on the History Channel, owned by A+E Networks, a joint venture half-owned by the Walt Disney Company, a leading purveyor of alien-themed propaganda entertainment, in his view. Apparently the only force more powerful than space aliens is the almighty dollar.
 
Childress also attempted to weigh in on evolutionary biology, which he proceeds to completely misunderstand based on mid-twentieth-century creationist attacks on “Darwinism.” His argument surrounds the so-called “missing link” and his belief that Bigfoot is a space alien hybrid. “There’s allegedly this missing link and they say they can’t find it,” he told Inverse. “We’re related to the greater apes but there’s got to be some missing link between them and us. What would that be in my mind is Sasquatch or Bigfoot. […] We’re all descended from Bigfoot.” Just consider that bullshit for a moment. How does Childress think that australopithecines and Homo erectus and all the other hominins and hominids fit into the tree of life if Bigfoot both stands at the root and on the farthest branch? My mind boggles even to think of it, and the worst part is that Childress is clearly spouting half-formed bullshit without so much as considering how his proposal could be reconciled with physical evidence, let alone that the concept of the “missing link” is a holdover from Victorian science. It must be nice when you can wave off any problems with the magic words “aliens did it.”
 
Without citing any evidence other than the claims of supposed alien abductees, Childress claims that aliens (a) run hospitals under the ocean and (b) have medicine to cure every disease but choose not to help most people.
 
Perhaps most bizarrely, Childress more or less openly endorses the bonkers version of Atlantis given in the ersatz prophecies of Edgar Cayce, in the fake tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, and on the fringes of Theosophy rather than the standard form of the story given in Plato, the oldest source for the Atlantis myth. Plato said that Atlantis was destroyed in 9600 BCE and had existed for several centuries prior to that. Childress stretches this back to absurdity. “When did we get out of our caves and start doing stuff? That was only 9000 BC, but the story of Atlantis is from 20,000 years ago. We were doing stuff. We were making roads. Building Bridges building forts. What were people doing something in about 50,000 BC? Atlantis.” I guess we can give Childress this much credit: Theosophists said that Atlantis peaked spiritually 100,000 years ago and dates back one million years. His numbers are slightly more realistic.
 
Oh, I take it back… Most bizarrely, Childress endorsed the hollow moon hypothesis (as he has done on Ancient Aliens more than once) that’s been going around for the past half-century, based on a piece of Russian propaganda from the 1960s aimed at Western audiences. Childress alleged that aliens created the moon by inflating an asteroid. Yes, really. “Like a glass blower blows glass, you go out into the asteroid belt, get yourself an asteroid, and with your alien technology you superheat that asteroid. Then you blow into it to make a giant space station,” he said. That seems like rather a lot of work to avoid showing yourself to the humans.
 
Finally, I will point out that Childress, apparently unbidden, praised the Russians in the interview, which continues the strange undercurrent of Ancient Aliens stars sucking up to Russia that has led the series to do several episodes devoted to praising Putin and Russia’s state-controlled scientific and military apparatuses.