Review of Ancient Aliens S03E11: Lies My TV Told Me

10/6/2011

There was a death in my family this week, so you will forgive me if I am less than enthusiastic about putting up with Ancient Aliens’ bullshit today, including the use of at least two known hoaxes as “evidence.” Last night’s episode, “Aliens and the Founding Fathers,” spent an hour suggesting that America’s founders were the recipients of extraterrestrial wisdom. But it was telling that most of the talking heads were not ancient astronaut theorists (AATs), and it was mostly left to the voiceover narration to launch into speculation about George Washington et al.’s alien encounters.

The majority of the episode featured warmed-over conspiracy theories about the Freemasons, long debunked, and occult theorizing about the Masonic symbolism of Washington, D.C.’s architecture leftover from other, sturdier History Channel programs. As the “experts” interviewed on Ancient Aliens strained to force E.T. into their prefabricated conspiracies—one talking head actually said that one could call a “heavenly being” seen by George Washington an extraterrestrial but it was a “heavenly being”—it was quite obvious that the program existed primarily as thematic lead-in and cross-promotional opportunity for Brad Meltzer’s Decoded, which does cryptographic fantasies much better. As with Ancient Aliens’ earlier episode devoted to promoting the movie Cowboys & Aliens, an alleged “truth” came a distant second to the commercial necessities of corporate synergy.

The main lines of “evidence” were laughably bad—not to mention fraudulent. One piece of evidence was an alleged vision George Washington had of a “heavenly being” that showed him “the birth, progress, and destiny of the Republic of the United States” while at Valley Forge. AAT Giorgio Tsoukalos and Ancient Aliens took this as a genuine vision (albeit of an "alien" and not an angel) reported by the 99-year-old Anthony Sherman, a (non-existent) former aid to Washington, in 1859, as told to Wesley Bradshaw. In fact, this is a well-known hoax concocted by Charles W. Alexander, the actual author of the piece, in 1861, at the start of the Civil War. It was intended as fiction, hence the anachronistic references to the “Union” projected back to 1777-1778.

Another claim made by Ancient Aliens, that Washington was visited by “Greenskins,” or alien beings, derives entirely from hoax diaries allegedly found in a Scottish castle in the 1990s and later reported on by a British tabloid reporter in the Sun. As far as I can tell, such diaries have never been published and in all likelihood do not exist.

After seeing credence given to a hoax exposed at least as early as 1917 and another with no supporting evidence whatsoever, what purpose is there in bothering to examine the AATs' other “evidence”?

Whopper of the week: The dumbest claim has to be that the streets of Washington, D.C. were laid out in the shape of a five-pointed star to communicate to the aliens that we “respect” them. Do I even have to mention that real stars do not have points, and the convention of five points on a star would have no relevance whatsoever to beings unfamiliar with the convention? Heck, even in Western civilization we don’t always use five points on a star. Sometimes we have four (like many depictions of the star of Bethlehem), six (the asterisk—literally, star), or seven (a sheriff’s badge).

17 Comments

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8/25/2013 08:43:15 pm

Other than Tsoukalos, they have nothing as a proof of the existence of alliance. They are just manipulating the stories. I have stopped watching the series long back. Now its season five, right? By the way, I heard some good review about this season!

John

5/16/2014 03:51:11 am

Stumbled on your site as a result of my suspicious nature. I'm a regular but not die-hard viewer of Ancient Aliens. This morning, 5/16/14 H2 is airing several back to back to back episodes and I have nothing better to do so I'm watching. When I first began watching this series Giorgio Tsoukalos had ' Ph D. behind his name as well as publisher of Legendary Times Magazine. Now the PhD moniker has been dropped. What's up with that? Or am I remembering wrong?

JaredMithrandir link

6/29/2014 04:24:21 am

You didn't address the claim in this episode that Founding Fathers like Benjamin Franklin believed that there was life on many Planets, and that each Solar System might have it's own God and he God of the Bible was only the God of our Solar System.

I find it interesting because if such theories were popular in Masonic circles in Early America, they may have influenced Joseph Smith and other early Mormons, cause that is essentially what the Mormon cosmology claims.

JW0914

8/9/2014 08:02:39 am

#‎AncientAliens‬, like ‪#‎AmericasBookOfSecrets‬, used to be a fascinating show... now, like the latter, it's nothing more than a whacked out conspiracy show with ‪#‎GiorgioTsoukalos‬ repeating over and over again "Is it possible..."; well sure, anything is possible, but not when there's no evidence to support it being possible and you're bending the facts to fit your beliefs, instead of bending your beliefs to fit the facts, you turn a fascinating subject into a conspiracy subject.

America's Book of Secrets did the exact same thing, except they did it after only 1 season, whereas it took Ancient Aliens 3 - 4 to become a whacked out conspiracy show with little substance. The original "Ancient Aliens" 2 hour history special back in 2004 (might be off by a year) is what spawned the series, and there are important questions that have been raised by the series in the first 2 seasons + the 2 hour special. The fact that African tribes knew of Sirius's binary dark star, for instance, of which hasn't been able to be explained properly since we only became aware of Sirius's binary dark star in the 1900's due to powerful observatory telescopes.

There are relevant and important questions that have been raised by Ancient Aliens, however since late Season 2 it's been nothing other than a whacked out conspiracy show that does itself massive damage by doing so. Like the one episode that implied the "devil" was an E.T... first, the "devil" has never existed and when Romans forced polytheistic religions to convert to a monotheistic one, what other way than to cement the superiority of the monotheistic religion than by changing polytheistic "god(s)" like Pan (the "god" of sex, wine, and fun) into something horrible. Hell is another monotheistic work of fiction that literally came from a work of fiction... Dante's Inferno. When written in the 6th Century, the Vatican capitalised on it to control it's parishioners... as is a recurring subject in monotheistic religions, the want of the arrogant and hubristic to control those they view as lesser than themselves.

siriusly?

9/19/2014 07:28:57 pm

Native americans knew nothing about the sirius binary system. The book "The Sirius Mystery" is the source of all those claims, AA loves to use sources that are known forgeries/lies/exaggerations and just hopes nobody decided to look into their sources....

9/20/2014 11:40:08 am

Please re-read my comment... the ethnicity was African, not Native American.

As far as your reference to "The Sirius Mystery", that simply lacks facts. African lore of Sirius's binary dark star goes back generations and was first made light of well before the 70''s.

You seemed to have missed the point of what I articulated... Ancient Aliens from the end of the 2nd season onward isn't worth the paper the script is written on. The original history special "Ancient Aliens", years before the series began, brought up legitimate questions, as did episodes in the 1st and early - mid second seasons.

Simply because the show has become entirely worthless and a waste of time to watch, as you'll find more facts in a one column article in any newspaper than in an entire episode, doesn't discount the legitimacy of questions that were posed mid 2nd season and prior. That's my opinion, and one that becomes a philosophical conundrum: does one or more acts discount and diminish the importance of what came before?

For example, we owe our entire interstate highway system and the economy it supports directly to Hitler, as it was based entirely on the Autobahn. Many don't know this, and a question I frequently ask is "Is it okay within our society to recognize the good things and vital inventions we owe our lives to if they come from horrendous people, the scourge of society?" Should the medical personal who were involved with the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment be recognized for the knowledge they contributed to medicine when that knowledge came at the cost of the horrendous suffering they imposed on the black men who thought they were being treated with medicine for Syphilis when all they were being given was sugar pills. All this so the white clinicians could watch the agonizing progression of syphilis and force these black men to die a horrific deaths. Much of what we know of syphilis came from that despicable, horrendous study. Take transplants, which save millions of lives around the world every day... no one realizes the horrendous cost animals with consciousness and sense of self suffered due to our transplant experiments. Take the most abhorrent of which, where the surgeon transplanted the head of one live chimp onto that of another live chimp. The chimp whose head was transplanted survived, however due to the fact the brain stem was severed, the chimp couldn't provide any of it's own life functions on it's own and was euthanized shortly thereafter.... but we owe the knowledge of transplant medicine to horrific experiments like the above.

All of these have different facts have one thing in common... do we as a society discount the good or knowledge afterwards, or before, when it comes from a horrendous person or people? I don't have the answer, but the answer will always change as societies evolve and devolve over time.

Paul Okruhlik

9/26/2014 03:30:22 pm

Guys get a life, don't criticize Giorgio Tsouklos and his group for putting on a good clean show. They are not making you believe in anything you don't want to believe in. All they are doing is making a show that entertaining and something to use your imagination. So don't be so harsh with these guys. Don't watch it if you don't like it. Give these guys credit for not putting on shows that are violent and bad example for our children. There is too much of that type of stupid shoot em up , killing, stabbing , cutting off heads and all the other things people think is entertaining.
Giorgio and his group are at least putting on some good clean entertainment. Believe what you want on what they say. Don't criticize them. Thank them for putting on some good clean entertainment, that you can use your own imagination on what they say. Believe in aliens if you want, I myself have never seen one. Believe in God, if you want. Have you seen him? Just enjoy the show like a lot of other people like myself do. And keep it to yourself if you don't like it. Who really cares what you think anyway. If you have nothing better to do than gripe about good clean entertainment, maybe you need to start watching the History channel or Discovery, Science channel, that has a lot of good entertainment. It's just entertainment. Nothing more.

9/26/2014 04:06:17 pm

There's one problem with what you just posted... this is an educational documentary, shown on the History Channel [by proxy H2], and because it's an educational documentary it must meet certain standards, the first of which is it needs to be based upon facts. If this was on any other channel but an educational one, you'd have a leg to stand on, however it is an educational channel.

Secondly, anyone who is being loose with the facts on a documentary of any kind should be criticized, and criticized heavily. This isn't about opinions, but facts, and the facts are Ancient Aliens, by proxy of Tsouklos, have continued the show based on zero facts and the key phrase "is it possible". Yes, anything is possible... but you don't consider possibilities that not only have no facts associated with them, but lack even the faintest whiff of evidence. Tsouklos single handedly took a show that through the 1st season raised valid, legitimate questions to a show midway through the second through the present that is nothing more than a conspiracy nut job of a show that has more in common with evangelistic mega churches than it does with history, historical evidence, or education.

He's tried to sell the "devil" as an alien, which is a bit impossible considering the "devil" has never actually existed. Satan is a modern idea and in ancient times, the notion of a supremely evil being just didn't exist. There was no single god of love or war, nor a supernatural being representing good and evil. The devil as we know him first entered human history about 3,000 years ago and was invented when we began believing in a monotheism [a single "god"].

Ancient Egyptians believed that good and bad were two sides of the same coin. The Greek deity named Pan resembles our modern view of the devil. Worshipped in northern Israel, by the 4th century BC Greek cultural influences had spread to the area. Pan was associated with nature, music and fertility; depicted with horns and a goat's hairy legs and hooves. Sometimes playful, yet sometimes exceedingly bad, tempting people to drunkenness and sex. God of disorder. Pan is where the word "panic" originated from and was worshipped until the Muslim conquest in the 7th Century. Although Pan is where we get the modern image of the devil from, he wasn't evil [just the opposite]. In the 19th Century BC, King Herod had such reverence for Pan, he built a shrine for Pan.

Polytheistic religions do not have a devil in their religion. They believe in complicated deities, much as humans are complicated. Judaism is the first monotheistic religion. "Yahweh" (YHWH) "proclaimed" their shall be no other "gods" before me. Around the same time Israel became monotheistic, ancient Egypt following, both doing so as a last ditch effort to unite the failing Roman Empire.

....And that's just one ludicrous imbecilic idiotology that's come out of his [Tsouklos] mouth. He's not an expert on anything, has no degrees or certifications in archaeology, history, or anthropology, and the undergrad he does have is related to sports. The original Ancient Aliens history special, years before the series, and the first season of Ancient Aliens brought up valid, legitimate facts and questions, and instead of sticking to that, he single handedly turned the show into a conspiracy theorist show that has no business calling itself a documentary. He's nothing more than a snake oil salesman, and don't even get me started on the producers of the show, of which seem to have a background in reality TV and shouldn't have been involved with the show at all.

How ignorant does someone have to be to watch the show and legitimately consider the fabrications they put forth? All that needs to be said is Tsouklos and the produces have repeatedly put forth debunked theories as fact, and anyone who still finds the show interesting after that, I consider to be of below average intelligence, who care more about opinions than facts [which is the definition of imbecilic stupidity].

Joe

1/11/2015 11:15:06 am

What?! King Herod was from the 19th century BC?! Wow, now that's a novel idea! Get a clue about some of the junk you're spewing before posting!

1/11/2015 11:27:24 am

it was supposed to read "19 BC", however it seems Word changed it to "19th century BC" when spell checked.

1/11/2015 11:30:29 am

As far as "junk" goes, I wasn't under the impression facts were considered "junk". While my opinions are contained within that post, all references to historical fact are fact... if you believe otherwise, please reply back with what you believe is not fact (that's been backed up by fact checking historical sources) and if I made a mistake, I'll request the blog owner to edit my comment.

1/11/2015 01:40:30 pm

OK, how about the part where you stated "Around the same time Israel became monotheistic, ancient Egypt following, both doing so as a last ditch effort to unite the failing Roman Empire."

You stated earlier that "The devil as we know him first entered human history about 3,000 years ago and was invented when we began believing in a monotheism [a single "god"]" & then stated "Judaism was the first monotheistic religion." So you're saying that around 3,000 years ago when Israel became monotheistic & ancient Egypt followed them into monotheism, they did so as a "last ditch effort to unite the failing Roman Empire" & you don't see any issue with that "junk" theory?! Maybe you should do some research on when the Roman Empire started to "fall" & then reply back.

sylvia sylvester

2/21/2016 12:45:58 am

good for you Paul. . . I think these guys complain and don't know what they speak of either. . . The Rosecrucians use a star do they not, are they not connected to the Free Masons? Too many people fight the possibilities. . .

cody

10/10/2014 10:12:15 am

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12/2/2014 09:50:55 am

I am of like minds with JW0914, for the most part. I thought the two-hour documentary special was a fascinating exploration of information I had never heard of before, and it enthralled me. The first season revealed more archaeological information that really opened up my mind to thinking about what is possible, and to seeing ancient civilizations in an entirely new and more respectful way. And then the show went off the rails.

But even so, I have watched close to every episode. Some have been so preposterous that I've turned them off, and some have been riveting, even when the suggested information was absolutely preposterous.

I understand JW's point about the integrity of the programming given that H2 is affiliated and associated with the History Channel, but H2 clearly has departed the realm of reality for more entertaining worlds. And I'm OK with it (although I do think H2 should rebrand as something more imagination- and less history-based).

I really, really like Ancient Aliens for a number of factors:

1. It's self-consciously campy. The show presents information as if it is real, but the commentators range from eccentric to self-caricatures, and I think that's a pretty clear cue to viewers that this show is not to be taken entirely seriously.

2. It asks questions. I'm a science guy, but I have a master's degree in creative writing and I paint. Imagination is so important, and science often is as institutionalized and authoritarian as religion these days. Science, really, is the art of asking questions and discovery often involves seeing or creating connections where most others do not see them or can't imagine them being. I don't care that 90% of the questions asked by this show are insane, because 10% or so are actually worth exploring--particularly archaeological records that really turn over our idea of our ancestors as stupid on their head. And even if not for that 10%, I think we need more people in the public who ask, ask, ask the way a child does, because that encourages people to think.

3. It's ballsy. The show turns its nose up at a lot of conventions, including reason, and while I feel strange even typing that, in truth, I think there's something to be said for that. Geniuses usually are those who don't make any sense. I'm not saying the show is ingenious or features geniuses, but the process of looking at things differently could contribute to ingenious future thoughts.

4. Even if it's nutso, the show still teaches me a lot that I would not discover on my own--Golbekli Tepe, Machu Picchu, and other historic sites. The Lascaux caves. Mayan, Aztec, Sumerian, Egyptian, Norse, Celtic, and other religions. There's nothing wrong with becoming familiar with parts of reality through fictional entertainment, and that show covers this ground. I've read a lot about so many new and interesting things because the show presented little bits of information about them.

5. The art. I really like the visuals of the show--they show so much ancient art and architecture, and the bizarro animations are fun and transform what might be taught as stodgy ancient art into funny, weird, exciting, and imaginative depictions of lives or living ideas of ancient people.

I certainly understand why people knock the show. It has become a parody of itself, and especially so with respect to Tsoukalos--but that doesn't devalue the entire enterprise. Any intelligent person watching the show knows that everything presented on Ancient Aliens is not to be taken as presented. But to me it's one of the most imaginative and thought provoking things out there, and I absolutely love it. It's sort of a 'Duck Tales' comic for adults.

12/3/2014 04:31:50 am

An interesting perspective... while I agree with some parts and disagree with others, it's nonetheless an interesting perspective.

While looking at it from your point of view, I'm still unable to get past the fact this show is not only marketed, but classified, as a documentary on the History2 (H2, formerly History International) channel. I'll use an analogy here: there's a reason 60 Minutes gave Lara Logan and her crew a 6+ month suspension when they allowed their [Logan and her crew] personal opinions to influence a news story that resulted in a fabricated story from an individual on Benghazi and resulted in 60 minutes having to to retract the entire piece and apologize... it damages the credibility of the entire news show [60 minutes], and by default, it's network. This is analogous to Ancient Aliens and the History2 channel.

reginald g. payne sr. link

5/17/2018 04:22:49 pm

Whatever a person think and/or believe, is their reality, whether it is right or wrong. If anyone choose not to believe in aliens, i suggest you read, "The Day After Roswell," By colonel Phillip J. Cosa," and "The Encyclopedia of Alien Encounters," by Alan Baker.

Within 30-days after appearing on the Art Bell Show, he was murdered; although the news reported, "He died from a heart attack," the same type of heart attack, a priest died from, that appeared on the Art Bell Show. The priest claimed, "He witnessed, devil worship in the Vatican."

All the modern technology we have now, such as night vision, fiber optics, integrated circuits, etc., are all...alien technology, obtained from the Roswell crash and provided by aliens that have been working with the U.S. government for well over 60-years. Google and ask for information regarding the aliens living below the Colorado airport.

I truly believe, enough evidence is available, for anyone who want to know the truth, it is there. The people that are trying to deny the truth, probably work for the government.

According to Alan Baker's book, the U.S. government, made a deal with the aliens, to allow them to abduct, American citizens, as long as they did not harm them. According to Mr. Baker, the Stealth Bomber and other technology was given to the U.S. by these aliens.

During these abductions, eggs were taken from the women and sperm from the men. As a result, we now have a countless number of half humans and half ET's walking among us. They are not here to harm us...but to save us from ourselves.

Google and ask for information on the Indigo/Star-children. These children are the product of (approved) alien abductions. They will be the beings that will change our world...as we know it. The only reason they will not destroy our planet, with their more advanced weapons, is due to the number of nuclear weapons on the planet.

The word alien, broken down is, Ali...meaning...in Arabic...Most High...En...meaning...Entity. Most High Entity is the origin of the word alien. Fact-check it.

Shortly after the bombing of Japan, we were warned by the aliens about the type of very dangerous weapons we are using. We were told, "We are the most violent race of people...in the UNIVERSE...and if we want to become a member of the galactic community...it is a must that we change our violet, war-like ways. These beings have been working with our government...for years.