The Red Planet: Mars. If you’re reading this, I assume you know a good deal about the background of ancient astronaut claims for prehistoric alien activity on Mars: how Percival Lowell saw what he thought were canals on Mars—but were actually an optical illusion—and then extrapolated from that an advanced Martian civilization; how H. G. Wells used this to create the War of the Worlds; and how that in turn influenced innumerable science fiction stories like Edgar Rice Burrows’s John Carter novels. This in turn fed back into the science-mythology of pseudoscience where the occupants of UFOs became the proverbial little green men from Mars. If you read this blog regularly, you probably also know that the very first claim that extraterrestrials built the pyramids appeared in one such science fiction novel, Garrett P. Serviss’s unauthorized War of the Worlds sequel Edison’s Conquest of Mars (1898) in which Thomas Edison travels to Mars and discovers that the Martians are disciples of Zecharia Sitchin—which is to say that they keep humans as slaves, mine gold across the universe, engage in great aerial battles, and built the monuments of early human civilizations: This Land of Sand and of a wonderful fertilizing river—what can it be? Gentlemen, it is Egypt! These mountains of rock that the Martians have erected, what are they? Gentlemen, they are the great mystery of the land of the Nile, the Pyramids. The gigantic statue of their leader that they at the foot of their artificial mountains have set up—gentlemen, what is that? It is the Sphinx! […] To think that we should have come to the planet Mars to solve one of the standing mysteries of the earth, which had puzzled mankind and defied all their efforts at solution for so many centuries! Here, then, was the explanation of how those gigantic blocks that constitute the great Pyramid of Cheops had been swung to their lofty elevation. It was not the work of puny man, as many an engineer had declared that it could not be, but the work of these giants of Mars. Now Ancient Aliens S06E16 “Aliens and the Red Planet” picks up where such luminaries as Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara (author of Ancient Aliens on Mars) leave off, speculating wildly about what aliens really did on Mars. Somehow this comes very close to involving the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator. The show opens by asking why NASA spends money exploring Mars when the government has so many other things to waste money on, and then Jonathan Young of the Joseph Campbell Archives falsely states that Mars is the “biggest” thing in the night sky after the moon. This is false. Both Venus and Sirius are brighter, for starters. He and former NASA scientist Robert H. Frisbee suggest that ancient people speculated about whether intelligent life could be found on Mars, but this is also false. Mars was not recognized as a body akin to the earth until the Renaissance. Before that the speculation was whether a choir of angels lived on the crystalline sphere geocentric theorists imagined Mars to be encased within. Dante describes this in the Paradiso as the Fifth Sphere of Heaven, for example. We then hear about the ancient relationship between Mars and war, a frequent connection due its blood-red color, or so we hear. This begins with the Babylonian god Nergal, the underworld sun god of pestilence and war. He became identified with Mars due to his association with dryness, heat, and fire, things seen as being orange-red. The Greeks and Romans did not independently assign Mars to the war gods Ares and Mars, however. They were translating Nergal in adopting Babylonian astronomy. Ancient Aliens doesn’t care about that but instead wants us to conflate the planet with the god Mars. Physicist John Brandenburg tells us that whenever the Romans were at war, the doors to the Temple of Mars Ultor in Rome would be thrown open, but he is very wrong. The doors opened at the Temple of Janus, not of Mars (Livy 1.19), or, more accurately, closed to mark times of peace. The material they are falsely attributing about Augustus closing the doors to the Temple of Mars is actually about the Temple of Janus and can be found in Augustus’ funeral inscription Res Gestae Divi Augusti 13 and Cassius Dio at 51.20.4 and 53.26.5. But who expects such fine details as actually checking the primary sources. Following this fact failure, we rehearse the story of Percival Lowell and the canal-based agricultural civilization on Mars. The show does not bother to tell viewers that this was untrue. Next the show discusses the 1976 Viking 1 voyages, which it illustrates with much more recent photography from Mars. They discuss the controversial tests that appeared at the time to suggest the presence of microbial life. Given that bacteria are not intelligent aliens, there isn’t much of interest here since many scientists believe that bacteria-like life can and probably does live on other planets. After the break we go to Teotihuacan in Mexico, to a recently-discovered (in 2003) tunnel that the show says (correctly) is beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent but which they illustrate with the Pyramid of the Sun. They can’t even get this basic fact right. In the tunnel, archaeologists found clay balls covered with gold-colored flecks that the show implies are real gold but are actually iron pyrite, fool’s gold. The walls, too, had gold flecks, making the cavern twinkle and glow in a beautiful way, at least as reconstructed; the real thing oxidized into orange rust. David Wilcock asserts that these flecks were intentionally placed as a star map, which no documentary evidence suggests is even remotely true. But this lets the show discuss the Dresden Codex’s Maya calendar discussion of the celestial position of Mars and its personification as a dragon. Young then relates this to a myth of Xipe Totec involving the god peeling off his own skin to feed the starving. They wrongly equate this with Quetzalcoatl in order to link the god to comets, whose tails could be said to resemble feathers, in order to suggest that this represents a comet striking Mars and peeling off its atmosphere and crust, killing off its civilization. Xipe Totec was not a native Aztec god but one imported from northern Mexico in the Postclassic period. He therefore has nothing to do with Teotihuacan or the predecessors of the Aztecs. After the break, we travel to Mesopotamia again to discuss the excavation of Nineveh and the Library of Ashurbanipal. Here we examine the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation story, from the perspective of Zecharia Sitchin. The show wrongly asserts that the Enuma Elish is the story of the Anunnaki (it’s not; they’re barely mentioned) and that the tablets were translated just once, in the nineteenth century. That’s ridiculous. New scholarly editions have appeared regularly down to the present. Erich von Däniken asserts that the nineteenth century “professors” simply did not understand space travel and therefore missed references to “heaven” meaning “outer space.” He’s talking about the Apocalypse of Abraham, but the show misses that and jams his assertion—anomalous reference to Abraham and all—into this section on the Enuma Elish. Using Zecharia Sitchin’s ideas, David Childress tells us that the Anunnaki used Mars as a supply station en route to earth, but he conflates that Sumerians and the Babylonians since they’re all weird old people in dresses, right? David Wilcock asserts that repeated references in cuneiform tablets state that the Anunnaki originated on Mars. Prove it. Name a text. Find any reference in Mesopotamian literature to the idea that Mars was an inhabited land and not a light circling around the tin dome of the sky, as the cuneiform texts actually state and imply. Giorgio Tsoukalos tells us that we are in fact Martians because he has no sense of consistency. We are also from the Orion nebula, the Pleiades, etc. Brandenburg tells us that Mars was destroyed by a nuclear war because traces of xenon-129 can be found there, associated on earth with nuclear explosions. Mainstream scientists note that xenon-129 occurs naturally in Earth’s atmosphere, and its higher concentration on Mars could be due to its remaining behind when most of the planet’s primordial atmosphere was lost, possibly within 100 million years of the planet’s life. Contrary to assertions, xenon-129 is not produced “only” by nuclear blasts but occurs naturally as well through radioactive decay. Brandenburg asserts that “Sumerian” mythology has a myth of the gods engaging in nuclear war on Mars. It does not. After the break, we start talking about whether Mars had oceans and whether there is evidence for microbial life on Mars. But microbes are not the same as humanoids, so this is an attempt to conflate genuine scientific questions with loony theories in order to give credence to the latter by associating them with the former. This leads into a show-and-tell where Giorgio Tsoukalos interviews John Brandenburg in person about the geology of Mars since Brandenburg—who is not a geologist—tries to make the case that two mountains on Mars are the remains of pyramids similar to those of the Giza plateau. His evidence is that the Sphinx was covered in red paint and therefore has to represent the red planet. “It’s conjectural,” Brandenburg says. He points to a lump of rock that he thinks looks just like the Egyptian Sphinx, and on the model he’s made of the site he purposely exaggerates the similarities. In the original NASA photo, I just don’t see anything similar. The photo below is the original NASA image, and the Pyramids are below it. You’ll see there is nothing much they have in common. Then we hear Mike Bara talk about the “Face on Mars,” a hill that very roughly resembles a human face, an illusion made more convincing by the low resolution of the original image. Later photographs of the Face made plain that it was just a trick of light and shadow. Several of the pundits assert that NASA purposely tried to make the face look natural by taking photos of it at the wrong time of day in 1998 and 2001. This confuses me. If it were artificial, should it not remain obviously so even in broad daylight? Nevertheless, we rehearse claims that various eroded hills on the plain of Cydonia are pyramids and artificial constructions.
After the final break we go in for a conspiracy. We start with the 1997 excitement over what at the time was thought to be evidence of microbes in a meteorite from Mars. Later research suggested that these objects could have been natural formations. Again, regardless of whether these really are bacteria, this implies nothing about the existence of an intelligent humanoid civilization on the Red Planet. Instead, the narrator tells us that NASA is suppressing the truth about Mars, and a disgruntled ex-NASA employee asserts that NASA doesn’t want anyone to know that life existed on Mars. I am again confused: NASA doesn’t own Mars. Other countries are welcome to go visit, and private companies could do so if they wished. Why aren’t these pundits piling up their speaking fees and royalties and merchandising profits to fund a Mars probe to go prove that microbes are on Mars, or, if they’re on a budget, hunt up so more Martian meteorites to examine for microbes? NASA doesn’t own all the meteorites on earth either. Instead Mike Bara and Robert Bauval darkly hint that the U.S. government would hide the truth if alien life were ever proven to exist because it could destroy human civilization through panic and fear. If that’s such a risk, and these pundits truly believe it is a real danger to civilization, why does Ancient Aliens exist?
47 Comments
Scott David Hamilton
2/22/2014 03:43:59 am
The interpretation of Xipe Totec is really strange, even for Ancient Aliens. A god who flays his own skin to feed humanity, and they interpret that as... Mars losing its atmosphere? Why not a machine that produced manna that fed the Mayans and when it broke down the Mayan civilization collapsed? (Sure, that's the wrong culture, but let's not be picky.) Why not an astronaut taking off his space suit, but he's so advanced his suit is bio-organic so it can be eaten? I mean, geez, if the AA people are going to suggest all ancient symbolism is literal, they should at least be consistent about it.
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2/22/2014 03:50:51 am
It comes straight out of Bauval and Hancock's "Mars Mystery" (1998) where they use the myth to suggest that it symbolized the destruction of Mars. It's not a classic ancient astronaut claim, which is why it reads so weird.
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2/22/2014 06:29:58 am
Personally,Jonathan Young is maximum turn off.The man is closer to a New Age Guru than to a legitimate academic.He really loves listening to the sound of his own,& as a psychology professor he doesn't even realize,he is the victim of his own Uber narcissism & greed. Fame before dishonor for the man who used to teach "mythic stories & depth psychology" courses,in "transformational psychology & consciousness studies" programs (sounds like something taken from Deepak Chopra`s script book).
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Zach
2/22/2014 02:09:23 pm
I completely agree. For someone who is "supposedly" the protege of one of the most accomplished scholars and professors of the 20th century, his descriptions on mythology comes off as half-assed and suspicious. Campbell would be turning in his grave if he knew this is how his research and studies would be used.
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2/22/2014 02:29:09 pm
Zach,
Shane Sullivan
2/22/2014 07:44:16 am
"Somehow this comes very close to involving the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator."
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Only Me
2/22/2014 10:54:29 am
I'm wondering how much these guys were influenced by Aaron Spelling. Think of the premise behind Battlestar Galactica: the surviving remnants of twelve advanced, interstellar traveling human colonies, journeying to find a "mythical" thirteenth colony, on a distant planet called Earth. Sounds vaguely familiar, hmm?
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Elian Gonzalez
2/23/2014 01:42:19 am
That was Glen A. Larson, but point well taken.
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Pacal
2/22/2014 11:40:57 am
Well there is a tunnel that goes under the pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan to a small cave under the pyramid. However since they were supposed to be talking about the Pyramid / Temple of the Feathered Serpent which they illustrated by showing a picture of the pyramid of the Sun(!!??) , they deserve a smack down for that alone.
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Graham
2/22/2014 01:32:23 pm
Stuart Robbins over at the Exposing Pseudo astronomy blog has looked into the Brandenberg claims and provides good background on where they probably came from and why they are bogus.
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J.A.D
2/22/2014 02:07:12 pm
I'm a total Ray Bradbury fan!!! His eclectic Martians
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Concerning Burroughs character, not only was he transported to Mars, but he was also transported back in time by about a billion years.
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charlie
2/22/2014 04:38:19 pm
Wow, how long can they keep this disaster going? They have about run out of new things and seem to just either rehash old shows or just come along with absolute pure speculation.
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charlie
2/22/2014 04:55:03 pm
I forgot to add that I agree 100% with Zach, that Joseph Campbell would be spinning in his grace at the way this Mr. Young has abused myth. Disgusting, but I suppose he rakes in the big bucks and that IS what matters to so many in the US of A in this time period. For the record, I am a US citizen, former US Marine and a veteran of the Vietnam war, so I feel quite free to be critical of this country and the charlatans who we seem to have an overabundance of today.
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Only Me
2/22/2014 05:28:42 pm
From one veteran to another...Semper Fi, Charlie.
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You are right on that one. In the past, they were pretty much restricted to the traveling medicine shows. Only the more famous ones like P.T.Barnum or Dr. Mesmer made into full public display. With the advent mass communication, in the form of national magazines, movies, radio, and television, they now had a wider forum for dispensation of their weird and noxious ideas, theories, and products. Now with the addition of the internet and (where any nut can post their beliefs at no personal cost) that number is liable to increase exponentially.
J.A.D
2/22/2014 05:01:39 pm
About four minutes into the program we get a brief look at the Senmat star*map from 1534 BCE --- it has a solar eclipse and
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J.A.D
2/22/2014 05:39:12 pm
http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/revealed-how-mars-lost-its-atmosphere/
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Clint Knapp
2/22/2014 08:00:24 pm
An entire episode about Mars without Richard C. Hoaglund spinning tales about ancient space wars, the artificial construction of Phobos, or the "hyperdimensional torsion physics" he measures with a wrist-watch hooked up to a laptop? I must say, I'm disappointed.
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Seeker
2/22/2014 08:01:56 pm
Thank you for breaking this train wreck down, Jason. I finally cancelled my season pass to Ancient Aliens because it's gone so far off the edge, I can't even get through an episode any longer. Hopefully H2 will get the hint and finally put this thing out of its misery.
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2/23/2014 02:46:48 am
I never watch those ancient aliens things because they are screwed up in their theology and linguistics and rely on debunked Sitchin and other issues, your articles show how they can't even get their history and current archaeology right.
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An Over-Educated Grunt
2/23/2014 02:54:56 am
And again it looks like AA is going to be used as an icebreaker show for another fringe show. Any plans to look at least at the first episode of Hangar 1?
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2/23/2014 12:51:19 pm
I might check out the first episode, but it looks like it's going to be recent UFO sightings, so I probably won't do much with it.
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An Over-Educated Grunt
2/24/2014 01:40:16 am
About what I expected. I was expecting any review you did of it to be more TV criticism than anything else.
yakko
2/24/2014 10:34:19 am
I've been seeing promos for "Hangar 1". That's the one about a secret underground group of experts who present extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claims of people who see UFOs. The "group of experts" is MUFON, which is about as "underground" as the Freemasons. I might check it out, but I don't have high hopes for it. From UFO Digest:
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An Over-Educated Grunt
2/25/2014 03:01:40 am
Don't you know, your TV doesn't actually NEED all those cables. It's a conspiracy by Big Wiring to make sure you stay tied to the wall!
yakko
2/25/2014 07:09:31 pm
And I'm sure that one of those cables is the one that feeds in all the Illuminati mind-control stuff I hear tell about.
Jase
2/23/2014 03:36:30 am
Jason, do you think that you might ever publish your 3-volume "Studies in Ancient Astronautics" in e-book format? I hope that you might consider offering a package price for all 3 volumes that saves on the cost of buying each volume separately.
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2/23/2014 12:52:44 pm
It's on the list for eBook release, but I did the paperbacks before I learned how to make eBooks, so the conversion will be more difficult and take some time. I won't put them together though since they aren't really related in any way other than the series title.
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Jase
2/23/2014 06:45:41 pm
Thank you for the reply.
Jamie Eckles
2/23/2014 04:17:33 am
I kid you not. I once heard Richard Hoagland claim that the Pathfinder rover traveled to the "face" and blew it up so it wouldn't be recognizable.
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yakko
2/24/2014 10:14:14 am
That must be in revenge for the Martians blowing up so many of our probes when we first started visiting there.
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Jamie Eckles
2/24/2014 03:04:32 pm
I got the impression that Hoaxland (a pet nickname I have for him) felt
yakko
2/24/2014 06:46:50 pm
I only know him by way of his Face on Mars stuff. In my town, the Masons have all of their secret meetings in this inconspicuous little building called...well, the Masonic Temple, and it's the third largest building on the town green after the Congregational church and the library. It must be the REALLY SECRET stuff that goes on in the back of Old Navy stores. :-) I'm going to have to check him out a little more closely.
Jamie Eckles
2/24/2014 10:16:01 pm
To learn more about Hoagland an excellent place to start would be at the following link:
yakko
2/25/2014 06:56:14 pm
Oh, I think I've run across this page before. I'm quite familiar with Phil Plait and his various Bad Astronomy sites. I don't think I read much of anything on this page at the time, probably I just looked it over and then bookmarked it for later and never got back to it. I have a long list of websites in my bookmark folder labeled "Out There" which I never quite seem to get back to, since I'm always off on the next journey. 2/24/2014 08:16:06 am
Jason, you are an excellent skeptic; keep up the good work!
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Hoagland is a joke. Part of the reason he went off about Old Navy was that, at the time, they had a sale on shirts @ $19.50. Now, the only reason the number 19.5 is special, according to him, has to do with a tetrahedron inscribed in a sphere. It's a latitude, measured in degrees.
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Hoagland is a joke. Part of the reason he went off about Old Navy was that, at the time, they had a sale on shirts @ $19.50. Now, the only reason the number 19.5 is special, according to him, has to do with a tetrahedron inscribed in a sphere. It's a latitude, measured in degrees.
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Hoagland is a joke. Part of the reason he went off about Old Navy was that, at the time, they had a sale on shirts @ $19.50. Now, the only reason the number 19.5 is special, according to him, has to do with a tetrahedron inscribed in a sphere. It's a latitude, measured in degrees.
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Hoagland is a joke. Part of the reason he went off about Old Navy was that, at the time, they had a sale on shirts @ $19.50. Now, the only reason the number 19.5 is special, according to him, has to do with a tetrahedron inscribed in a sphere. It's a latitude, measured in degrees.
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Hoagland is a joke. Part of the reason he went off about Old Navy was that, at the time, they had a sale on shirts @ $19.50. Now, the only reason the number 19.5 is special, according to him, has to do with a tetrahedron inscribed in a sphere. It's a latitude, measured in degrees.
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Me
7/16/2014 10:39:34 pm
Sometimes you are annoying like all "theorists"
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Timo
2/2/2015 01:05:58 pm
I just wonder why nobody takes a shot at the TV shows that pander to the lowest common denominator. I wouldn't have a big problem if the were broadcast oN some other channel, but where I live they are shown on Discovery Channel and History Channel. I hold these channels to a higher standard since (in theory at least) are supposed to be broadcasting factual information unless they are showing a movie. Their standard plea "the views expressed in this broadcast do no necesarrily express the views of this station, etc.) doesn't count. They need to be held to a higher standard, but won't change unless we start screaming at them. The search for higher ratings is what drives this, but if those of us with a certain degree of common sense threatened to stop watching. I'm sure that the majority of viewers are like others who have posted. We are, I believe, in the majority. We deserve to be heard.
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Andrew
3/22/2016 07:52:08 pm
If ancient aliens wanted to maybe seem credible, they would mention that Mayan Mythology mentions a god who descends from the sky and gives humanity a Gift...the god is called Ah Mucen Cab. But they cant mention ACTUAL facts about mayan gods, can they?
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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