Review of Ancient Aliens S07E03 "The God Particle"

Ancient Aliens has clearly run out of topics that are (a) ancient and (b) related to aliens. As a result we got this episode, S07E03 “The God Particle,” about the discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN in 2012. My grasp of particle physics is not nearly as good as my understanding of ancient history, and it is that disconnect between the knowledge of the audience and the facts that stand behind the speculation that allows ancient astronaut theorists to insert aliens into the very fabric of the universe, where they take on the role of God. You will forgive me if my comments are rather truncated since I’m not at all familiar with the physics behind the Higgs Boson—though neither are ancient astronaut theorists.

The more I think about it, the more telling it is that the show has permanently retired the old Ancient Aliens title card, which featured a faux-Egyptian tomb wall, in favor of the new blue one that shows the cosmos bathed in the blue light of God. The show isn’t about ancient times anymore but rather cosmology, in a bastardized sense.

We open with the on-screen text of Genesis 1:1 merged with 1:3 so God’s first act is now to make light, which the show likens to the Big Bang through on-screen visuals. The show equates religion and sciences as two ways to seek out the origin of all things. The show debates whether God was responsible for the Big Bang, and the degree to which it is appropriate to attribute aspects of physics to divinity. Ariel Bar Tzadok, the ancient astronaut rabbi, claims that religion and science must come together, and science needs to assume religious claims (myths) are true so we can find the real origin of them.

Next we describe the Large Hadron Collider and recite the old fears from 2011 and 2012 about whether its activities might have destroyed the earth. (It didn’t.) We then get a recap of the announcement in 2012 that the Higgs Boson had been discovered, and the implications for physics about the importance of the particle for understanding how particles gain mass. The show wants us to call it the “God Particle,” even though scientists themselves don’t use the term.

Ten minutes into the show, and nothing alien or ancient has been discussed. Giorgio Tsoukalos in fact tells us that all of this—including the ancient astronaut theory—is all about discovering quasi-religious truths about cosmology and the origins of all things. It was a very strange ten minutes that tried to marry spirituality to physics in service of (presumably) aliens, who in theory ought not to be religious beings at all.

After the first break, we go to Chandigarh, India to review the Vedas. Why? Subhash Khash, an Indian physicist, falsely claims that the Hindu Vedas have remained stable—to the letter—for more than five thousand years. They aren’t that old, or that stable. And Jonathan Young of the Joseph Campbell Archive claims that the Vedas are believed to be pre-human, which I believe he got from Blavatsky’s Books of Dzyan. The formation of the universe from a cosmic egg in the Rigveda is likened to the Big Bang Theory.

Just for your amusement, here is the actual Rigveda creation hymn, from Hymn 129:

1. Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.
What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water?
2 Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day's and night's divider.
That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever.
3 Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.
All that existed then was void and form less: by the great power of Warmth was born that Unit.
4 Thereafter rose Desire in the beginning, Desire, the primal seed and germ of Spirit.
Sages who searched with their heart's thought discovered the existent's kinship in the non-existent.
5 Transversely was their severing line extended: what was above it then, and what below it?
There were begetters, there were mighty forces, free action here and energy up yonder
6 Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The Gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?
7 He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,
Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.

(trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith)

Not exactly as advertised. So is the Higgs Boson “desire,” “breath,” or “warmth”?

Then we lie about Genesis, claiming that Genesis 1 matches the Big Bang Theory and the Higgs Field! Young claims that in Genesis light emerged “first,” and the Higgs Field transformed it to matter. This is a lie. Genesis 1:1-2 clearly says that God created the heavens and the formless earth before light and that the cosmic waters already existed. Light doesn’t come until verse 3. Why lie about something so simple?

Next we claim that the author of the Vedas was an alien who encoded the Higgs Boson into the text given above, which is ridiculous since no boson is in there.

After the break we talk about the Greek scientist Democritus, who studied under the magi, and invented the atomic theory of matter. The show asks how Democritus could have known atoms exist just seconds after an expert explained that he didn’t know anything about atoms but rather did a thought experiment about how many times a piece of matter could be divided until reaching a fundamental unit that could not be split. Democritus also speculated about other worlds—as many ancients did—but the show wants us to think of his philosophical speculations as contact with other planets or dimensions. David Wilcock, whom we learned this week is a 9/11 truther who believes a cabal of international financiers is planning a global genocide—speculates that Near Eastern priests taught Democritus alien secrets. The narrator tells us that Democritus probably had nothing to do with his own discoveries but was merely a stenographer for aliens.

As we go to commercial, the narrator tells us that this all has something to do with the Mayan calendar, which the show illustrates with a completely fake graphic based on the Aztec Sun Stone but with the central medallion replaced with a Maya royal relief.

After the break, we travel to Palenque, Mexico, home of Lord Pacal’s rocket ship coffin lid. But this time we aren’t interested in that. We get another view of the fake Mayan calendar as we get an overview of the Mayan Long Count calendar. The show discusses the December 21, 2012 cycle change—but Ancient Aliens declines to explain its own role in the doomsday panic of that year. The show did a whole episode in 2012 on how the world would end, which everyone but Tsoukalos agreed with. Now they revise their doomsday position—and David Childress tells us that the Mayan calendar actually predicted the discovery of the Higgs Boson and its potential to explain “our place in the universe.” That’s a bit removed from his 2012 claim: “It’s hard to know the future—what’s going to happen at the end of 2012—but it seems that perhaps the Mayans had some glimpse into the future that we have yet to find out.” Somehow or another once the date passed Childress remarkably discovered just what that future was—right after it happened. Funny how predictions tend to work that way. It couldn’t be because he was trying to fit the facts into an ideological idea for which there never was an actual prediction, could it? Of course not. That said, the “experts” who are so confident about the real meaning of the Maya calendar only became confident after their last set of claims fizzled and prophecy failed.

William Henry tells us that a Mayan carving of the World Tree shows sap, and this sap is the Higgs Boson, so therefore the tree shows we can make wormholes (branches) to other dimensions.

After the next break, the show tells us that a statue of Shiva the Destroyer stands outside CERN’s headquarters in Switzerland. It depicts Shiva dancing within a circle of flames, representing the cosmos. It was installed in 2004. There is no conspiracy about it, however. The Indian government gave it to CERN to symbolize the close cooperation between CERN and India. The Nataraja, or dancing Shiva, statue was meant to symbolize the churning of the cosmos, which the Indian government saw as an appropriate representation of physics.

Anyway, the show tells us that Shiva is an alien and his destruction of the universe refers to the Hadron Collider breaking apart subatomic particles.

At least this episode was better than the last time Ancient Aliens discussed the Large Hadron Collider. In S4E09 “The Time Travelers” in 2012 Tsoukalos claimed that the Aztec calendar predicted its existence because both were sort of round. Oh wait: It isn’t. This time Jason Martell tells us that the circle of flame surrounding the Nataraja is the circle of the Large Hadron Collider when its long tube is viewed head-on, and Tsoukalos agrees!

Large Hadron Collider (Boston.com)

Nataraja statue (LACMA).

The show finishes by speculating about what improvements to the Large Hadron Collider will reveal. The show tells us that adding more energy to the collider could create a black hole or even destroy the entire universe, kind of like the claims made for the collider back in 2011. David Wilcock, New World Order believer, speculates that the collider might help humanity—which I guess for him is the evil cabal of financiers—build a new universe. Then everyone throws up their hands and says we don’t have any idea what the collider might cause to happen, good or bad. The narrator says that aliens might have planted the “seeds of knowledge” to invent the Large Hadron Collider, which seems like an awfully specific thing to have spent 10,000 years plotting for.

Couldn’t they have just run a school for Babylonians and trained some kids in physics to get this done faster? I will never understand the aliens’ plots, but it’s a good thing David Wilcock does. That’s how we know, as he told Russian television, that the good aliens use earthquake weapons to destroy the underground bases of the New World Order and their international financier allies to stick it to the evil aliens, who have a treaty with the U.S. government authorizing anal probing.

You know, plot of the The X-Files.