Review of Ancient Aliens S07E04 "Alien Encounters"

Since the first three episodes of this season of Ancient Aliens has had very little to do with anything ancient or extraterrestrial, it seems that the producers decided on a course correction for episode four. S07E04 “Alien Encounters” takes us back to a more “classic” form of ancient astronautics, one in which any god is necessarily an alien, with the exception of Jesus, and UFOs are found anywhere and everywhere lights shine in darkness. In other words, this is still more repetition of what we’ve heard many times before.

We open with an examination of the 2011 Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. Since this is too recent to be ancient, the only connection to the show’s theme comes from an assertion that flying saucers were seen near the Fukishima nuclear plant. William Henry thinks that the aliens “stabilized” the nuclear plant to prevent a meltdown, and David Childress says the same thing in the form of a question but without the inflection of a question. Supposedly, UFOs were also seen at Chernobyl during its nuclear meltdown. Aliens love nuclear power, as we all know, but there isn’t even a hint of evidence for any of this. Cameras were trained on Fukishima during the meltdown crisis, and yet there is no video of these flying saucers…

David Wilcock, who believes that Jewish financiers and Reptilians are planning global genocide, says that the aliens control and plot out human history. It must be exhausting for them, planning out every YouTube video, meme, and wardrobe malfunction to keep our society moving in their preferred direction. The narrator tells us that to understand how it all works we need to review the “earliest alien encounters ever recorded”—which is a stretch since ancient astronaut theorists tell us that they need to interpret ancient texts because ancient people didn’t realize they were talking to aliens and therefore didn’t record talking to aliens.

So, we here these familiar chestnuts repeated almost verbatim from earlier episodes:

• Yahweh is actually a UFO that hovered over Mt. Sinai (S05E07)
• Gabriel is an alien who spoke to Muhammad (S05E09)

After the break, the ancient astronaut theorists discuss Constantine’s vision of the cross before his climactic battle against Maxentius at Milvian Bridge. Giorgio Tsoukalos says that Constantine saw an airplane, its wings forming a cross. The vision of Constantine is more ambiguous that the show pretends. Constantine’s contemporary Lactantius, writing in On the Death of the Persecutors 44.5, is commanded in a dream to inscribe a cross on his shields. Eusebius, another contemporary, is silent on any vision at all in his Ecclesiastical History, but in his Life of Constantine he gives the famous account of the sky vision:

But at the time above specified, being struck with amazement at the extraordinary vision, and resolving to worship no other God save Him who had appeared to him, he sent for those who were acquainted with the mysteries of His doctrines, and enquired who that God was, and what was intended by the sign of the vision he had seen. They affirmed that He was God, the only begotten Son of the one and only God: that the sign which had appeared was the symbol of immortality, and the trophy of that victory over death which He had gained in time past when sojourning on earth. They taught him also the causes of His advent, and explained to him the true account of His incarnation. Thus he was instructed in these matters, and was impressed with wonder at the divine manifestation which had been presented to his sight. Comparing, therefore, the heavenly vision with the interpretation given, he found his judgment confirmed; and, in the persuasion that the knowledge of these things had been imparted to him by Divine teaching, he determined thenceforth to devote himself to the reading of the Inspired writings. (trans. Ernest Cushing Richardson)

The trouble is that this is almost certainly Christian propaganda. It doesn’t appear in the contemporary Lactantius, who was a counselor of Constantine and would have had something to say about it beyond “it was all a dream.”

After this we discuss the Virgin of Guadalupe, a vision of a woman in white seen in Mexico in 1531. David Wilcock claims that splotches of paint in pupils of the famous image of the Virgin contains a photographic image of the people who first saw the painting. The show fabricates this with computer graphics, and everyone on the show decides that the vision of the Virgin must be real but has to be (a) an alien or (b) evil because the Virgin’s teachings do not match those of a certain interpretation of the Bible. But if the story is fake, then we don’t have to worry about any of that at all.

After the break, we talk about the storm that destroyed the Spanish Armada in 1588. Why? Weather is apparently controlled by aliens. The show blames Dr. John Dee because he claimed to be in communication with angels, and we all know that angels are really aliens. He’s been discussed on the show before, too (S06E04). Jason Martell seems to think that Dee had real contact with otherworldly beings, but no one quotes a word of Dee’s writings. Instead, Wilcock explains that the aliens (i.e., Jews) wanted to keep the English monarchy intact in order to protect Shakespeare and Newton, whose future works the aliens already planned because aliens are Anglophiles. You see, the English are the chosen people of the earth (at least until 1776), and were protected by a divine force from what William Henry calls the “darkness” of the Catholics and the Latin peoples of southern Europe.

After the next break, we discuss the origins of Mormonism. Joseph Smith made many different claims about the visions he supposedly saw at the founding of his faith, but the show pretends that none of the many variants exist and instead accepts the story of Smith’s visit with Moroni in the canonical form told by Mormons today. In other versions, every detail was different, down to the name of the angel and even the number of angels. But we know this because this segment is a recapitulation of an earlier discussion from S05E07. This leads to a discussion of angels and whether angels are really aliens in disguise. Moroni is said to have come from the Pleiades, but I’m not sure that this is an actual Mormon teaching since I see references to it only in anti-Mormon tracts from the nineteenth century. At any rate, the show insists that Moroni came to bring humanity to spiritual enlightenment, but they don’t explain why the aliens felt compelled to lie to humanity by filling the Book of Mormon with archaeologically unsupportable notions. Do ancient astronaut theorists support the claim that the Jews were the first inhabitants of America? Or that dark-skinned Native Americans committed mass genocide against white Jews? My guess is that none of them read that far to realize that’s what it’s about.

In the next segment, we talk about the way the Greek Fates controlled human destiny and compare this to other concepts of destiny and fate around the world. David Childress mentions the goat-headed goddess Mamitu and asserts that she lives in the sky with the Anunnaki. That isn’t true. She lives underground in the Underworld with the subterranean Anunnaki, the chthonic deities. (Marduk sent half to the sky and half underground at the creation.)

Not interested in pursuing this any further, Kathleen McGowan Coppens, who believes she is the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene, tells us about John Parkinson’s dream that helped inspire the M-9 anti-aircraft weapon systems of World War II. There’s nothing to this story other than the assertion that in addition to manipulating all of world history, extraterrestrials also speak to us in our dreams, like Cthulhu: “the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.” After the break, more dreams are discussed and claimed to be the result of alien transmissions that stimulate specific cells in our brains (through what, the “vibrations”?). So why did the aliens need to show up in their flying saucers and walk around in space suits if they could also mold the “fleshly minds of mammals” in their sleep? Aliens are weird.

The aliens are cosmic guidance counselors who want us to improve our technology, David Wilcock says, apparently unconcerned that he also preaches that aliens are plotting to kill us all when he’s on Russian television and on his website.

So, in sum, we (re-)learned:

• Aliens control not just our technology and our environment, but also our thoughts.
• All gods, demigods, and prophets are aliens or in league with aliens except for Jesus, but especially anyone associated with Judaism and Islam.
• There is no difference between a god and an alien except for whether they have a spaceship, and the aliens don’t always need spaceships anymore anyway.

The show claims humanity has a teleological path of ascension that will reunite us with the aliens in a quasi-spiritual New Jerusalem. Don’t tell that to David Wilcock or Jim Marrs. They still think the aliens are plotting to kills us all.