Review of Ancient Aliens S15E11: "The Ultimate Guide to UFOs"

This week, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch gained live plus same day viewers as a growing number of quarantine orders pushed the television audience still higher. This week, 2.1 million watched, with much of its 100,000-viewer growth coming from viewers under 49. This growth came in spite of a modest decline in lead-in Curse of Oak Island’s viewership, suggesting that the new show is finding an audience and will (sadly) be with us for years to come. On the other hand, Rob Riggle: Global Investigator continued its freefall, despite increased overall TV viewership, declining to just 470,000 viewers this week. Ancient Aliens is closer to the Skinwalker than Riggle, watching its audience grow as a quarantine makes Saturday viewers desperate for new content. But this episode isn’t exactly an exciting entry in the series for those more interested in the “ancient” than the “aliens.” It’s putatively a taxonomy of UFO shapes, which makes it something of a perverted Sesame Street: Triangle! Circle!

You will forgive me if the shapes and sizes of UFOs don’t interest me. My review will therefore be in the form of summary bullet points.
 
Segment 1

• The show starts with the alleged UFO sighting in Nuremberg in 1561. The talking heads don’t know the German text whose secondhand illustration they comment on. It was likely a sundog, like the one in Basel, Switzerland a few years later that they also reference.
• The show speculates whether different shapes of UFO represent vehicles for “different purposes” by one species or different vehicles used by competing species of alien.
• Saucer-shaped UFOs receive a summary discussion of their imagined history, and the show presumes, without evidence, that disc-shaped craft have an inherent but unknown “advantage” in space flight.
• Failed U.S. government attempts to build a disc-shaped craft are discussed.

 
Segment 2

• The second segment discusses the imagined maneuverability of UFOs and their supposed ability to go fast and turn hard; Richard Dolan claims that they use a “different” science that renders aerodynamics irrelevant, and David Childress claims that they generate their own gravity and/or antigravity.
• Flying saucers are compared to Ezekiel’s vision of God’s Throne, whose wheels they allege are “similar” to alien spacecraft. Even the show acknowledges that they are repeating claims going back to 1968. It is sort of cute, I guess, that they refer to Erich von Däniken by his first name now, since we are all friends after fifteen seasons.
• Travis Taylor from Secret of Skinwalker Ranch shows up to agree that Ezekiel saw a flying saucer, because he will say anything for money and has no scientific credibility whatsoever.
• Material from an earlier episode about Bob Lazar and his fake version of element 115, derived in turn from a documentary by Jeremy Corbelll, is repeated, including appearances from Corbell and George Knapp. Technically it’s not the same footage scene before, but it’s so similar it might as well be.

 
Segment 3

• The third segment deals with triangles. It rehearses that 1997 Phoenix Lights sighting, which they allege to be a triangular craft despite credible debunking of the lights as military flares.
• More sightings of allegedly triangle-shaped craft are discussed.
• The show alleges that triangles in ancient art are alien spacecraft, claims originating in an earlier episode devoted to triangles, though back then the show claimed ancient triangles were mystical rather than ufological. But as we know, Triangle Man hates Particle Man.
• Everyone on the show agrees that the U.S. military “reverse engineered” triangular UFOs to create stealth aircraft. No evidence is given except for triangles.

 
Segment 4

• The fourth segment discusses cylinder-shaped UFOs, including photographs known to be misidentified objects (including an 1870 frost formation) or photographic artifacts, which they claim are UFOs.
• The show repeats yet again a discussion of the 2017 interstellar object Oumuamua, featured several times this season alone.
• The show repeats earlier discussions of Sanskrit texts describing vimanas, or flying chariot-palaces. The show misunderstands the texts and repeats mistakes made in earlier episodes going back a decade. It is evident that the producers and main talking head have not actually read the texts even after all this time.

 
Segment 5

• In the fifth segment, a hoax video of a UFO over Jerusalem is treated as real.
• Michael Dennin arrives to discuss the imagined physics of the fake UFOs in this and other dubious UFO videos, and the show concludes that aliens must be “highly resilient” to G-forces. The show also speculates that alien aren’t physical beings but are supernatural “light beings.” Finally, it speculates that the craft have no pilots. The show considers all of these ideas more logical than admitting that many of these videos are fakes.

 
Segment 6

• The final segment discusses NASA’s plans for shape-shifting robots to explore other planets and moons, leaning into material from two episodes back about shape-shifters. David Childress literally sighs while discussing this, as though admitting that even he is tired of the repetition.
• The show vamps for time by summarizing the different shapes of UFOs without coming to any sort of conclusion. The narration states that aliens own the airspace over Earth and are the true rulers of the world.