Review of Ancient Aliens S15E12: "Aliens and the Presidents"

There is an amusing anecdote about the early days of television. Near the end of the Twilight Zone’s run, the series broadcast an episode about an evil ventriloquist’s dummy called “Caesar and Me.” That episode aired in 1964, and two years earlier, the show had aired a nearly identical episode, also about a living ventriloquist’s dummy, called, appropriately enough, “The Dummy.” Both episodes used the same dummy to play the dummy. (He’s in David Copperfield’s Las Vegas museum, if you want to see him sometime.) The producers that greenlit the latter episode, Bert Granet and William Froug, started producing the show in 1963 and hadn’t remembered that their predecessor, Buck Houghton, already did the same thing in 1962. Since there was no after-market for TV shows back then, no streaming and little syndication, everyone shrugged when they found out and assumed the audience would never catch on.  

Ancient Aliens isn’t quite like that because their blatant copying and recycling isn’t an accident, and everyone can see it. This episode covers the alleged connection between space aliens and U.S. presidents. These stories have appeared many times on this show. “Aliens and the Founding Fathers” covered the colonial period. More recent episodes have latched onto Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, and all of the presidents from my lifetime, right down to Donald Trump’s interview about UFOs when he claimed to know of no evidence for them. Overall, though, this episode was a near point-for-point recreation of the pilot episode of the failed Hangar-1: UFO Files on presidential UFO involvement that MUFON and the History Channel put out back in 2014 only to see crumple beneath the weight of its incessant fakery. This was the show that made up fake documents to try to bolster its bad ideas.
 
So why cut and paste past material into this theme episode? Do you even have to ask? Executive producer Kevin Burns may not assume the audience won’t catch on, but he certainly assumes they won’t care.

 
Segment 1

• The first segment starts with Trump’s comments on UFOs to Tucker Carlson, last seen in Ancient Aliens’ Tucker Carlson-themed episode. Parts of that episode are replayed here.
• Former 2020 candidates’ views on UFOs are played.
• The show claims 36% of U.S. presidents had UFO encounters. Of the 16, however, many of the claims are ex post facto or outright fake.
• The fake UFO reports about George Washington from “Aliens and the Founding Fathers” are repeated, with no acknowledgement that the stories are completely made up. As I reported back then: “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.”
• A fireball that Thomas Jefferson hear about in 1800 is reconfigured to be a UFO. It was a meteor.
• Abraham Lincoln is claimed to have had a “galactic manifest destiny” shown to him during the Civil War, though this is another fake story created after the fact.

 
Segment 2

• The show claims Teddy Roosevelt’s neighbors saw a ball of light over his house in 1907 and this represented aliens’ endorsement of Roosevelt’s plans to develop Pearl Harbor, and thus to ensure U.S. involvement in World War II four decades later. The actual event is more mundane. A D.C. Evening Star article from 1907 said that people in Oyster Bay, N.Y. saw a stationary white light in the sky and took it for an omen of either good or evil. At this distance from events, it could have been anything, and there is no way to tell.
  
• Harry Truman is alleged to have created the national security state to prevent UFO information from leaking out.
• Nick Pope claims that “benign” aliens that guided past presidents became hostile when nuclear weapons were invented.
• Eisenhower is alleged to have signed a treaty with space aliens during what was said to be a dentist’s visit in Palm Springs in 1954. In reality, he visited the dentist, according to the world’s leading expert on presidential dentistry—which is somehow, weirdly, real. This material was discussed on Hangar 1: UFO Files, which Ancient Aliens copies almost verbatim.

 
Segment 3

• The third segment repeats material about Nixon and aliens seen in the first episode of Hangar 1: UFO Files. The material ire repeated almost verbatim, and you might as well just read my original analysis of the National Enquirer article that both shows take for truth. Ancient Aliens omits the name of the newspaper that published the story, presumably because the Enquirer is too tabloid even for them.
• Jimmy Carter’s famous misidentification of Venus as a UFO is discussed as though it were a real encounter with a flying saucer. The talking heads blame Carter for failing to disclose the truth about UFOs.
• B-roll of a fake mock-up of the James Brady Press Briefing Room is shown as though it were the real one.
• The show alleges that the military only provides UFO secrets to Republicans because Democrats don’t have a “connection” to the military. Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson were all Democrats, but somehow the show pays no mind to this fact, failing to list them among Democratic presidents. Were they promoted to honorary Republicans because they made war?

 
Segment 4

• The fourth segment focuses on former Rep. Dennis Kusinich (D-OH), who was once a presidential candidate but was never president. He’s always been a New Age flake, but abandons what remained of his dignity to appear on Ancient Aliens to talk about his supposed 182 UFO sighting at kooky New Age actress Shirley MacLaine’s former home in Washington State. In 2008, as a candidate, Kucinich claimed his sighting was “unidentified,” but here, in his post-politics role as a UFO “disclosure” advocate and celebrity, he says it was “three craft.”
• Clips of John Podesta from his appearance last year on Ancient Aliens are recycled here.

 
Segment 5

• The fifth segment returns to the idea that Republicans have special access to truth, lionizing Ronald Reagan for his UFO sighting as California governor and his failed “Star Wars” missile defense program as president.
• The show celebrates Reagan for doing the same thing that Carter did, though they heavily criticized Carter for it. Instead, they that Reagan got a pass because his aids prevented him from sharing his kooky New Age and ET ideas. Carter’s honesty in explaining why he wouldn’t disclose everything about UFOs due to national security concerns is painted as a mockable failure, but Reagan hiding his own beliefs and literally covering up the truth is somehow cagey and powerful and a new level of honesty. I don’t pretend to understand why Republicans get this treatment.
• Linda Moulton Howe promotes fake documents supposedly showing that Reagan was briefed on the many different species of alien operating on Earth.
• Giorgio Tsoukalos wants to know if Reagan knew “something” about aliens. Reagan barely knew whether he was in real life or a movie during his presidency, so I doubt it.

 
Segment 6

• The sixth segment continues the show’s idolatry of Reagan, focusing on the “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative, which they paint as an anti-UFO system.
• Although the SDI program was a failure, Ancient Aliens only admits this in passing as part of claim that it “set up” Donald Trump to create Space Force more than 25 years after its failure. No evidence for this is provided.
• Although the show literally quotes Trump as saying he saw no evidence of alien spacecraft, the show nevertheless anoints him the holder of secret truths because he is a Republican and speculates—without the criticism given to Democrats—that he is conspiring to hide the truth.
• Praise of Trump’s imagined movement toward disclosure and confirmation follows despite, again, Trump literally saying the exact opposite of what the show asks us to believe of him. Once more, Republicans get a free pass because of their supposedly unbreakable symbiosis with the military.