Review of Ancient Aliens S16E05 "The Forbidden Bible"

This week, the former director of the CIA from 2013 to 2017, John Brennan, appeared on a podcast to say that he was intrigued by the Navy UFO videos promoted by To the Star Academy of Arts and Science. He said that we cannot exclude the possibility that flying saucers are vehicles driven by beings from other worlds and that we must keep an open mind. He wasn’t speaking from official knowledge, only from his personal speculation about otherworldly life, conflating the scientific probability of life somewhere in the universe with the improbable idea that large numbers of such beings are visiting us to pose for blurry selfies and sodomize the unwary. This depressing speculation from a former high official helps explain why cable TV thinks the 927,000 weekly Ancient Aliens viewers are a desirable and powerful demographic of senior citizens (the vast majority of viewers are over 50) worth catering to.

But is this the right way to keep people watching? The last few weeks of Ancient Aliens have been an embarrassing collection of repackaged segments and heavily recycled claims to try to push product during a pandemic. It was possible to watch in real time how the show’s writers packed together bits and pieces of old episodes and then, looking for ways to keep recycling, repackaged it yet again for the next. Hence, outtakes from an old episode on Sardinia were used to discuss Sardinia itself and then giants. And now that same material on the giants inspired this episode, perhaps the laziest yet, recycling previously recycled garbage on Biblical and apocryphal Judeo-Christian mythology. I trust that even the most casual viewer is familiar enough with these claims that I don’t need to highlight all the previous occurrences of their various claims about giants, fallen angels, etc. If I linked to them all, the whole review would just be hyperlinks.
 
There is very little to do other than simply list which claims they repeated this time.

Segment 1

• The segment starts in Ethiopia to rehearse familiar stories that its mythic connection to Solomon and Sheba is true. It cites Ethiopia’s canonization of the Book of Enoch as something important, mostly an excuse to rehearse even more familiar stories about Enoch, the Watchers, and the Nephilim.
  
• While it is true that the full book exists only in Ge’ez, fragments of the Greek text do exist, so it is not entirely true that it is known only from Ethiopian evidence.
• Tsoukalos claims the book describes an alien “abduction” and removal to a spaceship. Nothing in the story has anything to do with that, but if you decide that “heaven” is space or a spaceship, I suppose anything can sound like anything else.
  
• Tsoukalos claims that Zeus seizing Ganymede to become his paramour and houseboy is also an alien abduction equivalent to Enoch. I guess the alien believers really have a thing about anal probing. There’s probably something psychosexual about that.
  

Segment 2

• The second segment suggests that the Book of Enoch was omitted from Western Bibles because it was too “dangerous.” It was omitted because its theology was incompatible with emerging Christian orthodoxy, particularly in terms of the notion of sin, which Enoch ascribes to fallen angels but Christians believed came from the original sin of Eve. Both Jews and Christians of the early centuries CE rejected the notion that angels could sin, and therefore they ultimately rejected the Book of Enoch, not because of its supposed alien secrets.
  
• Much of this segment describes the story of the Fallen Angels from Enoch and tries to connect it to biblical passages. There are connections—the texts are in conversation with each other—but the show is too dumb to parse the complex intertextual discussions.
• Instead, the show asks if prophets and patriarchs who ascended bodily to heaven, including Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus, were simply abducted by aliens.

Segment 3

• The third segment deals with the Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly the Book of Giants, a fragmented text describing Enoch’s visit to the Giants before the Flood and his prophecy of their destruction.
• The segment describes text from the Genesis Apocryphon, a text that describes Noah as holding a divine radiance, such as Jewish lore ascribed to the equally saintly Seth. The show doesn’t actually know the text (they don’t even call it by its currently accepted name), so it summarizes Erich von Däniken’s faulty discussion, complete with the mistakes he made decades ago.
• The remainder of the segment shows how scholars are using technology to read damaged or unreadable parts of ancient scrolls. Tsoukalos suggests that such texts could have references to aliens and therefore this work is a corroboration of the ancient astronaut theory. That is not logic works.
  

Segment 4

• The fourth segment discusses the Genesis Flood narrative, and Kathleen McGowan Coppens mistakenly claims that Enoch’s version only washes away Nephilim. That’s not true. Everything on the Earth is killed off in both versions, but Enoch explains that the Flood was sent purposely to destroy the Giants, though a percentage of their souls were allowed to become demons to pester future humans.
• The show goes full creationists and argues that a “growing” number of experts believe Noah’s Flood really happened. It then repeats earlier episodes’ claims about finding Noah’s Ark. As ought to be obvious, there is no evidence of a Great Flood. Instead, the show tries to claim that a comet impact around 10,500 BCE was the Great Flood, despite its alleged impact being fire, not water, and a cold snap—again, not a flood. So the Flood is not a flood but is therefore true because it is literally false. Sure, whatever.
  

Segment 5

• Fuck me, this segment is about medieval pyramid myths! That’s the subject of my forthcoming book, Legends of the Pyramids, due out in August from Indiana University Press’s trade division.
• The show cites al-Maqrizi’s pyramid myth but is completely unaware that it is a somewhat bastardized copy of the version given in the Akhbar al-zaman. In fact, it isn’t even al-Maqrizi’s own work. He was summarizing earlier writers.
• Erich von Däniken falsely claims that the Islamic texts allege that Surid built the Great Pyramid and Enoch was the same as Surid. This is false, as I have shown many times. From at least the ninth century, Islam recognized Enoch as being the same as Hermes Trismegistus, another figure alleged to have built the Great Pyramid. (Originally, he and Enoch were thought to have built the Temple at Akhmim, not the Great Pyramid. That story emerged only after 1000 CE.) He was not the same as Surid in any medieval text. Indeed, Surid was roped into the story by anti-Hermetic writers to replace Hermes-Enoch.
• The show repeats a false claim, debunked many times, that Col. Vyse fabricated the cartouche of Khufu found in the Great Pyramid in 1835.
• The show asks us to believe the pyramid wasn’t Khufu’s work because “no mummy” was found in the pyramid. However, the same Arabic text the show claims as evidence specifically claims that a large number of Egyptian royal mummies were found inside, with (accurate) descriptions of what Egyptian mummies looked like, with their grave goods. You can’t have it both ways.
  
• Von Däniken claims that a hidden chamber in the pyramid contains Enoch’s written account of life before the Flood along with pre-Flood mummies.

Segment 6

• The final segment describes what they claim is a prophecy in 1 Enoch 91 that Enoch will return after a thousand years. This does not appear in the standard translation of the text. I do not recall it being anywhere in the book, but it has been a while since I read the whole thing.
  
• The show describes various claims that prophets and messiahs will come again and suggest they are returning aliens.