Review of Ancient Aliens S17E07: "Top Ten Alien Artifacts"

Once again this week, Ancient Aliens is devoting an hour to clips of past episodes arbitrarily arranged into a top-ten list. Audiences have noticed, and ratings for the series have fallen. Last week, Ancient Aliens attracted only 674,000 live-plus-same-day viewers, down nearly a third from last season’s average. This number is still much larger than most other non-news programs airing on Fridays—AMC’s History of Horror, for example, had only half as many viewers—but the audience exodus from Ancient Aliens indicates that even the notoriously loyal Ancient Aliens audience is less tolerant of reruns that it is of the usual policy of rehashing in slightly different words.
 
This week, my son came down with a virus, which left us taking care of a sick kid while trying to arrange doctor visits and COVID testing so he could qualify to return to school. He’s fine now, and the COVID test came back negative, but it’s been an exhausting week, so, like last week, I am simply going to list the topics covered and, where I remember the source, direct you to my prior reviews.

​10. The Crystal Skulls. Nineteenth century fakes mistaken for ancient. The clip comes from a season six episode, or an older one, in any case one so old the late Philip Coppens was in it.
 
 9. The Saqqara Bird. The bird-shaped Egyptian toy mistaken for evidence of an airplane. The segment reaches back farther than my near-decade of reviews. I think it goes back to season one, or even the pilot.
 
8. The Russian Nanotubes. A clip from a 2016 episode about alleged alien nanotechnology, which no skeptic has been allowed to examine.
 
7. The Dendera Bulb. Even the show admits that most experts believe this infamous Egyptian carving to be a snake and a lotus blossom, but we reach back to a 2012 episode to pretend it is a lightbulb.
 
6. The Dogu Statues. These are those clay figurines from Japan accused of being images of aliens as far back as the middle twentieth century ancient astronaut books. This clip is so old that I don’t have a record of it, so it must be from season one or two, though it appears to have spliced in bits of commentary from later seasons to judge by David Childress’s better-quality wardrobe.
 
5. The Rocket Man of La Venta. This refers to a winged statue that they claim looks like an astronaut. The brief clip comes from a 2019 episode, but I didn’t bother to record anything about it because the segment was so brief. Other researchers have indicated that the piece may be a fake since it is often said to have been bought on eBay.
 
4. The Columbia gold flyer. I’m not sure which of many episodes featuring the Columbian gold bug sculpture that ancient astronaut theorists have long claimed is an airplane came from. They cover this one a lot on this show. It probably came from the same 2019 episode used previously.
 
3. The Wedge of Aiud. A modern chunk of metal, identified either as a piece of a modern excavation bucket or a chunk of a WWII plane, mistaken for an out of place artifact from the Ice Age. The clip comes from a 2017 episode that devoted two segments to it.
 
2. The Tomb Lid of King Pakal. If there were a single artifact featured most often on Ancient Aliens, it would probably be the sarcophagus lid of Pakal of Palenque, falsely described as depicting a man in a rocket since the 1960s. The particular clip used here, featuring a much younger, thinner, better groomed, and tanner Giorgio Tsoukalos, comes from a 2012 episode.
 
1. The Elongated Skulls (of Paracas). I’m not sure it’s great optics for a show accused of dehumanizing ancient peoples to list human remains alongside statues and carvings on a list of artifacts, but while the skulls have appeared many, many times on the show, this particular clip is from a 2015 episode reviewed here.