Review of Ancient Aliens S18E04 "The World on Alert"

​We are only four episodes into the new season of Ancient Aliens, so naturally it’s time to start recycling and repeating. The season premiere covered the events that led up to last year’s report from the awkwardly named Office of the Director of National Intelligence on UFOs, and this episode is basically the same thing a second time, with more discussion of the alleged global reaction to flying saucers and why some people are on alert and afraid of what UFOs might do. I can’t say I’m too excited to be covering yet another version of the same thing. Perhaps I should instead recommend Keith Kloor’s piece in Science this week profiling Avi Loeb and looking into the question of how a Harvard scientist who only a few years ago earned Chris Mellon’s ire for refusing to endorse the Navy UFO videos as anomalous became an all-in UFO nut hunting aliens in Earth’s skies.  

​Segment 1
The first segment repeats material from the season premiere about the U.S. government UFO report from last June. The show (and John Podesta) vastly overstate the conclusions of the report (Podesta is giggly as he misrepresents its conclusions) and suggest that the government had “denied UFOs” until June 2021. That makes no sense since the government has routinely stated that people see unidentified things and that they haven’t found explanations for all of them. That has been true since 1947. After this prelude, the show begins repeating information from past episodes about UFOs in other countries, starting with Chile, taken largely from a 2020 episode called “Destination Chile,” with new talking head segments dropped in. A discussion of changing levels of Japanese interest in UFOs follows with some military UFO sightings discussed. As the show notes, the Japanese defense force appears to have changed its tune in order to align itself more closely with the U.S. military, which in 2020 and 2021, was under pressure from Congress to investigate UFOs. While the show implies that the U.S. is masterminding a conspiracy of disclosure, it might more parsimoniously be said that having allies also hunting UFOs helped the Pentagon look less silly chasing flying saucers at the behest of a handful of senators enthralled by half-truths from the New York Times.
 
Segment 2
 The second segment moves its focus to the United Kingdom, starting with the U.K. government’s announcement that it had no plans to issue a UFO report and did not consider UFOs a threat. We then get a discussion of the late Prince Philip’s well-known lifelong UFO interest. To fill time, the show presents a 1955 UFO sighting from the U.K. because it occurred on Lord Mountbatten’s estate. Linda Moulton Howe asserts that there was a conspiracy within the Ministry of Defence to hide the truth about ETs and UFOs, and it casts Lord Mountbatten and Prince Philip as heroes for seeking the “truth”—and then not telling anyone about it. Nick Pope, who filed UFO reports called into the MoD part-time for a couple of years, concurs partially but suggests that the British government has not taken UFOs seriously enough.
 
Segment 3
The third segment travels south to France to discuss France’s efforts to make public information about their military’s UFO sightings. Such sightings are then discussed, with the boring sameness that a lack of evidence produces in all of these stories of sightings. I confess that I did not care much about the balls of light pilots claimed to see in the sky.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment covers UFOs in China. Honestly, after a long day, I dozed off during this segment and missed a chunk of it. The Chinese government has flirted with UFOs almost from the beginning of the Communist era, a fact noted by Soviet observers in the 1980s. As in the Soviet Union, China would either encourage UFOs interest in the Chinese public or work to suppress it depending on their strategic interests at any given time.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment is about Haim Eshed, the former Israeli space security official who claimed ridiculously that the U.S. government and a Galactic Federation of space aliens are working together at a base on Mars under a fully executed treaty, and then it discusses Paul Hellyer, the former Canadian defense minister who was radicalized very late in life by a Peter Jennings UFO documentary and became a UFO nut, repeating any nonsense about multiple species of aliens that he heard from cable TV.
 
Segment 6
The final segment moves to Brussels to discuss NATO’s expansion of mutual defense to the space sector, and the show implies that this was done because of space aliens, though it acknowledges that China and Russia are taking aggressive moves in space. Moulton-Howe suggests that there is a plan to gradually reveal alien truths over the next 30 years. That would take us to about 100 years after the first flying saucer sighting in 1947, and, frankly, that seems like a rather long time to “prepare” humanity for aliens. It only took a few years to accept the existence of whole new continents populated by unknown civilizations. You’d think aliens could be done in a decade or two rather than a century. But, hey, it keeps Ancient Aliens in business through at least 2047.