Review of Ancient Aliens S18E20: "Return of the Egyptian Gods"

​The History channel’s efforts to salvage Ancient Aliens by moving it to 8 PM have not panned out quite the way they might have expected. The same 671,000 people tuned in an 8 just as they had at 9 on previous weeks, and the additional 1.5 million people who once watched the show when it was in its prime stubbornly refuse to return to the fold. And why should they? Even the dullest viewer must have begun to notice that the series has nothing new to say. Having run through its usual subjects three or five times over, they have finally decided to go in a new direction, with an episode aping its A+E Networks sister show Biography with a full-hour biography offering a credulous account of the life of Dorothy Louise Eady, better known as Omm Sety, a British folklorist resident in Egypt who believed she was the reincarnation of an Egyptian priestess. 

​Segment 1
The first segment shows highlights from the Golden Parade of 2021 in which the Egyptian government moved the bodies of the pharaohs to a new museum in a spectacular procession. The show rehearses the Egyptian legend of a first age when the gods walked on Earth, and then a very potted history of ancient Egypt and Egyptology leads into a biography of Dorothy Eady from the age of 3, when she fell down a flight of stairs, briefly was though dead, and developed a lifelong fixation with ancient Egypt, which she claimed came from a past life. Ryan Sprague appears on the show and asserts that falls unlock secret brain powers, including past life memories. The show does not note that there has never been any independent confirmation of Eady’s claims. Most of her claims are good educated guesses that an intelligent obsessive could have, consciously or unconsciously, produced, filtered through her fantasies and dreams, and rendered more accurate by repeated retellings and the gentle forgetting of wrong claims.
 
Segment 2
The second segment alleges that Eady wasn’t simply intelligent and hadn’t been studying all things Egyptian for 27 years by that point (for context, that is only a year less than I have studied ancient mysteries as of today) but instead was able to learn hieroglyphics quickly in 1931 because of supernatural guidance. The segment describes the failure of her marriage and her claim that a supernatural being named Hor-Ra dictated her past life to her, which she wrote automatically in demotic, a script she claimed not to be able to write. Sprague claims that her benefactor was an extraterrestrial. The show omits that Egyptologist Jaroslav Černý looked at her writing and declared it the work of a beginner learning demotic. Anyway, the show alleges that the various dreams she had about Egypt were in fact supernatural memories of a past life.
 
Segment 3
The narrator claim Eady was drawn to Abydos because of a mental connection to space aliens that the show alleges had something to do with Seti I’s temple there. The show accepts her version of events uncritically when she claimed to be able to identify texts, carvings, and features at Abydos that she had not seen, some of which she claimed to dream about. As best I can tell, no one asked the archaeologists who dug up the garden allegedly under her guidance to confirm the story, which she seems to have told in 1981, three decades after the fact. Indeed, many versions of the story only state that the garden had been discovered and them “matched” to Eady’s dream-vision.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment offers a potted history of Seti I, whom Eady believed was her paranormal demon lover and came to her both in dreams and in waking life. Sprague says Eady claimed Abydos was a time-travel portal, and William Henry falsely claims that the djed pillar of Osiris was a Tesla coil, a moldy oldie. Repeat claims from earlier episodes about Egyptian ships having the same shape as wormholes (don’t ask) follow, with the allegation that space aliens were apparently manipulating Eady’s horniness to convince her to “restore a stargate” for her handsome phantom beau.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment claims that recovering Nefertiti’s mummy is essential because she was a space alien. Fortunately for them, Zahi Hawass announced this week that he believes he found her mummy and will finish testing on it soon. Sadly for Ancient Aliens, she isn’t a space alien. Anyway, for no good reason they rehearse their favorite stories about Akhenaten (also a space alien) and his monotheistic (actually monolatrous) faith, which they claim was actually a UFO. Eady claimed that Seti (the dead pharaoh, not her son) told her that Nefertiti’s tomb was located near Tutankhamun’s. This isn’t really a supernatural shocker; having his father’s wife buried nearby would be a rather obvious guess. But either way, Nefertiti’s actual tomb has never been found.
 
Segment 6
The final segment summarizes what came before and praises Dorothy Eady, concluding, without good evidence, that she was “tuned into a direct channel of Ancient Egypt,” in Giorgio Tsoukalos’s words. The narrator says her “life’s work” was to “prepare” humanity for the return of the alien gods.