Review of Ancient Aliens S19E04 “The Power of the Obelisks”

​After a week away, Ancient Aliens returns with another instant rerun episode, this time focusing on obelisks. If it seems familiar, it’s probably because they did more-or-less the same episode way back in season 5, under the title of “The Monoliths.” Back then, ten years ago, the show offered such stupid faux insights as the false claim that a group of monoliths is called a “megalith.” The show remade that episode last year as “Mystery of the Standing Stones.” Have they learned anything in translating the earlier episodes focused on standing stones into a new episode specifying only pointy standing stones? It’s Ancient Aliens. What do you think? At least since season 5, if not earlier, Ancient Aliens has falsely asserted that obelisks were piezoelectrically charged power generators feeding electricity to a wireless atmospheric power grid. Guess what they focus on in this episode.

Segment 1
The show opens with a brief history of Western powers removing Egyptian obelisks and erecting them in their own cities. Andrew Collins claims that this is because of the “inherent power” of the obelisk, not the symbolism of asserting one’s superiority to ancient greatness. The show claims all Egyptian obelisks are “perfect,” though there are plenty of examples of errors and imperfections, from an obelisk that cracked before being erected (seen a few minutes later on this same show) to the imperfect angles of the pyramidion atop the very obelisk on screen as the talking heads discussed perfection. A repeat claim about the pyramidion representing a flying saucer occupied by space aliens follows with animation from an earlier episode.
 
We then move to Aswan to look at the quarry where Egyptians mine red granite for their obelisks, and the show repeats the tired argument that engineers are “baffled” by the transport of such heavy rocks. The show at least acknowledges this time that the Egyptians used manpower and ropes to move them, just as inscriptions show, before asserting that modern people have “failed” to move obelisks (Egyptologist Ramy Romany happily claims no one modern people can move one without machines) and therefore only “levitation” with white powder was used instead. Here Giorgio Tsoukalos is wildly misrepresenting a fanciful story told not of obelisks but of the stones of the Egyptian pyramids in medieval Arabic literature: “It is said that the builders had palm wood sheets covered in writing, and after having extracted every stone and having it cut, they placed over each stone one of these sheets; they then gave a blow to the stone, and it traveled far beyond the reach of sight” (Akhbār al-zamān 2.2, my trans.). The show manages to forget that Ancient Aliens itself admitted only minutes earlier that the Romans moved the same obelisks all the way to Rome and Constantinople using the same methods that they deny the Egyptians could have used.  
 
Segment 2
The second segment has physicist Michio Kiku continue to sell out what remains of his reputation by alleging, falsely, that the Egyptian obelisks’ granite made them into “lightning rods” via the piezoelectric effect acting on their quartz to absorb electricity, and Robert Schoch claims the electricity came from plasma. Somehow, despite still being granite, unchanged since ancient times, they mysteriously stopped being electric. This leads to the long-debunked allegation that the Great Pyramid was a power plant feeding electricity to obelisks and a bunch of mystery-mongering claims about the Great Pyramid’s “precision” engineering originating in nineteenth-century pseudoscience and Chris Dunn’s Giza Power Plant speculation, which, despite its modern gloss, is a reworking of a Victorian idea about the pyramid as a water-pump. He swapped out some of the steam for microwaves, but like his predecessors fails in explaining how, precisely, anyone operated such a device or how such power was controlled or broadcast, all while leaving no trace of the power, its conduit, or its utilization.

​Segment 3
The third segment recycles last year’s discussion of conspiracy theories about Nikola Tesla generating his wireless electricity technology from an expedition to the pyramids conducted by J. P. Morgan. As I mentioned last year, “Morgan really did go to Egypt on vacation, but he paid workers to excavate a Christian cemetery, not pyramids. The conspiracy theories derive from E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, which made up a pyramid expedition for Morgan. Morgan’s vacation in Egypt came a decade after Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower experiments, so it’s unlikely Morgan was funneling information to Tesla, with whom he had a falling out, especially since Morgan died shortly after leaving Egypt.” Travis Taylor, the former “chief scientist” for the U.S. government’s UFO effort, alleges that Tesla had secret knowledge of obelisks’ ability to generate power and feed it into a global wireless alien power grid. The segment ends by revising its previous hypothesis to allege that obelisks are instead “communication devices” that delivered wireless messages to flying saucers. How? No one cares to think through that conundrum. Are you supposed to turn them off and on to pulse out Morse Code? 

​Segment 4
The fourth segment turns to Heliopolis and calls the Egyptian gods aliens before turning to Moses in order to assert that the Jewish leader stole the alien secrets of the Egyptian gods and ran off to the Holy Land with them. This turns into a discussion of the Ark of the Covenant, which the show bizarrely claims uses the secret power of obelisks. They spin through so many weird claims, it’s difficult to follow them all. Suffice it to say, it’s a repeat of material from segment 4 of a 2017 episode, in which a painting of a Djed pillar is mistaken for a schematic of the Ark of the Covenant.
 
Segment 5
In the fifth segment, we move ahead by a millennium or two and move to the Kingdom of Aksum in modern Ethiopia to look at that culture’s large standing stones, which were sometimes carved to look like tall buildings. The show falsely claims that the Axum (the city is spelled differently from the kingdom) obelisks—actually stelae, not obelisks—used the secrets of Egypt, which is its excuse to rehearse the familiar story of Axum’s claim to house the Ark of the Covenant. You’ll remember much of this segment’s Ark discussion from segment 4 of an episode last year, when they showed and almost verbatim version. Here, the show claims the obelisks originated with Egypt, and it’s half-right, but for the wrong reasons. The Kingdom of Aksum probably borrowed the form from the Kingdom of Meroe, the Kushite kingdom in Nubia, which was in turn inspired by Egypt. But as each culture borrowed from the previous, the form and function changed. 

​Segment 6
The final segment looks at the Washington Monument, the largest obelisk-shaped structure in the world. It is not, of course, a standing stone but a building constructed to look like an Egyptian obelisk, in imitation of ancient symbols of power. Hugh Newman asserts that obelisks have a secret power connected to geodetic connections to Egypt and the truth about them is being hidden from us. Some other talking heads say that because the pointy part faces upward, obelisks connect us to the stars and space aliens. The narrator asks if obelisks are a secret high technology our “innate” emotional connection to “our alien creators” compel us to spread to power positions worldwide.