Review of Ancient Aliens S19E06: “Cosmic Impacts”

​In UFO world this week, the U.S. government said the unidentified objects recently shot down were almost certainly balloons, prompting Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Marco Rubio to take the obvious step of demanding more funding for the Pentagon office they jury-rigged to investigate UFO conspiracy theories, study imaginary superhuman aerial performance vehicles, and “replicate” alien spaceship technology. As you do with balloons. And of course Lue Elizondo and Chris Mellon claimed credit for the new awareness of balloons, disingenuously suggesting they have always been concerned about balloons and not the space aliens they have repeatedly implied were the only real threat. The public, though, seemed less interested in UFOs than politicians are; NatGeo’s splashy new Leslie Kean-fronted documentary series on UFOs, originally made for CNN, attracted only 326,000 viewers, almost all over the age of 50, in its debut hour.

​By contrast, Ancient Aliens had twice the audience last week. But this week it is swerving into territory I always felt was counterproductive: panspermia. The scientific speculation that Earth life might have been seeded by an infusion of chemicals or even microbes from beyond the stars is superficially attractive to believers in space alien intervention, but it would seem to obviate the need for ancient aliens at all. After all, if an errant meteor could produce earth life, then what did we need the aliens for? In their mythology, the aliens came later, to check up on the seed they sent out, but that seems like an extra layer of bureaucracy that an already baroque vision of history doesn’t need.
 
However, since Ancient Aliens has covered panspermia many times, technically this episode has a slightly different focus: Are aliens FedExing us technology on meteors?

​Segment 1
The first segment looks at the Barringer Impact Crater in Arizona and then discusses how asteroids and meteors have impacted the ancient Earth. Avi Loeb joins the cast of Ancient Aliens to offer his commentary, and his devolution into a full-on UFO nut is complete. He is the new Michio Kaku, who is also on hand to discuss the formation of the Earth and how comets, asteroids, and impacts affected it, particularly in terms of how they seeded Earth with precious metals “used in the electronics industry.” This, naturally, leads to a discussion of panspermia and the question of whether the nucleotides used in DNA came to Earth on a space rock. Giorgio Tsoukalos claims the “secret ingredients” of life came on meteors, and the narrator suggests that this was purposely planned by space aliens, which Tsoukalos then repeats in a somewhat confused and incoherent way. 

​Segment 2
The second segment looks at the meteorite embedded in the Kaaba in Mecca. It’s a reworking of material from a 2018 episode, right down to claiming the meteor was a communication device. The show then rehashes more material from the same 2018 episode about meteors and their worship in ancient times as divine symbols, somehow understanding less than Arthur Harvey did when he pioneered the study in an 1895 essay on “Aerolites and Religion.” Ancient Aliens then claims that Ohio’s Serpent Mound has a deep connection to Star People because it is located on the edge of an ancient crater. They then make a similar argument about Australia’s Wolfe Creek Crater, alleging that beings from the Aboriginal Dreamtime are physical space aliens.

​Segment 3
The third segment covers the interstellar object ʻOumuamua, repeating material from two 2020 episodes, themselves repeating a segment from 2019, though you will forgive me if I don’t remember which one. The only difference is that Avi Loeb is now making a personal appearance to discuss his claim, rejected by most of his peers, that the object was a piece of alien technology. Loeb also alleges that a meteorite that crashed to Earth near New Guinea in 2014 was an alien spacecraft because it was denser and harder than other meteorites. Kaku backs up the claim, though with a requisite “maybe” to avoid going too far down the alien tech road. Loeb, as you will recall, is seeking funding to search for the meteorite at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and undoubtedly he thinks appearing on this show will help that effort by communicating with the government UFO enthusiasts who have turned the series into a de facto government mouthpiece.

​Segment 4
The fourth segment visits Mexico’s Zone of Silence and alleges that various meteor strikes, UFO sightings, and technological crashes that happened there have some sort of connection, but they don’t bother telling us what. A meteor crash there brought curium to Earth, an element that doesn’t appear naturally on Earth but which does elsewhere in the universe. Travis Taylor alleges that an “advanced civilization” forged the curium “in a reactor” and sent their tech to us via meteor. Instead, reality-based scientists believe the curium to be remnants of interstellar material that formed before the sun. Ancient Aliens claims that a giant magnetic anomaly attracts space aliens to Mexico to “terraform” our planet that somehow involves directing meteorites to Earth while also visiting in UFOs in order to … well, they never quite say what they are doing or why.

​Segment 5
The fifth segment is yet another cross-promotion for sister show The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. You will remember that the show did a whole cross-promotional hour to help launch Skinwalker in 2020 and has repurposed material from its sister show from time to time. Taylor claims that the Skinwalker Ranch “phenomena” are due to the “crash” of alien technology or a meteor (he uses them interchangeably in his comments) fifty million years ago. Taylor alleges that aliens may have seeded ancient technology around the world by crashing massive rocks into the Earth to be buried while sending out electromagnetic signals.

​Segment 6
The final segment describes Loeb’s efforts to recover the 2014 meteor and his plans to use a magnet to try to collect its fragments. He then speculates in a shockingly blasé way that he expects to collect evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization in this meteor. Michio Kaku cheers him on, though cautioning that the chances of it being E.T. tech are very low. The narrator doesn’t bother to explain why aliens needed to crash meteoric “devices” into the Earth as recently as 2014 if they are also visiting us in their spaceships but suggest aliens are “directing” the “evolution of the planet” in some mysterious way.