Review of Ancient Aliens S19E09: “Aliens in Our Airspace”

​The longer Ancient Aliens has been on the air, the less time they spend on “ancient” material. It’s been many years since the title accurately described the series, and at this point, the show is more or less a catch-all garbage dump for whatever UFO or paranormal material they can shovel into the void. This week’s episode revolves around supposed mysteries involving airplanes, ranging from pilots witnessing UFOs to the disappearance of whole planes. As you might notice, airplanes are not terribly ancient (the show’s claims about prehistoric flying contraptions notwithstanding), and I am growing increasingly tired of UFO stories. Forgive me, but I don’t have the energy to detail every UFO sighting in this week’s episode. Aerial paranormal paranoia is not my area of expertise, so this review may be more of a list than an analysis.

​So, without further ado: Reptilians on a Plane.
 
Segment 1
We start, as is seemingly required by law, with the 2017 New York Times report about the Pentagon UFO investigation led by Lue Elizondo (that the Pentagon denies had any official recognition), and this leads from military UFO encounters to a discussion of civilian UFO encounters. Some old UFO sightings involving commercial craft are rehearsed without evidence, including one in Alaska in 1986 that involved an FAA investigation into a commercial pilot seeing some lights in the sky. While the crew of Japan Air Lines Cargo Flight 1628 saw only lights, Captain Kenju Terauchi claimed to see craft with thrusters and other technological aspects. Other planes in the area saw nothing, and Terauchi was a known “UFO repeater” who claimed multiple sightings of spacecraft, suggesting to skeptics that he was a fantasy-prone personality.  

​Segment 2
The show returns from commercial and wrongly states humans have only had an aerial view for “a hundred years or so,” apparently forgetting about balloons, which have carried humans into the sky for centuries. Another UFO sighting from a plane is featured next. Micah Hanks appears—is this his first time?—to complain that “traditionally” the government hasn’t cared to investigate commercial pilots’ UFO sightings, so a civilian ufology group, NARCAP, concluded that the UFO in question was a super-craft with a plasma radar-repelling shield. Uh-huh. Then a 2006 UFO sighting over O’Hare Airport in Chicago is rehearsed. Steven Greenstreet appears on the show to note that the FAA concluded that the sighting was a cloud and to dismiss the conclusion, while the History Channel has covered this twice before, on UFO Hunters and Hangar 1. Greenstreet says the weather conditions weren’t right for a hole-punch cloud, the formation the FAA fingered, but Dr. Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium, told the Chicago Tribune in 2013 that the conditions were perfect for that type of cloud formation. 

​Segment 3
The third segment is another collection of UFO sightings from planes. The longest of them involved a sighting off the Oregon coast in 2017 that involved scrambling military jets to intercept the objects, which allegedly shot off at high speed when the jets arrived. The show dryly notes that the government did not investigate the sighting, and neither did they, offering no evidence that the witnesses who described indistinct white objects in the sky saw alien spacecraft, or, indeed, any craft at all. All we have is a recording from a pilot who describes, contra this show’s account, the white object as looking like “an airplane.” Not exactly a flying saucer. 

​Segment 4
A Mexican UFO sighting near Mt. Popocatépetl is presented, with claims that the UFOs disabled Carlos Antonio de los Santos’s small plane’s landing gear and that Men in Black tried to intimidate de los Santos into silence. The reenactment footage used and some of the wording in the narration were reproduced from The Unexplained Files. I even went and double-checked the footage. It is the same, and Ancient Aliens’ credits indicate they bought footage from Warner Bros. Discovery Access. Unexplained Files aired on Discovery’s Science Channel in 2013.
 
Segment 5
Another segment, another plane. This one claims a small plane hit a UFO in 2002 and crashed, killing the pilot and leaving no trace of the UFO behind except for strange “red markings.” The show offers no insight into the crash, and indeed seems more interested in complaining that the FAA didn’t do enough to investigate what the plane hit than in searching for evidence. Therefore, I won’t bother to care either. Some suggested the plane hit a small drug-smuggling craft.
 
Segment 6
The final segment summarizes the episode, speculates that the government doesn’t want to alarm the public about aliens targeting our planes, and praises NASA for investigating UFOs, all while reinforcing the assertion that there is a “threat” to aircraft from space aliens that is somehow also a glorious moment of contact with cosmic wonder.