Review of Ancient Aliens S19E14 “The Top Ten Alien Craft”

​I can’t think of an Ancient Aliens topic I could care less about than a list of the ten most popular shapes for alien spaceships. Triangles! Circles! Rectangles! Maybe this will be a helpful primer for the legislators busy preparing for next week’s UFO hearing in the House of Representatives. Or maybe it will just be another reminder that Ancient Aliens is less sophisticated than Sesame Street and spends more time repeating the same material over and over again than any given children’s program. Maybe Congress can use the remedial help. Rep. Tim Burchett, an erstwhile Ancient Aliens talking head who will co-chair the hearing, accused “the intelligence community” of somehow scuttling an amendment he offered to require the FAA to prepare a UFO report, only to have it come out that Burchett helped accidentally spike his own amendment by voting for a change in rules that prohibited a vote on it. We have real geniuses working on UFOs.

​Frankly, the only reason I am reviewing these all-rerun episodes is because the History channel and Ancient Aliens have decided to list them as official episodes of the series and not, as in years past, special episodes under a different title. (For Nielson ratings purposes, they are designated as “specials,” not episodes, however.) The show is attracting about 650,000 weekly viewers for these reruns, which is very sad because this is about on par with episodes of new material and they have more viewers than most programming on CNN.

​This episode is in large measure recycled from a 2020 episode called “The Ultimate Guide to UFOs,” with some segments swapped out for very similar ones from other episodes.
 
10. The Flying V. A segment from a season 14 episode previously recycled in the Top Ten Alien Encounters clip show in 2021 and an episode just this year. The show references the so-called Nuremberg UFO of the 1500s, which it compares to a V-shaped craft, despite having previously called it a cigar-shaped craft.
 
9. Orbs of Light. A segment on foo fighters I can’t place; I don’t really pay a lot of attention to their UFO episodes because they are rather dull. I recognize the animations, but I don’t know which episode they came from.
 
8. Stealth UFOs. I’m not sure. This segment likely comes from a 2020 episode or else the 2013 one it drew from.
 
7. The Benben Stone. From a 2022 episode, partially excerpting a previous episode.
 
6. Rocket Ships. A discussion of Pakal of Palenque’s coffin lid, a subject discussed regularly since the pilot episode, and Buddhist stupas. This seems to be from a 2022 episode, based on Tsoukalos’s clothes and hair in the clip, but I’m not sure which one.
 
5. Jet Packs. The brief clip of a likely fake statue of the “Rocket Man of La Venta” comes from a 2019 episode and was previously recycled in a 2021 clip show.
 
4. Acorn-Shaped Craft. A segment on the Kecksburg UFO similar to one seen in a previous 2021 top-ten clip show, recycling a 2018 episode, itself recycling previous episodes. The specific segment used here is, I believe, the version that aired in a 2022 segment.
 
3. Floating Cities. This segment continues a discussion of vimanas and other Sanskrit material begun in the 2022 segment just referenced. It’s from the same episode and the same segment of that episode.
 
2. Cigar-Shaped Objects. The fourth segment of a 2020 episode uncritically accepting a misunderstood 1870 photograph as recording an alien spaceship, a claim repeated in a 2021 segment.
 
1. The Flying Saucer. I’m pretty sure this is excepted from the first and second segments of the 2020 episode used throughout this edition of Ancient Aliens, but frankly Kenneth Arnold and Ezekiel’s vision are covered so often, it’s hard to tell. It matches my notes from the 2020 episode, though.