Review of Ancient Aliens S20E01: "The Top Ten Alien Influencers"

​We are a few weeks out from the fifteenth anniversary of Ancient Aliens, whose pilot special debuted in 2009. The weekly series bowed the next year, and over the course of fourteen years and twenty seasons, the show gradually shifted toward a hybrid model. Where once the series separated its clip shows into distinct programs with different names, like Ancient Aliens Declassified or Ancient Aliens: Ultimate Evidence, now the mothership has absorbed the patchwork episodes into itself to pad its episode count and stretch a typical 12-to-16-episode season into six months of content. But, as best I can tell, the last time Ancient Aliens opened a season with a clip show was back in season 8 in 2014, and even then, it was only on a technicality: The History channel renumbered the episodes after the fact and retroactively made what was originally broadcast as S06E20 into S08E01. (The whole of season 7 was carved from the second half of season 6.) With everything happening in the UFO field over the past year, the idea that Ancient Aliens would open their season with a clip show speaks to the sclerotic bankruptcy of an enterprise that has now subsisted on fumes for the majority of its run. 

​Tonight’s stupidly titled episode, “The Top Ten Alien Influencers,” purports to rehashes segments from previous episodes about “teachers” who supposedly transmitted cosmic secrets to humanity, either through the influence of aliens or by being secret extraterrestrials themselves. 

​10. Watchers. But of course. Nothing appears so often on Ancient Aliens as the Watchers and the Book of Enoch. Who knows which episode this extremely short clip originally came from since they have repeated the same material for fifteen years.
 
9. The Kami. A segment on Japanese mythological beings. I’d guess it came from their 2017 episode on Japan, which covered the same material about a divine crow.
 
8. The Kachinas. Segments about the Hopi tales of the Kachina appeared in season 6 and season 18 among others. I imagine this segment was from season 18 since Tsoukalos looks older and more grizzled in this clip.
 
7. The Telchines. A segment about Greek fish-men who did metalworking. This is an old segment I didn’t remember from a 2014 episode.
 
6. Nommo. Made famous by The Sirius Mystery, the Nommo have appeared on the show many times. This segment looks like it was edited down from a 2019 episode.
 
5. Baiame. I didn’t use the name “Baiame” when I wrote this segment up in 2016, but it was the second segment of “The Wisdom Keepers.”
 
4. Imhotep. Another figure frequently discussed on Ancient Aliens, this segment about the famed ancient Egyptian architect and model for Hermes Trismegistus seems to be part of the same segment excerpted back in July for a previous clip show.
 
3. Akhenaten. I believe the show has done segments about Akhenaten at least nine times over the years, with countless minor references besides. As best I can guess, the segment is excerpted from the lengthiest of these, in a 2014 episode.
 
2. J-Rod. The show has discussed the alleged alien employee of Area 51 in two episodes, in 2014 and again in 2023. It’s hard to tell which this segment draws from because my DVR crashed that day back in 2014, so I didn’t see the complete original segment, but a brief glimpse of the date “2022” on screen, Tsoukalos’s graying hair, and the appearance of Alejandro Rojas as a talking head would imply it’s the 2023 version.
 
1. Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Your guess is as good as mine why a segment from this 2023 episode about Luis Elizondo, David Grusch, and Congressional interest in UFOs is in a show about alien influencers. What are the UFOs teaching us? The show does not say.
 
A small final note: For many years, the History Channel has added three extra minutes of commercials to an already thin Ancient Aliens runtime to push its ending past the ten o’clock hour. This year, they have added a fourth extra minute of commercials, straining even my famously infinite patience with the sheer volume of commercials. 23 minutes of commercials to 41 minutes of content is a ridiculous ratio. I may start recording episodes to watch on fast-forward to get this miserable task over with faster.