Review of Ancient Aliens S20E06 “The Top Ten Alien Disasters”

​I’m not sure why I bother with these reviews anymore. Ancient Aliens doesn’t seem interested in producing actual content, so I don’t see much reason to review the clip shows they have substituted for a real season of television. This episode’s theme is disasters, which is what Ancient Aliens has been for most of its run. The idea of aliens being associated with world-changing catastrophes is a very old one. As Chris Aubeck noted in his 2022 book Alien Artifacts, one of the very first ancient astronaut theorists, the Baron d’ Espiard de Colonge, made similar claims in his 1865 book Le Chute de Ciel (The Fall of the Sky). He wrote that meteors had devastated the ancient earth and brought space aliens down. Ancient humans remembered these aliens as the monsters, demons, giants, and gods of mythology. These alien gods gave humanity sophisticated science and interbred with humans until another cataclysm destroyed Atlantis and the world of the Nephilim/aliens. And even at that early date, the good baron had already mixed his ideas with significant racism, claiming the white race was the most intelligent and the only one with divine alien ancestors, and thus the only one with real science. 

​The ten disasters the show attributes to aliens are:
 
10. The Fukushima Nuclear Accident
9. The Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster. Both 9 and 10 are from the same segment of a 2014 episode.
8. The Silver Bridge Collapse. I don’t remember which of the half-dozen episodes with segments about Mothman this discussion of the fictitious monster came from.
7. The Dinosaur Extinction. Although they did a 2012 episode on dinosaurs, this is from a 2023 episode on asteroids.
6. The Tunguska Explosion. I remember the segment, which incorporates material from “Aliens and Evil Places,” but I didn’t cover this particular segment when it aired in 2011 or when it was reused in whatever episode this version came from.
5. The Ten Plagues of Egypt. I think it’s from a 2013 episode on magic since it focuses on Moses’s magic staff.
4. The Ancient Nuclear War. This segment on Mohenjo Daro has made the rounds. Various versions appeared in the 2009 pilot, a 2017 episode, another 2017 episode, and a 2019 episode, and each time they reused the fabricated Sanskrit texts ancient astronaut theorists cobbled together in the 1960s.
3. The Black Plague. A segment on the Black Death from a 2019 episode on how aliens are responsible for all plagues and diseases that aired with unfortunate timing a few months before the COVID pandemic.
2. The Disappearance of Atlantis. Who knows which of the dozens of mentions of Atlantis this came from. It’s from sometime in the middle period, after Childress got a makeover and Tsoukalos started showing his age, but before the pandemic changed their filming style. Whatever this was cobbled together from, it features newer footage of the older Tsoukalos restating a claim he first made in a 2010 episode about Atlantis being a giant spaceship.
1. The Great Flood. Another topic so frequently discussed on Ancient Aliens, I couldn’t identify which episode it came from except that Irving Finkel appeared in it, allowing me to connect it to a 2020 episode on primeval times, or barring that a 2023 episode on lost civilizations.