Review of Ancient Aliens S20E10 “Mystery of the Stone Spheres”

​In a busy week for space aliens, a new study reported that Avi Loeb mistook the vibrations of a passing truck for the seismograph signal of an interstellar meteor, a claim Loeb vigorously denied on his blog. Then, former AARO director Shawn Kirkpatrick said in a Zoom interview for the National Security Space Association that ufology believers in government are, essentially, a national security risk: “The thing that is most troublesome to me are the number of people in government that I worked with, that I did not know held those beliefs. And they suddenly came to my office and said ‘I’m not working with you anymore because you're part of the UFO coverup.’ They said this without evidence. But they believe this anyway. This is disturbing. This is a big red flag. How can you trust these people to make rational decisions? How can you trust them with national secrets?” Naturally, key ufologists turned to Congress to try to override the Pentagon’s accurate conclusions, and Ross Coulthart said in his podcast that two senior senators approached him while he was flitting about the Capitol to praise him and share UFO conspiracy theories about an AARO coverup, thus proving Kirkpatrick’s point.

​Meanwhile, Ancient Aliens has chosen to make this week’s episode another entry in their occasional series of episodes attributing geometric shapes to space aliens because what human could possibly have come up with triangles, circles, intersecting circles, or, now, spheres.
 
One of the targets of this episode, the Costa Rican stone spheres was first covered way back in season 5, in 2013, and nothing much has changed since I first reviewed their claims:

​… the show repeats the old canard that the balls are near-perfect spheres (they’re not) to 96% accuracy. At best the spheres are visually spherical, but in terms of mathematical precision, they are far from true. The myth of their perfection comes from a mistake made in reporting their measurements. Archaeologist Samuel Lothorp measured them with a measuring tape and reported the average measurement of each to three decimal places, an accuracy level his tape could not actually provide. Later writers mistook the average measurement for absolute measurements and declared them near-perfect spheres. Further, although Ancient Aliens claims the spheres are all of granite, several are made of limestone or sandstone. Unreconstructed colonialist David Childress refers to “jungle dwelling local chiefs” and might as well just make monkey sounds while talking about his contempt for “primitive” people.

​Segment 1
The show opens with a rundown of famous stone monuments before claiming that “perfect” stone spheres are found worldwide. Despite having a geologist on to tell us that many are natural formations, the show tells us that some are so “perfect” they must be “shaped by the hand of man.” However, aside from the Costa Rican spheres, the “obviously” manmade spheres are decidedly far from perfect. This launches us into the 1939 discovery and 1943 first academic report of stone spheres in Costa Rica and a recap of claims covered in previous shows covering Costa Rica. Hugh Newman claims that the stones look machine-made, though this is belied by the photographs shown on screen. The show wonders how anyone could move a sphere, and they are apparently unaware of the concept of “rolling.” Jim Vieira denies that indigenous people could carve the spheres without modern tools, though this is obviously untrue. The show claims to know a legend that the spheres were created by the thunder-god who is therefore an alien, but I am not aware of there being any surviving records of the legends of the makers of these spheres. When the show dealt with this subject the first time, Tsoukalos claimed that the legend referred to the spheres as “cannon balls” used “by the god of thunder.” As cannons were a European import, that marks this story as post-colonial; however, the fact that nobody knew the spheres were there until 1939, including indigenous people, means that the legends are modern constructions.
 
Segment 2
The second segment covers Bosnian stone spheres, which is exactly what followed the Costa Rica spheres in the season 5 episode this show is recreating and expanding. As I said at the time: 

Bosnian pyramid promoter Sam Osmanagich tells us that similar stone spheres found in Bosnia are manmade, but they are not very round and are just natural boulders. How do I know this? Robert Schoch said so, but Ancient Aliens won’t let him do so on their air. Schoch (a) believes demons from another dimension perform supernatural feats on this earth and (b) that a lost civilization built the Sphinx and many ancient sites, so when even he says these are not manmade spheres from a vanished civilization, you know it’s a failed claim.

​Once again, nothing has changed as the show recycles the same material except that the show is slightly more willing to concede that the spheres may be natural, though Sam Osmanagich claims they are manmade and 100,000 years old. Kathleen McGowan repeats the “96% perfect” claim originating in the measurement of Costa Rican spheres and applies it to all spheres everywhere without understanding what she is talking about. Both Osmanagich and McGowan claim the Bosnian spheres contain an unidentifiable chemical and therefore the stones are artificially produced to channel “earth energy.” Spheres and pyramids, he says, “amplify the energy” through quartz. Remarkably, none of the spheres are actually producing any measurable energy, but McGowan claims she feels “powerful” around them.

​Segment 3
The third segment discusses the more than one hundred small gold-colored pyrite-encrusted clay spheres excavated beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the show covered this exact same material in 2017, when it claimed they were ancient technology, and in 2013, when the show claimed the spheres were a star map. In reality, they were most likely meant as an early type of disco ball to make the underground chamber sparkle and shimmer by torchlight. The show repeats material about mica sheets from the 2017 episode, alleging once again that it is a heat shield, and the clam about mercury from the 2013 episode, again claiming the mercury was used in high-tech machinery. David Childress and Tsoukalos both claim the temple was a giant machine for producing electricity, even though there is no evidence of any energy being generated, nor any way to transport such energy, or any devices to use such energy. The reason liquid mercury was used is fairly simple: Water evaporates and mercury doesn’t, so it makes for a good substitute for decorative purposes where water is indicated, such as the First Emperor of China used for the model rivers in his tomb.

​Segment 4
The fourth segment covers Avi Loeb’s claim to have found micro-spherules from an interstellar object in the Pacific Ocean. Loeb believes these may be technological signatures from a piece of alien technology, but every independent review has found them to be either natural or bits of human-made industrial waste. Loeb himself appears on the show once again (they appear to be drawing multiple episodes f appearances from one interview last year), this time explicitly arguing that the interstellar object “may have been a spacecraft.” Loeb claims that the spherules contain a never-before-seen compound of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium. Lanthanum is used in making cast iron, so I’d probably put industrial waste at the top of my research hypotheses.

​Segment 5
The fifth segment repeats material from a 2018 segment about a directed panspermia claim by Milton Wainwright that tiny spheres carried life to Earth from another planet. As I wrote at the time, 

I covered this in 2015, when the claim first achieved public notice, and again in 2017 when Robert Bauval wrote about it in his book on panspermia. Josh Gates also covered it in his Expedition Unknown miniseries about extraterrestrials. Ancient Aliens itself discussed panspermia on at least four previous episodes, including one at the end of last season. Wainwright has made several unusual and generally unsupported claims for alien material on Earth, and he is a conspiracy theorist who believes that all world scientists have conspired to hide the fact that Darwin did not invent evolutionary theory.

​Segment 6

Scottish stone sphere.

The final segment discusses Scottish stone spheres of the Neolithic, which were fairly small (under 3 inches, or about 7 cm in size) and have anywhere from a few to more than 150 nodes or knobs. Over 400 examples have been found. Archaeologists do not have a consensus view on their purpose, and explanations ranging from use as oracle stones to use as bolas or for hide-working have been proposed. The show claims that the oracle stone explanation is supported by “local legend” and therefore connects to “otherworldly beings.” As the first examples weren’t discovered until the nineteenth century, the legends, such as they are, are modern inventions. The show ends by suggesting stone spheres are monuments that commemorate the “original seeding” of the planet by alien space spheres.