Review of Ancient Aliens S20E11 “Mysteries of the Maya”

​After a three-month hiatus, Ancient Aliens returns with a “new” episode, but you would be forgiven for thinking it another rerun. This episode, “Mysteries of the Maya,” can easily be confused with 2012’s “The Mayan Conspiracy” and 2019’s “Secrets of the Maya.” The show covered the Maya in at least fifteen other episodes, according to a 2019 History Channel playlist. The number is undoubtedly higher now. It’s depressing to think that I have been reviewing this show for almost fifteen years and have spent at least ten of them complaining about the endlessly recycled content. And yet, it’s still important to cover this unfortunately influential show. Just last week, Ancient Aliens superfan Danica Patrick went on a podcast to rant about Reptilians and dimensional rifts and vast conspiracies, and Congress is still trying to hunt crashed flying saucers and dead aliens while Tucker Carlson panics about an ancient lost cryptoterrestrial civilization, and this is what America’s chattering class ignores as voters lap it up and use it to make decisions that may send the world into a doom spiral. But, hey, Giorgio Tsoukalos’s hair sure is funny, right?

​Segment 1
We open with a potted and rather boring history of the Maya and especially the academic study of the Maya, emphasizing pre-1960 ideas and presenting developments in Mesoamerican archaeology since 1960 as recent revelations. I suppose for History’s audience (the vast majority of whom are over 50), it is “recent.” (The show relies on its handful of pet Mesoamerican archaeologists, each of whom has appeared several time before.) The Maya calendar is discussed, including the supposed Maya Apocalypse of 2012, here debunked and retroactively revised into a “transformational event,” and Maya knowledge of astronomical precession. The destruction of Maya literature in the early colonial period is discussed, with speculation that lost books might exist somewhere in forests of the Yucatan. 

​Segment 2
The second segment covers the Maya codices, and again events from far in the past are called “recent.” Maya writing has been well understood for more than half a century, but the show claims this happened “only recently”—even while admitting the timeline involved. The Popol Vuh is summarized, with emphasis on Kukulkan, the flying serpent, whom the show calls an alien in a spaceship. The show declines to note that the Popol Vuh we have today was composed in 1588, from older sources, but under colonial influence. The segment basically repeats the parallel segment from “The Mayan Conspiracy,” sometimes point-for-point. The ending, about Chichen Itza and its shadow serpent illusion, is borrowed largely from a 2022 episode.

​Segment 3
The third segment discusses the city of Copan, and much of the discussion of the statues and relief carvings at the site, claimed to look like men in spacesuits, is borrowed from a 2020 episode on “The Mystery of the Stone Giants” and from a segment on 18-Rabbit from a 2014 episode. The ridiculous claim that King Pakal of Palenque’s coffin-lid depicts him in a space capsule, debunked many times over the past 60+ years, has been repeated often enough to be familiar to even the most casual viewer. Giorgio Tsoukalos tells us that he Maya netherworld, or Xibalba, was “recently” discovered to be the Milky Way, so Pakal flew in a spaceship into outer space. Again, “recently” is used rather loosely, as the idea of the dark spot in the Milky Way as an entrance to Xibalba has been known for my entire lifetime, if not before. For Ancient Aliens, knowledge froze around 1960 and anything that happened after is a shocking new revelation.

​Segment 4
The fourth segment discusses the excavation of the city of El Mirador starting in 1978. Again, the show gets very excited about the idea that half a century ago (“recently”) archaeologists admitted to being “wrong” about Maya history and that massive pyramids predate the Classic period, thus suggesting to the show’s talking heads that civilization in the Americas began as a way to worship space aliens. No, I don’t quite understand the logic either. I learned about all these pyramids in college 25 years ago, so I am not sure what is supposed to be new or secret.

​Segment 5
The fifth segment covers LiDAR scans of the Mirador basin revealing previously unknown Maya cities in amazing numbers (around 110,000 structures), and Travis Taylor shows up to compare the Preclassic Maya civilization to Ancient Egypt, despite having no knowledge of either. The show discusses elevated causeways that connected these ancient cities, and the show lurches awkwardly from astonishment at what real archaeologists discovered (this time in actual recent years—2022) to claiming that the “evolutionary theory” of the Maya is wrong so aliens taught them to build cities. The narrator says the whole of the Americas were populated only by “primitive people” in 1000 BCE, so there is no way anyone could have come up with pyramids. The show conveniently omits the older Olmec, not to mention all of South America, and conflates sites that date from 1000 BCE to 150 CE into a single massive explosion of pyramids in 1000 BCE. The pyramids, in their massive final form, came much later than the initial settlements.

​Segment 6
The final segment tries to connect the Maya gods and ancestors to beings from the Pleiades through the work of 1970s writer José Argüelles, the New Age kook who arranged the 1987 Harmonic Convergence. He decided the Maya were star beings from the Pleiades. The show claims El Mirador was arranged to mirror the stars of the Pleiades, which is an idea put forth by Don Regi, a current Maya leader, and advocated by Jerry Murdoch of the University of Florida. I am not aware of proof of the claim.