Review of Ancient Aliens S20E12: “Unlocking the Stargates”

​Ten years ago, Ancient Aliens delivered an episode entitled “Aliens and Stargates,” and now we are back at it, rehashing the same material the show has covered repeatedly over the intervening decade. What is there even to say about a rehash of a rehash that, even in its first titular episode, wasn’t original but had previously been covered by the show? I’d ask them to get some new ideas, but in this particularly dark intellectual climate, where propaganda and hate has poisoned every well, I’d be too worried that they’d follow their former colleague David Wilcock straight into the bowels of QAnon and Russian propaganda. 

As most of you remember, star gates (or stargates, as the show prefers) entered ancient astronaut lore from the 1997 movie Stargate and the subsequent TV series, and Ancient Aliens retrofitted old ancient astronaut claims to conform to movie myths. 

​Segment 1
We open with Jack Williamson’s 1931 Amazing story “The Meteor Girl,” the first story to imagine a portal through space, and the show admits that real-life portals, or star gates, are merely theoretical and are not known to exist. Travis Taylor says that they could be real and therefore might also connect us to other dimensions or realities. A bunch of myths involving doors and gates used by gods are said to be star gates, just because. Taylor says Vishnu traveled between realities via a “stargate that enabled him to go from universe to universe.” To make any of this make sense, the show plays rather elastically with the concept of “other realms,” treating anything on the other side of a bridge, door, or gate as a “realm,” whether it is heaven, another planet, or just land. The Gate of the Gods in Peru, which I laughed about a decade ago when David Childress claimed the mountainside stone niche was a doorway, suggesting Childress should run into it headfirst if he were so confident, is repeated here and claimed to be a portal once again. I can’t say how accurate the show’s account of a legend about a priest vanishing into the gate is since virtually every reference to Aramu Muru online is to a New Age/ancient alien stargate claim.

​Segment 2
The second segment explores a circular, flat-topped mountain in Sri Lanka where locals claim to see UFOs and a Hindu god supposedly landed on it in ancient times. The Buddha was said to have contemplated there, so the show says he was a space alien who teleported there. They say he was a nine-foot-tall blue alien (based on taking ancient symbolic art literally) and flew around in a saucer. A round mandala-like carving of a cosmic map on a wall in Sri Lanka is said to be a portal to either another planet or another dimension. The show can’t really get its story straight.

​Segment 3
The next segment rehashes material about the Bermuda Triangle and claims it is a star gate, which of course makes one wonder how big these gates are supposed to be if they are as small as a door, mid-sized like a mountaintop, or as big as the entire ocean contained in the Bermuda Triangle. Claims that another evil triangle exists in Michigan follow. All of this is from the 2014 episode. The answer to the question of size seems to be that star gates are like quantum tornadoes that spin around and suck people up, except when they are somehow contained in a doorway. How sad for all those lost in the Bermuda Triangle that modern folk haven’t figured out how to contain these star gates as well as the Inca did with their doors. Algonquin myths are then used to rehash material from earlier episodes that elves and Bigfoot come from other dimensions.

​Segment 4
The fourth segment repeats Richard Doty’s dubious claim that American scientists created a star gate in Area 51. What’s to say about this, other than he is unreliable and there is no reason to believe the government is building wormholes to other dimensions. Nick Pope speculates the portals could be used to teleport nuclear weapons to blow up other countries. Once again, logic fails the show as Pope argues these portals exist between places on Earth while Doty claims they connect to other dimensions through which Lovecraftian terrors might leak. Apparently the portals can connect anything, without rhyme or reason.

​Segment 5
The fifth segment asks if taking hallucinogens can cause people to travel through dimensions and/or time. They don’t really decide which. Then they talk about astral projection, and again other dimensions, other planets, and other places on the Earth are all conflated, and apparently the mind can go to any of these—but what any of this has to do with physical star gates is unclear, particularly since if we can travel with our minds, what do we need the star gate for? I guess there is nothing quite like being able to touch the aliens (or humans) with your fingers.

​Segment 6
The sixth segment discusses a 2022 scientific experiment to create a holographic wormhole within a quantum computer, and the show expresses hope that real wormholes could be created. It does not, however, tell you that the 2022 experiment was heavily criticized and believed not to be a wormhole. David Childress tells us that star gates could help us vacation on Mars without the burden of travel, and the narrator says that maybe one of these gates will connect us to an alien.