Review of Ancient Aliens S20E13 “The Whistleblowers”

​I wonder sometimes if the core audience for Ancient Aliens ever gets tired of hearing the same thing over and over again, or if it is more like the Bible readings at church, where repetition and familiarity are both the appeal and a reinforcement mechanism. This week’s episode, “The Whistleblowers,” explores people who claim to be revealing government UFO secrets. You’ve seen them all on Ancient Aliens before. Indeed, Bob Lazar not only had his own dedicated episode in 2019 but has appeared in segments of other episodes on Area 51, Area 52, UFO investigators, etc. over the years. Even David Grusch had his own Ancient Aliens segment last year. But, hey, this is great promotion for Lue Elizondo’s new book, or would be if we had any idea how many people still watch this show. Nielsen stopped releasing cable ratings last year because they are so low now, and History hasn’t volunteered to share.

​Segment 1
The show opens with the 2023 UFO hearing in Congress that featured David Grusch’s unsubstantiated claims about crash retrieval and alien bodies. Rep. Nancy Mace appears on the show to claim the hearing was among the most important in history. Danny Shehan and Rep. Tim Burchett also appear, and Burchett claims without evidence that other UFO witnesses had been intimidated into silence, a claim George Knapp agrees with, again without evidence. A discussion of Luis Elizondo follows, with a revised history of his UFO involvement. Sheehan now says Elizondo was recruited to AAWSAP in 2007 and then participated in a “less formal” investigation called AATIP. Knapp now follows the revised story and claims Elizondo was “blocked” from creating a more formal program. Chunks of History’s Elizondo-led series Unidentified in which Elizondo celebrates himself are spliced in with praise for the New York Times story written by Elizondo-smitten UFO believers that made cable TV sensationalism into a national security crisis. Richard Dolan and George Knapp assert that the Pentagon campaigned to discredit Elizondo, though they are unable to identify a specific assertion from the Pentagon about Elizondo that was untrue.

​Segment 2
The second segment focuses on the alleged Roswell UFO crash, which Ancient Aliens obviously refuses to accept was a crashed Project Mogul spy balloon. (Indeed, they refuse to mention it at all, only presenting a false dichotomy between weather balloon and alien spaceship.) Instead, we get the conspiracy theory version, as given in so many previous episodes of the show. Maj. Jesse Marcel is the focus of this segment. His story grew over time, from the time Stanton Friedman and the National Enquirer interviewed him in the 1970s, when he was in his 70s, to his death in 1986. After his death, his son, also named Jesse Marcel, and his grandson, yet another Jesse Marcel, continued expanding the story with unsubstantiated additional details. 

​Segment 3
The third segment alleges that Cpt. Edward Ruppelt, who briefly headed the Air Force’s UFO investigation from 1952 to 1953 and wrote a 1956 book about his efforts to find the truth, was murdered to silence him. Ruppelt died of a heart attack in 1960, at the age of 37—four years after publishing his Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. One would think they would want to silence him before he published their secrets, but I guess that’s just me. Ruppelt’s revised 1960 second edition of his Report concluded that UFOs were not alien, reversing the first edition’s claim. But we are asked to believe the government killed him for … agreeing with them? Paul Hynek, son of J. Allen Hynek, appears on the show to repeat the elder Hynek’s oft-repeated account of the Air Force and CIA ordering him to debunk and cover-up UFO reports. The show calls Hynek a whistleblower for criticizing Project Bluebook, and asserts that Hynek delayed going public with his criticism because he believed Ruppelt had been murdered. 

​Segment 4
The fourth segment rehearses the story of Bob Lazar, with clips of interviews that first aired in 2016 and claims discussed in the 2019 Lazar episode. George Knapp celebrates himself for having Las Vegas’s highest-rated local program with his 1980s-era Lazar interviews, and Knapp claims that the government was monitoring and watching him, though his use of “we” makes it hard to parse how much was directed at Knapp and how much as Lazar. Knapp seems to see himself as a unit with Lazar. Knapp claims people who contacted him about UFOs received death threats from the government. Bits of the Jeremy Corbell’s Bob Lazar documentary and Ancient Aliens’ Corbell interview, previously aired in the 2019 Lazar episode, are repeated.

​Segment 5
The fifth segment returns to David Grusch, repeating most of what they discussed in last year’s Grusch episode. Travis Taylor pops by to remind everyone he was secretly working on the UAP Task Force while publicly hunting alien ghost viruses on the History Channel. The segment opened with the Debrief article that introduced Grusch to the world, but they neglect to mention that the same UFO believers who wrote the 2017 Times story also wrote this one. The segment repeats the material about the 2023 hearing we already heard in the first segment of this very episode. Rep. Ana Paulina Luna appears on the show to claim the government murders UFO witnesses and that Grusch’s wife is under threat. Luna and Sheehan allege that the reporter behind a news article about Grusch’s mental health issues was “directed” by the Pentagon to smear him, but the show apparently wants to skirt libel laws since it carefully avoids referring to Ken Kilppenstein by name. 

​Segment 6
The final segment discusses Sen. Chuck Schumer’s effort to protect UFO whistleblowers, only to see most of his legislation spiked. The show claims that “the government” stopped it, which I suppose must mean that the show thinks of “the government” as the equivalent of Trump’s “Deep State” rather than Congress, which is quite literally the government. The show labels so-called whistleblowers “the heroes of this movement” and speculates that new UFO secrets will soon be revealed when Congress (i.e., the government) finally stands up to the government.