Review of Ancient Aliens S20E16: “The Teachers”

​After twenty seasons, it took me a bit by surprise that Ancient Aliens had never done an episode dedicated solely to aliens teaching humans science, culture, and spirituality. It’s certainly not because they’ve never covered the topic before, though most prominently in the year before I started reviewing the show. Early episodes from seasons 1 and 2 such as “The Visitors” (S01E02) and “Gods and Aliens” (S02E02) covered much of the same material, and references to aliens teaching humans pepper any episode that actually remembers this show is called “Ancient” Aliens and not UFO, Conspiracy Theory, and Popular Astronomy Review. Nevertheless, for a show that has leaned so heavily into aliens as life coaches and spiritual guides, I was taken a little aback that they hadn’t done this topic before.

​Segment 1
We open with Aristotle’s discussion of his daimon (I’m not familiar with the claim that Aristotle attributed his knowledge to a spirit being—I think they are referencing his discussion of possessing a eudaimon), followed by various ways of saying ancient myths discuss otherworldly beings teaching ancient people various things. The show falsely claims that the Sumerians attributed their knowledge to the Anunnaki, but that isn’t true. Cultural knowledge came from the Apkallu, the great sages, not the Anunnaki. Then they discuss the Babylonian myth of Oannes, one of the sages, who Berossus said came up from the sea. The show conflates the Babylonians with the Sumerians and said that because Oannes came up from the sea, he obviously came down from the sky. Go figure.
 
A bit about the Yellow Emperor of China and his relationship with a dragon is recycled from an earlier episode.
 
Segment 2
The second segment covers myths surrounding the development of metallurgy. Because bronzeworking occurs around the Old World in the fourth millennium BCE, the show suggests aliens taught everyone at once. A bit about the Telchines is repeated from a 2014 episode, and various other metal myths are briefly rehearsed, though our genius ancient astronaut theorists forget that the Book of Enoch specifically attribute this knowledge to the Watchers, their favorite “aliens.” Then the show discusses ancient Sicilian ingots that combined five alloys. The material is from a 2015 episode, where the show tries to connect these ingots to Atlantis’s orichalcum. The ingots were discovered in 2015, but they are much too young to be Atlantis’s secret metal, as they date back to perhaps the first few centuries BCE. They are likely the copper-zinc alloy the Romans called orichalcum, but it may not be the metal Plato referenced in his Atlantis tales, since it doesn’t match literary accounts.

​Segment 3
The third segment is, of course, about Enoch and the Watchers, but the account is all mixed up. The show claims that the Watchers took Enoch to heaven and taught knowledge of civilization, but this is wrong. The Watchers were the Fallen Angels and the villains of the story. God and the Good Angels brought Enoch to heaven, but what he learned their wasn’t the same as the Watchers’ revelation. The show then tries to bring in the Arabic legend that Idris the prophet, who was Enoch, built the Great Pyramid, but the show doesn’t understand its own claims and falsely alleges that al-Maqrizi said the Watchers taught Enoch how to build the pyramids. The Watchers don’t appear in al-Maqrizi, and he was a mere compiler anyway. His source, in his one brief mention of Enoch, understood Enoch to be Hermes Trismegistus and simply state he built the pyramids. The Watchers are only mentioned in one Arabic pyramid legend, and it is a corrupt text that has incompletely revised an earlier Jewish legend. Islam didn’t believe in fallen angels and instead attributed the deeds of the Watchers to the son of Seth.
 
We then move on to the Vedas and claims that the gods gave the texts to humanity. Claim from the episode on “The Mysterious Nine” are repeated. 

​Segment 4
The fourth segment discusses Helena Blavatsky and Theosophy. Much of this is a rehash of material from a 2013 episode, and despite Gary Lachman’s appearance here, we don’t get any real or serious analysis of Blavatsky. Instead, they take the Ascended Masters at face value, declare Blavatsky a genius and a prophet, and hail her as a “precursor of ancient astronaut theory,” Childress puts it. Ancient Aliens attributes Ghandi’s nonviolence and India’s independence to Blavatsky’s teachings.
 
The show says the Ascended Masters played a role in creating Buddhism because meditation connected Buddha to space aliens. 

​Segment 5
The fifth segment moves forward in time again to discuss a twentieth century UFO claim, about the supposed Area 51 extraterrestrial employee J-Rod. The material about him is drawn from two episodes, in 2014 and again in 2023. There is no reason for me to repeat myself her, since the show doesn’t bother with anything new. The bottom line is the claim that aliens are still imparting science facts to humanity today. Giorgio Tsoukalos, William Henry, and David Childress offer spiritual homilies about how “they” have a wisdom agenda for us and a plan for us to ascend to the stars. It’s all very weirdly religious, and they actually mimic televangelists as they preach their empty gospel. Despite the time devoted to these claims, no facts, evidence, or argumentation is offered, merely several minutes of opinion. 

​Segment 6
The final segment claims aliens manipulated human DNA to “design us to be like them” so they could teach us to use technology. The show again falsely claim the Anunnaki were actively involved in creating humans, and then a confused discussion tries to say Prometheus, Ptah, and the Serpent of Eden are all a “memory of higher intelligence, some kind of teacher” from space, in Andrew Collins’s words, and not for the first time, the show asks us to see Satan as the hero of the Bible. More blather about venerating space teachers follow, giving this show a very poor fact-to-hot air ratio.