Review of Ancient Aliens S20E18: “The Linda Moulton Howe Files”

​Continuing this season’s new effort to repackage old material by recasting it as biographies of ancient astronaut theorists, this episode follows the life and career of Linda Moulton Howe. If much of this episode seems familiar, it’s probably because the show has presented all of this material before and has profiled Howe’s life and career several times before. For example, a 2015 episode on crop circles contained a segment tracing Howe’s initial conversion from a young television news reporter to alien enthusiast when she became obsessed with crop circles. Similarly, a 2014 In Search of Aliens spinoff episode offered a description of Howe’s career, as did its 2020 recycling on the Ancient Aliens mothership, where the show added in Howe’s involvement with Art’s Parts. Other notable repeats include a 2019 episode about Howe’s “investigation” of aliens in Antarctica and of course last year’s episode on Howe’s efforts to prove the government is hiding a massive ancient pyramid in Alaska.

​Segment 1
The show opens with Giorgio Tsoukalos, George Knapp, and other talking heads praising Howe for bringing “high strangeness” into the mainstream media. The show insists that Howe is “hugely important” and then briefly touches on her early years in graduate school at Stanford (1966-1968) and her first years as a reporter at KNBC in Los Angeles, where she won some regional Emmy awards. At KMGH-TV in Denver in the late 1970s, she stumbled into the cattle mutilation mythos (which the FBI and many scientists later determined were a combination of predation, natural decomposition, and human activity), becoming fascinated by the idea that aliens are killing cows. This led to her documentary A Strange Harvest in 1980. Howe said that the work on that documentary transformed her life. “I felt like I had no choice,” she said, but to hunt space aliens for the rest of her life, though a cynic might suggest that the huge outpouring of phone calls and mail praising her documentary, and the success of the syndicated TV series In Search of…, which had been running to solid ratings for the past three years, might have done more than the aliens to suggest a more lucrative career path than local TV news.

​Segment 2
The second segment discusses Howe’s first encounter with Richard Doty in 1983 during the production of a documentary Howe was working on for HBO. Although Doty is, let’s say, a dubious witness at best, the show presents his provision of supposed presidential UFO briefing documents to Howe as a Deep Throat moment. HBO canceled the show. CNN picked it up, but then CNN canceled it, too. Howe suspected that the “CIA, NSA, DIA” pressured the media to silence her, and she began to believe that the government was surveilling her and tapping her phone. Howe claims that a man in North Carolina pulled a gun on her and told her not to continue investigating animal mutilations. The show passes over nearly a decade in silence (she was, in those missing years, writing her 1989 book Alien Harvest) before picking up in 1991, when Howe decides that crop circles must be the work of aliens because she felt the confession of Doug Bower and Dave Chortley to have made many of the circles themselves was disinformation. 

​Segment 3
The third segment chronicles Howe’s investigation of crop circles, which was covered in an earlier Ancient Aliens episode about her crop circle investigation, and this segment is nearly word-for-word identical. There is no need to repeat myself here. Jumping around in time, we go back to the 1980s and Howe’s failed effort to interest a mainstream publisher in her book Alien Harvest. Her ego got the best of her, and she refused an offer from a major publisher to publish the book because she insisted that explicit photos of dead animals be included, something the publisher would not agree to. She self-published the book and several others, which the show praises as a heroic fight against the system. I’m not sure why we are telling her story out of order, except that putting it in order is less flattering: Obsessed with aliens, she failed to go national on TV and then spent nearly a decade writing a book, only to turn down an imperfect publishing deal (very few are exactly what a first-time author wants) and then latch on to crop circles to try to claw herself back to relevance and fame when her self-publishing did not achieve the desired result.

​Segment 4
Howe catapulted back to UFO fame as a guest and host on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast A.M., which, more than anything, became the source of her fame since the mid-1990s (few would remember her 1980 local TV special). On November 28, 1998, How launched a website, Earthfiles, that she seems not to think sounded anything like The X-Files, despite calling it “the real X-Files.” She says the name came to her fully formed. Anyhow, the website became the hub of Howe’s increasingly implausible alien stories. The show jumps around in time again to tell us that in 1986, Howe met with Whitley Strieber, which brought her into the alien abduction community and the three main types of aliens abducting and probing humans. Offhand, she identifies the “Nordic” aliens as the Nephilim of the Bible—because the Nephilim always need to show up in stories like this.

​Segment 5
The fifth segment discusses Howe’s YouTube videos where she describes what alleged UFO whistleblowers have told her, particularly about the “pyramid” in Alaska and an alien base beneath Antarctica, both of which the show has covered before and I have linked to above. The false story of a UFO affecting nuclear missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base in 1967 is repeated from a previous episode, and Howe says that her own brother witnessed a separate incident of a UFO affecting nuclear weapons. Despite the praised heaped on Howe’s journalistic skill, no evidence is presented beyond stories.

​Segment 6
Having skipped over the fact that Howe’s promotion to an Ancient Aliens talking head now drives her career and her media appearances, we instead see a 2013 clip of Howe giving “testimony” at the fake “Citizen Hearing on UFOs” that pretended to be a Congressional hearing but was just a PR stunt. The narrator tells us that “many believe” Howe “laid much of the groundwork” for David Grusch to talk UFOs in a real Congressional hearing last year. The show then summarizes Howe’s steely determination to overcome threats and ridicule to advocate for the idea that space aliens are here and threatening us.
 
But at least Howe did things. I can’t wait until they get around to a Giorgio Tsoukalos biographical episode where it chronicles him studying sports communication in school, working as a bodybuilding promoter, having Erich von Däniken hand him a job in the ancient astronaut theory, becoming famous for having bad hair, and never writing a single book or working a day in his life again.