Review of Ancient Aliens S20E20: “Resurrecting Puma Punku”

​This season of Ancient Aliens has been more backward-facing than most as the series becomes an ouroboros eating its own tail, revisiting past episodes and celebrating the lives of ufology’s octogenarian heroes. This episode is no different, returning to one of Ancient Aliens’ most infamous episodes, 2012 “The Mysteries of Puma Punku” (where David Childress confidently asserted that an obviously irregular block was a perfect right-angle), parts of which were first revisited in a 2014 episode of the spinoff series In Search of Aliens entitled “The Mystery of Puma Punku.” Both drew on a lengthy segment about Puma Punku in the original 2009 Ancient Aliens pilot episode. Over the past fifteen years, Ancient Aliens has learned nothing about Puma Punku and continues to repeat false claims that were indefensible in 2014, 2012, and 2009. But, on the plus side, there is no new episode next week, and this might be the end of the season. It seems like an appropriate way to take leave of Ancient Aliens, at least for a while.

​Segment 1
We open with Pedro de Cieza de Leon’s visit to Tiwanaku in the sixteenth century, including his visit to nearby Puma Punku. He correctly noted that the local population of Inca believed the site had been built hundreds of years earlier by a pre-Inca people. The various talking heads complain that the multi-ton blocks of Puma Punku are too heavy for mere humans to have moved, and Travis Taylor claims the stones are so perfect that they look milled by machine. All of the ancient astronaut theorists firmly believe that humans wouldn’t work long enough or hard enough to achieve “perfection” in stone carving, so Giorgio Tsoukalos asserts that people used alien heat rays to “vitrify” the rocks. Arthur Posnansky is discussed as though he knew what he was talking about, embracing his fanciful calculation that Tiwanaku is 17,000 years old. Much hay is made of a passage in Cieza de Leon’s Chronicle of Peru (ch. 105) claiming the site was built in one night by a lost race:

I asked the natives, in presence of Juan de Varagas (who holds them in encomienda), whether these edifices were built in the time of the Yncas, and they laughed at the question, affirming that they were made before the Yncas ever reigned, but that they could not say who made them. They added that they had heard from their fathers that all we saw was done in one night. From this, and from the fact that they also speak of bearded men on the island of Titicaca, and of others who built the edifice of Vinaque, it may, perhaps, be inferred that, before the Yncas reigned, there was an intelligent race who came from some unknown part, and who did these things. (trans. Clements Markham)

​Segment 2
The second segment discusses an archaeologist’s visit to Puma Punku in 1995, and we hear from local Aymara spiritual guide and ancient astronaut theorist Jorge Delgado (he’s the author of a book about Peruvian mysticism) that the Inca gods were actually space aliens, whom he calls Space Brothers. The show doesn’t care about this claim (though it falsely implies that the Space Brothers are an ancient term and not a moder UFO-era adaptation), drops it quickly, and moves on to criticizing the Bolivian government’s efforts to excavate and reconstruct Puma Punku, sometimes poorly, in the twentieth century. We see archaeologist Alexei Vranich’s 3-D printed reconstruction of Puma Punku, which was probably a temple, which Vranich published in 2018.

​Segment 3
It’s bad enough that Vranich, of UC Berkeley, agreed to appear on Ancient Aliens to debase his own work, but in this segment he meets with Tsoukalos and Taylor to let them play with his model, treating two men who oppose everything he supposedly stands for as though they were serious investigators. Taylor suggests that a potential reconstruction of a doorway could date the site by assuming it once perfectly aligned with the sunset, though he seems to forget the sun sets at different locations on different days of the year.

​Segment 4
The fourth segment involves a different computer model of Puma Punku, and then Tsoukalos tells us that the use of I-shaped keystone cuts at Puma Punku and Angkor Wat in Cambodia proves that they were both built by the same “teachers,” as though the very idea was so wild no one could have independently thought of it. 

​Segment 5
The fifth segment delivers yet another computer reconstruction, this time by digital artist John Fillwalk, and the we see Fillwalk’s reconstruction of the main temple at Tiwanaku. Fillwalk built his model to test whether Posnansky was right about the Ice Age date of Tiwanaku, and Tsoukalos enthusiastically claims Posnansky was proved true, while Fillwalk shrugs and says it might be possible since there are some alignments, though nothing conclusive. Brien Foerster alleges that Puma Punku was destroyed by a volcano-induced tsunami and burial more than 12,000 years ago, though there is absolutely no archaeological or geological evidence to support that idea.

Gate of the Sun, Tiwanaku

​Segment 6
The sixth segment looks at the Gateway of the Sun at Tiwanaku, with its depiction of the Andrean Staff God (whom they call by his Inca name, Viracocha) and his bird-man attendants. Tsoukalos says that it symbolizes aliens flying down from the sky. The show ends by telling us that nobody knows what Puma Punku’s design or purpose was, and then the narrator tells us that it’s a mystery as profound as the pyramids but figuring it out will “bring us closer to our alien ancestors,” which has become the closing tagline for every episode—an empty refrain that, like Xeno’s paradox, seems to always move us closer to reunion without ever actually reaching the aliens.