Review of Ancient Aliens S21E08 “The Glowing Orb Phenomenon”

This week, my family and I had to say goodbye to our beloved cat Dakota, a couple of months shy of his seventeenth birthday. He had a big personality and strong opinions about everything. He was active, friendly, and loving and was brave throughout his battle with cancer. After his diagnosis, the vet had given him two weeks to live; however, he survived for four months and enjoyed his final weeks as much as he could, with plenty of affection and all of his favorite foods. He is loved and will be missed.

As you can imagine, it’s a difficult time, and I’m mostly writing this review of Ancient Aliens to distract myself after a very long day. Unfortunately, Ancient Aliens did not give me much worth writing about tonight. The topic—glowing orbs—is one of those vague, UFO-themed subjects I have no interest in. You will forgive me if I am not particularly inspired to opine in depth about whether blurry blotches caught on tape are really dust, bugs, balloons, or alien spaceships.

My cat Dakota (2008-2025).

​Segment 1
We start with the November 2024 drone flap in New Jersey. As skeptics and even the U.S. government concluded, these were nothing but airplanes and commercial drones, misunderstood by people who rarely look up. The various talking heads present “glowing orbs—i.e., out of focus lights—as a great mystery and present a mixture of what seems to be footage of airplane lights in a distance and unlabeled and labeled CGI recreations as evidence. Lue Elizondo makes his official Ancient Aliens talking-head appearance, but contributes nothing of value other than some bland assertions that UFOs are “real”—whatever UFOs are supposed to be. Jeremy Corbell’s “Mosul Orb” UFO video shows up next, and Jason Martell claims it was an “intervention” by an alien species watching our military. If I remember correctly, skeptics think it was a balloon whose speed was distorted by a camera artifact. 

In his first talking head appearance, Lue Elizondo unintentionally recreates the show's most famous meme.

Giorgio Tsoukalos in an early appearance that spawned a thousand "I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's aliens" memes.

​Segment 2
The second segment deals with foo fighters in World War II, which the show last covered in a 2023 clip show, repeating a segment from an early episode I don’t remember. Much of what they claim about foo fighters’ powers is myth and legend, and the small glowing orbs are typically explained as St. Elmo’s fire or ball lightning, not really tiny aliens. George Knapp appears on the show to rehash another Jeremy Corbell video about a 2019 Navy sighting of a “perfectly round sphere” whose feats of transmedium prowess skeptics like Mick West have carefully debunked. I don’t care enough to go look it up. Various other military “glowing orb” videos of so-called “swarms” are shown, though the videos show us nothing more than random out-of-focus lights or objects reflecting the setting sun. Elizondo asserts that world governments believe them to be advanced technology.
 
Segment 3
The third segment looks at more “mystery lights” in various locations, including the Marfa Lights (which were just headlights in the distance, raised to “ghost lights” by a magazine article in the 1950s) and the Brown Mountain lights of North Carolina, which Wikipedia explains better than the show. Two circles in a piece of Hohokam rock art are claimed to be orbs, even though they are just circles. Narrator Robert Clotworthy alleges that the orbs are “entities” crossing over into our dimension from another one. This leads to a claim that where orbs are cited, the sky holds a giant portal to another dimension that is somehow undetectable. 

Segment 4
The fourth segment contains the show’s semi-regular cross-promotion with The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, rehashing the threadbare “mysteries” of the allegedly haunted ranch and focusing on footage from past seasons of Skinwalker investing so-called “orbs” cited on the ranch. Like the Marfa lights, some of these are also car headlights in the distance. Travis Taylor gives his usual spiel about the many electromagnetic anomalies supposedly found on Skinwalker Ranch, which always seem to disappear in the presence of skeptics. Taylor suggests that fuzzy lights in the sky “come from a parallel universe.” Giorgio Tsoukalos connects this to the Enochian Watchers on the strength of the idea that the orbs are “watching” us.

​Segment 5
The fifth segment rehearses the myth of the Malmstrom incident where an alleged UFO supposedly turned off American nuclear weapons, previously presented in 2019, 2021, 2024, and elsewhere in the Ancient Aliens oeuvre. (I discussed the myth of the UFO nuclear menace back in 2021.) After this, a 1971 Naval sighting of a glowing sphere is presented, along with claims that the orb turned off an air craft carrier’s systems. This has been covered before, too. After this, we hear claims that an orb tried to set off the USSR’s nuclear missiles in Usove, Ukraine in 1982, beginning a countdown to launch the weapons at the United States, until the orb left and the countdown aborted. The claim, however, is dubious. George Knapp was the first to make it, back in 1997, from an oral account by former Soviet official Col. Boris Solokov, who was not present during the incident. Knapp entered it into the Congressional Record in 2023, but to my knowledge, Russia never provided documentary evidence of the claim.
 
Segment 6
The final segment speculates on whether the orbs are observers of humanity or are something more nefarious. They seem to settle on the idea of orbs as basically the Enochian Watchers and that someday we will meet the entities within.