Review of Ancient Aliens S21E10 “The Volcano Factor”

There is a secret myth about aliens and volcanoes whose revelation is apparently so sensitive that only the highest-ranking members of a controversial sect are allowed to hear of it. Millions of years ago, a space alien named Xenu brough billions of extraterrestrials to Earth in a spaceship shaped like a DC-8 airplane, affixed them to volcanoes, and then killed them all with H-bombs, releasing their souls to pester humans. Of course, this is the secret teaching of Scientology, in Operating Thetan Level III, so there is no chance that Ancient Aliens would risk the wrath of the alien gods’ lawyers by talking about the most notorious story of aliens and volcanoes on a show dedicated to … checks notes … aliens and volcanoes.

No, this episode is about public domain volcano myths and legends, along with a retread of the episode about why UFOs are attracted to mountains, rebranded with volcanoes. 

​Segment 1
The show opens with video of “glowing orbs” and other lights near Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano. Some local folklore about the spirit of the volcano, Gregorio (Don Goyo), who in most stories, has human form. The show has no interest in this and never actually asks what the lights on the video could be. Instead we rehearse the Kenneth Arnold sighting, and David Childress says, “You have to wonder: Are volcanoes some kind of UFO base?” We briefly hear the Roman tale of Vulcan having his forge in Moun Etna (Aelian, Various Histories 11.3), and the narrator claimed that this story and others like it “read like historical events.” Giorgio Tsoukalos claims the Greek and Roman gods were space aliens, but has nothing else to say. A Japanese story about a child found near Mt. Fuji, Princess Kaguya. The show claims she was found in a glowing bamboo stalk and was then taken back up to outer space by her extraterrestrial kin; the version recorded in the ninth or tenth centuries says that the baby princess was found in the stalk, she grew to maidenhood, revealed her celestial origin as a child of the Moon people, and ascends to the Moon with an entourage. It’s a long story, filled with romance and legendary happenings, and it is very clearly a kind of novel, akin to Lucian’s True History.
 
Segment 2
The second segment starts with an alleged flying cube that the pilot of Colombian plane saw in 2020 at a volcano near Bogota and a couple more sightings of similar objects near the same volcano, Nevado del Tolima. This is only of interest because the Tolima people, who lived at the base of Nevado del Tolima, made the infamous little gold bees that ancient astronaut theorists have claimed were airplanes since the 1960s. Tsoukalos wears a replica of one on his lapel, and he used to give them out to members of Erich von Däniken’s Ancient Astronaut Society back in the 1990s. The show provides some beautiful b-roll of carved stone statues at San Agustín Archaeological Park in Colombia, and the fanged, animal-like statues are claimed to be “extraterrestrial visitors” who may also have been vampires. The statues, known since the eighteenth century, are described as “bizarre,” though they resemble in form and style many jaguar figures from Central and South America, mostly because this show is kind of racist. Archaeologists believe the statues to be funerary, with intimidating zoomorphic figures intended to protect the dead in the afterlife.

Statues in Mesita B, San Agustín Archaeological Park (Bernard Gagnon / Wikimedia Commons)

Segment 3
The third segment stays in Colombia and focuses on Peña de Juaica, which even the show concedes is not a volcano. Despite it not being a volcano (the show tells us that there are volcanoes “near” it, though the map they provide, depicting most of Colombia, shows the volcanoes being laughably far from the mountain—150 km in each direction), we get to hear stories about strange lights seen around the mountain and that it is some kind of “star gate.” Then we are off to Indonesia to look at Java’s Mount Merapi, which also has a legend attached that two divine blacksmiths lived beneath the mountain and had a city buried there.
 
That, unfortunately, is not the traditional version of the story. According to scholars who recorded the tale, Empu Pamadi, who made daggers, refused to move his forge when the gods wanted to stabilize Java by relocating Mount Jamurdipa. Empu Rama supported Empu Pamadi in defying  the gods, and the ensuing battle with the gods’ messengers ended with the two smiths’ deaths and their forge becoming the caldera atop Mount Merapi.
 
Since there is a Buddhist site nearby, Tsoukalos repeats some claims that Buddhist stupas represent UFOs that we’ve heard many times before, and then we are off to a commercial.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment condenses material about UFOs seen around Mt. Shasta in California and Native American legends about beings living on or near the mountain that was previously discussed in the 2021 episode dedicated to Mt. Shasta. Dweller on Two Planets gets summarized, with its Lemurians, just as it was in 2021, and the show again claims the mountain to be an “alien base.” For what it is worth, the alleged story about ETs returning in “great sky crafts” (supposedly a direct quote) claimed to be told by Native people around Mt. Shasta do not show up in a literature search. There doesn’t seem to be any record of it prior to the publication of Dweller, and nineteenth-century literature on the peoples who lived around Mt. Shasta record very different creation stories. Justin McHenry, in his 2024 book on Lemuria, tried to trace the tales and found that the ones he could find were all second- or third-hand. As best I can tell, Grant Towendolly of the Wintu Tribe, who died in 1963, was the source for some of the stories, having told Marcelle Mason of Dunsmuir, California that his father had heard invisible people atop the mountain. When questioned in more detail, Towendolly identified cowboys riding horses in the distance as the “invisible people,” substantiating the notion that the story originated in encounters with white settlers.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment shows a flock of birds flying in a V-shape formation over an Icelandic eruption, and the show claims that it is a triangular UFO. The rest of the segment discusses the potential to harness volcanoes for energy to power technology, supposedly connected to UFOs because the aliens want to check to see if we are using our planet’s energy efficiently.
 
Segment 6
The final segment doesn’t say anything and just repeats material from the earlier segments while claiming that volcanoes are a mystery that can turn us into “alien explorers ourselves” with their massive amounts of energy to power our technology.