Review of Ancient Aliens S21E11: “The Birdman Mystery”

​At the most basic level, the ancient astronaut theory is a form of euhemerism, the philosophy proposed by Euhemerus in the fourth century BCE which held that the wonders of mythology and the various divinities were corrupt and misunderstood retellings of the deeds of real people. Euhemerus himself tended to myths as masking very human truth—so, for him, the gods were simply human kings deified. However, his successors became increasingly fanciful in an attempt to take myths literally while eliminating the supernatural. Dionysius Scytobrachion, for instance, imagined that the Golden Ram that carried Phryxus and Helle through the air was a boat with a ram-shaped prow and the Golden Fleece the flayed skin of a man named Krios (Mr. Ram). Ancient astronaut theorists take this tendency in a sci-fi direction by attempting to be even more literal and find creatures—i.e. aliens—that can allow them to keep even more of the stories unchanged. 

​There isn’t really much to say, therefore, about the Bird Men except that one either thinks of the animal-human hybrids of mythology as wholly imaginary, as symbolic, or as literal depictions of animal-headed humans. Not a single hybrid bird-headed humanoid body has ever been found.

​Segment 1
The first segment begins on the Navajo Reservation to discuss Native American myths of the “Birdman,” a winged human-like figure. Without doing more than announcing that such a myth exists, the show then moves on to a Mississippian burial known as the “Bird Man Burial” because the deceased were surrounded by shells in the shape of a bird. Similarly, a Mississippian tablet from Monk’s Mound depicts a human with avian features. The bird figures on the Gateway of the Sun at Tiwanaku are shown next, and David Childress says that they symbolize humans who can fly. The famous Easter Island Bird Man iconography is shown next, followed by a number of avian-human figures from art around the world, and as you might guess, none of these various stories is discussed at all—they are just listed. William Henry and Giorgio Tsoukalos ask why these images are so similar and thus must have a common source—even though the depictions are nothing alike. Some are humans with wings. Some are bird-headed humans without wings. Some are human-headed birds. Some are birds with arms. The only thing they share in common are elements drawn from the shape of birds. This is lazy even by the standards of Ancient Aliens, for whom a Google search is often too taxing an effort.

​Segment 2
The second segment deals with angels, whom the show identifies as “winged beings.” Tsoukalos claims angels were not part of the Bible until the early centuries CE, which is half true (and indeed, they don’t have birdlike wings but are horrifying swirls of eyes), but angel myths existed before then. The Book of Enoch, which is discussed next, dates back to 350 BCE and heavily feature fallen angels. At no point, though, are they described as birds or with wings. They are barely described at all but were apparently envisioned as humans. The show tries to relate the Watchers (the fallen angels) to the Anunnaki of Mesopotamian lore, and there is a case to make for that—but the Anunnaki are not the bird people of Neo-Assyrian art. The meaning of the Anunnaki changes over time as well, originally referring to the children of the supreme god An and later becoming a generalized term for an undifferentiated mass of divine beings. Anyway, they barely mention these before running off to Göbekli Tepe to see vultures on the T-pillars that the show calls bird men. They identify “handbag” symbols on the pillars as being the same as the buckets held by Mesopotamian bird-headed, winged figures. Of course, archaeologists have argued that the iconography at Göbekli Tepe is actually stylized depictions of the enclosures at Göbekli Tepe with roofs, meaning that they aren’t bags at all (they are not held in hands, for instance, unlike Mesopotamian buckets). But that would require Ancient Aliens to actively engage with scholarly work, and that is not as easy as doing a Google search for whatever Andrew Collins spat out in his last book.

​Segment 3
The third segment travels to Egypt to explore the “Zep Tepi,” the alleged “first time” (a phrase Graham Hancock adapted and used somewhat incorrectly to describe primeval times) in order to look at the hawk-god Horus. Then it’s on to Thoth, the ibis-headed god of knowledge. Stories about Imhotep receiving from Thoth the knowledge to build Djoser’s pyramid and to write a medical treatise are asserted but not discussed, and William Henry discusses the mystery schools of Memphis attributed to Thoth. Henry asserts that the Egyptian mystery schools taught Pythagoras that all the planets are inhabited, a claim that to the best of my knowledge does not appear in any ancient source but is instead derived from Helena Blavatsky conflating Pythagoras’s music of the spheres with the idea of inhabited globes in The Secret Doctrine. The claim that Pythagoras studied the Egyptian mysteries comes from Porphyry 600 years later and is contradicted by other ancient writers.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment revisits the Mexican dance of the fliers, but this dance of men swinging around a pole is only vaguely connected to “bird men” through a claim that it descends from a ritual honoring a Maya god who could transform into a bird. Then they discuss Quetzalcoatl, who is not a bird. The “feathered serpent” is, as the name suggests, depicted as a serpent. We see some of the same Olmec art that the show has used many times before, and they return to the handbag idea yet again, because apparently no one has ever had to carry anything until aliens taught people how to make bags. It’s “not a coincidence” Tsoukalos says. Somewhere during this segment, we dropped the idea of birds and it gradually transformed into “flight” in a general sense, culminating at the end of the segment with the claim that the birds can also be vehicles.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment focuses on Thailand and the Hindu being Garuda, the birdlike divine mount of Vishnu, which Tsoukalos calls “a passenger plane.” Tsoukalos takes stories about Garuda very literally, ignoring the Indo-European background, but the show doesn’t alight on the story long enough to do much than shout “Da plane! Da plane!” before we run off to another topic altogether, thunderbirds. Tsoukalos claims that stories of thunderbirds, being loud, must therefore be alien airplanes because apparently aliens traveled across the stars only to use 1960s-era jet engines here on earth. This is tied to the recent discovery of the Sumerian White Thunderbird Temple in Iraq, a sanctuary devoted to Ningirsu, a god depicted with bird wings.
 
Segment  6
The final segment givens Andrew Collins a few minutes to make his claim that the Lascaux Cave’s bird man figure is secretly the constellation Cygnus before examining a 44,000-year-old Indonesian cave painting that depicts a humanoid figure with what seems to be a beak, though that interpretation is open to debate as the image is not very clear. The show concludes by arguing that bird people are gods and gods are space aliens.