Review of Ancient Aliens S21E12 “The Abduction Files”

Of all the genres of Ancient Aliens episodes, those focused on modern ufology are my least favorite. Those that focus on ancient history or mythology at least have the benefit of allowing for some meaty critical analysis by reviewing the original sources and artifacts and evaluating how the ancient astronaut theorists distort facts to create their claims. By contrast, ufology episodes tend to lack even the patina of argument and are instead dull exercises in listening to people relate their subjective experiences and claim them as fact. 

This is not the first time Ancient Aliens has devoted an episode to alien abduction. Some notable examples include “Strange Abductions” from season five,  “Alien Breeders” from season seven, “The Vanishings” from season nine, “The Returned” from season eleven, “The Taken” from season thirteen, and “The Chosen” from season twenty. I am not sure what more I can add to any discussion of abduction than I have already covered in these reviews. 

The twist this time is that the show is focusing on the abduction researchers, particularly Budd Hopkins, rather than the abductees, in keeping with recent episodes’ focus on the history of ufology.

Segment 1
The first segment covers the life and times of Budd Hopkins and his gradual transition from an artist to full-fledged alien abduction researcher. The show leaves out a lot of facts, especially Hopkins’s longstanding interest in UFOs prior to the 1976 Village Voice article they present as his first foray into ufology. (Hopkins had been researching alleged abductions for 12 years by that point.) Hopkins wasn’t trained in any scientific method, and his use of hypnosis was questionable, and the show glosses over the problematic nature of some of his research to instead take his many claims at face value. Another unmentioned set of facts: Hopkins was funded by Robert Bigelow and was romantically involved with Leslie Kean. I guess that’s not the kind of reportage Ancient Aliens is looking for when recounting the tales of various abductees and the aches and pains they say they experienced the morning after each abduction.

​Segment 2
The second segment continues down the path of Hopkins’s conclusions about alien abductions, with various abduction stories strung through them. William Henry endorses Hopkins’s use of “regression hypnosis” to retrieve “missing time experiences.” As most readers know, hypnosis simply doesn’t work well for retrieving suppressed memories—something even Henry acknowledges. Richard Dolan, however, says that it’s OK because Hopkins published transcripts of his sessions, so we can see that he didn’t unduly influence subjects. (That’s not really how that works, since the hypnotic state allows people to free-associate fantasies they mistake for memories, but whatever.) Hopkins connected Whitley Strieber, whose abduction Strieber has recounted on Ancient Aliens countless times, with a hypnotherapist, and they worked together on abduction research—though at the time Strieber did not identify his abductors as aliens. Now he’s all-in on them being aliens. 

​Segment 3
The third segment begins with abductee Selma Syrek’s account of her many abductions, most of which sound like fantasies and dreams. Syrek explains that the aliens showed her videos and documents to prove that they had assisted humanity in the development of ancient cultures—i.e., they showed her episodes of Ancient Aliens. Giorgio Tsoukalos crows that this proves his various claims about the ancient astronaut theory, and Henry adds that abductions occurred in ancient times, citing Enoch’s “abduction” by “the Archangel Michael”—though the Bible says nothing about Michael, only that “God took” Enoch (Gen. 5:24). (Michael directs Enoch’s voyage through heaven in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which seems to be what Henry is referring to, though the tradition also appears in the fragment of the lost Apocalypse of Enoch preserved in the Cologne Mani Codex.)
 
We then move on to alien implants. We’ve covered this many times, and the show adds nothing new to its many previous claims that the implants (really, debris lodged in bodies) were technology—despite the lack of any identifiable tech within the lumps of metal and stone.

​Segment 4
The fourth segment covers John Mack’s interest in alien abduction after encountering the work of Budd Hopkins. The show then provides a sanitized account of Mack’s research, which I have critiqued in more detail in my review of Ralph Blumenthal’s 2021 biography of Mack. The show makes Mack sound very serious, though he was a Freudian who said silly things like claiming Pinocchio to be the story of a boy who achieves his first erection by thinking of his mother, and we hear from an abductee who claims that the aliens visited him to take his semen and then bone marrow: “They’re determined to take genetic material form me one way or another,” he says.

​Segment 5
The next segment tells us that the aliens are creating hybrid children with their abductees’ semen via testimony from Erik Nanstiel, the abductee who was talking about semen last segment and discusses his alien hybrid children in this segment. He makes computer-generated art of himself having intimate encounters with aliens, and he appears to be the same Erik Nanstiel who worked on an anti-vaccine conspiracy film back in 2016. Anyway, the segment repeats the usual claims about hybridization and secret alien agendas before sort of just giving up on connecting this back to Hopkins. 

​Segment 6
The final segment laments that alien abduction remains a “fringe topic,” even as the U.S. government investigates flying saucers. Nick Pope complains that we don’t hear very much about abductions nowadays, and it seems that the show is jonesing to get the government to probe (if you’ll pardon the pun) abductees and legitimize the “private research groups” that investigate alien abductions. We hear from MUFON that 74% of abductees say they don’t want their abductions to end, despite the pain and terror they claim to feel, which probably tells you more than MUFON thinks about the alleged physical vs. mental reality behind these claims.
 
Shockingly, during this episode, the History Channel announced that Ancient Aliens is changing the day it airs for the first time in over a decade. The Friday night staple is off next week, and then it will begin airing on Thursdays at 8 PM ET. I regret to inform you that I will not be able to review episodes same-day when it is airing at that day and time, so from now on, I will be reviewing the show sometime after it airs, probably Friday afternoons.