Review of Ancient Aliens S21E15 “Britain’s UFO Files”

​Ancient Aliens struggles to find new ways to repackage old material, and it seems that its most recent strategy has been to move away from thematic topics toward focusing on individuals or geographic locations. Last year, they devoted an entire episode to Scotland, and this year they expand their focus to the entirety of the United Kingdom, turning this hour over to a rehash of the British UFO files. If the subject seems familiar, well, it should. It already covered many of the most famous British UFO cases investigated by the U.K. government, including a 2022 episode that covered a 1955 sighting on Lord Mountbatten’s estate and several episodes that looked at the Rendlesham Forest sighting. Most fully, they devoted an entire hour in 2017 to “The Mystery of Rudloe Manor,” a British estate rumored to be connected to secret U.K. government UFO investigations. The episode was partly an excuse to rehash—surprise!—the British UFO files, which are the putative subject of this episode. But this time they added a new wrinkle, turning the show into an apology for the British Empire and a bizarre celebration of the aliens’ supposed plan for white people to rule the world.

​Segment 1
We open in November of last year when Britain experienced a copycat version of the drone sightings that plagued America at the same time. Such sightings were just the usual air traffic—airplanes, helicopters, commercial drones, satellites, etc. The show doesn’t care enough to explore this in any detail and instead rushes into a rehash of their previous episodes covering the 2008 release of the British military’s UFO files. Now almost twenty years after their release, we know there was nothing definitive about aliens in these files, but the existence of such files is taken to be prima facie evidence of … something.
 
After these brief references and allusions, we get a slightly longer recap of the Rendlesham Forest incident, with reused CGI and reenactments from the 2022 episode from which most of this brief recap was drawn. A swarm of UFOs supposedly flying past RAF Bentwaters base sighting follows next, though no real information is provided other than a story that military people saw lights moving quickly.
 
Then, we rush to Italy in 1942, when a British bombing crew supposedly saw a cigar-shaped UFO while on a raid near Turin. As with other WWII reports of aerial objects, there is no evidence beyond the crew’s claims, and we all know how well people understand what they are seeing in the sky under stress. Winston Churchill banned public disclosure of such sightings, and Churchill authorized the government to create a UFO report. The show implies that there is hidden evidence and a conspiracy to hide the truth.
 
Segment 2
The second segment discusses UFO sightings, sonic assaults, and other odd encounters in the English town of Warminster in the 1960s. Known as “The Warminster Thing,” the events resulted in a 1965 photo of a hub cab-shaped UFO flying through the sky. While there is no definitive explanation for the events, it seems likely to be a case of mass hysteria where any combination of normal but unusual occurrences, weather phenomena, and human fears led to a townwide panic.
 
After this,, we hear about a 1974 occurrence in Llandrillo, Wales, where a bright light appeared in the Berwyn Mountains. Jokingly called the “Roswelsh Incident” after conspiracy theorists claimed the British government recovered a crashed UFO and alien bodies, it was probably a combination of a passing meteor in the sky and an earthquake on the ground. The show doesn’t bother to mention it.
 
The Calvine UFO photo from last year’s “Mysteries of Scotland” episode is rehashed again with material repeated from that episode.
 
Segment 3
In the third segment, we travel to Yorkshire in England, which Giorgio Tsoukalos calls “a very strange place.” The segment starts with a discussion of Yorkshire’s fairy folklore and werewolf legends, which Lynn Picknett says are closely connected to UFOs and aliens. The segment covers Paul Sinclair’s decades of traveling the North Sea shore recording various lights in the sky on video. Blurry video of distant lights isn’t very interesting or convincing, but it sure takes up a lot of time.
 
Segment 4
The deeper into this episode we go, the less connection there is to the putative topic, “Britain’s UFO Files.” Now in the fourth segment we are on to Stonehenge, which is about as far from a UFO as you can get. The show devoted an entire episode to Stonehenge in 2019, and it recycles chunks of it for this segment. (The bit about Stonehenge being a map of the solar system, including Pluto [!] is taken nearly verbatim from the second segment of the 2019 episode.) Supposedly, ancient stone circles are hotspots for UFOs, and the shape of circles leads us directly to crop circles. The discussion is taken largely from the 2023 episode the show devoted to crop circles, including the unproved assertion that some such circles cannot be explained as human-made. Nothing in this segment has any connection to British government UFO files, of course, but there is a geographic connection since it all took place in Great Britain.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment looks into the Royal Family’s connection to UFOs and aliens. They start with the advisor to the first Queen Elizabeth, John Dee, and his supposed intercourse with angels. David Childress says that the angels are aliens and that the aliens planned the British conquest of a quarter of the world and wanted England to rule over a global Empire. I guess aliens are colonialists, imperialists, and a little racist? We also hear about Prince Albert supposedly recording a sighting of lights dancing in the sky, but I am not able to confirm this, since all of the Google results are about UFOs seen in Prince Albert in Canada rather than one related to the prince consort. George V saw a light in the sky in 1881 and recorded it in a ship’s log, calling it the light of a “phantom ship.” The show insists on calling George V “Prince George V,” though one was obviously not a reigning monarch with a regnal number before one takes the throne. Prince Philip’s interest in UFOs is very briefly mentioned.
 
The show then discusses the Stone of Scone, which an obviously untrue legend claims is the stone pillow on which Jacob dreamed of the ladder to heaven (Gen. 28:10-22). Even the show can’t really make much of this, so they claim it is a “symbol” of the Royal Family’s connection to space aliens and then assert that the aliens planned the rise of the British Empire. Does that mean they also planned its fall? Were they interested in the French Empire? Or was that more of an accident because the British didn’t follow the aliens’ plan well enough?
 
Segment 6
The final segment, returning to the History Channel’s traditional mode of telling old white men things were great when their grandparents ran things, becomes a bizarre apology for the British Empire, which former U.K. government flunky Nick Pope calls the “greatest” empire in world history. “The map was largely colored red with our colonies!” he said. William Henry similarly praises the territorial extent and prowess of the Empire. We then hear that all of the greatest empires have a large number of sightings of UFOs and other supernatural phenomena. William Henry puts forth a thesis that all of human history is the story of the rise and fall of empires, and the narrator tells us that it is unlikely to be coincidence that a tiny, weak island like England rose to rule the world while being flush with UFOs. Henry claims that the aliens have organized and preserved a succession of Western empires, from Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome to Britain (apparently the aliens didn’t care much about making the East or the Americas global powers)—and it’s clear that the show is trying to convince you that the aliens are conservative Western chauvinists who want a white empire to dominate the Earth.
 
That’s a new level of racist dog whistle I haven’t seen on this show in a long time.