Review of Ancient Aliens S21E16: “Mysteries of the Norse Gods”

​After several weeks of episodes themed around modern ufology, this week Ancient Aliens returned to its classic style in two ways—Not only was this episode centered on the old-fashioned ancient astronaut theory but it was also a remake of a previous episode the covered the exact same subject. You would need a long memory to remember that back in 2013, Ancient Aliens devoted an episode to “The Viking Gods” and spent that hour doing what they do in this hour, claiming that the Norse gods were extraterrestrial beings. As I mentioned at the time, this is a deeply problematic claim because the texts they ask us to take literally as historical records of the gods’ activities also are euhemerizing texts that explicitly state that the gods were human kings wrongly worshiped as gods. You can’t have it both ways; either we take them literally or we don’t.

​Segment 1
The episode begins with a geography lesson, explaining for the presumably ignorant viewers of the History channel what Scandinavia is and what peoples have lived there. The show tries to explain the difference between the Norse (the people of medieval Scandinavia) and the Vikings (the itinerant Norse raiders), and a potted history of Viking raids follows, with a map of their travels that states that the Vikings traveled much farther south into the modern United States than evidence suggests. The show then discusses runes and the paucity of contemporary records from the Viking Age, which means that most of what we know about their stories and myth comes from the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, two Icelandic texts from the 1200s.
 
An overview of the major Norse gods follows, though in no systematic order. The show then asserts that the gods “truly existed.” However, as noted above and in my review of the previous version of this episode, Snorri Sturluson explicitly states in his Prose Edda that the gods were mortal humans, specifically descended from Trojans, and alive in the time of Julius Caesar and Pompey.
 
Segment 2
The second segment again turns to the Eddas and cites the story of Denmark’s first king being the son of a god. The show compares this to stories around the world of monarchs being sons of gods. Then the show compares the nine realms of Norse cosmology to the idea of living on other planets, asserting that the Bifröst Bridge was not a “construction” but may have been a folk memory of a wormhole. This is ridiculous because the Prose Edda quite literally states it was “built with art and skill to a greater extent than other constructions” and is therefore a structure, even if made from magical elements, rather than a paranormal tunnel. The narrator and talking heads offer different etymologies of Bifröst (“shimmering path,” “quivering way”) but the writer of the episode has misunderstood these various scholarly attempts at etymology as alternative names for the bridge.
 
Giorgio Tsoukalos claims that Norse myths represent “misunderstood technology.” Thus, Sleipnir, the eight-legged flying horse, is a jet plane. But there are better explanations for his eight legs—two common ones are that he is a faded remnant of the double-horse of the Divine Twins common to Indo-European myths (the same horse appears in an Indian story) or that he represents the four men (and thus eight legs) that bore the bodies of the dead to their graves (Odin is the god of the dead). William Henry claims that Odin’s throne is “advanced alien technology” that allowed Odin to spy on the Earth. Frey’s ship, which could be folded to fit into his pocket, is supposedly “nanotechnology.” Odin’s spear is a “heat-seeking missile” or “guided precision weapon,” Henry claims. Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir, is supposed to be a high-tech weapon, but they don’t bother to suggest what it might be. (While the hammer is the most common weapon for Thor, some medieval sources assign him a mace or a club instead.) At any rate, the thunder-god’s lightning weapon is a common motif across Indo-European pantheons, so an attempt to single out Thor from all the other related storm gods is doomed to fail.
 
Segment 3
The third segment looks at the dwarves, which the show calls the creatures in Norse mythology created to forge the weapons of the gods. However, the show doesn’t get into the complexity of the issue, namely that there is overlap between a number of different magical beings (such as elves), that some of the stories are actually Germanic rather than Norse, and that the dwarves who made the Norse gods’ weapons were not a race of smiths but rather a small group, the Sons of Ivaldi, and two others, Brokkr and Eitri, who dared claim they could make better weapons. These dwarves, however, are barely mentioned beyond a single poem.
 
The show then praises the craftsmanship of Norse Ulfberht swords and claims that they could not have been created with human technology because they required forging temperatures of 3,000°F. Henry claims that one must be “open to the possibility” that the Ulfberht swords were made by space alien dwarves. However the show omits that the technology was in use in India at the time, and the Vikings imported the crucible oven via their trade route. Nova did an episode about this more than a decade ago, so it is not exactly a secret.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment discusses Viking ships, even though they are not gods, the putative topic of this episode. We are told that the ships were able to sail across water, “much as previous ships had done.” Fancy that. Michio Kaku then pops up to claim that the Vikings’ ability to navigate is inexplicable because clouds would have prevented them from seeing the stars. Thus, we turn to the sagas’ references to the sunstone, a polarizing stone that would allow the viewer to find the location of the sun in a cloudy sky and thus to navigate. In 2002, a piece of calcite found in a sixteenth century shipwreck was claimed to be a sunstone. Jason Martell claims it is a “beacon” and “advanced science.” The narrator calls it a “technological marvel.” This is not, as the show fails to note, high alien technology or magic but is instead a clever application of a natural substance. It requires no aliens to explain it.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment tries to claim that the legendary Viking funeral is supposed to represent an effort to teleport to visit the aliens. The show does not acknowledge that the stereotypical Viking funeral (burning ship set out to sea) is only one form of a variety of Viking and Norse burial and cremation practices, and not necessarily the dominant one. In this reading, the Valkyries are aliens abducting warriors to Valhalla, which is the mothership or “an orbiting space station” (in Tsoukalos’s words), because it was supposedly made of metal. The narrator tells us that the Norse burial used fire to imitate the flames used by rockets to reach the aliens’ space stations. They do not explain why aliens that use warp drives and wormholes need rockets to go up and down. Anyway, as I was saying, many Norse and Viking funerals were internments, and almost none involved boats. High-status individuals would be buried with a ship under rocks arranged in the shape of a ship or occasionally burned on one, but the cinematic version referenced on the show is based on a possibly fabricated source and not consistent with either the textual or archaeological records.
 
Segment 6
The final segment discusses various modern UFO sightings over Scandinavia, most taking the form of balls of light in the sky. The 1946 “ghost rocket” scare over Scandinavia is also discussed. No one on the show makes any effort to investigate any of these but instead simply assume that a light in the sky must be a space alien. The show then summarizes rather bluntly by repeating that gods = aliens and UFOs = aliens and therefore UFOs = gods.