Review of Ancient Aliens S22E01 “Skulls of the Gods”

​After a break of more than two months, Ancient Aliens returned Thursday night, as it has each January, for the start of a new season, its twenty-second over seventeen calendar years, counting from the 2009 pilot episode. I suppose that it is only appropriate that Ancient Aliens returns the same week that its guiding spirit, Erich von Däniken, died at the age of ninety. As long as the series, which was originally an adaptation of Chariots of the Gods, remains on the air, it’s almost like von Däniken is still with us, lying and fabricating shamelessly. Unlike the past two seasons, this one opens with an “original” episode rather than a “Top Ten” clip show. I suppose that is something like progress. On the other hand, the series began its new season with a rehash of familiar material about elongated skulls that the show has repeated for a decade and a half. In a week where Giorgio Tsoukalos was actively posting on X that the supposed “alien” mummies of Peru were nothing but desecrated human bodies made into “dolls,” it is a bit ironic that he is also appearing here to declare some skulls from Peru are in fact extraterrestrial. But that’s where we stand.

​Segment 1
We open in Houtaomuga, China in 2011, where several elongated skulls dating to around 10,000 BCE were excavated. These skulls were intentionally modified, as occurred later around the world. The show displays photos of skulls with intentional cranial modification from ancient cultures worldwide. The show notes the Greek doctor Hippocrates (in “Of Air, Water, and Situation”) described such cranial deformation, and the show concedes that in general elongated skulls are in fact the result of intentional human action to force children’s skulls into preferred shapes, often for religious reasons. Such deformations still occur today in the Congo, the Pacific islands, and some parts of Mexico. David Childress almost understands the idea of body modification as a status symbol (and Giorgio Tsoukalos will later deride the idea in the fifth segment), but the show backs off on this to ask why the “gods” had big heads if they weren’t aliens. One wants to make a Cone Heads joke, but I’ve done that many times before.
 
Segment 2
The second segment turns to Malta, a frequent Ancient Aliens topic, repeating a 2019 episode’s material about the unusual skulls found in ancient sites, itself repeating several earlier episodes and a 2014 In Search of Aliens episode on the same topic. We don’t spend much time on this before moving on to an elongated skull at Arkaim in Russia and then elongated skulls among the Huns—covering thousands of years and thousands of miles and claiming all of it is one thing. It’s difficult even to summarize how many cultures and time periods they fly through, or how superficial their analysis is. William Henry tells us that Osiris was depicted with an elongated skull, which is not true. He is wearing a tall, conical crown called an Atef, based on the Hedjet, or conical crown of Upper Egypt. It is not his head or his head shape. Similarly, they point to the Japanese god Fukurokuju, who has a giant head. That is symbolic, representing wisdom, but Ancient Aliens takes it literally. The narration repeats the question of why cultures worldwide depicted the gods as having long heads. William Henry says that there is no reason cultures around the world would independently find large heads to be beautiful or status symbols so they must all be imitating cone-headed aliens.
 
Segment 3
Having had only one idea that they repeated for two segments and ran into the ground, the show then moves the third segment to Peru and its famous elongated skulls. The show calls the skulls found in Paracas the “strangest” in the world. Footage from past episodes is used as b-roll as we hear about how “large” the skulls are. We hear once again about the same “anomaly” the show has been harping on for at least 12 years—the supposed “lack of a sagittal suture.” I’ve covered this before, noting more than once that “head-binding can lead to the closure of the sagittal suture, as medical researchers demonstrated more than a century ago.” The show then claims that the foramen magnum (the hole where the spine attaches to the skull) is offset by several centimeters in elongated skulls, thus proving they could not have been produced by head-binding. They took this claim over from L. A. Marzulli, the Nephilim-hunter who promoted it back in 2018, and as I reported at the time, his team “mistakenly concluded the foramen magnum is father to the rear of the skull in the Paracas skulls than in normal humans. The mistake arose because they failed to account for the protrusion of the face during the head-binding process, causing their reference point for measurement in the palate to be pushed forward, rather than the foramen magnum being pushed back.” Brien Foerster, who makes things up yet inexplicably gets treated as an expert by the mainstream media, claims that Peruvian skulls represent as a separate “subspecies” that could “interbreed” with regular humans. Tsoukalos asserts flat-out that Paracas skulls are extraterrestrial, while William Henry suggests that they belong to a pre-Ice Age (i.e. antediluvian) species (i.e. Nephilim).
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment is perhaps the most familiar to viewers of Ancient Aliens: the claim that pharaoh Akhenaten is a space alien because his gangly body and long head look weird to them. Tutankhamun’s skull is also somewhat elongated, and since his body has been scanned and tested repeatedly, though different researchers have come to different conclusions about whether the deformation was intentional or natural. Artistic depictions of Akhenaten and a young Tutankhamun likely exaggerated the extent of it when compared to the skulls we possess. Childress and Tsoukalos claim that Akhenaten had an encounter with an alien spaceship that he mistook for the Aten, and he claims that there are many references to pharaohs meeting with fiery discs from the sky, which seems to be a reference to the long-debunked Tulli Papyrus hoax from the 1950s. Then the show asks whether Akhenaten was himself a space alien who rode in on a flying saucer—which surely must be news to Amenhotep III, his very human father. The show also suggests that his mummy is missing, but as I pointed out before when evaluating this same claim in a 2017 episode, DNA testing in the early 2000s showed that a mummy found in 1907 was in fact that of the father of Tutankhamun. (Some have questioned whether Akhenaten was actually Tutankhamun’s father, and thus whether the mummy was Akhenaten’s.) “How awesome would it be if his mummy would be found,” Tsoukalos exclaims, “because we would be able most likely to test an extraterrestrial!”
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment turns to Mesopotamia and the excavation of Queen Puabi’s grave at Ur. Her skull appears elongated in photographs of the excavation, but this isn’t because of how she appeared in life but rather because it was flattened by the weight of the earth used to bury her. Hugh Newman acknowledges that it was flattened postmortem, but failing to understand basic geometry or physics, he announces that “there is a good chance” it was elongated before being crushed. The show next discusses the thirteen elongated skulls excavated in 2022 from Tol-e Chega Sofla in Iran, which were of course the result of artificial deformation, not aliens. But the bigger issue is the crude narration which declares these Near Eastern skulls to be evidence that “civilizations” practiced cranial deformation, “not just primitive tribes”—reinforcing long outdated notions about hunter-gatherers and non-state societies being ignorant and somehow less than the line of succession leading to “us” in the West. Since we are discussing Mesopotamia, the show must discuss the Anunnaki, which they intentionally conflate with the Watchers from Enochian lore. I am unaware of any proof of Childress’s claim that Mesopotamian accounts record the Anunnaki as having elongated skulls, a claim he seems to be deriving from the tall crowns—“special hats” he calls them—in some Near Eastern art depicting various gods. Tsoukalos says that if elongated skulls were a status symbol it must be because the aliens were cone heads. “Our ancestors tried to look like their gods,” he nearly shouts, doing his best imitation of Erich von Däniken. We throw to commercial with narrator Robert Clotworthy wrongly asserting that Göbekli Tepe is “the world’s oldest archaeological site.” I’m beginning to think the writers don’t actually know what archaeology is.
 
Segment 6
The final segment rehashes the show’s usual claims about Göbekli Tepe—“a high culture at a very early age,” as Andrew Collins states, recapping the usual Graham Hancock-style pseudohistory of Atlantis and the Flood. The show plays fast and loose with the words “advanced” and “civilization” in order to claim that because Göbekli Tepe is the same age as the Chinese elongated skulls, they are both derivative of an alien-influenced pre-Flood supercivilization. Collins follows Ignatius Donnelly in attributing all world civilizations to evangelists from this supposed fallen culture. Foerster repeats the claim that there is a second “sub” species of human, which he deems Homo sapiens paracas, responsible for this lost civilization, but Henry disagrees, calling them “an entirely different species of beings.” Each of the talking heads gets a chance to repeat what they already said a final time as the show comes to a close, and then the narrator summarizes everything we saw over the last hour with yet another recap of the recap of the recap. In the new season, having decided that recycling material between shows was too inefficient, the show now recycles the same material multiple times within each episode.
 
The show ends with an “in memoriam” card for Erich von Däniken, who died last week. Beneath a picture of him, the epitaph reads, “You taught us to look at the universe with new eyes.”