Review of Ancient Aliens S22E03 “Islands of the Gods”

​(For reasons that are beyond me, this episode is listed as S21E19 on the History website and S22E03 everywhere else.)
 
The settlement of Polynesia is one of the great stories of human achievement, full of incredible feats of sailing across almost incomprehensible distances. Those voyages carried a cultural matrix that included cyclopean walls and megalithic statues across the Pacific, the from the Marquesas to Nan Madol and from Hawaii to Easter Island. It’s also been a frequent subject for Ancient Aliens. In the past eight years, they have devoted entire episodes to Easter Island and the Marquesas (2018), Hawaii (2019), and Nan Madol (2020) in addition to frequent segments in other episodes. Now we are doing it all again because it’s been a few years, and they probably figure that the audience has forgotten since they reused so much material from these previous episodes, including b-roll footage.

​Segment 1
The first segment explains what Oceania is and who lives there, though they state that the native population is partially South American, which I am not sure is an accurate way to describe recent studies that found that the people of Easter Island and the Marquesas possess about 2% Native American DNA, suggesting contact with South America at one point in the past. The show instead suggests that the Polynesians are South American without reference to any evidence, and Hugh Newman expresses surprise that the various Pacific Islands shared cultural traits, “which suggests they somehow had contact with each other.” Sigh. Yes, Hugh, that is the entire story of the peopling of the Pacific—the Pacific Islanders are indeed related and sailed across the ocean from island to island. That’s just a fact, not a surprising bit of speculation.
 
The segment focuses on stone structures on the Pacific Islands, which were largely built in the past two thousand years. However, the show denies the age of the monuments and instead claims that they date back thousands or even tens of thousands of years earlier. For instance, a Hawaiian temple platform, or heiau, that archaeologists date to the thirteenth century, the show instead claims is “many centuries older” because of Hawaiian oral legends. Perhaps recognizing that this is not quite the shocking flex they think it is, the quickly move on to asking why brown-skinned indigenous people would bother building a large stone structure—being lazy, stupid humans, after all—and asking how they could have figured out how to make it strong enough to withstand the area’s frequent earthquakes.
 
The show tells us that the native Hawaiians believe that these temples were built by the Menehune, at which point we begin repeating claims from the 2019 Hawaii episode. I covered the Menhune when America Unearthed did an episode about them a few years earlier.
 
Jason Martell emerged from cold storage to claim, ridiculously, that the platform temples were landing strips for UFOs, which William Henry also supports. What would aliens that traveled between worlds need with a paved stone platform? How small are their ships? You would think that the ships landing on those platforms would crush the standing stones, statues, altars, and other constructions that stood atop these platforms.
 
Segment 2
The second segment moves to the Marquesas to repeat material from the 2018 episode on the subject. The show acknowledges that European diseases killed more than 60% of the pre-Contact population, but mostly to claim that knowledge of the islands’ ancient past has been lost. The claim that petroglyphs of turtles represent a global memory flying space turtles appeared in the 2018 episode, and Tsoukalos asserts again that the turtles are actually disc-shaped UFOs on the argument that both are sort of roundish. Turtles are rather common the world over, so perhaps—just perhaps—turtles in mythology are related to there being turtles in the wild. A Guatemalan carving of a human-headed turtle is this time called a flying saucer, though back in 2014 they asserted that it was a man in a personal hovercraft.
 
After this, we move on to tiki statues, which are stylized human figures which often included oversized eyes and heads. An actual Pacific Islander explains that the eyes were made large to look intimidating, but the show ignores this in order to tell us that the tikis of the Marquesas all represent the sky god and therefore are accurate depictions of Grey space aliens. Tsoukalos tells us that the belief that the tikis have magical powers represents the natives’ ignorance of some alien technology that seemed magical to them.
 
Segment 3
The third segment takes us to Easter Island to repeat material from the 2018 episode on the same. The narrator calls the moai “strange sculptures,” which is vaguely insulting. David Palaita, a professor at the City College of San Francisco specializing in contemporary Pacific Islander culture, tells us that the moai were intended as signals to seafarers coming in from South America because they were big enough toe see at a distance and to signal the South Americans that they found the right place. That seems to me to be the least likely story, both because there is no evidence of regular South American trips to Easter Island, and because they aren’t that big. How far away are they supposed to be seen relative to, say, the whole island? Out of the 887 moai on Easter Island, only one line of seven moai actually face the sea.
 
“Gigantologist” Jim Vieira claims the Easter Islanders tell of a kingly class of giants. This is a somewhat mangled version of a claim made by Carl Friedrich Behrens, one of the first Europeans to land on Easter Island in 1722. He claimed in a book-length poem (!) in 1728 that the people of Rapa Nui were 12 feet tall and told him their descended from the still vaster giants who built the moai. When James Cook arrived in 1774, he found neither giants nor any legend of giants. “I did not see a man that would measure six feet,” he wrote, dismissing Behrens’s poem as fiction. Helena Blavatsky brough the story back to life when she declared the Easter Island heads to be “memorials of the primeval giants,” i.e. the Nephilim.
 
From here, Andrew Collins tells us that the Easter Islanders believed the moai of Easter Island embodied a magical power imported from the Marquesas, and this magic power allowed the statues to walk on their own. Tsoukalos says this was a literal description of alien technology for moving large rocks.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment repeats material from the 2020 Nan Madol episode, which in turn repeats material from a season six episode. The claims made for the basalt city in this episode are those made in season six, including the false claim that there is a second city located under the water. Repeated dives have found only natural formations under the water. Once again, the show tries to link Nan Madol to Lemuria (which they transport from its original claimed location in the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, following James Churchward’s identification of Lemuria with Mu), but no one bothers to discuss the evidence for this in any detail, assuming the viewer already believes in geologically impossible Lemuria (again, depicted with a map of Churchward’s Mu) and therefore assumes the Pacific Islands are the tiny peaks of the sunken continent’s former mountains.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment takes us to Guadalcanal and UFO sightings there. We hear that the whole of the Solomon Islands have legends of supernatural beings—to which, no fooling; every region has such legends—and them we hear that Guadalcanal specifically has legends of giants. While this is portrayed as a deeply ancient legend (“centuries” old, the show says), the stories of Bigfoot-like giants ten feet tall or taller were first reported in 2010 by paranormal and UFO writer Marius Boirayon in a book published by … David Childress’s publishing house. The stories from that book claim to relate events from fifty years earlier. While there are tales of giant wild men in the region, I was unable to find evidence that this particular story is of any great antiquity. As best I can tell, the oral stories Boirayon’s informants told him in the early 2000s were adaptations of earlier traditional supernatural stories expressed in the then-popular cryptozoological medium.
 
Then we hear about a “dragon-snake” trans-medium UFO and other mysterious lights in and around Guadalcanal. None of these claims goes back more than a few decades, and there is of course no evidence offered for any of the claims, not even blurry videos of the dragon-snake. (Boirayon, incidentally, is a key figure in this claim, too—having documented sixty alleged sightings in 1995.) While this is presented as traditional indigenous knowledge, published accounts such as this letter in the Solomon Times from 2010 make plain that the population is well-versed in modern ufology and is just as steeped in pseudoscience as anyone else.
 
Segment 6
The final segment looks at a limestone trilithon structure in Tonga called Haʻamonga ʻa Maui (“The Burden of Maui”), named for a Polynesian folk hero. The show tries to connect this to “similar trilithons” the world over, such as Stonehenge, as though there were that many ways to stack a beam across two supports. While the show provides one story of Maui, it should be noted that his mythology varies greatly across the Pacific. While the show presents relatively recent oral traditions about Maui flying the stones to Tonga, archaeologists concluded that it is in fact the gate to the now-vanished royal compound which one stood beside it, dating to around 1200 CE. Robert D. Craig, in this Handbook of Polynesian Mythology relates the historical account that it was built to commemorate the bond between King Tuʻitātui’s two sons, with each upright stone representing a son and the crossbeam their bond. The Maui story appears to be a folk legend that arose later.
 
Tsoukalos concludes the show by telling us that every story has a kernel of truth and that truth is the visitation of “flesh and blood extraterrestrials.”