Review of Ancient Aliens S22E08 “Secrets of the Vedas”

​One week ago, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day opened to modest box office returns but massive media coverage. This has apparently excited all of the worst people in ufology, who spoke to the Wall Street Journal about how excited they are to see their favorite UFO lore up on the big screen, right down to the tabloid story about Richard Nixon taking Jackie Gleason to see some aliens. Danny Sheehan even claimed, preposterously, that this movie would finally get Congress to take “disclosure” seriously. The comment amused me since multiple members of Congress have now appeared on Ancient Aliens, which is the gold standard for taking nothing seriously, and it would entirely appropriate for the debased and degraded rump of a legislative branch we still possess to take its cues from a sci-fi film and a cable TV pseudo-documentary. It is the fruit of our era of cultural decline. 

​Speaking of cultural decline: Ancient Aliens is somehow still on the air and somehow still recycling the same false claims about Vedic and Hindu mythology they’ve been rehashing since they first discussed vimanas in the show’s 2009 pilot episode. Seventeen years later, they continue to repeat the exact same claims.
 
Segment 1
The show opens by explaining what Hinduism is, presumably because they know that most of their audience will not be familiar with it. The show says that the origins of the Hindu religion are a “mystery,” though that is not exactly true. Scholars have known since the eighteenth century that Hinduism, which grew out of the Vedic religion, is an Indo-European faith and arrived in India from Central Asia in the second millennium BCE. The show conflates Vedic religion (c. 1500 BCE – c. 500 BCE) with the synthesis that formed between it and indigenous Indian belief systems, forming Hinduism as we know it over the period between c. 500 BCE and 300 CE. This leads to a discussion of the Vedas and their teachings, including the massively large pantheon of gods and their human avatars, as well as their homes in the “Lokas.” A Loka is typically translated as plane of existence, a dimensional realm, or a planet, but its exact meaning and how many of them there are varies by Hindu sect. The show adopts the idea that there are fifteen, with seven above the earth and seven below.
 
They next discuss the Hindu gods—again treating historical Vedic religion as synonymous with contemporary Hinduism—and compare stories of gods as culture heroes with the made-up ancient astronaut legend of the Anunnaki, problematic because Zecharia Sitchin’s Anunnaki myth conflates the Anunnaki gods with the Apkallu sages, something Ancient Aliens has never figured out after all these years.
 
Giorgio Tsoukalos then appears to tell India’s billion Hindus that they are wrong to consider their gods to be divine. Instead, Hindus’ faith is “rooted in a type of reality that they at some point witnessed” when space aliens visited the subcontinent and were mistaken for deities. Sorry, Hindus. Didn’t you know the only correct deity is Jesus, the god of the majority of History channel viewers? Erich von Däniken famously said Jesus was the only god who wasn’t an alien, and this show seems to follow suit.
 
David Childress tells us that Hindu mythology “reads like the wildest science fiction of today,” and thus this is supposed to be real accounts of alien wars.
 
I should note before leaving this segment that the show uses computer-generated graphics of four books marked with the names of four major Vedic texts instead of filming real books. It’s emblematic of Ancient Aliens that they couldn’t be bothered to look at actual copies of the Vedas and instead faked an empty simulacrum, presumably because it was quicker and cheaper.
 
Segment 2
The second segment focused on the devas, the low-level gods, roughly akin to superheroes. The show compares them to the Tuatha Dé Danann of Irish lore, though William Henry falsely claims that the Tuatha Dé Danann were “light beings” akin to the devas, whose name means “shining” or “bright.” The Tuatha Dé Danann’s name means “folk of the goddess Danu,” and they are not particularly associated with light. Similarly, Henry seems to be fabricating the claim that the Anunnaki were often described as “luminous” beings; I found one reference to them being equated to lightning, but otherwise the only references to their luminosity are in ancient astronaut books. Henry says they are all the same beings.
 
Next, they discuss the vimanas, the vehicles of the gods. These were flying palaces in the Sanskrit epics, and they derive from the divine chariots of the gods (in the Vedas, they are drawn by horses, for example), similar to the solar chariot of Helios or the thunder chariot of the various storm gods. But the show falls back on the notion that gods don’t need vehicles, so these must be alien spaceships.
 
They go on to talk about their propulsion systems and other technical details, with Travis Taylor likening them to UFOs. As I wrote in 2012, “The concept of these flying chariots as UFO-style airships originates in a fraud, the Vaimanika Shastra, allegedly an ancient Sanskrit epic, but one ‘channeled’ from the astral realm by a Hindu psychic in 1918. No evidence of this text exists prior to 1952, and even the ‘translator’ of the text makes explicit that it was channeled from the spirit world between 1918 and 1923. The fake text specifically compares the vimanas to modern aircraft, describing their propulsion systems and other modern technological achievements.”
Similarly, the show rehashes claims from earlier episodes that the gods’ various weapons, such as Indra’s thunderbolt, are actually alien technology and not merely symbols of the natural phenomena the gods represented.
 
Segment 3
The third segment dispenses with the Vedas and Hinduism altogether and instead turns to the Indus Valley Civilization and its two most famous cities, Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. They repeat lies going back to the 2009 pilot about the latter city being strewn with skeletons that lay where they fell when the city was suddenly destroyed. In reality, only 37 skeletons were uncovered in Mohenjo Daro, and they were in graves and not contemporary. (They will return to this in Segment 4.)
 
The show tells us that the Vedas were written by the Indus Valley Civilization, a claim that appeared in some older scholarship but as best I can tell is not generally accepted because of the differences between the Vedic texts and what we know of the Indus Valley Civilization. For instance, the Indus Valley Civilization had prominent goddess worship, while the Vedas contain only minor goddess roles. Similarly, the Indus Valley Civilization was sophisticated and urban, while the culture depicted in the Vedas is more rural and agrarian. Elements may go back to the Indus Valley Civilization, similar to the way bits of Mycenaean culture and lore are preserved imperfectly in Homer, but it’s probably not right to call them Indus Valley Civilization texts.
 
William Henry tells us that if these texts date back to the Indus Valley Civilization, then Hinduism is not the development of the people of modern India, especially not the Dravidians of the south, but is instead a historical record of the encounters between the Indus Valley people and space aliens. (If you know that there is an ongoing debate in India about whether the Indus Valley people were “Aryans,” you can see the underlying claim that the show is dancing around.)
 
“Is it possible that Hinduism, the world’s third largest religion, was inspired by alien contact that occurred 4,000 years ago?” the narrator asks. “Ancient astronaut theorists say yes.”
 
Again: Ancient Aliens is telling Hindus their faith is fake, they are deceived by space aliens, and only the good white folks at the History channel know the way, the light, and the truth.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment turns to the famous Indus Valley Civilization Pashupati seal showing a horned, three-faced deity surrounded by animals. Many believe that it may depict a Lord of Animals or Horned God, a figure whose attributes are found in the modern Shiva. Some have suggested that it depicts the actual Shiva, though there is no evidence that this is a direct depiction of the current Hindu deity. The show adopts the position that they are the same god and then asserts that it proves Hinduism is much older than thought—directly contradicting the earlier segment that refused to accept that Hinduism emerged from Vedic religion in the late centuries BCE. But it plays in to their strange obsession in proving the Indus Valley Civilization is the true seat of Hinduism.
 
The show returns to the false claim that everyone in Mohenjo Daro all fell down and died instantly in a massive catastrophe. They then bring in David Davenport’s 1970s-era investigation into the end of Mohenjo Daro: He’s the guy who claimed a nuclear bomb blasted it. As I wrote years ago, in a previous review of an episode that covered the same claim: “We hear that the site was ‘vitrified’ through supernatural or nuclear explosion, but as the video clearly shows, the buildings of the city are not all turned to glass. There is some vitrification, but it isn’t of building but fire-hardened pottery, from a dumping ground where vitrified pottery was buried. The nuclear explosion must have been pretty special if it left the entire city standing, and its mud brick buildings unburned, un-cracked, and still in good condition down to this very day.”
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment keeps following Davenport’s faulty arguments and discusses wonder-weapons in Sanskrit texts that Davenport thought were a description of nuclear bombs. Giorgio Tsoukalos repeats the wildly false claims that the Sanskrit epics accurately depict the fallout from a nuclear blast. As I pointed out all the way back in 2011, these claims are completely fabricated by splicing together unrelated parts of the texts and mistranslating other parts. You can read my full report with the source texts here. Ancient Aliens will never acknowledge this, though, because two of their talking heads, the late Erich von Däniken and the still-living David Childress, were instrumental in fabricating and popularizing the claims.
 
This time, the show expands the claim beyond Mohenjo Daro to assert that the aliens laid waste to the entire Indus Valley Civilization with their spaceships and wonder-weapons, with the survivors then recording the battles in epics.
 
Along the way, Giorgio Tsoukalos claims that the Old Testament similarly featured “wars in heaven.” I assume he is thinking of the fall of Satan, but that is not an Old Testament story.
 
Segment 6
The final segment claims that the Vedas contain knowledge provided by space aliens. They claim that the texts anticipated the Big Bang (it’s far from the only ancient text to imagine creation from a single point, or egg, or what-have-you) and correctly estimate the age of the Earth. Except it didn’t. The 4.32-billion-year “Day of Brahma” is one day in the god’s existence and represents the complete cycle of the cosmos, not just the age of the planet Earth. The ancient astronaut theorists said this is all alien knowledge given to the Indus Valley Civilization and which somehow survived the nuclear obliteration of that culture. The show ends by repeating the major claims from the hour and suggesting the Indus Valley has a special connection to space aliens.