Review of Ancient Aliens S22E09 “The Wars of the Gods”

​Do you remember last week’s Ancient Aliens? Well, the show sure hopes you don’t, since they repeat a chunk of last week’s episode in this one, rehashing the same material about Vedic texts and nuclear bombs from last week. In fact, most of this episode is made up of repeats, rehashes, and outtakes from previous episodes, sometimes featuring dead people and sometimes strung together so poorly that Giorgio Tsoukalos occasionally changes clothes and his age while he talks! If putatively the topic is the “wars of the gods,” it is treated as nothing more than a vague theme, with “war” taken to be anything from an all-out nuclear battle to two beings having a disagreement to popping a balloon. One gets the feeling that the producers needed an extra episode and decided to construct one out of leftovers.  

​Segment 1
The first segment begins with Tall El-Hamam in Jordan, which a dubious scientific paper by some creationists claimed was destroyed by an airburst and was the biblical city of Sodom. I covered this when it was on a different pseudohistory show in 2014 and again in 2021 when the formal paper was published. Since then, the claim has grown only less credible, with Scientific Reports formally retracting the paper due to gross errors. Ancient Aliens neglects to mention the retraction and instead credits Erich von Däniken, who appears posthumously in an interview recorded presumably a year or more ago, with inventing the notion that Sodom was destroyed by angry space aliens. That is patently false, since the claim was first made by Soviet ancient astronaut theorist Matest Agrest in the Moscow Literary Gazette in 1960. Von Däniken borrowed the claim from Agrest via Pauwels and Beriger’s Morning of the Magicians, where it is discussed in detail. The claim angels were aliens is not original to von Däniken either.
 
Much of the segment repeats the claims about Sodom made in earlier episodes, again with the discrete refusal to specify what was going on in Sodom that made it so sinful that the aliens wanted to destroy it.
 
Segment 2
The second segment is a rehash of last week’s false claims about Mohenjo Daro and its supposed nuclear destruction. I didn’t bother to check, but if the same talking head clips aren’t reused, they are close enough to be interchangeable. The segment is point-for-point identical, down to the false claim that the Sanskrit epics (conflated here with Vedic texts) record radiation poisoning from ETs nuclear weapons, and there is no reason for me to repeat myself yet again.
 
From here, the talking heads claim that mythologies around the world record epic wars between the gods in the heavens, but they see no difference between the Christian myth of a massive war in Heaven between Satan’s angels and God’s angels and the Egyptian story of Set murdering Osiris or even the Maya story of the Hero Twins descending into the Underworld. These are not all equivalent “wars.” In their telling, any conflict of any type in a story involving gods is therefore a cosmic war.
 
Segment 3
The third segment discusses the drakospita, or Dragon Houses, of Euboea in Greece, which were first covered on the show in 2022. These megalithic stone structures are of unknown date and their builders are equally unknown. Though a fifth century BCE date has been proposed, they may not be particularly ancient, however, since they are not mentioned in Classical sources. The largest, roofed with massive slabs, stands atop Mt. Ochi, where construction must have been difficult. In legend, Zeus descended onto Mt. Ochi, and the show attempts to cobble together an argument by cutting together three different interviews with Giorgio Tsoukalos (wearing different clothes and appearing noticeably younger in some than others) to stitch together a claim that the Dragon Houses were places were ETs masquerading as Greek gods met with humans. The long and short of it is that this is an excuse to discuss the Titanomachy and claim it represents a war between two “factions of extraterrestrials.” The show preposterously claims that the Dragon Houses were built as protection from the gods’ weapons—both contradicting their own claim from two minutes earlier and defying logic since such buildings patently could not withstand a bomb-blast, let along a nuclear explosion, nor could they have been built quickly enough when a war broke out.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment revisits—again!—the underground city of Derinkuyu in Turkey, covered in 2017 and mentioned several other times. David Childress claims that it is like a bomb shelter. The show repeats the 2017 claims about a connection to Zoroastrian myths point-for-point, and it might even be the original segment pasted in. You can read my original criticism at the link above. As I mentioned at the time, the Zoroastrian myth is about “enclosures” not underground cities, which means that the story is not an account of Derinkuyu.
 
We then move on to a repeat of material about the Great Flood, this time in the Sumerian version, taken, again point-for-point, from a 2024 episode. According to my notes, the show used the same talking head clips, so it appears that new narration has been spliced into recycled excepts. There is very little connection to a “war” of any kind, except that Enki and Enlil had an argument before the Flood.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment rehashes yet again John Brandenburg’s claim that Mars suffered a nuclear war that resulted in the Valle Marinaris, a large gash conventional scientists believe to be tectonic in origin. This claim appeared many times before, including in a 2016 episode devoted to Mars. This show is put together so sloppily that it repeats the same material about Zeus’s thunderbolt and Vedic weapons from earlier in the show but introduces them as though for the first time. According to my notes, the show has gone light on Brandenburg’s nuclear claims since 2016, so this is a bit of a blast from the past. The segment concludes with the popular claim that the asteroid belt is the result of aliens destroying a planet with nuclear bombs. This 1990s-era conspiracy theory traces back to early nineteenth century astronomers’ speculation that the belt represented the remains of an exploded planet. However, modern astronomers instead believe that the belt is in fact the remnants of a ring of cosmic dust that never congealed into a full-sized planet the way the other four rocky planets on the inner solar system did.
 
Segment 6
The final segment rehashes the 2024 US military video of a fighter jet shooting a missile at a “UFO” (mostly likely balloons) near Yemen, which the show covered two weeks ago. The same talking heads make the same tired points, and as best as I can tell the show uses different clips of the talking heads from the same interview saying similar things in slightly different ways. In the original take. Travis Taylor said his team originally believed the object was a balloon, but in this take he says he couldn’t tell whether it was a balloon or an alien spacecraft. That doesn’t really speak well to his analytical skill or judgment. It’s unclear how this relates to a cosmic war, and the show finishes by suggesting that UFOs represent aliens with “competing agendas” who continue in conflict over a “contested” Earth. I’m not sure they are aware that they are essentially endorsing Manichaeism and its mythology in almost all its details, but Ancient Aliens is increasingly Manichaeism by another name.