Review of Ancient Aliens S22E13: “Secrets of the Amazon”

​After I graduated college in 2003, I briefly worked in the anthropology department at the New York State Museum before being transferred to a different unit. Now, this was back in the day when accessing scholarly information was difficult if you weren’t part of a campus community. I can remember talking with one of the archaeologists on staff there about the discovery of platforms and possible cities in the Amazon, and she was able to get me a copy of the Nature report about it, something the Museum had access to but I, as a civilian—and one with little money—did not. I remember being fascinated to learn that there had been a whole civilization I wasn’t aware of, and I mention this because that happened almost a quarter century ago. Since then, a great deal of work has been done on the settlements of the pre-Contact Amazon, and even Graham Hancock wrote a book about it in 2019 (America Before), in my review of which you will find more information and details. 

​The short form is that the Spanish reported large cities in the Amazon after the Conquest, but because Spanish-borne diseases killed up to 99% of the Amazon population and the rainforest quickly consumed the cities’ wooden remains, little evidence for them remained visible, and so they were forgotten until modern technology made mapping beneath the jungle canopy possible. Graham Hancock already claimed that these cities’ geometric platforms and enclosures had mystical, astronomical, or mathematical meaning—claims Ancient Aliens brings back long after Hancock already wrote those claims in America Before and also devoted much of the second season of his Ancient Apocalypse to the same material in 2024.
 
All of this is a long way around saying that Ancient Aliens is a long way behind the curve—but entirely in keeping with the 18-month turnaround between what ufologists were talking about on the internet and when it gets turned into an episode of Ancient Aliens.
 
Segment 1
We open with—what else?—the Amazon. But because this is a show for Americans, we need remedial lessons on what the Amazon is and what can be found there, including “dangerous fish,” “trees” that are “tall,” and “insects.” Some of the indigenous tribes are profiled, backed by some generic indigenous-sounding music, with the show stating that these tribes have legends of “star beings” who descended to earth and returned to the sky. It’s partly true; there are legends, such as the Desana people’s myth that their ancestors came from the cosmos and celestial beings descended to teach civilization. However, as anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, whose work underlies this segment, noted, this was reflective of an indigenous cosmology, not an account of space aliens.
 
Next we move on to the discovery over the past ten years of thousands of structures and earthworks in the Amazon, and the show giddily reports that these finds have proved archaeologists “wrong” and therefore archaeologists are likely wrong about everything else—the same archaeologists, of course, who are currently discovering the very sites the show is currently discussing. The talking heads don’t bother to ask why these cultures collapsed or where eight million inhabitants went. Instead, William Henry notes that current Amazonian peoples are primitive compared to these lost settlements, so you have to ask where the pre-Contact cultures got their “extraordinary” knowledge. The implication, of course, is that lazy natives could only rise above squatting in mud with help from the outside—not that what we see today is the result of an unthinkable collapse brought about by European diseases.
 
Segment 2
The second segment recycles material about Bep-Kororoti, a figure of Kayapo myth, whom Claude Levi-Strauss identified in The Raw and the Cooked (1983) as the spirit of a deceased shaman. He is the protector of bees and is depicted as wearing a beekeeper’s suit, which an annual ceremony depicts using a wicker costume worn by a member of the tribe. Since season 3, Ancient Aliens has identified his suit as a spacesuit, following Erich von Däniken in The Gold of the Gods (1973), who marveled with racist glee that such a suit was photographed in 1952, “at a time when the clothing and equipment of astronauts was still not familiar to all us Europeans, let along these wild Indians!” (pp. 144-146). Giorgio Tsoukalos calls this the “smoking gun” of the ancient astronaut theory because the suit resembles a 1960s space suit.
 
We then move on to the Vaupés River between Brazil and Colombia and the Tukano people, who spoke of beings descending in “canoes of light.” This isn’t typically how the myth is described. The standard version is that the serpent canoe of transformation brough ancestral beings of light (i.e. celestial souls) from the stars down to the Amazon. This canoe is a celestial serpent that transforms into a canoe to ride the waters of the Milky Way down to the waters on Earth below. Giorgio Tsoukalos says that because canoes cannot fly, it must be a spaceship. Never mind that it changed from a serpent into a canoe. It is “a description of modern-day technology.”
 
Segment 3
Having run out of ancient things to talk about, the third segment switches to UFOs. We start with glowing orbs of light seen in Colares, Brazil in 1977 that allegedly sucked the blood of islanders. The Brazilian government investigated the “vampire” UFOs in Operação Prato, but they found nothing. Ufologists insist that the government was covering up a real extraterrestrial event, though it appears to be a case of mass hysteria. Conspiracy theorists suggest that the Brazilian government sent the real evidence to the United States.
 
David Childress says that the Amazon is “a good place to have an extraterrestrial base” because the jungle is hard for humans to penetrate.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment again focuses on orbs of light, promoting the YouTube documentary Fenômenos na Amazônia (Phenomena in the Amazon) by Brazilian filmmaker and “top ufologist” Rony Vernet, who filmed interviews with locals who claim to have seen balls of light in the jungle, were chased by them, and even shot with energy blasts from the orbs. Vernet claims to have seen the orbs himself. Vernet claims to have recorded the phenomenon with his cellphone, but the little bursts of pixelated light in his video is impossible to identify. My first thought is hat it looked like fireflies streaking about. (The Amazon is home to an astonishing number of bioluminescent insects.) Vernet says the objects are “ten dimensional” and emerge from the forest, while the local villagers claim there is an interdimensional portal in the forest.

​Segment 5
Finally, in segment 5, we get to the Amazon geoglyphs and the claims Graham Hancock made for their occult meaning. However, the show doesn’t want to go the lost civilization route, so they say that the geometric shapes were used to signal the orbs, taking literally a 2017 anthropological conclusion that such earthworks were ceremonial gateways for shamans to enact rituals for communicating with the spirit realm. The narration elides the spiritual, celestial, and extraterrestrial, which is part for the course for this Neo-Manichaean spiritual revival masquerading as pseudoscience.
 
Segment 6
The final segment talks about the biodiversity of the Amazon and new species that were discovered in 2025. This has nothing to do with aliens, but the show wants us to conclude that therefore scientists don’t know enough to say that aliens aren’t hiding in the Amazon rainforest. The segment concludes with more repetition and alternate takes of lines from David Childress, Hugh Newman, and others that we already heard in previous segments. It’s so “people don’t forget,” Tsoukalos says about ceremonies already discussed, but is also serves as an explanation for why the final segment of each episode is just a bunch of repeats and recaps from the previous five.