Review of Ancient Aliens S22E15: “Africa’s Extraterrestrial Contact”

​Following on the heels of the last original episode not composed of clips, the Amazon-themed outing from two weeks ago, we return this week to rehashing familiar ancient astronaut claims by geographic proximity. The topic under consideration is “Africa,” the second-largest continent on Earth and one of exceptional geographic and cultural diversity. But for Ancient Aliens, Africa is the mysterious netherworld beyond civilization. In the old Looney Tune “Porky in Wackyland” (1938), Porky flies into Africa and crosses “Dark Africa” and “Darker Africa” en route to “Darkest Africa,” where surreal mysteries await. It’s hard not to think that Ancient Aliens views Africa—and indeed every part of the world outside the U.S. and Europe—in much the same way. If it were not for Egypt being part of Africa, they might have considered it wholly wild.

​Segment 1
The first segment opens with an overview of what Africa is for the benefit of American viewers who are not familiar with it. William Henry says that Africa “immediately conjures up” images of giraffes and zebras. Following this, the show claims that “all the tribes” in Africa have stories of sky beings, though this is no different than anywhere else in the world. It is somewhat interesting that the show decides to connect Egypt to sub-Saharan African cultures of western and southern Africa, though I wouldn’t read too much into it, since they don’t really offer any theory of African history or cross-cultural communication, let alone Egypt’s connection to the rest of the continent.
 
The show discusses Eshu, the messenger of the gods in Yoruba belief. They claim he looks like an alien, though his common appearance is that of a stylized human. After Eshu, the show segues into the Dogon tribe and the Sirius Mystery fantasies that have been repeatedly debunked since Robert Temple wrote his book 50 years ago. As most readers know, drawing on flawed research from the 1930s, the argument ran that the Dogon were aware of Sirius B, an invisible star in the Sirius system, knowledge they could only have acquired from space aliens—and not, say, from the anthropologists who wrote about it. Therefore, their gods, the Nommo, were in fact amphibious aliens from Sirius B. Famously, when the Dogon were restudied in the 1990s, no trace of their anomalous knowledge existed. At any rate, the original claim was that there were three stars in the Sirius system known to the Dogon, and that claim was quietly dropped over the years on account of it having no basis in science.
 
Segment 2
The second segment moves from West Africa to southern Africa and the Zulu. The segment covers the work of Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa (1921-2020), a traditional Zulu healer who later became an ancient astronaut theorist and a proponent of David Icke’s Reptilian mythology. Mutwa reinterpreted Zulu mythology through an ancient astronaut lens. His ancient astronaut claims began in 1996, at the height of the ancient astronaut and lost civilization revival of the 1990s, and they were explicitly drawn on Western UFO and extraterrestrial lore, specifically ancient astronaut books, which he used to interpret the gods of Zulu mythology and their chariots as aliens in spaceships. He depicted the gods—literally, in paintings—as sci-fi robots of the style used in twentieth century movies, down to the buttons and tubes on their metallic bodies, and various alien species from TV shows like Star Trek. His alien species were even identical to those of ufology—Greys, Reptilians, and Nordics.
 
Ancient Aliens accepts Mutwa’s ancient astronaut books as being an accurate account of what David Childress calls “genuine Zulu myths,” though this is not an opinion shared by scholars of Zulu culture.
 
Segment 3
The third segment doubles down on Mutwa’s fantasies, endorsing his “Chitauli,” reptilian beings who came in “fiery vessels,” as a legitimate Zulu myth. However, they do not appear in any recognized account of Zulu mythology published prior to Mutwa and are not recognized by scholars of Zulu beliefs. To give credence, the show relies on the endorsement of Sabata-Mpho Mokae, whom it describes as a South African historian. However, while he does believe in Mutwa’s eccentric mythology, he is not a professional historian. He is a novelist and a professor of creative writing. He does not work in the fields of history or religion.
 
Ancient Aliens alleges that Mutwa’s myths bear a striking resemblance to Zecharia Sitchin’s stories of the Anunnaki, and it occurs to no one that Mutwa wrote his ancient astronaut stories decades after Sitchin and, to judge by his books, which have passages about the “Chitauli” that very closely resemble Twelfth Planet—particularly the revision of the Babel myth into an alien plot and the claim that humans were genetically developed by the aliens—he was simply cribbing from Sitchin.
 
To that end, the show runs out of steam talking about Africa at this point and just starts repeating old claims about Mesopotamia. Giorgio Tsoukalos tries to tell Berossus’s story about Oannes, the fish-man who brought culture to Babylon, but he confuses Babylonia with Sumer. Drawing on Robert Temple, David Childress links Oannes to Nommo as both being amphibious, claims we have seen many times on this show. He then delivers the most unhinged line reading I’ve heard here in years, saying in a complete uninterested, tossed-off way, “Vishnu, too, is sometimes depicted as a kind of amphibious fish-god.” Much of what follows is recycled from an earlier episode about amphibious gods (specifically, “Creatures from the Deep” in 2015).
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment turns from mythology to structures as we look at the circular stone walls of South Africa, known as kralls, from “corral.” They were originally assumed to be animal pens, but the lunatic ancient astronaut theorist Michael Tellinger has tried to claim that they were electrical devices built by a lost civilization to channel earth energy. The show, however, mixes the kralls with a megalithic stone circle atop a hill in South Africa and weaves the whole discussion through Tellinger’s unevidenced claims, derived as they are from his adoption of Zecharia Sitchin’s worldview and his removal of its events to his homeland of South Africa.
 
For what it’s worth, the stone circle Tellinger calls “Adam’s Calendar” and claims is an energy production machine built by extraterrestrials tens of thousands of years ago is part of the Blaauwboschkraal stone ruins of Mpumalanga and archaeologists generally hold it to be associated with the Bokoni culture of 1500 to 1820 CE.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment moves to Egypt because the show can’t think of enough stuff about sub-Saharan Africa to fill out an hour—no Great Zimbabwe, no Nubia or kingdom of Aksum, no Timbuktu. Not even a mention of the Congo and the various creatures and beings said to live deep within the rainforest. I’m not sure the producers are even aware that Ethiopia is where the legend of the Watchers was preserved in the Book of Enoch when that book was lost to the West. Instead, we get a potted history of Egypt and a claim that Egyptian civilization arose all at once, fully formed as a gift from the gods. The show repeats allegations from a 2018 episode that the benben stone was a spaceship from which ETs emerged. I said in 2018 that I wasn’t familiar with any such story, but having looked into it since then, I could find none at all. As best I can tell, the modern claim is courtesy of Zecharia Sitchin. Sitchin reinterpreted the benben stone as a technological object, and in Stairway to Heaven (1996), he claimed that it was the vehicle that brough the sun god Ra, an alien, to Earth, and compares it to a modern spaceship. The warrant for this is the Piankhy (Piye) Stela, which says the king viewed “Ra within the Benben,” meaning the divine essence of the god, but which Sitchin interpreted literally as a vehicle carrying the alien.
 
For no particular reason, the show then alleges once again that the pyramids could not have been tombs, that no one knows who built them or how, and that they are machines for generating energy. Chris Dunn’s power plant idea gets another airing, and Childress again claims “ETs” built the pyramids to generate energy.
 
Segment 6
The final segment discusses the discovery of the most ancient Homo sapiens fossils in Morocco in 2017, dated to around 330,000 years ago, about 100,000 years older than any previously known fossils of our species. In other words, it suggests that humans lived only in North Africa for 100,000 or more years before moving outward. This has nothing to do with ancient aliens or flying saucers, but it fills time in a show that doesn’t really know much, if anything, about Africa and its many cultures. The show ends in the most bizarre way possible, with comments about ET visitation in ancient Africa from John Lockley, a middle-class white South African who identifies as a traditional shaman of the Xosha tribe (as well as a yogi and a Zen Buddhist!) and—but of course—believes the spirits he channels are space aliens. That is pretty much Ancient Aliens in a nutshell, and I’m not sure there’s a better way of summing up this episode.