Review of The UnXplained S08E01 “Impossible Ancient Structures”

​It’s hard to believe that William Shatner is 94 years old, or that he is currently the oldest person hosting a cable TV series, but the eternally young Star Trek star is both things—and launching a news season of The UnXplained, its eighth, the same week that Trump advisor Stephen Miller appealed to the actor to “save” Star Trek from “wokeness,” fundamentally misunderstanding the humanist nature of Star Trek. Back on cable TV, The UnXplained, sister program to Ancient Aliens, with whom it shares both a network and a production company, opened its new season with an episode about archaeology, so I figured it was a good time to check in. Shatner, after all, has been promoting pseudohistory about aliens and ancient lost civilizations since the 1970s, so I was curious how his show would treat “impossible” ancient structures supposedly too large or too perfect for humans to have built without modern technology.

​Segment 1
Shatner’s narration is still robust despite his advanced age, but the words the writers have given him to say do him no favors. He sounds like a vaguely confused grandfather excited by a meme he saw posted on Facebook and delivers his lines as though he hadn’t already covered this material on both this show and on his Ancient Aliens crossover episodes. The first segment begins with the Great Wall of China, a 13,000-mile series of defensive barriers constructed over more than 2,000 years. There is nothing inexplicable or impossible about the Great Wall, so I am at a loss as to what the wall is doing on a show about supposedly “impossible” structures or why, after explaining exactly how it was build, they still call it a “mystery.” According to one of the experts opining, the mystery is why China spent so much time and so much labor on the project, which modern people find unimaginable simply because they can’t conceive of other cultures and other times have different priorities and cared little about the human or financial costs.
 
Segment 2
The second segment takes us to Egypt, a “land of countless architectural mysteries that continue to defy understanding.” The segment focuses on the Serapeum of Sakkara, where the massive sarcophagi of the Apis bulls can be found. You’ll remember that Ancient Aliens did a whole episode about this in 2024, and Shatner’s show recycles material from that episode. He tells us that “some” people believe the sarcophagi to belong to the Apis bulls, but they might actually be the tombs of giants. The show does not bother to tell the audience that the sarcophagi only date to 550 BCE and later, with most being Ptolemaic in date. Instead, Hugh Newman appears and starts blathering about medieval “Arabian records, myths, and legends” in which he appropriates my work by citing the Akhbār al-zamān (c. 950 CE). He learned about from me back in 2017, and claims that the ’Adites were giants who came to Egypt and built the pyramids. That’s not quite true. The book states that there is a story that the ’Ādites invaded Egypt and that their leader, Shaddād bin ʽĀd, built the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre, but the author of the Akhbār al-zamān is quite clear that the Egyptians believed this Arabian legend to be false and that “Sūrīd is the builder of the two pyramids that are attributed to Shaddād bin ʽĀd.” Newman goes on to repeat his frequent confusion about art, thinking that if a carving or a painting depicts someone larger than life, they must have been giants. He offered what he calls his “compelling” idea on Ancient Aliens a few times, and I discussed it in more detail there, and yet somehow, he missed the fact that the author of the Akhbār al-zamān never identifies Shaddād as a giant but explicitly calls many of the (mythical) pharaohs who build the temples and pyramids of Egypt “giants,” i.e. Nephilim.
 
Segment 3
The third segment looks at India’s rock-cut architecture, specifically the Ellora caves, including both carved caves and free-standing temples carved from rock. Shatner calls them a “true mystery of ancient engineering.” The segment focuses on the Kailasa Temple of the eighth century CE, which was carved from the top down from the living rock. The talking heads ask how it was possible to plan that kind of carving, though it would seem that the obvious answer is that they planned out the basic shape, removed the stone around it, and then refined it down to what we see today, just as Michaelangelo carved the David in phases, not perfectly from the top down. It seems that the talking heads think it was produced in its finished form from the top down, which is implausible and ridiculous. Shatner asks if “lost technology” or “supernatural” forces were involved. Andrew Collins arrives to say that the “gods” built it with “lost technology,” but concluding that it is a human construction, which is weird because he also does double-duty on Ancient Aliens, where he claims aliens are responsible for such works.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment covers the Borobudur Temple in Indonesia, which is also a frequent stop on the Ancient Aliens itinerary. It’s an elaborately carved Buddhist temple from the ninth century CE and abandoned in the fifteenth century CE. The show does not bother to make a case that the temple is “impossible” but instead focuses the segment on whether volcanic eruptions led to its abandonment or whether it is “cursed.”
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment turns to the cyclopean architecture of Sacsayhuaman, yet another regular location featured on Ancient Aliens. The show claims Garcilaso de la Vega recorded legends about a lost race building the site, but he did not. He attributed it to the Inca under the successors of Manco Capac in Book 7 of his Royal Commentaries. (He also claims that the people of Tiwanaku were involved, which was not true.) I am unaware of a legend that Viracocha built the site, that the stones walked into place, or that a dragon made it by petrifying the locals with its flames. I was unable to find such stories in standard sources. After this, Hugh Newman claims that the angles used on the stones are a form of writing encoding secret messages from a lost civilization, which is ridiculous on many levels.
 
Segment 6
The final segment looks at the largest Buddha statue in the world, the Leshan Giant Buddha, but it doesn’t say much about it other than that it is big and supposedly endowed with supernatural power to calm rivers. Then the show recaps everything we saw before, without really reaching much of a conclusion. Shatner, though, attributes them to “our ancestors” rather than Bible giants or aliens, so I guess that’s a half-step up from Ancient Aliens. However, the conceit that ancient structures are “impossible” less because of how they were built than the fact that the History channel occupies the late-capitalist miasma that finds it hard to imagine anyone would ever spend extraordinary time and resources on something that wasn’t intended to turn an immediate profit is perhaps even more depressing than claiming aliens did it.
 
It’s tiresome watching the same material move from episode to episode and show to show, never changing. At the end of the day, The UnXplained is just another History channel show recycling the same threadbare mysteries from Ancient Aliens under a slightly different veneer.