The Spring 2018 Edition of Alien Con Finds "Ancient Aliens" Stars Musing about Humility, Opening Star Gates, and Disclosure

​It’s a bit of a cliché that reviewers and audiences misunderstood Starship Troopers and didn’t realize that it was a satire of fascism. All the same, I’m not quite sure how to react to the news that not only does America have internment camps for children now but that Pres. Trump has also ordered the creation of a new “separate but equal” military service branch, Space Force, to fight battles in outer space. I’m torn between thinking our world has drifted into The Man in the High Castle and thinking we’re now in Starship Troopers. Either way, there will be Nazis on the moon. 

​Meanwhile, thousands of Americans traveled from across the country to attend the History Channel’s sold-out Ancient Aliens fan festival, appropriately named Alien Con, in Pasadena to hear the stars of Ancient Aliens talk about “Disclosure” and star gates, and allegations that the truth will set us free any moment now. In photographs published in local media after the convention ended on Sunday, we saw auditoriums packed to the rafters to hear Giorgio Tsoukalos discuss his life story, immigrating from Switzerland to the United States to become the world’s most popular propagandist for the belief that human beings are not smart enough to stack rocks one atop the other without help from space aliens.
 
Perhaps in normal times, I might have found ways to treat the Ancient Aliens fan convention—with no less a special guest luminary than X-Files star David Duchovny—with humor. But, frankly, it’s just disturbing to see thousands of Americans giving a standing ovation to Erich von Däniken, the racist old coot who once mused that the “Black race” was probably a “failure” that the aliens corrected by genetically engineering white people, the same racist old coot who called Black people inherently “musical,” who railed against Muslims, who foamed at the mouth about gender fluid people, and who “dared” to ask the question: “Is there a chosen race?”
 
At the convention, von Däniken told the audience that humanity needed to be “humble” in the face of the overwhelming superiority of space alien gods. “We are not alone. We are just a tiny group in this endless universe. We should learn to become humble,” he said. That humility has never extended to his own estimation of himself or the rightness of his intolerant and ethnocentric worldview.
 
The ancient astronaut theory was born out of the racist and colonialist ideologies of the late nineteenth century, notably Atlantis theories and Theosophy, and has served as a vehicle for claims that nonwhite people were culturally inferior to white Europeans. Although more modern versions of the hypothesis have softened the edges a bit, plenty of racist claims about “white” gods and Euro-American cultural dominance pass under its mantle even today. David Wilcock and the late Jim Marrs, both from Ancient Aliens, have linked evil aliens to Jews. David Childress of Ancient Aliens wrote books about how white men dominated Atlantis and ruled over dark-skinned people. Giorgio Tsoukalos, a political liberal, nevertheless endorsed the work of convicted anti-Semitic hate criminal Jan Van Helsing in celebrating the Nazis’ alleged use of recovered UFO technology – on his Ancient Aliens spinoff show!
 
Nick Pope said that the reason he believes space aliens have visited Earth is, essentially, his boredom with reality as it is lived. “The world would be a more interesting place with aliens in it than without!” he told the crowd. Well, it would be more interesting with Greek gods, unicorns, and genies, but somehow that doesn’t really justify the search for imaginary creatures.
 
William Henry said that you know when you are close to a star gate portal to the alien realms because you experience a tingling vibration, and he added that star gates are “open to everyone.” Oddly, though, neither he nor the other ancient astronaut theorists have every made use of a star gate to meet the aliens who pay their bills, despite confidently asserting that doing so would provide proof positive of the aliens’ existence. I wonder why that might be. Maybe he just likes getting paid to travel to expensive tourist traps to “tingle” on camera. I can think of another industry that pays people to vibrate on camera… Of course, that one isn’t really open to “everyone” since they have at least some standards.
 
Giorgio Tsoukalos finished the convention by announcing that disclosure of the UFO reality is currently occurring. “Disclosure is already happening and we are in the middle of it right now,” he said, presumably inspired by last year’s New York Times report on the Pentagon’s outsourced UFO investigation program and the apparent industrial waste that its contractor, Robert Bigelow, has been investigating as wreckage from crashed flying saucers.
 
On the plus side, the Trump Administration now has Space Force to make use of all the discoveries and innovations that ufology and ancient astronautics have made over the years. Oh, wait… That’s right: After seven decades, there aren’t any. Well, there’s still the racism. Of course, ancient astronaut theorists are much more welcoming of illegal aliens.