Ancient Aliens is a show inexplicably put out by the History channel because life is a cruel joke and the people who believe easily debunked Moon landing conspiracy theories have more power than we ever thought possible. Although the show has been universally panned by all credible experts as being total and utter horseshit, you’d never know this if you watched the show itself because they don’t invite those kind of experts to speak.
If you’ve never watched an episode of Ancient Aliens or have and subsequently lost the ability to retain long-term information as part of the inevitable drop in IQ that accompanies marathoning it, allow us to sum it up. Every show centres around the premise that the ancient people of Earth were visited by aliens and that is why they were able to construct magnificent structures like the pyramids and other cool shit like the Easter Island heads.
The show is largely inspired by the writings of legendary dickhead, Erich von Däniken, author of the book Chariots of the Gods? which posits that all of ancient mans’ accomplishments can be attributed to Aliens.
The structure of each show usually goes as follows. They will usually show something from the past that scientists or historians don’t quite fully understand yet and point that as proof it must have been aliens. Sometimes the show mixes things up and draws parallels between aliens and the writings of ancient religious texts which sometimes mention things like balls of light in the skies and otherworldly beings. You know, alien stuff.
While experts have begrudgingly admitted that some of the things noted in the show have a tenuous factual basis, such as the multiple claims by the show that there simply some things from the ancient world we simply do not fully understand such as why so many unrelated ancient cultures had such a hard on for mummifying their dead. They’ve stressed that it’s wildly irresponsible to chalk these things as being evidence of aliens landing on Earth instead of the infinitely more likely explanation that modern historians need to start pulling their weight more.
It’s also worth noting that the show frequently just makes shit up to suit its agenda such as taking blurry pictures of Mars and saying there’s probably a big-ass alien pyramid in the distance.
However, by far the worst thing the show does is carefully censoring the kind of opinions that appear on the show to push the idea that its theories are more wildly held and accepted than they actually are by the wider scientific community, which is not at fucking all. We know this because when known sceptic and actual Archaeologist Kenneth Feder was invited to appear on Ancient Aliens a few years ago, he wrote them a letter back saying “I’d be happy to be on your show, but you should know that I think that the ancient astronaut hypothesis is execrable bullshit.”
For some reason, after hearing this, the History Channel rescinded their offer for Kenneth -Ancient Astronaut Theory is Bullshit – Feder to appear on their show and replaced him with an expert more friendly to the theory of everything being “probably planted by aliens”. An expert that unlike Feder, didn’t even a Wikipedia page.
