I have surveyed numerous colleagues and assembled what I consider to be Ancient Aliens' most popular offenses against science and truth. By no means do I pretend that it is comprehensive. But nevertheless I have finally summoned the courage, and will make this a three-part episode.
My internal dialog has always been there's just no way, it's too big and too deep a collection of falsehoods, I can't even begin to do the topic justice on a short-format show like Skeptoid. Yet from the show's very title to its many tireless years of specific claims, Ancient Aliens has laid out an explicit, unambiguous narrative that human civilization is largely the result of alien influence, whatever hand-waving explanation Burns may give today.įor many years, you - the Skeptoid audience - have been asking me to debunk Ancient Aliens. Science would have you believe we are the result of nothing more than a chance assemblage of matter. It's really a show about looking for God. That's the three-headed snake lady that gets you into the tent. It's not about little green men in outer space. In 2018 the show's executive producer Kevin Burns confirmed this change of direction in a New York Times interview: They have largely given up being an ancient astronaut show and are basically a New Age theosophical show about finding God. Mostly, the recent seasons have been a hodgepodge of recent news stories interspersed with anecdotes about UFO sightings and a few questions about whether aliens were involved in whatever theosophical or cosmological theme they are into this week. Author Jason Colavito, who has been perhaps the most prolific of the show's critics over its entire history, says: For over a decade, Ancient Aliens' producers have dredged up virtually every historical mystery (including many legitimate archaeological discoveries) and woven a narrative around them crediting space aliens.īut most recently - probably due to having run out of false historical claims to promote - the show has shifted focus. Von Däniken himself was a guest on the pilot episode, along with other proponents of the bizarre belief system who had themselves been influenced by von Däniken's books. From its inception, Ancient Aliens has promoted the most flagrant misinformation in what can only be reasonably described as a deliberate attack on science and history a coordinated assault against the public intellect, a reckless scheme to de-educate anyone who has an honest curiosity about humanity's ancient past.Īncient Aliens got its start as an unveiled promotion of the claims presented in Erich von Däniken's book Chariots of the Gods which asserted that virtually every ancient civilization was built or strongly influenced by literal space aliens who came down in flying saucers.
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One series stands alone as being most emblematic of this trend: Ancient Aliens, on the air constantly since 2009, on History (formerly The History Channel), an A&E Networks channel. Longtime Skeptoid listeners have, for many years, heard me (and many others) condemn the way the cable networks that bill themselves as presenting science or history quickly transitioned into the outright promotion of pseudoscience and pseudohistory, such that by the year 2000 the amount of anti-intellectual content has far outweighed the amount of factual content.
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