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.
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. It is a balanced investigation into a theory some believe cannot be true, but many agree cannot be ignored.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. Produced with the exclusive cooperation of von Daniken himself, ANCIENT ALIENS launches all-new expeditions to seek out and evaluate this evidence, with a concentration on discoveries of the last 30 years, including unusual DNA findings on man s evolution and newly decoded artifacts from Egypt to Syria to South America. Ancient cave drawings of strange creatures, remains of landing strips in Peru, and Indian texts that describe the 'flying machines of the gods' were just a few of the odd archaeological artifacts cited by von Daniken as proof that ancient astronauts were well known to our ancestors. Is it possible that intelligent life forms visited Earth thousands of years ago, bringing with them technology that drastically affected the course of history and man's own development? Presented in the 1968 bestselling book Chariots of the Gods, by Erich von Daniken, the theory of 'ancient aliens' rocked people's beliefs in mankind's progress. History Documentary hosted by Robert Clotworthy,