The Simple Pleasures of Watching 'Ancient Aliens'
Why I find The History Channel's leading demonstration of confirmation bias to be an oddly refreshing bit of programming.
I don’t know about you, but the past couple of years certainly pushed my television viewing habits to its extreme limits. My early lockdown viewing habits mostly consisted rewatching my favorite weird documentaries and Seinfeld reruns. After exhausting that supply, however, I opened up the floor to pretty much any type of documentary, and let the cards fall where they may. Somewhere after the Tiger King era, I stumbled upon a doc about UFOs called The Phenomenon and — if not convinced by it — was at least intrigued enough by the personalities involved to go further down that rabbit hole a bit. Long story short, I’m not entirely sure how it happened — perhaps I blacked out or was abducted — but those were the circumstances leading up to the day that I found myself binge watching the History Channel show that puts “history” in scare quotes: Ancient Aliens.
First, let me get a disclaimer out of the way: I’m a skeptic. I don’t believe in any of this stuff about ‘ancient astronaut theory’ — the show’s thesis statement that extraterrestrials visited Earth many years ago and are responsible for helping ancient civilizations construct many of the world’s ancient megalithic structures. There’s no compelling scientific evidence for this, and a fantastical claim like that should be supported by an equally fantastical amount of solid evidence. In place of solid evidence, the Ancient Aliens team generally relies on a dizzying array of confirmation bias, interpretations of ancient artifacts and artwork that might be construed as charitable to the theory, and an occasional misrepresentation of scientific fact to make their case. Sometimes, the conjectures posed by the show’s talking heads are so bonkers that is it difficult to imagine how one could even begin to debunk their claims (the episode, “Aliens and the Third Reich” and its conjecture that the Nazis used extraterrestrial technology to build a secret time machine comes to mind) — kind of the pseudoscientific equivalent of baseball’s infamous “Eephus Pitch.” I will allow that there is a certain impressiveness to an argument so crazy that it’s difficult to engage with within the confines of our standard framework of logic.
It is completely understandable, then, that much of the criticism around Ancient Aliens centers around the fact that this is an often nonsensical, pseudo-history show airing on The History Channel, which probably should be above this kind of thing if it is to refer to itself by such an academic name. It’s a fair critique, and one that speaks to our societal need to find everything entertaining. Indeed, it is a testament to our strange, fractured-reality Postmodern world that this show has somehow lasted 18(!!!) seasons — three as the flagship show — on a channel that was originally conceived as a happy hunting ground for history buffs. In fact, each episode of Ancient Aliens seems to mimic the overall trajectory of cable television-based journalism itself: begin with a bit of legitimate history and scientific fact, take a predictably sharp departure from reality in Act 2, and finally descend into a wild mix of speculation while occasionally rehashing earlier bits to fill time in Act 3.
However, there is something earnest — and oddly inspiring — about Ancient Aliens and its cast of archaeological revisionists, led by Giorgio A. Tsoukalos (a.k.a. “the guy with the hair, from the memes”). There’s no sense of slickness, no sense that they are trying to sell the viewer anything, save for their theories about mankind’s collaboration with the ancient astronauts — the show’s preferred term for the aforementioned prehistoric extraterrestrials. In an era of glossy, algorithmically-derived entertainment options that seem to auto-populate in real time based on what’s trending, Ancient Aliens is an unlikely pop culture juggernaut. Watching it reliably captures the hypothetical experience of turning on the television and seeing that your stoner friends from college somehow got the backing of a major television network to put on a show. You can’t help but cheer when the show’s mysterious, unseen narrator deadpans a favored catchphrase (“Ancient astronaut theorists say, ‘YES’” is a perennial favorite of mine — and yes, I own the T-shirt), or when one of Tsoukalos’ co-stars excitedly concludes that the answer to another one of the world’s unsolved mysteries is probably extraterrestrials.
Most importantly, it is a show that knows what it is. Yes, it may present pseudoscientific theories alongside verifiable scientific facts, generally delivered by special guest PhD’s that may or may not know the exact context of how their soundbites will be used. However, there is no question that this is a show that aims simply to entertain and— in contrast to many of its cable news counterparts — is highly unlikely to cause any of the harmful spillover effects that occur when sensationalism and conspiracy theory interact with rapidly-developing current events. In a time when politics is seen as entertainment and entertainment is seen as politics, Ancient Aliens deftly sidesteps the muddied waters altogether and sticks to delivering pure escapism, in the same manner that ghost stories and folklore have entertained our sense of wonder over the millennia. The mere fact that the show is alliteratively titled Ancient Aliens should speak to its comfort in the “entertainment” role, but if that’s not enough evidence, consider that it also willingly licensed itself to a VICELAND series that consists of rapper Action Bronson and his friends watching the show while smoking copious amounts of marijuana. Even if the mysterious voice in the title sequence demands we question everything, it does not demand to be taken all that seriously. Let people have a bit of harmless fun.
As someone that found an unlikely success with a niche interest in the music space, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the oddball projects that somehow manage to make it to the big leagues. I never thought that my years of playing stride piano would reach a larger audience than the few hundred diehard fans of that particular early jazz piano subgenre. Watching Ancient Aliens, it is clear to me that none of the cast anticipated that their work would ever reach such a mainstream crowd, either. While Tsoukalos seems to have a very good sense of how to make entertaining programming, his interviews also show him to be a good-natured fellow that is incredibly passionate about what he does. The fame doesn’t seem to have gone to his head (or hair), either. Rather than highlight his own accomplishments as the one to bring the Ancient Astronaut theory to the masses, he goes out of his way to suggest the work of his colleagues and predecessors — particularly the father of the theory, Chariot Of The Gods author Erich von Däniken. His desire to be a good steward of this theory is obvious, and quite admirable.
As for the rest of the cast, nowhere is their genuine nature more on display than in the Season 16 special, “William Shatner Meets Ancient Aliens.” Shatner was the show’s big celebrity “get,” and his poised, Hollywood-polished performance offers a study in contrasts when compared with the demeanor of the show’s regulars. He offers up the usual reality TV expert tropes — leaning back with his hands folded like a mob boss, telling the show’s cast to convince him. They parade out the hits — the impossibly precise cuts of stone at Pumapunku, recently declassified UFO footage from the Pentagon — and, in a classy move by Tsoukalos, even give Erich von Däniken a taste by getting him on a direct video call with Shatner. However, Shatner does not respond in nearly the same way that their fans do at conventions; he’s got a reputation and a new TV show, The UnXplained, to cross-promote. He remains a skeptic. He challenges their assertions. The show’s cast — save for Tsoukalos, who understands that this is just show business — practically melts down in a panic; talking over each other wildly, with desperation in their voices. To them, they aren’t just making good television with Captain Kirk; they’re defending their life’s work.
Shatner never quite comes around — offering the cast little more than something along the lines of an “I can see why you believe what you believe” by the episode’s end. That so many of the show’s regulars did not see this coming is both heartbreaking and refreshingly wholesome. Raised on a diet of fake reality TV shows, corporate-sponsored messaging, and manipulative news headlines, we have grown to be a cynical bunch, as far as our entertainment is concerned. We are accustomed to artifice; to the idea of our television personalities and untouchable celebrities wrapping a TV shoot and never thinking about it again, so long as the check clears. Ancient Aliens shows us that this need not be the case. Its cast doesn’t seem at all concerned with amassing fame and wealth. They’re concerned with getting us to think about how weird it is that an ancient battery was discovered near present-day Baghdad, and to consider if maybe extraterrestrials showed the ancients how to build them.
And, if we’re honest, some of the questions they raise are endlessly fascinating, when not posed rhetorically: How were the massive pyramids of Egypt aligned so precisely with the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west? How were the stones at Pumapunku chiseled with machine-like precision, without the use of modern tools? If we strip away the forgone, probably extraterrestrials conclusions, we are left with a show about all the many wonders of the ancient world — wonders that allow us to marvel at our own history on this planet and fill us with excitement for the future, if only to see what happens next.
Having now watched more than a few seasons of Ancient Aliens [FYI: the best intro sequence by far is the one with the voiceover monologue that begins, “There is a doorway in the Universe…” — that one always gets me pumped up], I’ve probably seen my fill. There are certainly more factual ways to explore the mysteries of the ancient world, and those mysteries are compelling enough without all the extraterrestrial stuff. But, I’ll count myself as a fan, nonetheless. Giorgio and his team seem like decent people that want the best for their niche community of fans, and that alone should inspire us all. It is not serious journalism, but it doesn’t purport itself to be serious journalism, either — and that’s a refreshing change of pace from the myriad of cable news shows that really ought to be considered news entertainment, in the same manner that Ancient Aliens is history entertainment.
Those of us with entrepreneurship dreams may also choose to view the show’s astronomical success as motivation: Just because your idea doesn’t fit into any of the pre-fabricated, Pumapunka-like structures in the mainstream doesn’t mean it can’t carve out its own niche. Sometimes, we just need to dig deep and find a way to turn that inert idea into a Baghdad Battery-like proof of concept. And, when the stars finally align for us and the opportunity to turn that crazy idea into a megalithic success presents itself, our Ancient Astronaut Theorist friends have already taught us how to respond — with an emphatic, “YES.”
-SB
3/6/22 — The reader’s mailbag was full of thought-provoking, wise, moving responses to last week’s piece. One reader suggested that it was lacking one crucial part of the transition from young to old: the realization that our legacy —whether it’s our children or our life’s work — is the only part of us that is meant to live on. Similarly, another reader opined that one of life’s grand ironies is that the young are invariably determined to chase immortality in all the wrong places, while dismissing the advice of the elders who have lived long enough to understand what immortality truly means. It’s just the circle of life, I suppose.
A father also shared a past conversation with his very self-aware teenage son, who hit the nail on the head by explaining that he knew his father was trying to prevent him from making mistakes in life, but there were just some lessons that he wasn’t going to learn in earnest until he made those mistakes for himself. As the reader wrote me: “It was at that moment that I knew he was going to be fine in this world.” I can relate; his teenage son sounds exactly as I was at that age.
Additionally, I received a number of notable quotations that summed up the theme of the piece — an old friend of mine [given the subject at hand, I’ll clarify that “old” in this case refers to duration of friendship, and not necessarily age] shared this one, by the late “disruption” expert Clayton Christensen:
“Employers look for maturity, but no high school curriculum can make young people older”
Another reader saw this theme reflected in the animated “Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse” movie, when the protagonist was told that he alone could know when he was ready to accept the burden of becoming Spider-Man.
Finally, a reader that also happens to be one of my Piano Request LIVE regulars got the last laugh about aging with this quip: “I peruse the ‘laugh lines’, in the mirror, and wonder what could have been that damn funny?!”
Unrelated to all of this — but, perhaps offered in an effort to disabuse readers from the notion that I do little else but watch Ancient Aliens all day — here’s a brand new Postmodern Jukebox video we just released.
As always, feel free to write me directly by replying to this email, or by emailing scottbradlee@substack.com. Word of mouth is the only marketing I do for this little corner of the internet, so please feel free to spread the word by forwarding this piece to anyone that you think might enjoy it!
Enjoy your week,
Scott