To prove that hypothesis on the show, an “aviation and aerodynamics expert” builds a scale model of the bird to see if it will fly. To “ancient alien theorists,” it’s evidence that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom had airplanes. To archaeologists, it looks like a toy, maybe a weathervane. Take the show’s investigation of the Saqqara Bird, a small wooden falcon removed from an Egyptian tomb in 1898. The show’s bedrock is an inversion of Occam’s tool for sorting hypotheses. But while those experiments used ancient prognostications and grassy-knoll-theorism to spice up their facts, “Ancient Aliens” put its spurious nonsense front and center. “Conspiracy?” and “Decoding the Past”-looking at universally debunked theories and trying to match history to prophecy, like those of Nostradamus, respectively-realized that Americans were much more interested in Dan Brown than they were in history books as early as 2005. “Ancient Aliens” wasn’t the network’s first show to break away from its formerly staid documentary style-“Ice Road Truckers” and “Ax Men,” which focused more on reality-style personal relationships and on-camera drama rather than exploring the history of northern trucking and lumberjacking, came out in 20. “Ancient Aliens” was just the canary in the mine this time around.Ĭards on the table, I realize that “Ancient Aliens” isn’t the only show in the History Channel’s lineup that’s gotten away from history as such. Richard Hofstadter taught us a half-century ago that things like anti-intellectualism and the ‘paranoid style’ have been with us since at least 1776. “Ancient Aliens” is a more popular show than you might think, but I doubt it’s got much influence on the zeitgeist, and I know that it didn’t invent what it’s doing. What I mean is that when it debuted in 2009, “Ancient Aliens” put to work certain attitudes and argumentative techniques that have, in the age of Trump, come to dominate our discourse. Other suspect extraterrestrials gave it to them as a humanitarian gesture to prevent their starvation in the desert.” The show is “Ancient Aliens,” and it’s everything that’s wrong in America. “But,” asks the narrator, “If the Israelites’ survival depended upon the manna machine, where did they get it? Some believe they had stolen it from the Egyptians prior to their exodus. “Of course, needed energy, for cultivating the algae, and this was produced, we postulate, by a small nuclear reactor,” says Rodney Dale, a wild-eyed madman. The chosen people were forced into the Promised Land because the algae-based-protein-bar machine that dispensed the “manna from heaven” they’d been eating finally broke down.
And they didn’t leave that desert because the offending generation had died off. I don’t know if you knew, but the Hebrews didn’t spend forty years in the Sinai after the Exodus because they’d incurred the wrath of God.
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