Ancient Aliens: Season 4 Blu-ray Review
Long ago and not so far away.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, November 19, 2012
Ancient Aliens, despite sounding ludicrous on its face, has turned out to be one of the more consistently
interesting History Channel series, one which took some of the ideas fostered by books like
Chariots of the Gods
and spun them into a number of fairly compelling, if sometimes rather tangentially related, stories about supposed long
ago contact between little green (or grey—more about that later) men and humans. Unfortunately, though, this series, as
in so many other History outings, has descended into such purely speculative and often apocalyptic territory that it's hard
to take it very seriously any more, and for some that was a challenge to begin with, even when the series tended to try to
be less shocking and more thought provoking. Rather strangely, A & E released
Ancient Aliens: The Complete Season 1
, but then neglected to do the same with either the second or third seasons, only relenting a few weeks ago with
The Best of Ancient Aliens,
a compilation of episodes from the first and (rather peculiarly) one from this latest fourth season. This is a hit and miss
enterprise, increasingly on the doom and gloom side of things tipped especially this year toward our putative endgame on
December 21, 2012, so if you
are going to watch this, you might want to start scheduling it sooner rather than
later.
The fourth season contains the following episodes:
The Mayan Conspiracy may not exactly make a cogent case for an actual
conspiracy, but it treads some
familiar, albeit compelling, territory in trying to ferret out how such a "primitive" society could have had such impressive
architectural and engineering feats, not to mention monuments aligned to celestial events and a calendar which
accurately predicts shifts in the Earth's axis every 26,000 years. The episode visits all of the four "cardinal" ancient
cities of the Mayan world, looking at various structures and sometimes coming to fairly questionable conclusions about
them. The episode also ventures even further back in time to the Olmec era, postulating that the so-called "colossal
head" sculptures which were uncovered centuries after they were crafted and then (rather strangely) buried are in fact
depictions of ancient aliens. One of the kind of interesting sidebars in this episode may in fact not have a lot to do with
aliens, namely the complexity of the Mayan language, which confounded scholars for untold years before a
mathematician named Ernst Forstemann was able to crack the code.
The Doomsday Prophecies continues on with the Mayan story, this time focusing on the now infamous "end" of
the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012. What may strike some as at least as interesting, is the rather odd
starting date of the Mayan calendar, August 13, 3114 B.C. There's quite a bit of interesting, if at times
repetitive, information imparted in this episode, including a nice segment on the seven pyramid temples around Tikal
which mimic the star system of the Pleiades, which the Mayans believed was the center of all fixed stars, and therefore
the center of creation itself. Christians' ears may perk up in another segment which portends the return of a major
Mayan God who will supposedly descend from the skies on –yep, you guessed it—December 21, 2012.
The Greys attempts to recolor (pun intended) the oft-repeated image of "Little Green Men", insisting instead
that ancient aliens were in fact grey. As might be expected, this episode has a long and not especially informative
segment on the famous Roswell, New Mexico occurrence in 1947, but has a more compelling segment dealing with an
1849 discovery near Mosul, Iraq, in what was once the ancient city of Nineveh. Ancient Sumerian tablets estimated to
be some 6,000 years old speak of an ancient God named Anunnaki who supposedly bred with humans. There are also
some compelling corollaries between pyramid or temple structures in areas as disparate as Mexico, India and China, all
of which were erected to honor sky gods, which of course
Ancient Aliens hypothesizes were actually little green
—er, grey men.
Aliens and Mega-Disasters. To paraphrase President Ronald Reagan, "There they go again". As if the Mayan
end of the world prophecy wasn't enough, History now gives us a laundry list of disasters like volcanoes, earthquakes
tsunamis and asteroids, all of which in this episode aren't attributed to the whims of Mother Nature, but instead to
some nefarious aliens who are out to obliterate humans. Evidently one too many History Channel series has migrated
far enough into outer space by this time to make advanced space civilizations question our collective intelligence.
The NASA Connection reestablishes what made
Ancient Aliens so interesting in the first place, namely an
effort to concentrate on science (if occasionally science merged with mythology). This episode doesn't have a whole
heck of a lot to do with aliens, unless you accept the conceit of
humans as aliens on "foreign" objects, as Buzz
Aldrin describes himself in his guise as a moon walker. There's some interesting information here giving some
background on Werner von Braun, the infamous German scientist responsible for Germany's deadly V2 rocket (the first
man made object to enter outer space) and who later helped develop America's space program.
The Mystery of Puma Punku. For my money, this was the overall standout episode of this season, if only
because it deals with a fascinating historical phenomenon that is not all that well known by the public at large. Puma
Punku is a weird assemblage of megaliths in Bolivia about 45 miles west of La Paz, seemingly deposited at an altitude
of over 12,000 feet. Many of these blocks (some of which are shaped like giant H's) are over 26 feet long and weigh in
excess of 100 tons each. While nearby Lake Titicaca may have a certain name recognition, few probably know very
much about Tiahuanoco, a once thriving metropolis where a precursor to the Inca once lived. This episode, like many
others in this season, features the unintentionally hilarious Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, a hyperbolic individual with an
Eraserhead hairdo whose claim to fame is publishing
Legendary Times magazine.
Aliens and Bigfoot. From the sublime to the ridiculous: this episode really scrapes the bottom of the barrel in its
attempts to link an already largely discredited idea with a completely speculative theory involving ancient aliens. There
is some interesting info here, almost in spite of the episode's focus, including the still unexplained set of footprints that
Mt. Everest climbers Eric Shipton and Michael Ward found in 1951. My home state of Oregon is also featured with the
famous Oregon Caves in the southern part of the state being posited as a secret lair for Sasquatch. One chilling
segment deals with a Russian scientist named Ivanov who was attempting to cross breed humans with apes.
The Da Vinci Conspiracy. Agatha Christie fans may know that the famous mystery writer had an unexplained
absence which she never wanted to talk about and which later became the focus of the feature film
Agatha.
Something somewhat similar evidently happened to Leonardo da Vinci, supposedly after he had some kind of mystical
encounter in a cave in Northern Italy when he was a teenager. Some theorists posit that da Vinci discovered a time
portal, was able to travel to the future, and then returned full of wonderful ideas which later populated such writings as
his Codex Arundel, and which helps to account for him coming up with concepts similar to the helicopter, airplane and
submarine centuries before they were technologically feasible. Of course, he might have just been a visionary genius.
The Time Travelers investigates one of the most enduringly fascinating ideas that has haunted Mankind for
millennia, namely whether or not it's possible to time travel. We get a brief recap of Einstein's Special Theory of
Relativity which set the scientific world on its collective ear by refuting Newtonian physics and insisting that space and
time were in essence one phenomenon. There's a really interesting segment on some ruins in Chaco Canyon, New
Mexico called Pueblo Bonito, which purports to give a geographical representation of our place in the universe and
which, like many other megalithic structures around the world, is able to predict cycles in universal orbits. There's
another interesting piece about the Mahabharata and one of the stories in that holy book which deals with a King who
was evidently hoisted into the sky to visit the Gods, and who discovered upon his return that Earth time had spun
through centuries instead of mere moments, sounding awfully like current ideas about traveling faster than the speed
of light.
Aliens and Dinosaurs. The alien connection in this episode is also rather tangential. Instead, this is actually a
fairly interesting exploration of the idea that there may have indeed been a time when dinosaurs and humans
cohabitated the Earth, against prevailing scientific wisdom and in fact more in tune with what some Fundamentalists
aver (see my review of
Dinotasia for some more commentary on this idea). We
do of course get an
apocalyptic focus as well, this time relating to asteroids which led to the end of the dinosaurs and may lead to the
demise of humans as well.
