“Ancient Aliens”: The History Channel’s Assault on Truth

Jeez I thought this hokum went out with the ark and Erich von Daniken's "Chariots of the Gods?" and "Return to the Stars" - which I fully admit to having read at around the age of 8-9 years old during a family camping holiday round Scotland (along with a healthy dose of Hitchcock's "Three Investigators" kids novels which I had an insatiable appetite for).

Anyway...then Carl Sagan happened for me and I was rescued.

I was amused watching ancient aliens when they were playing with WWII. At one point they ended up getting to Nazi 'levitation tech' which was literally a primative jet engine attached to generators to make magnetic fields.

The thing is that rather than grabbing serious drawings or plans, they grabbed abbreviated ones that were obviously used for training and the type of doodles someone qualifying on a system would make to explain their knowledge (military personnel proving they know enough to trust/fly/maintain their gear). And got utterly obsessed with a hex transformer (uses multiple transformers to shift the waveform of ac, then converts the peaks to get really high voltage DC), declaring alien technology that would never work. It really drove home the point to me how easy it is to eventually find a professional that will say what you want.

In the early '00s, we joked that it was the History-of-World-War-II Channel. Sometimes they'd rotate to other wars in which they could portray the United States in a heroic light. Back then, they were pandering with selectively chosen facts. Now they're just pandering with straight-up BS.

I actually sent them an email complaining about their scheduling and excessive alien theory usage around +/- 3 years ago. Also I raised questions about their so-called specialists. They responded but I was already fed up with their Constant pawn shop hysteria and alien jumbled mess

Wait, does anyone take this seriously? I thought the show was simply satire / a stoner meme.

They need to have an episode on Flat Earth.