SIOSI: ‘Ancient Aliens’ Season 4 on Netflix, Where Aliens Are The Source Of Everything All The Time

Season 4 of Ancient Aliens appears on Netflix, and it’s full of the long-running History Channel and A&E program’s usual suspects and wild speculations. Giorgio A. Tsoukalos – you know him and his haircut from the meme “I’m not saying it was aliens…but it was aliens” – is here, alongside Technology of the Gods author David Childress, and even the godfather of aliens-building-earth theories, Chariots of the Gods author Erich von Daniken. In the first episode, “The Mayan Conspiracy” is probed. For the truth? Not quite.

Ancient Aliens Season 4: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Ancient monuments, precisely aligned to celestial events,” the Ancient Aliens narrator intones over images of Mayan pyramidal structures and animations of outer space. “History written in stone, honoring otherworldly rulers, and a calendar accurately predicting shifts in the earth’s axis every 2,500 years.” What did the ancient Mayans know, were their gods aliens, and will the world end in 2012? Ancient Aliens is here with what it believes could be answers.

The Gist: “All these cultures were far apart from each other, sometimes by thousands and thousands of miles.” Giorgio A. Tsoukalos is talking to you like you’re seven. “So how is it possible that all these societies came up with not similar but identical stories? Was it really flying snakes or gods that were snakes? Of course not. It was misunderstood technology. This is evidence of ancient alien encounters in the remote past.” Fantastic leaps of knowledge like this abound in Ancient Aliens, which kicked off its fourth season with an exploration of the Maya civilization and how it connected with gods who were actually technologically-advanced extraterrestrials. Tsoukalos, also a producer, is interviewed frequently here, along with other proponents of ancient alien astronaut theories. Actual archeologists chime in, too, such as Edwin Barhart, the director of the Maya Exploration Center. But invariably, Ancient Aliens sets up the factual information shared by academics as a foil for its grab bag of “what if” and “how about” moments. By the time you get to the 3-D model sculpted to illustrate how the ancient king of Palenque was actually a space traveler, you just have to assume that the academics weren’t consulted on how their quotes would be used.

Were the colossal sculpted heads of the Olmec civilization not portraits of powerful individuals in the ancient mesoamerican society? Or, “Were they maybe aliens, because they had unusual facial features?” Sure, maybe. And maybe their colossal bodies are buried in the ground, and will reveal that they’re actually robots. What Ancient Aliens loves to do is set up a perfectly reasonable historical observation as the jumping-off point for theoretical and usually implausible “second reason” for the existence of things like head sculptures, ceremonial pyramids, an accurate calendar, and forays into astronomy. It even brings in the potential significance of blood sacrifice, because clearly, aliens were into that kind of thing.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It’s sort of crazy, but Ancient Aliens is still in production, and still airs on basic cable. And to that end, you can stream 17 seasons of the show on Hulu. But if you feel like staying with Netflix after catching Ancient Aliens season 4, you can follow up your viewing with the 2021 docuseries Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified.

Our Take: “Did their intelligence originate from somewhere else?” Alongside its raft of wildly speculative statements and assumptions based not on fact but rhetorical blather, Ancient Aliens also manages to be profoundly insensitive toward the Maya civilization. They couldn’t possibly have constructed pyramids with intricate stone carvings, the show asserts without any merit. Therefore, it must have been aliens. And there’s a lengthy list of phrases that do a lot of heavy lifting. “Is it possible,” “appears to be,” “maintain that,” “looks like,” “some type of”: David Childress, Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, Philip Coppens, and the other alien astronaut theorists interviewed are forever couching their wild-ass guesses in twisty phraseology that alludes to potentially unseen truths. Well, unseen by “mainstream historians,” anyway, who are constantly being cited as the yin to the alien theorists’ yang. Somehow, centuries of careful archeological work and examinations of the historical record have become misaligned with what’s really up, which is again that aliens came to earth with blueprints for temples, guidebooks on blood sacrifice, and offers to sexually mingle with priests and other Maya elites. It couldn’t be that the Maya perfected their calendar on their own, or that their building techniques were the innovative result of research and learning. No way! It had to be aliens. Because if it wasn’t, none of the guys interviewed in Ancient Aliens are going to sell any of their books.

Sex and Skin: Nothing here, though ancient astronaut theorists might believe otherwise.

Parting Shot: The narrator posits another question. Given the sophistication of the Mayan calendar, is it really possible that the Maya could have accurately predicted the exact date of some sort of Earth-changing event? Since it’s 2022 and we’re watching Ancient Aliens on streaming, the significance of 2012 has faded. But back then, this final quote from David Childress probably played great on basic cable. “If the truth is that the Mayans were in contact with extraterrestrial beings and now their calendar is ending on December 12, 2012, this might be the return of the gods themselves, of the extraterrestrials coming back to Earth, to the Mayans as they promised…”

Sleeper Star: George Noory, the longtime host of the late-night AM radio classic Coast to Coast AM, appears midway through “The Mayan Conspiracy” to deliver a quote rich with the same measured, accepting tone he uses with the callers to his radio show. “It’s very possible that this civilization,” he says of the Mayans, though extremely cultured, “was also pretty barbaric.” You get the sense from Noory that if he himself was to be ritually murdered in a sacrificial blood rite, he’d acknowledge the perspective of the high priest executioner.

Most Pilot-y Line: “But might the Maya have left behind clues to suggest that their origin and destiny had been plotted by otherworldly forces?” It’s possible that the word “might” has never done any more work than it is here.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Examples of why Ancient Aliens has been skewered online and ruthlessly memed for decades abound in the series’ fourth season. It’s not historical, it’s not plausible, and it’s not even that enjoyable as crackpot whimsy, because it’s so disrespectful in general of the accomplishments of ancient cultures.