Making Larry the Cable Guy look good

I have a theory that the History Channel’s programming decisions are made by barnyard animals. There’s really no other way to explain the travesty that is “Ancient Aliens.” “How bad could this show possibly be?” you ask. Well, it’s so bad that it makes another History Channel show, “Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy,” look positively trenchant. Larry the Cable Guy, in case you were wondering, is apparently some sort of redneck comedian who manages to make poop jokes – POOP JOKES – unfunny. You probably didn’t think such a thing was possible. It is.

Anyway, “Ancient Aliens” is so incomprehensibly stupid, so completely fucking insane, that it’s hard to look away. “Ancient Aliens” is in fact about ancient aliens. Not their civilizations – although that would be another wildly speculative show the History Channel could add to its roster – but their (alleged) interactions with ancient earthlings. Perhaps you’ve heard it said that historians and archaeologists are not sure how ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, and this may be true. Such an undertaking would have required incredibly complex engineering that, according to our present understanding of their level of advancement, might have been beyond the ancients’ capabilities.

Of course the rational explanation is that we don’t know that much about the ancient world, because it was a very long time ago indeed. They may well have had knowledge and skills we tend to attribute only to much more recent civilizations. The Romans had plumbing for Christ’s sake. They even brought it to the Britons, who forgot all about it after Rome fell, and didn’t rediscover it until 1976. Shit happens. Gaps in knowledge exist. Our best recourse is to keep on investigating, accepting that there are some things we may never know.

This view is not shared by the talking heads on “Ancient Aliens.” These maniacs, who prefer to be called ancient astronaut theorists, think the answers lie in outer space; take a gap in our knowledge of the ancient world, and insert extra-terrestrials. We don’t know how the Egyptians built the pyramids, so aliens must have done it. Their motivation? Well some ancient astronaut theorists speculate that the aliens needed gold for their spaceships, and came to earth to mine it. Some further speculate that humans were in fact created through a series of genetic experiments performed by these greedy spacemen on existing terrestrial species, with the intent of producing a race of workers who would do the mining for them. I speculate that ancient astronaut theorists are psychopaths.

Said psychopaths are also charmingly clueless when it comes to mythology. You see, a myth is by definition untrue; were it based on fact, it would not be a myth. This is of little concern to ancient astronaut theorists, who are not members of the reality-based community. They’re laboring under the misapprehension that ancient myths are historical fact, and therefore require explanation. If the ancient peoples of Peru believed that the sun god descended from the heavens, straddling a dragon with something shiny in his hand, this is evidence that Peruvians from olden times were visited by an alien – misidentified as the sun god by the credulous ancients – riding a spacecraft – misidentified as a dragon – holding a technological device of some sort – unidentifiable not only to the backward Peruvians thousands of years ago, but evidently to modern ancient astronaut theorists as well.

One particular ancient astronaut theorist on “Ancient Aliens” has really captured my heart, a gentleman by the name of Giorgio Tsoukalos. He generally sports a velvet smoking jacket and defiantly wears his hair in a style that brings to mind Ace Ventura. According to wikipedia his credentials consist of an undergraduate degree from Ithaca College – smugly known as “IK” among students at neighboring Cornell University – in the field of Sports Information Communications. Mr. Tsoukalos is precisely the breed of lunatic you’d expect to be dreaming up conspiracy theories in his garage, and to know that he really is doing just that is almost comforting. It means that all is right with the world. Anyway, he’s a real gem, and worth the price of admission (or cable).

When it comes right down to it, I really can’t recommend this program enough. If you like to scream obscenities at your TV, “Ancient Aliens” is most definitely the show for you.