It‘s Probably (not) Aliens!

Ancient Aliens blames the Trojan War and Aztec human sacrifice on extraterrestrial orders, which is a very convenient way to let the people in charge off the hook. Scott and Tristan get into Homer's very human gods, Mexica beliefs about sacrifice and the Spanish accounts used to justify conquest, then connect the argument to Christian nationalism's claims of divine authority. We close with 'Voyage...

Srinivasa Ramanujan did extraordinary mathematics, and Ancient Aliens would like to credit his extraterrestrial internet provider. His accounts of dreams and devotion to the Hindu goddess Namagiri become evidence of an alien download. Scott realizes his childhood refusal to show his work could get his homework dragged into this. We look at the expensive paper, borrowed books and mathematical commu...

Ancient Aliens would like you to believe Angkor Wat required a trip to space college and a supply of magic water. Apparently, giving Khmer builders credit for knowing how to build things is asking too much. We look at the religious poem being repackaged as an alien encounter, the canals used to transport sandstone, and the enormous amount of skilled, often coerced labour behind the temple. We also...

A 17-year-old peasant girl helps turn the tide of the Hundred Years' War, and Ancient Aliens would like to speak to her extraterrestrial supervisor. Apparently, Joan of Arc couldn't have rallied an army without someone uploading military strategy into her brain. We look at what that explanation leaves out: the religious world Joan grew up in, a church bureaucracy that evaluated visions, and an exh...

An airman touches a UFO in Rendlesham Forest, downloads a binary message into his brain, and keeps the evidence to himself for 30 years. That's the story Ancient Aliens wants us to accept. Conveniently, the message becomes public in time for television. We examine the notebook behind the claim, the details that grow with each retelling, and why a string of ones and zeros needs more than “trust me,...

Scott is back from parental leave and asks what he missed. Tristan opens with the war in Iran. Welcome back, buddy. We kick off the season with a news catch-up and corrections on Yellowstone's supposed apocalypse schedule, willow bark and aspirin, and how Soviet worker awards helped bosses demand more work. Scott gets challenged on Scooby-Doo continuity and Thanos's motives, then looks for the tec...

David Jacobs spent his retirement from teaching history at Temple University convinced that alien-human hybrids he calls hubrids are quietly moving into apartments in Philadelphia, taking jobs, and waiting for a signal to enslave the planet. The catch is that these telepathic interstellar conquerors apparently cannot work a toaster, order a coffee, or figure out when to clap at a concert, so they...

Somewhere in the deep lore of alien abduction, past the gray guys who run the equipment, sits a manager. Six to nine feet of praying mantis, purple robe for rank, telepathic, standing at the head of the table while the drones do the wet work. It regards you the way a farmer regards livestock. This week, Tristan brings on Stanford (yes, the one we verbally abused all of last season, now a guest in...

In 1980, a mysterious stranger named R.C. Christian spent the equivalent of $200,000 to erect 19-foot-tall, 119-ton granite monuments in rural Georgia. Ancient Aliens wants you to believe the "Georgia Guidestones" are an extraterrestrial warning to keep the human population under 500 million, passed down by the secret Rosicrucian order. Tristan and guest Sarah Davis Baker are here to inform you th...

Ancient Aliens wants you to believe Nikola Tesla was an alien conduit whose secret death ray was buried by the FBI. The actual story: the "vault" they seized in 1943 contained a Wheatstone bridge, which was the 1940s version of a multimeter you could order from a catalogue. The MIT physicist who wrote the dismissive evaluation report was, no joke, John G. Trump, uncle of the current US president....

Have you ever looked at a beautiful old train station and felt something had been lost? Good news: the something is "labour protections." Bad news: a Russian topologist from the 1980s has a different theory, and it's currently eating TikTok. This week, Tristan is joined by Mia Mulder , who happens to have made the definitive YouTube video on this exact topic two years ago and then forgot she'd bee...

Ancient Aliens claims Leonardo da Vinci was contacted by extraterrestrials, in person or telepathically, and given blueprints for tanks, helicopters, and parachutes centuries ahead of his time. Tristan and guest host Sophie Edwards ( We Have Always Existed ) walk through what's actually in the sketches. Sophie also has a YouTube channel called We Have Always Existed about gender-nonconforming peop...

Tristan flies solo without Scott (now on baby duty) and brings in Phil and Kevin from the Pixelit podcast to crack open Nan Madol, the stone complex sitting on a coral reef in Pohnpei. Ancient Aliens says it was built by giants from the stars who ran a hybrid breeding program before culling the survivors. The actual story is way better: a feudal dynasty extracted so much labour from its people tha...

Ancient Aliens wants you to believe the Toba super-eruption 74,000 years ago was an alien population cull, a "cosmic reset button" to wipe out noisy, rebellious humanity 1.0 and replace us with a genetically upgraded, obedient slave race that then built all the pyramids. Tristan walks Scott through the claim piece by piece: the Anunnaki population control panic, the inside-job volcano theory, the...

Season premiere corrections episode! Erich von Däniken is dead (despite what the Ancient Aliens community assured us about his extraordinary health), Ash Ketchum retired, and nobody told Tristan, and a listener named Leif has been emailing corrections since the Biden administration. This episode: batteries, Thailand's impressive colonial-era diplomacy, why calling medieval people historically illi...

Tristan flies solo while Scott's on paternity leave to bring you an emergency episode about the "clearest UFO photograph of 2026"; a viral image of a sharp, metallic object over Acapulco that got AI-enhanced, scored 97% authentic by some unnamed tool, and landed in a news cycle where the President had just promised the alien files were coming. It's a $12 Party City balloon bouquet shaped like a mo...

Ancient Aliens claims the 3,000 standing stones at Carnac in Brittany are quartz-rich geomagnetic batteries that beam GPS signals to extraterrestrials. In this episode, Tristan takes us deeper into the actual physics of magnetism than this podcast has possibly ever gone, and it turns out the Earth's magnetic field is so weak your fridge magnets are millions of times more powerful, quartz can't hol...

A Latvian immigrant, barely five feet tall, builds one of the strangest tourist attractions in North America out of coral stone, and Ancient Aliens can only think to credit aliens with it. In this role-reversed birthday episode, Scott takes the research chair to investigate Coral Castle, the sprawling stone garden in Homestead, Florida that features astronomical alignments, stone rocking chairs, a...

Scott's down for the count, so his nearly-third-trimester wife Emily Pilat steps up to the mic. (This episode actually is coming out on the due date.) Together with Tristan, they travel to the Armenian highlands to investigate Karahunj, a site of 223 standing stones that conspiracy theorists call "Armenian Stonehenge." The claim? The 80 holes drilled into these stones are precisely aligned with th...

Ancient Aliens claims the megalithic stonework at Sacsayhuamán in Peru is so precise it must have been built with alien laser technology or by a lost advanced civilization, because obviously the Inca couldn't possibly have figured out how to move big rocks on their own. They absolutely could, and they did it through sophisticated engineering, organized labour systems, and generations of accumulate...

In Part 2 of our Göbekli Tepe series, we pivot from debunking ancient alien claims to examining why conspiracy theories are so fucking dangerous in 2025. We start with the shocking discovery that Hank Green made a video with almost our exact podcast title (we're not mad, don't tell anyone we were mad), then spiral into a serious discussion about how recommendation algorithms, economic incentives,...

Tristan and Scott return to the "smoking gun" of the ancient astronaut world: Göbekli Tepe. According to Netflix documentaries and  Ancient Aliens , this 12,000-year-old site is impossible. They claim there were no tools, no agriculture, and no way to move 15-ton stone pillars without anti-gravity (or at least a visit from some tall, white Atlanteans). In Part 1 of this deep dive, we look at...

Harvard Professor Avi Loeb is back, and he wants you to believe that the new interstellar object screaming through our solar system, 3I/Atlas, is a hostile alien spacecraft sent to destroy us. In this episode, Tristan and Scott (who is currently possessed by Professor X) break down why this claim is "objectively wrong" and why the reality, a 14-billion-year-old "Universe Placenta" from the dawn of...

We interrupt your regularly scheduled debunking of ancient astronaut theories for an emergency broadcast: We might have actually found aliens this time. No, really. Scott and Tristan break down the discovery of the Cheyava Falls rock by the Perseverance rover. This dusty red doorstop features "leopard spots," which, on Earth, are a chemically specific signature of biological life. We discuss the r...

We’re kicking off the new season by doing the one thing  Ancient Aliens  refuses to do: admitting we were wrong. First, Scott has entered his "Napalm Era" and held the podcast hostage to talk about the 2025 animated masterpiece  K-Pop: Demon Hunters  (and the specific lyrics that have rewired his brain). Once we get that out of our system, we open the mailbag to face the music....