As if responding to my suggestion that their earlier “Ancient Aviators” episode was being coy about its true intentions by slyly dancing around the extraterrestrial question, this episode covering similar Ancient Astronaut themes goes full bore into it from beginning to end, with essentially no skeptical minds present to put their wild claims in check. Even among the chunk of In Search Of… that I’ve watched for this column, it is rare to have this many bizarre, hazily verified words and images shot into your eyes and ears in such rapid succession, presenting a litany of favourite tropes of this entire category, from vaguely alien-esque artwork from the past to out-of-place artifacts. They really, really seem to want their viewers to come away with the idea that aliens are not only the ones responsible for some of the notable projects and beliefs of ancient (again, mostly non-white) civilizations, but may in fact be the origin of the entire human species. It is bold, aggressive, and frequently hilarious in its continuous credulousness—basically, the perfect episode to write about it.
Season 4, Episode 19 (January 31st, 1980)
THE BASICS:
Despite Ancient Astronauts being a topic they’ve covered before on In Search Of.., there’s very little repeated ground here, a cameo appearance from the Nazca Lines aside. Still, if you at all familiar with the kinds of “evidence” provided to back up the earth-shattering ideas being proposed, this contains some of the greatest hits, and every part of it is stated with utmost conviction by men of ostensible science, which is one of their standard tricks to make sure the audience doesn’t think too hard about the actual substance of what’s being presented. This is In Search Of… at its most In Search Of…
Of course, what I really love is that the episode proper begins with a brief history of the burro in Death Valley, where specimens of the species managed to survive and create a breeding population in a seemingly inhospitable environment. Leonard Nimoy asks “Is there an analogy to be made between the burro in Death Valley, and man on the Earth? Was life left on Earth by an alien exploration millions of years ago?” Starting your episode by comparing humans to a bunch of asses is certainly a choice. In this case, though, the comparison made by apt.
After intriguing viewers with what the narration claims is a fossil shellfish from five hundred million years ago embedded in what appears to be a shoe print, things are off to the kooky races. “Former NASA Scientist” Maurice Chatelaine, someone who apparently worked on the Apollo moon landings and is one of the big interview subjects here, has informed the world that “there is no doubt that aliens have walked among us” in books with titles like Our Ancestors Came From Outer Space—I wonder what he really thinks about this subject. Like all people who start making outlandish proposals—in this case, that modern humans are the result of an interbreeding experiment with aliens (Chatelaine speculates that the first landings occurred 300,00 years ago, which would contradict the show’s claims about the fossilized shoe print, but who’s keeping track?)—he started out “ very skeptical” but “little by little” the evidence worked on him until “[he] was convinced.” You could say that he did his own research, certainly not a phrase that continues to carry any connotations these days. That evidence, if you can believe it, mostly comes from finding references to vaguely alien-ish-sounding things from the ancient world, and jumping to conclusions based on patterns he finds in those things. The big pattern he points out in this episode is a series of temples around the Aegean Sea, connecting the dots to create a giant Maltese cross that he thinks could only have been made with the aid of “an orbiting satellite.” That segments then has commentary from a statistical mathematician, who calculates that such a pattern is extremely unlikely to have come about by chance, adding some “outside” credence to Chatelaine’s pattern (nothing dates a show like this more than the way they depict someone using a computer, with all the Sci-Fi beeping and booping noises.) This is pretty standard stuff, the kind you also saw in the “Ancient Aviators” episode—the idea that aliens must be involved comes entirely from the seeming impossibility of these coordinated construction projects, which of course assumes that the coordination is actually there in the first place, but we’ll get back to that at the end of this piece.
Nimoy brings up other examples of curiously aligned sites—including both the pyramids in Egypt and a “pyramid”-shaped alignment of temples in France that also seemingly maps out modern uranium mines (which Chatelaine claims also points to the location of the Nazca Lines because these aliens seem to love little Easter Eggs)—and each time asks if Earth Visitors were the ones behind it, the repetition burrowing the suggestion into the viewer. Reading these things as uranium mine maps or landing strips shows how some people in modern times have a real recency bias, interpreting everything in the ancient world in terms that they understand. Strangely, Nimoy’s narration tells us that the Nazca Lines “don’t appear to be a landing strip”, and that the location of “Earth Base One”—a term that they start using without any explanation—is maybe located elsewhere. That’s about as critical as this episode gets.
From there they transition to their next major topic, focusing on the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous American tribes like the Hopi in the southwestern US. In a confused attempt to make the show look more culturally sensitive, they claim that it’s “experts” who think Indigenous beliefs are “primitive” and “…based on…superstition and myth”, whereas this show, of course, takes their beliefs seriously. They go on to describe Hopi creation stories, where their ancestors came from other worlds, and continued to interact with beings from those other worlds; one story tells us that the “First World” was a “great rock in a sea of mist”, which Nimoy immediately suggests is referring to Venus, and that they came to “the blue world”, a description of Earth that this show thinks could only be made by someone with modern knowledge. They look at the famous Kachina figures and other stylized artwork and claim that they have “uncanny resemblances to spacemen” (the idea that exaggerated and alien-looking figures are a common creation of other human imagination is never really considered.) All this “evidence” comes across as strange because it gives a level of literalness to these beliefs that completely takes away the actual spiritual dimension they possess to the people who believe them (as symbolized by the question “are these spirits, or space travellers?”), which comes off as both ignorant and condescending. When they talk to an actual member of the Hopi Kachina Society, he simply confirms that they believe in beings from other worlds riding around in spacecraft but says his religion forbids getting into it in any detail. They take their own spiritual beliefs seriously and don’t discuss them so willy-nilly to outsiders, and I can’t help by feel that using it as evidence for extraterrestrial presence in the past is one of those things that misses the point of it entirely
(Nimoy appears on screen at one point to say “If the Indians had left us written records, we might have the answers to some of these mysteries” but “…obviously that is not the case.” Yes, if only things were convenient, that would be swell. Might as well speculate wildly instead!)
That section of the episode throws so many claims and “startling discoveries” at you that it’s difficult to keep up. They cast some doubt on the dates of when humans crossed the Bering Land Bridge to North America, using a skull found in California (the Del Mar Skull) that is supposedly dated 48,000 years old (over 20,000 years older than other evidence of human migration to the region suggests.) They claim that a god named “Amun-Ra” appears in both Indigenous American and Egyptian religion, although I haven’t been able to find any other reference to that. They talk about the “Elephant Slabs”, found in New Mexico, which are depictions of elephants made by people who seemingly should not have seen elephants before. They ask how multiple peoples from across the world could concurrently invent the boomerang. A Colonel Sanders-looking scientist appears to explain that some wavy pattern petroglyphs are actually representations of sine waves and other technological diagrams that some Indigenous people witnessed when extraterrestrials were repairing a damaged spaceship. The final segment is about a strange geode (the “Coso Artifact”) found in California by some “rock hounds“ that seemingly contains a spark plug in its centre, with some unnamed “geologist” telling them that it’s 500,000 years old.
It’s an overwhelming parade of stuff, thrown at you without much discussion but plenty of recreations and “questions” asked by Nimoy’s narration. If what you want from an episode of In Search Of… is as many wacky stories as can fit into twenty-two minutes, you get plenty of bang for your buck here. The final remarks pose these rapidfire examples as “disclosures” that continually erode at the skepticism of scientists who balk at the simple and believable idea that aliens visited our planet, created our species, taught us everything we know, helped build many of our famous structures, and then seemingly peaced out. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and can you really deny the extraordinary evidence on display here?
MOST RIDICULOUS CLAIM(S):
It’s difficult to choose from all the things this episode drops on you, it really is. But I feel that the one line that embodies the hopeless gullibility of this endeavour is when they show a Zuni ritual involving a sculpted mask and Nimoy tells us that “No can satisfactorily explain why it resembles a space-helmeted astronaut”—when I’m sure most people looking at the mask is thinking “…does it?” That is immediately followed by another Zuni tradition of carving gourds into things that, I guess, look like flying saucers, treated with the same level of credulity. I’m sometimes jealous of the unearned confidence this show displays.
WHAT WE HAVE FIGURED OUT SINCE THEN:
Anyone who has looked at the evidence presented in this episode with any level of actual scrutiny seems to be able to disregard them immediately. Those shoe prints are likely misidentifications. Maurice Chatelaine’s cross requires a lot of map fudging to keep its shape (that article even shouts out this episode!) The Del Mar skull has been dated multiple times and is significantly younger than is presented here. The Coso Artifact has been re-examined as recently as 2018, and was found to be a regular old 1920s spark plug that was covered in mud. There are even some theories about how the Elephant Slate came about that do not involve aliens. Of course, the only explanation is that aliens are much tidier and better at hiding their tracks than originally thought. They are wily ones, for sure.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 