Advertise on podcast: It‘s Probably (not) Aliens!

Skinwalker Ranch promises UFOs, ghosts and interdimensional portals, with a TV franchise that needs the mystery to keep going. Scott and Tristan follow the Sherman family's reports through Robert Bigelow's Pentagon-funded research and Brandon Fugal's History Channel show, looking at ordinary explanations for the scares and the money behind the investigations. Then we get into how Diné traditions and Ute land dispossession become a generic 'Native American curse', while our editor refuses to secretly haunt the audience. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 One' from editor Max's Bloodstar, a Halloween synthwave album about a character who crash-lands on an alien planet and fights to survive. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 community missing from that story, then follow similar claims through Brahms, Puccini and William Blake. We examine a dubious book of composer interviews, an opera with a traceable history of adaptations, and why a creative breakthrough can feel like it arrived from somewhere else. Jimmy Neutron becomes relevant. Scott remembers that taking a nap used to be part of his writing process. Then we get into who benefits when genius is treated as something a lucky few are born with. Colonial stories about Ramanujan push Indian knowledge out of the picture; the lone-genius myth makes the people and public support behind an achievement disappear. We talk about schools that punish people for learning differently, and why feeding people and funding libraries might be a better talent strategy than waiting for a message from space. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 compare two supposedly identical pyramids that turn out to have different materials, heights and purposes. Scott has a soundboard clip about magical water. This becomes everyone's problem. Then we follow the claim that Cambodians couldn't have built their own monuments through French colonialism, stolen antiquities and modern conspiracy content. Denying people credit for their history helped justify taking their land and heritage. We discuss efforts to bring that heritage home, and what Khmer water management and farmers' adaptations to drought and flooding can teach us about living through climate disruption. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 exhausted French army with a very human morale problem. Then we follow her through the siege of Orléans and the fight to put Charles VII on the throne. Scott discovers that the historical figure he'd imagined as a man named Jonah Vark was, in fact, Joan of Arc. Her capture and trial bring us to the people who got to decide whether her convictions made her useful or dangerous. We discuss her execution, the later overturning of her conviction, and the French far right's use of her as an anti-immigration mascot. Everyone seems to have a use for Joan. Giving her credit for her own choices is apparently harder. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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, bro” to count as evidence. Then we follow the alleged coordinates to Hy-Brasil, an Irish phantom island that mapmakers kept copying onto maps. Scott also uses Space Jam as a unit of time. This will apparently be on the test. The bigger problem is who gets to be humanity's chosen saviour. We connect Ancient Aliens' secret rulers to Silicon Valley's billionaire visionaries, Elon Musk's DOGE, and the idea that a special few should make decisions for everyone else. We finish with ways to check a source and challenge a revelation without waiting for another man with a notebook to save us. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 technicality that means he was right anyway. Also, Denis Leary has apparently been working this whole time. Sorry, Denis. Along the way, we talk Artemis II, the media fixation on Hasan Piker, and The Onion's Infowars plans. A listener revisits Tristan's old warning about war with Iran, which is a miserable thing to get right. We also discuss David Wilcock's death and how to criticize harmful ideas without mocking someone's mental health. The soundboard is back, too. You've been warned. Content note: Discussion of suicide and depression. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 abduct people to teach them. Tristan is joined by Mildred from Thought Slime, back for a record number of guest spots while Scott is on baby duty, to walk through how Jacobs assembled an entire alien class system of robed mantises, drone grays, and prototype hybrids out of nothing but hypnosis sessions, a lot of them done over the phone. Then it stops being funny. We get into how hypnotic regression manufactures memories that feel more real than the real ones, the documented case of the woman Jacobs put through 91 sessions and the harm he caused her, and why the History Channel keeps handing this guy a microphone (the answer is ad money, mostly). Underneath the goofy lore is great replacement rhetoric with the labels swapped out: a hidden enemy that looks like you but isn't, a coming loss of everything you are, and a man selling himself as the only one who can save you. Same story Europe told about changelings centuries ago, now with a UFO strapped to it. We land somewhere more hopeful, on why actually knowing the people around you is the thing that breaks the spell. Guest Plug: Mildred from Thought Slime makes left-wing comedy and video essays on YouTube at youtube.com/@thoughtslime. Mildred is also, for the record, the current title-holder for most IPNA guest appearances. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 good standing) to work out where this giant bug came from. The trail runs straight to David Jacobs, an actual history professor who ran more than 900 hypnotic regression sessions and emerged with a full taxonomy of alien species and their agendas. We get into why hypnosis is the same memory-fabricating machine that produced the satanic panic, how your brain rebuilds every memory from scratch and patches the gaps with whatever's lying around, and why sleep paralysis has been parking a terrifying presence at the foot of human beds for as long as we've had beds. Then there's the square-cube law, which is grim news for anyone hoping a seven-foot insect could stand up without collapsing into paste. Then the part that matters. Peel the costume off the mantis, and you're left with a job description: detached managers who treat the people under them as a resource to optimize, workers who run the program with zero ethical input, surveillance nobody consented to, monitored reproduction, value squeezed out of people the system won't acknowledge as people. That's capitalism with extra legs. The mantis is a face bolted onto a faceless system, because our brains would sooner hunt one villain than sit with the idea that nobody's driving. Your anger is correct. The target is a bug. (Next week, we put Jacobs himself under the magnifying glass.) Guest plug: Stanford co-hosts Captain's Log Supplemental, a Star Trek rewatch podcast grinding through the entire canon in chronological order, currently surfacing into Strange New Worlds after doing hard time in Enterprise. Go find it wherever you get podcasts. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 that the Rosicrucian manifestos were basically 17th-century German shitposts, and the real author of the stones was actually a deeply racist, eugenics-loving physician from Iowa. We trace the absurd, irony-poisoned history of the monument, right up to the moment a completely different brand of right-wing conspiracy theorists blew it up with a bomb in 2022 because they thought it was demonic. It's a journey through the horrors of historical eugenics, elite longtermism, and the bizarre mirror world of American politics where fascists accidentally destroy other fascists' monuments. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. The Office of Alien Property Custodian was a wartime filing bureaucracy, not Warehouse 13. And the death ray Tesla pitched in 1934 ran into the same physics problem every subsequent attempt has run into: air. Charged particles scatter when they hit it. DARPA spent decades and a lot of money rediscovering this. Physicist and YouTuber Angela Collier (back for round two after the Planet Nine episode) walks Tristan through why the lone-genius myth keeps getting recycled, why Tesla's actual story is sadder and more interesting than the conspiracy version, and how the same myth-making machine that turned a guy who died broke feeding pigeons into a $1.4 trillion brand also lets Elon Musk cosplay as a self-made inventor while doing Nazi salutes and gutting USAID. Plus: why the History Channel was built explicitly as "romance television for men," what disability justice has to say about the autism-as-superpower frame, and why Hans Asperger was, factually, a Nazi. Guest plug: Angela Collier is a physicist and YouTuber whose videos do for physics what this show tries to do for archaeology. Go watch her recent Dyson sphere video, in which she reads a physics paper out loud and explains, with admirable patience, why disassembling Jupiter to build solar panels is silly. Her channel is at youtube.com/@acollierastro. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 been on the podcast before. Together, they take on Tartaria, also known as the mud flood theory, also known as (per Bloomberg) the QAnon of architecture. We trace it from Anatoly Fomenko's "new chronology" through Nikolai Levashov's Aryan space-giants, into Putin-adjacent nationalist rhetoric, then watch it break containment around 2016 and metastasize on western social media into a modular conspiracy that bolts onto Q, the great reset, and great replacement theory. Plus: Chicago raised its entire street level by four to six feet using 6,000 screw jacks and one guy with a whistle; the 1893 World's Fair was held in a city made of fancy papier-mache; and a horse and buggy is actually a sophisticated piece of equipment that you, specifically, could not build. The bigger argument is a double erasure: capitalism already wrote the Irish and Italian masons out of the record of who built Grand Central, and Tartaria does it again by claiming humans couldn't have built it at all. Walter Benjamin called this aestheticization of politics, and warned us about it in 1935. We didn't really listen. Guest plug: Mia Mulder makes excellent video essays at youtube.com/MiaMulder and is launching the Paul Lafargue Institute, a big-tent left-wing think tank named after the author of The Right to Be Lazy. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 people in the ancient world, and you should watch it. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 that they got overthrown, after which the survivors built one of the most deliberately decentralized political systems in the pre-modern Pacific. Then the episode follows a much weirder thread: how Helena Blavatsky's occult race theory became Lovecraft's cosmic horror, became a Cthulhu tabletop sanity mechanic, became Erich von Däniken's plagiarism, became the History Channel's "romance television for men" pitch deck, and became modern Great Replacement panic. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 genetic upgrade fiction, and the "chosen survivors in alien bunkers" arc, tracing every beat back to a Babylonian myth, a long-debunked bottleneck estimate, and Helena Blavatsky's "root races" (which, spoiler, the Nazis loved). Then things get current. The same bunker-survivor fantasy powers Mark Zuckerberg's $270 million underground Hawaiian compound, Peter Thiel's New Zealand escape hatches, longtermism, elite pronatalism, and the eco-fascist "humans are the virus" meme that crawled out of 2020. Douglas Rushkoff calls it The Mindset: accumulate enough capital to personally exit the world you helped break. The actual archaeology from Shinfa Metema 1 shows the opposite: Toba survivors made it through not with bunkers but with bow-and-arrow tech, flexible diets, river-corridor mobility, and long-distance obsidian trade networks. Cooperation, not seclusion. Plus: why Scott thought "Koolau Ranch" was a salad dressing, a sustained argument that every geological term in this episode should be a AAA video game, Candace Owens' theory that Charlie Kirk was a Project Looking Glass time traveller, and Scott's final episode before paternity leave. Build your obsidian handshake network before you need it. Content note: Discussion of eugenics, eco-fascism, and Malthusian "population control" rhetoric throughout. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out! Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates! Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.