This week’s episode takes us back to the roots of the Ancient Alien Theory: the idea that monuments and images of the ancient world indicate alien influence and interference.  In this episode, “new evidence” (hence the title) is reviewed that supposedly gives greater credence to the theory.

The first item is the “superhenge” found surrounding Stonehenge.  This is a circle of now-buried monoliths, and is the largest of the fifteen ritual sites in the area.  The theorists speculate on the purpose of these structures, and the most interesting of these is that it is the remains of a spaceport.  They connect this to Egypt (quite abruptly, with almost no transition) by saying that there is evidence of alien influence in the tomb of Tutankhamun.  I have to say, if the aliens were building a spaceport and they wanted to go to Egypt, it doesn’t make sense to build it in England…but, whatever.

Recent work in the Valley of the Kings has shown that there may be tunnels leading from Tutankhamun’s tomb to other chambers, which may themselves be tombs.  No actual excavation of these has been done, all of the information we have is from various imaging and scanning technology.  The Ancient Alien Theorists tell the audience that one of these chambers must be the tomb of Nefertiti, and that the discovery of her body will show that she had alien DNA.  To their minds this will prove that the Egyptian pharaohs were not of this world. They reinforce this with older elements of the Ancient Alien Theory – that the Egyptian royal family had odd, inhuman, characteristics (elongated heads and almond-shaped eyes) and that the attempt by Akhenaten to change the state religion of Egypt was an indicator that he was showing the people his alienness.  I can’t comment on the DNA aspect, since we don’t actually have the DNA, but I’ll go out on a limb to say it’s highly unlikely that the Egyptian royal family wasn’t human.  As for Akhenaten and his change of religion, that’s easily explained: the pharaoh came into a political situation that was highly controlled by the priests of the various cults, and so in order to pull more power into his own position, he declared that the god Aten had visited him and revealed that his was to be the sole cult worshipped. Akhenaten did this to increase his own power by reducing the power of the priests of the other cults, not because he was an alien.

The next item on the list is the use of mercury in some tombs around the world, particularly the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl and the tomb of Qin Shi Huang.  The AATs claim that this is a connection with the Alien Gods because Indian mythology tells us that the gods used mercury in their crafts.  The reality is simpler: mercury is a rare thing, thus for a king to put it into his tomb was an indication of the king’s power.

The show ends with a discussion of Machu Piccu and the Nazca Lines, which are, like almost everything else discussed in this episode, old hat for the AATs.  Both of these are supposed to have been built with alien technology and/or for the benefit of alien gods.  While we think they have religious elements to them, thus it could be said they were “built for the gods,” they didn’t have alien help.

This episode is exemplary of the crux of the Ancient Alien Theory: orientalism.  Orientalism is a view by Westerners of the “East” as an Other, often with a sense of imperialism that allows for that Other to be seen as less capable.  It is identified in modern scholarship with the works of Edward Said and Bernard Lewis.  It applies to the Ancient Alien Theory because very rarely is this theory applied to anything in the Western European world.  Where it is applied in Europe, it is in the very ancient world, such as Stonehenge or pre-Classical Greece, when humanity is commonly considered to be less developed and so “dumber.”  Simply put, the Ancient Alien Theory tends to be applied to the accomplishments of Brown people and not to those of White people.  It serves as a way to diminish these cultures in opposition to, and in favor of, Western European cultures.  And this is just one more element of the theory’s illegitimacy: if it were a reasonable theory, it would be applicable across the Earth, irrelevant of location or the people living there.