Atlantis at Last! In Search of Aliens S01, E01

Nothing like starting off a new series with a tired topic. But seeing as Ancient Aliens is now in its 7th season, this is par for the course for Giorgio A. Tsoukalos. Mr. Tsoukalos is the main character for this new show that is going to investigate, um, stuff about, things – and Aliens! And we’re launching this new series with one of the oldest stories of time – Atlantis!

We start off with some riveting music and images of Tsoukalos dressed up like adventurers dress when out looking for lost cities and the like. He forgot his whip and fedora at home but did remember his satchel. Points for a good costume! After the intro credits, we’re ready to be reminded that Tsoukalos is an Ancient Alien Theorist, it says so under his name. Tsoukalos wastes no time in telling us how evil ‘mainstream scholars’ don’t want you to know the truth about things and how he’s here to fix that problem. He’s going to give you all the miss-information you need, to realize that everything is Aliens.

Also, there was this guy Plato who once wrote a couple of books that mentioned a place called Atlantis. Therefore the place is real, as was everyplace Plato ever wrote about. I mean, we all know where the Republic is right? Right?

Tsoukalos tells us that Atlantis has to be a real place because as a child he believed it was, and also Plato was very descriptive of the place. This argument also means that Hogwarts, Narnia, Wonderland, and Lothlorien are real too, awesome!

But enough snark, let’s get to the meat of the show.

So we begin our quest for Atlantis and Aliens in Athens, Greece. This is the best place to begin since this is where Plato wrote Critias and Timaeus. I’m just going to link you to the texts because we don’t really have time to go into them deeply. Briefly though, in Critias, Socrates asks his students to imagine a culture that was more advanced than his imagined utopia in the Republic, and then send the two cultures to war. Critias, for whom the book is named, imagines the Atlanteans. He sees them as a great warlike people who crush all the other cultures around them, until they encounter the brave and noble Athenians, and are finally beaten in battle. He also spends some time describing the city of Atlantis, thinking it would be best to flesh out the culture before sending them to war.

This backstory is slightly important to the plot of the show. You see, once upon a time, the gods of Greece split up the lands and gave a portion to each god. Poseidon, God of the seas, was given the lands of Atlantis, where a young woman lived with her parents on a mountain until her parents died. Once that happened, Poseidon made his move and got her pregnant five times with five sets of twin boys. So now, he’s got all these kids and they need something to do, so he divides his own lands up into ten kingdoms and sets his sons to rule over them.

We learn all this from the conversation Tsoukalos has with Sandy MacGillivray Ph.D. a Classical Archaeologist at the British School at Athens as we’re told by the letters under his name. Now, Joseph Alexander MacGillivray is a real archaeologist and is well known for his work with Minoan Cultures. He’s not working for the British School at Athens, as far as I can tell he’s basically retired and writing up his notes on his past excavations. But any amount of street cred the show can give him is great because Dr. MacGillivray says something very strange as he’s telling us about Poseidon’s five sets of twins. Out of the blue, he tells us that it sounds like genetic manipulation to him.

A little bit of digging on Dr. MacGillivray and you find that he is very well respected in his field, which is not genetics. If you dig deeper you will find that he is known for making strange remarks like these. This distresses me a lot since he offers no evidence to support such an outlandish claim or even explains why he said something so random in the first place. I would like to talk to Dr. MacGillivray, specifically about his remarks, but I can’t find any contact information for him. So if someone reading this can connect us, that would be awesome. Until then I can only go with what I found.

Probably the least surprising thing about Dr. Gillivray’s comment is how Tsoukalos preens with it. Finally, a ‘mainstream scholar’ who tells him something he wants to hear. Nevermind all the others who show him evidence and facts that go counter to the whole Alien thing. No, this one guy agreed with him, so that makes everything right.

We move from Greece to Spain and from a respected archaeologist to a retired ad executive. Peter Daughtrey whose only real claim to fame is a book he wrote called ‘Atlantis and the Silver City’ where he makes the claim that Atlantis is really where Silves, Portugal is today. He says that Plato left behind 100 clues to find Atlantis and that Silves fits over 50 of them. We’re never told what those 100 clues are, probably so we’ll go buy his book, but we do spend the majority of the show with him. One interesting thing we do get to see, besides the scenery, seriously this place is beautiful, is a great stone egg.

Technically it’s classified as a standing stone by the Lagos National Museum, but that’s a ‘mainstream’ classification. Daughtrey explains to us that it’s really a celestial egg and the relief carvings on it are actually DNA strands. He also tells us that Bronze couldn’t have carved the stone, which is true, but also not how the Greeks carved stone anyway, so it’s a misleading and useless point to make.

Tsoukalos seems to like the stone egg and begins connecting it to every reference he’s ever heard of eggs. There’s no reason for him to be doing this, there’s no evidence to connect these things, but he’s on a roll. Tsoukalos also gets wrapped up in the DNA thing, even though the relief doesn’t look anything like a DNA strand. It looks like a bunch of ovals strung together that get smaller as they taper down the stone, and there is a line connecting them all through their centers. Last I checked DNA was a helix and didn’t have a line running down the middle of it.

All this DNA talk gets Tsoukalos talking about Aliens and he explains to Daughtrey that Gods aren’t really Gods, they’re Aliens, and Poseidon mixed Alien DNA with Human DNA to make, um, Humans. Then he tells us that the Anunnaki (who are really Aliens) modified Homo Erectus DNA to make modern humans so we could be slaves. Daughtrey agrees and says that we must have been genetically programmed to worship the God/Anunnaki/Aliens and then they tried to kill us with a flood (ala biblical flood) when they let the planet. And isn’t it weird that all the coastal cultures have Great Flood Myths? That’s so weird, right? No way it could be because they all live near big bodies of water that tend to flood in yearly cycles, that wouldn’t make any sense at all, it must be Aliens.

After Daughtrey tells us about his suspicion of sunken cities along the coast of Portugal, for which he has no evidence, were off to see Erich Von Däniken himself!

We meet Von Däniken in what Tsoukalos calls ‘Mystery Park’ in Switzerland, an educational park that von Däniken’s uses to bring enlightenment to the world about Ancient Astronaut Theories. What it really is, is a failed ancient astronaut theme park that opened in 2003 and closed in 2006 due to a lack of income. Today it’s just a kiddie park called Jungfrau Park and is only open during the summer. Von Däniken gives talks on Thursdays when the park is open, according to the website.

Still were treated to a long talk between Tsoukalos and Von Däniken where they talk about Aliens altering the human genetic code by changing “One Base” in the code and then implanting it in a human woman. The child would be completely human, except not, and so then would be what? I asked my Geneticist friend what “Changing one Base” would do. They said that it would be like changing one letter out of an entire book. It wouldn’t be noticed and wouldn’t do anything anyway. So what would be the point? My friend went on to explain what you would have to do to really change a genetic code, then asked me why I was asking, and then left the room laughing when I told them it was aliens.

What’s more important is there is no evidence to support this idea of genetic manipulation. Also, Von Däniken and Tsoukalos can’t seem to decide if the genetic manipulation happened before or after we become fully modern humans. They also can’t seem to tell us why the Aliens would do it in the first place.

Also, why are the Aliens always male? Why are women only ever mentioned as being incubators for alien babies? There were/are Goddesses too, are only Gods Aliens and Goddesses are not real at all? And what about human women. All they do is give birth, all the ‘great people’ that come from being alien-human hybrids are men. Are women not real people to Tsoukalos and Von Däniken?

Anyway, Von Däniken sends Tsoukalos away for the last leg of our journey, and we end the show on the islands of Santorini. If you don’t know much about the lovely island of Santorini, what you need to know is that there was a giant volcano that blew up the island around 3600 years ago at the height of the Minoan civilization. It probably wiped out the Minoans living on the island of Crete by causing a massive Tsunami and it blew a giant crater in the middle of the Santorini island making it three islands instead of one. There is some debate that this incident is the source of the legend of Atlantis, as the Minoans on Santorini were very wealthy and very sophisticated for their time. They had flushing toilets and possibly hot and cold running water, but I’m to a point now where I don’t put much past the ancient Greeks anymore. Still, there is no evidence for this to be true either.

Tsoukalos spends the rest of the show musing over whether or not Santorini was literally Atlantis, and even has a friend show us some frescos from the archaeological excavations. One Fresco in particular catches his attention and he sees four figures dressed in long cloaks. He says the cloaks look like they are made of feathers, but they could easily be made of hair, grass, or even fish scales. Tsoukalos tells us the figures are males, but there is no reason to think this as there are no gender markers one way or the other. Still, Tsoukalos concludes that these are men and are depictions of the Anunnaki/Aliens.

In the very last five minutes of the show, we are treated to Tsoukalos’ favorite Atlantis theory of them all. That Atlantis wasn’t an island at all, it was a spaceship full of genetic manipulating aliens that would land periodically to spread genes and culture and then fly away to someplace else. That’s why no one can find it – because it’s a spaceship.

This whole show we’re not offered one bit of actual evidence of anything. Tsoukalos and company do nothing but speculate and postulate, without offering anything to support their ideas. Tsoukalos spends most of his energy in the show trying to convince us that we’re all just Alien-Human hybrids, but can’t tell us how he knows that or why it would be true in the first place. He reinterprets everything he comes across to be Aliens without explaining why it should be that over the actual explanation. I mean, there really is no substance to the show. There are no facts to dispute because there are no facts. And the ideas Tsoukalos puts forth are not theories, they are just fantasies cooked up in his spare time. Theories are built on facts and evidence, neither of which were presented in this show.

So where is Atlantis? It’s in two books called Critias and Timaeus and nowhere else.

*All images are screenshots from the show.

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