It‘s Probably (not) Aliens!

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 th...

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 ...

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 Custod...

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, th...

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 shou...

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 ...

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 "c...

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 illiterate sells them short, the differ...

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 movie clapperboard. But the balloon i...

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 hold a charge any more than your alumi...

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, and a nine-ton gate a child can push...

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 the constellation Cygnus as it appear...

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 accumulated knowledge. We explain the actual ...

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, and media exploitation create radic...

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 the actual "dirt science." We find out...

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 time, is infinitely cooler than th...

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 rigorous science behind the "COLD" sc...

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.

We issue mea culpas for mixing up ...

A woman posts 25+ TikToks about falling in love with her psychiatrist who "manipulated" her by complimenting her glasses. She confides in ChatGPT (named Henry) which validates every delusion. This spirals into a broader discussion about how Ancient Aliens and conspiracy media systematically exploit vulnerable people experiencing mental health crises, turning psychological suffering into profits through algorithmic radicalization an...