The television program Ancient Aliens argues that there is good evidence that space aliens interacted with ancient human societies and continue to be active here on Earth. Most of the archaeological claims made on the program have been shown repeatedly to be wrong and farfetched. This presentation will discuss a small sample of the claims made on Ancient Aliens and explore the shared intellectual ancestry of Ancient Aliens, eugenics, the occult, Nazism, Atlantis believers and other pseudoscientific belief systems. While the “evidence” presented by Ancient Aliens is a joke, it turns out that when you scratch the surface the joke really is not very funny.

Andrew White, Research Archaeologist for the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, is an anthropological archaeologist with interests in huntergatherers, lithic technology, human evolution and complex systems theory. He is particularly interested in combining archaeological methods and theory with ethnographic data and computational modeling to develop new ways to push the boundaries of our understanding of the social, cultural and evolutionary aspects of the human past. He has spent some time confronting pseudo archaeological claims about the human past and feels that other professional archaeologists should do the same.