A retired history professor is convinced telepathic aliens who can't use a toaster are quietly replacing humanity, and we trace that goofy panic straight back to a very old and very dangerous idea.
Jun 16
1 hr 9 min
Tristan and guest Stanford take apart the UFO-lore claim that seven-foot praying-mantis aliens run a hidden hierarchy over human abductions, following it from one historian's hypnosis sessions through sleep paralysis to the management class it's quietly describing.
Jun 9
1 hr 20 min
Tristan and guest Sarah Davis Baker explore the bizarre history of the Georgia Guidestones, debunking claims of alien population control to reveal a legacy of eugenics, 17th-century hoaxes, and explosive right-wing infighting.
Jun 2
1 hr 11 min
Ancient Aliens claims Nikola Tesla's death ray was real and the government hid the alien tech, but the secret vault contained a Wheatstone bridge, Donald Trump's uncle filed the debunking report, and the lone-genius myth has been doing real political damage ever since.
May 26
1 hr 39 min
Tartaria, the TikTok conspiracy theory that claims a globe-spanning civilization was buried by a mud flood in 1850, is a Russian nationalist psyop that survives because capitalism already erased the workers who actually built the pretty buildings.
May 19
1 hr 44 min
Ancient Aliens claims Leonardo da Vinci got his inventions telepathically from aliens; we trace the great man theory of history from Thomas Carlyle through Francis Galton coining eugenics straight to Peter Thiel's embryo selection, by way of a tank that doesn't work.
May 12
1 hr 11 min
Phil and Kevin guest-host as Tristan unpacks how a Pacific island culture's medieval revolt against feudal extraction got rebranded by Ancient Aliens as a failed alien hybrid experiment, with a side trip through the Blavatsky to Lovecraft to von Däniken pipeline that put eugenics-flavored cosmology on basic cable.
May 5
1 hr 34 min
Ancient Aliens says aliens triggered a super volcano 74,000 years ago to cull humanity and preserve a chosen few in bunkers, which is, coincidentally, exactly what Mark Zuckerberg is spending $270 million trying to do.
Apr 28
2 hr 4 min
Tristan and Scott kick off a new season by correcting their own mistakes about batteries, Thai colonial history, medieval historiography, Zoroastrian theology, and the historical Jesus while eulogizing their nemesis Erich von Däniken with the dignity he deserves (air horns).
Apr 21
1 hr 22 min
A viral AI-enhanced "UFO" over Acapulco turned out to be a $12 party balloon, but the real story is how AI upscaling, government disclosure hype, and platform economics are building a world where sharper images mean less truth.
Mar 26
39 min
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