History’s hit series Ancient Aliens is back with a compelling episode called The Star Gods of Sirius.
The new season is taking us to historic and fascinating locations across the planet to piece together compelling evidence that intelligent aliens once visited earth and communicated with (and taught) ancient humans.
Monsters and Critics spoke to Giorgio Tsoukalos about this show and AlienCon.
Giorgio is a journalist and the host on the long-running series and the man behind the famous alien memes all over social media. Tsoukalos too, is now considered one of the world’s leading ancient astronaut theorists and he is also the publisher of Legendary Times magazine, the world’s only ancient astronaut research journal.
To date, he has amassed a core of scientists and academics, which are called upon by Prometheus (the production company lead by Kevin Burns) who have fallen over to his way of thinking, that there are too many inexplicable coincidences across cultures and countries to not have an alien encounter in the past.
Their interviews are interspersed amidst the footage of each episode as an underscore to the scientific and logical academic arguments that we humans are not the only intelligent life forms in all of the galaxies of a universe so vast that most, if not all, people cannot comprehend the actual size of it.
Fans know that Tsoukalos is an acolyte of Erich von Däniken, the author of Chariots of the Gods and one of the leading experts on ancient alien theory who will make appearances from time to time at AlienCon.
We spoke to him about Ancient Aliens and AlienCon, which is happening this weekend:
Monsters & Critics: I keep thinking I watched the best episode ever of Ancient Aliens and then you throw another one at me, the Star Gods of Sirius!
Giorgio A. Tsoukalos: Yes. I don’t know how much I can talk about the episode but I’ll talk about AlienCon, I’ll answer any questions, but episode-specific, let’s just see how it goes.
M&C: It was fascinating how this episode pieced together the phonetics and the similarities in such disparate cultures and languages. Every episode, I always make notations of who you employ to comment and serve as your experts, and I notice that there were… I don’t think that there was a linguist or someone who studied language. Am I incorrect or correct?
Giorgio: Well, that’s a great question. I mean, first we interviewed Rodney Dale for one of the episodes in reference to the Manna Machine, and Rodney Dale, back in the day, in the 1970’s, in 1978, together with George Sassoon, they wrote a book called The Manna Machine.
In there, they used modern day translations for ancient Aramaic, and so both Rodney and George Sassoon, Rodney Dale and George Sassoon, are, in a sense, linguists, and we interviewed Rodney Dale because George Sassoon has passed on.
Now, I do know that we have interviewed a whole bunch of religious scholars and also anthropologists and ethnologists, and so I would presume, or hope, that they know some of the language of their local, or wherever they’re conducting their research, but that we’ve had an in-residence linguist? You’re correct with your observation. I don’t think we have one.
M&C: When you brought it home with the word dog, the English word dog, and how German, Latin, and French… It’s hund, chien and canis, where did we get dog from? I felt that was a really great way to kind of end the whole circle from going from Japan to Africa to Ireland.
Giorgio: That is an incredible fact, and here’s the thing that there are things that did not even make it into the episode.
For example, if you look at the ley lines in present-day Europe, there are these straight lines that cover all of Europe, and there is one line, for example, that goes all the way from northern France, through Italy, and the root word for each of these towns that are lined up in one straight line is the word for star.
So you have Calais-Mont Alix-Mont Alet – L’Alet – Anxon – Aisey- Alaise- L’Alex- Alzano-Calesi- Cales all in a line, So the original root word for the word stem is star.
If you have an entire ley line which is thousands of kilometers long and each city lines up on that line and each city corresponds to the word star, or the root, then the ancient astronaut explanation behind that is that a long, long time ago.
When the Pagans had their places of worship, [and] the reason why the Pagans had their places of worship[where they did] is because at some point in those very places, an extraterrestrial encounter happened.
Because if you look at many of these ley lines, and many of the present-day cathedrals, they’re all built directly on ancient Pagan places of worship.
Often times, those places of worship have something to do with the ancient astronauts visiting in our past. All the ancient Pagan ritualistic stuff has been appropriated by, in Europe’s case, by the Catholic church. So it’s an incredibly fascinating topic when we look at language in the larger picture.
By the way, only about 50,000 years ago or so, we were given a gene that allows us to speak in the first place because you have to ask yourself, why do chimpanzees… who have as long a time of an evolution as we have, why don’t they speak? Why can’t they build a car and things like that?
Well, the ancient astronaut theory suggests that this happened due to an artificial change of our DNA.
M&C: And whenever people say, well how did Stonehenge… Everyone needs a teacher, right? These ancient people, who we marvel at how they could do these things without technology, they had to be taught or shown by someone or something.
Giorgio: Thank you so much for saying that because I personally, and neither has Ancient Aliens or any the contributors, none of us have ever said or even implied that aliens built Stonehenge or that the aliens built the pyramids.
All we’ve ever said was just exactly what you just said, that at some point our ancestors had teachers because I am often told that by suggesting that our ancestors had teachers that this somehow undermines the human ingenuity of our ancestors.
If that were true, then remove any and all teachers that we have today, abolish all the universities, abolish all the elementary schools and kindergartens and everything, and then let’s see how we’re doing.
We’ll do ridiculously terrible because, in order to become who we are as a person, we need to have teachers. Our first teachers were our parents, then your kindergarten teacher and so on and so forth.
We’re surrounded by teachers, so to suggest that anything and everything in our ancient past was born out of a vacuum and that is what our archaeologists are suggesting.
Who is kidding whom here? It can’t happen unless you are taught something, so the idea that we’ve had teachers in the past, in my opinion, is not insulting. On the contrary, it is a requirement. It’s not insulting at all.
M&C: Right. I’m in agreement with you. I loved that you showed the basalt stele of the Hammurabi. That was such a breathtaking thing to see and tying that into the premise of Friday’s show, who is King Hammurabi speaking with? Who do you think he is speaking to or being spoken to by?
Giorgio: Well, in concordance with whom he speaks, there are also not just the descriptions but also the depictions, and there is this winged disk, if you picked it up in the air and you have to wonder, either our ancestors did not know how to depict the sun or the moon, or there was a flying disk up in the sky…
And the way they showed the flying disk is with carving a disk with wings. It is an incredibly beautiful and poetic way with which to describe something that our ancestors did not have the technological jargon nor the technological understanding.
This is why the ancient astronauts knew that they would immediately be regarded as instantaneous gods.
Arthur C. Clarke said it best when he said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. When you have these worldwide stories, including King Hammurabi, who describes that he has communicated with beings from up in the sky, who were their teachers and imparted knowledge, not only just to him but his entire people that he was with.
We have to wonder whether or not, at some point, we’ve received help from the skies, and the answer to that is a resounding yes. It all sounds very poetic. It all sounds very mythological, but it only sounds like that because our ancestors did not have the technological jargon, the terminology, with which to describe these eyewitness accounts.
M&C: I was blown away by the blue stones that Jared Collins had collected, and how DID this guy in California get his hands on all of these blue stones only found in Sierra Leone?
Giorgio: Well, I have to be perfectly honest with you. That’s maybe a Kevin Burns question, but all I can tell you is that Jared is a collector and he is also the guy that has one of the original elongated skulls from Paracas, Peru, and we actually tested that skull last year, or maybe it was two years ago, and if you remember, the person that we tested it with was Dr. Todd Disotell of the anthropology department of New York University, in Manhattan.
If you remember, Todd Disotell, in the very first episode that we ever did, the stand-alone special of Ancient Aliens, he was one of the skeptics. He was like, you know this is all nonsense.
Here we are, 10 years later, or nine years later, and we’re using the same guy to test our skull and then afterward, when he actually received the results and looked at it, there was smoke coming out of his ears because he was like “well this is interesting because we can determine who the mother is but we don’t know who the father is.”
So, my immediate question upon receiving those results from him, and he is the one who made these results, he didn’t send it off somewhere. He is the one who tested it.
He was like, well… I asked him ‘so, is this something that you think merits further investigation?’ He immediately said, “Yes, I’m on it. This is really weird.”
Because I do think that some of these elongated skulls are the results of artificial head binding, but I think that some of those elongated skulls are extraterrestrial. We are looking at the aliens right in front of our eyes.
M&C: Okay. Let’s talk about AlienCon. You’re in Los Angeles. It’s running for three days. Now, is there an east coast AlienCon this year or has it already passed?
Giorgio: I think there will be one in Dallas, Texas, in October. 4-6. Just go to TheAlienCon.com, and this weekend we’re here in Los Angeles at the L.A. Convention Center.
I’m looking forward to meeting all these smiling faces again because that’s the thing that I appreciate the most, so many happy people.
M&C: And it grows in popularity, and you get a whole swath of people from the most educated to just laypeople, a coming-together of people who have very open minds.
Giorgio: Yes! It’s a place where people can just come together as friends and, essentially, you don’t have to explain yourself.
M&C: Right. I interviewed a friend of yours earlier, Ramy Romany, who’s got a show on Discovery, and he talked very highly of you and, in the interview that I had with him. Are you going to have him collaborate or serve as an expert on any of your future Ancient Aliens?
Giorgio: Oh, he has already done that! We have already been on a couple of episodes together. Ramy has appeared on Ancient Aliens quite a few times and, last season, we did one two-hour special with Ramy called Space Station Egypt.
It was a two-hour special where we traveled to Egypt together and… No, Ramy, not only has he appeared on the show but he’s one of my dear friends and he’s doing invaluable work. Also, his new show is fantastic.
But when I was in Egypt with Ramy, it was the first time in almost 20 years that I had been there, and I could have not imagined a better host and guide than Ramy at the time.
M&C: I have a fun question for you and it has nothing to do with your hair.
Giorgio: [lsughing] Well, that’s a new one!
M&C: Okay, I’m a member of a couple of professional TV organizations including GALECA, which is the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, and one of the fun questions they gave me for you was were any of these ancient aliens in the LGBTQ rainbow?
Giorgio: I am sure, I am sure! Just like there’s an LGBTQ community on Earth, there’s an LGBTQ community, millions of them, out there.
This planet is nothing special, so whatever is going on here is going on out there, and it would not surprise me one bit, and it would be amazing. It would be amazing! Can you imagine all these parades throughout the universe? It would be amazing.
Ancient Aliens airs Fridays at 9/8c on History.