It‘s Probably (not) Aliens!

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 should watch it.
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Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube
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Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max
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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 the survivors built one of the most deliberately decentralized political systems in the pre-modern Pacific. Then the episode follows a much weirder thread: how Helena Blavatsky's occult race theory became Lovecraft's cosmic horror, became a Cthulhu tabletop sanity mechanic, became Erich von Däniken's plagiarism, became the History Channel's "romance television for men" pitch deck, and became modern Great Replacement panic.
Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula!
Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out!
Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube
Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube
Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates!
Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com
Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 "chosen survivors in alien bunkers" arc, tracing every beat back to a Babylonian myth, a long-debunked bottleneck estimate, and Helena Blavatsky's "root races" (which, spoiler, the Nazis loved).
Then things get current. The same bunker-survivor fantasy powers Mark Zuckerberg's $270 million underground Hawaiian compound, Peter Thiel's New Zealand escape hatches, longtermism, elite pronatalism, and the eco-fascist "humans are the virus" meme that crawled out of 2020. Douglas Rushkoff calls it The Mindset: accumulate enough capital to personally exit the world you helped break. The actual archaeology from Shinfa Metema 1 shows the opposite: Toba survivors made it through not with bunkers but with bow-and-arrow tech, flexible diets, river-corridor mobility, and long-distance obsidian trade networks. Cooperation, not seclusion.
Plus: why Scott thought "Koolau Ranch" was a salad dressing, a sustained argument that every geological term in this episode should be a AAA video game, Candace Owens' theory that Charlie Kirk was a Project Looking Glass time traveller, and Scott's final episode before paternity leave. Build your obsidian handshake network before you need it.
Content note: Discussion of eugenics, eco-fascism, and Malthusian "population control" rhetoric throughout.
Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula!
Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out!
Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube
Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube
Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates!
Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com
Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 difference between Zoroastrian Mithra and Roman Mithras, the scholarly consensus on whether Josephus actually mentioned Jesus, and why Christianity and Nazism are theologically incompatible, but that's never stopped anyone. Plus: the oldest known piece of writing is basically a one-star Yelp review, Tristan wasted a week researching AI-generated slop, and Scott wants to play Taps on air horns.
Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula!
Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out!
Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube
Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube
Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates!
Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com
Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 is the easy part. The harder question is what happens when AI upscaling can turn any blurry nothing into convincing 4K evidence, when detector scores give your brain permission to stop thinking, and when the platforms pushing this stuff can't tell the difference between wonder and truth, and don't need to, because both generate clicks. Tristan breaks down the optics, the AI, and the disclosure hype that sent a foil balloon around the world, walks through a practical framework for evaluating viral images, and talks about why the real Acapulco, still dealing with earthquakes, hurricanes, and cartel violence, deserves more of the attention that went to whatever was floating above it.
Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula!
Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out!
Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube
Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube
Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates!
Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com
Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.