The History Channel series Ancient Aliens, which will soon conclude its 20th season, pioneered an increasingly influential brand of pseudo-history, also on display in the recent Netflix production Ancient Apocalypse. Both shows gain their appeal simultaneously from the allure of hidden knowledge and the wish to escape from discomfiting truths. The core narrative they purvey, in the words of Ancient Apocalypse host Graham Hancock, is that before the emergence of human civilization as we know it, there reigned an “advanced culture with an industrial power greater than our own,” a “precursor race” that presumably arrived from another planet. This supercivilization perished in an unknown catastrophe, but not before passing on some of its knowledge to benighted early humans, who have been playing catch-up with these forgotten progenitors of civilization ever since.
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