I Don't Know...

Gorgio A. Tsoukalos, aka "The Ancient Aliens Guy."

The A might stand for AquaNet.

I love Ancient Aliens on the History Channel. I love that show almost as much as I love Nicholas Cage. Clearly, I am not alone, as History routinely shows AA marathons for hours and hours until you start thinking that styling your hair like a member of the Centauri nobility is the way forward. (I watched a lot of Babylon 5 as a kid, what of it? Bruce Boxleightener rules!)

Seriously though, Tsoukalos is the icing on the cake. I can't quite put my finger on why I love AA so much, aside from it being downright hysterical at times. Of course, the featured commentators make outlandish, unsubstantiated, absurdly broad claims about history, technology, and extra-terrestrial life. They routinely minimize the intelligence and capabilities of ancient peoples worldwide in their desire to prove that we've already made contact with E.T. But the idea that there exists alternate explanations to our understood histories is intriguing. I like the folks who exist outside my reality; I've always like the freaks and geeks, the mold-breakers, the rules-ignorant, and the oddballs. Ancient Aliens is chock full of them!

More than that, I think it's the History Channel's sneaky way of actually trying to offer information on, oh, I don't know, HISTORY. Does anyone else remember when TLC stood for "The Learning Channel" and not just The Lunatic Channel (as I like to call it)? Or when shows like Ice Road Truckers weren't the backbone of History's programming? Reality shows are eating our brains. But when Ancient Aliens spends half a show on Göbekli Tepe, I have a feeling it's because History's number crunchers didn't think they'd have enough viewers to justify an entire show just on the site. Personally, I would watch that on repeat (and I read the National Geographic article on it about six times), but by inserting it into Ancient Aliens, at least they're reaching a broad audience about that remarkable discovery.

I used to joke that I learned far more from The History Channel (which we used to jokingly call "The Hitler Channel" around our house since they showed WWII documentaries 20 hours a day when they first came on the air) than I ever did in history class. I learned about Boudica, the warrior queen who kicked some serious Roman ass in the first century, for the first time on History. I discovered the origins of our Arabic numeral system, the mysteries of the Maya, the life of Gavrillo Princip, and  visited the vastness of space with Carl Sagan because of the History Channel and the Science Channel. And when the first introductions to such concepts are provided in such digestible, accessible pieces to the average mind, one hopes that curiosity blossoms and we continue to learn. And I did! But it was also thanks to The History Channel that I was able to explain Neville Chamberlain and the Munich Agreement to my college 300-level history course in a way our professor could - or would - not. "I got this!" I remember thinking. "I watched a whole two hours about this on The Hitler Channel in ninth grade."

Certainly, TV shows are no replacement for actual education, reading, discovering, or listening. Yet, in all my years of schooling, we never even got past WWI in our attempts to grasp the broad and untenable strokes of what a flustered instructor would try to call "world history." But what I was able to do was spend quality time with Greg. Every day, when I came home from school, my father had The History Channel, or one of its sister stations, on. And we'd talk about my day and watch the Third Reich goose-stepping on celluloid, or an excavation in Nazca, or Malcolm X railing against oppression, or an exploration of the technologies of the Chinese Empire. And we discussed what we watched, as you should discuss history and perspectives and what it means to us now. And it piqued my curiosity and satisfied a need for eclectic and important knowledge and factoids that I will probably always possess.

And now we are supposed to watch these various vacuous and ubiquitous reality TV shows, which simply attempt to reflect whatever reality we choose to see, devoid of the fascination, and beauty, and often uncomfortable truth of what has come before us. And, so absurd as it can be, I think Ancient Aliens does something that our media so often fails to do these days; it fosters curiosity and demands that we question the status quo. After all, if Boudica, or Princip, or Malcolm X, or Sagan hadn't questioned the way things were, we would live in a vastly different world, for better or for worse. In a society where we question so little, where we mindlessly consume infotainment instead of legitimate news reporting, at least we have these eccentric individuals on Ancient Aliens trying new thoughts on for size, outlandish as they may be. And I'm not saying Tsoukalos and his cohorts are anything like the revolutionary thinkers of the past, but maybe, just MAYBE in some small way, the curiosity they start to pique, the imaginations they can, perhaps, enhance, will help grow a revolutionary thinker of the future, because God (or aliens) know that we're doing a pretty shit job of it on the whole these days.

And then perhaps we'll finally get a legitimate explanation for his hair.