PODCAST · history
It‘s Probably (not) Aliens!
by Tristan Johnson & Scott Niswander
Was Earth really visited by mysterious extraterrestrial travelers thousands of years ago as many proponents of ”ancient astronaut theory” believe? What are the hidden secrets and mysteries behind ancient monuments and forgotten civilizations?Every week, historian Tristan Johnson and regular human person Scott Niswander dive through the archives to learn about the fascinating histories of ancient civilizations while also debunking the myths and straight-up lies presented in History Channel‘s massively popular tv show Ancient Aliens that has sparked a new generation of conspiracy theorists. We hope through this show, you can gain an appreciation for just how cool ancient societies were, and not simply credit their impressive advancements to alien visitors.NEW EPISODES EVERY WEEK! Follow the show so you don‘t miss an episode, and leave us a review! It really helps us out!
Episodes
-
Ramanujan: Show Your Work or They'll Make It Aliens
Srinivasa Ramanujan did extraordinary mathematics, and Ancient Aliens would like to credit his extraterrestrial internet provider. His accounts of dreams and devotion to the Hindu goddess Namagiri become evidence of an alien download. Scott realizes his childhood refusal to show his work could…
more -
Angkor Wat: Colonialism Went to Space College
Ancient Aliens would like you to believe Angkor Wat required a trip to space college and a supply of magic water. Apparently, giving Khmer builders credit for knowing how to build things is asking too much. We look at the religious poem being repackaged as an alien encounter, the canals used to...
-
Joan of Arc: God Forbid a Girl Break a Siege
A 17-year-old peasant girl helps turn the tide of the Hundred Years' War, and Ancient Aliens would like to speak to her extraterrestrial supervisor. Apparently, Joan of Arc couldn't have rallied an army without someone uploading military strategy into her brain. We look at what that explanation...
-
Rendlesham Forest: 'Trust Me, Bro' in Binary
An airman touches a UFO in Rendlesham Forest, downloads a binary message into his brain, and keeps the evidence to himself for 30 years. That's the story Ancient Aliens wants us to accept. Conveniently, the message becomes public in time for television. We examine the notebook behind the claim…
more -
We Goofed: Scott Had a Baby. We Have Bad News.
Scott is back from parental leave and asks what he missed. Tristan opens with the war in Iran. Welcome back, buddy. We kick off the season with a news catch-up and corrections on Yellowstone's supposed apocalypse schedule, willow bark and aspirin, and how Soviet worker awards helped bosses demand...
-
Walking Amogus
David Jacobs spent his retirement from teaching history at Temple University convinced that alien-human hybrids he calls hubrids are quietly moving into apartments in Philadelphia, taking jobs, and waiting for a signal to enslave the planet. The catch is that these telepathic interstellar...
-
The Real Mantis Was The Exploitation We Made Along The Way
Somewhere in the deep lore of alien abduction, past the gray guys who run the equipment, sits a manager. Six to nine feet of praying mantis, purple robe for rank, telepathic, standing at the head of the table while the drones do the wet work. It regards you the way a farmer regards livestock.…
more -
Rosicrucianism Was Just A 1614 S***post
In 1980, a mysterious stranger named R.C. Christian spent the equivalent of $200,000 to erect 19-foot-tall, 119-ton granite monuments in rural Georgia. Ancient Aliens wants you to believe the "Georgia Guidestones" are an extraterrestrial warning to keep the human population under 500 million,...
-
Nikola Tesla Was Never Forgotten, He Was Just Sad
Ancient Aliens wants you to believe Nikola Tesla was an alien conduit whose secret death ray was buried by the FBI. The actual story: the "vault" they seized in 1943 contained a Wheatstone bridge, which was the 1940s version of a multimeter you could order from a catalogue. The MIT physicist who...
-
Tartaria: A Russian Psyop For People Who Hate Drywall
Have you ever looked at a beautiful old train station and felt something had been lost? Good news: the something is "labour protections." Bad news: a Russian topologist from the 1980s has a different theory, and it's currently eating TikTok. This week, Tristan is joined by Mia Mulder, who happens...
-
Leonardo da Vinci Was Just A Guy With ADHD
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...
-
Anarchist praxis in the 17th century (a love story)
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...
-
We Should've Had Shovels For Hands
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…
more -
Struck Down In His Prime At 90 Years Young
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:...
-
The Clearest UFO Photo of 2026 Costs $12 at Party City
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…
more -
Magnets: How Do They (Not) Work?
Ancient Aliens claims the 3,000 standing stones at Carnac in Brittany are quartz-rich geomagnetic batteries that beam GPS signals to extraterrestrials. In this episode, Tristan takes us deeper into the actual physics of magnetism than this podcast has possibly ever gone, and it turns out the...
-
Coral Castle: Women Always Be Wanting You To Make Megaliths
A Latvian immigrant, barely five feet tall, builds one of the strangest tourist attractions in North America out of coral stone, and Ancient Aliens can only think to credit aliens with it. In this role-reversed birthday episode, Scott takes the research chair to investigate Coral Castle, the...
-
Scott Is Tired So His Pregnant Wife Is The Host Now
Scott's down for the count, so his nearly-third-trimester wife Emily Pilat steps up to the mic. (This episode actually is coming out on the due date.) Together with Tristan, they travel to the Armenian highlands to investigate Karahunj, a site of 223 standing stones that conspiracy theorists call...
-
Sacsayhuamán: The One Where We Solve the Male Loneliness Epidemic
Ancient Aliens claims the megalithic stonework at Sacsayhuamán in Peru is so precise it must have been built with alien laser technology or by a lost advanced civilization, because obviously the Inca couldn't possibly have figured out how to move big rocks on their own. They absolutely could, and...
-
Göbekli Tepe Part 2: Oops, All Tristan Makes You Sad
In Part 2 of our Göbekli Tepe series, we pivot from debunking ancient alien claims to examining why conspiracy theories are so fucking dangerous in 2025. We start with the shocking discovery that Hank Green made a video with almost our exact podcast title (we're not mad, don't tell anyone we were...
-
Göbekli Tepe Part 1: Using Excessive Amounts of Lube To Move Big Rocks
Tristan and Scott return to the "smoking gun" of the ancient astronaut world: Göbekli Tepe. According to Netflix documentaries and Ancient Aliens, this 12,000-year-old site is impossible. They claim there were no tools, no agriculture, and no way to move 15-ton stone pillars without anti-gravity...
-
3I/ATLAS: Stop Trying To Make 'Oumuamua 2 Happen
Harvard Professor Avi Loeb is back, and he wants you to believe that the new interstellar object screaming through our solar system, 3I/Atlas, is a hostile alien spacecraft sent to destroy us. In this episode, Tristan and Scott (who is currently possessed by Professor X) break down why this claim...
-
The Most Important Rock In History Is Stuck In A Locker On Mars
We interrupt your regularly scheduled debunking of ancient astronaut theories for an emergency broadcast: We might have actually found aliens this time. No, really. Scott and Tristan break down the discovery of the Cheyava Falls rock by the Perseverance rover. This dusty red doorstop features...
-
Tristan Has Watched K-Pop Demon Hunters 6,000 Times
We’re kicking off the new season by doing the one thing Ancient Aliens refuses to do: admitting we were wrong. First, Scott has entered his "Napalm Era" and held the podcast hostage to talk about the 2025 animated masterpiece K-Pop: Demon Hunters (and the specific lyrics that have rewired his...
-
Henry Said My Therapist Wants to F*** Me
A woman posts 25+ TikToks about falling in love with her psychiatrist who "manipulated" her by complimenting her glasses. She confides in ChatGPT (named Henry) which validates every delusion. This spirals into a broader discussion about how Ancient Aliens and conspiracy media systematically…
more -
A Fast Pass To Heaven (Terms and Conditions Apply)
Ancient Aliens loves to portray angels not as divine messengers, but as heavenly soldiers armed with advanced weaponry, turning biblical stories into "battle reports" of alien soldiers. But this isn't just a weird sci-fi twist; it taps into a much older, darker tradition. We trace the long…
more -
I'm Gonna Beat Jesus
You've seen it on TikTok: a wild theory connecting a sacred mountain in the Middle East, fallen angels, the Roswell crash, and the number 33. Welcome to the Mount Hermon conspiracy, the belief that a supernatural coordinate system, the 33rd parallel, serves as a global energy grid for aliens and...
-
Elf on the Shelf Is A Cop
Ancient Aliens claims that myths about divine "Watchers" from the Anunnaki to the Eye of Horus are actually cultural memories of extraterrestrial surveillance systems. But what if the truth is far more terrestrial and much more insidious? Tristan argues that these stories aren't about alien...
-
The Gospel According to the House Hippo
After an 11-month hiatus that felt like a biblical epoch, Tristan and Scott are back to ask the tough questions, like "Do you remember the name of our own podcast?" and "Do Christians actually believe in angels?". The answer, according to Ancient Aliens, is that they shouldn't because angels were...
-
Dramatic_Fart.mp3
In April 2025, the James Webb Space Telescope made a groundbreaking discovery: a distant exoplanet, K2-18b, showed signs of dimethyl sulphide. A chemical that, on Earth, is only produced by life. The media went wild with the news that we had finally found a "fart planet," the first real...
-
Corrections: We Are The Liberal Joe Rogan Now
To kick off the new season, Scott and Tristan uphold their sacred tradition: correcting all the things they've gotten wrong. What begins as a simple corrections episode quickly spirals into a sprawling conversation about the Canada-U.S. relationship, the strategic importance of maple syrup, and a...
-
The One Where We Finally Talk About Garrus
Join Scott and Tristan for a chaotic post-season Q&A where they tackle everything from their favourite fictional aliens to conspiracy theories they almost believed. Get ready for tangents into video games, surprising revelations about research rabbit holes, and an unexpectedly passionate debate...
-
Montauk: The Conspiracy Theory That Inspired Better Fiction
Let's explore the bizarre world of the Montauk Project, where recovered memories meet Cold War paranoia to create one of America's wildest conspiracy theories. We explore how a decommissioned military base somehow became ground zero for alleged government experiments in mind control, time travel,...
-
The Great New Jersey Drone Panic of 2024
In late 2024, New Jersey became the epicenter of a nationwide panic when mysterious large drones started appearing over military installations, power lines, and even Trump's golf course. From the Morris County sightings to the Coast Guard's encounter with a dozen coordinated drones, we dive into...
-
Ancient Aliens Can't Melt Stone Beams
Scott and Tristan melt down Ancient Aliens' claims about Scotland's mysterious vitrified forts. Through terrible Scottish accents and unexpected detours into modern battery technology, they explore how Iron Age Scots used sophisticated fire management techniques to create these unique structures…
more -
The Ancient Greek Scientist Who Didn't Build a Death Ray
Join us as we dive into one of ancient history's most persistent myths: Archimedes' legendary death ray. From Ancient Aliens' claims of extraterrestrial technology to Mythbusters' multiple attempts to recreate it, we explore how this mathematical genius became associated with a weapon that…
more -
Ancient Aliens Really Need To Stop Making Things Up About Alexander (the Great) ft. Dael Kingsmill
Was Alexander the Great's historic campaign into India really halted by alien intervention? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes (of course they do), claiming mysterious flying shields scared his war elephants. We dive into the actual historical records, discuss why troops might not want to march...
-
Thunder Gods Don't Need Plasma Rifles
Ancient Aliens claims that mythological super-weapons - from Zeus's thunderbolts to Poseidon's trident - were actually advanced alien technology misinterpreted by ancient peoples. But what if these legendary artifacts were actually serving a different purpose? Join us as we explore how these...
-
Chariots of Liar: The Truth About Ancient 'Spaceships'
From fiery chariots in the Bible to flying turtles in Native American mythology, ancient stories are full of fantastic flying vehicles and creatures. But while Ancient Aliens insists these are proof of extraterrestrial technology, we dive into the real cultural and religious significance behind...
-
Beer, Pizza, and Big Rocks: How Ancient Buildings Were Actually Made
From the Great Pyramids to Baalbek, ancient astronaut theorists claim that mysterious acoustic levitation technology was used to move massive stones. But what happens when you actually look at the physics of sound? Join us as we explore the real engineering achievements of ancient civilizations,...
-
Jericho: Aliens Love Their Bass Drops ft. Tom Nicholas
Ancient Aliens claims the walls of Jericho were destroyed by advanced alien sonic weapons powered by the Ark of the Covenant. Plus: The best Veggie Tales songs, medieval siege tactics, and why aliens with faster-than-light technology probably would have just invented gunpowder instead. Check out...
-
Why Ancient People Could Actually Art
From Egyptian sun disks to Mayan turtle sculptures, watch in horror as Ancient Aliens transforms religious symbols into spaceships, completely ignoring centuries of cultural context and artistic expression. Learn about the actual meanings behind these ancient artworks while questioning why…
more -
We Goofed: The Sandwich That Didn't Start World War I
Gavrilo Princip probably wasn't munching on a sandwich when he decided to kick off World War I. This, along with other thrilling things we did wrong, is in this one. We'll also explore how we managed to confuse rocks, misplace a few billion dollars in military spending, and accidentally transport…
more -
Is The City Of Teotihuacán A Literal Computer?
Teotihuacán is a city that "millions of people around the world" believe looks like a computer chip. So it must be, apparently. We're joined by Quintin Smith who is much more generous than we are. Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not)...
-
Die Glocke: The Nazi Time Machine
This is the big one! Was Die Glocke real? What did it do? And is "anti-gravity" the bad boy of physics? Get new episodes early on 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…
more -
No, The Swastika Isn't An Alien Symbol
I can't believe we even have to say that. Get new episodes early on 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...
-
Did Nazis Ever Actually Find Mystical Treasure?
Obviously not. But this raises an interesting question about why pop culture has painted nazis in this treasure-hunting way. Get new episodes early on 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.…
more -
The Slow And Secret Rise Of Esoteric Nazis Since WWII
Turns out, nearly every seemingly innocuous new age-y thing is linked back to nazi ideology. So that's no good. Get new episodes early on 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…
more -
Aryan Aliens: Yep, It's Gross!
So far, we've debunked Ancient Aliens' claims that Nazi Germany got help from alien technology. But now we're tackling the much grosser belief that the aryan race was actual aliens. Get new episodes early on Nebula! Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient...
-
Wernher von Braun's Little Rocket Brain
Wernher von Braun didn't care who he made rockets for or for what those people used his rockets. Nazi Germany? The United States? Didn't matter to him. Cool guy. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
We're indexing this podcast's transcripts for the first time — this can take a minute or two. We'll show results as soon as they're ready.
No matches for "" in this podcast's transcripts.
No topics indexed yet for this podcast.
Loading reviews...
ABOUT THIS SHOW
Was Earth really visited by mysterious extraterrestrial travelers thousands of years ago as many proponents of ”ancient astronaut theory” believe? What are the hidden secrets and mysteries behind ancient monuments and forgotten civilizations?Every week, historian Tristan Johnson and regular human person Scott Niswander dive through the archives to learn about the fascinating histories of ancient civilizations while also debunking the myths and straight-up lies presented in History Channel‘s massively popular tv show Ancient Aliens that has sparked a new generation of conspiracy theorists. We hope through this show, you can gain an appreciation for just how cool ancient societies were, and not simply credit their impressive advancements to alien visitors.NEW EPISODES EVERY WEEK! Follow the show so you don‘t miss an episode, and leave us a review! It really helps us out!
HOSTED BY
Tristan Johnson & Scott Niswander
Loading similar podcasts...
Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does It‘s Probably (not) Aliens! have?
It‘s Probably (not) Aliens! currently has 165 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is It‘s Probably (not) Aliens! about?
Was Earth really visited by mysterious extraterrestrial travelers thousands of years ago as many proponents of ”ancient astronaut theory” believe? What are the hidden secrets and mysteries behind ancient monuments and forgotten civilizations?Every week, historian Tristan Johnson and regular human...
How often does It‘s Probably (not) Aliens! release new episodes?
It‘s Probably (not) Aliens! publishes regularly with 165 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to It‘s Probably (not) Aliens!?
You can listen to It‘s Probably (not) Aliens! on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts It‘s Probably (not) Aliens!?
It‘s Probably (not) Aliens! is created and hosted by Tristan Johnson & Scott Niswander.
URL copied to clipboard!