Somewhat different take - I don't know that reinforcing racist or "xeno-dismissive" ideas is the greatest harm from Ancient Aliens. Instead, the book that spawned the show (and many other books and shows like it) are case studies in what happens when you presume that correlation DOES imply causation. They are hurtful to public knowledge and lead readers/viewers down nonsensical paths that have zero basis in the academic fields the on-air hosts prance through. They make Dan Brown look like a serious academic. They take discrete artifacts, remove all historical context and then reapply modern interpretations of what human beings make and why. It gets even worse when they get into cherry picking lines from ancient texts, and the greatest detriment to the public comes from how they tie lines between things that are not connected.

If they want to pull a single line from the New Testament and then say, Oh, look at this Egyptian hieroglyph that looks like a space ship, I think the ancient NT Greek could be interpreted as "flying being," therefore, aliens visited "ancient Egypt" (whatever that means) and were probably Jesus, case closed. But to be able to draw connections between time periods and cultures, particularly through texts, you need to be a master of those texts and the cultures that created them. If you do NT Greek, that's your area and if you want to tie an interpretation of ancient Greek to an Egyptian hieroglyph, then you need to either be a master in that area or consult with masters in that area. This is the deep complexity of academic rigor. People spend their entire careers on just a handful of written words. Or objects. Or oral histories. Or Earth science. Etc.

But Ancient Aliens comes in, ignores every scholar who has come before them and without any academic seriousness, they tie airplane hieroglyphs to the King James NT to something they found on a blog and conclude, "clearly, this is aliens."

This is frustrating because it is so extremely stupid, but it is bad for the general public, which doesn't really have an appreciation for how complex historical investigation must be and they get distracted and misinformed, to say nothing of missing out. Actual true history is really interesting. But all History channel gives them is some wacko with wild hair spouting theories about which he lacks the background, the seriousness, and the insight to say anything substantive.

tl;dr: Ancient Aliens makes us all dumber.

I do think these theories reinforce racist beliefs but not in the direct "non-white people can't build big cool things" way. After all, people are happy to apply these theories to (what they perceive to be) white people! Stonehenge and Carnac attract a ton of these ideas, and really I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an old megalithic monument in Europe that someone hasn't tried to explain by pulling in Atlanteans or aliens or similar things.

The harm, for me, lies a lot more in how it decontextualises and others a lot of non-white civilizations. First off, it takes societies out of their temporal context and labels them all under the category "ancient". A culture like the Nazca civilization, which was contemporaneous with ancient Rome, or even the Inca who were around at the same time as clearly "modern" people like Luther, get relegated to the same category as old kingdom Egypt and even neolithic hunter-gatherers. They're not allowed the luxury that's given to European and later Middle-eastern or Asian civilizations like Rome, the Ottomans, etc. of being seen as the complex results of centuries of evolution and continuity. They're just a static, timeless "ancient", unchanging and therefore always stuck in a primitive state. This isn't uncommon outside of these theories either. How many times, in pop-culture works, are areas like the Americas and Africa depicted as stagnant and unchanging? And it's often a struggle to convince people that, for example in strategy games, the Aztecs and Inca really shouldn't be put in the stone age.

Then the othering comes in since these civilizations don't get to be regular humans anymore. They become something "more" and "less". They're people connected to supernatural wisdom that we in the modern west have forgotten, and often a state of spirituality and connection with the supernatural (and extraterrestrial) that we should return to. But at the same time, by possessing that knowledge and those ties to the supernatural, they're forcibly disconnected from the regular world they inhabited. Sometimes this is done in a seemingly positive way, after all they're using ancient magics/atlantean technology for it! But that makes them something more than human,and that's still dehumanizing. And other times they are just receptacles for the wisdom of outsiders (aliens, atlanteans, angels) without agency or innovation. And of course, their modern descendants are all the lesser for having forgotten that wisdom of their forefathers (which, if you think about it, is kind of just the old 19th century theory of racial degeneration back in a new form). Obviously this is all very prominent in New Age circles, with their fascination for South-Asian or Indigenous spirituality. But it's also reflected in more mainstream views of, for example, Native American peoples as a utopian environmentalist civilization uncorrupted by the modern world.

So, I think it's a bit simplistic to reduce the issues with these theories to "they make people think non-white people can't build impressive things", but they definitely do reinforce racist ideas in society.

Though I am certain the topic has an appeal to the fantasy element as well as offering a way to believe in a "higher power" for some, it is my firm opinion that the show is extremely detrimental to the Historical profession as well as humans' ability to understand the past while still retaining a sense of wonder, awe, and reverence for human ingenuity and industry.

First, the show takes away agency for human endeavors. To look at Machu Pichu, The Great Wall, The Maoi Statues, The Great Pyramids, or the Nazca Lines is to see the result of centuries of human inquiry and intellectual exercise. It took uncountable years of toil and unified vision to create these amazing works; it took a deep understanding of geometry, astronomy, mathematics, and logistics to create even a single great work in a single location, let alone multiple places across cultures, continents, and centuries.

To believe in "ancient aliens" as the progenitors of such works is to belittle the human mind; that we are too dumb, too dull, too lazy, and too awkward to engineer such things before a calculator or telescope was invented. That somehow technology preceeds a sophisticated understanding of the world, rather than is a tool brought about after that understanding has been established and proven.

Worse, if we take away "Responsibility" for the great things ancient civilizations accomplished, then we must also take away responsibility for the awful things too: human sacrifice, slavery, wars, and genocides. If the "ancient aliens" commanded humans to build these grand things, then they must have also demanded unthinkable atrocities as well. You don't get to pick-and-choose. Humans did great things, but we've also done horrific things as well. That is agency.

Moreover, I find the concept of "Ancient Aliens" to be racist: most of these shows 'examine' works in South and Central America, Africa, and Asia. But I have never heard of an Ancient Aliens arc explaining where the Romans' acxomplishments - roads, The Colosseum, or aqueducts, for example - were "built" by these aliens. Same with Greek advances in art, literature, and Atomic theories: it smacks of the idea that people living someplace other than Europe are stupid and need "alien" help, but Romans and Greeks are okay and can take resposibility for their achievements. Why is it so impossible to believe that, say Egyptians created these amazing pyramids themselves? If they didn't, how do these "Alienologists" explain the many, many experimental attempts, such as the Step Pyramid and the "bent" pyramid? What about Mastabas? Why would Aliens and their supposedly "perfect" technology need to practice with architecture, geometry, and construction over the course of centuries? If they screwed up, why did they leave it? Why not blast it with their Atomic Ray Zappers (tm)?

Finally, "Ancient Aliens" (and programs similar to it) have contributed to the erosion of belief in collective human endeavor and the worth of studying history while substituting conspiracy theories. They are intellectual "empty calories"; they give you an endorphin high and then you crash, leaving you with the mental equivalent of rotten teeth and diabetes.

In my decade plus of teaching at the college level, not a year has gone by that a student or member of the public has not sidled up to me at some point and posited that the "truth" is being covered up and we "so-called experts" are part of the conspiracy, though "probably, unwittingly" because Universities have "brainwashed" us.

Think about that for a moment: these programs (whether intentionally or otherwise) erode trust in higher education as a whole.. They erode trust in professional academics and peer-review.

To these people, whether on TV or in person, there is no acceptable proof except that which reinforces their confirmation biases.

I do not know one Historian who did not put themselves through the wringer to get where they are; they sacrificed years of their lives, subjected themselves to astonishing pressure and stress, and moved across the country (and in some cases, the globe) to learn and teach about the truly amazing world we inherited and the astonishing, beautiful, horrifying, and brutal cultures that helped get shape that world. And we don't make all that much money at it, to boot! It is a kind of altruism that those TV-paycheck hunting talking heads cannot fathom and so they belittle and minimize real, provable, documentable history just to sell more ShamWOW commercials.

EDIT: Thank you all for the awards. I am stunned at how my late night soap boxing resonated with so many of you. Thanks for haunting r/AskHistorians and thanks to u/zurbzurbzurb for giving me the opening to spill my guts. 😁

I never thought this day would come but... I am a media professional who actually has dissected Ancient Aliens at one of my jobs. I don't know how much of this post is actually going to be historically relevant (I’m not a trained historian) and I’m probably breaking the 20-year rule just because HISTORY only started in 1995 but I will leave the mods to decide on the worth of the post.

First, to answer the question directly:

Does Ancient Aliens push a narrative that delegitimises indigenous people? There are certainly episodes that suggest that ancient sites were built with help from aliens (S3E6, for instance), but the series’ overarching narrative tries to link everything and anything to aliens, including plagues (S3E7), myths (S1E2) and Albert Einstein (S5E5). It is accurate to say that the series tends to treat any technological achievement as alien in origin, but this seems to be done without prejudice to any particular race. Who does the series say has had help from aliens? Nazi Germany (S2E5), Leonardo De Vinci (S4E8), the Vikings (S5E11), NASA (S10E2) and more.

What really interests me is your claim that Ancient Aliens is “dangerous”, even though it is just one of many pieces of content in several forms pushing these Ancient Astronaut theories. So I thought I’d write a little about the history of HISTORY, because the impact of the content depends a great deal on the platform on which it is broadcast. I’d also like to write something about how Ancient Aliens is scripted, because that also sets it apart from a lot of material covering the topic.

You are not alone in your criticism of HISTORY programming in general and Ancient Aliens in particular. HISTORY and A+E Networks (parent company of HISTORY) have received a lot of criticism of their programming. In 2016, for example, Senator Chuck Grassley tweeted “If u don't like history now is time to go HISTORY CHANNEL and u can watch PAWN STARS”. (Indeed, Senator Grassley is well known for his hatred of HISTORY.)

Senator Grassley’s comments are typical of a lot of criticism the network receives, which is that the series it commissions and broadcasts are not “real history”. That then begs the question, why does the public seem to think that HISTORY has a duty to only broadcast “real history”?

I would argue 2 reasons: first of all, HISTORY has built a brand as an educational documentary channel. And secondly, HISTORY is a hugely popular channel. Therefore, any content on HISTORY is somehow “legitimised” and also reaches a wide audience.

HISTORY (then known as The History Channel) began broadcasting on January 1, 1995, and its original lineup included the following series:

• HIstory’s Crime and Trials, acquired from the BBC.
• The Century of Warfare, acquired from the BBC.
• Victory at Sea, an Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentary produced in 1952.
• Modern Marvels, a network original about science and engineering.

All serious, credible stuff! The History Channel also aired a show called The History Channel Classroom every morning, intended as supplementary classroom material. The network released all rights to this programme for a year to encourage taping of the programme.

The History Channel was thus very keen to brand itself as serious, informative and educational, and even today a little of that branding persists (more on that later).

The power of HISTORY to reach a wide audience has also been in evidence since its inception. In a 1996 interview with the LA Times, Abbe Raven, SVP of Programming, said, “... you can examine any topic in history in a creative way and make it exciting and dramatic… what we hope to do is tell dramatic stories with a new slant of some kind.” The Myers Reports’ annual survey of the cable industry in that year found that cable operators were more likely to add the History Channel than any other service. Indeed, the channel was adding about a million new subscribers every month.

Okay, so how did this popular, serious, educational channel turn into what it is today?

In 2001, documentary cable networks started to face competition from a new source, which was Wikipedia. As internet access became widely available and Wikipedia grew, audience behaviour changed. Now, if you had a burning question about the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, you could go to Wikipedia and read about it. You wouldn’t sit through an hour-long documentary… or worse, a 6-hour series, at a set time in a set place every week.

Documentary cable networks realised the shift in audience behaviour, and from around 2005, the three big factual networks in America (National Geographic Channel, Discovery and A+E Networks) started to experiment with new forms of programming, shifting from “documentaries” to “factual entertainment”. This is the era of Discovery’s “Deadliest Catch” (reality series following crab fishermen during crab fishing season) and “Lobster Wars” (same, except with lobsters instead of crabs).

HISTORY was quick to catch on and in 2009 they commissioned Leftfield Pictures to produce what would become their biggest hit of the time - Pawn Stars. The format of Pawn Stars is simple. Each episode sees a number of people walking into the World Famous Gold & Silver Pawn Shop with something to pawn. Once inside, the pawn shop owners talk a little bit about the history of the piece. At this time, factoids are displayed on screen e.g. “The Ezekiel Baker rifle was the first standard-issue British-made rifle.” Then there is some bargaining over how much the item is worth.

Pawn Stars was formatted in this way because the network wanted to preserve the idea that HISTORY was educational. The thinking was that you couldn’t google for something if you didn’t know it existed. So HISTORY was going to broadcast an entertaining series to get you to sit down and watch. It would deliver interesting nuggets of information with very little elaboration, and if you were interested you could look it up on Wikipedia. Pawn Stars was pop history, but it was still history, and the channel was still educational.

The slate of reality shows on HISTORY during this era - Swamp People, Ax Men, Ice Road Truckers, The Pickers etc. - tried to ensure that there was at least some educational value. Swamp People, for example, was ostensibly a glimpse into a community and a “traditional way of life”, as the practice of alligator hunting dates back some 300 years. (Incidentally, this also resulted in an older, white, male, right leaning audience. In 2014, a study by Echelon Insights found that 62% of political ads were Republican.)

There was also another type of programming that started around this time, which was the conspiracy theory/mystery solving type of series, which brings us to Ancient Aliens, but also Mystery of Oak Island, Brad Meltzer’s Decoded, Hunting Hitler and more. These also give something you can’t get on Wikipedia - they join together a myriad of little facts and use them to weave a compelling narrative. However, that posed a problem, which was that if HISTORY wanted to preserve some of their educational branding, how could they do that while still pushing theories about aliens building pyramids?

If you listen closely to the narration of Ancient Aliens, you’ll notice that the narrator never makes a claim (at least, that was the way it was when I was studying the series about 5 years ago). It’s always, “... could it be, as Ancient Astronaut Theorists believe…” and, “... could this be evidence of a guiding hand from beyond our planet? Ancient Astronaut Theorists say, yes.”

The show then cuts to an interview with an Ancient Astronaut Theorist who repeats the claim as fact. However, it’s the interviewee stating his point of view, and not the narrator. Thus, while the network is giving the interviewee a platform and priming the audience for his soundbites, it is not actually stating the claims as fact.

All of which is a very long way of saying, the reason Ancient Aliens gets such a lot of criticism is that, unlike a website buried in a corner of the internet,

1. Ancient Aliens is entertaining, and sits on a popular channel, and thus the average viewer is more likely to stumble across it.
2. Ancient Aliens sits on a channel that still has some credibility, and is thus more likely to be taken as true.

Edit: I want to add that Ancient Aliens is actually a very well produced show. The producers have the scripting and pacing down to an art, and it is this art that makes the show not just entertaining, but believable to a great many viewers. They may not swallow the entire 191 episodes, but they certainly start thinking, well, maybe aliens do exist... I don't think one can talk about the detriments of Ancient Aliens without dissecting exactly what makes the show so popular and acknowledging that it is a very clever production.

Think about it. A show with no grounding in facts. A series full of outlandish propositions. 191 episodes that invalidate the accomplishments of the most intelligent species in the history of the planet... and get that very same species to believe it. How could such a thing be possible? Could it be that the producers of the show had help from beings of a different species altogether? And could that species have come... from a different planet altogether?