HistorySociety & CultureEducation

It‘s Probably (not) Aliens!

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!

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S6 · E163
Tuesday · 1 hr 15 min
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 more work. Scott gets challenged on Scooby-Doo continuity and Thanos's motives, then looks for the technicality that means he was right anyway. Also, Denis Leary has apparently been working this whole time. Sorry, Denis. Along the way, we talk Artemis II, the media fixation on Hasan Piker, and The Onion's Infowars plans. A listener revisits Tristan's old warning about war with Iran, which is a miserable thing to get right. We also discuss David Wilcock's death and how to criticize harmful ideas without mocking someone's mental health. The soundboard is back, too. You've been warned. Content note: Discussion of suicide and depression. 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 Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S5 · E161
June 16 · 1 hr 9 min
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 conquerors apparently cannot work a toaster, order a coffee, or figure out when to clap at a concert, so they abduct people to teach them. Tristan is joined by Mildred from Thought Slime, back for a record number of guest spots while Scott is on baby duty, to walk through how Jacobs assembled an entire alien class system of robed mantises, drone grays, and prototype hybrids out of nothing but hypnosis sessions, a lot of them done over the phone. Then it stops being funny. We get into how hypnotic regression manufactures memories that feel more real than the real ones, the documented case of the woman Jacobs put through 91 sessions and the harm he caused her, and why the History Channel keeps handing this guy a microphone (the answer is ad money, mostly). Underneath the goofy lore is great replacement rhetoric with the labels swapped out: a hidden enemy that looks like you but isn't, a coming loss of everything you are, and a man selling himself as the only one who can save you. Same story Europe told about changelings centuries ago, now with a UFO strapped to it. We land somewhere more hopeful, on why actually knowing the people around you is the thing that breaks the spell. Guest Plug: Mildred from Thought Slime makes left-wing comedy and video essays on YouTube at youtube.com/@thoughtslime. Mildred is also, for the record, the current title-holder for most IPNA guest appearances. 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.
S5 · E160
June 9 · 1 hr 20 min
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. This week, Tristan brings on Stanford (yes, the one we verbally abused all of last season, now a guest in good standing) to work out where this giant bug came from. The trail runs straight to David Jacobs, an actual history professor who ran more than 900 hypnotic regression sessions and emerged with a full taxonomy of alien species and their agendas. We get into why hypnosis is the same memory-fabricating machine that produced the satanic panic, how your brain rebuilds every memory from scratch and patches the gaps with whatever's lying around, and why sleep paralysis has been parking a terrifying presence at the foot of human beds for as long as we've had beds. Then there's the square-cube law, which is grim news for anyone hoping a seven-foot insect could stand up without collapsing into paste. Then the part that matters. Peel the costume off the mantis, and you're left with a job description: detached managers who treat the people under them as a resource to optimize, workers who run the program with zero ethical input, surveillance nobody consented to, monitored reproduction, value squeezed out of people the system won't acknowledge as people. That's capitalism with extra legs. The mantis is a face bolted onto a faceless system, because our brains would sooner hunt one villain than sit with the idea that nobody's driving. Your anger is correct. The target is a bug. (Next week, we put Jacobs himself under the magnifying glass.) Guest plug: Stanford co-hosts Captain's Log Supplemental, a Star Trek rewatch podcast grinding through the entire canon in chronological order, currently surfacing into Strange New Worlds after doing hard time in Enterprise. Go find it wherever you get podcasts. 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.
S5 · E159
June 2 · 1 hr 11 min
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, passed down by the secret Rosicrucian order. Tristan and guest Sarah Davis Baker are here to inform you that the Rosicrucian manifestos were basically 17th-century German shitposts, and the real author of the stones was actually a deeply racist, eugenics-loving physician from Iowa. We trace the absurd, irony-poisoned history of the monument, right up to the moment a completely different brand of right-wing conspiracy theorists blew it up with a bomb in 2022 because they thought it was demonic. It's a journey through the horrors of historical eugenics, elite longtermism, and the bizarre mirror world of American politics where fascists accidentally destroy other fascists' monuments. 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.
S5 · E158
May 26 · 1 hr 39 min
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 wrote the dismissive evaluation report was, no joke, John G. Trump, uncle of the current US president. The Office of Alien Property Custodian was a wartime filing bureaucracy, not Warehouse 13. And the death ray Tesla pitched in 1934 ran into the same physics problem every subsequent attempt has run into: air. Charged particles scatter when they hit it. DARPA spent decades and a lot of money rediscovering this. Physicist and YouTuber Angela Collier (back for round two after the Planet Nine episode) walks Tristan through why the lone-genius myth keeps getting recycled, why Tesla's actual story is sadder and more interesting than the conspiracy version, and how the same myth-making machine that turned a guy who died broke feeding pigeons into a $1.4 trillion brand also lets Elon Musk cosplay as a self-made inventor while doing Nazi salutes and gutting USAID. Plus: why the History Channel was built explicitly as "romance television for men," what disability justice has to say about the autism-as-superpower frame, and why Hans Asperger was, factually, a Nazi. Guest plug: Angela Collier is a physicist and YouTuber whose videos do for physics what this show tries to do for archaeology. Go watch her recent Dyson sphere video, in which she reads a physics paper out loud and explains, with admirable patience, why disassembling Jupiter to build solar panels is silly. Her channel is at youtube.com/@acollierastro. 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.
S5 · E157
May 19 · 1 hr 44 min
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 to have made the definitive YouTube video on this exact topic two years ago and then forgot she'd been on the podcast before. Together, they take on Tartaria, also known as the mud flood theory, also known as (per Bloomberg) the QAnon of architecture. We trace it from Anatoly Fomenko's "new chronology" through Nikolai Levashov's Aryan space-giants, into Putin-adjacent nationalist rhetoric, then watch it break containment around 2016 and metastasize on western social media into a modular conspiracy that bolts onto Q, the great reset, and great replacement theory. Plus: Chicago raised its entire street level by four to six feet using 6,000 screw jacks and one guy with a whistle; the 1893 World's Fair was held in a city made of fancy papier-mache; and a horse and buggy is actually a sophisticated piece of equipment that you, specifically, could not build. The bigger argument is a double erasure: capitalism already wrote the Irish and Italian masons out of the record of who built Grand Central, and Tartaria does it again by claiming humans couldn't have built it at all. Walter Benjamin called this aestheticization of politics, and warned us about it in 1935. We didn't really listen. Guest plug: Mia Mulder makes excellent video essays at youtube.com/MiaMulder and is launching the Paul Lafargue Institute, a big-tent left-wing think tank named after the author of The Right to Be Lazy. 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.
S5 · E156
May 12 · 1 hr 11 min
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 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. 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.
S5 · E155
May 5 · 1 hr 34 min
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 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.
S5 · E154
April 28 · 2 hr 4 min
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 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.
S5 · E153
April 21 · 1 hr 22 min
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: 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.
S4 · E152
March 26 · 39 min
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 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.
S4 · E150
March 3 · 1 hr 15 min
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 Earth's magnetic field is so weak your fridge magnets are millions of times more powerful, quartz can't hold a charge any more than your aluminum can, and granite is about as conductive as a floor tile. We also untangle why a Pythagorean triangle at a site with 3,000 rocks is statistically inevitable, and why the real question isn't "what did Carnac do" but why Ancient Aliens can't accept that sometimes people just build things to feel something. Plus: the MRI machine that can never be turned off, the case for a really long cable to space, and a branded non-alcoholic IPA we desperately need someone to make for us. 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 Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S4 · E149
February 24 · 1 hr 47 min
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 sprawling stone garden in Homestead, Florida that features astronomical alignments, stone rocking chairs, and a nine-ton gate a child can push open. Ancient Aliens made seven claims about it in seven minutes. Only one of them is true. Along the way, we discover that the show's romantic "jilted lover" narrative was invented by a jeweler in the 1950s, that the "mysterious black box" was just the top of a tripod, that there's literal video footage of Ed using pulleys (which Ancient Aliens apparently didn't watch), and that Ed's own book contains some of the most unhinged things we've ever read on this podcast; and we've read Chariots of the Gods. We close by examining the "lone genius" myth, why romanticizing isolation is dangerous, and why community is, dare we say it, communing-ism. 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 Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S4 · E148
February 17 · 1 hr 27 min
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 "Armenian Stonehenge." The claim? The 80 holes drilled into these stones are precisely aligned with the constellation Cygnus as it appeared 12,000 years ago, suggesting either alien contact or a lost ice-age civilization that taught Bronze Age Armenians impossible astronomy. The reality involves a graveyard, some goats, and a guy with a Geocities website endorsed by Graham Hancock. Along the way, they unpack the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, talk about why a Nobel Prize–winning physicist promoting archaeology doesn't automatically make him right, visit the worst website on the modern internet not owned by Elon Musk, and grapple with the uncomfortable question of what happens when legitimate failures in institutional science create vacuums that grifters are all too happy to fill. Plus: Canadian parliamentary drama, Pontius Pilate's descendant works at a Christian nonprofit, and why ancient people drew so many penises on walls. Content Warning: Discussion of radicalization, political violence, January 6th insurrection, and the exploitation of vulnerable populations. 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 Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S4 · E147
February 10 · 1 hr 44 min
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 they did it through sophisticated engineering, organized labour systems, and generations of accumulated knowledge. We explain the actual construction techniques (leverage, controlled fracturing, the mit'a labour system), debunk claims of "impossible" precision, and discuss how ancient astronaut theories systematically erase indigenous achievement while sanitizing the very real human cost of empire-building. Also, we spend an unreasonable amount of time obsessed with pronunciation guides, we invent "Pull lotees" as an ancient workout routine, and we learn that Julian Michael is the hero we need but don't deserve. We prove beyond a shadow of a doubt in this one that, despite both being in our 30s, we are still 12. 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 Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S4 · E146
February 3 · 1 hr 28 min
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 mad), then spiral into a serious discussion about how recommendation algorithms, economic incentives, and media exploitation create radicalization pipelines that lead from "ancient aliens built pyramids" to January 6th insurrections. We explore how conspiracy content preys on vulnerable populations, why confrontational fact-checking backfires, and what you can actually do when someone you love falls down the rabbit hole. Content Warning: Discussion of radicalization, political violence, January 6th insurrection, and the exploitation of vulnerable populations. 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 Stanford See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S4 · E145
January 27 · 1 hr 36 min
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 (or at least a visit from some tall, white Atlanteans). In Part 1 of this deep dive, we look at the actual "dirt science." We find out that not only were there tools (thousands of them, actually), but that moving big rocks is mostly just a matter of having enough lube. We also discuss why Ice Age: The Meltdown might be a more historically accurate document than Graham Hancock’s entire bibliography, and why finding a fox carved on a rock doesn't automatically mean Noah parked his boat around the corner. 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.
S4 · E144
January 20 · 1 hr 16 min
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 is "objectively wrong" and why the reality, a 14-billion-year-old "Universe Placenta" from the dawn of time, is infinitely cooler than the sci-fi grift. We discuss the "thick disc" of the galaxy, why scientific pre-prints are a media hacker's best friend, and whether the X-Men actually have a space program. 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.
S4 · E143
January 13 · 54 min
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 "leopard spots," which, on Earth, are a chemically specific signature of biological life. We discuss the rigorous science behind the "COLD" scale (Confidence of Life Detection), why this rock might be the most important thing ever drilled, and the agonizing reality that it is currently stuck millions of kilometres away because the Mars Sample Return mission is wildly over budget. Then, to make sure you don't leave this episode feeling too hopeful, Tristan explains why finding independent microbial life on Mars might actually confirm that the "Great Filter" is ahead of us, and that we are all doomed. 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.
S4 · E142
January 6 · 1 hr 21 min
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 brain). Once we get that out of our system, we open the mailbag to face the music. We issue mea culpas for mixing up our Star Trek treaties (Khitomer vs. Algeron is serious business), failing to understand how mirrors and thermodynamics work, and forgetting that lighthouses are actually very pretty. We also revisit Lord of the Flies to discuss why William Golding might have just been sick of dealing with British private school boys, and clarify that Spider-Man (Supaidāman) gave us giant robots, but he didn't invent them. Finally, we tackle a listener email that sends us down a rabbit hole regarding the philosophical roots of fascism. Tristan explains how the transition from Enlightenment empiricism to Romanticism's "triumph of the will" explains everything from the Flat Earth movement to the modern political divide. 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.

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