The Producers of Ancient Aliens - 15 Nov

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER/CREATOR, ANCIENT ALIENS

C hariots of the Gods! You mean to tell me you have never heard of Chariots of the Gods?

I was speaking with my producer, Nikki Boella, and her team. They were about to start production on a documentary special for the History Channel entitled Indiana Jones and the Ultimate Quest. It was commissioned by Lucasfilm as a tie-in to their first Indiana Jones film in more than three decades, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. My company, Prometheus Entertainment, would be producing it, and we wanted it to be something more than just a making-of movie special.

Didnt anyone here see the Sun Classic Pictures documentary? The one that came out in the 1970s? The one with all of those rhetorical questions?

Still nothing.

I was facing a room with wide-eyed stares and blank expressions. A sea of empty vessels waiting to be filled. I had to accept the fact that my producer and her staff were all under the age of fortyand not one of them had ever heard of Erich von Dniken and his groundbreaking book from 1968, Chariots of the Gods.

Now, I admit thateven by this timeI had not read the book. I had only seen the documentary back when I was in high school. Nevertheless, it made a huge impact on me.

For the Indiana Jones project, the folks at Lucasfilm wanted us to do a two-hour special, but they did not want to share with us any details about their upcoming film. Everything about their project was top secret. All they would share with us was the trailer and the movie poster. That was it.

What could this new movie be about? I wondered. The first one was about the Ark of the Covenant. The second was about the sacred Sankara Stones of India. The third was about the Holy Grail. All three previous films had had a religious theme. All three films were about holy worship and humankinds devotion to God.

Corrigan, Troy. Wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Film_Poster_for_Chariots_of_the_Gods.jpg

But what about this fourth film?

I looked carefully at the poster and noticed something strange about the crystal skull depicted. It was elongated!

Thats it! Aliens! The new Indiana Jones film is going to be about aliens! Just like Chariots of the Gods.

This revelationlater justified when I actually saw the finished filmturned out to be a godsend. It also offered the perfect hook into how my company could approach a feature-length documentary about the worlds favorite fictional archaeologist. Why does man dig?

As far as I was concerned, the answer was simple: We dig because we are looking to find out where we come from. We are looking for Daddy. We are looking for proof of God.

That is, indeed, the ultimate quest.

Interestingly, our Indiana Jones documentaryand its connections to Chariots of the Godswould also open the door into another exciting area: ancient astronaut theory.

Believing that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull would be borrowing much from Erich von Dniken, I asked Nikki to find us the new Erich von Dniken. There must be someone, I reasoned, who is carrying his mantle into the twenty-first century.

Enter Giorgio Tsoukalos, a young man with a deep tan, an eager grin, and a mane of thick, restless hair.

After he gave his interview for our documentary, I asked to meet with him. You really believe in all this aliens stuff? I asked. I do not believe, he said to me, using a combination of precise diction flavored with a vaguely traceable Euro-Swiss accent, I know.

The documentary special premiered on May 18, 2008. It was well received, and everyone associated with it was proud to have been part of it.

Several weeks later, I had an opportunity to have lunch with an executive from History. It was then I confided that my inspiration for the Indiana Jones special was Erich von Dniken and Chariots of the Gods.

I love Chariots of the Gods! my client enthused. Id love to do a new Chariots of the Gods for television!

Armed with this bit of good news, I dashed back to my office and called Giorgio.

Is Erich von Dniken still alive? I asked, gingerly.

Absolutely! replied the hirsute pop-icon-to-be. He lives in Switzerland and I will be happy to arrange a phone call for you.

The rest, as they say, is History (Channel).

My phone conversation with Erich convinced me that a new approach to Chariots of the Gods was not only long overdue, it was imperative that it be done. Much work and research had been done in the field of ancient astronaut theory in the forty years since Erichs book had first been published, and since that time, humankind had landed on the moonand even sent robots to Mars!

We would call our documentary Ancient Aliens. We also made a deliberate decision to not populate the program with the usual phalanx of naysayers, skeptics, and debunkers. Not because we didnt want balance, mind you. It was simply because we wanted our show to be open-minded.

For us, Ancient Aliens wasand remainsa show about questions and possibilities. It is about a theory. The big What if?

We knew from the start that we couldnt prove ancient astronaut theory any more than we could prove the resurrection of Jesus. It was an interpretation based on evidence.

The show premiered on March 8, 2009, and quickly became a hit.

One two-hour documentary special led to five moreand each of those was based on five rhetorical questions: Who were they? (The Visitors.) Why did they come? (The Mission.) What did they leave behind? (The Evidence.) Where did they go? (Closer Encounters.) Will they return? (The Return.)

At this point, I thought we were finished. Six two-hour television documentaries about ancient astronaut theory. Even Sun Classic Pictures didnt accomplish that!

My client at History called again. We need another ten hours.

After that there was another ten. And another. And another.

As of this writing, we are well past one hundred programs, and there is no end in sight.

Ancient Aliens wasand remainsa show about questions and possibilities. It is about a theory. The big What if?

Have I become a believer? Lets just say I remain open-minded, just as I hope our audiences are. I think of myself as the narrator of the show. I deal only in factsbut Im open to asking questions: Could it be? What if? How can we be sure? In this way our series remains honest. We let the ancient astronaut theorists have their day in court. We let them give answers to the questions we pose. Sometimes the answers are plausible. Sometimes theyre outrageous. All of them are honestly held and thoughtfully given.

Shortly after the series premiered, I came across an article written by a history professor. In it, he accused our series of offering pseudo science and pseudo history and of having, what he termed, a post-colonial attitude. That is to say, he objected to our questioning of conventional history and suggesting that third-world peoples in ancient times could not have produced architectural wonders without the help of some kind of superior, outside guidance.