Ancient Aliens, 17 years later. It's still terrible and sucks. (+history channel rant)
When i was a kid, i was obessed with dinosaur documentaries (mostly on a hardrive), watching stuff like Your Inner Fish, Prehistoric Predators by Nat Geo, The Walking with series, The World After Dinosaurs and eventually i watched the ancient aliens dinosaur episode (since it seems ancient aliens is popular in czechia, and on csfd (czech version of imdb) is listed as the 469th favourite series along with acutal documentaries like Walking with Dinosaurs and The Life of Mammals!), but now i grew up and realized that ancient aliens is shit. It is extremly stupid, flatout steals footage (No, no not you clash of the dinosaurs and jurassic fight club) from acutally good documentaries, creationist, pseudosciencefitic, and a load of nonsense, and yet it somehow still airs on history channel? The history channel also started to air nondocumentaries like the vikings show? And now it is flooded by either ancient aliens, its 2 clipshow spin offs, conspiracy (or pokemon seizure) filled celebrity hosted shows that are getting milked to death (especially the history's greatest mysteries and willaim shatner ones, the latter has 8 seasons and even has a space themed spin off), ai slop, or oak island (which i hope ends with the treasure being the friends they made along the way). They are even bringing back old goated history channel shows like Life After People and MonsterQuest and turning it into Killer Kings style ai slop, seriously don't watch the jersey devil promotional video on their youtube channel, it is so cringe, especially the thumbnail and ending, and complety kills the whole "Search for it but never find it" style of the original!
But back to Ancient Aliens, they claim absolute lies, and even quote mine acutal sciencetists like Luis Chiappe. Like claiming that Albert Einstein learned all his influenital knowledge from aliens, although it really is because of einstein's autisim. Or that aliens wiped out the dinosaurs, although the asteriod was created when two asteroids in the baptisna belt collided in the jurassic period. Or Or that the world will end in 2012, which is not true, because we are in 2026 now. Or Or Or that octopus are acutally aliens, even though are they fossil evidence of prehistoric octopus ancestors named Pohlsepia and Palaeoctopus. Or Or Or Or that dinosaurs lived with humans, but the last non-avian dinosaurs died out in the paleocene as there are alamosaur and hadrosaur fossils dated to after the asteriod impact.
It would be intersting if you in the comments left a list (preferby a google drive) of geninuly good and historical/archaeological, non conspiracy, non alien version/counterpart (or alternative, but not any youtube original video like PBS digital studios, Walking with.. or streaming programs from netflix, apple tv+, etc. since that's too easy) documentary of every episode of ancient aliens ngl, because everytime i try to watch ancient aliens i feel i want something more historical and feel wrong for doing that.