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!

  1. 5d ago

    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.

    1h 39m

  2. May 19

    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.

    1h 44m

  3. May 12

    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.

    1h 12m

  4. May 5

    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.

    1h 34m

  5. Apr 28

    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.

    2h 5m

  6. Apr 21

    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.

    1h 23m

  7. Mar 26

    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.

    39 min

  8. Mar 3

    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.

    1h 16m
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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 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!

Information

  • Creator
    Tristan Johnson & Scott Niswander
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    158
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2021 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    It‘s Probably (not) Aliens!

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