#BADLANDS GUARDIAN NATIVE AMERICAN TV#

The third segment visits Canada (well, through photos and stock footage) to view First Nations petroglyphs about a hundred miles from the Guardian.

They try to make this out to be a sign of specialness or superiority, but surely even they realize that the enormous difference suggests that they are simply seeing things. The show seems to struggle with the idea that the Badlands Guardian looks like the head of a stereotypical First Nations person (the show says “Native American,” but the formation is in Canada) in profile in what looks to be a realist nineteenth century art style, which is vastly different from the style of any other geoglyph. The show repeats the lie that a geoglyph of a fisherman in Peru is really a space alien, a claim debunked many years ago. If the aliens can see a small geoglyph from that distance, they could see cities and other signs of human habitation, so this argument seems weak. The discussion of global geoglyphs ranges from the mundane to the nonsensical, and most of the show’s usual talking heads, including Nick Pope and Hugh Newman, try to claim that what they call geoglyphs (some of which are actually earthworks) were intended to communicate with space aliens who were looking at Earth from other galaxies. This leads to yet another discussion of the Nazca Lines, a subject that has appeared on Ancient Aliens with depressing regularity since the show debuted a decade ago. The second segment tries to make an argument by analogy, asking viewers to assume that the existence of geoglyphs elsewhere on Earth proves that the Guardian is an artificial geoglyph. I can’t help but think that’s because the Guardian’s Wikipedia page refers to apophenia.

The show had an expert use computer simulations to try to argue that the formation was intentionally created, and it’s interesting that the show refers to skeptical views of the Guardian as an optical illusion with the word “apophenia” (seeing patterns that don’t exist) instead of “pareidolia” (seeing familiar patterns in vague, abstract, or natural patterns). The show presents these mutually exclusive ideas as though they were harmonious. Henry says that humans could not have made a geoglyph on their own and needed aliens to do it for them, while Tsoukalos differs and says that First Nations people in Alberta carved it themselves because they were trying to signal space aliens.

William Henry and Giorgio Tsoukalos claim that only space aliens could provide the answer. For no good reason, they use part of the time to give us a history of the carving of Mount Rushmore, which is a mountain carved from stone, while the Badlands Guardian is made from soil and clay.

#BADLANDS GUARDIAN NATIVE AMERICAN TV#

It’s not wholly inappropriate, though, since Serling was an ancient astronaut believer who hosted In Search of Ancient Astronauts, the ancestral TV special that eventually gave rise to Ancient Aliens, both being adaptations of Chariots of the Gods.Īnyway, the first segment tries to make the case that the Badlands Guardian is an intentional carving and not a natural formation, and David Childress shows up to tell us that archaeologists are “often mistaken” about what is artificial and what is natural. I still hate the new opening sequence, especially its invocation of the Twilight Zone by using “There is a door…” and imagery recalling Rod Serling’s title sequence.

Badlands guardian native american