Ancient Origins
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Episodes/Season 18/Alien Air Force
S18 · E07February 25, 2022transcript available

Alien Air Force

This episode draws a direct line between recently declassified U.S. Navy footage of unidentified aerial phenomena and ancient accounts of mysterious flying objects. The central case comes from July 2019, when nine warships from Carrier Strike Group 9 off San Clemente Island were "swarmed" by unknown objects that the USS Russell captured on night vision—pyramid-shaped craft hovering 700 feet above the ship with no visible wings, exhaust, or control surfaces. Ancient astronaut theorists, noting that the Egyptian Museum houses pyramid-shaped artifacts and that ancient texts describe flying vehicles, suggest these modern Navy encounters may involve the same extraterrestrial visitors who have allegedly appeared throughout human history, from Sumerian accounts of Oannes emerging from the sea in a "winged disc" to 3,000-year-old descriptions of advanced aircraft.

Mainstream explanations for the Navy footage range from optical effects in night vision equipment to drones or other conventional aircraft misidentified under low-visibility conditions—the Pentagon has yet to confirm the objects as extraterrestrial. Ancient "flying" descriptions, archaeologists note, are typically mythological or symbolic rather than literal eyewitness accounts of technology. Still, the episode offers genuine intrigue: the Navy itself released this footage and acknowledges it captured *something* that penetrated military airspace, and the pattern-matching between modern sightings and ancient imagery raises questions about how humans across millennia have visualized the unknown in their skies.

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