It‘s Probably (not) Aliens!

Somewhere in the deep lore of alien abduction, past the gray guys who run the equipment, sits a manager. Six to nine feet of praying mantis, purple robe for rank, telepathic, standing at the head of the table while the drones do the wet work. It regards you the way a farmer regards livestock. This week, Tristan brings on Stanford (yes, the one we verbally abused all of last season, now a guest in good standing) to work out where this giant bug came from. The trail runs straight to David Jacobs, an actual history professor who ran more than 900 hypnotic regression sessions and emerged with a full taxonomy of alien species and their agendas. We get into why hypnosis is the same memory-fabricating machine that produced the satanic panic, how your brain rebuilds every memory from scratch and patches the gaps with whatever's lying around, and why sleep paralysis has been parking a terrifying presence at the foot of human beds for as long as we've had beds. Then there's the square-cube law, which is grim news for anyone hoping a seven-foot insect could stand up without collapsing into paste.
Then the part that matters. Peel the costume off the mantis, and you're left with a job description: detached managers who treat the people under them as a resource to optimize, workers who run the program with zero ethical input, surveillance nobody consented to, monitored reproduction, value squeezed out of people the system won't acknowledge as people. That's capitalism with extra legs. The mantis is a face bolted onto a faceless system, because our brains would sooner hunt one villain than sit with the idea that nobody's driving. Your anger is correct. The target is a bug. (Next week, we put Jacobs himself under the magnifying glass.)
Guest plug: Stanford co-hosts Captain's Log Supplemental, a Star Trek rewatch podcast grinding through the entire canon in chronological order, currently surfacing into Strange New Worlds after doing hard time in Enterprise. Go find it wherever you get podcasts.
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Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube
Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube
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Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max
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In 1980, a mysterious stranger named R.C. Christian spent the equivalent of $200,000 to erect 19-foot-tall, 119-ton granite monuments in rural Georgia. Ancient Aliens wants you to believe the "Georgia Guidestones" are an extraterrestrial warning to keep the human population under 500 million, passed down by the secret Rosicrucian order.
Tristan and guest Sarah Davis Baker are here to inform you that the Rosicrucian manifestos were basically 17th-century German shitposts, and the real author of the stones was actually a deeply racist, eugenics-loving physician from Iowa. We trace the absurd, irony-poisoned history of the monument, right up to the moment a completely different brand of right-wing conspiracy theorists blew it up with a bomb in 2022 because they thought it was demonic. It's a journey through the horrors of historical eugenics, elite longtermism, and the bizarre mirror world of American politics where fascists accidentally destroy other fascists' monuments.
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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
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Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com
Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max
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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.

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.

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.