Do Aliens Exist? Or, A Friday Afternoon Ritual
Rebecca Sperry
There’s something to be said for consistent routines, especially with all of the uncertainties surrounding the future. Some people enjoy a glass of wine (or a few beers) after work, while others like to go for a run to burn off steam. Over the last (almost) two years, there has been very little constancy about my life. Between leaving my nine-year career in education, going back to grad school, and getting a cancer diagnosis, the most stable thing in my life has been its instability. There has been one consistent, let’s call it “ritual” in my house, however.
Every Friday night, after a long work week, with whatever food we can scrounge up, (read: take-out because let’s be honest, there’s no cooking going on over here) my husband and I plop ourselves down in front of the television and watch one of the most unrealistic and downright laughable shows: Ancient Aliens. That’s right! There is, in fact a show, on the History Channel, of all places, about alien existence.
According to the very reliable wikipedia page dedicated to this show (which is in its seventeenth season), the premise is to “explore the ancient astronauts hypothesis, past human-extraterrestrial contact, UFOs, government conspiracies, etc.” The colorful guests, along with the far-reaching topics such as “Aliens of the Old West” and “Aliens and Bigfoot” makes this show a must-watch for anyone who either 1) has too much free time on their hands or 2) wants to know if the greys really do exist (my husband and I clearly fall in the former category).
Now to be honest, when I say that we watch this show every Friday night, what I mean is, my husband watches it while I busy myself with either mindless social media scrolling or typing on my computer. But every now and then, while I’m trying to read one of the hundreds of pages assigned weekly in my History of Composition class, a sound clip or line from the show will pull me away from my deep dive into English A and Harvard’s influence on our present-day Freshmen English classes. “Do aliens exist? Are we the offspring of our alien ancestors? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes.” The absurdity of the few lines that I catch will often make me literally laugh out loud and respond to the television, “DO the ancient astronauts say yes though?”
Not only is the content far-fetched and amusing af, the guest speakers, who are almost always the same, are characters in and of themselves. The two most impressive, and downright entertaining of the guests, though, are Giorgio Tsoukalos and my personal favorite David Childress. Tsoukalos rocks black, spiky hair, entirely too long to be spiked and is now a host of Ancient Aliens along with being a consistent guest speaker. What makes him so amusing is, hands down, his inability to comprehend that he has used entirely too much self tanner and is much closer to orange than he is bronze.
As much as I love trying to understand why he doesn’t stop using so much self tanner, Tsoukalos is not what keeps me coming back for more aliens week after week; that award goes to the man, the myth, the legend, David Childress. Childress is in a class all his own. Not only are his theories extremely far-fetched in terms of the impact aliens had on places like the lost city of Atlantis, his accent and speech patterns are absolutely fascinating to me. I can’t say that I do a good impression of Childress, but I can say that I love quoting him on a pretty regular basis.
Although I rarely follow the plot of the show and question my husband about whether or not he is actually watching it, I have begun to look forward to the Friday evening entertainment provided by David Childress and Giorgio Tsoukalos while I decompress from the onslaught of graduate school reading requirements. I may not ever sit down with a bowl of popcorn and flick on Ancient Aliens on my own, (I rarely watch TV as it is) but there’s something to be said for taking an hour a week to explore the possibility that aliens do exist. Do I believe in aliens? No, but if I ever had the opportunity to meet David Childress in person you can bet your Friday evening takeout that I would feign believing in extraterrestrial lifeforms. What I want to know is, do you believe in aliens?
