Last year, Netflix released a series called Ancient Apocalypse, hosted by Graham Hancock, and they really shouldn’t have. The show, which copies the Ancient Aliens format popularised by The History Channel, is another unfortunate example of the mainstreaming of conspiracism by content platforms desperate to pull in audiences.
Some may dismiss content like this as harmless filler, while others may see it as valuable in documenting alternative positions on controversial issues, but I believe it’s inappropriate for Netflix to allow Hancock to present his conspiracy-riddled theories with zero pushback. This sort of conspiracy content, where folks like Hancock hide their power level, increases the likelihood of stochastic conspiracism, especially when it’s promoted by nominally non-conspiratorial platforms like Netflix. By obscuring all the red flags around Hancock’s work, Ancient Apocalypse provides an on-ramp that is likely to start or accelerate a conspiracism spiral for some number of people.
Most people are likely to be unfamiliar with Hancock’s work. I certainly was, despite having spent a good bit of time in Ancient Aliens spaces. Hancock is certainly less famous than Von Daniken’s Chariot of the Gods, David Icke’s (((reptilians))), or Giorgio Tsoukalos’ hair, but that doesn’t make him less harmful.
Hancock is a British conspiracy theorist who self-identifies as a journalist and believes authorities are suppressing evidence of a highly advanced prehistoric civilisation. Hancock has written over 20 books on his ‘advanced ancients’ hypothesis, and has appeared on over a dozen episodes Ancient Aliens to promote the theory.
In his most influential work, Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization, Hancock argues that a technologically-advanced prehistoric civilisation was destroyed by a catastrophic meteor strike, and that the survivors travelled the world spreading stories and techniques to try to help humans avoid the same fate. Hancock claims that the existence of this Ur civilisation explains commonalities between seemingly disconnected cultures, such as the existence of pyramids and other superstructures around the world. His work inspired several movies, including the big budget disaster film 2012 about a prophesied apocalypse, and the prehistoric action movie 10,000 BC.
Hancock is often portrayed as a less extreme or harmful conspiracy theorist than folks like David Icke, but this reputation is incongruous with his actual body of work. For example, on Hancock’s wiki there’s no mention of his many appearances on Ancient Aliens, nor are Aliens ever mentioned on Ancient Apocalypse. You might think that’s because Hancock is skeptical of Alien involvement with ancient humans, especially when you add in misleading quotes found in Hancock’s work, such as:
My own view is that all of the anomalies of history and prehistory pointed to by advocates of the ancient astronaut hypothesis are far better and more elegantly explained as emanating from a lost, advanced HUMAN civilization of prehistoric antiquity than from high-tech alien visitors from another planet.
The reason this is so misleading is that Hancock actually does believe in aliens, he just thinks they’re not from outer space. In episode three of Ancient Aliens (01:10:00), in a section of the show arguing that our DNA was shaped by aliens, Hancock claims that DNA couldn’t have come together on Earth by chance. He argues that it’s more plausible that aliens would leave coded messages in our DNA than leave messages on physical monuments. Hancock’s claims are immediately supported by Von Däniken himself. I’ve discussed previously how alien gene editing is a staple of Hotep conspiracism, and often goes hand in hand with the history of racist theorising about human origins and eugenics.
Moreover, in the final moments of season one of Ancient Aliens, Hancock outright says he believes humans have made contact with aliens:
I believe through the experiences that shamans have been documenting and reporting for tens of thousands of years that we are in contact with entities and beings that are not of this earth. Precisely what those entities and beings are remains to be established.
Hancock is a vocal advocate for legalising the use of psychedelics, promoting the idea on multiple episodes of the Joe Rogan Podcast as well as in a TEDx talk that was unpublished from YouTube but is still available on the TEDx website. Hancock believes psychedelics allow for communication with extraterrestrial entities. Hancock even claims that the entities have shown him firsthand the truth of his advanced ancients hypothesis.
That’s not even his most extreme or harmful view. Hancock’s books often aim to tie his advanced ancients theory to anything that’s popular in current culture, usually while adding nothing novel to the existing conspiracism beyond another safe-looking entry point. While it’s unsurprising that he uses his advanced ancients theory to explain the existence of pyramids, or the prevalence of flood myths and stories like Atlantis, he also speculates that his advanced ancients may have built monuments on Mars and that NASA covered up the evidence.
Most would consider that a particularly outlandish claim, but critics highlight that Hancock’s theories about Mars appear to mostly repackage claims from The Monuments of Mars, by Richard Hoagland, and that Hancock’s book was written primarily to create a tie in between his advanced ancients and the Mars mission that was capturing popular attention at the time. For some reason, the Netflix series doesn’t include an episode where Hancock lays out his Martian monuments theory.
Things go from outlandish to disturbing when you get to Hancock’s book The Master Game: Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World, coauthored by Robert Bauval and originally released under the name Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith. Hancock’s website claims the book reveals a “secret religion that has shaped the world”, and if you’re a regular reader you know exactly where this is going.
However, I need to be careful, because The Master Game really puts the (((J))) in JAQing Off. As David Barrett puts it in his review of the book, the incoherent mess of an argument culminates in the authors promoting “the old Jewish-Masonic plot so beloved by ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorists”. The authors might object that they are only talking about Zionist connections to the Freemasons, not all Jews, this seems no different than Icke’s response to accusations of antisemitism, nor to Cooper’s absurd reprinting of the Protocols of Zion with the caveat that it’s not really about Jews.
It’s difficult to convey how the disjointed nature of the writing might provide for endless deniability without quoting at length, but consider these passages from the final page of the book:
Nonetheless, we can hardly avoid posing the obvious question: is it possible that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations took the ‘Masonic experiment’ all the way and actually ‘rebuilt’ the Jewish Solomonic state in Palestine? As farfetched and incredible as it seems, there is something else in the background that justifies such an outrageous question.
These dangerous questions and dark pronouncements culminate in the concluding line of the book’s main text:
As has several times been the case during our years of research for this book, we felt the ghostly lifting of a veil brush against our faces. Yet this time the revelation of what lay behind the veil was so sinister, so worrying and so misunderstood by so many that at first we thought it best to let it be, to ignore it, to delete it from our thoughts let we be branded as “conspiracy theorists” only after much consideration have we reached the conclusion that we must bring this strange and frightening issue to attention.
This strikes me as an egregious example of cheap talk skepticism. The authors seem to lend credence to dangerous conspiracism where the harm is unlikely to fall on them directly.
Ultimately, Hancock’s work is about repackaging existing pseudoscientific conspiracy theories for mainstream audiences, which is why it’s so unethical for Netflix to promote him as legitimate. What ties Hancock’s work together is his overarching narrative that he is simply a disinterested journalist asking important questions, and that he’s constantly being prevented from getting answers by academics and organisations like NASA. This theme is front and centre from the start of Ancient Apocalypses, and it’s presented with zero pushback. Hancock claims that archaeologists refuse to engage with his theories, despite ample debunking of his work, and while he never explicitly states the motivations behind the cover up, he makes clear that a nefarious conspiracy of some sort is the only plausible explanation.
It isn’t just Netflix and Hancock claiming he’s speaking truth to shadowy powers. Joe Rogan, patron saint of conspiracism, shows up in person to stand in a field with Hancock and nod along to the theory and wonder why professional archaeology won’t debate alternative narratives. Rogan, who shares Hancock’s love of both conspiracism and psychedelics, has played a significant role in promoting Hancock’s work, inviting him onto his hugely-popular podcast many times, so it’s not totally surprising that he shows up in the special to lend his influence. Again and again, it cannot be overstated the significance of the Joe Rogan podcast as a nexus for conspiracism.
What makes the Netflix special worse than just for-profit conspiracism mongering is something like stochastic conspiracism. Stochastic conspiracism, like it’s close relation stochastic terrorism, is a situation where predictable harm occurs because of speech, but we’re unable to limit the speech or impose consequences because of the probabilistic nature of the harms it causes. Meaning, we can’t know how many people or which people in particular will first encounter Hancock’s work through Ancient Apocalypse and end up reading The Master Game, but it’s likely the number is larger than zero. Perhaps they come to the show from Rogans podcast, or they’re familiar with Rogan and they see Rogan constantly nodding along to Hancock’s claims, and they take away social reinforcement that Hancock’s claims are reasonable. So, when they get to his theory about the Masonic-Zionist secret cult that caused 9/11, they’re more likely to take it seriously. For folks not caught up in the spiral, that might sound absurd, but from within the worldview it can all seem quite reasonable.
Despite the well documented criticism of Ancient Aliens for its promotion of racist conspiracism, most people likely perceive it as an absurd but harmless side show, set against a backdrop of endless Hitler documentaries. It even feels like some of the people involved were in on joke:
Not so with Ancient Apocalypse; it’s played straight by all involved. Maybe that explains why it’s garnered less attention than Ancient Aliens, which is now in its 19th season, but it also means viewers are more at risk of taking it seriously enough to take the next step down the spiral. That’s why it’s so important that companies like Netflix not follow the History Channel’s model of commodifying conspiracism and pseudoscience for mainstream audiences, even if they play it off as harmless entertainment.
If you’re a content producer, you have a moral obligation to reject any version of the Ancient ______ format. Similarly, if you’re a content consumer, you should spend your precious attention on something more valuable than a copy of a copy of Chariots of the Gods.
