Culture Ancient Apocalypse is the most dangerous show on Netflix - Why has this been allowed?

Ancient Apocalypse is the most dangerous show on Netflix

A show with a truly preposterous theory is one of the streaming giant’s biggest hits – and it seems to exist solely for conspiracy theorists. Why has this been allowed?

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Ancient Apocalypse is the most dangerous show on Netflix | Television…

archived 23 Nov 2022 12:57:31 UTC

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A show with a truly preposterous theory is one of the streaming giant’s biggest hits – and it seems to exist solely for conspiracy theorists. Why has this been allowed?

Stuart Heritage

At the time of writing, Ancient Apocalypse has been comfortably sitting in Netflix’s Top 10 list for several days. This presents something of a mystery, because the show closely resembles the sort of half-baked filler documentary that one of the lesser Discovery channels would slap up at 3am between shows about plane crashes and fascist architecture. Ancient Apocalypse obviously has an audience, but who on Earth is it?

Fortunately, you don’t have to watch for long to find out. In quick succession, during the pre-show sizzle reel, we are treated to clips of the show’s host Graham Hancock being interviewed by Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. Finally, we have an answer: Ancient Apocalypse must be a TV programme made exclusively for people who like to shout at you on Twitter.

Of course it is. These people are Hancock’s bread and butter; the “free thinkers” who, through some bizarre quirk of nature, are often more perennially outraged than anyone else on Earth. They’re drawn to Ancient Apocalypse, thanks in part to Hancock’s loud and persistent claims that his life’s work is being suppressed by Big Archaeology.

The thrust of Ancient Apocalypse is as follows: Hancock believes that an advanced ice-age civilisation – responsible for teaching humanity concepts such as maths, architecture and agriculture – was wiped out in a giant flood brought about by multiple comet strikes about 12,000 years ago. There are signs everywhere you look, he says. To prove this, he spends an entire television series looking everywhere.

Hancock travels to Malta, to Mexico, to Indonesia, and to the US, purely so he can look at remnants of old structures and insist that they prove his theory. Which isn’t to say that is all he does, of course, because a great deal of every episode is spent railing at the buttoned-up archeological institutions that fail to listen to him (because, according to them, the whole theory doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever).

The result – sadly, given it’s about an intelligent life form being exploded off the planet in a hail of cometfire – is preposterously boring. Hancock goes to a place and says: “They want you to think it’s this, but actually it’s that,” over and over again. I once got trapped at a party with a Flat Earther. It was a very similar experience to watching this.

Which isn’t to say we should dismiss Hancock’s theory out of hand, of course. Because if he’s right, and the history of humanity really is just the first five minutes of Prometheus, it would change everything we know about ourselves. But we certainly shouldn’t treat his hodgepodge of mysteries and coincidences as fact.

That’s the danger of a show like this. It whispers to the conspiracy theorist in all of us. And Hancock is such a compelling host that he’s bound to create a few more in his wake. Believing that ultra-intelligent creatures helped to build the pyramids is one thing, but where does it end? Believing that election fraud is real? Believing 9/11 was an inside job? Worse? If you were feeling particularly mean-spirited, you could suggest that Netflix knows this, and has gone out of its way to court the conspiracy theorists.

But, hey, not all conspiracy theories are bad. If you don’t like Hancock’s story about the super-intelligent advanced civilisation being wiped off the face of the planet, here’s another that might explain how Netflix gave the greenlight to Ancient Apocalypse: the platform’s senior manager of unscripted originals happens to be Hancock’s son. Honestly, what are the chances?

 

[Ser Prize]

But why is it dangerous? I haven’t seen it - If it’s ancient aliens tier it’s just funny. How could such a show be the most dangerous thing in the media?
I don’t know much about Hancock but the idea of a cometary impact around 12k years ago has plenty of evidence. We know which comet and we can see where bits of it landed. That’s hardly ancient aliens tier stuff, it’s more cautious but increasing evidence for an event. Why dangerous?

It challenges established narratives that they have in place. These people NEED absolute control.

I posted this earlier, it should explain the very basics: https://youtu.be/3qXuAzzVOTQ

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

But why is it dangerous? I haven’t seen it - If it’s ancient aliens tier it’s just funny. How could such a show be the most dangerous thing in the media?
I don’t know much about Hancock but the idea of a cometary impact around 12k years ago has plenty of evidence. We know which comet and we can see where bits of it landed. That’s hardly ancient aliens tier stuff, it’s more cautious but increasing evidence for an event. Why dangerous?

If you watch the ancient aliens picture show, you will become an anti-vaxxxing, election denying, Trump/West 2024 voting Pizzagator:

That’s the danger of a show like this. It whispers to the conspiracy theorist in all of us. And Hancock is such a compelling host that he’s bound to create a few more in his wake. Believing that ultra-intelligent creatures helped to build the pyramids is one thing, but where does it end? Believing that election fraud is real? Believing 9/11 was an inside job? Worse? If you were feeling particularly mean-spirited, you could suggest that Netflix knows this, and has gone out of its way to court the conspiracy theorists.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

But why is it dangerous?

Because Graham Hancock is soooooo close to concluding that all of the anomalies he has found fit in perfectly with Young Earth, Creationist theories. If Graham could overcome his atheistic prejudices and talk to Ken Ham et al, at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, they would be able to show him the link between everything he sees, and the aftermath of the Flood.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

Why do j*urnalists hate conspiracies so damn much? I'm gonna watch it as soon as I find another Netflix account to mooch off

Because they're part of one

 

[AN/ALR56]

We've had large brains for hundreds if not a couple million of years.

And the fucking sea level was far, far lower, it makes fucking sense that civilization would have a catastrophe and the survivors would find refuge and become the learned elite of whatever group they had found.

It happened in the bronze age, it happened again when roman england was abandoned, it happened when the Byzantines were destroyed by the ottomans, it happened in south America with the incan/Aztec survivors living in hidden cities until found decades later and killed off.
Why not in the Ice age?
I've watched this documentary, it's literally Graham interviewing local archeologists who all claim based on evidence that the sites they found are man made and older and he makes connections with all those places over the world having a flood myth.

 

[teriyakiburns]

I don’t know much about Hancock but the idea of a cometary impact around 12k years ago has plenty of evidence. We know which comet and we can see where bits of it landed. That’s hardly ancient aliens tier stuff, it’s more cautious but increasing evidence for an event. Why dangerous?

It's only dangerous to the intellectual hegemony that has dominated the sciences for the last sixty or so years. Hancock is a loon and a crackpot, but it seems that loons and crackpots are the only people talking about anything remotely controversial these days, as anything that even slightly challenges the orthodoxy is immediately dismissed as crackpottery and lunacy.

The vaccine kerfuffle alone showed that. Orthodoxy repeated the mantra of safe and effective no matter what evidence was presented, whilst anyone presenting that evidence was pilloried out of the scientific community, and possibly out of any form of viable employment.

Another example is the thunderbolts project, a group which espouses a theory called the electric universe, or the idea that electricity is the primary force shaping the universe and that plasma is the primary form of matter. As theory, it's more predictive than the standard model and its epicycles of dark matter and dark energy (it successfully predicted that both poles of Jupiter and Saturn would be hot, well before these were observed, just to pick an example). Unfortunately, the only people talking about this theory also believe things like: humans originated in australia after being deposited there by a giant column of water from one of jupiter's moons, or Mars was our original homeworld and we were sent here after the hollow moon attacked and destroyed the northern hemisphere. Crackpots. But they're the only ones talking about the EU theory, because everyone else dogmatically rejects anything that runs counter to The Science™.

As a theory, it may well fail under closer examination, but it never even gets the opportunity.

Of course, when I say dangerous to the hegemony, what I really mean is that these ideas are dangerous to their funding. Billions are spent on gigantic instruments that have been designed to search for something that is, by its described nature, unmeasurable and imperceptible, keeping the "scientists" who operate and administrate them in comfortable employment for their entire lives. There are entire industries dedicated to the continued support and pursuit of grants and funds, for anything that sustains the current paradigm. Real science only happens at the fringes, where it can be safely ignored by the establishment.

 

[Otterly]

It's only dangerous to the intellectual hegemony that has dominated the sciences for the last sixty or so years. Hancock is a loon and a crackpot, but it seems that loons and crackpots are the only people talking about anything remotely controversial these days, as anything that even slightly challenges the orthodoxy is immediately dismissed as crackpottery and lunacy.

The vaccine kerfuffle alone showed that. Orthodoxy repeated the mantra of safe and effective no matter what evidence was presented, whilst anyone presenting that evidence was pilloried out of the scientific community, and possibly out of any form of viable employment.

Another example is the thunderbolts project, a group which espouses a theory called the electric universe, or the idea that electricity is the primary force shaping the universe and that plasma is the primary form of matter. As theory, it's more predictive than the standard model and its epicycles of dark matter and dark energy (it successfully predicted that both poles of Jupiter and Saturn would be hot, well before these were observed, just to pick an example). Unfortunately, the only people talking about this theory also believe things like: humans originated in australia after being deposited there by a giant column of water from one of jupiter's moons, or Mars was our original homeworld and we were sent here after the hollow moon attacked and destroyed the northern hemisphere. Crackpots. But they're the only ones talking about the EU theory, because everyone else dogmatically rejects anything that runs counter to The Science™.

As a theory, it may well fail under closer examination, but it never even gets the opportunity.

Of course, when I say dangerous to the hegemony, what I really mean is that these ideas are dangerous to their funding. Billions are spent on gigantic instruments that have been designed to search for something that is, by its described nature, unmeasurable and imperceptible, keeping the "scientists" who operate and administrate them in comfortable employment for their entire lives. There are entire industries dedicated to the continued support and pursuit of grants and funds, for anything that sustains the current paradigm. Real science only happens at the fringes, where it can be safely ignored by the establishment.

The funny thing is that for the last ten years you’d be pilloried in my industry (and I have been) for saying ‘actually I don’t think we really know how SSRIs work and I don’t think chemical imbalance theory is complete’ or ‘hey all these Alzheimer’s trials keep failing maybe our model is wrong?’
And then magically, over the course of a few weeks, the orthodoxy changes.

 

[gaystoner]

"The people that shout at you on Twitter"

So the transgenders?

 

[Beautiful Border]

I think Graham Hancock is completely full of shit but I really don't see what the harm in giving his theories a platform could be. Articles like this (along with the way he was banned from the Serpent Mound site during the filming of the documentary) only add credibility to his claims of persecution. If you want to disprove the idea he's being suppressed, simply let him speak and let people judge his ideas on their own merits.

I don't think his theory about a lost civilisation before the Younger Dryas is correct and would even go as far as to say he's a bit of a charlatan - his shenanigans with the Piri Reis map in episode four were particularly egregious - but he is absolutely correct when he says there are accepted narratives in academia it is risky to publicly go against, and the author of this article doesn't like that being pointed out.

 

[derpherp2]

The funny thing is that for the last ten years you’d be pilloried in my industry (and I have been) for saying ‘actually I don’t think we really know how SSRIs work and I don’t think chemical imbalance theory is complete’ or ‘hey all these Alzheimer’s trials keep failing maybe our model is wrong?’
And then magically, over the course of a few weeks, the orthodoxy changes.

I love the part where while the orthodoxy changes, people out of the field still assume said theories are still a thing and will then go on about how you farted using only your left buttcheek once or some other esoteric thing you did months ago so you're wrong. Also black scienceman says you're wrong so you're wrong.

While also bitching about flat-earthers and religious nuts or branch covidians or orcs, or whichever shit it is right now.
Academia really is just a glorified frat club/pyramid scheme. I want it to stop, fuck me.

 

[Hollywood Hitler]

The people that shout at you on Twitter

I'M NOT YELLING, YOU'RE THE ONE WHO'S YELLING!!!!!!!!!!

 

[6 Years Ago]

Why has this been allowed?

He gives himself away here... his entire point is that material that questions HIS FAITH should not be allowed.

Also, who does he think is supposed to allow it? To whom does he grant authority to disallow the things we should see and hear?

 

[The Ugly One]

All this article really accomplishes is solidifying my belief that journalists should be herded into the sea.

 

[Glossy Paper]

So when is a mysteriously preserved message telling us the survivors to rejoin the greats in the stars going to appear, and reignite space-craze for the current generation?
That would fit pretty well in the opening of some old scifi story.

 

[Sithis]

Once again I arrive at the conclusion that this is largely the fault of Zero Tolerance policies in schools. Had these soy based fags been properly bullied and beaten as kids they would have learned they are not the center of the universe and calling for some other authority figure to "sweep it up, janny!" only makes things worse for you.

 

[teriyakiburns]

All this article really accomplishes is solidifying my belief that journalists should be herded into the sea.

There's enough toxic waste in there already. We should shoot them into the sun.

 

[Niggs Monaghan]

But why is it dangerous? I haven’t seen it - If it’s ancient aliens tier it’s just funny. How could such a show be the most dangerous thing in the media?
I don’t know much about Hancock but the idea of a cometary impact around 12k years ago has plenty of evidence. We know which comet and we can see where bits of it landed. That’s hardly ancient aliens tier stuff, it’s more cautious but increasing evidence for an event. Why dangerous?

It's dangerous because whenever he goes to sites or tries to contact archaeologists about it, he gets stonewalled and ostracized for even suggesting the Current Theory might be altogether wrong. It's outing the archaeological community as being unable to update their ideas or admit they were wrong about something so huge.
There is a bit of the fantastic to it, as he leans into ancient myth to try and see if there's any evidence for what ancient societies have written and depicted (about a great cataclysm). Iirc he does also mention the Tartaria/mud flood idea, so that also might be pissing them off.

 

[Ammyterasu]

I couldn't care less about that show but I will defend it on principle. Fuck journos.
Reminds me of that one flat Earth video game on Steam and all the vidya journos shitting a brick over it. No fun allowed jpeg.

 

[draggs]

It's stupid

There are stupid people who think superficial and coincidental similarities between some aspects of ancient Irish, Phoenician, Mesoamerican, etc., architecture shows they had a common societal ancestor

How is that dangerous?

 

[Father Karras]

Jesus christ, is this guy trying to say there has never been a cheated election? I know the answer but come on