I'm Not Saying It Was Aliens, But It Was Aliens: The Rise of Pseudohistory Documentaries

Suppose you have even a passing knowledge of historical documentaries on television or streaming services. In that case, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they focus on space aliens, the supernatural, and myths about buried treasure or secret Nazi weapons programmes. Surely, this seems to be antithetical to the discipline of history, which tends to be an academic consensus based on evidence. However, over the last 15 years, a massive amount of conspiratorial, speculative documentary content has been presented as history on platforms such as Netflix, HBO Max, and The History Channel.

When it comes to all the problems facing humanity in the 2020s, silly shows about ancient aliens seem like it's of the more low-stakes variety of issues. But there’s a lesson to be learned here, and it’s about what this can tell us about those larger problems. The circumstances that produce these documentaries – pervasive misinformation, anti-intellectualism, nationalist and autocratic shifts in countries around the world, the enshittification of the internet and media, and capitalist greed and cost-cutting – are the drivers of those larger problems, and sometimes they are the problems themselves. 

At the Fragments 2025 Symposium on 28 November, I’ll be discussing these topics using The History Channel's European and US programming as a case study. From its nickname of “The Hitler Channel” at the turn of the century, due to an overabundance of WWII-related content, to its current incarnation as the host of Ancient Aliens, The UnExplained, and Hunting Hitler (some things never change), we’ll be looking at the market and cultural conditions that underpinned this change. We are currently in a revival of superstition across cultures and countries. Trust in institutions is low, and people all over the world are looking to outside perspectives to make sense of a world that appears to have none. The old ways aren’t working, so a lot of us are looking for even older ways, and returning to myth, superstition, esoterism, and magical thinking. We see this in our politics and culture, and in the microcosm of pseudohistory documentaries.