Ancient Aliens – S18 E12 | Extraordinary Encounters: Ancient Aliens has followed investigators across the globe as they’ve gone directly to the sites where unexplained incidents have been reported. Now, Giorgio Tsoukalos takes a look back at the most extraordinary encounters that, as far as he’s concerned, provide evidence of an extraterrestrial presence on Earth.
Ancient Aliens is an American television series that premiered on April 20, 2010, on the History channel. Produced by Prometheus Entertainment in a documentary style, the program presents hypotheses of ancient astronauts and proposes that historical texts, archaeology, and legends contain evidence of past human-extraterrestrial contact. The show has been widely criticized by historians, cosmologists, archaeologists and other scientific circles for presenting and promoting pseudoscience, pseudohistory and pseudoarcheology.
Ancient Aliens explores the controversial theory that extraterrestrials have visited Earth for millions of years. From the age of the dinosaurs to ancient Egypt, from early cave drawings to continued mass sightings in the US, each episode in this hit HISTORY series gives historic depth to the questions, speculations, provocative controversies, first-hand accounts and grounded theories surrounding this age old debate. Did intelligent beings from outer space visit Earth thousands of years ago?
Did intelligent beings from outer space visit Earth thousands of years ago? From the age of the dinosaurs to ancient Egypt, from early cave drawings to continued mass sightings in the US, each episode gives historic depth to the questions, speculations, provocative controversies, first-hand accounts and grounded theories surrounding this age old debate.
Ancient Aliens – S18 E12 | Extraordinary Encounters
In ufology, a close encounter is an event in which a person witnesses an unidentified flying object. This terminology and the system of classification behind it were first suggested in astronomer and UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek’s 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. Categories beyond Hynek’s original three have been added by others but have not gained universal acceptance, mainly because they lack the scientific rigor that Hynek aimed to bring to ufology.
Sightings more than 150 metres (500 ft) from the witness are classified as “Daylight Discs,” “Nocturnal Lights,” or “Radar/Visual Reports.” Sightings within about 150 metres (500 ft) are subclassified as various types of “close encounters.” Hynek and others argued that a claimed close encounter must occur within about 150 metres (500 ft) to greatly reduce or eliminate the possibility of misidentifying conventional aircraft or other known phenomena.
Hynek’s scale became well known after being referenced in a 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is named after the third level of the scale. Promotional posters for the film featured the three levels of the scale, and Hynek himself makes a cameo appearance near the end of the film.
