Ancient Aliens – The Sentinels: Seven stone giants stand guard over a Pacific island. We explore what they are protecting, and from whom. Ancient Astronaut theorists Giorgio A Tsoukalos and David H Childress explore a Polynesian land of bizarre figures and forbidden places.
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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 – The Sentinels
Easter Island has been a frequent touchstone of the ancient astronaut theory in general and of Ancient Aliens in particular, in no small measure due to the otherworldly aesthetics of the colossal stone moai that dot Rapa Nui and the bafflement of early explorers as to how the statues were carved and erected. (They didn’t know that the denuded island once had trees, which were used to help move them.) William Henry says they are “alien”-looking statues. The look more like H. P. Lovecraft than the Greys, truth be told, but this show has a long history of ignoring the idea of stylization in art.
Last year, Expedition Unknown sent Josh Gates to the island to hunt for evidence of space aliens, and nearly sixty years ago, the anthropologist Robert Suggs (with whom I have discussed Polynesian history) lamented that even at that date Easter Island had become the province of mystery-mongers. “The mystery of this island, then, is largely of an artificial nature, created for specific purposes by nonscientific authors.” The passing decades did not change his view. Now Ancient Aliens sends Giorgio Tsoukalos and David Childress to Polynesia to expand the “mystery” across the Pacific.
Easter Island
Easter Island (Rapa Nui: Rapa Nui, Spanish: Isla de Pascua) is an island and special territory of Chile in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. Easter Island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapa Nui people. In 1995, UNESCO named Easter Island a World Heritage Site, with much of the island protected within Rapa Nui National Park.
It is believed that Easter Island’s Polynesian inhabitants arrived on Easter Island sometime near 1200. They created a thriving and industrious culture, as evidenced by the island’s numerous enormous stone moai and other artifacts. However, land clearing for cultivation and the introduction of the Polynesian rat led to gradual deforestation. By the time of European arrival in 1722, the island’s population was estimated to be 2,000 to 3,000. European diseases, Peruvian slave raiding expeditions in the 1860s, and emigration to other islands, e.g. Tahiti, further depleted the population, reducing it to a low of 111 native inhabitants in 1877.
Chile annexed Easter Island in 1888. In 1966, the Rapa Nui were granted Chilean citizenship. In 2007 the island gained the constitutional status of “special territory” (Spanish: territorio especial). Administratively, it belongs to the Valparaíso Region, constituting a single commune of the Province Isla de Pascua. The 2017 Chilean census registered 7,750 people on the island, of whom 3,512 (45%) considered themselves Rapa Nui.