Thirteenth Season of Ancient Aliens Lands on DVD

When I was a kid, I gobbled up all my grandmother's discarded World Weekly News copies. The stories in them were so fantastic and inspiring, I was surprised they didn't make the nightly news. To be fair, this was around the time Close Encounters of the Third Kind was huge, and the Betty and Barney Hill story, and Project: Bluebook, glued me to my television set. I'd cut out all the articles and paste them in a scrapbook. I would later go get books by J. Allen Hynek and Erich von Däniken.

The aliens were here, and I was going to be prepared.

Even today, the prospect of alien life intrigues me, and the notion that it may have made contact with Earth in some fashion, while the rich soil of many a conspiracy theory, is an irresistible fascination. So while I've seen enough past seasons of Ancient Aliens to know that, no matter the question, ancient astronaut theorists will always respond Yes!, I'm still suckered in from beginning to end for any episode that happens to cross my screen.

This thirteenth season of Kevin Burns' ongoing series of docu-episodes hits on several hot topics. Even though some of the ideas have been touched on before -- many times, even -- I still have to watch, as we get accounts of encounters with Men in Black or Shapeshifters. Stone giants and aerial-only viewable designs are a common theme, and I still will absorb every scene and every word. And when they trot out the Book of Enoch and the Dead Sea Scrolls and reframe the context of the stories in the perspective of alien encounters, I'm in it for the long haul.

But, not every episode is going to be a mind teaser. The so-called Immortality Machine -- which sadly doesn't work -- might have just been the architectural project of a disturbed mind. And devoting an entire hour-long episode to the magic of the number 12 is a bit of a stretch for discussion even for me.

But even the most outlandish episodes will cause me to sit and ponder. Because there's an awful lot of space in this universe, and if the landlords ever return home, I want to make sure I have the best chance not to be evicted.

Klaatu barada nikto.