A tactic I have found to be of frequent use on Ancient Aliens is the strategy of Gish Gallop, a technique that was constantly abused and created by Duane Gish the young earth creationist. Gish Gallop is basically the fallacious debate tactic that supporters of conspiracies and challengers of science use by creating a series of weaker arguments and misinterpretations to drown out the opponent in a flood of fictions and distortions to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument. Ancient Aliens uses this same tactic - a series of small, fast intrusive arguments that buries any counter arguments.
The main point of this episode was to make the convincing argument that aliens exterminated the dinosaurs so that there would be more room and less competition for our species. My first issue with this hypothesis is that throughout the entire episode they don't use any explicit evidence their claims. Instead, they use evidence from fundamentalist Christians: Michael Cremo, author of Forbidden Archaeology, and Willie Dye, credited biblical archaeologist with past young creationist views that were lacked to mention; not very reliable scholarly sources (4, 5).
One piece of "evidence" that was used by the creationists was referencing that some researchers had found human footprints alongside the footprints of dinosaurs (Cremo). This line was used out of context in Cremo's interview but was used in parallel with another piece of evidence that Roland T. Bird, credited paleontologist, found human footprints that were associated with dinosaur trackways in Texas. When researching upon these footprints, it's easily found that he found many dinosaur footprints and trackways, but no human tracks. It was even found that carved human tracks were carved in the same stone by locals - but creationists, blinded by dogma, use these fake tracks to misinterpret them as human footprints (2).
Dye creationist later uses the Ica stones from Peru as evidence to support the idea that humans and dinosaurs coexisted - the famous fake stones that are engraved with images of dinosaurs and humans interacting. These stones were created by farmer Basilio Uschuya and his wife, yet the Ica stones are presented as evidence by both Dye and Ancient Aliens as if they are authentic ancient artifacts recovered from the age of dinosaurs (1).
While trying to prove the idea that aliens exterminated dinosaurs and that humans coexisted with them, the show continues on to argue that carbon-14 dating isn't reliable for aging dinosaurs. But if someone in the field were to actually be asked, it is known that paleontologists don't use carbon-14 to age non-avian dinosaurs - carbon dating is used for materials containing carbon up to 60,000 years old. Paleontolgoists use radiometric dating for estimating non-avian dinosaurs, just as you use different dating systems for different rocks and ages.
Lastly, the episode makes a case that the coelacanth, an archaic lobe-finned fish that predates evolution of the dinosaurs, is in modern existence of non-avian dinosaurs. The show contradictingly concludes that aliens manipulated dinosaur DNA to turn them into less threatening animals like the coelacanth - ignoring the fact that coelacanths were already around in the oceans for more than 360 million years (3). So did the aliens exterminate the dinosaurs or did the dinosaurs survive into modern day by being molecularly manipulated into being fish? As usual, Ancient Civilizations continues their redundant arguments that consist of small pieces of seemingly irrelevant and false information for their overall conclusions.
References
1. Polidoro, M. (2006) Ica Stones: Yabba-Dabba-Do! Skeptical Inquirer, 26(5)
2. http://www.footprintsinstone.com/history/roland-t-bird/
3. Amemiya, C. T., Alfoldi, J., Lee, A. P., Fan, S., Philippe, H., MacCallum, I., … Lindblad-Toh, K. (2013). The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution. Nature, 496(7445), 311–316.
4. http://www.mcremo.com/
5. http://yorkshiretales.com/allaboutmormonism/page_bogus_doctor_willie_dye.html
