William Shatner will boldly go to debate alien life. (Credit History Channel)
As the iconic Captain Kirk in the revered “Star Trek” franchise, William Shatner’s character traveled to alien planets, encountered ancient civilizations, and traveled in advanced aerospace vessels, but now Shatner has set his phasers to take aim at real-life unexplained cases of other worlds, and extraterrestrials starting with a two-hour cross-over episode of “Ancient Aliens.”
Shatner, host the History Chanel’s “The UnXplained,”for the first-time ever will join a roundtable discussion on the Feb. 12 episode of “Ancient Aliens” with ancient astronaut theory experts Giorgio Tsoukalos Erich von Däniken, David Childress, William Henry, Linda Moulton Howe and others.
“ (Erich) von Daniken wrote years ago about the possibility that aliens have been here, and there are all kinds of referrals to it in the Bible, and stones, and language, so he refers to that, and developed this ancient alien theory, which a lot of people have retained,” Shatner said. “I was skeptical, (but) because of my relationships with everybody (at History) they invited me to have this discussion. It’s a panel; a spirited discussion on whether they (alien) were here or not, and what’s your proof? It’s a fascinating couple of hours. You could be skeptical about everything until you see this footage of the Navy pilots, and these objects that are flying around, and you hear the people on radar guiding the airplanes not knowing what it is. They are semi-excited, and semi-perturbed because they don’t know if it is going to hit them or not because it comes at them, and then disappears. It was being triangulated; it was there. What it was we don’t know, and it enters the realm of the unexplained, which is also the name of a show, and ‘UnXplained’ covers cases like that. What the heck was that? Why do we mummify things? What is gold, and why does it have these magic properties? These are subjects that are part of the show.”
The Hollywood legend has been around science fiction, pop culture and investigative TV for over 50 years. During that time, the world has seen elements of science fiction become fact with our advances in AI, space exploration and technology.
“I’ve connected to a couple of companies that are doing that (artificial intelligence), working with images that can think,” said Shatner. “It is absolutely unbelievable what we human beings can do, and it is also mysterious and unexplained (if you forgive me for using that term, which is the show I do on History Channel) were we are going. What does AI mean? What does it do? What are the extents of artificial intelligence, and where will it take us? Will it take over? Will we be able to disconnect; pull the plug on a computer that is artificially intelligent? There are all these mysteries that lurk in the future, and we don’t know the answer to.”
Shatner has been an interested observer in the Nimitz UFO videos confirmed by the Pentagon, and released via the work of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. As life often imitates art, the military’s newest branch, the Space Force’s logo looks oddly similar to the Starfleet logo from the original “Star Trek” TV series.
“I think the great science fiction of 20-30 years ago imagined what might take place because it was happening in the laboratory, but projected this isolated thought into a plot, and gave it a human ring, and all of a sudden it became a story, and people said ‘well, that is just a story’,” said Shatner. “Like with aliens; there’s a guy in Florida in the swamp, and he says he got ‘picked up’ and everybody laughs. And then, we saw this (real) Navy footage that was unexplained, and I’m with everybody else saying ‘oh come on,’ but then you look at the footage, and you say, ‘what happened?’ And the military are equally puzzled. What was THAT on that footage, and that is where we are?”
“Star Trek” creator, and writer Gene Roddenberry was involved in pre-Star Trek research into mediumship with the paranormal investigation group Lab Nine. Part of this study included channeling entities, other civilizations, and alien-human hybrids-all tropes that appear in “Star Trek.” There is also a claim that parts of Star Trek was inspired by “the mysterious Nine” study he was privy to. Did Roddenberry ever disclose any of this with the cast of the show?
“No, I never talked to him about it, or heard about that,” Shatner said. “It sounds a little off-beat, but everything is off-beat, so I don’t know if those are true. What I do know, is that so many of the great stories of ‘Star Trek’ were invented by these great science fiction minds, some of whom these science fiction writers were scientists that worked in labs, and wrote stories about things that were coming out of the laboratories that didn’t exist then, but exist now like mobile phones, and artificial intelligence.”
-By MIKE DAMANTE
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