Initially I rated this series a 6 but after thinking about it more changed it to a 4 and write a review. It's OK, not great. Read on why.
The show and the host The show is rated as reality-TV and is kind of an 'action' documentary. The host, Josh Gates, talks a lot and does stuff. He tries to be humble in some situations but fails. The viewer sees him drive a prototype mars rover, climb down a cave, drive a 4x4 for hours, letting go of a weather balloon, operating a metal-detector and coming to obvious conclusions. Stuff. He does participate in everything which is good.
Cinematography and the aliens Another positive thing about the show is that it is well filmed. High quality picture, well captures scenes and reasonable directing. Even the night shots are decent. Also the experts on the show are equipped with night cameras, but mostly the only thing we see is Josh. Also close-ups of Josh listening to other people don't really add much to the show.
Every episode Josh travels to unrelated locations around the globe where mysterious UFO things happened or science happens. Most topics are already covered in-depth in many other shows and documentaries. Not much new information was presented (see conclusion). We've all seen the NASA rovers, telescopes, ISS astronauts, jittery UFO footage, Easter Island, Roswell and Nick Pope. The only topics that were kind of interesting for me personally were the incident at the school in Zimbabwe and the English team of researchers capturing space-dust.
Coming back to film quality. When they tried to film strange lights in the sky all quality was lost. When filming UFO's you need an in-focus picture and a point-of-reference to determine size and location of the object (see conclusion).
The conclusion and my conclusion New information could have been presented maybe but they missed the ball on just around everything. During the episodes they had some research results outstanding. In the last episode all results were discussed. Turns out bones in a cave are just bones in a cave, an iron meteorite fragment is just an iron meteorite fragment, a captured dust-particle is a dust-particle. (Side note: Walking with a sample through a clean-room can still contaminate the sample. Clean-rooms are never 100% dust-free, especially if someone like Josh isn't wearing a beard-cover. I work in clean-rooms so I know something about them.) An old picture negative doesn't get better over time. The 'expert' on UFO footage was just ridiculous. Cellphone footage must be fake and a light in shaky out-of-focus footage that Josh's team filmed must be an UFO? Especially the 'strange' footage in the last scene of the show was an obvious fake but the 'expert' called it a UFO anyway. What a joke. Poor ending of the season.
It's reality-TV, so a lot things are staged and also look clearly staged. Finding the meteorite fragment for instance. And the last scene in the cutting room. So don't expect too much from this series. If you're interested in the UFO subject, check out the show 'Alien Highway' instead. They do more serious research and it's not so much about the hosts of the show.
The show and the host The show is rated as reality-TV and is kind of an 'action' documentary. The host, Josh Gates, talks a lot and does stuff. He tries to be humble in some situations but fails. The viewer sees him drive a prototype mars rover, climb down a cave, drive a 4x4 for hours, letting go of a weather balloon, operating a metal-detector and coming to obvious conclusions. Stuff. He does participate in everything which is good.
Cinematography and the aliens Another positive thing about the show is that it is well filmed. High quality picture, well captures scenes and reasonable directing. Even the night shots are decent. Also the experts on the show are equipped with night cameras, but mostly the only thing we see is Josh. Also close-ups of Josh listening to other people don't really add much to the show.
Every episode Josh travels to unrelated locations around the globe where mysterious UFO things happened or science happens. Most topics are already covered in-depth in many other shows and documentaries. Not much new information was presented (see conclusion). We've all seen the NASA rovers, telescopes, ISS astronauts, jittery UFO footage, Easter Island, Roswell and Nick Pope. The only topics that were kind of interesting for me personally were the incident at the school in Zimbabwe and the English team of researchers capturing space-dust.
Coming back to film quality. When they tried to film strange lights in the sky all quality was lost. When filming UFO's you need an in-focus picture and a point-of-reference to determine size and location of the object (see conclusion).
The conclusion and my conclusion New information could have been presented maybe but they missed the ball on just around everything. During the episodes they had some research results outstanding. In the last episode all results were discussed. Turns out bones in a cave are just bones in a cave, an iron meteorite fragment is just an iron meteorite fragment, a captured dust-particle is a dust-particle. (Side note: Walking with a sample through a clean-room can still contaminate the sample. Clean-rooms are never 100% dust-free, especially if someone like Josh isn't wearing a beard-cover. I work in clean-rooms so I know something about them.) An old picture negative doesn't get better over time. The 'expert' on UFO footage was just ridiculous. Cellphone footage must be fake and a light in shaky out-of-focus footage that Josh's team filmed must be an UFO? Especially the 'strange' footage in the last scene of the show was an obvious fake but the 'expert' called it a UFO anyway. What a joke. Poor ending of the season.
It's reality-TV, so a lot things are staged and also look clearly staged. Finding the meteorite fragment for instance. And the last scene in the cutting room. So don't expect too much from this series. If you're interested in the UFO subject, check out the show 'Alien Highway' instead. They do more serious research and it's not so much about the hosts of the show.