‘Ancient Aliens’ show picks up Tuatha Dé Danann story
Poet, storyteller and tour guide Marty Mulligan jokes that he almost believed he was being pranked when he received a call from the global hit show Ancient Aliens asking would he film a segment with them about the Tuatha Dé Danann.
“These guys rang and said they were ringing from their offices at Sunset Boulevard in LA, and I’m like: ‘yeah right…’,” he says adding that it was only when they swung their camera round and showed him their surroundings that he fully believed them.
The upshot was that last week, the TV company flew Marty to London and spent several hours interviewing him in the atmospheric surroundings of a swanky period house at Wimbledon in London.
The segment is expected to be broadcast on The History Channel to a worldwide audience of millions in February or March.
The TV company became interested in Marty after they came across a book about the Tuatha Dé Danann he had published online and containing stories he had grown up hearing about these mythical heroes, and which he now shares with visitor groups that he leads on tours of the Hill of Uisneach.
“I never wrote a book before, but I wrote this, published it myself, and I got a good reaction, a good response to it, and I sold a few books and was happy with that.”
Marty was involved in the recent Music at Mearescourt festival, and just a couple of weeks before that he received an email from a friend of his saying a TV company had been trying to contact him. Email contact began and then the request from the company that he do a Zoom call with them.
“In the meantime I’d looked up this Ancient Aliens programme, and apparently millions of people watch it: I didn’t realise how big it was,” says Marty.
“I was kind of dubious at first, and then I saw that millions of people watch it and that it could be an opportunity,” and so the Zoom call took place with a producer and director.
The two revealed that they had touched on the area of Irish mythology before and they explained that what had helped pique their interest was the account in Marty’s book of how the Tuatha Dé Danann had arrived in “skyboats” and how the land was covered with mists for three days after the arrival of these gods with their super powers.
“So they asked if I would be interested in doing a piece with them for this programme, and I go: ‘OK, grand’ and then it started getting serious and they began talking about coming over here and filming on Uisneach, but the Covid thing was unclear and they said that alternatively they could bring me over to London.”
In the end that was the route they opted for and they arranged flights and a hotel.
“They would have kind of preferred to do it in Ireland and I would have liked that as well,” says Marty, who flew out on Sunday of last week and back on Tuesday.
The programme crew have suggested to Marty that he try to be in America when the show is broadcast, on the basis that the opportunity might arise for him to do some storytelling in the US, something Marty admits he would love.
“It’s something I have always wanted to do: I’ve been trying to get into the American market with the storytelling: It is something I love doing. I’ve been doing it for years on the hill (Uisneach) and I just love it.”
Prior to the interview, the show gave Marty about 26 questions.
“I said I’m not gonna get into the whole thing about ‘aliens’; I’m not gonna say the Tuatha Dé Danann were aliens; that you won’t get me to say that.”
Happily, the show agreed that was fine.
“I had great fun; I really enjoyed it,” Marty says of the experience.
The filming took almost two hours, and the crew also filmed a professor from Brussels who gave an academic take on the Tuatha, who are described and detailed in several ancient texts.
The interviews are to be used in an episode called ‘The Shining Ones’: “The Tuatha Dé Danann were often referred to as ‘The Shining Ones’,” Marty explains.
Celtic Thunder
Marty has also done storytelling on film lately with the US-based singers Celtic Thunder, of which Mullingar man Emmet Cahill is a member.
They were in Ireland and they were doing a kind of documentary and sort of tourist videos of Ireland, and I got a call asking if I could take them on a tour of the hill (Uisneach), and I did and they filmed it and it was great craic. I thought no more of it and then I got a call from their producer in America and he loved it and asked me could I do some more filming with them.”