Unidentified

Season 1 History Channel (*186) 18:25 Doccie Episode 6 Two military insiders make shocking claims against the US government and airforce – not only do UFOs exist, their technology has been used in war machines for decades.

Season 1 National Geo (*121) 20:00 Doccie

Movie mummies are normally undead rotting corpses walking around moaning and groaning, bandages falling off as they shuffle. But shame, they were people too and had feelings – and that is coming across in new doccie series Kingdom Of The Mummies (2020). “To behold these ancient bodies of our past is something special,” says Egyptologist Dr Ramadan Hussein as he excavates a world-first on the show: an intact ancient Egyptian funeral home.

Everyone knows about mummies, but the actual process of mummification is still shrouded in mystery because funeral parlours were always destroyed and looted long before archaeologists came alone. Until 2018 when Dr Hussein and his crew found a hidden entrance at the Saqqara necropolis, an hour’s drive from capital city Cairo. “We were not expecting this find. We thought it was special, but a 4 000-year- old golden mask made us realise that it was much more important,” says the expert. And it’s the kind of find that viewers are getting unprecedented access too – everything from the tools used, to the ornate canopic jars are explored as Dr Hussein explains the process used to preserve the deceased.

Don’t expect to see ooey, gooey monsters either – the mummies, the oldest of which was 2 600 years – was transported safely to a nearby museum in humidity- controlled caskets so that new bacteria didn’t rot them. Strange as it may sound, that is a problem. “Getting the bodies to safety was our main objective. Then we could start our digging up the dead,” adds Dr Hussein.