Ancient Alien Astronauts - A Thinker’S Guide to Unusual Claims and Weird Beliefs

Think: Why You Should Question Everything - Guy P. Harrison 2013

Ancient Alien Astronauts
A Thinker’S Guide to Unusual Claims and Weird Beliefs

Did space travelers from a distant world visit the Earth during ancient or prehistoric times? Did they interact with the people, influence their engineering, art, and religious beliefs, and perhaps even interbreed with them to supercharge our evolution?

Maybe. Who knows? I can’t say for sure that it didn’t happen. What I do know is that no one has ever proved this amazing story or even presented any good evidence for it.

Chariots of the Gods?, a 1968 book written by a former hotel manager named Erich von Däniken, is more responsible than anything or anyone else for making this claim so popular. It was an international bestseller when it first came out decades ago, and it is still selling today. But why? Surely people would not just accept a claim this wild without rock-solid proof, right? No, they would and they do. Apparently it doesn’t matter that virtually every professional archaeologist in the world rejects this claim. Nor does it seem to make any difference that every single argument Von Däniken made has been thoroughly addressed and demolished by experts. People seem to like this idea of ancient aliens visiting us so much that they can’t resist boarding the chariot.

I won’t go into detail about the numerous problems with the ancient-astronaut claim. Those who want more can read the chapter about it in my book 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True. The point I want to make here is that this story is rooted in a view of our ancestors that is both inaccurate and detestable. Von Däniken and others who promote this belief push the premise that prehistoric and ancient people were hopelessly dim and could never have done the things anthropologists and historians say they did. These were such bumbling idiots that they had to have had extraterrestrial help in order to get anything done. If not for the advanced visitors, it’s clear that we would all still be grunting at one another in dark caves or up in trees. Here is a small sample of claims made about ancient people found in Chariots of the Gods?

“In the Subis Mountains on the west coast of Borneo, a network of caves was found that had been hollowed out on a cathedral-like scale. Among these colossal finds there are fabrics of such fineness and delicacy that with the best will in the world one cannot imagine savages making them.”38

“The Great Pyramid is [a] visible testimony of a technique that has never been understood. Today, in the twentieth century, no architect could build a copy of the pyramid of Cheops, even if the technical resources of every continent were at his disposal.”39

“Where did the narrators of The Thousand and One Nights get their staggering wealth of ideas? How did anyone come to describe a lamp from which a magician spoke when its owner wished?”40

“It is an embarrassing story; in advanced cultures of the past we find buildings that we cannot copy today with the most modern technical means.”41

Not only are these assertions condescending, but also they’re just plain wrong. First of all, anatomically modern people have been around for at least 200,000 years or so. This means that people with brains as capable and creative as ours were here for more than 195,000 years before the great pyramids of Giza were built and stories like The Thousand and One Nights were written. Interestingly, prehistoric people had slightly bigger brains than we do today, and they might have been more intelligent.42 This makes sense when you consider how unforgiving life would have been for Stone Age dimwits. Most would have been selected out of the gene pool early by poisonous berries, falling rocks, and hungry predators. Today, however, the dimmest not only survive at high rates, but some of them belong to an extremely successful subspecies known as “celebrities” and star in reality TV shows.

No one with any sense has ever suggested that we went from Australopithecines sleeping in trees to Homo sapiens building pyramids in one flash of insight. A lot happened between Homo erectus and the reign of Khufu. The progression of technology was not so unusual that it requires extraterrestrials to explain it. In short, there is nothing about ourselves or our past that indicates that we were incapable of doing the things we did. And, contrary to what Von Däniken says and writes, we could in the past and can today build a giant pyramid if we wanted to. Researchers have even demonstrated ways in which people might have moved and placed large stone blocks using only ancient technology and muscle.43 There is no doubt it could be done with modern technology.

Even within Egypt, the progression is evident. The three famous pyramids at Giza did not spring up from the sands in a way that defied the flow of ancient Egyptian history. I have visited the nearby Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, for example, and this older pyramid is precisely what one would expect to see. It’s huge and impressive yet less of a technical and artistic achievement compared with the pyramids that followed. What are we to believe—that less intelligent and less capable aliens helped the Egyptians at Saqqara earlier and then, years later, slightly more sophisticated aliens lent a hand at Giza to produce the superior pyramids?

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