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WillowOne's Positions

Ancient Aliens

My Positions

  1. Ancient monuments reflect human ingenuity, culture, organisation, and the tools available at the time. They are not the product of, or evidence for, extraterrestrial visitors.
  2. The "ancient aliens" hypothesis is not merely wrong but disrespectful. It takes the greatest achievements of past peoples, typically non-European peoples, and awards the credit to imaginary beings.

Rejected Positions

Aliens built ancient monuments

  • Claim: Structures such as the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, the Nazca lines, Puma Punku, and the Easter Island moai were built with alien help, because the people of the time could not have built them.
  • Basis: The perceived complexity of the structures; limited surviving records of their construction; the claims of Erich von Däniken (Chariots of the Gods?, 1968) and the television series Ancient Aliens (2009–).
  • Reason for rejection: The argument is one from Personal Incredulity: the proponent cannot imagine how it was done, and concludes that it could not have been. But archaeology has documented how it was done. For the pyramids there are the workers' villages at Giza, the quarries, the ramps, the tools, the copper chisels, the administrative papyri of Merer (c. 2560 BC) recording the transport of limestone blocks, and the unfinished monuments that show the process mid-way. Easter Islanders have demonstrated "walking" a moai with ropes. The Nazca lines can be laid out with stakes and string. None of these required anything beyond human labour, organisation, and time.

Ancient depictions show aliens or spacecraft

  • Claim: Carvings and paintings (for example the Palenque sarcophagus lid, the Dendera "light bulb", the Abydos "helicopter") depict astronauts, rockets, or aircraft.
  • Basis: Pareidolia; unfamiliarity with the iconography of the culture in question.
  • Reason for rejection: In every case, the image is well understood within its own context. The Palenque lid shows the ruler Pakal descending into the underworld along the World Tree. The Abydos "helicopter" is a palimpsest of two overlapping sets of hieroglyphs. Seeing a spaceship in these is like seeing a face in a cloud.

Sources

  • Skeptoid episode 96: "Ancient Astronauts"
    https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4096
  • Jason Colavito, The Cult of Alien Gods (2005), tracing the idea to H. P. Lovecraft's fiction
  • Kenneth Feder, Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology (various editions)
  • Tallet, P. and Marouard, G., "The Harbor of Khufu on the Red Sea Coast at Wadi al-Jarf", Near Eastern Archaeology 77 (2014), on the Merer papyri

Also see