In John Carpenter’s film The Thing , a remake of another film from the 1950s called The Enigma from Another World , a spaceship crashes in Antarctica 100,000 years ago. Upon discovering it, one of the protagonists mentions that the Inca civilization appeared thanks to aliens. In the movie Stargate an alien species, the Goa’uld, came to Earth in 8000 BC, enslaved the early Egyptians and created their culture and religion. In Ridley Scott’s disappointing Prometheus , scientists prove that human beings are the product of genetic research by an alien race . And in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull the alien-gods return, this time within the Mayan culture. All this shows that, for Hollywood, aliens populate ancient civilizations like the Aragonese on the beaches of Salou in August. Where did they get such an idea?
Like all stories associated with the UFO myth, the first references to ‘ancient astronauts’ are found in science fiction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We had to wait until 1954 for this literary idea to be proposed in earnest by a British mystery journalist named Harold T. Wilkins. But no one paid much attention to him.
Sagan and the aliens
A decade later, astrophysicists Iosif Shklovsky and Carl Sagan speculated on the possibility that there had been contact with extraterrestrial beings in historical times , although they concluded that there was no evidence of such a visit. Now, if it had really happened, how could we know? In answering this question, the two scientists gave an argument to the pseudo-archaeologists that they have used to exhaustion: if the contact had occurred, it would have been recorded in the stories and legends of those peoples. An ‘earthly’ example is found in the French circumnavigation expedition led by Jean-François de Galaup, Count of La Pérouse, when in July 1786 they encountered the Tlingit , an Amerindian tribe from northwestern Canada. That contact was preserved within the oral tradition of the tribe and more than a century later it was collected by the ethnographer George T. Emmons. Obviously the Tlingit had adapted the story to their culture but it was still a sufficiently accurate account of what happened. For Sagan, this proves that, under certain circumstances, it is possible to preserve “a historical record of a brief contact with an extraterrestrial civilization”, as long as it is made shortly after the encounter and that it is a significant event for the society. company contacted. Moreover, Sagan and Shklovski, looking for some example of what this written record could be like, pointed out that the legend of the Babylonian fish-man Oannes , who brought agriculture, mathematics and the arts to the first Sumerians, could be that of a contact with beings from another world.
memories of the future
In the end, what was pure speculation turned out to be true. In 1968 a Swiss hotelier named Eric von Däniken published a book that would become a best-seller: Memories of the Future . In it he defended that extraterrestrial beings have been responsible for the origin and development of different civilizations and even the appearance of the human species. In this way, since the early 1970s, when UFOs invaded our skies day in and day out, the idea became popular that the pyramids of Egypt, the Nazca lines, the moais of Easter Island and other archaeological sites they were proof that extraterrestrials had visited us in times past: the gods of ancient religions were, in reality, extraterrestrials who had arrived on our planet. This pseudoscientific nonsense is called the ancient astronaut hypothesis, though it might be better to rename it alien creationism .
We can find ‘traces’ of the visit of extraterrestrials if we read ancient texts in current key. Thus, the Hindu flying chariots, the vimanas, are nothing more than spaceships. Furthermore, thanks to a peculiar interpretation of history, Zecharia Sitchin attributes the creation of the Sumerian culture to extraterrestrials, mentioned in his texts as Anunnaki, who came from a twelfth planet in the Solar System, Nibiru. According to Sitchin, these Annunaki came to Earth 400,000 years ago to mine, especially gold, and for this they created a race of worker-slaves, human beings. Sitchin claims that the Anunnaki meddled in the lives of our ancestors until their culture perished in a series of catastrophes caused by the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago. Seeing that the humans had survived and that everything they had built was destroyed, the Anunnaki left Earth but not before giving us – or at least the humans of the Fertile Crescent – the means to govern themselves.
Do we want more evidence? Some cave paintings, such as those of Tassili , in Algeria, are portraits of astronauts with diving suits, or the Mayan sepulchral slab of Palenque , in Mexico, an astronaut piloting a spaceship with the engines on! On the other hand, places like Puma Punku and Tiahuanaco in Bolivia, the fortress of Sacsayhuamán in Peru or the pyramids of Egypt themselves are the “proof” that they were built with the help of extraterrestrials. Why? Because they are beyond the technological possibilities of those primitive civilizations: “In Puma Punku -writes Däniken-, as in the mountain above Sacsayhuamán, a technique was used that cannot be attributed to the ancestors of the Indians”. Or said in Roman paladin: the ancients were fools and incapable of any technological achievement.
In addition, there are certain representations that resemble objects of our current technology: the so-called bird of Saqqara in Egypt , or the Quimbaya artifacts of Colombia, are they not airplanes? And what about certain reliefs from Dendera (Egypt), which for the Spaniard Javier Sierra are incandescent light bulbs? This is the only way to explain how the ancient Egyptians were able to illuminate the corridors of their temples without torches, since no traces of soot have been found on the ceilings.
The most striking thing about all this madness is that those similarities that the pseudo-archaeologists proclaim are similar to the existing technologies at the time they wrote their books: hence they see incandescent light bulbs and not low-energy ones, or astronaut suits similar to that of Neil Armstrong but not Pedro Duque’s. And what about the alleged ‘landing strips’ of Nazca? Apparently the alien spaceships, capable of traveling hundreds of light-years through cold space, needed an airport as if they were a jumbo jet. Finally, alternative archaeologists make an error of principle when interpreting rock art like that of Tassili: they assume it to be realistic. And it certainly was, but not always. In fact, the Paleolithic painters were very imaginative and showed a clear tendency to schematization and symbolism to the point of making the figures unrecognizable.
References:
Bullard, TE (1996) “Ancient Astronauts”, The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal edited by Gordon Stein, Prometheus Books, pp. 25-32.
Colavito, J. (2005) The Cult of Alien Gods, Prometheus.
Fagan, G. G. (2006) Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public, Routledge
