• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Pseudo-Archaeology & The Racism Behind Ancient Aliens

eburacum said:
Sorry, but there is no truth to these fantasies whatsoever. No evidence of ancient alien technology, no ancient alien DNA, no bodies, not even any alien poo. Everything the Ancient Alien proponents say was done by aliens was within the capabilities of ancient humans, so it is a hypothesis that is entirely unnecessary.
Click to expand...
Hold on... alien poo might be much like human poo.
 
hunck said:
Having never watched Ancient Aliens I decided to watch one tonight. What utter tosh. It was full of 'is it possible that', 'could it be that', 'many people believe that' etc.

Alien abductions featured in this episode & Whitley Strieber featured briefly. This is the man that according to wiki, 'witnessed' the Texas Uni Charles Whitman shooting spree in 1966, giving numerous graphic details about victims, subsequently admitted he hadn't been there at all, then changed his mind in a later book & said he was there. His mother however said he was in Austin on the day of the shooting but not on campus. You'd have to be credulous as fuck to believe anything he says yet here he is blathering on about his abduction.

It then moved on to 'alien implants', 'alien/human hybrids' with speculation of genetically altered human sleepers who will be switched on by aliens at some point in the future for nefarious purposes & so on. Utter bollocks.
Click to expand...
Yes, the program is tosh. Totally low-budget tosh.
However, it can be entertaining - and I think that is really its primary purpose. I'd argue that it has a right to exist purely as a 'Fortean Fun' item.
 
I noticed the technique of ‘Whatiffery’ while reading Fortean books as a teenager. For the first few chapters, there’s speculation, stuff like ’What if there is another explanation and neolithic man was really into fairgrounds and Stonehenge was built as an enclosure for the rides?’ By the end and the conclusion, this sort of idle speculation is stacked up as proof of the author’s pet theory.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Hold on... alien poo might be much like human poo.
Click to expand...
This could be an interesting subject to explore in more detail. The intestinal flora is likely to be completely alien, since they are unlikely to tolerate human (or terran) microbiota. We could test this stuff for DNA and also find out what they eat, if anything. It may be the case that the alien digestive system uses completely artificial microbes or nanobots to disassemble ingested material, ot they might eat pre-digested pap that needs no processing at all. The possibilities are endless.
 
I've seen many ridiculous hypotheses using the fact that most things - anything really - has a possibility no matter how unlikely or ridiculous the idea is.
"One theory is that they were killed by ... aliens!"
"Really! How stupid!"
"Can you categorically state it wasn't?"
"Well ... no."
"Then you can't categorically say it wasn't aliens so the theory is valid!"

Woolly-headed logic irritates me. The idea that the most infinitesimal chance of something validates a theory is so ridiculous.
 
It seems to me there are two distinct forms of prejudicial bias involved in embracing the ancient aliens hypothesis.

The first is racism / ethnicism (in the prejudicial sense). This involves the skepticism or denial that a less developed (primitive; ancient; etc.) group of fellow humans is capable of certain achievements (e.g., monument building). This inter-human prejudice sets the stage by disputing which humans accomplished X.

The next step (if taken ... ) is to offer an explanation for who else either directly produced the achievement or aided the disputed group in accomplishing something beyond their own capabilities.

This doesn't automatically lead you to ancient aliens. There have been plenty of examples of proposed alternative achievers drawn from other - presumably more advanced or enlightened - human groups. Such examples include (e.g. ) reassigning credit for North American sites to pre-Columbian European visitors and credit for Great Zimbabwe to Phoenicians or other folks from the more respected ancient Mediterranean area cultures.

This leads to the second stage in prejudicial explanation ...

Shifting speculative focus from known ancient humans to aliens moves beyond racism to something better construed as "speciesism" / "specism" (i.e., prejudice based on species). Both these labels are recognized terms, but they arose and are most closely associated with presumptions about status and relations between humans and our fellow terrestrial animals.
 
I think I understand you but in words that I understand ...
First it must be assumed that X structure was beyond the native (i.e. inhabitants local to the structure) ability to create. This assumption based on archaeological or anthropological data extant.
Then, if the natives didn't build it ... who did?

Now, theories may try to demonstrate that a migrant force created structure X, either using native labour or teaching the natives techniques that they themselves hadn't developed. What was the migrant force? A society/people from a different part of the world imposing their own techniques/motives? Like Spanish conquistadores imposing the building of churches on a people in MesoAmerica? Or making 'natives' build fortresses in the design of their invading culture?
Or was it ... aliens? This changes the base assumption - that it's gone from "natives couldn't have made these" to "humans couldn't have made these"! People make things when they are motivated - by religion, by need, by benefit. That motivation may recede and, so too, does the skills to make them.
In very simple terms, I was taught to use a slide-rule for calculations, to get me through maths 'O' levels. I was told (as many of us were) that pocket calculators won't always be available. At the time the assertion was valid. They didn't know about the development of personal computing, smartphones etc. which makes calculators available. I still have a slide rule. Two, in fact. But I've forgotten how to use them. Yeah, I could find out and 'retrain' but ... why should I?
In the future, what if my great-grandchildren go through my things and find a slide-rule? First, they'd wonder what it was for. Second, they'd wonder why I bothered? Generations further, when people have hyper-advanced technology (to me), they find a slide-rule, they might question "he didn't have advanced tech like us and relied on basic mental arithmetic ... so who gave him this rudimentary calculator?"

In simple terms, most people "use it or lose it!" So what if the need for megalithic building declined, and the skills required were lost. What if it was just too much bloody hassle, or a particular priesthood who could command slave labour lost support? The structure X remains and some smartass says "yeah, well, the natives obviously don't have the skills to make it ... it must be *gasp* aliens!"
 
Min Bannister said:
What's your explanation then?
Click to expand...

I reckon.... that if the piggies were living as free-range, almost wild style then they'd be eating a great range of stuff, mixed with a lot of earth. In the autumn wild or cultivated fruits (some pigs still live in orchards today) would be included. Human teeth wear down and 'rot' when a lot of tough, fibrous or abrasive foods are eaten so I wonder if the combo of natural mixed diet, abrasion and time would do the same to a pig's teeth?

Pigs eaten today are normally less than a year old, they don't get time to get bad teeth. The breeding sows last a bit longer but they're fed a fairly controlled diet unless totally free-range. If the 'sacrificial' pigs were older than a couple of years then I'd bet that that at least some of them would have manky gnashers.
 
Stormkhan said:
I think I understand you but in words that I understand ...
Click to expand...

Yep ... The essential point was that it's not reasonable to frame things with regard to a single direct leap from "these folks couldn't have done it" to "aliens must have been involved." The implied chain of reasoning is more complicated than that.

The ancient alien proponents always seem to evade / avoid the middle ground ("other humans were involved"). This obscures the fact that similar speculations concerning outsider aid had been floated for a long time before "aliens" were available as suspects.

It's also worth noting that blaming extraordinary ancient accomplishments on aliens effectively negates a lot of the onus associated with attributing achievements to "higher / better" human cultures or societies. It's safer to shoot off your mouth about alien assistance because no one can claim you're trying to shift credit to your own / preferred human traditions or cultures.
 
Maybe the pigs were aliens ...

pis.jpg
 
I'm just not buyinbg into this paleo-seti =racism trope, but before I explain why, here's two disclaimers: (1) Whilst I haven't read any `ancient astronaut`books for a long, long time and whilst I have come to reject most of the `ancient astronaut` claims, I was heavily engrossed in it all as a child (roughly between 9 - 14) to the extent that I still see Daniken as a sort of second Uncle. So I have a sentimental involvement in the issue. And (2) I have never actually seen the `Ancient Aliens` TV show (!) so just can't comment on that side of things

From what I recall of the Ancient Astronaut heyday of the early-to-mid-seventies, Stonehenge did feature a lot in its iconography. I can't recall if Uncle Daniken himself ever wrote about Stonehenge at that time (I believe he has done since), but it was just `there` in the mix somehow and I'm pretty sure I had a book - the author of which is long since forgotten - which featured a depiction of Stonehenge on the cover with a flying saucer hovering over it.

The point of all this being -that the idea that `Ancient astronauts` are belittling dark skinned southern hemisphere people hardly fits here - as Stonehenge is very much a British icon.

Likewise, there has been a lot of emphasis in the above discussions about how `A.A` theorists are claiming that the alien visitoirs built or helped to build various ancient artefacts and monuments. Again, from my memory of the idea as it was in the seventies, the emphasis was much more on how these carvings and pictures etc were inspired by first contact - a tribute to the astronauts - but produced by natives of the earth. The artwork was admired, but a lot of effort was put into decoding it so that it would seem to be a depiction of alien interaction or some kind of response to this. Thus, for example, the Nazca lines were not seen as significant because nobody at that time was capable of constructing them, (I don't recall that being disputed) but for the fact that they could only be appreciated when seen from above - as though the target audience had airflight.

Have the original claims of the `A.A` brigade been vulgarised a bit since - by the `Ancient Astronauts` TV show, say ? - it's possible.

Then there is the question of the racial identity of these intergalactic interlopers. I honestly have no memory of this ever having been mentioned by the `A.A` advocates at that time. However, in Chariots of the Gods, there is that infamous picture from Mexico (?) of a reclining `astronaut` surrounded by what looks like technical gizmos and switches (apparently it's really an entombed Incan prince, or something). Well, the astronaut here is clearly a Native South American in terms of race - or `red -skinned` as we would probably have said in those days!

Then Robert Temple thought the aliens were highly evolved fish!

This racism claim seems to hinge a lot on the - to me highly dubious - connection that certain commentators have made between H.P Lovecraft and the later A.A advocates. Sure enough Lovecraft was, in his youth at least, a virulent racist, and some of his stories did feature ancient aliens of sorts - but he was on a whole, whole different trip than Daniken and co.

Then there is a quotation by Daniken which I am not going to repeat here - but it is to the effect that black people were a genetically engineered `mistake` which were later superseded by better yellow and white people. Without doubt this is an appalling line (and I certainly have no recollection of ever having read it) I hope to God that it has been massively ripped out of context and I also note that it gets endlessly recycled in the context of this debate, which implies to me that such remarks are thin on the ground among the `A.A` community.

I can see now that Daniken was often a bit of a dummy - and he is a convicted fraudster to boot - but reading his books as a child didn't turn me into a racist. Rather I thnk they helped to give me some respect for ancient cultures and for people of different ethnicities which has stayed with me.

If you want a real conspiracy theory about the `Ancient Astronaut ` trope - how about this one? I have in my possession a printed Russian article the title of which translates as ` The Theory of {Paleocontact was born in the U.S.S.R`. The language level is too hard for me to read properly now - but the gist of it is obvious. And then note this: one of the forerunners of Daniken was one Peter Kolosimo - an Italian who was also a convinced communist (to the extent that he called the astronauts `cosmonauts`).

Now wouldn't it be a laugh if alt-right proponents of `A.A` are unkowningly peddling a form of....`cultural Marxism` !?
 
I read Von Daniken's books when they first came out, and I missed the racism at time, but it is undeniably there. Times and mores have changed.

Far more important than his racism is his general misanthropy - everything good achieved by humanity has been attributed to 'aliens' by this ignorant idiot. I'm glad you gained respect for ancient cultures and their achievements, but this was despite his ideas, not because of them.
 
EnolaGaia said:
It seems to me there are two distinct forms of prejudicial bias involved in embracing the ancient aliens hypothesis.

The first is racism / ethnicism (in the prejudicial sense). This involves the skepticism or denial that a less developed (primitive; ancient; etc.) group of fellow humans is capable of certain achievements (e.g., monument building). This inter-human prejudice sets the stage by disputing which humans accomplished X.

The next step (if taken ... ) is to offer an explanation for who else either directly produced the achievement or aided the disputed group in accomplishing something beyond their own capabilities.

This doesn't automatically lead you to ancient aliens. There have been plenty of examples of proposed alternative achievers drawn from other - presumably more advanced or enlightened - human groups. Such examples include (e.g. ) reassigning credit for North American sites to pre-Columbian European visitors and credit for Great Zimbabwe to Phoenicians or other folks from the more respected ancient Mediterranean area cultures.

This leads to the second stage in prejudicial explanation ...

Shifting speculative focus from known ancient humans to aliens moves beyond racism to something better construed as "speciesism" / "specism" (i.e., prejudice based on species). Both these labels are recognized terms, but they arose and are most closely associated with presumptions about status and relations between humans and our fellow terrestrial animals.
Click to expand...

We've not found any evidence of plumbers from Lemuria though or dinosaurs building Stone Henge. Just like we have no evidence for Aliens. So what do we go on?
 
marhawkman said:
Is it insulting to our ancestors? yeah. Is it racist though? I'd argue no.
Click to expand...
When you take away the past achievements of people who are already dispossessed and discriminated against, you know what? Yeah, that's pretty racist actually. It may not be the "in your face" face racism of neo-nazis, it is the crypto(meaning hidden or implicit)-racism of academics who refuse to credit an ancient people of the past with their true efforts, just because their present day descendants have been laid low by external aggression. That is the racism that Ancient Aliens is promoting, by stripping these ancient human cultures of their achievement and handing them over to non-existent little green men for whose existence they have no evidence. The subtext is undeniably racist, and can be used as ammunition by more vocal racists to use against the oppressed people, that they "never had civilization" before their oppressors came along.
 
Frideswide said:
I don't recognise this at all. Disclosure: Academic Archaeologist, retired fully earlier this year. Which ought to mean that my views on this count for something. Or does this mean that I am a shill in the system.
Click to expand...

If people valued education and intelligence we would not have political leaders like this current shower.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
eburacum said:
Sorry, but there is no truth to these fantasies whatsoever. No evidence of ancient alien technology, no ancient alien DNA, no bodies, not even any alien poo. Everything the Ancient Alien proponents say was done by aliens was within the capabilities of ancient humans, so it is a hypothesis that is entirely unnecessary.
Click to expand...
I can't watch Ancient Aliens; I used to try with the sound off just to look at the photography of the ancient sites but then I'd get a scare and see Childress or Tsoukalos on the screen.. :omg:
There may have very well been UFOs (alien devices) in ancient times (I think there probably were), but the fake mummies, misattribution of human engineering and architectural accomplishments and gross misinterpretation of archaeological evidence was just too much to deal with; they do damage to archaeology and UFOlogy simultaneously. :( And make the rest of us look daft.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Yes, the program is tosh. Totally low-budget tosh.

However, it can be entertaining - and I think that is really its primary purpose. I'd argue that it has a right to exist purely as a 'Fortean Fun' item.
Click to expand...
this is how I see it. It's an obviously biased interpretation of facts. They do raise some good points but have ridiculous leaps of logic to get to their conclusion.

Stormkhan said:
In simple terms, most people "use it or lose it!" So what if the need for megalithic building declined, and the skills required were lost. What if it was just too much bloody hassle, or a particular priesthood who could command slave labour lost support? The structure X remains and some smartass says "yeah, well, the natives obviously don't have the skills to make it ... it must be *gasp* aliens!"
Click to expand...
In some cases it may have been only one guy who knew in the first place. Nan Madol for example, the original architect and his descendants were the only ones who actually built the city. When that dynasty was killed off the city was abandoned. In situations where trade secrets aren't written down, knowledge gets lost super fast. Which... well in some ways kinda validates that PoV. The ancestors of the current inhabitants had skills their descendants don't. This doesn't mean aliens did it, but one could argue that a different civilization did. It's not a different ethnicity of civilization though.

Zeke Newbold said:
Then there is a quotation by Daniken which I am not going to repeat here - but it is to the effect that black people were a genetically engineered `mistake` which were later superseded by better yellow and white people. Without doubt this is an appalling line (and I certainly have no recollection of ever having read it) I hope to God that it has been massively ripped out of context and I also note that it gets endlessly recycled in the context of this debate, which implies to me that such remarks are thin on the ground among the `A.A` community.
Click to expand...
Oh this rabbit hole gets better. Or deeper anyways... The idea is that a race of Human-like beings came to Earth who were both god-tier genetic engineers, and had basically no moral scruples. One of Von Daniken's books had a story treatment of what he imagined things to be like. This went into quite a lot of detail about the reasons for multiple types of people. To include stuff like Minotaurs and other beings not traditionally considered "Human". The story is that whatever aliens were creating Mankind did a LOT of gene splicing and weren't really happy with their experimental results. But instead of trashing them they just dumped them into the wild to see what would happen. Which resulted in a bunch of weird monsters that eventually died out, but also several different versions of Humans. It's been close to 25 years since I read it so I don't remember if he was trying to say one "race" that was created this way was actually considered "perfect" and thus better. (though it's possible he did) Thing is though, von Daniken basically treated all Humans as inferior creations of a better race. It's not a particularly good book and most of his ideas are rubbish.

But what does this actually have to do with AA? The TV show doesn't actually use this material AFAIK. So whether von Daniken was trying to use it to claim one "race" was better than others is not directly relevant. AA isn't trying to make claims about racial supremacy.

In some cases the show actually starts off by taking ancient legends seriously and trying to figure out what the legends were talking about from the PoV that the fantastical stuff actually happened. From one PoV you could say that the main stream basically treats most legends and folklore as fiction until proven otherwise. So, AA does not take the same approach as Von Daniken, since his take was that pretty much all myths and legends were at best half-truths.

Frideswide said:
I don't recognize this at all. Disclosure: Academic Archaeologist, retired fully earlier this year. Which ought to mean that my views on this count for something. Or does this mean that I am a shill in the system and therefore inherently untrustworthy?
Click to expand...
My comment wasn't meant as a criticism of the concept of peer review. Thinking again, the question that I phrased badly would be better phrased as a question of how often peer review is applied to things that are genuinely controversial. What I was trying to ask was whether peer review matters if the paper is written so that it appeals to an audience that already agrees with the findings of the paper? IE is the review a formality?

Perhaps the actual answer there is "why publish something that's not newsworthy?" IE if the paper isn't covering new material then what reason is there to publish?
 
marhawkman said:
But what does this actually have to do with AA? The TV show doesn't actually use this material AFAIK. So whether von Daniken was trying to use it to claim one "race" was better than others is not directly relevant. AA isn't trying to make claims about racial supremacy.
Click to expand...
Okay, the problem is a bit more covert than what you are suggesting. The whole Ancient Aliens "Theory" is undermining the achievements of ancient societies, and thus undermining the descendants of those societies who are often economically dispossessed and subject to oppression. When you tell someone that their ancestors didn't build that magnificent structure, it was little green men for whom we have no other evidence, you are taking away their heritage, and giving a bunch of racist ignoramuses ammunition to then redouble the oppression.

What is worse is the fact that we in fact DO KNOW how many of these huge structures were built, and it actually isn't rocket science, but it is often pretty clever. If you use wet sand and seaweed, you can produce a reduced friction surface that can allow immense weights to be moved. Add to that some simple wedges and levering, and the fact that you can "walk" large weights by rocking them and then providing impetus and you have most of the answer. Then there is the issue of polishing rock using the same kind of rock to produce clean straight surfaces, and in the case of the Pyramids, the generally ignored piece of information that copper chisels harden up a lot when worked and re-worked in a phenomenon known as work hardening.

marhawkman said:
In some cases the show actually starts off by taking ancient legends seriously and trying to figure out what the legends were talking about from the PoV that the fantastical stuff actually happened. From one PoV you could say that the main stream basically treats most legends and folklore as fiction until proven otherwise. So, AA does not take the same approach as Von Daniken, since his take was that pretty much all myths and legends were at best half-truths.
Click to expand...
I think the mainstream is utterly correct to treat legends and folklore as fiction until proven otherwise. Our culture has learned thru bitter experience that con artists are a huge problem, and never moreso than when they dress themselves up in a frock and call themself a priest, and start exploiting the poor and the credulous. I see AA as pandering to these con artists and their shabby tricks by being insufficiently critical of obvious BS. You should sit down with a properly read archaeologist and have them debunk an episode of AA or two for you. The lies AA tells are appalling, and the woo woo is atrocious, and it all feeds in to a conspiracy theory mentality that is completely socially destructive, as it fuels an anti-science mentality that winds up with sh!theels deciding not to wear masks and killing hundreds of thousands of people because they have politicised a medical emergency.
 
Jason Colavito reviews latest Von Daniken book.

War of the Gods: Alien Skulls, Underground Cities, and Fire from the Sky
Erich von Däniken | New Page Books | Sept. 2020 | 214 pages | ISBN: 1632651718 | $17.95
Picture


Years go by with the inevitable cycle of the seasons repeating their majestic rounds. After winter, summer. After summer, winter. And with the regularity of the season, so too does Erich von Däniken release a new book, and with the same repetition as the seasons. Each book is the same as all the books before, and each one begins with the ritual of pretending otherwise. War of the Gods, originally published in German 2018 but released in English for the first time this month, starts with a letter in which von Däniken (henceforth EVD) proclaims with great excitement news that he imagines will surprise his readers: “In this book, I present new findings!” Unfortunately, there is an ominous note: “But it is only possible by building on previous experiences.” Each winter brings a different snowstorm but you always know it will snow. So, too, do you know that whatever soupçon of new material appears in War of the Gods will be buried in a blizzard of recycling. He frequently refers to his own books, the books of guests on Ancient Aliens, and to claims made on the Ancient Aliens television show itself, recycling in an endless loop of previous claims tracing back to his own earliest efforts to recycle Morning of the Magicians to his own advantage.

The book opens with an utterly bizarre story that (a) I don’t believe is true and (b) is suspiciously timed to the popularity of a certain Netflix series. EVD claims that while on a tour of South America in 1988 a traveling companion died and he was escorted to the home of Pablo Escobar, who showed him an elongated human skull, declared it extraterrestrial, and made a big deal about its lack of sagittal sutures. That last point only became a major talking point among ancient astronaut theorists in the last few years, but—and this is important—scientists as far back as 1863 studied artificial cranial deformation and reported that in those cases there was “obliteration of the sagittal suture in the elongated skull.” It’s literally in the scientific literature, and it is no alien mystery, even if Pablo Escobar got off on thinking it one. EVD claims he turned down a later offer of an all-expenses-paid trip to Colombia on Escobar’s dime after discovering he was a brutal drug kingpin. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-war-of-the-gods-by-erich-von-daniken
 
All von Daniken knows it how to keep performing his schtick. Some people will buy any nonsense - they are the ones that allow this clown to make money.
 
Sharon Hill said:
All von Daniken knows it how to keep performing his schtick. Some people will buy any nonsense - they are the ones that allow this clown to make money.
Click to expand...

And you've never made any money out of it either? What's your fee to appear at a conference? You'd be a bit fucked if there were no Von Danikens' around.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top