I had a conversation today where the other party was feeling a little guilty about going off on a rampage at a casual question. The person asked what he thought about ancient astronauts and he told her that people who forward those hypotheses or believe in them really pisses him off because they are saying, in effect, brown people couldn’t have built/done those things back then so it must have been extraterrestrials doing it for them. He apologized to the questioner but, being Mexican, she said she’d never thought of it that way and it was food for thought.
I haven’t thought about the subject for years so I did a quick skim of the Wiki article, and he’s right. Except for von Däniken mentioning Stonehenge and Childress Ireland, there’s no evidence presented of anything in Europe. It’s all Biblical (Semites), Egypt, India, Mesoamerica, and Easter Island.
So, are people who say, “They couldn’t do it by themselves,” racist, however unconsciously?
No simply because as you said people bring up Stonehenge all the time as well as being a structure no humans could build, I remember hearing so many times about how those stones were “too massive to move with primitive technology”. I used to read a lot of ancient aliens books and Stonehenge is always mentioned.
“Was the black race a failure and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then programme a white or a yellow race?”
“I quite understand that I am playing with dynamite if I ask whether the extraterrestrials ‘allotted’ specific tasks to the basic races from the very beginning, i.e. programmed them with special abilities.”
But yes, besides the outright racists like von Daniken, in general, the tone of pseudoarchaeology is absolutely racist.
Stonehenge is sometimes given as an exception. But it stands out for that very reason, and it’s died out in ancient astronaut circles because its construction is pretty well covered at this point, down to where the rocks are sourced from and the wooden precursors.
Maybe sometimes, probably not most of the time? I mean, people who believe in conspiracy theories don’t usually think through all of the logical implications of their beliefs; that is why they are people who believe in conspiracy theories. My guess is that for most of them, it’s some combination of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” plus a generalized desire to Know Secret Things or to thumb one’s nose at the experts.
I think there is an implicit racism, based on ignorance. I certainly wouldn’t label the person as racist, it’s at a subconscious / cultural level.
If you’re generally ignorant of history you might believe some region of the world is simply “primitive” and then when you learn of various artefacts and great structures, it seems incongruous. It’s this ignorance that helps an idea like this to spread.
Anyway, rather than racism I would focus on the lack of skepticism and understanding of standards of evidence that brings someone to believe such ideas.
I would say that the idea is definitely racist, but that the person who holds the idea might or might not be. Though obviously, racist ideas have more appeal to people who are racist. And of course, racism isn’t a binary thing: People can be racist to greater or lesser degrees.
To me, ancient astronaut believers (humans couldn’t have built that) don’t seem as racist as the Atlantis believers (brown humans couldn’t have built that). Try Googling ‘Graham Hancock’, who is probably the most well-known Atlantis proponent currently, and the word ‘racism’ for links to a whole lot of discussions on the subject. Hancock’s recent and controversial ‘Ancient Apocalypse’ series on Netflix presented yet another rehash of the idea that a master race’s lost civilization came up with all the great advances of antiquity, and then brought their ideas to all the other cultures that couldn’t possibly have invented such things on their own. Why did Netflix air this ‘documentary’ that so many archaeologists and historians say is total baloney? Is it a coincidence that Graham Hancock’s son, Sean Hancock, is “senior manager of unscripted originals” at Netflix?
The Easter Island Moai were created between 1100 and 1600 AD, and are used as examples of Ancient Astronaut artifacts. Yet no one claimed that Roman concrete, much older and which for centuries has confounded scientists for its long lasting properties came from a similar source. I think the AA belief has its roots in racism. Whether current proponents are aware is another story.
European culture is terrified of the fact that historically technological knowledge and scientific progress is not always an unbroken line. The Middle Ages notwithstanding, we think Western Civilization is something that will continue to expand and persist into infinity, despite evidence of almost countless civilizations that did not. How did those great civilizations fail to progress. It’s simple. Someone else did it for them, and when their benefactors abandoned them, it all fell apart.
I once saw an Ancient Aliens episode (don’t judge me - they often have it on in the breakroom at work, and it almost always causes me to roll my eyes so far into the back of my head as to see gray matter) where they suggested Einstein was inspired by aliens to come up with the theory of relativity.
Anyway, I once took a tour of Teotihuacan outside Mexico City. The guide was very adamant that while no one is quite sure how the pyramids there were built, one thing that is known for sure is that it was NOT aliens. So, I’m guessing the question comes up pretty often there.
First, put me in the group with @Mijin and @Chronos. It’s racism out of ignorance rather that malice and it’s proponents need to be encouraged to look at their unexamined assumptions more than they need to be condemned. The whole idea that everyone either is or is not racist and that any accusation of racism must be defended against rather that thought about is pernicious.
But, second, the belief that ancient Egyptian/Mayans/Celts are helpless to undertake large projects by themselves is another “ism” in the same class as racism.
Oh, I do that in plenty, but until yesterday’s conversation I’d never considered the racial side of it, possibly due to the baked in racism we have here in the US.
That was precisely the fellow in the conversation said. “Nobody says the Greeks or the Romans couldn’t have built the Acropolis or the temple of Hercules with all those columns by themselves.”
Is that because their construction methods were heavily documented, while the other megastructures weren’t? Were there any mysteries in Roman architecture?
There have been ‘ancient astronaut’ theories about many ancient cultures of every race. Atlantis, pyramids in the new world, relics from Greece like the Antikythera mechanism, Stonehenge, etc.
I feel like it’s just a manifestation of a set of beliefs or assumptions where ‘people in the past were ignorant/uncultured/savages’. I think it’s a variety of racism - that is, one that is inflicted upon who are already dead. Not sure if that makes a difference to it being racism, but I suppose it gives it a different effect (the dead do not experience injury).
Yes, these ancient alien ideas are bound up and inseparable from racism. Below is an article that gives a summary of much of that history, including noted racists like Andrew Jackson and the Nazis.
Even if people start from a non-racist view, and are just interested in the ideas, any online “research” into ancient aliens will quickly lead to alt-right and white supremacist websites.
Archaeology itself was not a solid science until well into the 20th century. Most so-called archaeologists were wealthy self-taught amateurs who went out to gather objects rather than research peoples.
The period overlapped with the rise of racial pseudoscience, during which anatomists decreed that brain size correlated with proximity to Aryanness, and brown and black peoples - siloed into “races” - had smaller brains and less capacity to learn, even if supplied with schooling.
Yet a third influence was the schooling that did exist, as least for elites in Britain and other countries, tracing western civilization’s superiority back to Greek and Roman ancestors. Egypt was allowed in because of the undeniable evidence of the pyramids but the population in the 19th century had severely regressed, making them easy for Napoleon to conquer. Similar logic prevailed over the rest of the world. England’s colonies included once-great ancient civilization like India and Persia, and, for all purposes, China.
Looking at the difference between modern-day abilities and the wonders being dug up and put on display in western museums, and adding in the current-day theories of white biological superiority, made it easy to logically conclude that the creators of the wonders had to be a different set of people than the present inhabitants. The UFO craze after WWII gave the perfect explanation. Aliens. Big-brained aliens with superior technologies.
As always with conspiracy theories, that more rational audiences could find several thousand holes in that explanation gained no traction. A book full of Gish gallop conquered all doubts.
There is no question at all that the roots of ancient astronaut theories lie in the overtly racist past. “Those people couldn’t have done it” hit every stereotype at a time when almost all elites in western “civilization” believed in a hierarchy with themselves at the top. Since most people today know absolutely nothing about history, they presumably know nothing of this history either. I wouldn’t let them off the hook for this ignorance. The theories hit their own sets of stereotypes just as well even if they can’t articulate to the level of an ism.
And prior to space aliens, the unknown superior intelligence responsible for the impressive ancient buildings was simply white people who had made there way to that part of the world in ancient times.