Ancient astronaut believers: Are they racist?

In My Humble Opinion
81

Well, the chief issue there is that Roman aqueducts were heavily documented in linguistic and cultural media familiar to western investigators. When these same western investigators happened across ancient monuments in foreign lands whose cultures they were much less familiar with (and whose people they were somewhat predisposed to consider “primitive” or “savage” anyway), that’s when their naive credulity about “alien influences” kicked in.

Early modern Polynesian peoples had narrative and cultural traditions about their ancient moai statues, just as early modern Europeans had narrative and cultural traditions about Roman building. It’s not the locals who start these stories about their material heritage being the work of some kind of alien magicians.

What makes an ancient structure “look like” “obvious human engineering” versus some inexplicable mysterious construct is mostly just the observer’s cultural preconceptions and background knowledge.

82

@DesertDog put up a link to Wiki on Ancient Astronauts in the OP. Discourse shows that exactly one person has clicked on it, so I’m throwing it out there again.

The page shows both the breadth of the claims and the lengths claimants have gone to to find “evidence” to prove that these structures or artifacts are objectively impossible for ancient humans to have been made. Many of the claims are about obvious human engineering much newer than the Roman aqueducts but not part of standard Greco-Roman western civilization. All of them, I believe, are the works of brown people.

Erich von Däniken wrote his incredibly popular, bestselling Chariots of the Gods in 1968. His claims therefore have been floating in the public stew of ideas for 55 years, putting them within the adult reading years of almost everybody alive. Though not the first with these claims, his book spawned a vast infrastructure of books, tv shows, “documentaries,” and other media. All of them owe whatever influence they may have to a Swiss crackpot fraudster who embezzled the money used to research the book, gave no previous writer on the subject credit, and whose utterly invented historical falsehoods “constitute the ultimate in racism,” according to John Flenley and Paul Bahn.

No amount of twisting will make them claims non-racist. If you espouse them you are slighting more than half the human race.

83

So were the Egyptian monuments and their construction:

84

Mostly Von Daniken’s shocking racial views, which are also quite idiosyncratic as well as being idiotic.

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Racism and these theories of Ancient Astronauts are both based on ignorance of some pretty evident facts about the intelligence of one’s fellow man, whether they be of a different ethnicity or of a different era.

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Jews can be white or brown depending on what is most useful to the person making the argument at that time. I don’t say that to be funny, but Jews seem to occupy an odd place on our minority oppression/oppressor scale.

87

Here in Arkansas just outside of Little Rock we have a place called Toltec Mounds. It’s called the Plum Bayou Mounds Acheological State Park now but it used to be called Toltec Mounds. You might not know a lot about the Toltecs, but if you know anything about them you know they were in Mexico and not so far north as Arkansas. The culture that built the mounds, called the Plumb Bayou people, flourished in the area from the 7th through 11th centuries and were not the same group that white settlers found in the area in the 18th and 19th centuries. As far as I know, we don’t know what the Plumb Bayou people called themselves or even what happened to them.

For whatever reason, someone ascribed the mounds to the Toltec culture and the name stuck even though most archeologist at the time figured out the ancestors of the modern tribes must have built it. I’ve never heard any theories about ancient aliens with this one, perhaps it’s because a series of dirt mound just isn’t as impressive as a big pyramid.

88

I know they’ve gone after the Serpent Mound, being the most visually striking. I assume all other mounds are tangentially maligned.

In any case, as noted the alien angle is a new thing. White purple have assumed Vikings, the lost tribes of Israel, Atlaneans, or basically anyone other than indigenous people since the 1700s.

89

As a Jew, when folks ask me if I’m white, I typically reply that I can pass.

90

Stonehenge was already old when the Celts arrived in Britain, so those cultures that build Stonehenge that disappeared were considered by guys like Von Daniken as not as “civilized” as the new arrivals. Not too hard for guys like Daniken to make old cultures to be “uncivilized” and incapable of doing that kind of work. If not racist, then it is IMHO a bigoted thing to do.

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The aqueducts are also much newer than the pyramids - the pyramids were at least as ancient to the Romans as the aqueducts are to us. Why is it so surprising that there’s so much more of a difference in their level of documentation?

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Whereas the first pyramids predate Stonehenge…

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No wonder when the followers of Von Daniken made a museum about his “discoveries” and the findings of other crackpots; called Mystery Park in Europe, a critic from the Swiss Academy of Sciences called it a “Cultural Chernobyl”!.

94

The earliest part of Stonehenge, a ditch and bank, predate the pyramids. The large standing stones came along later. Speaking of standing stones, there are menhirs and dolmen found throughout western Europe that go back much further.

95

Curly: “Hey! I resemble that remark!”

96

Just a quick google for Romans and aliens:

Ancient Aliens: Extraterrestrials Build the Sacred Temple of Jupiter (Season 18)

I’ll stop there. It goes on,and on.

97

Four cites.

Reading the first one, “Drake utilized over fifty writers of antiquity and scrutinized their main works through a UFO ‘lens.’”

This says nothing about architecture and construction used as “proof” of ancient alien contact with Romans. It appears to be putting together “UFO-sounding” stories from ancient mythology and saying they sound just like some extraterrestrial phenomenon.

The second cite says “This book is about the possible connection between Romans and aliens. It is a fascinating read and will leave you wondering what the future may hold.”

Certainly nothing mentioned about architecture or construction. Unless you can cite the book itself, I don’t think really addresses the OP in relation to the Romans.

The fourth cite is a book that “might be the most convincing and evocative rendering of an ancient society (in all its alien-ness and sometimes disgusting-ness) that I have ever come across.”

So, about the alien-ness of that culture in relation to ours, not about extraterrestrial contact with Romans.

The third cite is kind of interesting, in that it does deal with a large constructed piece of monumental architecture in the MIddle East. It seems to focus on a set of stones that formed the platform on which the Roman temple was built, though it mentions that many previous cultures had used the site.

So then at 3:27 of the video it says “But if the platform at Baalbek was constructed thousands of years before the Romans arrived in the Bekaa Valley…”

So, the most relevant cite here says that the Romans didn’t construct the megalithic “proof of alien construction” part of the monument - that the stones, in all their immovable, can’t-put-a-piece-of-paper-between-them majesty, were there before the Romans arrived. And since the people living there at the time were certainly more primitive and swarthy, it must have been ancient aliens who did it for them, right?

You had a previous cite in this thread about Ezekiel’s “wheel within a wheel” which, again, is more related to the first cite you give in your post - connections between ancient writings and our modern concept of aliens - and less about the OP which focused more on monumental architecture and construction. The “literary criticism” tropes of ancient astronaut “thought” generally aren’t given the same level of definitiveness in terms of proof, in what ancient astronaut literature I’ve happened to read, as near as I can remember.

So I’d still have to conclude that the OP idea “Ancient astronaut proponents don’t cite Roman monumental architecture as evidence of alien intervention” is not refuted by your cites.

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No, but they do cite Stonehenge and Avebury.

99

Dude, you didn’t actually get started.

Exactly. I don’t see how anybody who had bothered to read beyond the five words of that review title could possibly imagine that Voetmann’s fictionalized biography of Pliny the Elder was in any way relevant to alternative-history claims about extraterrestrials building Roman monuments. :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

100

Not all ancient astronaut believers!!!

I read Chariots of the Gods and a followup book when I was a kid. I also read a de-bunking of the same. When it was pointed out that the Nazca lines, that von Däniken hypothesized were inter-stellar aircraft runways, were generally about a foot wide, it began to occur to me that not all published authors had a clue about what they were talking about.

I recall that the debunking of Chariots briefly discussed some of the implications of the theory as well as the blinkered views of its proponents. Here’s Carl Sagan’s introduction to a prominent debunking book of the 1970s:

Essentially, von Daniken’s argument is that our ancestors were too stupid to create the most impressive surviving ancient architectural and artistic works. But people hundreds or thousands of years ago were in no significant way genetically different from people today. They had the same hopes and aspirations, organizational skills, and intellectual and artistic abilities. What is more, close inspections of von Daniken’s work show a persistent suppression of the abundant archaeological evidence…

The popularity of the Von Daniken must, I think, be theological in origin… At just this moment arises the beguiling doctrine that an all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent creatures have in the past and will one day in the future come out of the sky and save us from ourselves.

The word “racism” doesn’t occur in the book, but is partly implied I think by the assumption of stupid ancestors. Overall though, I’d tend to credit the theological explanations over the bigoted ones, since there are more direct ways of expressing prejudice than pointing to fake mysteries.