God and Nature Fall 2021
The Ugly Origins of “Ancient Aliens” |
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By Philip Cottraux
Ancient Aliens is currently History Channel’s top-rated show. The online world looks no better: videos about alleged prehistoric advanced civilizations like Atlantis get much more attention on YouTube than any program about real archeology. The channel Bright Insight, for example, currently has over 102 million views. Sadly, real academics countering this phenomenon are in short supply. But while this obsession may seem like harmless fun on the surface, the reality of where it originates is anything but.
There are two theories I’m going to tackle here. Versions of the first one vary, but they generally claim that the human race has amnesia. In these stories there was a period in the ancient past when mankind was almost as technologically advanced as it is today. Then, during the Younger-Dryas extinction event about 11,000 years ago, an asteroid reduced humanity to the Stone Age, forcing it to rebuild from scratch.
Ancient Aliens is currently History Channel’s top-rated show. The online world looks no better: videos about alleged prehistoric advanced civilizations like Atlantis get much more attention on YouTube than any program about real archeology. The channel Bright Insight, for example, currently has over 102 million views. Sadly, real academics countering this phenomenon are in short supply. But while this obsession may seem like harmless fun on the surface, the reality of where it originates is anything but.
There are two theories I’m going to tackle here. Versions of the first one vary, but they generally claim that the human race has amnesia. In these stories there was a period in the ancient past when mankind was almost as technologically advanced as it is today. Then, during the Younger-Dryas extinction event about 11,000 years ago, an asteroid reduced humanity to the Stone Age, forcing it to rebuild from scratch.
"Himmler’s Ahnenerbe presents a perfect example of pseudoscience." |
The second theory replaces advanced prehistoric humans with extraterrestrials, claiming that the technology needed to build the pyramids and Mesoamerican structures could not have come from Earth. These ancient astronauts gifted us with scientific breakthroughs and were worshiped as gods; monuments like pyramids, ziggurats, or the Nazca lines in Peru were markers showing the UFOs where to land.
If I try to debunk these theories directly, I’ll end up down a rabbit hole of crystal skulls and carvings that look like flying saucers. My approach is to instead expose their dark history.
Scientific racism is a broad concept covering many different nineteenth century movements, the most famous of which was Social Darwinism, based on misapplying ideas of fitness and selection to human society. To be fair to Charles Darwin, he never supported any such thing, and that term was coined by Herbert Spencer, a follower of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Spencer was already using Lamarckian evolution to promote racism before Darwin ever published The Origin of Species. Racism, which had arisen from a need to rationalize slavery, similarly rationalized British imperialism by portraying it as blessing the “savages” in South Africa, India, and Australia with “progress,” even if that meant brutally subjugating them.
Colonialist racism and social Darwinism were so pervasive throughout this period that few scientific fields were immune from their influence. Archaeology was no exception. As the field was in its infancy, European archeologists approached digging up the past in other parts of the world with a Eurocentric mindset. When these explorers discovered ruins like the pyramids, they thought that such incredible feats of architecture couldn’t have possibly been built by the “primitive” cultures (i.e. dark-skinned people) in whose lands they were found. They imagined there must have been an advanced race of whites present to help the Egyptians or the Mayans—and the idea of a technologically superior prehistoric civilization was born. (Note that impressive European structures like the Colosseum or the Parthenon are never seen as needing such explanations.)
Across the Atlantic, the U.S. also fell victim to this thinking. In order to justify the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Andrew Jackson made references to a commonly believed archeological myth at the time that the complex mound structures found across the eastern United States had been built not by the ancestors of Native Americans but by a “lost race” of tall people, likely Caucasian, who were later exterminated by “the existing savage tribes.” Jackson thus saw any atrocities as justified: the white man was just taking back land that was originally his. A modern version of the same myth called the Solutrean Hypothesis continues to be believed, largely by white supremacists, despite DNA evidence now unequivocally linking any prehistoric remains that have been claimed to belong to this “lost race” to modern-day Native Americans.
A current proponent of the ancient civilization theory is Graham Hancock, a British writer who has built an entire career on pseudo-archaeology. Among other things, he claims the Sphinx is tens of thousands of years older than originally thought, every ancient ruin and myth points to Atlantis, and, of course, Native Americans weren’t the first to arrive in the Western hemisphere. Hancock frequently plays the classic pseudoscientist game of depicting himself as a David taking on the Goliath of mainstream archaeology.
The epic tale of an advanced civilization that was destroyed in a cataclysm, its ruins on the bottom of the ocean waiting to be discovered, is certainly tantalizing. Atlantis was first described by Plato in two of his writings, Timaeus and Critias. But prior to 19th century America, historians did not take the story literally. In the greater context, Plato was clearly using a fictional city to illustrate a philosophical point, as he was prone to do. The idea that Atlantis might be real started with a Minnesotan Congressman named Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly had a mediocre career in politics but saw great success as a science fiction writer, producing fantastical books in the same vein as Edgar Rice Burroughs or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His 1882 book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World was an instant best-seller. But was there any truth to it? None whatsoever, any more than The Lost World could be used as a real template to find living dinosaurs in South America.
While the late 19th century saw versions of this myth become embedded in small esoteric spiritual movements like Theosophy, it truly roared to life in the 1930s thanks to the regime of Adolph Hitler.
The Indiana Jones movies were right that the Nazis were interested in ancient artifacts. But their mission wasn’t to find mystical superweapons like the Ark of the Covenant; it was to prove the superiority of the Aryan race. The Ahnenerbe (“ancestral heritage”) was a group of scientists and scholars headed by SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who took the idea of Aryan superiority to new levels. In this ideology, Nordic Germans were created by the pagan gods of Norse mythology, and while the rest of Paleolithic humanity were primitive cave-people, these semi-divine ancestors invented civilization and traveled around the world, building every structure from the pyramids to the Babylonian ziggurats to the South American platform temples. The Ahnenerbe’s job was to find evidence for this imaginary ancient people.
German archaeologists faced a crisis: they could join and promote insane ideas, or risk being sent to concentration camps. Many quietly retired. Most, like so many German citizens, reluctantly joined and followed orders. While no archaeologist directly took part in the Nazi atrocities, they did feed a propaganda machine that culminated in genocide.
Nazis meeting their just rewards after the war gets much publicity, but for every Nazi who faced justice, a hundred others melted back into the population. One of the Nazis who escaped justice was a propagandist named Wilhelm Utermann. Even with the assistance of Google, I could find very little on Utermann, possibly because he continued working under assumed names to avoid attention. Aliases included Wilhelm Roggersdorf, Utz Utermann, and Mathias Racker. In 1968, he was hired to edit a book that repackaged the Ahnenerbe’s ideas for the Space Age, replacing “ancient Aryans” with the more palatable “ancient Aliens.” That book was Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken.
Von Däniken was a Swiss hotel manager with a history of jail time for fraud. He had no education in archeology, but his book was released during the perfect cultural zeitgeist. Spaceflight was a new reality, and the human race was facing the existential dread that we may be alone in the universe. People started seeing “unidentified flying objects” and “humanoid creatures” everywhere. The mythology around Area 51 began. While the idea of extraterrestrial visitors had already been popular due to books like War of the Worlds, the height of Cold War paranoia truly gave birth to the UFO craze.
Chariots of the Gods? has sold over 70 million copies worldwide. Von Däniken’s 1979 follow-up, Signs of the Gods?, added eugenics to the alien visitor theory, proposing that extraterrestrials also designed our DNA and gave some ethnicities superior genes. “Was the black race a failure,” he asked, “and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then programme a white or yellow race?” Von Däniken, now 86, continues to work as one of the producers of the TV show Ancient Aliens, and even in 2021, when people can easily be “canceled” for past insensitive comments, few stop to consider his lengthy repertoire of racism.
But the real issue goes beyond Nazis, Atlantis, and “scientific racism.” It’s the simple definition of real science versus pseudoscience. It isn’t even about the degree or education one has; some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs have been from amateur enthusiasts, and there are PhD graduates who promote utter quackery. It’s not even about the claims one makes. It’s about one thing only: method.
Setting aside their evil beliefs, Himmler’s Ahnenerbe presents a perfect example of pseudoscience. Their methodology was the same used by modern flat-earthers: they started with their conclusion, and then cherry-picked evidence to get the desired results. They tried to prove an idea. Real science requires trying disprove one’s own ideas, and only theories that can withstand rigorous testing become scientific consensus.
This basic understanding could spare the world much turmoil.
References:
“Ahnenerbe.” Wikipedia.org. Last edited July 24, 2021. Accessed July 30, 2021. <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnenerbe>
Benoit, Julien. “Racism Is Behind Outlandish Theories about Africa’s Ancient Architecture.” Theconversation.com. September 17, 2017. Accessed July 30, 2021. <https://theconversation.com/racism-is-behind-outlandish-theories-about-africas-ancient-architecture-82898>
Bond, Sarah E. “Pseudoarchaeology and the Racism Behind Ancient Aliens.” Hyperallergic.com. November 13, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2021. <https://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-racism-behind-ancient-aliens/>
Bowker, John (ed.). Religions: Cambridge Illustrated History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2002, page 10.
Bowler, Peter J. Darwinism. Twayne Publishers, New York, NY, 1993, pages 4, 8, 62-65, 76-77, 99.
Colavito, Jason. Faking History: Essays on Aliens, Atlantis, Monsters, and More. Albany, NY, 2013, pages 1-11, 67-75, 130-137, 167-173, 257-268.
Hudson, David, Jr. The Handy History Answer Book (Third Edition). Visible Ink, Detroit, MI, 2013, pages 83-84.
“Josef Mengele (Holocaust Encyclopedia Online).” Encyclopedia.ushmm.org. Last edited April 2, 2021. Accessed July 30, 2021. <https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/josef-mengele>
Olmstead, Kathryn. Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2009, pages 51, 183-185, 197, 199, 203
Roberts, J.M. A Short History of the World. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 1993, pages 53-54, 262-263, 373-374.
“Wilhelm Utermann.” Wikipedia.org. Last edited May 30, 2021. Accessed July 30, 2021. <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Utermann>
“Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.” Wikipedia.org. Last edited July 23, 2021. Accessed July 23, 2021. <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis#:~:text=Graham%Hancock’s%202015%20pseudoarchaeology,with%20that%20of%20other%20peoples.>
Zaitchik, Alexander. “Close Encounters of the Racist Kind.” Splc.org. January 2, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2021. <https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/01/02/close-encounters-racist-kind>
Philip Cottraux is a Pentecostal Bible teacher, writer, and author. He has a passion for educating people about the Bible and challenging them to grow closer to God. His mission is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ by combating the spiritual lukewarmth plaguing today's church.
If I try to debunk these theories directly, I’ll end up down a rabbit hole of crystal skulls and carvings that look like flying saucers. My approach is to instead expose their dark history.
Scientific racism is a broad concept covering many different nineteenth century movements, the most famous of which was Social Darwinism, based on misapplying ideas of fitness and selection to human society. To be fair to Charles Darwin, he never supported any such thing, and that term was coined by Herbert Spencer, a follower of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Spencer was already using Lamarckian evolution to promote racism before Darwin ever published The Origin of Species. Racism, which had arisen from a need to rationalize slavery, similarly rationalized British imperialism by portraying it as blessing the “savages” in South Africa, India, and Australia with “progress,” even if that meant brutally subjugating them.
Colonialist racism and social Darwinism were so pervasive throughout this period that few scientific fields were immune from their influence. Archaeology was no exception. As the field was in its infancy, European archeologists approached digging up the past in other parts of the world with a Eurocentric mindset. When these explorers discovered ruins like the pyramids, they thought that such incredible feats of architecture couldn’t have possibly been built by the “primitive” cultures (i.e. dark-skinned people) in whose lands they were found. They imagined there must have been an advanced race of whites present to help the Egyptians or the Mayans—and the idea of a technologically superior prehistoric civilization was born. (Note that impressive European structures like the Colosseum or the Parthenon are never seen as needing such explanations.)
Across the Atlantic, the U.S. also fell victim to this thinking. In order to justify the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Andrew Jackson made references to a commonly believed archeological myth at the time that the complex mound structures found across the eastern United States had been built not by the ancestors of Native Americans but by a “lost race” of tall people, likely Caucasian, who were later exterminated by “the existing savage tribes.” Jackson thus saw any atrocities as justified: the white man was just taking back land that was originally his. A modern version of the same myth called the Solutrean Hypothesis continues to be believed, largely by white supremacists, despite DNA evidence now unequivocally linking any prehistoric remains that have been claimed to belong to this “lost race” to modern-day Native Americans.
A current proponent of the ancient civilization theory is Graham Hancock, a British writer who has built an entire career on pseudo-archaeology. Among other things, he claims the Sphinx is tens of thousands of years older than originally thought, every ancient ruin and myth points to Atlantis, and, of course, Native Americans weren’t the first to arrive in the Western hemisphere. Hancock frequently plays the classic pseudoscientist game of depicting himself as a David taking on the Goliath of mainstream archaeology.
The epic tale of an advanced civilization that was destroyed in a cataclysm, its ruins on the bottom of the ocean waiting to be discovered, is certainly tantalizing. Atlantis was first described by Plato in two of his writings, Timaeus and Critias. But prior to 19th century America, historians did not take the story literally. In the greater context, Plato was clearly using a fictional city to illustrate a philosophical point, as he was prone to do. The idea that Atlantis might be real started with a Minnesotan Congressman named Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly had a mediocre career in politics but saw great success as a science fiction writer, producing fantastical books in the same vein as Edgar Rice Burroughs or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His 1882 book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World was an instant best-seller. But was there any truth to it? None whatsoever, any more than The Lost World could be used as a real template to find living dinosaurs in South America.
While the late 19th century saw versions of this myth become embedded in small esoteric spiritual movements like Theosophy, it truly roared to life in the 1930s thanks to the regime of Adolph Hitler.
The Indiana Jones movies were right that the Nazis were interested in ancient artifacts. But their mission wasn’t to find mystical superweapons like the Ark of the Covenant; it was to prove the superiority of the Aryan race. The Ahnenerbe (“ancestral heritage”) was a group of scientists and scholars headed by SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who took the idea of Aryan superiority to new levels. In this ideology, Nordic Germans were created by the pagan gods of Norse mythology, and while the rest of Paleolithic humanity were primitive cave-people, these semi-divine ancestors invented civilization and traveled around the world, building every structure from the pyramids to the Babylonian ziggurats to the South American platform temples. The Ahnenerbe’s job was to find evidence for this imaginary ancient people.
German archaeologists faced a crisis: they could join and promote insane ideas, or risk being sent to concentration camps. Many quietly retired. Most, like so many German citizens, reluctantly joined and followed orders. While no archaeologist directly took part in the Nazi atrocities, they did feed a propaganda machine that culminated in genocide.
Nazis meeting their just rewards after the war gets much publicity, but for every Nazi who faced justice, a hundred others melted back into the population. One of the Nazis who escaped justice was a propagandist named Wilhelm Utermann. Even with the assistance of Google, I could find very little on Utermann, possibly because he continued working under assumed names to avoid attention. Aliases included Wilhelm Roggersdorf, Utz Utermann, and Mathias Racker. In 1968, he was hired to edit a book that repackaged the Ahnenerbe’s ideas for the Space Age, replacing “ancient Aryans” with the more palatable “ancient Aliens.” That book was Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken.
Von Däniken was a Swiss hotel manager with a history of jail time for fraud. He had no education in archeology, but his book was released during the perfect cultural zeitgeist. Spaceflight was a new reality, and the human race was facing the existential dread that we may be alone in the universe. People started seeing “unidentified flying objects” and “humanoid creatures” everywhere. The mythology around Area 51 began. While the idea of extraterrestrial visitors had already been popular due to books like War of the Worlds, the height of Cold War paranoia truly gave birth to the UFO craze.
Chariots of the Gods? has sold over 70 million copies worldwide. Von Däniken’s 1979 follow-up, Signs of the Gods?, added eugenics to the alien visitor theory, proposing that extraterrestrials also designed our DNA and gave some ethnicities superior genes. “Was the black race a failure,” he asked, “and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then programme a white or yellow race?” Von Däniken, now 86, continues to work as one of the producers of the TV show Ancient Aliens, and even in 2021, when people can easily be “canceled” for past insensitive comments, few stop to consider his lengthy repertoire of racism.
But the real issue goes beyond Nazis, Atlantis, and “scientific racism.” It’s the simple definition of real science versus pseudoscience. It isn’t even about the degree or education one has; some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs have been from amateur enthusiasts, and there are PhD graduates who promote utter quackery. It’s not even about the claims one makes. It’s about one thing only: method.
Setting aside their evil beliefs, Himmler’s Ahnenerbe presents a perfect example of pseudoscience. Their methodology was the same used by modern flat-earthers: they started with their conclusion, and then cherry-picked evidence to get the desired results. They tried to prove an idea. Real science requires trying disprove one’s own ideas, and only theories that can withstand rigorous testing become scientific consensus.
This basic understanding could spare the world much turmoil.
References:
“Ahnenerbe.” Wikipedia.org. Last edited July 24, 2021. Accessed July 30, 2021. <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnenerbe>
Benoit, Julien. “Racism Is Behind Outlandish Theories about Africa’s Ancient Architecture.” Theconversation.com. September 17, 2017. Accessed July 30, 2021. <https://theconversation.com/racism-is-behind-outlandish-theories-about-africas-ancient-architecture-82898>
Bond, Sarah E. “Pseudoarchaeology and the Racism Behind Ancient Aliens.” Hyperallergic.com. November 13, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2021. <https://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-racism-behind-ancient-aliens/>
Bowker, John (ed.). Religions: Cambridge Illustrated History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2002, page 10.
Bowler, Peter J. Darwinism. Twayne Publishers, New York, NY, 1993, pages 4, 8, 62-65, 76-77, 99.
Colavito, Jason. Faking History: Essays on Aliens, Atlantis, Monsters, and More. Albany, NY, 2013, pages 1-11, 67-75, 130-137, 167-173, 257-268.
Hudson, David, Jr. The Handy History Answer Book (Third Edition). Visible Ink, Detroit, MI, 2013, pages 83-84.
“Josef Mengele (Holocaust Encyclopedia Online).” Encyclopedia.ushmm.org. Last edited April 2, 2021. Accessed July 30, 2021. <https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/josef-mengele>
Olmstead, Kathryn. Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2009, pages 51, 183-185, 197, 199, 203
Roberts, J.M. A Short History of the World. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 1993, pages 53-54, 262-263, 373-374.
“Wilhelm Utermann.” Wikipedia.org. Last edited May 30, 2021. Accessed July 30, 2021. <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Utermann>
“Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.” Wikipedia.org. Last edited July 23, 2021. Accessed July 23, 2021. <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis#:~:text=Graham%Hancock’s%202015%20pseudoarchaeology,with%20that%20of%20other%20peoples.>
Zaitchik, Alexander. “Close Encounters of the Racist Kind.” Splc.org. January 2, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2021. <https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/01/02/close-encounters-racist-kind>
Philip Cottraux is a Pentecostal Bible teacher, writer, and author. He has a passion for educating people about the Bible and challenging them to grow closer to God. His mission is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ by combating the spiritual lukewarmth plaguing today's church.