The History Channel has aired this series since 2010, and when I mentioned to a colleague how I enjoyed Ben Vermeulen's "In den Beginne..." he gave me the first season on DVD.
Ancient Aliens sounds like a really interesting concept, but the way the series is just bludgeoning the viewer with piece after piece of evidence is just irking me. I don't mind the overly-American researchers (I'm looking at you, Giorgio "Poofy Hair" Tsoukalos!) that much, but they do get a bit on your nerves. Yes, I can see you're excited. Ok, seriously, I know you're excited. Godsbedamned will you please stop shouting into the camera! I get it! You're excited!
I'm now halfway through episode two "The Visitors", so I can't say anything about the rest of the first season, but here's my thoughts so far.
1. Ancient aircraft
Gold ornaments that might be aircrafts. And when you make a larger scale model of it and fit it with an engine, it actually flies. You're trying to tell me that some artist thousands of years ago went through the trouble to make a gold scale model of an aircraft? Form might define function, but sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one. It could just be a bead that looked pretty.
Also: you had to
add an engine. Please explain to me how you gloss over that particular bit of missing evidence. Refined fuel? Metallurgical know-how? Precise gears?
You're testing an hypothesis, and you're only testing whether your hypothesis
could be right. You never take into account that there might be more simple explanations that fit just as well. That's rubbing me the wrong way. How about testing other plausible explanations that might explain it in exactly the same way as you do these wild fantasies?
2.
PumapunkuPumapunku blew me away. Those giant blocks of granite, so precisely cut and carved. Those brilliantly straight lines. The trouble is: you're telling me that there's no way the primitive natives could have cut those stones these days, because there's nobody alive
today that would even take on the job. That's how difficult it would be.
But you're not giving me an explanation of how it could be done. Basically, what you're telling me is "We
won't do it today. So they
couldn't do it without the help of aliens and their advanced methods back then."
You're not giving a plausible explanation, because you gloss over the question "how could you carve these stones so precisely." And that's the question that lies at the base. If we know how to carve those dense, hard materials so precisely, we can say something (meaningful) about the tools used, and perhaps extrapolate whether ancient man had access to such tools, or whether they did need help from outsiders. Just saying "we can't do it today, so aliens did it" is probably the worst argument I've heard in a while.
I can't do my homework today. So aliens did it for me.
Completely following this train of thought over the horizon and down the slippery slope: how many ancient crafts have been lost to time? Take flint knapping, for example. The trade has been lost in the depths of time, but certain historians have developed it anew, and are still amazed by the things humans made back then, and how precise they could break the flint. We're not completely helpless as a race, and assuming that we couldn't have made things like Pumapunku on our own is an insult to our own inventiveness.
Pumapunku isn't the only place where this amazing skill of fitting stones precisely is displayed, either. It was a pretty common skill back then. We just use mortar because it's cheaper and faster.
3. The manna machine
Another amazing discovery. Israelites were banished to the desert for fourty years, where they survived on manna. Extrapolations prove that it is possible to build a machine which cultivates a specific algae that will allow humans to survive for longer periods of time. It requires nuclear energy, though, so that puts a serious crimp in the style of any civilisation using goat herding as a prime source of income. The theory is that aliens gave the Israelites the machine as a humanitarian gift so they would not perish.
If I remember my bible lessons correctly, it was God - who gave them the manna, the big Alien in the sky, that guy - who told them that because the Israelites had become sinful they had to stay in the desert for 40 years in the first place, wasn't it? Way to bind a people to you: first banish them to the desert and then give them the means to survive there.
And if these Aliens were so darned humanitarian, then why do we see signs of (human) sacrifice near the great big monuments of the time? Monuments that were, according to the Ancient Aliens series, created using tools of the aliens. Would the humanitarian Aliens allow humans to build things if they knew that human sacrifices were being performed there?
4. Great Pyramid of Giza = Power Plant
Giza pyramid. Amazing structure. How did they build it? Nobody knows. What was its function? Well, according to the Ancient Aliens fanatics, it was a giant power plant. Let's just gloss over the details of chambers filled with acids and things. According to the DVD, the power made by the Great Pyramid of Giza was beamed into space, or possibly distributed through the air like a Tesla coil was designed to do.
Refueling ancient alien spaceships by beaming power into space? Seems kind of cool. Is it worth the effort? I don't know. It sounds a lot more energy efficient than landing the thing, filling her up at the nearest (Nacza desert) spaceport, and taking off again.
Why would the Ancient Egyptians need electricity? Well, duh. To use their
Dendera lightbulbs, of course.
5. Lifting heavy blocks.
Mankind could never lift heavy blocks, like the ones used in Stonehenge.
Thanks to Twi linking me to
this video, I think we can prove we don't need aliens for this either. Or modern machines. Just wood, some sand, and a few thousands waterskins.
6. Where's the evidence?
If aliens really did visit us and give us technologies, there should be more traces of this. If the pyramid of Giza was a power plant and it did power 'modern' technologies, where are the remains of that? Wires? Metal alloys? And why would we lose these technologies over time? Why would the aliens leave us for thousands of years?
Wouldn't we create records all over the world that would document these things? If we can decipher the ancient clay tablets of Sumeria and interpret them to tell stories of aliens, why isn't there any more proof anywhere else? In India, it's apparantly accepted knowledge, so why aren't we cross-checking things?
X. In conclusion
I don't know exactly what to think of this series. The cheerful, nigh-ecstatic scientists are getting on my nerves. Especially because they wear pips of the "gold alien aircraft model" on their lapels. The way they try and force their "proven theories" down my throat irks me. The way they prove their theories is even worse; I'm not dumb, I'm not easily influenced, and I'd like to see them try and fail at proving their theories for a change. Or to try and test an alternative theory (what if humans actually did it themselves?) for a change.
The one-sidedness of their story is just too annoying.
On the other hand: what if... they were true? There's lots of things modern archeologists can't explain (yet). There are numerous cultures who believe that gods came from the sky. And it's never wrong to question the things that we are told, because even if it's futile, it might still exercise your brain.
The chance that we are the only living things in the universe is astronomically small, because the universe is a pretty big place. And even if we can't answer the question why intelligent beings would come visit stone-age people on another planet it could be entertaining to dwell on the thought they did. I'd personally go for the anthropological interest.
But I wouldn't accept these theories as chiseled-in-stone truths.
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