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Stop Spewing Ancient Aliens' Racist Theories

Can we please not rewrite history to take away the agency of the people who made it?
Stop Spewing Ancient Aliens' Racist Theories
Credit: Stockbym - Shutterstock

You don’t need me to tell you that the Ancient Aliens series, which somehow airs on a network called History, is utter bullshit. Its whole gimmick is that it’s silly and “just entertainment,” and yes, probably most viewers watch it that way. But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about what’s layered just underneath the silliness: a lot of racist bullshit.

Ancient Aliens is careful to emphasize that “some people: are saying what if aliens built the pyramids, not that the show itself is claiming it’s true. It’s just playing devil’s advocate, you know. In doing so, it interviews experts, uses lots of stock footage, and recycles old theories. And there are plenty of discredited theories to choose from—many of them created explicitly to prove a racist point.

Ancient alien theories only work if you think indigenous people couldn’t have built impressive things

Even before people started ascribing ancient wonders to aliens, there was plenty of speculation by Europeans about how non-European architectural marvels might have been built. These include not just the pyramids in Europe, but stone works elsewhere in Africa, pyramids in Central America, massive earthworks in North America, and more. Anytime it wasn’t immediately obvious how something was built, it became a “mystery.”

Meanwhile, European monuments don’t tend to get this treatment. Stonehenge, maybe, but not too many others. The concrete of ancient Rome was made with engineering secrets that have only recently been rediscovered, for example, but “how did they build the Colosseum?” was never a thing in pop culture the way “how did they build the pyramids?” has been.

It sure seems like the underlying idea was that white people couldn’t believe that indigenous peoples of color might have built complicated structures. For example, when Euroamericans found impressive earthworks in various parts of North America, they postulated the existence of an ancient, extinct race they called Mound Builders, who must have created them.

While the creators of the mounds may not have been the same indigenous people who were living in or near those locations at the time, there was no scientific reason to believe that the Mound Builders would have been an entirely different type of person. But race theory was hot at the time, and it was both politically convenient and academically trendy to position modern native Americans as a distinct, inferior race from Europeans and from anyone else who could have built cool shit like those mounds.

And it wasn’t just this one little theory about a group of Mound Builders—several thinkers of the time claimed there was a pure or superior race that traveled the globe, creating everything we recognize as good about civilization, before vanishing from the Earth. The Nazis were really into one version of this theory (the Aryans being their name for the pure ancestors).

The Southern Poverty Law Center explains here how these theories all blur together—mound builders, Aryans coming from Atlantis, aliens building the pyramids, and more—into a racist muddle. Or as they quote one scholar as saying: “The idea that aliens built the pyramids isn’t so funny when it draws young people to websites that quickly switch out aliens for Jews and start talking about gas chambers.”

Making up shit about history isn’t harmless

Returning to reality for a moment: What about the people who built the stuff that conspiracy theorists keep crediting to aliens? They all had their own engineering knowledge, social organizations, religious beliefs, and so on—their own cultures. And these are interesting! I find it far more boring to think that aliens plopped the Rapa Nui (“Easter Island”) moai in place than to read about how teams of people can work together to make them walk around the island like the legends say they did.

In many of the Ancient Aliens hypotheses, beliefs and structures from around the world are smushed in search of similarities: Tombs in Egypt and temples in Central America are both pyramid shaped, so that must mean aliens liked pyramids. But viewing the world that way means ignoring the very different cultures in those two disparate places, and that people built those pyramids for different reasons and using different methods.

In other words, by trying to see everything through one lens (“What if it’s aliens?”) we’re ignoring actual history. And sometimes, we’re destroying historical artifacts—this Conversation article mentions that groups of people trying to prove ancient alien theories chipped a piece off a Giza pyramid and raided Nazca graves in Peru.

And there’s another thing to consider: As one scholar put it on the AskHistorians subreddit, attributing works of humans to aliens doesn’t just have implications for architecture and art. If we take away responsibility, “for the great things ancient civilizations accomplished, then we must also take away responsibility for the awful things too: human sacrifice, slavery, wars, and genocides.” And, yep, Ancient Aliens has done episodes on the Nazis, even suggesting they may have had access to alien technology. Sigh.