Ancient Astronaut Belief

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Ancient astronaut belief is the modern claim that intelligent beings from elsewhere in the cosmos visited Earth in prehistory, were taken by early peoples for gods, and left their traces in the myths, monuments, and sacred texts that record those gods. On this reading the deities of the past were literal travelers, and scripture is garbled testimony to events that actually happened. The technical name for the supposed event is paleocontact.

The idea took its recognizable shape in the twentieth century, though its parts are older. The early-century writer Charles Fort had already collected anomalies and floated the notion that humanity might be someone’s property; pulp science fiction made flesh-and-blood “ancient astronauts” a familiar furniture of the imagination. The current crystallized in 1968 with the Swiss author Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, a worldwide best-seller that ran a single argument across hundreds of sites: that the pyramids, the Nazca lines, the Maya tomb-lid of Palenque, and the visions of the prophet Ezekiel were beyond the reach of the people who made them, and so pointed to visitors from the stars. Later figures elaborated variants — Zecharia Sitchin built an entire pseudo-history from a particular reading of Sumerian cuneiform — and in the twenty-first century cable television gave the whole complex a second mass life.

What its proponents hold is a recasting of religion as misremembered history. The gods of myth were real, the argument runs, but technological rather than divine; revelation was a kind of cargo cult; and a hidden chapter of the human past was deliberately or accidentally forgotten. To readers it felt explanatory: it took the recurring images that puzzle a literal eye — chariots of fire, beings descending from the sky, knowledge said to be given rather than won — and offered one cause behind them all, an event rather than a metaphor. The appeal is partly that it keeps the wonder of scripture while discarding the supernatural, and partly that it flatters a suspicion of received authority.

Scholarship treats the current as pseudoarchaeology and has answered it in detail. Specialists in each field the argument touches — Egyptology, Andean and Mesoamerican studies, Assyriology — have shown that the monuments are explicable by the documented capacities of the cultures that built them, that the textual readings rest on mistranslation, and that the “impossible” artifacts dissolve on inspection. Critics from Carl Sagan onward have also noted a recurring undertow: the claim that non-European peoples could not have raised their own great works without outside help, an old colonial assumption in futuristic dress.

The current keeps company with older esoteric ideas it sometimes borrows from and sometimes contradicts — Theosophy’s lost root-races, the long literature on a sunken Atlantis, the perennial wish for a single forgotten source behind all the world’s religions. It is best understood as a modern myth about myth: a way of holding on to the strangeness of the ancient world by relocating its gods from heaven to outer space.

→ Related: Atlantology Lost Civilization Reception · Theosophy · Mesopotamia