One bit of debunking “proof” was to suggest the Nazca Lines couldn’t have been used as alien runways, as suggested by some ancient alien proponents, because the surface is made up of a shallow trench of sand from which darker colored pebbles have been removed to create the pattern, and by the chaotic display of lines that might have confused even the best pilot. True. Any craft “landing” on the trench would no doubt destroy it. But they fail to explain why the objects were etched into the landscape in the first place, which could have been simply, and probably were, to honor or revere sky gods, either bird or otherwise, something we do today when we build churches and holy sites of worship. These lines are not proof of aliens, and they are not proof of “not aliens.” They are mysterious lines we will never truly understand because we weren’t there to directly question those who put them there. And that is the only truth we have to hold onto, no matter what side of the fence we are on.
Some of the debunkers do make great points of poking holes in the interpretations of the proponents of the theory, and succeed in identifying fraudulent and fake statements that come from misinterpretations of holy texts, images, and symbols, and follow up with alternative possible explanations. But many of the debunkers have no background in archeology, anthropology, history, mythology, or comparative religion, and instead either settle for personal attacks on the people involved, bash television shows in general, or make huge assumptions of their own, and ask us to believe them without evidence to back it up—which is exactly what they claim the proponents are doing. Just as we ask our readers to use discernment when reading up on this subject, we ask them to have equal discernment reading the debunkers. Though we agree with the debunkers that not every unknown can be attributed to “aliens,” we certainly don’t deny that perhaps some can.
Unfortunately, until a cadre of real and credible academics and scientists get together to answer all these questions, the questions remain open for interpretation, no matter how flawed either side may see it.
So, most of the rest of us are stuck with, again, bits and pieces of information, some of it no doubt able to be interpreted one way or another depending on the motives and agendas of the sources.
The television series features a variety of proponents of the theory, including wild-haired producer Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, who has become a meme due to the success of the program and often gives way more airtime to believers than to those who challenge the theory. Still, we must remember it’s a television show, and the authors of this book you are reading know full well that you can be interviewed for a show for hours and only have small bits of your discussion used on the program, which rarely tells the entire story, and that anything on television is usually done for entertainment over education. But, as many debunkers would have us believe, does that mean everyone on the show is a fraud? A liar? Nope, not at all. Many of the guests on the show are legitimate scientists, authors, and researchers with a vast body of work behind them in archeology, archeo-astronomy, geology, anthropology, history, and other fields that have a vested interest in identifying how information and knowledge progressed along the historic time line. We authors have heard some of these guests speak at conferences, away from TV cameras, where they have shown amazing evidence for their claims, and also openly stated they did not have all the answers.
Does this mean we authors believe in the theory ourselves? We do, and we don’t. And that is our job—to examine all the various possibilities with as open a mind as we can, while understanding the bigger picture, as earlier chapters of this book point out, of how information reaches us and is often encoded in what we deem “fiction.”
Sadly, there is so much negative discourse now; a real honest and straightforward dialogue might be impossible. Like in politics, once people take sides, it’s hard to sway them back to center. In fact, we strongly encourage our readers to read up on materials from both sides and make their own decisions. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Okay, we shall set off of our proverbial soapboxes now.
Major Theory Players
The theory itself, though, is based on a body of work that includes books by notables such as Erich von Däniken, author of the blockbuster 1968 Chariots of the Gods, a controversial book that led to many sequels and a ton of controversy when it came out, especially from religious fronts who took offence at the content. Scientists and academia basically poo-poo-ed the book, but von Däniken earned a growing audience as he continued to write and speak about the two main kinds of evidence he and others were looking for: clues found in ancient holy texts and ancient artwork, architectural sites like the pyramids, and mysterious out-of-place objects that suggested we humans once interacted with beings from the sky.
Von Däniken is often called the grandfather of the ancient astronaut/alien theory, but others have contributed to the debate and discussion as well, including Harold T. Wilkins, who wrote books about flying saucers, the mysteries of time and space, and the secret cities and ancient mysteries of South America way back in the 1940s and 1950s; Charles Fort, an American researcher into anomalous phenomena, for whom the term forteana was coined, in the late 1870s through the early 1930s, and who wrote a book that he never published about Martians controlling events on earth before writing The Book of the Damned in 1919 about “damned data” or paranormal phenomena that science rejected; Robert Temple, who wrote a book in 1976 called The Sirius Mystery that set off a firestorm of interest into the West African Dogon tribe and their amazing knowledge of the cosmos, that he claimed were comparable to the beliefs of both ancient Egyptians and Sumerians; and Zecharia Sitchin, an Azerbaijani-born American author who claims to be one of few scholars permitted to read and interpret ancient Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets, as his Website states, and who focused his books and research on the ancient Sumerian civilization and their links to the Anunnaki, a race that inhabited the planet Nibiru orbiting out beyond Neptune, who came to visit Earth more than 400,000 years ago to look for gold, and, in an attempt to genetically create miners to help them, created the human race instead, including the “Adapa,” equated with Adam of the Book of Genesis. Sitchin’s work includes a series called The Earth Chronicles, starting with the “12th Planet,” which told the story of Nibiru, and ending in 2007 with “The End of Days: Armageddon and Prophecies of the Return.” He wrote numerous other books as well, including his last book before his death in 2010, There Were Giants Upon the Earth: Gods, Demigods, and Human Ancestry: The Evidence of Alien DNA. However, his publisher, Bear & Company, will release a novel Sitchin was said to have been writing in secret before his death titled The King Who Refused to Die: The Anunnaki and the Search for Immortality, said to be an allegorical story based on his actual research.
Newer books include one we believe to be very objective and worth reading, among all the others we suggest here and the Bibliography: author and researcher Philip Coppens’s The Ancient Alien Question: A New Inquiry Into the Existence, Evidence, and Influence of Ancient Visitors. Coppens sadly passed away recently, but the body of work he left behind is instrumental to a solid understanding of lost civilizations and ancient knowledge. A very new book, Aliens in Ancient Egypt: The Brotherhood of the Serpent and the Secrets of the Nile Civilization by Xaviant Haze introduces some new and cutting-edge information about the alien question. We strongly suggest reading the older books, the newer books, and everything in between, including a collection of essays and articles about lost civilizations by New Page Books called Lost Civilizations and Secrets of the Past, which features a variety of contributors and insights, because this is a huge puzzle with many pieces spread out over a variety of arenas of academia, science, and religion.
There are many others writing and speaking about the ancient astronaut/alien theory, and we don’t wish to slight them, but we don’t want to focus either on the theory itself; it’s been dissected enough. Most approach the subject from the study of ancient Egypt, because of its tremendous advancement, which seems to have happened almost over
night, in science and physics, medicine and astronomy, and art, almost as if someone came along and tutored them. There seems to be a rift between orthodox Egyptologists and those of a more ancient alien bent, over everything from who built what, how they built it, and why.
Many of these proponents point to the pyramids at Giza, Easter Island’s Moai statues, Stonehenge, and Avebury, and other massive monuments and edifices, and incredibly old and sophisticated sites like Puma Panku near Tiwanaku, Bolivia, or Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, or the Star Child skull and its alleged non-human DNA, and the Abydos helicopter (all subjects we strongly suggest you look into, pro and con) as proof of alien intervention; we say hello baby, call me maybe. All of these monuments and sites defy rational explanation and even challenge our assumptions about how old human civilization really is—but are they proof of alien architectural consultation or assistance? Not necessarily. Many people suggest we couldn’t have possibly raised the megaton blocks that build the pyramids, or moved the giant stones that created the henge monuments, or cut to the finest paper-thin perfection the slabs that served as the foundations for temples and sanctuaries unearthed and revealed. Yet, why couldn’t we?
Other Ideas
New theories involving sonic levitation, made even more credible with scientific research and experimentation involving the use of sound waves to lift small objects, as well as existing theories involving lifts and pulleys and pure mass labor, appear to hold just as much weight (pun intended), yet we are so drawn to the easy way out, which would be aliens dropping from the sky with the technology that allows us to whip up a pyramid. Yet we cannot seem to find evidence of that technology. Did it die with our ancestors, or is it encoded in their stories and myths and religious texts? Where are the blueprints to the machines—the long manuals with instructions on how to cut a chunk of stone to a precise measurement?
Biblical scholars might point to the details of the building of the Temple of Solomon included in the Old Testament text, and archeologists point to tiny passages and tunnels deep inside the pyramid that only a small alien could wiggle through (why not a dwarf or a child?) and we hear bits of clues about messengers from above giving instructions to mortal men to build a ship, a craft, a temple, a monument; all are valuable clues to try to piece together our past, if we interpret them correctly.
Even then, there would still be so many questions, because some codes are impossible to break without the actual key.
Again, we turn to the question of whether or not alien intervention, despite the many people citing circumstantial evidence of it, would even be needed to help humans along the evolutionary road to higher knowledge, consciousness, and innovation. One of the ways we might get a better perspective on this is to step out of the past and think about the present.
One of the disadvantages our ancient ancestors had was the lack of computers, cell phones, and ways to not only write down mass amounts of information, but pay it forward as well. Our future descendants will no doubt appreciate the sheer volume of facts and events we’ve recorded for them to one day decipher and learn from—and yet, what if they advance so much that even with all the paperwork and proof we leave behind, they still don’t understand it? Isn’t it possible that this simple explanation could account for why today we have such a hard time truly deciphering the symbols, art, glyphs and images, stories, songs, and myths of old?
Some say that it had to be aliens, or something that helped us make leaps in advancement we didn’t appear ready to make. But again we point to the state of technology today, and the amazing progresses we have seen just in the last 100 years, when we “leaped” forward from books by firelight to toting our Kindles on our flight. We had no television 100 years ago. No spaceflight. No computers. No cell phones. Yet here we are in a blink of the eye with all that and more on deck, including holograms of rock stars, curing diseases with sound waves, quantum computing, and possible 7-11s on Mars.
It took great innovative and imaginative minds to make those leaps throughout time. Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Nikola Tesla, Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Steve Wozniak, and whoever the person was that invented Pop Tarts—these were people who had the foresight and ability to think outside of the box and because of it, we leaped.
Unless, of course, you believe they were all aliens!
Overnight Success
It is highly possible that those very same leaps took place thousands of years ago, over short bursts of time, but to us today seem to have happened overnight. We think here of “overnight success” stories of celebrities, athletes, writers, and so forth. To the public, the success of someone like J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter empire, might seem to have happened in a flash. Yet Rowling knows of the years leading up to the big break, and the hard work that we did not see because they were not being lived under the microscope of public view. Our ancestors could indeed have made huge leaps that appear to us, now, as overnight successes, yet took decades—maybe even centuries—to build up to. When tipping points come, they come fast, but the progress toward the tip could take much longer. Even if it is only a year, think about how your own life can change drastically in just 365 days when you make one change, or one choice, or one discovery that alters every aspect of the way you live.
The bottom line is this: Whether we believe in alien intervention, access to a field of all information, completely natural human innovation, sheer imagination, or some troll named Joe who showed up one day thousands of years ago with a blueprint of the future, no one will ever truly know how things went down for one reason, and one reason only: We weren’t there. And as of yet, no one has discovered an operator old enough to call and ask for “information, please?”
We hate to say only time will tell, but perhaps it’s only a matter of time before a site is excavated or a text is discovered that provides enough detail and maybe even a few more that can corroborate it, that tells us how we got from there to here.
Is it possible that ancient people had other means by which they could access information and ideas that did not exist at the time? Or at least didn’t exist within their own culture?
Collective Data Bank
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung wrote extensively about the collective unconscious, the part of the human mind that is common to humanity as a whole and is distinct from our personal consciousness. This collective mind, if you will, contained memories and archetypes, which were universal images, symbols, dreams, and ideas understood by all cultures that represent the basic human experience. The collective unconscious, which Jung actually based on experiences he had observing and working with schizophrenics, has also been called a “universal dumping ground” or “data bank” for all information, past, present, and future. The information in the collective unconscious is given to us at birth. We don’t have to “learn” it; it comes with the territory, and is inherent to the brain.
Jung himself said in The Structure of the Psyche:
The collective unconscious—so far as we can say anything about it at all—appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious.... We can therefore study the collective unconscious in two ways, either in mythology or in the analysis of the individual.
Yet this collective data bank—this field of information from which our personal psyche and consciousness tapped into for that information we did not ourselves have direct experience with—might be the storehouse of ideas that our ancient ancestors tapped into as well.
Archetypes, as we wrote about earlier, manifest in the stories and images of not just mythology, but religious writings as well, and they also play a huge role in our own personalities and behaviors. Jung believed that the collective and its archetypal images served as a king of transcendental wisdom that all of humanity had access to that went above and beyond that of everyday consci
ous experience. He also suggested that the causes of synchronicities were embedded in the collective unconscious, with the effects visible in the conscious realm.
Perhaps some of the visions and encounters written about in the Bible and other texts, believed to be aliens offering wisdom and knowledge and information, may instead have been angels, entities, and other beings speaking to people via the collective unconscious, archetypal beings appearing in dreams bearing the gifts of wisdom and ideas. The gods and deities and winged creatures may have indeed been Jung’s concept of symbolic beings designed to appeal to us on a much deeper level than the conscious mind could understand. The blueprints for pyramids, henges, and monuments could have been transmitted via the collective mind, from the great data bank and universal information field to individual minds eager and ready to receive such information.
Maybe that’s how ideas and stories and innovations work today, as many writers have attested to the sense of being channels for the work, and not the actual originators. Even today, we all know of certain ideas, especially in the entertainment industry, that suddenly seemed to be everywhere at the same time, as if suddenly 20 different people got the urge to write about a cannibal named Louie who lived on a small island off the coast of Greenland. We chalk it up as coincidence or just copycat lack of originality, but if all the information that ever existed was contained in this field—this data bank—would it not be possible for two different civilizations to suddenly get the same light bulb idea at the same time, even though they were thousands of miles away?
Laird Scranton is the author of The Science of the Dogon: Decoding The African Mystery Tradition, and is one of the leading authorities on the West African Dogon and their cosmology, which is filled with stunning symbols and concepts similar to the most cutting-edge science. We talked with him about where this native tribe may have gotten their advanced knowledge.
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