Atheism Stack Exchange Archive

Ancient Aliens Theory

What are people’s thoughts on the Ancient Aliens Theory of human development. I saw a series on the Discovery channel and while there are a few ho-hum flights-of-fancy type extrapolation and interpretation of archeological “evidence”, it is (to me) a fascinating take on ancient historical “events” (both physically evident events, like the building of the pyramids etc) and “scriptural events” from various religions.

Answer 120

Show me the evidence, and I’ll tell you what I think about it. All the so-called I’ve seen to date amounts to a huge pile of conspiracy dung.

  1. There is no evidence that any extra-terrestrial beings ever visited Earth.
  2. There is no evidence that there ever was any discontinuity in the evolutionary ancestry of any existing species. There are a lot of gaps in the fossil record, but nothing to suggest some kind of leap. We can trace every know species back to distant ancestors.
  3. Any reliance on ancient texts is suspect. A text is not evidence per-se of anything.

If we found a text tomorrow that stated that humans were created when a galactic overlord threw billions of aliens into a volcano and then proceeded to blow up the volcano, our first reaction wouldn’t be: “Must be true, I should really send all my money to the Church of Scientology”, it would be: “What a load of hooey…”. The same is true of any text: what’s important is corroborating evidence for the specific hypothesis you are looking into. Even if a text is found to be corroborated in many aspects, it does not follow that the rest of the text must also be true. It might raise our confidence in it, but it should not lead us to treat the text as authoritative absent any corroborating evidence.

The same is true of the so-called archeological evidence these people present. It usually amounts to: “Well, in this extremely stylized, simplified drawing of a person, I personally see a god in a space suit, so it must be so”. Or: “I can’t think of a way ancient people could possibly have built this or that structure, so it must have been aliens”, or: “If we round up or down by a factor of 10-15% this or that measurement, it will match one of 20 or so magic numbers I’m hoping to find (such as the so-called golden ratio)”. All of this is pure imagination, with nothing to stand on.

But the most telling sign that this is all bunk is the reaction of these people when their pet hypotheses (NOT theories) are challenged: they will systematically scream “SCIENTIFIC CENSORSHIP!!!!!”. A true scientific hypothesis MUST be challenged. It is in the very nature of that challenge that lies the power of Science to approach reality. An unchallenged hypothesis is a worthless hypothesis.

Answer 57

Let me start by saying that while there’s some great stuff on the Discovery channel (Adam! our buddy), there’s a lot of trash. Just look at any of the several (ugh) ghost shows.

To the meat. It’s an interesting idea, but there’s precious little evidence to support it. IMHO, Occam’s razor works against this idea in the same way that it works against God himself. It requires a highly-advanced society (much, much more so than ourselves today) to set up the very intricate network of life that we have today, and either start from the beginning with the first proto-bacteria anyway, or hide their traces extremely well.

Seems more like a Star Trek story than a serious theory to me, personally.

Answer 54

I’m a skeptic in all things, not just religion. There is no evidence supporting this view point that can be tested empirically. It’s all based on conjecture. It usually can’t even be archeologically backed, such as building the pyramids. Archeologists know who built the pyramids and when. It wasn’t aliens.

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