MB Civic

Certain authors hypothesize that intelligent extraterrestrial beings called ancient astronauts or ancient aliens have visited Earth, and this contact is connected with the origins or development of human cultures, technologies, and religions.

A common variant of the idea include proposals that deities from most, if not all, religions are actually extraterrestrials, and their technologies were taken as evidence of their divine status.

Proponents of ancient astronaut theories often maintain that humans are either descendants or creations of extraterrestrial beings who landed on Earth thousands of years ago. An associated idea is that much of human knowledge, religion, and culture came from extraterrestrial visitors in ancient times, in that ancient astronauts acted as a “mother culture”.

Ancient astronaut proponents also believe that travelers from outer space known as “astronauts” or “spacemen” built many of the structures on earth such as the pyramids in Egypt and the Moai stone heads of Easter Island or aided humans in building them.

Proponents argue that the evidence for ancient astronauts comes from supposed gaps in historical and archaeological records, and they also maintain that absent or incomplete explanations of historical or archaeological data point to the existence of ancient astronauts.

The evidence is said to include archaeological artifacts that they argue are anachronistic or beyond the presumed technical capabilities of the historical cultures with which they are associated (sometimes referred to as “Out-of-place artifacts”); and artwork and legends which are interpreted as depicting extraterrestrial contact or technologies.

Certain mainstream academics have responded that gaps in contemporary knowledge of the past need not demonstrate that such speculative ancient astronaut ideas are a necessary conclusion to draw.] Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, however strongly believed in what he called panspermia, the concept that earth was ‘seeded’ with life, probably in the form of bluegreen algae, by intelligent extraterrestrial species, for the purpose of ensuring life’s continuity.

He believed that this could have been done on any number of planets of this class, possibly using unmanned shuttles. He talks at length about this theory in his book Life Itself.

Robert Graves (Graves 1968) writes, “Mythology is the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student’s experience that he cannot believe them to be true; hence the English adjective ‘mythical’ meaning ‘incredible’; hence the omission from standard European mythologies of all Biblical narrative even when closely paralleled by myths from Persia, Babylonia, Egypt and Greece.”