I’m not saying Ancient Aliens is racist…

…but it’s racist. Or can be.

The other day I ran across this excellent short post by Michael Heiser. Heiser is an Old Testament scholar and expert in ancient Semitic languages who has side interests in UFOs, cryptozoology, esotericism, and pretty much “anything old and weird,” as he puts it. A lot of his work in these areas is to correct or debunk the pseudoarchaeology of “ancient aliens” theorists like Zechariah Sitchin, who popularized the Annunaki as the extraterrestrial explanation for everything, or the godfather of the whole movement, Chariots of the Gods author Erich von Däniken. In this post he addresses some of the racialist assumptions behind these “ancient aliens” theories.

Bad assumptions

Like Heiser, I’ve had an interest in “anything old and weird” since childhood and, like Heiser, I have an interest in learning why people believe things like “ancient aliens” theories. My main concern, as an historian, has usually been to expose the chronological snobbery behind theories like this. As Heiser summarizes it:

some presume that humans in antiquity were so primitive they could not build these things without the assistance of non-human intelligence.

The presumption, inherited from the Enlightenment and given a scientific gloss by Darwinism, is that our technological sophistication somehow indicates our superior position in the eternal upward climb from barbarism. We today are superior technologically, scientifically, and—skipping over a number of premises—therefore morally.

With this assumption fixed firmly in place by years of progressive education, crude and condescending depictions of the past in popular media, and now historically illiterate activist messaging on social media, the recipient of “ancient aliens” theories is primed to believe that the pyramids, the Nazca lines, Stonehenge, etc. are too carefully constructed, too perfectly aligned with things “we” only understand now through “science,” to be the work of ancient man. Heiser:

All (and I mean “all”) of the examples of “impossible” architecture foisted on viewers of shows like Ancient Aliens were indeed built by humans. They weren’t primitive savages just because they didn’t have cars, cell phones, or the internet. Their technology solved their problems and met their needs, not ours. All the techniques they used are demonstrable from applied physics (which isn’t a physics that needs atom smashers).

Side note: I’m struck that aliens seem to have assisted all the fantastically remote civilizations of antiquity with projects like pyramids—a pile of stones with a square base, laborious to build but by no means difficult to design—but not the Romans with their extremely sophisticated hydro-engineering projects or the medievals with the gothic cathedral. The gravitation of these theorists to things that already have a certain mystique should be suspicious.

The race card

I’m a fanatic on the topic of chronological snobbery, but Heiser’s post directs us to another dimension of “ancient aliens” theories: the racial. A number of such theories rely on a narrative proposing that

an elect super-race taught by aliens could mediate that esoteric knowledge to poor savages in the New World by a select / advanced super-race descended from the Atlanteans, the original inheritors of alien knowledge.

Or something similar. Call such theories legion, for they are many.

Heiser links to two longer posts by archaeologists Jason Colavito and Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews. Both concern a specific book by the aforementioned von Däniken in which he apparently makes a lot of assertions about prehistorical races that are cartoonishly off-base, and both provide good examples of racism in discredited archaeology like Nazi racial theory (based on the work of Madison Grant, which gave us the notion of “Aryanism” we associate with the Nazis) or the racially-motivated misreadings of sites like Great Zimbabwe. Colavito even notes how von Däniken’s alien theories lead him not only into racialist ideas of human development but to eugenics and all sorts of other mad scientist projects:

Von Däniken asserts that the “extraterrestrials did choose a specific race.” He won’t say what that race is, but he leans heavily on Jewish claims to be the chosen people, which we have just seen him connect to the white (European) race. There can only be one conclusion, even if unstated. He then advocates eugenics, suggesting that modern genetic research will advise which combinations of races “are beneficial and which should be eliminated.” He seriously asks whether the aliens want “strict segregation” of the races, and he advocates human cloning to perpetuate the very best superior specimens in the event of disaster.

Both posts are worth reading, but Fitzpatrick-Matthews—whose post “Is pseudoarchaeology racist?” prompted the other two—demonstrates how the chronologically snobbish assumptions behind “ancient aliens” theories can bleed over into racialist thinking. Fitzpatrick-Matthews:

In part, this is a reflection of the discredited view that human history follows a linear progression from technologically unsophisticated to sophisticated . . . Bad Archaeologists are unwilling to do the background research into the societies that produced the monuments they present as mysterious, so either they do not appreciate the evidence for ancient complex societies or they deliberately withhold this evidence from their readers. What is more pernicious, though, is that while they can accept that locals (Greeks, Romans and so on) were responsible for the ancient monuments of Europe, they are unwilling to countenance the same explanation for people on other continents, especially Africa and South America.

He concludes by noting the use such theories have been put to by radical racialist groups. Having both personal and academic interests in early medieval Germanic peoples, Anglo-Saxon England, the Norse, and similar topics, I run across these people all the time. The unwitting aid given to racists by bad historical theories—whether they involve aliens or not—only muddies the waters and casts doubt on those with a legitimate interest in these fascinating peoples and their lives.

In short: ideas have consequences.

The ultimate failure

To take it back to Heiser, who brought all this to my attention:

I’ll point out again that there are no Bible verses that have the nephilim building anything, or possessing super-knowledge. . . . The reason is simple: books like 1 Enoch were concerned with the idea of intelligent evil lurking behind the human propensity toward self-destruction and idolatry, not architectural prowess or tyranny of the less enlightened savages through technology. Books like 1 Enoch and material in the Bible never put forth the idea of advanced human technology being bestowed to a master race for control of inferior races, or to condescendingly pass on their super knowledge. The concern is theological or moral, not the singling out of an elite race “blessed” by such knowledge.

And that’s the ultimate irony. Chesterton described bigotry as “the failure of the mind to imagine any other mind.” People who adopt “ancient aliens” explanations for our history don’t just demean the past through their assumed superiority, they show that they are not even interested in the past for its own sake. “Ancient aliens” theorists don’t do the hard work of trying to perceive what the people who built the pyramids or took the effort to write ancient texts were themselves interested in or why they chose to do what they did. See Heiser’s comment from near the beginning of this post that ancient peoples’ “technology solved their problems and met their needs, not ours.” The theorists, having lost sight of the humanity of the ancients, can only see these things as evidence for their own pet theories of extraterrestrial influence.

Whether for reasons of chronological snobbery or racism, whether naively or knowingly, their fault is a lack of charity.

More if you’re interested

Read Heiser’s full post here and the longer posts by Colavito and Fitzpatrick-Matthews here and here, respectively. Heiser also runs an excellent video channel at Vimeo (though he still uploads most of his videos to YouTube as well) in which he briefly investigates popular esoteric theories and sheds some critical light on them. For a good sample, here are his videos on the Annunaki and supposed depictions of aliens in Egyptian art. Erich von Däniken also gets namedropped in several of the late great Charles Portis’s novels, notably Gringos, which you should definitely read. And I’ve written about chronological snobbery many times here before, notably here.