Chariots of the Gods

that just never got to be. I was thinking, you know, we've got Disneyland and Disney World that we know some people here in the office that are really into disney World. We go all the time. But it's based on all these classic animated characters, right, And I was thinking, there should be an alternative theme park that's based on the classic animated characters, not of Disney, but of Don Bluth. Okay,

so this would be like the Secretive Nim Yeah. So you've got like a Secret of Nim ride where you you like ride this cinder block to the lee of the stone. And then you've got you've got like characters walking around in the streets, of course, and costumes of Rocketdoodle comes up to you. There's an old Dogs Go to Heaven, you know, you get to be a dog and go to dog Hell. Ride that. Yeah, that was

a disturbing portion of that movie. I remember. Yeah. But then also there's gotta be a Dragon's Layer ride because Don Blues worked on that. That's right. This is the classic animation style video games. Yeah, where you die no matter what you do all the time. Oh yeah, we could have one for a ranking and bass rock box. You get into all those old cool Disney alternative animated

classics like the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, Goblin singalongs. Yeah, I'm all where there's a whip, there's a way, I'm all for it. You have one hal that's just for singing along with that Leonard Nimoy song about the Hobbit. Yeah, I gotta work that in somehow though that that's not actually in the movie, But the movie itself is full of full of all sorts of wonderful tunes. Um. It's interesting because we have all these various ridiculous and real

theme parks and then we have these fictional ones. So we we have made up parks like Jurassic Park, we have West World, we have Itchy and Scratchy Land. But on the other hand, we do have Dollywood, the Dolly Parton themed theme park, I don't think I've ever been to Dollywood, but you gotta wonder what's there? Is it just the same stuff, Like, it's just roller coasters and carnival games and stuff, except it's Dolly Pardon themed. What's all about the theme, right, It's all about the fluff.

Like I remember, I never went to Dollywood, but I went to Opery Land in Nashville, Tennessee, back when that was a theme park, a country music sort of country themed theme park, and and that was fun. It wasn't necessary that I was into the uh, into the flavoring that was provided. But still, the basic rides, you do need some reason to get on there. You need some sort of character associated with it, to tell a story with the ride. Dude, that Dollywood Joe Lene roller coaster

was a scream. So there are a lot of worthy theme park destinations out there. But here's one that I think most of us may not have heard of. I had not heard of this one until we started researching this episode. I had not heard of this until you sent it to me. It's nestled in the Swiss Alps, and it's called young Frau Park. Okay, does that mean young woman? I believe so it's name for um, it's name for a particular alpine peak in the immediate area.

It originally opened as Mystery Park, though it offers fun and entertainment for the entire family, including Misty Land for the children, a huge indoor outdoor children's paradise, segue rides, trampolines, laser shows, a petting zoo, and of course multiple exhibits in live shows addressing the mysteries of ancient history and the possible answers to be found in ancient astronaut hypothesis. What yes, yeah, this is I need to drive this home. This is not some silly skit that Joe and I

have prepared for everybody. This is a real theme park in Interlock and Swiss of Land, centered around the ideas and writings of Eric van Donikin, author of the nineteen book Chariots of the Gods. I like how the original book title ends in a question mark. Yes, so, I really think we should make a point when we're talking about his book. We should we should pronounce it chariots of the Gods of the Gods like they might be

chariots of somebody else's. I also love how it takes what is otherwise a tremendously awesome title and kind of screws it up by making a question. You know, you've got that standard clickbait format these days, where like the actual body text of an article might be fairly reasonable, but the headline makes some outlandish claim not justified by the article itself. This is sort of the opposite. This is like the title is actually a little bit more

careful than the book. Yes, and we will definitely get into that as we proceed. But this particular park again, it opened as Mystery Park and two thousand three at a reported cost of eighty six million Swiss francs or sixty two million dollars American uh. But then it closed in two thousand six. Then it opened reopened again in

two thousand nine as Young Frau Park. It's an exhibits still focus on things like the Nazca lines, the construction of the Pyramids, and other noted uh quote unquote examples of ancient astronauts, speculation or a A s plus. Donikan himself still gives lectures there and insists that quote everything ends in a question mark, so as if it's all just a consideration of these ideas rather than um, you know,

propaganda about it. Well, I must say that makes me feel a little bit better about it, because I kind of want to go. I don't put any stock whatsoever in the ancient aliens hypothesis, but this sounds like a good time. You've got a petting zoo, and you've got a guy given lectures about how aliens probably talk to our ancestors. Yeah, there's a sun sphere they have like

a ziggurat and a pyramid. You can, you can. I'll try to make sure that we link to the homepage for the park so that you can check it out, because it does look fun. It looks you can children can have their birthday parties there. It looks like an interesting destination, and we would love to hear from anyone who has ever gone there themselves. So I've been familiar with Van Donkin for a long time. I remember seeing him mentioned on old reruns of In Search of hosted

by Leonard nimoy A and a yeah. But but I had no idea that this had been incorporated into a theme park. This is the kind of thing you come to expect from religious groups in the United States, like the Holy Lands Theme Park. I believe it is in Florida. Oh yeah, if you're not aware of this phenomenon. In the United States, there are multiple, uh, not just Bible themed, but specifically Young Earth creationist theme parks in the United

States that have like models and exhibits. It's sort of like a cross between an amusement park and a museum attempting to promote the idea, for example, that humans and dinosaurs lived side by side and that the Earth is six thousand years so old. Yeah, and you know, it makes sense that we would have theme parks about this because in the United States, two things that people take very seriously our religion and their major entertainment brands. So

of course there's a Disney Park. Of course there's like Universal Studios. But I just really wasn't expecting, uh, there to be a theme park based around the concept of ancient aliens. It really gives me hope that my son can one day celebrate his tenth birthday party at a Phantom Time hypothesis theme park. I want to Lizard People theme park that would be good, yeah, with the costumes it basically rights itself, or a good Flat Earth theme

park that'll do it. I wonder if that means the roller coasters will be very boring though there's no looks. It's just flat circle flat roller coasters. Yeah. So we've had listeners in the past ask us to talk about ancient aliens related topics. I think it's come up in passing on the podcast quite a few times. Actually, we just kind of mentioned it here and there as one of those things that you know, it would be interesting if there were some actual evidence for it, but there

doesn't seem to be any good evidence. It's all just kind of like based on massive over interpretation of little tidbits of interesting mythology and imagery from the ancient world, and sometimes on outright fraud and and stuff like that. Yeah, and we'll get into all that today. I do want to before we get into it, I do want to stress that we are going to approach this topic, like all the topics we can approach, with a skeptical mind, but an open mind. Okay, yeah, an open minded mind exactly. Yes.

And while we're gonna be talking about about von Donnikin himself and his book at the top of this episode, we are going to get into say Carl Sagan's thoughts on the possibility of ancient aliens as we progress, and of course through all of it, it is an exciting idea. I mean, it factors into so many different works of fiction that that we love. It's uh, it's just comes down to the fact that, like you said, the evidence

is never there. Yeah, exactly. Now. I want to be clear that I find the idea of ancient aliens visiting Earth long ago in the past as fun and interesting as anybody else would. It's something that I would love to believe if there were good evidence for the I mean, that's such a cool idea. Um, And so it's and it's also not something that I would say is something

we should just dismiss out of hand. Like some people make the argument that, Okay, if somebody shows up and says, I've got a new propellantless drive that'll get us through space without propellant, some people say, you know, if you're violating the laws of physics, I don't even need to listen to you to begin with. I don't feel like that about ancient aliens. I'd say, Okay, this is something that we don't know whether or not aliens exist. Maybe they do. We don't know if they do exist, whether

they visited Earth in the past. Maybe they have. There's

no reason to rule it out out of hand. So it's at least worth looking at the evidence if somebody thinks they have some exactly, So let's return to Chariots of the Gods uh the Night sixty eight book by Eric von Donakin, And the basic idea here is again that ancient that ancient astronauts visited Earth and serve as the sort of god figures of our mythologies and religions, and they wowed us with their technology and taught us to do things like make bread and build pyramids, the

two primary activities of human civilization. Well they're they're also we'll get into it, especially the pyramid thing more. But these are the sort of things that it's easy to look at and say, how did people ever figure this out? I thought about that with bread before you know, I'm like, this is amazing. It's so tasty, and I if you, if you you show me where it came from, and I would. I can't imagine ancient people putting that together.

But of course they did put it together. Do you think aliens were the ones that taught us to drink the milk that comes out of goats and cows. Oh well that is that isn't another interesting topic of topic. I believe Julie and I did an episode that got into some of that in the past. Because there are different theories regarding how we made this leap. One of them one of the theories is that it actually involved a drinking contest, like essentially dares and double dares among

ancient people. I bet you can't down that glass of of of sheep's milk. Let's see what happens. Okay, So it would be like, drink this crocodile's urine, drink this goat's milk, but then the goat milk was kind of tasty. Yeah, I mean it actually would play into some of these ancient astronaut ideas, like the aliens arrive and they're like, hey, you uh monkey creature, Um, can you drink the milk of that other one without becoming ill? Let's see what happens,

just doing experiments on us. Yeah. Uh. So we can't rehash all of von Danikin's arguments from his book, but I think just to give you a flavor of the kinds of things he argues and and what it feels like to participate with his arguments. We should just give an example from several of his major lines of evidence, and one of the major types of arguments he makes is about ancient projects that supposedly we're beyond our power

to produce at the time. Right, So this is you know you mentioned how do we learn to bake bread? How do we learn to build pyramids? Von Dannikin essentially will look back and say, hey, we couldn't have done that back then. Must have been aliens showing us how to do it or assisting us with their technology. So classic example of this you'll often hear is the pyramids of ancient Egypt. Right, if you've got an ancient Aliens person talking to you, they'll say, look, there's no way

the ancient Egyptians could have built the pyramids. These these stones that the pyramids are made of or gigantic How did they get them to the site? How did they build them with such precision? You know that, how do they move them so far? It's just impossible. They couldn't have done it, right, Why did they build it like that? Why were they looking up? Yeah? Vandanakin makes that argument too.

He says the pyramids they seem to be oriented with some kind of relationship to the stars, and Egyptian astronomy was not advanced enough for them to have had this kind of like knowledge of the stars when they built them. That seems to be wrong. But yeah, if you look at pyramids like the Great Pyramid of Giza built in the twenty century BC, it's true that we used to consider it a great mystery how these amazing marvels like the Pyramids were built in a time before modern metal working.

I mean, these people didn't have iron tools or anything. They were probably working with like copper tools. Uh, this is really before any kind of advanced wheels of any sort. But as best I can tell, modern archaeologists and Egyptologists do not believe that it was beyond the power of the ancient Egyptians to create these marvels like the Pyramids. We now know a lot about the construction of the pyramids. So the pyramids were built through massive coordination of engineers

and skilled workers. Granite building materials were probably floated down the Nile on rafts from quarry locations upstream. Uh. And we've discovered, through for example, ancient illustrations, that giant stone blocks were dragged into place using ropes and sledges. So workers would have ropes and they pull a sledge with a stone on it. And there was even a recent discovery about how wetting the sand underneath the sledge could reduce the friction between the sledge and the ground, helping

ease the transport of the blocks. And then there's other evidence that indicates, for example, the height of the pyramids was achieved with the use of wait for it, ramps. But where they get the ramps? Joe, clearly aliens crazy? No, I mean, yeah, how could they have figured out that you could pile earth up to make a ramp? But yeah, So this kind of argumentation, it seems to me to be based on basically just a type of prejudice, prejudice

against the abilities of the ancient people. Ancient people might have had less scientific knowledge and less technology than we do, but they weren't stupid. In fact, they were really clever, often more clever than we are, because they had to accomplish their great works with so much less. Yeah, they were not, as the saying goes, standing on the shoulders of giants. No, they had to they had to be

giants themselves in order to do great things. So that's one type of argument, but then you've got a couple others. One is like looking at ancient art and saying, well, that depicts a lilians and spaceships. So you could look at ancient figurines from Japan and say that looks like an alien in a space suit. Or you can look at the Nasca Lines of Peru, where von Danikin says their quote very reminiscent of aircraft parking bays on a modern airport. I look at that, I don't know, I mean,

it looks to me like their giant works of art. Yeah, this is one of those cases where you're taking several logical leaps to get to a more grandiose explanation. Yeah. And it's not to say that things like the Nasca lions aren't themselves very interesting and mysterious, Like who did the people who created them think they were making them for?

If they're too big for the average human to actually see, Uh, they must have had the idea of like gods in the sky or even maybe somehow people traveling in the sky to look down and see them. So you know that's not impossible. But there are these mysteries and and and they're very interesting, but I don't think you need to jump to this is a landing strip for spacecraft or this is in you know, an aircraft parking bay. Likewise, another way he looks at ancient art is the Mayan

temple of the inscriptions at pelen k Robert. Had you ever seen this carving before? Um? If I had, I'd forgotten about it. It's it's very cool because you see

this individual that's kind of in a recline position. Uh. And you know, I'm not sure how how I would have interpreted it had I not been looking at it, uh as part of the research for this episode, like knowing what people would read into it, Because knowing what people would read into it, I look at it and I'm I'm reminded of hr Geeger's concept for the pilot that they encounter in Alien, that the giant, you know, that the Titan character that is uh fossilized in this

uh this command chair within the crashed Alien spaceship the engineer. Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of a similar reclining pose surrounded by I don't know what what you'd call it, kind of ornate objects that look like all then maybe that could be some form of technology. So this carving from this Mayan temple is from the sarcophagus of the Mayan lord Pakal the Great, who lived in the seventh century CE. And from what I've read, the stuff in the carving are

common Mayan religious symbols. They're the kinds of things you see on Mayan carvings that indicate things about the Mayan mythology and cosmology. But of course von Dannikin and the ancient Aliens people they say, well, it's got a guy reclining and he's surrounded by all these objects and lines and weird looking stuff, and so maybe what this is is it's a person who is reclining in a spaceship that's ready for takeoff, and they're surrounded by all these

technological objects. It's a fun read on a piece of art. I love that idea, but but again it comes it comes down to the question is this really the best explanation for what we're looking at here? Yeah, good question. Again, I think the answer is probably no. And then finally another line of evidences, for example, ancient descriptions of things in literature and religion. So we I think we've talked on the podcast before about the first chapter of the

Book of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible. Robert, I have we done this one before? I know it came up when Christian and I talked about John d and sort of the various occult ideas about angels, because we talked about how how rad the angels are in the Old Testament, you know, with interlocking wheels and uh a sense of like multiple eyes and strange fires. Yeah. So just to give a brief reading, the author, supposedly, the prophet Ezekiel rights that he had a vision one day the heavens

were opened. Quote. Then I looked, and behold, a whirlwind was coming out of the north, a great cloud with raging fire engulfing itself, and brightness was all around it and radiating out of its midst, like the color of amber. Out of the midst of the fire. Also from within it came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance. They had the likeness of a man. Each one had four faces, and each one had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet

were like the soles of calves feet. They sparkled like the color of burnished bronze. Now, as I looked at the living creatures, behold, a wheel was on the earth beside each living creature, with its four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their workings was like the color of barrel, and all four had the same likeness. The appearance of their workings was as it were, a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they moved, they went toward any one of the four directions. They did

not turn aside when they went. As for their rims, they were so high, they were awesome, and their rims were full of eyes all around the four of them. That is awesome imagery. You can't deny the amazing power of that description. Yeah, it does it. It sounds and feels like an counter with something beyond the human experience

and God. And certainly if you want to say it's an alien, that would make sense to But are you convinced that number one, the author really saw this and this isn't merely a composed narrative serving a religious purpose.

Number two, if the author did actually see this, that it wasn't a hallucination, right one, either caused by quote unquote natural causes, you know, some sort of religious trance or the consumption of some sort of psychedelic substance, either one or or just a dream or dream too, or pure daydreaming, pure imagination. We've talked about that before too. We often want to limit just the pure imagination of ancient people's and say, oh, well, they actually saw something,

or clearly they were eating strange mushrooms. But really you can we I think everyone around us can attest to this. You can create amazing things without bumping your head or or or eating something odd. I totally agree. I always want to emphasize that point. And then only are you convinced. Even if this was something physical the author actually saw, was it aliens? Maybe it's something else being described in

a kind of vague and imaginative way. So von Danikin is convinced, He says, quote the description is astonishingly good. Ezekiel says that each wheel was in the middle of another one, an optical allusion to our present way of thinking. What he saw was one of those special vehicles that Americans use in the desert and swampy terrain. Ezekiel observed that the wheels rose from the ground simultaneously with the

winged creatures. He was quite right. Naturally, the wheels of a multipurpose vehicle, say an amphibious helicopter do not stay on the ground when it takes off. What do you think of that? Read Robert. So the idea is is he beheld an alien in a in a a fan boat, a swamp boat, right and buy you billy alien by you billy. Well, that kind of that kind of kicks

the wind out of this for me. If I think of it as that, I like the idea of it just being interlocking cosmic wheels with eyeballs all over the place. I like that too. Von Dannikin also argues that it must have been aliens and not God's Ezekiel is describing, because quote Ezekiel gives precise details of the landing of this vehicle. He describes a craft that comes from the north, emitting rays and gleaming and raising a gigantic cloud of desert sand. Now, the God of the Old Testament was

supposed to be omnipotent. Then why does this almighty God have to come hurtling up from a particular direction. Cannot he be anywhere he wants without all this noise and fuss? Now I have to say Again, I don't really buy that argument at all, because it strikes me as a pretty shallow and uninformed reading of the Old Testament. I think the Bible is full of references to God and other divine beings having physical bodies and physical limitations and

being subject to normal corporeal existence. Like remember after Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, the Book of Genesis says that they quote heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. So he's walking in the garden and he can't see them if they hide. Well.

This is one of the points that Julian James made about the Bible, taking into account both Testaments, is that in the beginning, things are very physical, and then they become less physical as you progress. God begins as something that is seen and nearly felt, and then he becomes something that is occasionally seen and only heard, and then the then it's a voice that one is is longing for,

one is reaching and grasping for. Well, I would absolutely agree that there appears to be a chronological progression over the history of religion, of the steady abstracting of religious beings like a long long ago. If you look into the most ancient religions, there does not seem to be a problem with a vision of ancient angels approaching from the north and blowing up a lot of dust and causing a physical disturbance when they arrive. Um. I mean,

I've talked about this on the show before. I think this clear distinction that we make between aliens and gods is sort of a post Enlightenment distinction informed by scientific thinking and discovery and ideas about physics and biology. And I don't think that distinction would necessarily make a whole lot of sense to all of the people of the ancient world. And and an Old Testament angel might show up and you might need invited into your house or wrestle it out out in the yard. Uh, that that

sort of thing. The gods of the Greeks are taking physical form and seeking to engage in intercourse with human beings exactly so so we think like, Okay, gods are ethereal, supernatural beings. They exist outside our spacetime universe. They're free from the bounds of the laws of physics. And meanwhile, aliens are biological organisms like us. You know, they they're from some other planet. They may have powerful biological or technological abilities that we don't have, but they're bound by

the laws of physics. And I just don't get a lot of this distinction when you read ancient literature, when you read these ancient religious texts, you don't get the feeling that this distinction necessarily would have been salient to them. Gods often had physical bodies, like you say, they could be injured or killed. They lived in distant but physically solid places in the mountains or in the sky, which they believed there was ground in the sky that you

could walk around. They could be bound. That would be like the ultimate doom for a god of Olympus to be bound somewhere. Absolutely Prometheus. Yeah, And speaking of Prometheus, here's one of the craziest things. Many of the gods, not not always, but many of the gods in ancient religions clearly get their power not from some kind of supernatural nature, but from artifacts that they possess essentially, some

kind of ancient vision of a technology. Right, They've got some thing that gives them power just like a technological alien would. Yeah, magical items. So anyway, that wraps up my basic description of of the flavor of von Danikin's type of arguments. I think we can already see a lot of the flaws within it, but I think it's worth exploring more the history of how this idea developed and what a better version of this type of hypothesis

might be. The thing about Chariots of the Gods, however, is that it is an essential book to discuss because it definitely launched ancient astronaut speculation into the public consciousness. Absolutely, it emerged, and it came along I think really at just the right time, because this is a period of time we've discussed on the show before a period of rapid technological change in the second half of the twentieth century. And remember it was published in nine So just think

of all the things that are going on. You know, we are reaching out into space. We are we're we're reaching for the moon, We're sending out probes to study the cosmos and even bring word of our existence to potential other forms of life out there. I mean, this is the same energy that's going to lead to the establishment of ct IN. But it was also a period of time mean which supernatural experiences took a decidedly sci fi turn, in many cases entailing UFO sightings, alien abduction

experiences that we have a whole episodes about here. And von Donnikin's book took the notion of alien inspired alternative archaeology and ancient alien visitors and propelled it into the mainstream consciousness, first as a book and then his various spinoff bits of media. And we we should be clear here von Donnikin popularized the notion, but he was not the originator. Well it depends no, No, you're you're right

about that. He he was not the originator. I was gonna say, I was gonna make a distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Let's say, even in nonfiction, not necessarily the originator, right.

So one of the sources we looked to him this was a Skeptic magazine article titled Chariot Rror of the Gods by Jason Colavito, and he points out that you had sci fi writers such as in specifically HP Lovecraft, exploring the idea of ancient aliens visiting the Earth and being basically the responsible agents for our various achievements and

our very existence. Yeah, absolutely, if if you're not familiar with love Crafts alien agent aliens mythos, just to read a quote from Call of Cthulhu that also appears in Colavito's article. Quote, there had been eons when other things ruled on the earth, and they had had great cities. Remains of them were still to be found as Cyclopean

stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epics of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had indeed come themselves from the stars and brought their images with them. And of course the original title for that that story by Lovecraft was the Call of Cthulhu. But the Colavida even goes so far as to line up the nineteen sixties European popularity of love Crafts fiction

with the publication of The Chariots of the Gods. Yeah, that's totally right. I mean we should mention Morning of the Magicians. Oh yes, so I've never read it, but I'm familiar with it by reputation. This was in a nineteen sixty book by Louis Paulis and Jacques Bergier. Uh. And this is a book that I actually learned about on the DVD special features for the Nazi zombie film Shockwaves from seven, which is, if you haven't seen it,

a fabulous film, uh, with Nazi zombies in Florida. And it was inspired at least in part by the Morning of the Magicians, which supposedly also gets into uh, you know, ideas and conspiracies related to Nazi interest in the occult. Well, I mean so. Colavito points out that this book Morning of the Magicians was inspired directly by Lovecraft's fiction, as the authors were actually editors of a French magazine called Planet or Planet I guess, which printed French translations of

Lovecraft throughout the sixties. In Traces of the Gods, Ancient Astronauts as a vision of our future, Johan as Richter points out several additional precursors here, uh so possible first ancient astronauts speculation concept in sci fi comes from Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Service, published in eight I've never heard of this, No, I had not either, and that it basically discusses the idea that the Pyramids

were built by Martians. There's also an eighteen seven novel by Kurd loss Fitz that explored this sort of contact between interplanetary cultures, and of course he points out Lovecraft. But then there's also Perry Roden, a German science fiction series running since nineteen sixty one, and it apparently gets into some of these ideas as well. So it seems like, especially if you go into the fiction realm, the nineteen

sixties were full of ancient astronauts stuff. Yeah, it's just von Donkin had the book that really just took it and propelled it into the mainstream. Now, of course this ended up making its way into other fictional properties that were even more and stream like movies. Oh yes, uh, you know, just to name a few here, I probably the greatest example is two thousand and one, A Space Odyssey. You know, I never think of that as an ancient alien story, but that it is what it is, right,

the idea. Yeah, so there's a there's a monolith that appears on Earth at some point during our evolution and sparks this revolution and tool use among our ancient ancestors. Yeah, and it's It's one of the reasons we don't think about it much is because it is such a a

thoughtful and intelligent treatment of the concept. And we'll actually get into to it when we start discussing Sagan's Carl Sagan's thoughts on ancient alien speculation, because some of the things that he say might might take place given a situation like this line up directly with the plot of two thousand and one. But then you have you have other films as well. For instance, God told me to the Larry Cohen film about Christ Like hermaphroditic aliens, that

that definitely has an ancient alien vibe to it. Of course, the Ridley Scott film Prometheus is it's rich with with ancient alien speculation as well. I didn't see this film, but Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull gets into this as well, Right, it's this an ancient aliens uh speculation film. Yeah, it is easily the weakest of the Indiana Jones movies, I think explicitly because Indiana Jones it didn't need to go into the sci fi realm. I think it works

best when it's integrated deeply with earth based mythology. Yeah, I agree, like the Ark of the Covenant is terrifying and awesome in in Raiders because you don't know what it is. It is this mysterious supernatural thing and maybe it is alien in nature, but it is it is either it's so strange that it is alien. Either way. Also, the c G I go for it didn't help um. Now, one of my favorites that I almost didn't think to include is The Life of Brian, the Monty Python religious epic. Uh,

there's a there's a brief alien interlude. I recall, there's like a chase sequence with the character of Brian and he is accidentally abducted by aliens and goes on a brief adventure and it's it's so perfect because it's so accidental. The aliens don't seem to be trying to do anything. They just sort of happened to run into the story for a little bit and then they're out of it and no knowledge is getting like, there's no there's no wisdom imparted upon Brian by this experience. It just scares

the crap out of him. I don't know this for sure, but I'm going to speculate that the reason that is in the film is simply because somebody wanted to create some alien spaceships and alien sets and and alien costumes, and they wanted a way to fit it in. So they just said, oh, let's have them get abducted for

a couple of minutes. Yeah, I'm glad. I'm glad they got to make it, because it does seem like the kind of situation where producers might say, is this necessary to the script, because we could cut this whole alien thing, and then we don't have to build a spaceship or an extraterrestrial and we could cut down and maybe you know, at least a day's worth of filming, and then Terry Gilliams like, I already built it. Uh. They're also less

memorable films that we might mention Stargate. I say less memorable, but I definitely remember an Egyptian god having his his head teleported off and that in that film that was at least one awesome quality kill. Yeah. The best thing about it I recall is like, is like attack by Edge of Teleportation Zone. Of course, the fifth element has

ancient Aliens plot element as well. Yeah it does. And uh and for any of our pyramids, Oh yeah, that's right, And speaking of pyramids, Uh, here's one something for our our Doctor Who listeners out there. If you're a fan of the the The Old Doctor Who episodes, there was an episode called the Pyramids of Mars that has some ancient alien speculation um uh intrigue in it. And there's this this wonderful moment where this uh like Egyptian deity servant steps out of the like a portal and says,

I bring SUITEX gift of death to all humanity. And of course there are plenty of other examples in the film and literature that we could bring up, and we would love to hear from you the listeners, what your favorite bits of fictional ancient astronaut intrigue you happen to be. But clearly it's been a very inspiring idea to many people, Like it's something that caught on fast and we haven't

let go of since. Now. Mentioned of Prometheus is key here, and we've already touched on both the movie and the actual character the titan Prometheus who brought fire to the ancient Greeks in in the myth And it's interesting because we we see this motif time and time again a myth in which a god red demigod gives a technology to ancient people. UH. These are frequently referred to as

culture bearers. So we have Prometheus the firebringer. UH. In Chinese mythology, we have Sujin the fire driller, who, who fulfills the same role, brings the technology of fire to mortals. Uh and UH. I have to admit that, even though I don't personally put a lot of of stock or faith in in a a s, I still read these accounts or look at visual interpretations, and part of me always thinks, oh, yeah, it was totally an ancient alien. That it just makes sense. What else would Promethe this be?

But of course this is always flawed logic because I feel like one of the big things to drive home here is that God's in our myths are not merely mislabeled aliens. Rather, I think it's the reverse. Aliens are essentially rebranded gods. I agree with you a hundred percent on that. I think you're exactly right. Our visions of aliens come from our mythological visions of gods, and they continually are influenced by them. I mean, think of the way the movie Prometheus is echoing all of these echoing

all of these themes from Greek myth Yeah, exactly. I guess we need to take a break, don't we. Yes, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank all right, we're back now, Robert, you mentioned I think that you'd actually seen some of these Ancient Alien shows that they show on what the History Channel or

one of those one of those subsidiary networks. I have never watched any of the Ancient Alien shows, but I did see Leonard Nemys in search Off or at least reruns of it on A and E back in the late nineties. Was that the sort of the proto Ancient Aliens? In a way? I remember them exploring topics like this and uh and and also stuff like big Foot? Was Bigfoot an alien as well? Probably? Yeah, I want to I'm gonna drop a fact on you. We'll see how you deal with this. Did you know that Ancient Aliens

is still on still making new episodes. It's currently on season thirteen. How you like them? Apple, It's it's I mean, having looked at some of the examples that are frequently brought up, there are a lot of There are a number of examples that are used, that are brought up to support uh, ancient alien speculation. But it seems like you'd run out of the really good ones by at least season eight. Yeah. God, I mean not to say that Ancient Aliens is not a fun idea. It's fun

to speculate about, fun to play with. But given that, I think you and I agree that there's really no good evidence anywhere, how do they get that far? Yeah? I think it's it's safe to say that they don't get that get to this point by, you know, through through anything resembling accurate balance, consideration of scientific fact or

archaeological fact. They're basically writing documentary fiction, right Yeah. Brian Switek described the show in Smithsonian Magazine as what you quote, what you would get if you drop some creationist propaganda, Uh, Eric van Donnikin's Chariots of the Gods and stock footage from Jurassic Fight Club into a blender. What results is a slimy and incomprehensible mixture of idle speculation and outright fabrications. Now he's discussing an episode of the Ancient Aliens show.

I think where they they're they're talking about dinosaurs. Okay, read I read this article and he says that there's basically they've got all their quote experts on talking about how aliens might have wiped out the dinosaurs in order to make room for humankind to ascend, and so they've got animations of dinosaurs running away from spaceships that are

blasting them and stuff. It does feel a lot like creationist propaganda at that point where you just especially when you start using the dinosaurs, you know, because I feel like then you're really you're trying to get to the children. That's true. It's despicable and unfair. It's like using cartoon characters on cigarettes. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's why. Just the other day I found a creationist book in a lending library at at a state park, and I've moved it

directly from the lending library to a trash can. And it was such a satisfying them. You know, some of those creations books, they have some good illustrations in them that I really enjoy. The illustrations are great. I just, uh, I feel like there should be a warning label on the front, uh, you know, letting you know that this is uh, this is not science. Now there was one. I'm trying to remember. I think it might have been a creationist book by Dwayne Gish, but I'm not positive. Anyway,

it's it depicts a dinosaur. I think it's a parasar alafus paras. How do you say that one? Parasar Lopuskay? So that's the way one. That's the way my son says it, and he's usually better at dinosaur named pronunciation than than me. In the illustration, it's breathing fire on a t rex. It's just like, yeah, that one it breathes fire. Well, that explains the yeah, the complex nasal composition.

So anyway, back to Chariots of the Gods. We've recently discussed some beautifully presented hypotheses by writers such as Julian Jaynes and Letterard and Leonard Schlaine. Uh. You know that that make a case for something that that you might not accept completely. You know, it's maybe taking a radical approach to our interpretation of the past and to just how humans interact with with ideas. Chariots of the Gods

is not on the same level with these books. In fact, I would say that the author of ann most reminds me of is probably l Ron Hubbard, And I say that as somebody who who picked up l Ron Hubbard with an open mind, saying, you know, all right, this this is this is a book that means a lot to a fair number of people. I want to see

what there is to get excited about in the introduction alone. Uh, von Donnikin immediately goes into attack mode on anyone who might disagree with his notion that archaeological and religious evidence definitely supports the idea that ancient aliens visited the earth and kickstarted humans from that hate level. Uh and I feel like I actually have to read just a little bit of it here, he said, he writes quote, it took courage to write this book, and it will take

courage to read it. Because its theories and proofs do not fit into the mosaic of traditional archaeology constructed so laboriously and firmly cemented down. Scholars will call it nonsense and and put it on the index of those books which are better left unmentioned. Layman will withdraw into the snail shell of their familiar world when faced with a probable ability that finding out about our past will be even more mysterious and adventurous than finding out about the future.

So and that continues for for paragraphs afterwards as well, where he's it's he's not saying exclamation points in it. Yes, yeah, he's not making He's not saying I have an interesting idea. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but I'd like you to think about it. He's saying, Look, let's just get this out of the way. If you're not down with this idea, you're a coward. Well, I mean we should try to be critical of ourselves and skeptical of the skeptical mindset, right, But I mean we we discuss and

entertain radical hypotheses and strange ideas. We try to bring a skeptical mind to them, say, Okay, are they actually presenting any good evidence or not? Right? And we will and we'll give it that give it that a fair fair shake here. I mean, we are giving it a fair shake here. But but I also have to say, like, there's there's something in the way that the idea is presented in the book that I think does not give ancient alien speculation. Uh uh, doesn't do it any favors,

because it immediately feels a bit um aggressive. Yes, Now, I I looked back to see like a little bit more about what the the immediate reaction was to was to the book and how it was received in the years to follow. And I found a really interesting New York Times review by a critic, Richard Lingaman. Uh. This was from four and he really put the screws to the book while also highlighting of von Donakan's background as a convicted embezzler, fraud and forger. So here a few, uh,

a few highlights from the review. Quote. His method is to use a negative ancient people's couldn't have done or thought all the things they did, to prove a positive that the ancient people were the beneficiaries of some kind of cosmological point for program quote, von Donakin's evidence is that of an enthusiastic amateur, not scholar, an amateur with an axe to grind. There is a tendentiousness in his

book that lies in an urgent, recurring motif. A running complaint against the quote high priests of organized religion, who, along with the archaeologist, refused to admit the truth as von Donakan has revealed it. Actually, most modern religion is not anti scientific, though it might be might well be anti von Donakin. The two aren't as synonymous. As for archaeologists, I suspect that their professional tendency is to chip away at the pot shards of truth rather than make cosmic

leaps of faith into outer space. And then he goes on to say, ironically, for a man who is almost gaga about space science, much of what von Donakin purveys depends upon ancient religious myths, specifically the recurring references to skyborn gods. We come full circle. The man who seeks to overturn the religious explanation of man's origins goes not

to scientific evidence, but to the Bible and Ezekiel's fiery wheels. Now, to push back against that somewhat, I would say, though it would be very hard to be conclusive about the idea that are have been visited by aliens if all you had to go on was literature, I would say that in many cases, if it actually did happen, the only evidence we might have would be literature. Exactly. Yeah, And as as we'll discuss later on, and Carl Sagan said as much as well, this is where we would

find the evidence. Carl Sagan is a bit more cautious and determining what, let's say, a lot more cautious, a lot more cautious and in determined like what could possibly be identified as evidence. But still he admits that like this is what we have. We have this this, this is that when you look back on an ancient people's and the records they left, you're gonna get religion, You're

gonna get myth. But this is also uh, you know, you see what he's doing here is he's operating off of unanswered questions and then immediately navigating to a speculative answer. I mean you see this in all kinds of people who are trying to prove radical and speculative hypotheses, where they take a thing that, you know, take an unknown like we don't know how they built the pyramids, and back in the sixties and seventies that was largely true.

I mean, we might have had some good hypotheses, but it was like, oh wow, you know, there was this feat accomplished in the ancient world. How could they have done it? And so because that ends in a question mark and it's a mystery, now you have license to say, well, if we don't know, then it must have been X. And that's exactly what you can't do. So then Donican he makes some pretty broad assertions about the archaeological evidence

he presents. You know, it's not so much of the Baghdad battery might have been a battery, now it was a battery. It's not that the Japanese do goose sculptures um kind of look like they their space suits, but they you know, they're definitely representations of space suits. They are spacemen. Now they do look really cool. And and the thing is in any of these various bits of evidence that are brought up, the ones that you know

aren't fraudulent in nature, they are fascinating. Even the ones that are fraudulent in nature, we could potentially do a whole episode on, but it's it's to to hold them up then as proof of of ancient aliens. Is uh, you know, is this is a step beyond all right, So I think we've had we've we've had enough time with with Chariots of the Gods. Let's take a break and when we come back we will see what Karl Sagan had to say about all of this. Thank thank alright,

we're back. Now we've been discussing Eric van denikin Chariots of the Gods, the ancient aliens speculation, uh, and a lot of the problems with it. But one thing that this got me wondering about is, I'm reading von dannikin I'm thinking that this argumentation is not very good. A lot of the evidence seems very shaky. What would a good,

well presented case for ancient aliens speculation look like? What would it look like if a responsible, thoughtful, skeptical scientist approached the question and tried to put together the best possible case for it. Yeah, because a lot of times it seems like you have two types of people looking at it. You have like quasi religious advocates of ancient aliens and and you have skeptics that are in here

just to tear it down. You know that there they don't seem like they would even entertain any of the ideas like who would be the person to maybe not take the middle ground, but at least approach it with with skeptical open mindedness. Yeah, not middle ground, but just giving it a fair skeptical shake. Yeah. And and luckily this is where Karl Sagan enters the picture, because in the book Intelligent Life in the Universe, Uh, Sagan teamed

up with the Soviet astrophysicist Josef Schowski and Uh. Indeed, in the book they do consider they consider a number of possibilities of concerning uh aliens and the possible existence of aliens, but they do specifically look at the idea of ancient aliens as well. They get into it pretty late in the book, but here's some of the basic

ideas they present. So they said that if interstellar travel is technically possible, then it is quote likely to be developed by a civilization substantially in advance of our own. That kind of makes sense. Are not ready for interstellar travel yet? And uh, and they argue that if you have a technologically advanced group like this, the enterprise of space travel is simply gonna be too rewarding for them to give up. They're just they're going to to expand

beyond their own planet. I think maybe you could argue with that, But then again, I don't know. I think it's fair to assume that there's an exploratory nature in most organisms. Yeah, I mean, certainly when we come back, we always come back, of course, around to the idea that we have to look to our only example of life and intelligent life, and that's an intelligent life and that's us, and therefore we tend to think, well, they would do what we do, which is enlightening and at

times horrifying. Well, okay, so if you try to reason back, whereas you say, if an organism has intelligence, it can probably move right, and moving organisms tend to be either like hunting or foraging types of organisms. They're not just going to be sitting there and photosynthesizing. So if they have to seek out types of food, then they probably have some kind of exploration instinct. I don't know. I mean, that's very rough, but trying to get there. No, No,

I think you're right. So they say that if interstellar space flight is a feasible and then technological civilizations of the galaxy will be uh An intercommunicating whole, but that the communication will be sluggish. So at this point, the Sagan uh and Schlovski they do some math and they determine that quote if contacts are made on a purely random basis, each star should be visited about once every ten to the fifth power years, or I believe that's

what a hundred thousand years. Furthermore, quote, each communitive technological civilization should be visited by another such civilization about once every thousand years. So you see where this is going, right, given their assumptions. Yes, so they say that it's possible then that a starship might have come by the planet during the earliest stages of intelligent life on Earth, and that it's therefore possible that, yes, and an extracestrial civilization

could have visited the planet within historical times. Okay with you, so far, all right? However, this is an important they lay out here. Quote, there are no reliable reports of direct contact with an extraterrestrial civilization during the last few centuries, when critical scholarship and non superstitious reasoning have been fairly widespread. Any earlier contact story must be encumbered with some degree of fanciful embellishment due simply to the views prevailing at

the time of the contact. The extent to which subsequent variation and embellishment alters the fat basic fabric of the account varies with time and circumstance. And so they point to an example made by historian Mercelles Lead in the myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos in history. And this is this is an excellent book that I've referenced on the show several times before. This is where you get into the idea of the terror of history UH

and the cyclical versus linear time. But Eladi pointed out just how supernaturally elaborate, elaborate it a simple Romanian romantic tragedy became, so it became it transformed into a story of ancient magical myth within the subject's own lifetime, so that it's like a game of telephone to a certain extent. Here it's the myth making just compounds everything, so the the individual it's about is still alive, but the stories about it have placed it in a magical mythic past. Well.

The myth making impulses not just to make up a story, and for the listener, not just to repeat a story, but to repeat a story with your own changes and abolishments. Exactly so for our purposes here though, the idea if there's if there's science occurring among the magical, then how are we to tell them apart in the stories that

survived from the ancient past? Good question. On the other hand, Sagan and Slowski point out that there's also, for instance, the the account of six first contact between the telling that people of North America and sailing vessels. Their quote oral rendition contains sufficient information for later reconstruction of the nature of the encounter. But also these stories contain myth mythic descriptions of the ships. Is uh, the of the the French ships as great black birds with white wings.

So they say, if you look at the myth, you see clear embellishments. But you can also put together historical details from them that we can verify as correct. Right. So Sagan argues that this means that quote, under certain circumstances, a brief contact with an alien civilization will be recorded in a reconstructible manner. Uh. However, he drives home that it needs to be first of all, committed to written records soon after the event. It has to be there.

It has to result in major changes for the contacted people, so not our life of Brian example, where nothing is really affected. Uh. And then also the contactors can't be a timpting attempting to disguise themselves, so the aliens can't be pretending to be humans. So that's going to throw everything off right right now, I know they wouldn't say that unless we can verify all that stuff, we can be sure that alien contact never happened in the past.

They would just say that, you know, we're not justified in moving to that conclusion until we meet the following criteria, right. And they also say that you just can't look for sky gods. It's just too obvious. The sky is just too obvious a place to position your gods, Like the only other place to have your gods live is in the deep ocean, or just in the ocean if you are a seafaring people. Mountaintops or mountaintops. Yeah, but just

these are just obvious places for gods to be. You can't say, oh, here's the story about a sky god, therefore ancient aliens. So instead they say that what you need is a visit from the sky, a return to the sky, and a gift of knowledge or technology. Now, I would charge that that might even be too broad based on some of the culture bear motifs that I mentioned earlier, I would agree with that. So this is a nineteen six book, so it came out before Chariots

of the Gods Uh set the world on fire. So he's not responding in this book to specific evidence presented by von Donnikan, but he does talk briefly about some evidence that would have brought up, particularly by Soviet ethnologist M. M. August, and he just drives home that yeah, these you have these cases for past cultures encountering interstellar society, but that there are just ultimately no known alien artifacts that that are just definitely connected with this with such a visit.

There's just no hard evidence. But the authors do offer one possible example from ancient sumer that they think might be a good starting point if you're going to consider, uh, examples of potential ancient alien contact. Yeah, so that they say, we don't have any hard evidence, but we need at least a framework for how to examine ancient literature and stories and stuff to see if they meet the great

if they're actually worth considering. And they give this example of one that is maybe worth considering as an example of alien contact, not not necessarily as an evidence, but just worth looking at. So the story relates to the origin of the Sumerian civilization. Summer is one of the most ancient civilizations known on planet Earth, dating back to

roughly the fifth millennium b CE. UH. These these versions of this one story can all be traced back to one Birosis, a priest of Bell Marduke in Babylon during the time of Alexander the Great, and supposedly Borrosis had access to ancient cune of form and pictographic records from thousands of years before his time. And there are multiple translations and retellings of Barrosis. And the authors of this book quote three passages about Borrosis and his writings at length.

So I'll try to summarize. First. According to Alexander polyhistor and Borrosis is giving a summary of the history and geography of Babylon, with its native plants and crops, and

its neighboring people's and so forth. And he comes to speak of beings variously known as ab Khalu and as Barrosa's himself calls the first one of these creatures Owanas or a Wannies or Adappa, and Barrosas tells that at the time in ancient Babylon, there were men of many nations who were yet uncivilized and quote lived without rule

and order, like the beasts of the field. But then something happened quote in the first year there made its appearance from a part of the Persian Gulf which bordered upon Babylonia, an animal endowed with reason who was called as the whole body of the animal was like that of a fish, and had under a fish's head another head, and also feet below similar to those of a man subjoined to the fish's tail. His voice, too, and language was articulate and human, and a representation of him is

preserved even to this day. Robert, I got a picture here, at least one picture of oh well, so that the picture of a honest uh, just kind of looks like a fishman, which I'm definitely into. But that description with the double faces that that is, that is creepy. It really reminds me of some stuff that our Scott Baker plays with in his um his second Apocalypse saga, which does involve a sort of ancient alien motif within a

fantasy world. Interesting. I got more quote. This, being in the daytime, used to converse with men, but took no food at that season, and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences and every kind of art. He taught them to construct houses, to found temples, to compile laws, and explain to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and showed

them how to collect fruits. In short, he instructed them in everything which could tend to soften manners, and human I is mankind. From that time, so universal were his instructions, nothing material has been added by way of improvement. When the sun set, it was the custom of this being to plunge again into the sea and abide all night

in the deep, for he was amphibious. Oh and then also quote after this there appeared other animals like Oenus, of which Barrosas promises to give an account when he comes to the history of the kings. And then, according to an ancient writer known as Avid nous Uh, he's giving an account of the borosis is giving an account of the king's of ancient Mesopotamia, and he mentions in passing o Honus and other quote double shaped personages who

came out of the water at various points in history. Also, Apollodorus gives an account of this history, mentioning that fishmen appear out of the Persian Gulf at various points throughout history. And Alexander Polyhisto, or the source of the first version of the story uh tells a version of the common flood myth with a king of ancient sumeer being warned by the gods of a coming flood catastrophe, and he's

told how to preserve his himself in civilization to survive it. So, according to these ancient accounts, Sumerian civilization was not the invention of humans, but a gift bestowed and guided by several waves of semi humanoid fish like visitors. Kind of interesting. Oh yeah, Now this may have once been more impressive evidence at a time when many archaeologists believe Sumerian civilization sort of sprang up out of nowhere at the time

the myths described. The authors of the book now note that it seems there was probably a more gradual technological and cultural evolution to the first Sumerian cities. It is interesting to think that this same the same kind of questions we might ask today, like how did bread? How did they ever figure that out? Or you know, or making fire that what was it like when when somebody discovered this, Like even in ancient times, I'm imagining you could still have someone that might think, wow, I just

don't see how anyone figured this out. It must have been fished people, right, It's not like they knew who first drank milk out of the cow right, they needed a myth for that too, um So. The authors also point out interesting features of Sumerian pictographic art on cylinder seals, which show mysterious symbols that appear like they could be

representations of solar systems. So there will be a symbol where there's like a central sphere with rays appearing to come out of it, and it's being circled by smaller spheres. The idea of planet circling a son, of course, wouldn't catch on until centuries later. And more interestingly, there are images of this type with different numbers of planets that seem to be associated with different gods, almost suggesting that it's like, Okay, this god came from this solar system

and this other god came from this other solar system. However, as fun as it can be to draw connections like this, the author's stress that we should not get carried away quote these cylinder seals maybe nothing more than the experiments of the ancient uncons anscious mind to understand and portray a sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes hostile environment. The stories of the op Kalu may have been made out of whole cloth, perhaps as late as Babylonian times, perhaps by Barrosas himself.

Sumerian society may have developed gradually over many thousands of years. In any event, a completely convincing demonstration of past contact with an extraterrestrial civilization will always be difficult to provide

on textual grounds alone. But stories like the Oanes legend and representations especially of the earliest civilizations on the Earth, deserve much more critical studies than have been performed here to four, with the possibility of direct contact with an extraterrestrial civilization as one of the many possible alternative interpretations.

So they're saying, it's a high bar, you know, if you're going to try to go from ancient textual evidence and just like storytelling to okay, aliens came here, it's going to be a really high bar to jump over, right, But we should at least be open to the idea that such contact could have possibly happened, and have a

good idea of what evidence for it would look like. Yeah, So they summarized that given the numbers they discussed, it's possible that Earth has been visited maybe many times, maybe by numerous galactic civilizations even during geologic time, and that they might have a base of operations within our solar system. So in the point out that the moon makes the most sense here, just as author C. Clark explored in his science fiction specifically two thousand and one, we should

stress again appears to be no evidence of that. No, yeah, no, no evidence. But but basically they're saying, like, all right, somebody comes through here, they see, oh, there's something interesting going on in this Earth. But we're important aliens. We have things to do. We can't hang out around here and watch. We can't wait for it to get interesting. Let's leave something behind, so we leave Larry. Yeah, let's

leave Larry. Uh, Larry, But we don't want to leave Larry in plain sight because they're really looking at the stars a lot, and they're right things down. I guess we're gonna have to put it on the other side of the moon just to keep it under wraps. Uh. But now we've surveyed the other side of the moon and no Larry so far. Yeah, so you know they

need to they say that, Yeah, they would. They might want to create an automated system to keep track of technological developments on Earth because that thousand year interval it wouldn't be enough to avoid self annihilation incidents. You know, they don't want to miss anything. You don't want to come back a thousand years later and it's like, oh, those what happened to those ape creatures? Oh they discovered nuclear whatps man, They're gone already and we missed it now.

They also point out that the other thing to keep in mind is that if if if extraterrestrials wanted to contact us, they wouldn't necessarily need to show up and do it. They could simply transmit a message, And certainly the work of the set has revolved around that, like, let's listen, let's see if their signals coming. That seems to be a far more plausible way for first contact

to occur. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean people when they imagine first contact happening, they think we're going to be looking at the aliens face to face. I'd say they're at least two things more likely than that. Number one is that, of course we would get their electromagnetic signals first. But also still more likely than encountering them face to face

is simply encountering their technology in person. They're they're unscrewed probes. Now, the good news that the authors present here is an advance civilization like this wouldn't have to enslave us or eat us good because they would probably be be on that however, so so the Cathulu theory is off. Yeah, I guess that one's off the table. Maybe, But then when you get into questions of religious or cultural conversion,

well we can't really rule that out. The other possibility is that perhaps humans have some unique talent that aliens would require, even if it's just mere amusement, or they might just want to crush us to prevent us from posing a threat, just say, oh, well they have promised they have spunk these humans, we need to cut that out. Or or also even worse, they get to be something that they call the cockroach response, which is simply it's different. We better kill it. But then again, if it hasn't

happened already, then then maybe we're safe. Now Again, that book came out The Four Chariots of the Gods. Uh, Sagan definitely lived long enough to reconsider some of this and to and to sort of revisit the idea of ancient aliens in light of the ancient alien madness. I guess you could say that kind of gripped the culture. Let's hear it. Yeah, so he he wrote about it

this time solo. In the book Broke's Brain, Reflections on the Romance of Science, He wrote that he believed that those excited by ancient alien speculation, you know, they're generally motivated by sincere scientific and occasionally religious feelings that you know, their their passion for science is real. But quote, for many people, the shoddily thought out doctrines of borderline science are the closest to oximation, to comprehensible science readily available.

So the idea here is you're scientifically curious, but then where do you go to get your information? Like you turn on the TV, and if you're presented with in search of if you're presented with ancient aliens, then that is what is going to feed your hunger. Yeah. I mean a lot of times you see people who are attracted to pseudoscience or people who have not had the right kind of exposure to how inspiring real science can be.

Yeah yeah, or or or for instance, how inspiring real archaeology can be, how how legitimate studies of mythology, how how they can inspire us. So most of his criticism is really not leveled at people who enjoy it or or buy into it, but rather those certainly those who peddle it. Uh and he he responds broadly to some of the evidence and chariots of the gods and points out that quote in every case, the artifacts in question have plausible and much simpler explanations. I agree with that

our ancestors were no dummies. They may have lacked high technology, but they were as smart as we, and they sometimes combined dedication, intelligence, and hard work to produce results that impress even us. So against killing it. Yeah. He also pointed out that a s may have remained a popular idea in Russia at the time because it presented religious ideas within a scientific framework. So if you're in a communist state, that's sort of got an anti religious position,

but you've still got a religious disposition. You want to believe in mythological types of ideas, but it's not cool to say be a Christian or anything like that anymore. You could be essentially of the ancient aliens religion, right, Yeah, it is quasi religious at least. He also speculated that the interest in UFOs and ancient astronauts quote seems at least partially the result of unfulfilled religious needs. So again you have tales of wise, powerful, benign humanoid entities that

attend to the human race. And this is an idea that definitely ends up becoming central to a numb a different ufo uh New religions, the idea that the aliens will save us from ourselves, that the aliens have an answer to our essentially our religious needs. And he he also mentions that that he had given the idea of ancient aliens far far more attention than he cared to

think about, and that he loved the idea. But but you know, as you might expect Sagan to him, and clearly he didn't write about it previously and in this volume because he thought it was just ridiculous and above consideration. No, clearly Sagan doesn't like hate this and want to crush it. He just wants to be responsible when entertaining the idea. Yeah, he's but he says that the the supposed evidence rarely

requires more than just passing attention. Quote in the long litany of ancient astronaut pop archaeology, the cases of apparent interest have perfectly reasonable alternative explanations or have been misreported, or are simple pre varications, hoaxes and distortions. And then he makes these final points. He says that even if an advanced alien civilization had really wanted to leave a

calling card, there would be no question. They could have left a metal artifact that, due to elemental composition, would have clearly been from beyond. Or yeah, they could have left a silicon semiconductor chip, yeah, yeah, they could have left a mathematical proof as a calling card. There there are various things that could have done. Here's Fermat's last theorem. Yeah, but but they didn't. They didn't leave any of these things. This book broke his brain. Reflections on the romance of science.

This is still in print. You can you can definitely obtain a copy, and I would advise anyone who's interested to check it out because he does go into greater detail on some of the arguments for a s namely the serious mystery of the dogon people. Uh, it's all very interesting. We don't really have time to discuss it here, but the book is out there. Sagan's writing is always a joy, So I invite everyone to check it out.

So I'd say my takeaway at the end of this is that there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea that Earth may have been visited by aliens at some point. It's possible for all we know. There's nothing wrong with playing with speculation or looking for evidence there. But don't get carried away. Don't let it become your religion, and don't don't lower your standard of evidence just because it's a cool idea and you want it to be true. Yeah,

I agree, Like, don't make it your religion. But if you do make it your religion, just be open about the fact that you've made it your religion. That's fine too, sure, Yeah, yeah, uh. Don't make it your religion and then pretended science and try to convince people. One last thing, I want to test your intuitions on something or discigional audience just you. I mean, the audience can play to play along at home. But Robert, I want to think about ranking some probability.

So let's say you're in a scenario where you find out archaeologists have discovered a tomb in the Nile Valley with multiple lines of evidence independently confirming to every major archaeologist satisfaction that the tomb has remained buried and undisturbed since at the latest. And also inside the tomb they discover a clay jar containing silicon, semiconductor chips and say lithium ion batteries. All other things being equal, what do you think would be the ranking of the most likely

interpretations of this? Would it be that there was ancient lost technology, right, that some ancient Egyptians figured out how to make these inventions semiconductor chips and batteries, and somehow this is the first we're finding out about this capability of theirs, or ancient aliens. Aliens came and brought this or taught humans how to make it and it was lost, or they just you know, shared a few trinkets, or time travel or all the experts are wrong and this

is some kind of hoax. Well, I have to throw out time travel because that definitely breaks our understanding of of cosmos. I was going to say the same. I think I actually ranked time travel below ancient aliens, and I would I can see where though, I can see where someone would be more inclined for ancient Aliens over the two remaining options, simply because if you go to ancient aliens, then you kind of have an out. You don't have to admit that, oh well, we simply missed

it in the in the in the archaeological record. We just somehow missed the fact that the ancient Egyptians developed batteries. Yeah, it's a tough question actually knowing how to rank these

other ones. I think for me, the top option would be a tie between all all the experts are wrong and it's some kind of hoax that's been very cleverly designed to fool all the The hoax is really the place I think I would go first, because it's just it seems so outrageous, like it it's too much of a leap of faith to think aliens like time travel is is impossible as we understand uh the underworkings of the universe. And then the idea that we simply missed

all record of this technology also seems unlikely. Lost technology is very hard to hard to believe because of the context. Right um, that technology doesn't come to exist in a vacuum, but comes as a result of other technologies. So if you suddenly found lithium ion batteries and silicon semiconductor chips in ancient Egypt, it wouldn't just be that, like, Wow,

how do they figure out how to make those? They would be missing many many steps along the chain of technological progress that would lead you to be able to make those. So you'd have to assume not just that, but you'd have to assume the step before it, and before that and before that, like all the metal working and all the fine machining and machining tolerances and things

like that. Yeah, it's like if you suddenly found out that you're significant other was a drug lord, you know, and would and they were you, and you would say, how did I not know they were a drug lord? Like you would think there would be there would be other steps up to becoming a drug lord, right, I would have been surprised at something way earlier in the chain of this progression. Yeah, so that's hard to entertain too,

But I don't know. I think maybe I I probably go with hoax first, and then maybe it's hard to decide whether ancient aliens or lost technology is a better because one of those those answers at least has an answer built into it for why there's no evidence of its development and construction or it's travel beyond that region, like because it's simply an alien dropped it. But in any case, I think clever hoax beats the other two definitely,

and it's sad, like that's the sad answer. Nobody wants that to be the answer to their either they're great archaeological find or their unique insight into some bit of existing mythological, archaic archaeological evidence. But I would have to wonder we'd at least do an episode on it. We try to give it a fair shake, right, yeah, exactly,

all right, so there you have it again. We did not have time here to discuss every example that is often brought up as as potential evidence for ancient aliens, though many of them are are just fascinating in their own ride. I think one or two we've discussed on the show before, like the idea that uh that that the Hindu epics describe the use of nuclear super weapons. It's a fabulous concept, but we just didn't have time to get into it today. But again, there is ultimately

no evidence for for that being true. I agree, certainly no physical evidence, which is what the real standard would be. Even with physical evidence, as we've said, it would be hard to know exactly what to make what to make of it. And with all this uh, literary and artistic evidence that's heavily based on interpretation, you've got all the problems that we discussed with say again and trying to

make sense of what's this story from ancient summer about? Um, Yeah, it's it's a hard hill to climb up if you want to say that there were ancient aliens. But if you must climb that hill, do your best to do it in a responsible, skeptical, evidence based way. Yeah, or certainly give it your best shot, go wild within the realms of fiction. Again. I hope that we I hope we keep getting great ancient astronaut fiction because I can't

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