ALIEN: Ancient Aliens

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Every once in a while, we uncover something that changes our understanding of human history.

More recently, a skull was found in Morocco that suggests the first Homo sapiens appeared 100,000 years earlier than anyone thought.

And in 1929, researchers found a map from the 1500s that was so accurate it could only mean one of two things.

Either a huge chunk of human history is totally missing from the record, or the map wasn't made by humans.

This is Supernatural.

I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

This week, I'm talking about ancient aliens.

As the theory goes, extraterrestrials have been visiting Earth for thousands and thousands of years, and they've left evidence behind to prove it, from Stonehenge to the Great Pyramid.

So maybe the question isn't, are we alone?

Maybe it's, have we ever been?

I'll have that and more coming up.

Stay with us.

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Unless you've been living under a rock for the past decade, you've probably heard about ancient aliens.

It's one of the biggest pseudoscientific theories out there and one of the most controversial too.

Your gut instinct might be it's all a bunch of crap, which wouldn't be unfair, but stay with me for a minute because it all started with something that is really difficult to explain.

The Piri Rees map.

In 1929, a group of researchers are working in the archives of Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.

This place was built in the 15th century as a headquarters for the Ottoman sultans, so they find tons of relics and manuscripts inside.

So many that by 1929, people are still combing through, making sure they've cataloged everything.

And it turns out there is something they missed.

A piece of parchment rolled up on a shelf in the library, forgotten and covered in dust.

It's torn, so it's only a small fragment of a much larger map, but it seems to show the eastern coast of South America, the islands of the Caribbean, and the west coast of Africa.

Based on the dates inscribed, it has to be one of the earliest maps of the Americas ever drawn.

They say it's from the early 1500s.

Some experts look it over and they determine that this map was made in 1513 by a guy named Piri Rees.

Back in the day, cartographers would basically crowdsource their info, pulling together data from tons of different sources and maps and naval charts.

Piri Rees claims to have used 20 different sources for his, some from ancient times, some more recent, but most importantly, one made by Christopher Columbus.

Piri's uncle was a privateer and he supposedly looted the Columbus map off a Spanish soldier in 1501.

Unfortunately, it's never been recovered, so we don't know what details Piri took from it.

But everyone pretty much assumes, well, Columbus explains how he knew about South America and they basically just file the Piri Reese map away and forget about it.

That is until 1956, when a Turkish naval officer gives a copy to the U.S.

Navy.

From there, it ends up in the hands of a retired Navy captain named Arlington H.

Mallory.

And this is when the mystery really starts.

Mallory is a kind of amateur archaeologist.

Old maps are his hobby.

And as he's looking this one over, he spots something out of place, something no one else noticed before.

At the very bottom of the parchment, there's this landmass that's maybe a few inches long.

It's clearly a coastline with inlets and bays and islands.

And to Mallory, it looks eerily like the coast of Antarctica.

As you probably know, Antarctica is covered in ice.

It's been covered in ice for millions and millions of years.

But there's land under there somewhere.

And thanks to tech innovations like sonar tests, we now know what the coastline looks like underneath.

Without access to that technology, how would a guy in the 1500s know?

Mallory is so stunned that he brings the map to some astronomy and geology professors for a second look.

And they are just as confused as he is.

Eventually, it catches the attention of Charles Hapgood, a professor who teaches the history of science at Keene State College.

Hapgood is no stranger to alternative out there theories about science, and he's intrigued.

He takes the Piri Reese map to the Air Force's cartography division, and they ultimately affirm that, yes, the landmass at the bottom is in fact Antarctica.

To figure out how that could be possible, Hapgood and his students spend countless hours poring over the Piri Reese map and comparing it to other maps from the medieval and early modern times.

In the process, they find even more odd details.

Like some of the islands off the coast of Antarctica look just eerily similar to the Falklands, which as far as we know, no one had discovered in the early 16th century when this map was made.

And there's a mountain range drawn in South America that has to be the Andes, which nobody from Europe or Asia knew even existed at the time.

And some of these features are surprisingly accurate.

For example, the distance between Africa and South America seems to be correct, which should be impossible because there was no way to accurately measure longitude until more than 200 years after this map was made.

Hapkood Hapgood even brings in a mathematician from MIT to convert the map's measurements into modern latitude and longitude.

And they confirm, yep, it's pretty much spot on.

So the question is, how did this happen?

How could someone in 1513 pinpoint longitude, chart the coast of Antarctica, and identify landforms that no one had discovered yet?

Hapgood's only conceivable answer is wild, but simple.

He thinks there must have been some ancient lost civilization that existed before Antarctica was frozen over.

And they had super advanced technology, enough to sail around the whole globe and map it all accurately, including Antarctica.

But at some point, this civilization was destroyed, probably in some big disaster, leaving behind little to no evidence of their existence, except a map, which was somehow passed on to their descendants.

But there's one problem with his theory.

The timeline doesn't add up.

Antarctica has supposedly been frozen over for millions of years and Homo sapiens didn't even evolve until 200 or 300,000 years ago.

The first human civilization didn't spring up until maybe 6,000 years ago.

And like, okay, maybe those dates are wrong.

We find new evidence all the time, but how could they be off by that much?

It defies all logic.

So when Hapgood publishes a book about his theory in 1966, it's mostly ignored.

But it does catch the eye of a Swiss hotel manager named Eric von Däniken.

Von Däniken comes up with a different theory, one that's even more radical than a lost civilization.

What he notices is the Piri-Rees map is very accurate in terms of the measurements, but parts of it just don't look right.

Like South America looks weirdly distorted.

It curves really far to the right, and the tip seems to merge into the coast of Antarctica at the bottom.

Now, if you've ever seen a satellite photo of the Earth, you probably noticed how the continents look distorted and disproportionate.

Since the Earth's surface is curved, a two-dimensional photo can't capture it accurately.

And I mention this because Von Daniken discovers that the way the coast of South Africa is distorted on the Piri Reese map is the exact same way as it is in satellite photos.

So he concludes the Piri Reese map wasn't just based on other maps.

It must have been based on aerial photographs as well.

But he isn't suggesting that Hapgood's Lost Ancient Society was so advanced that they developed airplanes.

That would be ridiculous.

Instead, he thinks the photographs were taken by aliens.

Coming up, the beginnings of the ancient alien theory.

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Can I take your order?

Miss, I've been hitting up McDonald's for years.

Now it's back.

We need snack wraps.

What's a snack wrap?

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Snackrap is back.

Now, back to the story.

Eric Von Danikin isn't the first person to propose that aliens made contact with ancient humans, but he is the first person to give it serious consideration in his 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods.

His main evidence is that there are certain monuments and artifacts that ancient cultures shouldn't have been able to produce.

For example, the pyramids in Egypt.

The individual stones that make up the pyramids weigh up to 15 tons each.

Even with today's technology, it would be really difficult to transport and place stones that are that heavy.

Experts say that these stones were probably transported on wooden rollers, but Von Daniken asks, where did they get the wood in the middle of the desert?

There aren't really a lot of trees out there.

Even more interesting is the Nazca lines, these giant shapes drawn into the soil of the Nazca Desert in Peru.

Some of them are just straight lines, others are animals or human-like figures.

Each individual shape is up to 1,200 feet long.

At that scale, it would be really hard to design anything that's proportionate from the ground level because you can only see the full shapes from above.

All over the world, there are other landmarks that fit this pattern.

Stonehenge, the Moai statues on Easter Island, the ancient Maya temples, massive, often unexplainable monuments that seem really difficult to construct and that usually seem to have a religious significance.

Well, according to Von Daniken, that's because gods are actually aliens.

In practically every religion around the world, there are references to alien visitors or spaceships.

In Hindu mythology, the gods travel around in flying vehicles, which Von Daniken suggests are actually spaceships.

The Old Testament has angels, beings that come down from the sky to communicate with humanity.

The book of Ezekiel even describes what definitely sounds like a UFO in this passage.

I saw a windstorm coming out of the north, an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light.

The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures.

In appearance, their form was human, but each of them had four faces and four wings.

It's a little wild, right?

And the list goes on.

There are Egyptian hieroglyphics that look like helicopters, Paleolithic rock carvings that seem to depict astronauts in spacesuits.

Everywhere you look, it's the same iconography, the same stories of divine beings that live in the sky.

Vondaniken thinks that isn't a coincidence.

All of these religious myths are just retellings of something that actually happened.

At some point in ancient history, aliens came down to Earth and humans mistook them for gods.

And these alien visitors brought their advanced knowledge and technology with them.

Say, prehistoric satellite photos of Antarctica or whatever tools it took to build the pyramids.

And because ancient humans would have been blown away by this stuff, it probably would have seemed supernatural to them.

So it makes sense that they then used the technology to build these huge monuments in honor of their godlike visitors.

And Von Daniken suggests that some of the monuments might have served actual purposes for the aliens too.

For example, from above, the Nazca lines look suspiciously like an airfield.

And Stonehenge could have been built as a landing pad.

When he releases his book in 1968, it's widely criticized by historians and experts.

But the public goes wild.

Chariots of the Gods sells 7 million copies and kickstarts the entire ancient aliens industry, which to this day is thriving.

TV shows, conspiracy theories, and an annual convention called AlienCon that basically sprung out of this book.

And in the years after its release, other writers add their own thoughts and speculation to the mix.

In 1976, this guy named Zachariah Sitchin publishes a book called The 12th Planet.

He argues that ancient Mesopotamia was visited by aliens from an undiscovered planet called Nibiru.

Supposedly, the Nibiru visitors came to Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago to exploit the planet for minerals.

After a while, they got tired of toiling in the mines themselves, so they literally created humans through genetic engineering to do the slave labor.

The aliens set up the first human society in Sumer and appointed a king to act as their representative.

The Sumerian people recorded stories about their alien overlords, whom they call the Anunnaki.

According to Sitchin, these Anunnaki are the same ancient aliens who built the pyramids and all other monuments Von Danikin couldn't explain.

They stuck around and guided human culture until about 12,000 years ago when the last ice age ended.

He thinks the melting ice caps caused a flood that destroyed all the Anunnaki's bases, so they basically just bounced and left humans to their own devices.

But that might not not have been their last visit.

The same year, a writer named Robert K.

G.

Temple comes out with his own book called The Sirius Mystery.

The mystery he's referring to is how the Dogon people in Mali could possibly know about a star called Sirius B, which is impossible to see with the naked eye.

He proposes that around 5,000 years ago, the Dogon were visited by aliens from a planet in the Sirius star system, who brought them advanced knowledge of astronomy.

Over the next few decades, countless authors come up with their own new theories, each one wilder than the last.

And it reaches a fever pitch in 2010 when the History Channel launches a whole series called Ancient Aliens.

After 200 episodes, the show is still on the air today.

Pretty much every self-proclaimed expert on this stuff has appeared on it, including Eric von Däniken himself.

You've probably seen that meme of the guy with the big frizzy hair from the show.

That's the show's executive producer.

Despite the fact that he's a former bodybuilding promoter with a BA in communications, the History Channel bills him as one of the world's foremost ancient astronaut experts.

Which is an indication of a glaring issue with all of these theories.

There are practically zero scientists or archaeologists who buy into ancient aliens, like at all.

Ever since the theory became mainstream, it's essentially been blasted by every academic on earth.

And not just because of the wild claims themselves, but because of the hideously dark implications hiding underneath.

Coming up, I'll look at the truth about ancient aliens.

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Now, back to the story.

You may have noticed that I didn't present much actual evidence in support of ancient aliens.

And that's because, frankly, there isn't any.

None of the authors who built this theory had any evidence to support their claims.

It was all built on wild speculation and misinterpretation.

I mean, let's go back to that first piece of evidence, the Piri Reese map.

As I said, in the late 90s, it inspires enough controversy that academics start looking at it seriously.

In 1998, Stephen Dutch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, examines the map and immediately notices some problems with Charles Hapgood's interpretation.

For starters, in his view, the map doesn't accurately depict Antarctica's coastline after all.

He points out that the map is blatantly missing key features, like the Drake Passage and the islands in the Weddell Sea.

And if the coast of Antarctica isn't really as accurate as everyone made it out to be, there's nothing strange about it being on the map in the first place.

In the 16th century, it was commonly believed that a southern continent existed, even if nobody could see it.

They called this land Terra Australis, and any competent cartographer included it in their work.

Piri Rees himself even explained in his maps captions that the landmass on the bottom was supposed to look like a combination of this fabled southern land and the South American coast.

How that detail was missed for so many decades is a mystery of its own.

If you take away the Piri Reese map, Von Daniken's whole theory relies on the premise that ancient cultures were incapable of building the pyramids and Stonehenge and so forth.

But that's blatantly not true.

If he'd have spoken to any archaeologist, which he apparently didn't, he would have learned that they have a pretty good idea how most of these monuments were built.

Like, you don't actually need to be hovering in a UFO to see the Nazca lines in proportion.

They can be seen clearly from the surrounding hills.

And there are many credible theories about how the Stonehenge rocks might have been transported, even if historians can't agree on which one is most likely.

The pyramids are still a bit of a mystery, but evidence suggests that Egyptians might have just used ramps and pulley systems.

Beyond that, there are so many false and misleading statements in von Danikin's book, I don't even have time to go through them all.

In the words words of Carl Sagan, I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of Von Daniken.

And the authors that followed in his footsteps aren't much better.

The 12th planet is based on a total misinterpretation of Sumerian myths.

And there's no evidence that the mythical planet Nibiru ever existed.

The Sirius mystery is also pretty much a fantasy.

Astronomers agree that the Dogon people probably did get their knowledge of the stars from a more technologically advanced civilization, but one that came from Europe, not another solar system.

And speaking of Europe, there's something we need to address.

With the exception of Stonehenge, all of these ancient alien theories revolve around non-European cultures.

As tons of actual experts have pointed out, this reinforces the old imperialist idea that non-white cultures are inherently less capable.

Like no one ever questions how the ancient Greeks built the Parthenon or how the Romans perfected aqueducts.

Even hardcore ancient alien theorists tend to accept that, yes, the evidence is clear, they did that themselves.

But when cultures in Africa or the Americas accomplish something similar, the reaction is somehow, there's no way they could have figured that out on their own.

Now, does that mean that everyone who believes in ancient aliens is racist?

No, most people probably don't even think about these implications.

Now, these theories wouldn't exist without people willing to question precedents set by established science, history, and mainstream thought, which is good.

People should be curious.

People should question.

As a society and as a culture, it's how we hone and grow our collective knowledge.

But what's so troubling in this case is believers don't apply that same scrutiny to their own theories.

They reject any evidence presented by actual experts, but are basically willing to believe the word of some random guy off the street without a second thought.

The irony is kind of jarring.

Like during the 2018 Alien Con, one woman told the producers of Ancient Aliens, quote, I'm indoctrinating my children in your show so they'll ask questions and not believe everything they're told.

That is, unless they're being told that aliens built the pyramids, in which case they should apparently believe it without asking for any proof.

The blind faith people have in this theory is almost cult-like, which probably isn't surprising given the connection it draws between extraterrestrials and religion.

In fact, according to Kevin Burns, an executive producer of the Ancient Aliens TV show, that connection is the whole point.

He told the New York Times, it's really a show about looking for God.

Science would have you believe that we are the result of nothing more than a chance assemblage of matter.

The real truth is we don't know.

In the end, that's what's at the real heart of this story.

Not the totally answerable questions about who built the pyramids or what's at the bottom of an old map, but the truly unanswered questions that science can't resolve.

There's this innate human need to believe that we're not alone in the universe, that no matter how chaotic the world may seem, someone who knows all the answers is watching over us, guiding us.

For some, that guardian is God.

For others, it's aliens.

Thanks for listening.

I'll be back next week with another episode.

To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all Audio Chuck originals.

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