Ancient Alien Astronauts

When does speculative science cross the invisible line and become pseudoscience? That's a topic I grapple with when writing science fiction, and one which crops up whenever scientists air some of their wilder theories.

For example, Dr. James Benford recently published a paper on searching for alien "technosignatures" on Near-Earth Objects in our own Solar System. In short, he wants to look for ancient alien space probes. Benford is a scientist, and his paper got published in The Astronomical Journal. It's speculative, but it's Real Science. 

Fifty years ago, Erich Von Daniken published Chariots of the Gods?, a book asserting that artworks and artifacts of ancient human cultures contain evidence of contact with alien visitors. Von Daniken's book was pure pseudoscience, and it spawned a whole branch of pseudoscience with thrives to this day. His stuff has been debunked over and over but the idea continues to fascinate the public.

The maddening thing about the "Ancient Astronauts" pseudoscience is that it's not even crazy. The idea that the Solar System may have been visited in the distant past is entirely plausible. (Hence Benford's paper.) It's an interesting hypothesis which points to some very promising areas of research: detailed surface surveys of Near-Earth Objects, especially the Moon; radar mapping of other objects; the search for life on other planets; possibly even a search for chemical anomalies in ancient rock strata here on Earth. 

If Erich Von Daniken had proposed those ideas the SETI community would honor him as a visionary. But he didn't. His "theory" is based on ignorance and flat-out lies about ancient civilizations on Earth, ignoring mountains of solid investigation and analysis by archaeologists and historians. The best analogy would be someone trying to prove that America was discovered and colonized by the Roman Empire, using the architecture of Federal buildings and Caesar's Palace casino in Las Vegas as proof.

And speaking as a science fiction writer, I have to say that Von Daniken's ideas of alien contact don't convince me. Like most pseudoscience involving contact with aliens, it simply isn't weird enough. His alien "chariots" are too similar to 1970s aerospace technology. His visiting space gods have two arms, two legs, and a head on top. If he'd cited artwork showing entirely non-human beings I might be persuaded.

So what? A dude writes a book of crackpot science and makes a fortune off it. What's the harm? Why do I care?

Two reasons. First, the whole "Ancient Astronauts" pseudoscience has tainted the well for actual scientific research into the subject. Until the arrival of tech billionaires who were science fiction nerds willing to spend millions of dollars to finance searching for aliens, there was virtually no support for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It stank of woo. It has taken half a century for SETI research to overcome the "looking for little green men" stigma that people like Mr. Von Daniken helped pin on it.

And second, it's just wrong. Chariots of the Gods? is full of errors and misrepresentations — and not just about things which were disproved by subsequent decades of archaeology, but things which were known to be false when Von Daniken was writing. I'm pretty sure he knew it, too. Getting things right is important, or at least it should be.

One of the most dependable lines in the woo business is that "orthodox scientists" are too stodgy and unimaginative to accept the revolutionary ideas of the pseudoscientists. But that's actually the reverse of the truth. It's the pseudoscientists who are unimaginative, and their transparently bogus ideas get in the way of actual research into the speculative edges of science. 

I've always been fascinated and amused by pseudoscience, but I think the practitioners could do a better job. Do your research! Come up with weirder ideas! Who knows, you might turn out to be right . . .

 

 

Comments

[Edward Wright]

“Chariots of the Gods” was actually plagiarized from “The Morning of the Magicians”, an obscure book by a French author, Robert Charroux.

Charroux, in turn, derived his ideas on H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction but took it seriously.

The book manuscript that Von Daniken submitted was unpublishable, so the publisher hired a ghost-writer to fix it up: an ex-Nazi, who added his own racist ideas to the book.

A train wreck from beginning to end.

[Cambias]

An astonishing amount of stuff was plagiarized from Pauwels and Bergier's Morning of the Magicians. It's the font for the whole "Da Vinci Code" Priory of Sion nonsense, it's got secret Nazi occult stuff, it's got mutants with superpowers living among us -- did Stan Lee skim a copy at one point? Certainly Wilson and Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy is heavily drawn from Morning of the Magicians. It may be the most influential occult book of the 20th century.