this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Alien conspiracy theories about the Egyptian or Mayan Pyramids, the statues on Easter Island, the Nazca Lines, etc also have the implicit racist undertone of "well it's not like the actual humans from those primitive and backwards cultures could build it!" Basically, non-white people built something too advanced and white people don't like that.
By comparison, we never see alien conspiracy theories for mediaeval castles and cathedrals. No TV show is saying "so you're telling me that a bunch of serfs who couldn't read and didn't know basic arithmetic could build a castle? Nah they were too primitive it was probably aliens."
This is such an absurd take. There's people in Europe who believe that Europe's megalithic structures were built during the time of Atlantis and devote their whole existence to proving it, just to give one example. And of course, Stonehenge, neolithic Europes intergalactic landing site/astronomical calendar/astral energy power plant.
Megalithic structures like the Baalbek stones or Göbekli Tepe from preliterate times are aweinspiring enough to get anyone's imagination going, it's that simple. And some people then have a hard time distinguishing their imaginings from reality. They seem impossibly large and their purpose and methods of construction are lost to time, so it's easy to come up with fanciful ideas to fill in the blanks. Sure, we now have decent theories of how the pyramids were built, but that weren't always the case.
Castles and cathedrals were built too recently for even the wildest of wild brains to believe they weren't built by humans.
It also implies aliens are dumb as dirt.
"Hey Xorglib, what did you do on your vacation to Earth? Did you teach them how to cure diseases? Or maybe advance their technology by a millennium or two?"
"Oh. Ummm...I helped them move some stones into a giant 3D triangle to immortalize their god emperor. And that was it."
"Asshole."
Just the alien version of building sand castles.
We do see Stonehenge included in ancient alien theories sometimes though.
People say the exact same things about Stonehenge.
And just like that, that long ass comment about how it’s actually racism is deflated.
Jesus fucking Christ sometimes it’s not racism.
Stonehenge was built by Mesolithic hunter gatherers though? They were dark complected.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/made-at-ucl/stories/face-cheddar-man-revealed
You really think folks speculating about the origin of stonehenge decades ago were thinking "this couldn't have been built by people of dark complection!". That is a very extreme reach.
I have no idea, but one person said that alien architect theories were racist:
Then you said they say the same thing about Stonehenge prompting capital to say:
I just don't see how bringing Stonehenge into it is a gotcha that proves it's not racism, since it was also built by brown people.
And yet, no one knew that when these theories were being thought up
Or it was early European farmers from the Eastern Mediterranean. Who cares what color they were?
But in reality, fucking no one thinks about race when they speculate aliens might be involved in stuff like this.
They generally think “there’s no way people were this advanced way back then”.
People should stop shoehorning race into everything.
Utter nonsense. The reason alien conspiracy theories don't exist about castles and cathedrals is because the construction of these buildings was almost always very well documented and in many cases these documents still exist today. As far as I know there are no testimonies on the construction of the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids other than the structures themselves.
But there were? Just off the top of my head you have Deir al-Medina, which is the village were the workers assigned to the tombs in the valley of kings were assigned to (not exactly the pyramids, but similar enough). We have records of how they complained about bad working conditions and missing supplies, which were usually promptly dealt with because of the importance of the tombs to royal ideology.
Also: what about the texts literally in the pyramids that describe how they were being built and by whom (at least by whom further up in the hierarchy)? It's not like those aren't texts because they're not written in the Latin alphabet. Archaeologists did not, in fact, make up how pyramids/tombs were constructed.
Also, the Mayans most likely had extensive records as well, but we'll never know for certain because the Spanish colonists destroyed everything Indigenous without regard.
Honestly I get angry whenever Western media describes the Mayans or any Indigenous community in the "new world" as "mysterious" or "little is known about them," without the accompanying context of why so little is known about them, as if they're fairies or something. Couldn't be the fact that the colonial powers deliberately tried to erase them right?
Cue a new sticker of "We did that!"
Remember one about the inca or something, and they said that there was no way they could cut perfectly fitting stone bricks for their walls, so it must have been aliens or something
Except maybe they just ground out the imperfections after excavating the stone, the exactly the way European masons did.
They stacked things on top of other things? Must be aliens!
Funnily enough (to me), the (white) Anglo-Saxons spoke of the Roman ruins in Britain as having been built by giants, because they could not imagine how they had been constructed.
You're talking about the same type of people that think the earth is flat. These people don't think about race, they see a mystery and try to see their agenda in it.
My social studies teacher was fond of pointing out that people in ancient times had the same size brain we have now and where they lacked academics for math literacy they spent all their time working out tradecraft.
Yes let's make it a race thing. Have you considered that maybe the majority of ancient structures are found in those countries. These countries were more civilized and were building much more sophisticated stuff before white people were. The few ancient white structures that we don't understand how they built and still stand do have conspiracies around them e.g. stonehenge.
Most of this ancient alien shit dates back ti the nazis, give or take a specific or two. Serisously replace alien with arian and youre half way there. Plus nazis still use it as a recruitment method.
You're doing literally the same thing ancient astronaut theorists do. Drawing lines between unconnected dots. You have no evidence the Nazis inventing it, it was just sci fi authors. Ancient Astronaut stuff is dumb without everyone exhaustingly trying to brand EVERYTHING as somehow linked to the Nazis. Please touch grass.