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The concept of Ancient Aliens rests at the exact midpoint between popular science fiction stories and bizarrely common conspiracy theories with tons of sincere believers. The trope raises many interesting questions, but many of those ideas are unfortunately tied to a ton of unpleasant ideas about human development.

Sci-fi aliens come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. The works of science fiction that include intelligent life could use them as heroes, villains, uninvolved observers, or anything in between. The go-to period for an alien invasion is right now, while the typical era for life alongside extraterrestrials is the future, but Ancient Aliens take the concept to a time before recorded history.

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The Ancient Aliens or Ancient Astronauts trope suggests a reality in which intelligent extraterrestrial life made first contact with mankind thousands of years ago. There's a substantial gap in time between the birth of the first Homo sapiens and any form of written language or record keeping. This pre-historic era could have theoretically featured things that would be considered impossible today. The aliens rarely just drop by and observe in Ancient Alien stories. Instead, they offer guidance, shape the development of humanity, and earn the worship of early mankind. Sometimes an Ancient Alien science experiment resulted in the eventual birth of human beings, and they've been on Earth longer than we have.

Stargate movie poster with spaceship shooting Egyptian pyramid. Jack O'Neil with Daniel Jacksons on a dune

Where many sci-fi ideas are shaped by the development of real technology, the Ancient Alien trope largely has its roots in pseudoscience. The Ancient Aliens concept evolved from the popular "Lost City" subgenre of fantasy, which depicted explorers hacking their way through the jungle to discover an old hidden metropolis. The trouble with these stories is that they almost always involved white people wandering into areas populated by people of color and finding things they didn't expect to see. When European explorers saw even the slightest technological advancement in an area without any white people, they immediately began imagining the fantastical space beings that must've been responsible. This is the basic underline of the Ancient Aliens conspiracy movement. The Pyramids of Giza, Easter Island heads, the massive structures throughout Central and South America, and many more iconic landmarks are chalked up to aliens by many.

In 1968, German novelist Erich Von Däniken released the bestselling bible for the Ancient Aliens movement Chariots of the Gods. The book is supposed to be non-fictional, though the overwhelming majority of the work is pseudoscientific nonsense. Von Däniken popularized the Ancient Aliens trope in all of its forms. Most modern works that suggest an early first contact take directly from Von Däniken's widely disproved text. Chariots of the Gods suggests not only that the aliens created many notable landmarks, but that their advanced technology formed the basis for all major religions. The work took clear influence from H. P. Lovecraft, so much so that many credit the father of cosmic horror with the entirety of the Ancient Aliens trope. Despite the complete lack of scientific basis for Chariots of the Gods, the overwhelming majority of fictional examples simply canonize that work as the new rules of the fictional universe.

Many of the biggest sci-fi franchises in modern history add a little Ancient Aliens flair. Both Marvel and DC feature alien species that appeared on Earth thousands of years ago, informed the development of mankind, and became the gods of ancient mythology. The Alien mythos suggests that the mysterious Engineers created mankind through their science. In the non-canonical Aliens vs. Predator, it's revealed that the Yautja built the pyramids in South America to contain Xenomorphs on Earth. The most recent outings of the beloved Godzilla franchise explain that ancient Kaiju informed many cultural ideas about dragons. This trope frequently crosses over with the Advanced Ancient Civilization, which ensures that just about every story with Atlantis counts towards this trope.

avp-pyramid Cropped

Ancient Aliens don't necessarily have to be deeply problematic, but they are more often than not. The idea that aliens contributed every innovation that wasn't accomplished by white Europeans is pervasive in science fiction and deeply rooted in colonialism, xenophobia, and racism. There are a lot of interesting ideas that could come of aliens interacting with human beings, even in the distant past, but it's almost always used as an explanation for questions that have already been answered.

An interesting example of this trope that eschews its worst connotations comes from the Star Trek franchise. The crew of the Enterprise often become the Ancient Aliens to less developed planets, bringing an interesting level of perspective to the concept. There's still a lot of ground that could be covered with this trope, but just pointing to Chariots of the Gods is a lazy trope that consistently runs afoul of basic decency. The Ancient Aliens trope must be used wisely to avoid the connotations, but there are still interesting ideas to be gained from this pre-historic concept.

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