Pyramids, Pareidola, and the Press

This is part 2 of a continuing series about aliens. Here’s part 1.

Let’s talk ancient aliens. Von Daniken notwithstanding, there’s a pretty big body of historical imagery and lore that somehave interpreted as evidence that aliens once walked among us, perhaps as gods. One of the things they point to most commonly is ancient megalithic structures, like Stonehenge, the moai of Rapanui, and of course Egypt’s pyramids.

The mystery of the pyramids is why people think there’s a mystery

For the most part, the idea that ancient human beings couldn’t possibly have built these structures is racism, except against people who lives thousands of years ago. (Or more accurately, racism, and also against people who lived thousands of years ago!) Really, though, we modern humans with our cushy lives simply find it difficult to grasp the sheer volume of effort that people were once willing to apply to such projects.

It’s like a card trick. It looks like magic because it’s so hard to envision someone practicing shuffling cards for so long and with such dedication that they can control and remember precisely where every card is at every moment. Most of us don’t have that kind of dedication toward anything. But once, people were indeed willing to scour stones to a precise surface that fits together free of gaps, and work in teams of hundreds pulling tons of stone across endless miles of desert.

In the case of the pyramids, specifically, the idea that they were built by aliens also goes against a tremendous body of easily-found contrary evidence. To believe that the pyramids were engineered and built with alien help, you have to ignore the clear progression of structures leading up to the pyramid. First the mastabas gave way to step-sided structures, culminating in Sneferu’s smooth-sided bent pyramid, where the ancients fucked up the angle and had to change course midway through. Finally after much trial and error, the pyramids we think of when we hear “pyramid.” The Valley of Kings is an exhibit showing us the evolution of Egyptian tomb engineering.

Not only that, like every great empire, the ancient Egyptians freakin’ loved them some bookkeeping. Bureaucracy is the backbone of every great nation. We have records showing where the stone was quarried, how many men a foreman had working for him, attendance records, how much beer the workers went through. Not to mention the graffiti left inside by the workers themselves!

It was not aliens. It was us. Humans are amazing!

Pareidolia, our favorite word

OK so the pyramids were definitely not ancient aliens, fine. But what about all the other evidence? Carvings of UFOs and aliens on Mayan temple walls? All those stories about gods descending from the heavens? That’s got to be rooted in fact somewhere, right?

Yes and no.

These are just such Mayan images.. That sure does look like a UFO, doesn’t it? The shape? The flames? The little alien inside the first one? Incontrovertible! Except for one thing.

We invariably interpret the imagery of the ancients through the lens of the modern. And that means that sometimes, when we look at an image from a long time ago, our modern context steers us horribly wrong. There’s a fascinating phenomenon where people in old photographs look like they’re texting. Here’s a painting from 1850 or so of a girl who looks like she’s texting, but it’s a prayer book. Here’s a guy from 1911. Here’s Lieutenant Sulu texting. (Thanks, Sumana!) Time traveling jokes aside, I bet if George Takei had a smartphone on the set of Star Trek, we’d have heard something about it.

OK, except for two things. These particular images of the Mayan UFO carvings? It’s probably all fake, anyway. In my searching around for a good primary source talking about them, I couldn’t find an origin to these photos. Not a single reference to exactly where it was found, who found it, who has it now, nothing. As much as I love it, I’ve been forced to conclude that they don’t actually exist, or have been egregiously misrepresented. But hey, if you know better, let me know!

This isn’t as fun as I was hoping, Andrea

OK, OK, that’s enough of saying it’s not aliens. Because what if it looks like a spaceship, and it flies in the air, and the people of the time definitely say that was what was happening, and it wasn’t just, say, Ye Olde Time Kite Festival or a fever dream that some painter decided to capture?

I present you the 1561 Nuremberg “celestial phenomenon.”

In 1561, a broadsheet run by Hans Glaser printed this page describing a “sky battle” over the German town of Nuremberg. According to Glaser, the sky was crowded with rods and globes fighting in the sky. Similar reports were made in 1554 and in 1566 over Basel, Switzerland. So we have imagery of stuff flying that sure doesn’t look like birds or clouds, long before man was airborne, and people of the time reporting that some weird, scary stuff was going down and they couldn’t explain it, either.

It’s a shame they didn’t have phones to text us with after all. It would’ve been great if they could’ve snapped a few photos.

Stay tuned for next time, when we fast-forward to the birth of the modern UFO conspiracy movement: Roswell New Mexico. I can’t wait!