What the modern ancient alien enthusiasts are doing is basically assuming the truth of their own mythology, in this case a kind of spacefaring physicalist scientism, and subsequently reading it back into human history (often not very well—their grasp of the histories of religion and magic are atrocious). In this presentist myth, there are no invisible nonhuman agents, no God, no magic, no miracle, no world of the dead, no two worlds of experience, nothing genuinely paranormal or supernatural. There is only misperceived technology. Such enthusiasts have taken Arthur C. Clarke’s “any
...more
