M
ention ancient beliefs in aliens to just about anyone, and it will probably beam down the iconic meme that has been making internet rounds since Ancient Aliens premiered in 2009. It needs no explanation. Memes aside, there are legitimate questions about mysterious artifacts and phenomena still floating around in space.
Some ancient alien theories have been disproved. It is now known that the pyramids were indeed built by humans, hordes of humans pushing and pulling two-ton limestone rocks up stone ramps. Other theories are more nebulous. Besides the sun and moon, what else did ancient eyes witness flying in the sky? Why were weapons crafted from meteorites that were notoriously hard to work with, and long before the dawn of the Iron Age? What could talismans shaped like miniature spaceships possibly be referring to Why do statues of the pharaoh Akhenaten show a morphology that could easily be of another species? Who actually were those beings the ancients regarded as gods?
If there ever was a god with a god complex, it had to be the ancient Greek playboy otherwise known as Zeus. He was the ancient Hugh Hefner of his Mount Olympus mansion and obviously had a fetish for mortal women, with whom he sired innumerable demigods who would go on to have their own fantastical stories told through the generations. Being married to the goddess Hera was apparently not enough to sate his sexual appetite. Lounging on his throne and drunk on nectar and ambrosia, Zeus decided the fates of men and threw the occasional lightning bolt while trying to decide which of their woman to impregnate next (at least when Hera wasn’t seething with jealousy). Then he would take one bizarre form or the other so he could descend to the mortal world and sire illegitimate children with legitimate powers.
The trysts of Zeus are enough for at least a few seasons of a mythical soap opera. Perseus, slayer of Medusa, is the result of Zeus streaming down as golden rain to the princess Danaë through the roof of her chamber. It is more than understandable that her father refused to believe she somehow ended up pregnant from liquid gold that pooled on her lap and seeped between her thighs. Phoenician princess Europa was abducted to be turned into a cow and seduced by Zeus after he morphed into a bull. Princess Eurymedusa still swooned over him when he crawled over to her in the form of an ant. He appeared as a satyr, horns, hooves and all, to Amazon queen Antiope. Her twins Amphion and Zethus would raise the walls of Thebes with nothing but lyre music—not that Thebes, because the Egyptians had their own aliens to deal with.
Zeus was not the only deity spreading his supernatural seed among humans. While the spawn of Zeus, despite preternatural genes, appeared like other Homo sapiens, interbreeding manifested differently in other cultures. Artifacts in the image of pharaoh Akhenaten have been haunted by suspicions for over 2,000 years. The way his predecessors were drawn was something of a He-Man prototype befitting a living god, but Akhenaten’s strangely elongated face and uncharacteristic curves deviated from the pharaonic beauty standard. Whether this was actually what he saw reflected in the waters of the Nile is unknown. His silhouette and facial features are vaguely reminiscent of tall greys, the unofficial poster children for alien encounters who may or may not hail from Zeta Reticuli and allegedly crashed at Roswell.
Some Egyptologists argue Akhenaten might have purposely asked royal artists to exaggerate his features so he appeared otherworldly. What, then, was he trying to replicate? Egyptian deities were always rendered in human form, but the heretic pharaoh banished that entire pantheon for the sun disk Aten, which some ancient alien theorists hypothesize might have actually been a flying saucer that blazed in the heavens. Maybe he imagined himself as belonging to a lineage that was not of this Earth. Even though his parents were the human pharaoh Amenhotep III and his queen Tiye, whose DNA was determined to be completely human, the mystery of “junk DNA” whose purpose remains uncertain may be keeping secrets. Maybe an alien encounter gave him visions of what divine beings actually looked like. The mummy of Akhenaten has been lost to what was probably looting if he wasn’t beamed up by the spaceship he might have seen on the horizon.
Whether Akhenaten was some sort of hybrid or just wanted to vogue like one is still debated. There has been no unearthly DNA found in the mummy of his son, Tutankhamun, whose hoard of gilded treasures skyrocketed him to icon status thousands of years after his death. Whether Akhenaten’s unusual profile could be explained by head binding is unknown, since his mummified body was never found. Elongated heads were considered the height of beauty and possibly an echo of the divine by several ancient cultures from Africa to Mesoamerica. The mystery behind this practice of cranial deformation is whether there had been some sort of convergent evolution of the imagination, which might have shaped ideas of divinity in cultures that probably had no idea of each other’s existence, or if they had been visited by extraterrestrial beings who they believed were gods in the flesh.
What body modification cannot explain is the race of giants that supposedly once roamed this Earth. The Annunaki, spawn of the heavenly ruler An, were the gods who rose to power when the Sumerians and other Mesopotamian civilizations flourished in the Levant. After translating cuneiform tablets, controversial theorist Zecharia Sitchin hypothesized that these beings from the planet Nibiru descended from the skies to mine gold and use it to seal holes in the sky. The assertion that these beings saw Nibiru as a gate may also suggest they made leaps through the cosmos via wormholes. They also created humans, supposedly as a worker race to handle the mining, and interbred with them. Later theorists who analyzed Sitchin’s findings are convinced those same cuneiform tablets are proof the Annunaki created our species. At about eight feet tall, they must have been hard to miss, and so were their demigod offspring.
Ancient peoples were communicating about, and possibly with, aliens long before any form of writing ever existed. Petroglyphs from prehistoric cultures across the planet have shown scenes involving visitations. Ancestors of the Hopi tribe drew Kachinas, beings with heads like stars crowned by waves of radiation. Unlike the Sumerians and Egyptians and Greeks, the Hopi maintained these extraterrestrials were not gods, but beings who touched down on Earth in aircraft that were far too advanced to have been built by people who lived 12,000 years ago. Whatever knowledge they had from elsewhere landed with them. Similar petroglyphs have been discovered in parts of Europe, Asia, South America and Australia. The similarities between their depictions of these entities can be unsettling. Was this the result of similar legends being conjured by different cultures or visitations from the same aliens?
If there was any evidence of aliens having landed on, or at least hovered above, Earth, it would have to be in the form of some sort of spacecraft (unless they defied the laws of physics and teleported here). Many ancient cultures explained sunrise and sunset as a divine entity flying the chariot of the sun into the heavens at dawn and retreating at dusk. Maybe that was no chariot. What if what they were trying to explain was not the journey of their sun god, or a cosmic phenomenon controlled by gravity, but an actual spaceship? Ancient texts from India describe flying contraptions known as Vimanas. They often take the form of airborne chariots or palaces carrying deities, and sometimes human sages, between astral realms. Their technology was supposed to be so advanced that it was beyond human comprehension. Artifacts that uncannily resemble our idea of spaceships have surfaced in India. It is uncertain whether these were born of the imagination or even made by human hands.
Weapons also seem to be tangible proof aliens were here. There are the lightning bolts Zeus was always pulling out of nowhere and the Mjolnir which Thor struck the firmament with to spark lightning. They had the power to summon what we now know as electricity or smite the most evil of humans. Ancient alien theorists argue that deities from many cultures were not actually wielding lightning, or weapons like the Mjolnir, but light sabers. From the Viking wilds to the rainforests of South America, stone statues built thousands of years ago are clutching something that appears to be more than just a royal staff. Extraterrestrials with advanced technology freaked the mortals out because they were either waving their glow sticks around in the sky or occasionally striking Earth with them when they were in a mood. Star Wars apparently happened a long, long time ago, just not in a galaxy far, far away.
Some weapons were regarded as gifts from the gods which almost always landed in the hands of royalty. Tutankhamun was buried with a dagger whose blade is definitely not of this earth. While the meteoritic iron is explainable as being forged from a space rock that crashed in the desert, and iron was rarer than gold in ancient Egypt, theorists see beyond the visible realm. An arrowhead unearthed in Switzerland, which dates back to around the same time period, was also found to be hammered out of iron from a meteorite. Humans were not using much iron in 1300 BC. It was still very much the Bronze Age, with the Iron Age a thousand years in the future. Then there is the issue of meteorites being brittle, making it especially difficult to create usable objects, and extracting iron would have been excruciating. It leads to the question of whether this was a blade made by human hands at all. Anything that fell from the heavens was though to be divine, so it only made sense this dagger would be wielded by the living god who was the pharaoh.
On the other side of the world, Amakuni and his son Amakura, Japanese swordsmiths of legend, were attempting to forge a weapon like no other. Swords that had been in use for over a thousand years were awfully heavy and unwieldy. After praying to the Shinto gods or kami, who often intervened in the human world, they emerged from their forge with what is now known as the katana. The skeptical emperor decided to arm his warriors with these blades next team they rode into battle, and while he returned with fewer men, hundreds of blades remained unscathed. What exactly happened in that forge is left to speculation. Could the kami have intervened, and were these beings thought to be deities actually aliens who descended upon the royal swordsmith and taught him cryptic methods they had never shared before? Amakuni might have been the chosen one to wield both the sword and the knowledge of its creation.
Ancient alien lore runs deep. There are enough legends and accounts to fill an entire star system, if not a galaxy. Many have logical and scientific explanations that do not involve extraterrestrial beings at all. Glow sticks? Lightning cracking in the atmosphere. Bizarre morphology? Genetic mutations. Flying chariots? Solar and lunar cycles dictated by gravity instead of Apollo or Horus. Spaceships streaking across the sky? Someone might have glimpsed a fleeting space rock before it disappeared into the impenetrable darkness of the vacuum again. Divine beings with wings and powers almost inconceivable to humans? Imagination. Maybe hallucinogens.
Even with perfectly logical explanations that Star Trek’s Spock would have approved of, never mind that he was half alien himself, unknowns persist. There may still be encounters and phenomena from thousands of years ago which even the wildest theories in quantum physics are unable to explain. Whether these entities emerged from a wormhole, teleported or arrived via astral projection, maybe the ancients were right. It was aliens.
