The ancient astronauts/aliens epidemic is eerily similar to the claims that vaccines cause autism. One reliable person distributed pseudoscientific publications, causing a hurricane among people’s personal beliefs as well as the scientific community. Truly it shows that believing such propaganda is regressive and insulting to human intellect. It has become impossibly easy for people to believe those with titles, such as authors, scientists, et cetera. Sometimes a title seems to be, within itself, a form of validity. This is certainly a great human error when it comes to the scientific community. People taking fiction over fact solely due to a person’s reputation or title immediately regresses us as humans. This paves way for people who unfortunately must spend their time proving those wrong versus focusing on new discoveries and findings. That being said, it is very easy to deconstruct the argument of those like Erich Von Daniken’s. Von Daniken’s claims were immediately found to be extremely like the stories of American science-fiction author, H.P. Lovercraft. Lovecraft’s stories were mostly published after his death in 1937, automatically defeat Von Daniken’s beliefs and arguments since he was only two years old at the time of Lovecraft’s death. Assessing Von Daniken’s claims about extraterrestrials visiting Earth can easily be deconstructed from an anthropological sense. From his work, he seems to have only pulled sites, artifacts and findings from non-European cultures. These arguments can be tied back to “Myth of the Moundbuilders”. The belief behind the excavational findings in the mounds were that the Indigenous peoples of the time were quote on quote too “savage” or “primal” to have produced such lovely and articulate pieces. It seems Von Daniken is taking a similar approach with his claims of ancient human interactions with some sort of lost alien race. The belief that non-European cultures could be far more advanced for their time proves to be heavily rooted in ethnocentrism. The Egyptians were notorious for upholding well documented experiences, and not once to their records hold evidence for the appearance of extraterrestrials in their historical timeline. Leaps forward in certain ancient societies are easily explainable even based on present day experiences. Even in the last one hundred years, humans have displayed grand leaps in fields like medicine, technology and so forth. The fact that the disbelief that a culture with non-European roots could not have possibly displayed such innovation is clearly a theory that is sheerly based on that of racism.
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I agree with a lot of what you said except when it comes to people with titles. When it comes to people with titles like “forensic geologist” or even actual archaeologists spouting pseudoarchaeological claims that go against obvious facts, I agree with you. I also agree with you about topics like whoever started the rumor that vaccines cause autism. However, we can’t just stop trusting everyone with a title because they have a title for a reason. Doctors, for example, go through 8 years of college(undergraduate and medical school) plus 4-6 years of residency and a fellowship to get the title of MD or DO. In probably 95% of the cases, those doctors are to be trusted because they know what they are talking about. We can’t distrust all doctors because of the 5%(this is an estimate but it’s probably even lower than this) that believe vaccines cause autism or might misdiagnose someone who comes into the hospital. Similarly, the ancient astronauts “theory” is clearly ridiculous, especially when it comes to Egyptians because they did document everything, so they are going against well-established facts. This is supported by some actual archaeologists but as Professor Watrall said, many of the interviews on TV shows with legitimate archaeologists are heavily manipulated and edited to convince viewers that their “theory” is supported by scientists. So this is also not a reason to distrust all archaeologists due to a rare few working with non-archaeologists(who make up most of the people on these TV shows). For example, Giorgio Tsoukalos is just a television personality and producer. He has no archaeological or historical background at all.