In 1968, Erich von Daniken wrote a book, Chariots of the Gods, proclaiming the idea that aliens had visited and influenced Earth in ancient times. His thesis was the logical progression of the ideas of Carl Sagan and other evolutionists who claimed that intelligent life must have evolved many times in the universe. Naturally, if intelligent life had evolved many times, then surely they had become spacefaring cultures and paid Earth a visit!
Von Daniken interpreted Ezekiel’s vision of the wheels within wheels as an encounter with an alien spaceship. Following Von Daniken, another ancient astronaut theorist who interpreted Ezekiel's "wheels within a wheel" passage as an encounter with a spaceship, was Josef F. Blumrich, a former NASA engineer. In his 1974 book, The Spaceships of Ezekiel, Blumrich argued that the prophet Ezekiel described a literal spacecraft, and he produced detailed technical drawings of the hypothesized vehicle based on Ezekiel’s biblical account. As this theme progressed over the past fifty years, it has come to be called the “Ancient Astronauts” theory.
About ten years later, Zechariah Sitchin wrote a book called The 12th Planet, in which he interpreted the Sumerian theogony of their gods, called the Annunaki, as a family of ancient aliens from the Planet Nibiru, which visited Earth every 3,600 years. Sitchin expanded on The 12th Planet with a series of seven books called The Earth Chronicles, which attained a cult following.
The film series known as the Alien franchise further developed this idea in fiction. In Alien Prometheus, a group of scientists and explorers from Earth travel to a distant star system to meet the “Engineers,” the alien race that created life on Earth, only to discover the Engineers intended to exterminate humanity as a failed experiment.
Von Daniken’s and Sitchin’s Ancient Astronaut theories were further popularized by shows like Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM, now continued by George Noory. The talk show host, Joe Rogan, has interviewed several people across the spectrum of ancient astronauts and ancient high technology theories, including Bob Lazar and Jeremy Corbell, who claimed the US Government was reverse engineering alien technology at Area 51.
From this millieu of various fringe theories about human origins emerge two general hypotheses: Ancient Astronauts seeded life on Earth, and a lost ancient worldwide high technology civilization existed leaving many of the ruins found around the world.
It is my position that the first, while being mostly nonsense, is partially based on the demonic invasion of the Earth after the Fall. The idea that beings from “up there” in Heaven, left their domain and came “down here” on Earth comes straight from Genesis 6 and Jude 6.
And the angels who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day;
The second hypothesis, ancient high technology, has a firm basis in the reality of our ancient pre-deluvian and post-deluvian ancestors. The amazing feats of the ancients were the fruit of the minds of men made in the image of God, not the work of aliens.
Seraphim Rose talks about aliens in Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future and says a similar thing. While there is fraud, some of these encounters with "aliens" seem like clear demonic encounters. It's an interesting book.
There definitely seems to be an angle there where they want to convince humans of the existence of some super high technology alien race and that we need to do <<whatever false demonic religion>> in order to save the world from some impending disaster, or to ascend to a higher technological plane of being etc. At the moment it seems to be a non starter but some people for sure would be all in on this. I don't know if this is relevant but <<child hurters>> were almost always big star trek fans when star trek was still a relevant thing. Maybe a link with this kind of futuristic utopian science fiction type belief system.
One thing which bothered me with the ancient aliens stuff is how they often seem to take for granted that people in the past were inferior. There's some tacit buy-in to a progressivist evolutionary world view with this kind of outlook. Or they don't think people can do anything at all which made for a fun tiktok trend "we couldn't build the pyramids with today's tools. Today's tools:" cue into ridiculously huge mining equipment or cranes.
This is great. How do we get you on Rogan?