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  One of Von Däniken’s bestselling rivals was Zecharia Sitchin, the late ancient astronaut theorist who claimed to be the only person on earth who correctly understood Sumerian, which he promptly confused with Akkadian (just as he confused Hebrew and Aramaic). Sitchin was less political than von Däniken, and as a result his theories, while less appealing to the mainstream media, have a smaller but more devoted following. In his “theory” the aliens were cosmic wanderers, traveling the universe in a mobile planet, obsessively collecting gold, manipulating other planets’ politics, and reveling in their intellectual achievements and their cultivated separation from other species. The parallels to the anti-Semitic stereotype of the gold-hungry intellectual Jews who run the world in secret from their ghettos are so painfully obvious that only Sitchin, an Azerbaijani Jew who lived for years in Israel, could fail to see them. Sitchin unconsciously emphasized these parallels by drawing nearly all of his “evidence” for the aliens from Jewish texts and the Near Eastern myths the ancient Jews had interacted with.

  A third contemporary theorist, Robert Temple, had some academics fooled with his claim that flying space frogs from Sirius gave civilization to the Sumerians, largely because of his ability to fill The Sirius Mystery (1976) with hundreds of footnotes to inaccurate and obsolete sources, which he misunderstood.[22] Several positive reviews by academics (though not archaeologists) gave Temple the patina of scholarship. But after his thesis was conclusively refuted by actual field research,[23] Temple descended into a New Age fog, imagining that the CIA, other world spy agencies, and “the hypnosis community” (don’t ask) were stalking him across his home of London and they (not his scholarly shortcomings) were sabotaging his career.[24] While the U.S. government had investigated some ancient alien theorists with cult followings in the early 1960s, my own survey of all declassified CIA and other U.S. government documents finds no evidence of any interest in Temple or his Sirius “mystery.”

  The ancient astronaut theory had its heyday in the 1970s and gradually withered during the 1980s as economic prosperity drove away the spirit of ennui and returned America to a full-throated embrace of superpower status, reflected in renewed enthusiasm for the empire of Atlantis and its “lost civilization” mirror-images. But after 9/11 the heady confidence of the Atlantis empire-builders gave way to the aliens again, and the economic crisis of recent years opened the door to a renewed call for a mythic past of savior gods, especially those who could be expected to return to punish the wicked and reward the righteous, preferably by December 23, 2012, the (incorrectly assumed) end date of the Mayan calendar.

  The rumblings of renewed interest in ancient astronauts began in the early years of the twenty-first century when the History Channel began running more frequent episodes of History’s Mysteries exploring ancient astronauts, and other cable channels followed suit. By 2009, this spawned Ancient Aliens, a two-hour History Channel documentary (which, full disclosure, attacked me as a “skeptic”) reintroducing the ancient astronaut theory. Ratings were so high that History commissioned Ancient Aliens: The Series, which has aired more than forty episodes since 2010 claiming alien intervention in everything from Stonehenge to the Revolutionary War. The program, led by charismatic “ancient astronaut theorist” Giorgio Tsoukalos (who, full disclosure, has actively disliked me since I interviewed him in college) and “lost civilization scholar” David Childress (who, again, full disclosure, has attacked me in print for labeling him an ancient astronaut theorist before he came out as such) offered speculation freed from facts, a comforting narrative about aliens as angels who would lift the souls of the dead to an extraterrestrial heaven (through a “quantum window” opened by human blood loss),[25] and a prophecy of the aliens’ imminent return: “It’s hard to know the future,” Childress told viewers, “what’s going to happen at the end of 2012—but it seems that perhaps the Mayans had some glimpse into the future that we have yet to find out.”[26]

  Freed from the earlier generation of writers’ feints toward appropriating the legitimacy of science and scholarship, the new ancient astronaut theory of Ancient Aliens had become an all-out religious revival. (Creationists and fringe “spiritual” leaders were among its talking heads.) The “ancient astronaut theorists” asked viewers to worship the aliens and join them in condemning global warming, human evolution, and scientific inquiry as heresy against the aliens’ agenda. The aliens are punishing us right now for our hubris with major earthquakes and hurricanes, the theorists, sounding like a wrathful Pat Robertson, said.[27] Instead, viewers were urged to equate the aliens with angels, pray for the aliens to spirit their consciousness to the aliens’ plane of eternal bliss, and support traditional social and economic hierarchies as decreed by the aliens who were, in every sense that counts, gods.

  The ancient astronaut theory, as depicted on Ancient Aliens, had collapsed in on itself. The twentieth century version of the theory had argued that ancient gods were really aliens; its modern religious version told Ancient Aliens’ 1.5 million weekly viewers that the aliens were in fact their true gods. At least the Raëlians and Scientologists had the courtesy to admit upfront that their ancient astronaut theories were alternative religions. Ancient Aliens’ slipshod pseudo-scholars wrap their faux-religion in the borrowed raiment of science and appear to pray for a future when they will be granted their rightful place as prophets, or kings.

  2. The Origin of the Space Gods[28]

  I. Aliens in the Mythos

  One of the most dramatic ideas found in H. P. Lovecraft’s weird fiction known as the Cthulhu Mythos is the suggestion that extraterrestrial beings arrived on earth in the distant past, were responsible for ancient works of monumental stone architecture, and inspired mankind’s earliest mythologies and religions. In the 1970s, this basic premise was resurrected as the “ancient astronaut theory,” a fringe hypothesis that gained widespread popularity thanks to Swiss hotelier Erich von Däniken’s book Chariots of the Gods? (1968) and its television adaptation, In Search of Ancient Astronauts (1973), hosted by Rod Serling, of Twilight Zone fame. According to research done by Kenneth L. Feder, at the height of von Däniken’s popularity in the 1970s and ’80s one in four college students accepted the ancient astronaut theory, but twenty years later less than ten percent did.[29]

  Though mainstream science does not recognize extraterrestrial intervention in human history, the theory continues to receive exposure on cable television documentaries, in magazines, and in a plethora of books.

  Providence, Rhode Island author H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) has been justly hailed as a master of the horror story, and his work claims a place beside Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King in the pantheon of the genre. Born into a wealthy family in 1890, Lovecraft’s life was a series of reverses and declines as his family lost their fortune and his parents succumbed to madness. He was a precocious and self-taught scholar who read voraciously and devoured as much literature as he could read. He read the novels of H.G. Wells, whose War of the Worlds told of the coming of alien creatures to earth. He also read the eighteenth-century Gothic masters of horror, and above all Edgar Allan Poe. He also read works of pseudoscience and mysticism for inspiration.

  When he set about writing his own works, he began to blend the modern world of science fiction with his favorite tales of Gothic gloom. Lovecraft tried to bring the Gothic tale into the twentieth century, modernizing the trappings of ancient horror for a new century of science. Lovecraft published his work in pulp fiction magazines, notably Weird Tales, though some of his works were not published until after his death in 1937. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, science fiction and horror magazines reprinted Lovecraft’s tales numerous times, and he became one of the most popular pulp authors.

  Lovecraft’s works banished the supernatural by recasting it in materialist terms. He took the idea of a pantheon of ancient gods and made them a group of aliens who descended to earth in the distant past.

  Across his works, Lovecraft provided a number of different explanations for th
e arrival ancient visitors on the primeval earth. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” the Old Ones, including the tentacled, star-born Cthulhu, are said to have come “to the young world out of the sky” and to have raised mighty cities whose remains could be seen in the cyclopean stones dotting Pacific islands. These Old Ones brought with them images of themselves (thus inventing art) and hieroglyphs once legible but now unknown (the origins of writing). They spoke to humans in their dreams, and established a cult to worship them (the origins of religion). They appeared as, and were treated like, monstrous living gods, so great were their mystical powers.

  Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them. These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.[30]

  In later stories, Lovecraft added new details and altered his previous conception of the Old Ones to provide a richer and more developed picture of alien intervention in earth life. In At the Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft presents his most complete vision of the extraterrestrial origins of human life. Here, the Old Ones were now a separate species of alien creature at war with Great Cthulhu and his spawn, who only arrived eons later. The Old Ones were “the originals of the fiendish elder myths” of ancient mythology,[31] and they raised great cities under the oceans and on the primitive continents. These beings arrived on earth after colonizing other planets, and they created life on earth a source of food. These artificial primitive cells they allowed to evolve naturally into the plants and animals of the modern world—including primitive humanity, which they used as food or entertainment.

  Elsewhere, Lovecraft described his ancient visitors as maintaining a presence on the modern earth, and like the Nephilim of the Bible, they begat children with earth women in The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and “Medusa’s Coil.” In “The Horror in the Museum,” it is suggested that the monstrous creatures once worshipped as gods were not all extraterrestrials, and that some may have come from alternate dimensions. In The Shadow Out of Time, the extraterrestrial Great Race is one of countless species spanning the universe, and their mental powers let them project themselves backward and forward in time, gathering intelligence and knowledge for their library and, in places, imparting their own wisdom. Most to the point, in his ghostwriting of William Lumley’s “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” the title narrator learns from the pre-human Book of Dzyan that aliens from Venus came to earth in spaceships to “civilize” the planet.

  Human knowledge of these aliens is fragmentary and obscure. Evidence exists in the form of anomalous ancient artifacts of pre-human manufacture, garbled folklore and mythology, and written texts like the Necronomicon, Nameless Cults, and the Book of Eibon, which hint at but do not fully disclose the extraterrestrials’ nature and habits.

  Many critics of Lovecraft have noted that his vision for the Mythos changed over time, as the godlike and semi-supernatural Cthulhu of “The Call of Cthulhu” gradually gave way to the fully material aliens of At the Mountains of Madness; in time faux mythology gave way to faux science in the Mythos. Many Mythos writers, beginning with August Derleth, were dismayed by the contradictions in Lovecraft’s writing (e.g., Cthulhu is an Old One in “Cthulhu” but merely their “cousin” in “The Dunwich Horror”; the Old Ones change identity several times, too), and they have attempted to systematize the Mythos. However, Lovecraft’s writings reflect the way real myths develop, with changes and contradictions and anomalies. This is compounded by the fact that Lovecraft did not write as an omniscient narrator but rather presented his Mythos through the eyes of scholars and writers who had only part of the story and therefore could not offer the whole truth. Even in the Necronomicon Abdul Alhazred (it is implied) was privy only to hints and rumors and interpreted the Mythos through the guise of the Near Eastern mythologies he knew. “These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the ‘Shoggoths’ in his frightful Necronomicon, though even that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb.”[32]

  In other words, Lovecraft’s Mythos tales show us a fragmented, shifting, and uncertain view of the alien beings reflected through the biases and prejudices and mental limits of those who encounter them.

  II. Ancient Astronauts before Lovecraft

  The idea that life could exist on other worlds was not unique to Lovecraft, of course, and the concept had a long history dating back to early Greek philosophers who speculated on the nature of beings on other worlds. Anaxagoras (c. 500-428 BCE) proposed that life began from “seeds” that littered the universe; Anaxarchus (c. 340 BCE) thought there to be an infinity of worlds, and Epicurus (c. 341-270 BCE) felt life existed on many planets across the vastness of space. These philosophers, though, did not propose the visitation of these aliens to the earth.

  The most important early writer to propose extraterrestrial visitation on earth was Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), the founder of Theosophy, a Victorian-era amalgam of Spiritualism, Eastern religions, and good old-fashioned hokum. In The Secret Doctrine, Theosophy’s most important text, Blavatsky noted Greek speculation about life on other worlds and asserted that the ancients had first-hand knowledge of the fact of extraterrestrial existence. She speculated that the beings on the innumerable inhabited worlds may have “influence” or “control” over the earth. She also asserted that spiritual beings originating on the moon contributed to the metaphysical development of earth life:

  The first race of men were, then, simply the images, the astral doubles, of their Fathers, who were the pioneers, or the most progressed Entities from a preceding though lower sphere, the shell of which is now our Moon. But even this shell is all-potential, for, having generated the Earth, it is the phantom of the Moon which, attracted by magnetic affinity, sought to form its first inhabitants, the pre-human monsters.[33]

  But for her any alien intervention is a sideline to the epic history of evolutionary and spiritual developments of an assortment of earth creatures who grew from primal ooze to Aryan supremacy on the lost continents of Hyperborea, Lemuria, and Atlantis.

  Blavatsky’s disciple W. Scott-Elliot expanded on hints in the Theosophical cosmos by creating a race of divine beings inhabiting Venus. In The Lost Lemuria (1904), Scott-Elliot claimed that beings that evolved on Venus but had reached a spiritual or “divine” stage of development came to earth and taught the inhabitants of Lemuria the arts of civilization and gave them wheat and fire.[34] A critical difference between the lords of Venus, Blavatsky’s moon creatures, and Mythos beings (and indeed modern ancient astronauts) is that the Theosophical Venusians and lunarians are not envisioned as true extraterrestrials (in the modern sense) from distant star systems but as incarnations of spiritual beings who share a mystic connection to earth creatures and feel a spiritual calling to aid their brethren on earth. Here, the Venusians are inhabitants of Venus in the same sense that the angels of God were once thought to inhabit Venus, Mars, and the other crystalline spheres that surrounded the earth. As Scott-Eliot put it:

  The positions occupied by the divine beings from the Venus chain were naturally those of rulers, instructors in religion, and teachers of the arts, and it is in this latter capacity that a reference to the arts taught by them comes to our aid in
the consideration of the history of this early race, continued.[35]

  In 1919, the great collector of anomalous trivia, Charles Fort, published the Book of the Damned, in which he speculated that old stories of demons could be related to “undesirable visitors from other worlds,”[36] though he did not draw a firm connection between devils and aliens. He also suggested that other worlds may have communicated with ours in the distant past, left behind advanced technology, or attempted to colonize the earth.[37] “If other worlds have ever in the past had relations with this earth, they were attempted positivizations: to extend themselves, by colonies, upon this earth; to convert, or assimilate, indigenous inhabitants of this earth.”[38]

  However, Fort made no claim that such things actually happened, only that they may have happened, and at any rate there is no way to tell whether the creatures were alien, trans-dimensional, spiritual, or even imaginary—perhaps the result of telepathy, communications from the spirit realm, or from myriad other sources.

  H. P. Lovecraft read both The Book of the Damned and Scott-Elliot’s compilation volume The Story of Atlantis and Lost Lemuria (1925), and from these fragmentary ideas about prehistoric extraterrestrial visitation imagined (more-or-less) flesh-and-blood aliens arriving on earth in the distant past and all that this implied.

  III. Ancient Astronauts after Lovecraft

  Lovecraft’s Mythos became one of the touchstones of modern horror literature and a powerful theme in horror, fantasy, and science fiction, where the idea of alien visitors in the deep past continues to enjoy popularity in contemporary works like Stargate, The X-Files, Doctor Who, Alien vs. Predator, and hundreds of other movies, books, and television shows. However, Lovecraft’s alien gods also spawned the decidedly non-fiction (if not factual) ancient astronaut theory, which continues to convert new adherents today.