Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 5 September 2016 issue)

Dear Kam,
Is it my imagination or was that Ancient Aliens guy in Kuala Lumpur recently. What’s his name, Giorgio Tsoukalos? I agree with him that aliens built the pyramids.
Curious and curiouser

With the rise of Donald Trump and the success of Brexit, it is clear we live in the age of stupid. Stupid loves conspiracy theories and his favourite TV show is Ancient Aliens, which visits archaeological sites to find “unexplained” mysteries and then suggests that aliens built the pyramids and so on. It is complete and utter rubbish and I hate it so much but I always watch it because it gives me a chance to shout at the TV. Ancient Aliens has made a star of its enthusiastic “expert” Giorgio Tsoukalos, who has become famous for his crazy hair and for the meme of him and the word “Aliens”. The meme wittily suggests that anything that cannot be easily explained must be the work of aliens. “I’m not saying it was aliens … but it was aliens,” says one version. Tsoukalos recently visited Malaysia to promote his new TV show about, you guessed it, aliens. I really wanted to meet him but events conspired against me. Like the meme, I’m not saying it was aliens …

I think there was a time when ignorance was considered to be a bad thing. If we did not know or understand something, then we had to dig deeper and find out what it meant. Now Ancient Aliens and conspiracy theories reward us for our ignorance by giving us easy and exciting answers based entirely on lies and ridiculous connections. How did ancient South Americans build something as remarkable as Machu Picchu without metal tools? Aliens. There is no need to do any tedious research, such as reading the Wikipedia page, because aliens did it. I mean, the Incas not only did not have metal tools but they also had not even invented the wheel or writing. How could they possibly have built Machu Picchu when they were clearly technologically backward and their civilisation of 16 million was crushed with almost comical ease by less than 200 Spanish Conquistadors in the 1530s. The Incas were obviously a pathetically ridiculous people and they could not possibly have built Machu Picchu, so it must have been the aliens. The whole ancient aliens theory is based on unsaid but dismissive racism. As far as I can see, Ancient Aliens never suggests that the Ancient Britons who built Stonehenge needed any help from aliens but instead the TV show repeatedly visits South America and Egypt to show how aliens must have helped ancient brown people build remarkable structures. These structures fill the modern traveller with wonder and yet all too often the modern traveller cannot accept that people of the past, whose descendants are now selling trinkets on the roadside, could have possibly built them without outside help. Aliens.

Given enough time and resources, almost anything can be built. For instance, Ancient Aliens is especially fond of a place called Puma Punku in Bolivia. Here we find a temple complex built a thousand years before Machu Picchu with large carved rock blocks often in the shape of an “H”. Tsoukalos cannot believe that these were built by ancient peoples because the rock is andesite, which, he tells us, is the hardest rock in the world and can only be cut with diamonds. This is not true. This is a lie. Andesite is quite hard but not as hard as other rocks that can be found nearby. If you bang the harder rock against the andesite, then you will gradually create a shape that can be finished to perfection by scouring with sand. Tsoukalos does not show us that just off-screen are many unfinished blocks that were obviously being bashed in this way before work was abandoned. E.T. was not required. Instead, it required lots of people and plenty of time. The rest of the structure was made with sandstone, which is incredibly easy to work. I grew up in a sandstone area and at school, we would carve all sorts of things during lunch break by rubbing two pieces of sandstone together. But why did they go to all that trouble? Perhaps a king was inspired by an early John Maynard Keynes and it was abandoned when their equivalent of the Austrian School became fashionable. Andesite is similar to, but not as hard and brittle as, the red granite of Peninsular Malaysia. Our granite is pretty much the only rock on the peninsula and it is unworkable because it is so hard and it splinters too easily, which is probably why we don’t have a Borobudur or Machu Picchu (Borobudur and buildings in Bali are made from easily worked lava rock).

Virtually every piece of “evidence” that Ancient Aliens cites is a lie, an exaggeration or just plain lazy, which suits us just fine in the age of stupid. Tsoukalos seems like a very nice man but I think that his argument is based on an essentially racist need to explain away the remarkable achievements of ancient peoples and instead, give credit to fictional aliens with the advanced technologies to which we aspire. The pyramids are astonishingly old. Cleopatra was the last pharaoh of Egypt and less time has elapsed between her time and ours than between her time and when the pyramids were built. The knowledge of their engineering techniques has been lost over that time but archaeologists have dug up many workable solutions. Not everything has been explained (like how were Stonehenge’s massive rocks transported over hundreds of miles?) but that does not mean we should be lazy and say aliens did it. It just means we need to work harder to find out and we should give credit to people of the past for their remarkable achievements.

The godfather of this ancient aliens nonsense is the Swiss author Erich von Däniken, who concocted his claptrap back in the 1970s. I saw an old TV show where the great author/scientist Carl Sagan interrogated von Däniken about his intellectual gibberish. Back then, Sagan had the TV show and von Däniken was the circus freak. Today, Sagan is dead and von Däniken’s acolyte Tsoukalos has the TV show. Aliens.

Reprinted with the kind permission of