Skip forward a few years, and Mary Vetterling-Braggin, an academic philosopher, tangled with the same theory in the 1980s. Many, like von Daniken's mentioned above, also claimed that aliens mated with and/or bio-engineered the first humans.) (I should pause the narrative for just a moment to explain - for those who haven't read other similar posts - that the "ancient aliens" theory tries to explain all sorts of impressive monuments and achievements by ancient people as the work of aliens posing as gods. The result was sometimes considered to be the best rebuttal out there. In the mid-1970s, an amateur with an undergraduate philosophy degree named Ronald Story wrote a book debunking von Daniken. Back then, the archaeological community was fighting the good fight against Erich “Aliens Did It” von Daniken. So it’s no surprise that a few philosophers had a go at the ancient alien theory as soon as it poked its head up in the 1970s. For example, you can go all the way back to the 1950s, and you’ll find Laurence Lafleur, a philosophy professor at Florida State, leading the charge against Immanuel Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision.” (Velikovsky was something of an ur-example of pseudoscience as well as pseudohistory he remains exhibit A for the demarcation problem.) Philosophers of science have a surprisingly respectable history of attacking pseudo-archaeology. To understand why, we’ll have to take a stroll into the foothills of philosophy of science. The PseudoarchaeologistsĪncient aliens theorists like to preface their speculations by asking, “Is it possible…?” “he claim that the ancient astronaut hypothesis is ‘possible,’ although true, turns out to be relatively uninteresting from a scientific point of view.”īackground: Philosophy of Science vs. Georgio Tsoukalos, bodybuilding promoter, discussing the ancient alien theory “Is such a thing even possible? Yes it is!”
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