Ancient Astronauts, Cosmic Collisions

In the face of so much nonsense out there about the ancient past and the public's seemingly limitless capacity to listen anyone but the experts (consult the depressingly ebullient reader reactions to Hancock's crashingly unoriginal and largely fictional "Fingerprints of the Gods" at this site), Stiebing's book comes as a breath of fresh air. He is lucid, concise, factual, and reasonable. In successive chapters, he tackles the flood myth, Atlantis, Velikovsky's colliding-planets theory, ancient astronauts, the pyramids, mythic (and factual, in the case of the Norse) pre-Colombian voyages to the Americas, and ends with an assessment of the main characteristics of "popular" theories. In each case, he clearly lays out the much-despised "conventional" position on these issues: how, for instance, geology completely fails to uphold the proposition of a universal flood or how the pyramids were almost certainly built by Egyptians as tombs for their god-kings some 4,500 years ago and not by Atlanteans, refugees from a Martian civil war, or mysterious bearded figures from Antartica. What was striking to this reader was how many of the supposed "discoveries" and "theories" of recent pseudoscientific works like Hancock's (published in 1995) have long been argued and disproven already (Stiebing's book came out in 1984). Yet the "popular theorists" just continue to rehash the old, long discredited "evidence," never address countervailing opinion in detail, and sell thousands upon thousands of books. There can be no better indication of their utter disregard for the truth -- or of their motives.Stiebing recognizes that part of the appeal of "popular theories" about the past stems not only from their sensational nature but also from a communication gap between mainstream scholars and the general public, few of whom have any idea what academics do or how they arrive at their dates, hypotheses, or conclusions. Stiebing ends with the hope that "Perhaps with concerted effort we can narrow the communication gap between scholars and the general public and make people less intellectually unwary than they have been heretofore. If so, popular theories may become less popular in the future." We must now admit, almost 15 years on, that his optimism has proven unwarranted. Despite excellent TV shows like "Archaeology" and "NOVA," the mass media continue to tout endlessly the "mysteries" of Atlantis, the Bible, ancient astronauts, the pyramids, etc. Charlatans like John A. West, Robert Schoch and Graham Hancock continue to get more airtime to view their nonsensical and untenable positions than any "mainstream" archaeologist. You can bet your bottom dollar that Hancock's crock has sold far more copies than M. Lehner's superb "The Complete Pyramids," a mainstream work that charts the rise and demise of the pyramid-building era of Egyptian history. The communication gap that Stiebing identified in 1984, it seems, is wider than ev

If you feel even the slightest sense of dismay at the size of the "new age/occult" section in your local bookstore as compared to that of the "science/nature" section, you will probably enjoy this book. If you never noticed the discrepancy, well, you're probably not reading this review. An earlier review of this book criticizes Stiebing for focusing his critique of ancient astronauts on the mistakes made by a single proponent. A full description of the egregious errors made by _all_ proponents of notions of ancient astronauts, however, would fill thousands of pages. There will always be some new crackpot that Stiebing has missed. Stiebing's book examines a number of other pseudoscientific subjects, and is not limited to ancient astronauts, and whatever your personal feelings about the reality of such things may be, this book is an invaluable counterpoint to the flood of irrational "literature" that currently chokes bookstores everywhere--the flood that gives the lie to the persistent notion that such "alternative" viewpoints are somehow censored by an all-powerful scientific establishment. For a real idea of the nature of this mythical power, try to find this book in the store nearest you. Now try to find one by von Daniken. 'Nuff said.