The claim that non-human visitors intervened in human prehistory, teaching, building or engineering, and that myth is the record of it. Its neighbours in these vaults are close, and the distinctions are the useful part. Lost Civilization Hypothesis keeps the lost antecedent human. Proto-Ancient Human Hypothesis puts the same idea inside a taxonomy of non-human intelligence but keeps the intelligence terrestrial. Extraterrestrial Hypothesis concerns contemporary craft and makes no deep-time claim. Breakaway Civilization is a contemporary splinter rather than an ancient visitor. Erich von Daniken made it a mass phenomenon in 1968 by accumulating anomalies; Zecharia Sitchin gave it a named cast and a chronology from 1976, reading the Enuma Elish as a literal cosmogony and the Anunnaki as a species from Nibiru; Ancient Aliens has broadcast both since 2009. Its evidence arrives in three layers that are usually presented as one: real texts and objects, contested translations and readings of them, and a scenario built on those readings. The structural difficulty is that most versions absorb disconfirmation, because professional disagreement is read as paradigm defence and unavailability as concealment, so as stated they cannot be falsified. The parts that were falsifiable have been tested and have failed, among them Cydonia, the 1983 infrared reports discussed under Nibiru, and the claim that the Olmecs were West African miners, which the genomic record does not support.
Connections
Zecharia Sitchin · Erich von Daniken · Anunnaki · Nibiru · Ancient Aliens · Lost Civilization Hypothesis · Proto-Ancient Human Hypothesis · Extraterrestrial Hypothesis · Cydonia · The Wars of Gods and Men · Atra-Hasis Epic · Vimanas · Robert Temple