American archaeologist and the author of Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, the standard undergraduate text on the subject, now in its eleventh edition, which has carried a chapter on the ancient-astronaut literature since its first.
Why he is the right name for the position
The mainstream archaeological answer to Zecharia Sitchin, Erich von Daniken and the Lost Civilization Hypothesis is usually silence: the field classifies the material as pseudoarchaeology and does not engage it as a competing hypothesis. Feder is the exception who engages it in print, case by case, and the vault had no node for anyone who does. Without one, the reader of an ancient-astronaut node has nowhere to go for the other side except the sceptical notes inside the node itself.
His method is the one worth borrowing: he does not argue that the claims are impossible, he asks what the record would look like if they were true and then shows what the record actually contains, which is also the method Flint Dibble used in the 2024 exchange with Graham Hancock.
Connections
Zecharia Sitchin · Erich von Daniken · Lost Civilization Hypothesis · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Flint Dibble · Graham Hancock · Michael S. Heiser · Ancient Aliens