I've been thinking about the 'ancient aliens'/'ancient astronaut' idea lately. (Sceptically, you understand.)

There are a lot of pseudohistorical interpretations of SE Asia's past out there, mostly (ethno-)nationalist ones. But the ancient aliens stuff is fairly new.

Usually SE Asian pseudohistory involves exaggerated or entirely false claims about people or places that flatter modern ethnic groups or nations in some way. So you see claims that the Malay hero Hang Tuah met Leonardo da Vinci, for example. (He did not.)

That's the typical stuff. Inventing heroes - or if not inventing them outright then building on very brief or very vague references in primary sources or oral tradition. There are plenty of examples of this - 'historical' figures whose existence seems extremely doubtful.

Siliwangi is a good example from Sunda/West Java. But you can find examples all over. The paucity of local manuscripts means that the local historical imagination hasn't had much to work with, so... brief references get blown up into something bigger. https://twitter.com/siwaratrikalpa/status/1266072052349493248?s=20

That's the standard SE Asian pseudohistory. It's ever-present, ineradicable, and the bane of researchers' lives. It means a lot of students of SE Asian history go into the subject with great expectations and can be disappointed by the nature of the surviving sources.

Anyway, lately another kind of pseudohistory has crept in, particularly in relation to sites like Candi Sukuh in Central Java and Gunung Padang in West Java. This newer pseudohistory claims that these places were built by aliens or Atlanteans or something else along those lines.

In an earlier age these sites - which aren't as mysterious as they seem, by the way - would probably have been credited to Lemuria or Atlantis. These days, though, ancient alien visitation is the hot product on the pseudoscience marketplace.

Basically the 'ancient aliens' concept is that extraterrestrial beings visited our planet in times past to dispense technology/mine Earth for gold/have sex with humans/build stone megastructures.

Enigmatic stone building in a developing country? Aliens did it.

That's the logic.

Really ancient European sites are also sometimes implicated in this ancient alien stuff - Stonehenge and so on - but generally speaking medieval French cathedrals (and the like) aren't. Apparently Europeans were clever enough to build those. Hmm.

It's an idea that goes back to the mid-20thC in its particulars and to 19thC pseudoscience for its general approach to theory and evidence. It's basically just the idea of Atlantis but with aliens substituting for Atlanteans. Pretty silly stuff imo. (Pretty racist too.)

As an aside: What I find interesting about this is that ancient alien theory started to become *really* popular among ufologists and conspiracy theorists after the invention of the smart phone.

Suddenly everyone was carrying a decent camera with them everywhere they went - and yet the number of good photos of UFOs didn't increase. If aliens really were visiting our planet we'd see evidence of them everywhere, wouldn't we? And yet we don't.

It's hard to keep making documentaries and writing conspiracy theory books about decades-old UFO sightings and Cold War cover-ups. So the alien-seeking community changed tack to the less commonly exploited subject of *(pre-)historical* alien contact.

This had the added bonus of allowing people in developed countries to ignore the actual history of societies in the developing world in favour of elaborate nonsense, which is something people in developed countries love to do.

These days the main example of 'ancient alien' 'theory' (if it can be called that) is the bombastic nonsense on "Ancient Aliens", a long-running show on the misnamed History Channel. Now going on 15 seasons!

You'd think that after 15 seasons the whole ancient aliens pond would be all fished out - but obviously if you look into claims of alien contact in real detail they tend to stop making sense, so ancient aliens enthusiasts have a tendency to flit around the globe. No deep dives.

And Indonesian sites, like the aforementioned Gunung Padang, have featured a fair bit on Ancient Aliens and in ancient-alien-adjacent media in the last few years. They're supposedly thousands of years old and basically identical to South American temples (etc. etc. etc.)

Borobudur even appeared on Ancient Aliens back in 2012, with wild-haired talking head Giorgio Tsoukalos even claiming that it was a 'temple mound to the stars'.

(It's not; it's just a big Buddhist stupa that was built in the 9th century CE.)

Graphics like this one are also pretty popular in online discussions of this stuff...

(Never mind that the 'Indonesia' temple here is actually in Cambodia and was built a lot more recently than 2850 BCE.)

It seems to me that this sort of attention to Indonesian sites has been increasing recently but I could be wrong. I'm not sure if the earliest progenitors of ancient alien 'theory', like Erich von Däniken, mentioned many Indonesian sites.

Either way, most of the sites in question aren't actually all that mysterious. Several have inscriptions attached to them telling us when they were made and by whom. Borobudur's like that. They're 'mysterious' in that we don't know *everything* about them - but aliens? Nah.

Sukuh, probably the most famous such site and the one most frequently compared to a Maya temple (which it really doesn't resemble), was built in the fifteenth century CE. Not so ancient! A few inscriptions at the site tell us how old it is. It's a little enigmatic, but...

(img cred: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Candi_Sukuh_2007.JPG)

... there's nothing there to suggest that aliens built it or had any hand in it. The logic is that it seems ~*oooooh*~ spooky and it's in a middle-income country full of people who aren't white. So, obviously, Aliens!

Anyway, don't believe everything you read or see about Indonesian temples, try not to fall for fundamentally racist myths about the past, and do your best to find out what can actually be supported by real primary sources instead of leaping to extraordinary conclusions. Fin.

Curious, so: do you believe in anything paranormal?

I guess I'd have to say that I'm sceptical of anything and everything paranormal or supernatural. I don't believe in any of it.

But that's also not a very interesting view and it's not something I think or talk about much these days.

I was always interested in paranormal things when I was a kid. Mostly in a sceptical way, probably because my dad's an amateur astronomer with a PhD in physics. Pretty hard to grow up in a family like that and believe in ghosts or whatever else. I did want UFOs to be real though.

I also happened to grow up between Winchester and Southampton in Hampshire, England, which is where modern crop circles as we know them were first invented - by a couple of men in a pub.

When you know something like that - that one of the cornerstones of UFO lore was invented by people from your own area as a prank - it becomes pretty difficult to believe in the phenomenon as a whole. They just made it up! And M. Night Shyamalan made a movie about it!