One story, two ways

After fifteen years of writing here at Skeptophilia, one thing that never fails to amaze me is how little it takes to get a crazy claim going -- and that afterward, it's nearly impossible to eradicate.

The reason for the latter is, I think, a variety of factors.  First, there's the undeniable fact that the outré explanations are nearly always way more interesting than the prosaic ones, and the result is the Fox Mulder Effect:

I must admit, a wee bit shame-facedly, to having experienced this myself.  I went through an unfortunate period in my college years and early twenties when I wanted desperately for stuff like Tarot card divination, precognitive dreams, various cryptids, and past lives to be true, and read books on the topics voraciously.  Eventually -- and fortunately -- better sense, training in scientific skepticism, and an innate drive toward honestly won the day, and I gave it all up as a bad job.  Not, of course, without some pangs of regret.  That our lives were subject to mystical, ineffable powers, that magic was in some sense real -- well, the draw was powerful.  Today I might rail against the true believers who still fall for such attractive fictions, but at the same time, I understand them all too well.

Second, there's the sunk-cost effect -- that once you've put a lot of time and energy into promoting an idea, it's tempting to stick with it even once you know it's a losing battle (partly explaining how there are still significant numbers of people desperately clinging to Donald Trump's sinking ship).  Admitting that you were wrong, or -- worse -- that you were bamboozled can be profoundly embarrassing.

Third, as we've seen here many times before, once the seed of an idea is planted, expunging it is about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube.  It remains in our memories like some sort of insidious post-hypnotic suggestion.  This is especially true if you keep running into it over and over, something that social media has made a hundred times worse.  As the (probably apocryphal) quote from Joseph Goebbels says, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, eventually people will believe it."

I think you can come up with a few modern examples of this principle without my prompting.

But to take a less emotionally-charged instance of all this, today let's look at the strange tale of the three-thousand-year-old cellphone.  I'll tell the story two different way, and see which appeals to you.

In about 1300 C.E., in the ruins of an ancient Babylonian city in what is now Iraq, a historian found a strange-looking artifact:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Karl Weingärtner (User:Kalligrafiemonk), Babylonokia, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Naturally enough, seven hundred years ago they had no idea what the strange object was.  The writing in the ovals, and the inscription at the top, though, they recognized as clearly cuneiform, a script consisting of wedge-shaped impressions, originally made using the triangular ends of reed stems.  Cuneiform is most commonly associated with Sumerian, a linguistic isolate, but was adapted for use by a number of other unrelated languages in the region, including Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, and Urartian.  Because some of these languages even now are only partially understood, the finder of the artifact knew only that it was some kind of ancient script, but not what the symbols meant.

Today, though, the object takes on a much greater, and stranger, significance.  It's been dated to the thirteenth century B.C.E., and investigated by archaeologists (who later covered up their findings because of how earthshattering the conclusions were).  But the information was leaked, picked up by a site called Paranormal Crucible, and used to support an astonishing claim: the ancient Babylonians had modern technology -- including something very like a cellphone.

Cue the Ancient Astronauts crowd experiencing multiple orgasms.

Okay, now let's do the story a different way.

In 2012 a German artist named Karl Weingärtner created a piece of art out of clay that looked like a mobile phone with cuneiform buttons.  He made it, he said, as a reaction to the negative effects of global information technology after visiting an exhibition at Berlin's Museum of Communication called From the Cuneiform to the SMS: Communication Once and Today.  Weingärtner posted an image of the (initially untitled) piece on Facebook as part of a promotion of his art, and one of his followers promptly christened it the Babylonokia.

Well, once an image is online, it's damn near impossible to stop people from downloading it and then doing what they want to with it.  And that's exactly what happened.  Someone grabbed the photo and reposted it -- claiming that it was a real three-thousand-year-old artifact from ancient Mesopotamia.

Thing is, very few people can read Sumerian (or Akkadian etc.), so almost nobody could see that the symbols themselves were meaningless, vaguely cuneiform-like scribbles.  I'm reminded of the absolutely cringe-worthy thing going around -- I've even heard of it being used in elementary school classrooms as a "multicultural lesson" -- where you "convert your name to Japanese characters" by some bogus one-to-one correspondence between hiragana and the English alphabet, which doesn't even try to get close to how sounds are expressed in the Japanese language.  Weingärtner, of course, wasn't simply being a blithering insular bigot the way the Japanese character people are, but was making an (entirely different) point about the ubiquity of technology.

And in any case, there are very few Sumerians still around who might be offended.

Conclusion: there are no three-thousand-year-old cellphones.  The person who lifted Weingärtner's image and reposted it as an actual artifact was, to put not too fine a point on it, lying.  The ones coming afterward who believed it are simply gullible, or else have been reading too much Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock.

Which, now that I come to think of it, are kind of the same thing.

The problem is, you can see why the first version of the story has real sticking power, and the second one doesn't.  There are still people using Weingärtner's clay cellphone as evidence that advanced technology existed in the distant past, and the photo shows up regularly on websites devoted to Ancient Astronauts and "unsolved mysteries," lo unto this very day.

Further evidence that once a claim gets out there, there's no getting it back.  And that, as the Rock Man from Harry Nilsson's The Point said, "You see what you wanna see, you hear what you wanna hear."

So when you run into a claim like this, just keep your rational facilities engaged, okay?  I mean, I get why weird explanations are appealing.  I've been there, and in some ways, I'm still there.  I just feel like it's more important to find the real answer, you know?  As Carl Sagan put it, "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

****************************************

Beneath the labyrinth

One of the things that bothers me most about the woo-woo mindset is the apparent need they feel to superimpose some kind of paranormal frisson on top of damn near everything, as if what we know from science and rational inquiry isn't fascinating enough.

I mean, really.  Do you need to add any Tao of Physics nonsense to make quantum theory mind-blowingly cool?  Do we need to have the apparent positions of the planets against the backdrop of stars somehow controlling our lives to make astronomy awe-inspiring?  Why is there this bizarre drive to look at the universe around us, with all of its real marvels, and say, "Nope, that's not sufficient"?

That was my reaction to the rather overwrought article I read over at Substack a couple of days ago, entitled, "The Labyrinth at Hawara: What the Scans Found and Why Egypt Won't Let Anyone Dig."  Hawara, it turns out, is a recently-excavated archaeological site in Egypt, near the pyramid of Amenemhet III, and is about 380 by 160 meters -- so, a pretty sizable structure -- that once was made up of hundreds of rooms separated by walls and rows of columns.  Now, it's a ruin, and in fact much of the stone that was used to build it was scavenged for other uses in the intervening four millennia.  Its original purpose is unknown, but it may have been a temple complex.  The historian Herodotus, who visited it in around 430 B.C.E. while it was still standing, described it as follows:

[The Egyptians] made a labyrinth [... which] surpasses even the pyramids.  It has twelve roofed courts with doors facing each other: six face north and six south, in two continuous lines, all within one outer wall.  There are also double sets of chambers, three thousand altogether, fifteen hundred above and the same number under ground. ...  We learned through conversation about [the labyrinth's] underground chambers; the Egyptian caretakers would by no means show them, as they were, they said, the burial vaults of the kings who first built this labyrinth, and of the sacred crocodiles. ...  The upper we saw for ourselves, and they are creations greater than human.  The exits of the chambers and the mazy passages hither and thither through the courts were an unending marvel to us ...  Over all this is a roof, made of stone like the walls, and the walls are covered with cut figures, and every court is set around with pillars of white stone very precisely fitted together.  Near the corner where the labyrinth ends stands a pyramid two hundred and forty feet high, on which great figures are cut.  A passage to this has been made underground.

Which, I think we can all agree, is pretty freakin' cool.

But apparently not cool enough, because the fringe got a hold of this story and began to embellish it.  The Egyptian government has halted deep excavation of the site; the official reason given was the high water table in the area, making digging a fraught endeavor, both from the standpoint of safety and of potentially damaging the site irreversibly.  But we all know what "official reason" means to woo-woos:

It means "lie."

So in came Joe Rogan (because of course he did) and interviewed someone who said that the real reason was a "magnetic anomaly" that scans had discovered in the area, that was evidence of a "thirty- or forty-meter-wide metallic sphere" buried underneath the labyrinth, and the Egyptian government didn't want us finding out anything more about it.  Well, that could only mean one thing, right?

Of course right.  Aliens.  What else?

The Substack article was accompanied by the following, obviously AI-generated image:

This has about as much credibility as a pic that someone claims is "a real photograph of Mordor," but no one comes right out and says that.  The article, and Rogan, and (now) many other fringe-y sources, strongly imply that's really what's under there, and the Egyptian government is stopping anyone from looking into it further because, um, reasons.

Oh, and if that wasn't enough, Rogan also said that in order to prove all this, we need to "occupy Egypt, and just fucking get this done."

*brief pause to stop screaming and throwing heavy objects*

Well, actual archaeologist Flint Dibble (with a name like "Flint Dibble," what other profession could he have gone into?) had some choice words for Rogan et al. about his penchant for "pseudoarchaeological crap," and calls out the "metallic sphere" claim for the nonsense it is.  There was no anomalous magnetic scan, and there is zero evidence of a metallic sphere (or a metallic anything) buried at Hawara, much less what Rogan says is there (a spaceship, natch).

C'mon, people.  Ancient Egypt is cool.  Hawara is a site that was already almost two thousand years old when Jesus was born.  This temple complex -- or whatever it was -- is amazing, astonishing, fascinating.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO ADD A FUCKING SPACESHIP TO MAKE IT COOLER.

Sorry.  I said I was going to stop screaming. 

I'm really done now.

Anyhow, that's today's maddening visit to the fringe.  The upshot is that you should go to actual sources by actual archaeologists (such as this one) for your information, and stop listening to Joe Rogan, whose grasp of the truth is such that if he said the sky was blue and the grass was green, the chance of their being some other color is close to a hundred percent.

****************************************

Underwater cherry-picking

Because my son has an odd sense of humor (Wonder where he got that from?  It's a puzzle), for my last birthday he got me a copy of Graham Hancock's 2002 book Underworld: The Mysterious Origin of Civilization.  Hancock is notorious in skeptical circles for his outlandish ideas about... well, damn near everything.

I use the word "outlandish" deliberately, because he not only propounds dozens of claims about the origins of earthly cultures, he also has an entire book on the "Face on Mars," which is supposedly evidence of an advanced civilization on the Red Planet that was later wiped out by a cataclysm, but which turns out to be a bigass pile of rocks that only looks like a face if you (1) aim your camera at it from one specific direction, (2) make sure the photograph is grainy and low-resolution, and (3) squint your eyes at it real hard.

Hancock is not above messing with the facts to make them fit his favorite pseudoarchaeological "theories."  RationalWiki, never ones to mince words, describe a tiff he got into over the Egyptian pyramids:

[H]e aligned the Giza complex to the constellation of Orion as it was some 10,000 years ago, although the BBC program Horizon thought otherwise.  They claimed that Hancock had fiddled with the locations of some of the temples to fit in with his own theories, and had even ignored the texts carved on the temples themselves, which explained quite clearly why and when they had been built.  Hancock cried foul to the Broadcasting Standards Commission, who politely told him to sod off.

So he's a little suspect right from the get-go.  Then add to this the fact that he's appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, which by itself reduces someone's credibility level to the dimensions of your typical subatomic particle.

Despite this, his books are international bestsellers, which makes a writer like myself grind my teeth down to nubs.

But all envy aside, I decided to read Underworld.  I figured at least it was worth the time from the standpoint of entertainment.  

There's no doubt he's got a compelling style, with a keen eye for description and detail, and does know a good deal about the places he visits.  You can see why unwary readers find him convincing.  But if you start looking at just about all of his claims with any care at all, you find that his foremost talent is cherry-picking.

Historian Garrett Fagan's 2006 book Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public gives dozens of examples of Hancock's selective use of evidence -- such as his claim that Antarctica was ice-free six thousand years ago (ignoring geological and ice core data showing that it's been completely glaciated for at least a hundred thousand years), and that the Bolivian archaeological site of Tiwanaku has been the subject of "minimal archaeology" and is "a mysterious site about which very little is known" (actually, it's been extensively studied, including radioisotope analysis strongly contradicting Hancock's assertion that it's over ten thousand years old).

So the approach appears to be "mention only the evidence that supports your claim, and cite only people who agree with you."

Hell, it worked for Erich von Däniken, right?

To take one example from Underworld, there's Yonaguni Monument, which I had never heard of before.  Yonaguni is an underwater rock formation in the Ryukyu Island chain.  There's no doubt it's peculiar:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Melkov, Yonaguni Monument Terraces midpart NWW, CC0 1.0]

The edges are dead-straight, some with corners at perfect right angles.  Here's what Hancock writes about it:

The first anomalous structure that was discovered at Yonaguni lies below glowering cliffs of the southern shore of the island.  Local divers call it Iseki Point ("Monument Point").  Into its south face, at a depth of about 18 meters, an area of terracing with conspicuous flat planes and right angles has been cut.  Two huge parallel blocks weighing about 30 tonnes each and separated by a gap of less than 10 centimeters have been placed upright side by side at its northwest corner.  In about five meters of water at the very top of the structure there is a kidney-shaped "pool" and nearby is a feature that many divers believe is a crude rock-carved image of a turtle.  At the base of the monument, in 27 meters of water, there is a clearly defined stone-paved path oriented toward the east...

Two kilometers west of Iseki Point is the "Palace."  Here an underwater passageway leads into the northern end of a spacious chamber with megalithic walls and ceiling.  At the southern end of the chamber a tall, lintelled doorway leads into a second smaller chamber beyond.  At the end of that chamber is a vertical, rock-hewn shaft that emerges outside on the roof of the "Palace."  Nearby a flat rock bears a pattern of strange, deep grooves.  A little further east there is a second megalithic passage roofed by a gigantic slab that fits snugly against the tops of the supporting walls.

What's remarkable -- and insidious -- about the way this is written is that without giving any actual evidence, he deliberately chooses verbs implying that Yonaguni is an artificial construct.   "Cut."  "Placed upright."  "Carved."  "Paved."  "Oriented."  "Hewn."  Even the nouns do this: "Passageway."  "Roof."  "Lintel."  "Ceiling."  "Terrace."  "Path."

Once he sets you up this way, the rest of his argument -- if I can dignify it by that name -- goes something like this:

• Is Yonaguni a manmade structure?  Sure looks like it to me.
• To cut and place enormous stones with that precision requires significantly advanced technology.
• But it's under twenty-some-odd meters of water!  So it must have been built when the sea level was lower.
• When was the sea level that low?  Tens of thousands of years ago.  So that must be when Yonaguni was built.
• So the Ryukyu Islands were inhabited by a highly technological culture twenty thousand years ago.  Q.E.D.

The trouble is, the scientific consensus (I can almost hear Hancock shouting "to hell with the scientific consensus!", but we'll soldier on anyhow) is that Yonaguni is a completely natural formation, formed from shale and sandstone of Lower Miocene age.  Archaeologist Carl Feagans has studied the formation extensively, and after an analysis of the features of the structure (which I encourage you to read in its entirety) has the following to say:

The first and primary claim made about the Yonaguni Formation, that it is an artificial, megalithic construction, is not upheld.  Not if you’re a rational person who cares about evidence...

[N]one of the “features” [described as artificial] are supported by evidence that corroborates the claim.  There’s a lot of talk about “tool marks” but no evidence of these is shown.  There’s talk about artifacts, but no discussion on why they could not have been lost a sea by other means.  There’s a lot of “looks like” analogies but no physical evidence to show why they are anything more than pareidolia or imagination.

[T]here’s no evidence that the YF is anything more than a naturally occurring formation of shale and sandstone originally deposited in the Miocene and uplifted and inundated in the Pleistocene.

Look, I understand how easy it is to be fooled.  Only fifteen kilometers from where I live is a lovely spot called Lucifer Falls.  The bedrock around here is similar to Yonaguni -- shale, slate, limestone, and sandstone -- albeit a great deal older (our rocks are Devonian in age).  

And all along the path to Lucifer Falls are rocks with squared-off corners, some so flat they look like they must have been cut by humans.  But no.  Other than a few obvious stairs, walls, and platforms, the area around the falls is completely natural.  The rocks simply fractured that way.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Andrea Pagani, Lucifer Falls (232560709), CC BY-SA 3.0]

But Hancock knows all too well that "it's cool, but it's a natural rock formation" doesn't sell near as well as stuff like Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria.  So don't expect the cherry-picking to stop any time soon.

As far as Underworld goes, I guess I'll persist with reading it a bit more.  I've gotta be able to tell my son that at least I gave it the ol' college try.

But if Hancock brings up Ancient Aliens, I'm fucking done.

****************************************

Facepalms of the gods

While snooping around looking for topics for Skeptophilia, I stumbled upon a page over on Quora that made me utter a string of really bad words and then say, "that nonsense again?"

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that the aforementioned nonsense was the contention that mythological accounts of powerful deities living in the skies are evidence of visitations by aliens with advanced technology.  The original poster on Quora called it "the Ancient Alien Theory," which made me grind my teeth even harder, because the use of the word theory to mean "this crazy idea I just now pulled out of my ass" makes me absolutely livid.

But I shouldn't be surprised that they use it this way, because (1) they also misinterpret just about every piece of archaeological or anthropological evidence in existence, and (2) calling it a "theory" gives an undeserved sheen of seriousness to their claim.  What gets me, though, is that this stuff has been around for decades, has been debunked every which way from Sunday, and it's still got traction.

The whole goofy story starts with the book Chariots of the Gods, written by Erich von Däniken in 1968, but more's the pity, it doesn't end there.  Chariots of the Gods is the Creature That Won't Die.  Like the Hydra, it just keeps regrowing heads and coming back at you again.  In fact, Chariots of the Gods was only the first of a series of books by von Däniken, each ringing the changes on the Ancient Astronauts theme.  When Chariots of the Gods hit the bestseller list, he followed it up with: Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else.

Obviously, I made the last one up, because von Däniken at age 89 is still blathering on about The Gods.  His books have sold 62 million copies, have been translated into 32 languages, and his ideas formed the basis of a theme park in Switzerland, thus further reinforcing my belief that skepticism will never be the lucrative profession that woo-wooism is.

A statue from the late Jomon period of Japan (1000-400 B.C.E.), which Erich von Däniken thinks can only be explained as a space-suited alien, since humans obviously never include weird imaginary creatures in their mythological art. [Image is in the Public Domain]

You might ask what von Däniken's evidence is, other than the argument from incredulity ("wow! The pyramids are really big!  I can't imagine making a pyramid, myself.  Therefore they must have been designed and constructed by aliens!").  Here are a few pieces of evidence that von Däniken claims support the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis:

• The Antikythera mechanism.  This complex "mechanical computer," found in a shipwreck dated to about 150 BCE, contains a series of nested gears and was used to calculate astronomical positions.  Von Däniken says it's of alien manufacture, despite the fact that similar devices are mentioned in Greek and Roman literature, including Cicero's De Re Publica, in which its invention is credited to Archimedes.  (To be fair to von Däniken, I used Antikythera myself as the central MacGuffin in my novel Gears.  However, unlike von Däniken's work, Gears is clearly labeled "fiction.")
• The Piri Reis map.  This map, dating to 1513, "could only have been drawn using an aerial perspective," von Däniken claims.  In other words, it was drawn looking down from a spacecraft.  Unfortunately for von Däniken, the truth is that human sailors have been quite good at drawing maps for a very long time, because those who weren't quickly became fish bait.  The antecedents of the Piri Reis map have been identified, and include ten maps of Arab origin, four of Portuguese origin, and one map drawn by Christopher Columbus himself.
• The sarcophagus of Mayan ruler K'inich Janaab' Pakal, which allegedly shows him riding in a spacecraft.  The claim has been denounced loudly by every known expert in Mayan culture, language, and history.  The sarcophagus depicts the Mayan religious concept of the "world tree," not a rocket ship with a plume of exhaust, says archaeologist Sarah Kurnick -- von Däniken's claims to the contrary show that he can't be bothered to learn the first thing about Mayan culture before making pronouncements about what their art and inscriptions mean.  An objection which, of course, could be made about every other cultural artifact he mentions.
• The Moai, or Easter Island statues.  These are pretty cool, but in my mind only demonstrate what a lot of single-minded people working together can accomplish.
• A "non-rusting" iron pillar in India, that supposedly didn't rust because it was some kind of alien alloy.  When von Däniken's books became popular, naturally skeptics wanted to go to India to check out this story.  They found the pillar, and you'll never guess what it had on it?  Rust.  If you can imagine.  Being that this was kind of conclusive, von Däniken backed off from this claim, and said in an interview with Playboy, "We can forget about this iron thing."

The truth is, piece after piece of von Däniken's "evidence" falls apart if you analyze it, and try not to be swayed by his hyperdramatic statements that always seem to include phrases like "can only be explained by," "scientists are baffled by," and "a mystery beyond human ken."  Von Däniken's books were written because they make money, and are, simply put, pseudoscientific tripe.  The best debunking of his claims was Ronald Story's 1976 book The Space Gods Revealed, which is a page-by-page refutation of all of von Däniken's claims, and remains to this day one of the best skeptical analyses of pseudoscience ever written.

But the frustrating bottom line is that all of that hasn't made a dent in the popularity of von Däniken and his ideas.  Much of the blame lies with shows like Ancient Aliens, of course; the This Is No Longer Even Remotely Related To History Channel keeps pushing it because it's lucrative (it's now on its twentieth season and showing no signs of flagging).  So despite the rationalists and skeptics giving themselves facepalm-induced concussions, it looks like The Gods are still going to be around for a good long while yet.

****************************************

The non-mystery of the Dendera Light

One of the things that has always struck me about woo-woo types is how little it takes to get them going.  I suppose when you've already decided what you believe, the amount of evidence you require to support that belief can asymptotically approach zero without changing your stance one iota.

I ran into a particularly good example of that yesterday -- the Dendera Light.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Olaf Tausch, Dendera Krypta 48 (cropped), CC BY 3.0]

The Dendera Light is a motif found in the carvings in the Temple of Hathor in Dendera, Egypt.  The design is of a giant snake emerging from a lotus flower.  It appears in at least six different places, accompanied by texts that are all rather similar -- so its meaning is fairly well understood.  It is part of the creation myth, showing the god Harsomtus (an incarnation of Horus, in the form of a snake) being born and going out into the world.  This is supported by the inscriptions, one version of which reads:

Speaking the words of Harsomtus, the great God, who dwells in Dendera, who is in the arms of the first in the night-barge, sublime snake, whose Chentj-statue carries Heh [the personification of eternity], whose crew carries in holiness his perfection, whose Ba [spirit] caused Hathor to appear in the sky, whose figure is revered by his followers, who is unique, encircled by his forehead-snake, with countless names on the top of Chui-en-hesen, the symbol of power of Ra in the land of Atum, the father of the Gods, who created everything.

The Dendera Light motif almost always appears on lists with names like "Ten Unexplained Mysteries From Ancient Egypt" despite the fact that except insofar as we still have a fairly fragmentary understanding of Egyptian mythology, beliefs, and practices, it's not very mysterious at all.

Why?

First, someone noticed that the oval container (or halo) surrounding the snake was the same basic shape as a Crookes tube, an early version of the cathode-ray tube invented by British physicist William Crookes in 1870:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons D-Kuru, Crookes tube two views, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT]

The second thing was a passing comment by British astronomer and polymath Joseph Norman Lockyer, who had gone to Egypt to investigate the alignment of ancient temples and monuments with astronomical objects.  He and a colleague noticed the absence of soot deposits in the interior of some of the temples -- something you'd expect with the use of torches or oil lamps -- and the colleague jokingly said that this could be explained if the ancient Egyptians had electric lights.  Lockyer, clearly recognizing that it was a joke, mentioned it to a friend, and that was all it took.

In a classic example of adding two and two and getting 318, we have "vaguely oval shape in a religious motif" plus "humorous comment about the lack of soot in Egyptian temples" equaling "the ancient Egyptians had high technology, including electricity and who-the-hell-knows what else."

Therefore, of course, you-know-who had to be involved:

Needless to say, this claim has actual archaeologists tearing their hair out.  Kenneth Feder, professor of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University, who is a vocal debunker of ancient aliens claims and the like (he is the author of The Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology) points out correctly that if the ancient Egyptians had electricity and light bulbs, it's a little odd that we've never found a single trace of a wire, socket, filament, generator, or battery -- not so much as a glass shard from a broken bulb.

I get that the ancient Egyptian culture is fascinating and, in one sense, mysterious.  As I mentioned earlier, our understanding of how these people lived and what they believed is incomplete at best.  The monuments and temples and relics we still have today are beautiful and evocative.

But none of that is an excuse for making shit up.

So let's keep a sense of perspective, here.  The inscriptions and designs we don't yet understand do not imply that ancient aliens had anything to do with it.  "We don't yet understand" means only one thing; "we don't yet understand."

And as far as the Dendera Light, I'm afraid that's where we have to leave it.

****************************************