Ancient-Astronaut Artifact Claims and Scholarly Rebuttals

In 1968, Erich von Däniken published “Chariots of the Gods?” and read the relief on the sarcophagus lid of the Maya ruler K’inich Janaab’ Pakal at Palenque (which the book wrongly placed at Copán) as a spaceman sitting on a rocket-powered spaceship, wearing a spacesuit [25]. Maya scholarship reads the same relief almost entirely differently: Pakal lies at the base of the Maya World Tree, wearing the net skirt that marks the Maize God, set within the jaws of a monster that swallows him into the underworld, while the sacred bird Itzam Ye perches above; whether he is descending in death or being reborn upward, the idea of transition is what matters [19]. The jaws of a monster with both serpent and centipede characteristics frame the scene, a double-headed vision serpent winds through the branches, and the tree carries te (tree) glyphs and mirror signs [19]. The same cross motif appears in Palenque’s Temple of the Cross. [1]

Illustration: Maya maize god. Image: unknown Maya artist, from Robicsek 1981 / Wikimedia Commons. The Maize God as scribe. Source

Palenque, Temple of the Inscriptions, Sarcophagus Lid (PAL: TISL). Photo: Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya / Europeana (CC BY 4.0). Source

Illustration: Maya cylindrical vessel DMA 149-1990-4. Photo: User:FA2010 / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Illustration: Plaster cast of inscribed wall panel from Temple of the Cross, Palenque. - DPLA - 853e0b1521f27cc7e2df293efa80f735 (page 1). Photo: Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology. 1897-1965 / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Yaxchilan Lintel 15, a vision serpent before Lady Wak Tuun (British Museum). Photo: Michel wal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Source

The same gap recurs in Japan. Goggle-eyed Jōmon shakōki-dogū figurines from the Final Jōmon period (c. 1000–400 BCE) have been described by pseudoarchaeology as figures in spacesuits, while one online guide to the figurines notes that “archaeological evidence does not support claims that the figures wear spacesuits or depict extraterrestrials”. The shakōki label is a modern Japanese coinage drawn from the resemblance of those broad eyes to Arctic snow goggles. For the more than 20,000 dogū excavated across Japan, fertility, healing and ritual use are evidence-based hypotheses rather than proven meanings, and no single function has been proven. [2] [3] [4]

Illustration: Dogū (Clay Figurine). Photo: The Met / Open Access. Source

Copy of a Dogū (Clay Figurine). Photo: The Met / Open Access. Source

Head of a Clay Figure (Dogū). Photo: The Met / Open Access. Source

Dogu jomon period japan. Photo: davide ferro / Wikimedia Commons. From kamegaoka, Aomori prefecture. Final Jomon. 1000-300 BC. Source

Goggle-eyed dogū from Kamegaoka, Aomori, Final Jōmon (Tokyo National Museum). Photo: sailko / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Source

Findings

The sarcophagus lid of K’inich Janaab’ Pakal I of Palenque stands in the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque, its burial crypt reached at the base of the pyramid. Pakal’s dates are firmly anchored: born in 603 CE, acceded in 615 CE at age 12, and died in 683 CE at approximately age 80. Under the iconographic reading the relief’s central cross carries the Maya World Tree. At its base Pakal rests on the Quadripartite Badge, a k’in-marked offering bowl whose documented associations run to the Maize God and the cyclical renewal of the maize cycle, and king and bowl lie within the jaws of the earth monster. Greene read him as falling into the maw of the earth monster, while Fitzsimmons argues that he is rising rather than falling. [5] [6] [19]

God K K’awiil. Image: unknown Maya artist, from Kerr 2001 / Wikimedia Commons. Woman entwined by God K’s (K’awiil’s) serpent leg. Source

Temple of Inscriptions, Palenque. Photo: Antony Stanley from Gloucester, UK / Wikimedia Commons. Temple of Inscriptions, Palenque. Source

Palenque temple 1. Photo: Jan Harenburg / Wikimedia Commons. Palenque ( Chiapas ). Temple of inscriptions. Source

Palenque Temple of Inscriptions. Photo: Strobilomyces / Wikimedia Commons. Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. Source

The Nazca Lines were made in the desert of southern Peru between about 500 BCE and 500 CE, in an earlier Paracas phase and a later Nazca phase [24]. One influential interpretation is Johan Reinhard’s water hypothesis: the lines were sacred paths leading to places where deities associated with the availability of water could be worshipped [24]. Von Däniken argued that the long straight lines and wide trapezoids resemble runways seen from above, but the reading fails twice. On the ground the trapezoids lie on an uneven, rocky desert surface without structural reinforcement or drainage, which is not engineered to support any aircraft [7]. And Joe Nickell, who reproduced figures with only the tools available to the Nazca people, showed that a small team could recreate even the largest figures within days, without any aerial assistance [7] [24]. The astronomical theory of Paul Kosok and Maria Reiche, who read the lines as markers of where the sun and other celestial bodies rose or set, has lost much of its support: Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Aveni concluded in 1990 that the evidence was insufficient to support an astronomical explanation [24], and a 1990 analysis by Aveni found the alignments statistically indistinguishable from chance [7], although some writers still read the lines as astronomical markers [16]. A 2024 AI-assisted aerial survey by Yamagata University and IBM Research identified 303 previously unknown figurative geoglyphs with six months of fieldwork, nearly doubling the number of known figurative geoglyphs [20]. A 2024 paper classified the figurative geoglyphs as either line-type or relief-type and linked the two classes to different uses [24]; line-type figures were made by removing black stones in a linear pattern, while relief-type figures are often located on slopes [21]. The humanoid figure known as the “Astronaut” is read as a shaman or priest rather than a space-suited alien. [7] [16] [20] [21] [24]

The Condor geoglyph, Nazca. Photo: Colegota / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5 es). Source

Nazca bird. Photo: BjarteSorensen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Source

Nasca Astronaut 2007 08. Photo: Raymond Ostertag / Wikimedia Commons. Nasca (Peru), Astronaut, August 2007. Source

The Astronaut geoglyph, Nazca. Photo: Colegota / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5 es). Source

Líneas de Nazca, Perú, 2015-07-29, DD 64. Photo: Diego Delso / Wikimedia Commons. Source

The Saqqara Bird — a sycamore-wood figurine excavated in 1898 from the tomb of Pa-di-Imen at Saqqara, Egypt, dated to approximately 200 BCE, with a wingspan of 180 mm and a weight of 39.12 g — was championed by Egyptian physician Khalil Messiha in 1972 and 1991 as a 2,000-year-old model glider, a claim that has propagated through von Däniken’s circle. A 2023 peer-reviewed aerodynamic study by Zierow and Lesemann, using high-precision 3D scanning and computational flow simulation across multiple angles of attack, concluded that the artifact has a low maximum glide ratio, a center of gravity located at the trailing edge of the wing and behind the neutral point, longitudinal stability that fails modern specifications, and asymmetric spanwise lift distribution producing uncontrolled roll — explicitly stating that “the connection between the Bird of Saqqara and an alleged knowledge of aerodynamics in ancient Egypt could not be confirmed”. Glider designer Martin Gregorie’s 2002 balsa replica of the Saqqara Bird was “totally unstable without a tailplane”, and even with a tailplane fitted its “glide performance was disappointing”; his verdict was that the bird was probably made as a child’s toy or a weather vane. Mainstream Egyptology reads the falcon form as religious iconography instead: the falcon is the form most commonly used to represent the most important gods of the Egyptian pantheon, most notably the falcon deity Horus and the sun deity Ra Horakhty, and the bird may have been a ceremonial object, a toy for an elite child, a weather vane, or a masthead ornament for a sacred boat. [8] [9] [10] [11]

Bronze statuette of a falcon, the form of the god Horus (Hunt Museum, MG 006). Photo: The Hunt Museum / Europeana. Source

The goggle-eyed (shakōki) Dogū figurines of Japan’s Final Jōmon period — the most-cited example being the goggle-eyed figure with a broken leg found in 1887 at the Kamegaoka Site in Aomori Prefecture and dated to 1000–400 BCE — are claimed by ancient-astronaut popularizers to depict humans wearing spacesuits, with the broad horizontal slit-eyes read as helmet visors. The mainstream reading is earthbound: the term “shakōki” (“light-blocker”) is a modern descriptive label inspired by the resemblance of the broad slit eyes to snow goggles used in Arctic regions. More than 20,000 Dogū have been excavated across Japan, many surviving only as fragments, from houses, pits and refuse deposits as well as ritual deposits and burial areas; some figures appear deliberately broken at the limbs, which later writers read as illness transfer. Fertility, safe childbirth and healing are evidence-based hypotheses rather than proven universal meanings, and many figures emphasise breasts, hips or pregnancy-like abdomens. [2] [4]

Cross-shaped dogū from the Sannai-Maruyama site, Early to Middle Jōmon (Sanmaru Museum). Photo: own work of the uploader named on the Wikimedia Commons source page (CC BY-SA 4.0). Source

The Vaimanika Shastra — the Sanskrit text most often cited by ancient-astronaut proponents as evidence that ancient India possessed advanced “vimāna” flying machines — is an early 20th-century text which, according to G. R. Josyer, Pandit Subbaraya Shastry dictated in 1918–1923 [22]. A 1974 critical study by five researchers at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore — H. S. Mukunda, S. M. Deshpande, H. R. Nagendra, A. Prabhu, and S. P. Govindaraju, published in Scientific Opinion — concluded that the heavier-than-air craft described are aeronautically non-feasible “poor concoctions” with geometries “unimaginably horrendous from the point of view of flying” and propulsion principles that “make them resist rather than assist flying”. The Pushpaka Vimana of Ravana, the most quoted example of a vimana, is one of those mythological flying palaces described in Hindu texts and the Sanskrit epics: Ravana took it from Kubera, and Rama returned it to Kubera [22]. The genuinely ancient Samarangana Sutradhara of King Bhoja of Dhar, an 11th-century treatise on temple architecture, devotes a chapter to the mechanical contrivances, the yantras, and describes automata including mechanical bees and birds; it also envisions machines that could fly, while its author declines to say how such machines are built, for the sake of secrecy and not from any lack of knowledge [23]. [12]

Connecting the Dots

The Palenque sarcophagus lid shows a Maya ruler — K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, born 603 CE and died 683 CE — at the base of a cosmic World Tree marked with ‘te’ (tree) glyphs, with the sacred bird Itzam Ye perched above and the jaws of a serpent-centipede monster below. The same pattern appears in Japan’s Jōmon figurines: the broad-eyed shakōki-dogū of the Final Jōmon period (c. 1000–400 BCE) carry a modern descriptive label — shakōki means “light-blocking device” — retrofitted onto a stylized aesthetic convention found across a corpus of more than 20,000 dogū, variously interpreted as linked to fertility, healing or ritual use. [4] [11] [13] [18] [19]

The dating evidence collapses the ancient-astronaut timeline at every site. The Vaimanika Shastra, whose content Pandit Subbaraya Shastry said was dictated to him by the sage Bharadvaja, is an early 20th-century text which, according to G. R. Josyer, Shastry dictated in 1918–1923, and a 1974 study at the Indian Institute of Science judged the aircraft it describes “poor concoctions” [22]. Nazca’s figurative geoglyphs reach back before the Nazca period: drones used by archaeologists revealed 25 figures in the Palpa province assigned to the Paracas culture, which some historians consider the possible precursor of the Nazca lines, and many of these figures predate the associated Nazca lines by a thousand years; the Peruvian archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, a co-discoverer of those figures, reads many of them as depictions of warriors [24]. The 32-metre humanoid known as the “Astronaut” is carved on a hillside [16]. This long indigenous sequence, a Paracas phase followed by a Nazca phase [24], contradicts the ancient-astronaut premise that the lines were too large and precise for the peoples who made them, a premise whose underlying assumption Kenneth Feder criticised directly, writing that the essence of von Däniken’s argument “was based on racism” [14].

The same evidentiary pattern recurs across all five cases: an indigenous cultural feature is isolated from its context, then explained by reference to imagined external technology. Däniken’s rendering of the Palenque lid as a rocket-powered spaceship exemplifies the pseudohistorical pattern of sensational claims: archaeologists see nothing special in the figure but a dead Maya monarch in traditional hairstyle and jewellery, his right hand making the conventional gesture that other figures on the lid also make rather than holding any rocket control, and the “rocket flames” resolving into the beards of two serpents, the “rocket motor” being the face of a monster that symbolises the underworld [25]. David Stuart’s reading of the k’in bowl beneath Pakal as the hieroglyph EL (“to emerge, come out”) places the figure inside a Maya iconography of rebirth, with Pakal shown rising as the eastern sun [18]. The aerodynamic tests align: Martin Gregorie’s 2002 balsa replica of the Saqqara Bird was “totally unstable without a tailplane” with “disappointing” glide performance [17], and the 2023 study by Zierow and Lesemann concluded that “the connection between the Bird of Saqqara and an alleged knowledge of aerodynamics in ancient Egypt could not be confirmed” [15]. Each artifact, when read against its own cultural corpus, requires no alien engineer — a structural finding the ancient-astronaut framework cannot accommodate, since it depends on the very isolation of the artifact from its context. [15] [18]

The Other Side

Conventional readings of the Nazca geoglyphs have moved far beyond the “alien landing strip” interpretation. The mainstream symbolic reading of the so-called “Astronaut” geoglyph depicts a shaman or priest, in contrast to the pseudoarchaeological reading of an astronaut or alien visitor. A 2024 AI-assisted survey has added hundreds of previously unknown figurative geoglyphs to the record, situating the figures within a much larger ritual landscape. A water-related reading also structures part of the field: the Tree geoglyph may have symbolised the hope for rainfall, or represented the underground aquifers that were critical for surviving in the desert. Phyllis Pitluga’s computer-aided analysis argued that the spider geoglyph encodes an anamorphic diagram of the constellation Orion, with associated lines following the changing declination of Orion’s Belt. As for any aerial-landing-strip reading, the geoglyphs do not behave like runways: most of the lines are best viewed from above, while the humanoid figure itself is carved on the side of a hill and can be seen from a lower vantage point. [16]

What We Actually Know

The ancient-astronaut readings aren’t fabrications – they’re interpretations of real artifacts, and that’s where their traction lives. Von Däniken’s 1968 “Chariots of the Gods?” built the Pakal-as-pilot claim on an actual Late Classic Maya relief [25], the Saqqara glider theory rests on a genuine 39-gram sycamore object excavated in 1898 from the tomb of Pa-di-Imen, and the dogū astronaut claim begins with thousands of excavated Jōmon clay figurines whose goggle eyes genuinely startle on first viewing. The claims persist because the visual surface is ambiguous: a Maya ruler in what looks like a control panel, Jōmon figures with enormous goggle-eyes, a bird-shaped wooden artifact with a vertical tail. Eyes see, and eyes see spacesuits. The reading requires ignorance of iconographic context. [2] [4] [11] [17]

The iconographic context, once surfaced, dissolves the readings. The Pakal lid’s cross-shaped tree is identified by specific diagnostic markers – te (tree) logograms on the trunk and each of the three branches, and mirror signs – as the Maya cosmic World Tree. The tree is further marked with the profile head of God C on the lower left corner of the trunk, and a vision serpent winds through it, a being that symbolised the pathway by which sacred beings pass from one world to another. David Stuart’s epigraphic reading anchors the composition: the k’in (sun/day) bowl beneath Pakal serves as the hieroglyph EL (“to emerge”), the basis of elk’in (“east”), fusing birth and death iconographically. The dogū’s goggle eyes give the figure its name – shakōki-dogū, a modern Japanese descriptive label likening the broad eyes to Arctic Inuit snow goggles – and the figurines date to the Final Jōmon period (c. 1000–400 BCE), one late regional style within a corpus of more than 20,000 dogū throughout Japan, and one online guide to the figurines notes that “archaeological evidence does not support claims that the figures wear spacesuits or depict extraterrestrials”. [2] [4] [18] [19]

For Nazca, the astronomical hypothesis of Kosok and Reiche has lost much of its support: Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Aveni concluded in 1990 that the evidence was insufficient to support an astronomical explanation [24]. Another reading is Johan Reinhard’s water hypothesis: worship of mountains and other water sources predominated in Nazca religion, the lines were sacred paths leading to places where deities associated with water could be worshipped, and the figures were symbols meant to invoke those deities’ aid in supplying water [24]. In ancient Andean cultures the spider was often associated with fertility and water [16]. Figurative Nazca geoglyphs fall into two classes, line-type figures made by removing black stones in a linear pattern and relief-type figures often located on slopes [21]. The Saqqara Bird, dated approximately 200 BCE, has mainstream interpretations as a child’s toy, a weather vane, or a masthead ornament for a sacred boat. [11]

What remains genuinely speculative is narrow. One online essay argues that the Saqqara Bird’s vertical, rudder-like tail and the absence of legs set it apart from Egyptian bird art, which in its account consistently shows horizontal, fan-shaped tails and almost always legs; the same essay lists ancient wind-direction indicators from Mesopotamia (c. 1800–1600 BCE), Greece (the Tower of the Winds) and Han Dynasty China, where weather vanes were shaped like birds, so the object need not be unique as a wind-direction device [9]. The glider reading persists but lacks direct evidence. The largest question this corpus leaves open is methodological: among the sources gathered here, no specialist directly compares the rhetorical and visual strategies across the five artifacts – how selective cropping, arguments from present ignorance and appeals to lost knowledge operate similarly or differently in each case – and none documents how the canonical von Däniken version of each claim has continued to evolve through the Ancient Aliens TV format. The imagery is real, the readings are real, the rebuttals are real, but none of these sources maps the rhetorical mechanics by which an unlearned eye keeps seeing spaceships. [9]

References

[1] (PDF) The Palenque Mythology: Inscriptions from the Cross … — https://www.academia.edu/32273450/The_Palenque_Mythology_Inscriptions_from_the_Cross_Group_at_Palenque (accessed 2026-08-28) [Academic]

[2] Dogū: from prehistoric figurines to collectible pocket monsters — https://jgeekstudies.org/2018/05/19/dogu-from-prehistoric-figurines-to-collectible-pocket-monsters/ (accessed 2026-08-28)

[3] Japanese Pottery - Clay Figurines from the Jomon Period — http://www.e-yakimono.net/html/jomon-dogu.html (accessed 2026-08-28)

[4] Dogū Figurines: Meaning, Types and Jōmon Mystery — https://www.daiyokai.com/en/post/dogu-jomon-figurines-mystery/ (accessed 2026-08-28)

[5] the quadripartite badge: narratives of power and resurrection in — https://sciences.ucf.edu/anthropology/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/09/Ingalls_Victoria.pdf (accessed 2026-08-28) [Academic]

[6] The Quadripartite Badge: Narratives Of Power And Resurrection In Maya Iconography — https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/2393 (accessed 2026-08-28) [Academic]

[7] The Nazca Lines Still Don’t Make Sense [8:01-9:35] — Michael Button (YouTube) — https://youtu.be/RJJbiHUO534?t=481 (accessed 2026-08-28)

[8] AERODYNAMIC INVESTIGATION ON THE ARTEFACT “BIRD … — https://sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/ama-2023-0046 (accessed 2026-08-28)

[9] The Saqqara Bird: Artifact, Icon, or Ancient Technology? — https://www.archaeo-acoustics.com/post/the-saqqara-bird-artifact-icon-or-ancient-technology (accessed 2026-08-28)

[10] Does the Saqqara Bird Show That Ancient Egyptians Knew … — https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a73172123/egyptian-saqqara-bird-glider/ (accessed 2026-08-28)

[11] Saqqara Bird — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqqara_Bird (accessed 2026-08-28) [Reputable]

[12] Why the Indian Scientific Community is to Blame for the Lack of Science … — https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/indian-science-congress-ancient-aviation-criticism (accessed 2026-08-29)

[13] [PDF] Between Heaven and Earth - Birds in Ancient Egypt — https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/docs/oimp35.pdf (accessed 2026-08-28) [Academic]

[14] Erich von Däniken Criticism: Foolsgold of the Gods — https://www.enotes.com/topics/erich-von-daniken/criticism/kenneth-l-feder (accessed 2026-08-28)

[15] Researchers Thought This 2200-Year-Old Egyptian Artifact … — https://indiandefencereview.com/researchers-thought-egyptian-artifact-could-fly-science-settled-debate/ (accessed 2026-08-29)

[16] The 8 Most Intriguing Nazca Lines — https://www.thecollector.com/most-intriguing-nazca-lines/ (accessed 2026-08-28)

[17] Flying the Saqqara Bird - Catchpenny Mysteries of Ancient Egypt — https://www.catchpenny.org/birdtest.html (accessed 2026-08-28)

[18] iconography – Maya Decipherment — https://mayadecipherment.com/tag/iconography-2/ (accessed 2026-08-28)

[19] How a sarcophagus in a Mayan temple depicts the Tree … — https://www.ldsliving.com/how-a-sarcophagus-in-a-mayan-temple-depicts-the-tree-of-life-the-veil-and-the-resurrection/s/89267 (accessed 2026-08-28)

[20] Accelerated Discovery of Nasca Geoglyphs Guided by AI — https://www.dlr.de/en/eoc/latest/news/2024/accelerated-discovery-nasca-geoglyphs-by-ai (accessed 2026-08-28)

[21] Scientists discover 4 new Nazca Geoglyphs using AI deep … — https://arkeonews.net/scientists-discover-4-new-nazca-geoglyphs-using-ai-deep-learning/ (accessed 2026-08-28)

[22] Vimana — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimana (accessed 2026-10-04) [Reputable]

[23] Samarangana Sutradhara — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samarangana_Sutradhara (accessed 2026-10-04) [Reputable]

[24] Nazca lines — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_lines (accessed 2026-10-04) [Reputable]

[25] Erich von Däniken — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken (accessed 2026-10-04) [Reputable]