A more accomplished inventor than Edison, a more sinister killer than Hitler.
Back in 2009 I watched a program on what was then called The History Channel (now just History, which is ironic as it no longer has anything to do with history but is instead reality shows about ambiguously gay garbage men and all sorts of utter crap) called Ancient Aliens. At the time it was the most viewed program ever aired on The History Channel (over 2 million views). The program presented speculation that many of the things ancient people built, supposedly with one foot still in the stone age, which modern technology cannot replicate (the Great Pyramid took 23 years to build, supposedly by thousands of people pulling stones along a ramp that would have stretched for several miles and contained several times the voulme of material as the pyramid itself, and with the entire world's supply of boom cranes it would take at least 100 years to build and cost more money than the GNP of most countries; the Stone of the Pregnant Woman at Baalbek weighs over 1000 tonnes and does not have enough surface area to attach sufficient ropes for it to be moved), and proposes that it is possible that extraterrestrials visited Earth and had some role in these astonishing accomplishments.
From there it degenerated into idiots claiming that absolutely everything in the universe was done by ET, and has retconned itself at least once.
According to the man with the hair, show producer and host Giorgio Tsoukalos (according to wiki his day job is running an ET themed amusement park, which sounds wicked cool until you realise that it's probably all desk work and meeting with people with deep pockets), all the world's religions were started as cargo cults by ET (because things like God/gods, angels, and anything nonphysical is laughable on its face, and because no one ever used entheogens until the 1960s), every single artefact "looks surprisingly like" some modern machine which isn't the least bit odd considering that ET is supposedly millions of years more advanced than humans and yet is using Apollo era technology, ET started the American Revolution and was in communication with the Free Masons, George Washington, Ben Franklin, and maybe gave Sam Adams the recipe for beer, ET was behind the works of Shakespere and Leonardo da Vinci (because if you use a computer to distort da Vinci's paintings you can make ET heads or something), ET is responsible for every war in history, selects every US President, and mines the atmosphere for gold, somehow. Apparently "ancient astronaut theory" is no longer a theory, it's a deus ex machina for everything in the universe (except explaining where ET came from and if there is an even older race of ancient aliens who created the ones that visited Earth, and why the definition of "ancient astronaut theory" keeps changing for every episode).
In Season One ET visited the Earth looking for gold or liquid water (gold being a very heavy element should actually be more abundant on Mercury than Earth, and water is very common throughout the universe and can be found in huge quantities on the outer planets) and they found primitive ape creatures which they infused with ET DNA (or ENA) to make humans to mine the gold. Once they had enough they left until Roswell in 1947.
In the latest episode ET visited the Earth millions of years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs with laser weapons so the planet would be free to grow humans to mine for ratings on History's sister channel H2. The reason this change in ET agenda was never explained.
Here's what Charlie Sheen has to say about Ancient Aliens:
