I. The Ancient Astronauts (AA) Theory Revisited

Introduction

By William L. Saylor

"Mythology is the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student’s experience that he cannot believe them to be true; hence the English adjective ‘mythical’ meaning ‘incredible’; hence the omission from standard European mythologies of all Biblical narrative even when closely paralleled by myths from Persia, Babylonia, Egypt and Greece."- Robert Graves (Graves 1968)

For many modern skeptics the world’s oldest writings, on clay, stone and papyrus, is simply myth. However, if we dismiss all of the ancient literature and inscriptions - the Bible, the Koran, the Mahabharata, and the thousands of clay tablets from Mesopotamia - as too incredible to believe, we would still have to deal with the question of the physical evidence. Who built the ancient megalithic structures? How were they built? Why the practice of building pyramids at ancient sites all over Earth for a period or time, and then suddenly abandon them? Who marked the Earth’s surface with gigantic lines and figures? Who created the astonishing artwork on Mars? Why and how were these things done? In this space age, with it’s remarkable technological advances, it is becoming apparent that the "miracles", and other seemingly supernatural events reported in ancient texts, the megalithic constructions, and the enigmatic lines and artwork over the Earth, resulted from an advanced technology which was incomprehensible and indescribable by the ancient human observers. On these pages we take the position that there is a reasonable explanation, within natural law, for these mysteries.

In this series of articles we will review the evidence that these mysteries are attributable to ancient astronauts; extraterrestrials who have visited Earth in prehistoric and historical times, and have interacted with humans or their evolutionary predecessors, i.e. what authors throughout history have referred to as "the gods".
Most authors, with the exception of Zecharia Sitchin (1976), who write about ancient astronauts, take us to familiar sites around the world where we get a "how-could-they-have-done-that?" feeling, but do not get into details concerning the god’s technology, motivation, or their whereabouts.
By contrast, in these pages I attempt to touch on the following questions: 

• What was the nature of the gods? 
• How did they accomplish their seemingly miraculous feats? 
• What did they value? 
• What was their connection to humans? 
• Where did they come from and where did they go?

http://www.world-mysteries.com/aa_1.htm#Introduction