this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
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Just some context: Ancient Aliens is racist. It's roots are literally Nazi.
You see, it's only achievements in brown countries that need alien help. The Greeks didn't need ET for the Colosseum, heavens no. We just scratch our head at Africans or Americans building pyramids and stuff.
In the 30s, Nazi "researchers" believed in something I'll call "Ancient Aryans" which is exactly the same as Ancient Aliens except it's pure Germans who are visiting these primitive cultures and raising architecture. What happened to the Germans? They were annihilated by in-breeding with locals of course.
Aryan ≠ German. Aryan would be closer to modern day Afghan, Pakistani, or maybe Ukrainian? Aryans were from the grasslands east of the urals.
Just to be pedantic, the Romans built the Colosseum. While they did cosplay as Greeks, they weren't actually Greeks themzelves
To be further pedantic, the Greeks started calling themselves the Romioi in late antiquity, so some Greeks were in fact Romans, but not all Romans were Greek.
I'll take this opportunity to shill for one of my favorite content creators, Miniminuteman, who just so happens to have a video debunking Ancient Aliens (two parter actually)
Googledebunkers unite!
There are dozens of us!
And another pyramid video coming in a couple hours
Yeah Ancient Aliens has always been real weird, and I'm gonna be honest I've never heard of the Ancient Aryans thing so... yeah the similarities are weird for sure. Few things to note.
The Parthenon is Greek, the Romans built the coliseum — also, the Native Americans didn't have a unified name for the Americas. If it makes you feel better you can say indigenous people of the American continents, or even Indigenous Americans, but calling them strictly American is genuinely awful.
My mom was born in Keams Canyon, and I've visited. If you went there calling the people there Americans they would not appreciate it. They're Hopi, or maybe Navajo.
Even if Nazis believed in Ancient Aliens as some sort of weird ubermensch theory, that doesn't make the idea itself racist at all.
People are fascinated by aliens. Before aliens people tended to attribute giant structures to gods and spirits when they lost the historical records. You don't need racism to believe in crazy fantasy ideas, you just need to be a bit too credulous.
The Nazis doing something isn't the best argument of it not being racist
I hate "ubermensch" theory because it puts Nietzsche in a negative light when he wasn't an antisemite.
This is a bit of a misconception.
Nietzche opposed a specific political group in Germany at the time called "The Anti-Semites". So he has a lot of quotes where he complains about The Anti-Semites, but he isn't really critiquing what we would consider antisemitism, but just this specific group and their ideology.
And this was probably not because he opposed them, but because they were problematic allies. His sister would marry an Anti-Semite, become one herself, and his books would be published by The Anti-Semites after his death.
I don't have any of them handy at the moment, but Nietzche had many things to say about the Jews that would get him branded an antisemite by modern standards.
I would think it had more to do with time. Pyramids were built thousands of years before the Colosseum.