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In the public imagination, there is nothing outrageous about the idea that extraterrestrials

visited Earth and made contact with human beings or even created human beings in the ancient past. Indeed, it is such a common

notion that we see it saturating the entertainment industry. For the last 10 years or so,

superhero films based on comic books have dominated the box office. And I'm not criticizing

these entertaining films. I enjoy them.

What's interesting is that so many of them play with the notion of ancient contact with

extraterrestrials. The depiction of the old Norse gods as having been interdimensional

space aliens in the Thor films comes to mind.

As does the 2021 film, The Eternals, which portrayed a species of giant ancient aliens,

the Celestials, who actually created humanity through genetic experimentation.

A similar story was explored just this year in the final season of Star Trek Discovery,

resurrecting from an obscure episode of the 90s series, Star Trek The Next Generation,

a species called the progenitors, ancient aliens who had created all life and all alien species in the Milky Way galaxy.

We see it also in the 2012 film Prometheus, which expanded Ridley Scott's alien film's

mythology to reveal that a gigantic humanoid alien seen only as a skeleton in the first film was actually

a member of an ancient alien species that had ceded the primordial Earth with its own DNA.

Meanwhile, this popular trope, long exclusive to the realm of science fiction, has bled into the public's understanding of history.

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