They Came from the Pleiades

This episode explores whether technologically advanced civilizations existed on Earth tens of thousands of years ago, inspired by a 2018 NASA paper by Gavin Schmidt and astrophysicist Adam Frank that examined detectability of ancient societies. Ancient astronaut theorists including Giorgio Tsoukalos and David Childress point to oral traditions from cultures worldwide—Greek accounts of Five Ages of Man by Hesiod, Aztec cosmology, and early Judaic texts describing pre-Adamite races—as evidence that humanity has experienced cyclical rises and falls over vast timescans. David Childress cites a submerged pyramid city that he suggests must be 50,000 years old based on ocean depth, while Mark Carlotto argues Mesoamerican sites extend archaeological timelines from 10,000 years to tens of thousands. The episode suggests cataclysms erased physical evidence of these earlier civilizations, leaving only mythological memories.

Mainstream archaeology dates Earth's earliest civilization to Mesopotamia around 3000 BC and finds no physical evidence supporting advanced pre-Ice Age societies—the very absence of artifacts, cities, or technology from proposed 50,000-year timelines argues against their existence. Physicist Michael Dennin acknowledges the NASA paper's intriguing premise but notes it was a theoretical exercise about detectability, not evidence that such civilizations actually existed. For curious viewers, the episode offers genuine questions about how oral traditions preserve historical memory across millennia and whether our current technological age would leave recognizable traces after catastrophic destruction—legitimate topics that don't require accepting the ancient astronaut framework.