The Truth about the Alien Astronaut Theory
The popularization of the theory that anything technologically or scientifically impressive done by ancient brown people HAD to be the work either of whites who conveniently showed up and taught the brown people or of actual alien astronausts can be traced back to Erich von Däniken's 1968 pseudoscience best-seller Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. Most people know that. But I bet you don’t know what the two taproots of that book are.
Now, Skeptic Magazine did an article on Chariots of the Gods?, and its reporters found that the editors of the French sci-fi magazine Planete, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, published a book in 1960 called Le Matin des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians). To quote Skeptic, "Especially relevant to this is Part One: Vanished Civilizations, where they heap up evidence backing up Lovecraft's fictional claims about alien super-civilizations of the past."
(It's not really too surprising that Pauwels and Bergier heavily promoted Lovecraft in this book, as Planete reprinted a good chunk of Lovecraft's work in French. The Morning of the Magicians had an entire section on Nazi fringe science, too.)
And according to Skeptic, von Däniken copied huge swaths of work from The Morning of the Magicians, especially the part supporting Lovecraft.
Lovecraft, as most people know, was virulently racist.
That would be bad enough. But Chariots of the Gods? was also extensively rewritten by its editor, Wilhelm Roggersdorf. (Der Spiegel says: ‘Erwin Barth von] Wehrenalp [the founder of publishing house Econ Verlag] engaged the writer Wilhelm Roggersdorf as a co-author, who wrote the manuscript "totally as described"[.]')
So who's Wilhelm Roggersdorf?
That's a pen name of Wilhelm "Utz" Utermann (1912-1991). "Roggersdorf" was the name of the town in which he lived. During the Nazi regime in Germany, Utermann was an editor of the Völkischer Beobachter (the Nazi party newspaper, whose name translates to "Racial Observer") and was editor-in-chief of the Hitler Youth and the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) periodicals.
So the theory that alien astronauts invented everything in the ancient world that was created by people of color and that the brown people of the world needed to be taught everything by aliens or by wise whites?
It stems from pseudoscience based on the fantasy works of an American racist and was popularized by a book rewritten by a "co-author" who had written and edited Nazi-approved newspapers and magazines.
