Browse Conspiracy Theories

Göbekli Tepe is a genuine 11,600-year-old megalithic site in southeastern Turkey that pushed monumental architecture back to Stone Age hunter-gatherers. Popular writers, above all Graham Hancock, recast it as proof of a lost technologically advanced civilization, a claim mainstream archaeology does not support.

Robert Temple's 1976 book The Sirius Mystery claimed the Dogon people of Mali held impossible ancient knowledge of Sirius B, an invisible white-dwarf companion star with a ~50-year orbit, taught to them by amphibious extraterrestrials called the Nommo. The claim rests on 1930s-40s ethnography by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen. But a 1991 field restudy by anthropologist Walter van Beek found Dogon informants did not actually hold the Sirius-B lore Griaule reported, Sirius B's existence and orbital period were already well known to Western science before Griaule arrived, and Carl Sagan and others argue the knowledge, if genuine, reached the Dogon through ordinary human contact.

A set of clay jars with copper cylinders and iron rods, found near Baghdad and dated to the Parthian or Sasanian era, are claimed by alternative-history writers to be ancient electric batteries — proof of a lost electrical technology used for electroplating, or even a gift from ancient astronauts. The jars are genuinely old and a jar-plus-two-metals arrangement really can produce a fraction of a volt, and replicas (including a famous MythBusters build) have generated current. But there are no wires, no connectors, no electroplated artifacts, and no textual record of electricity in antiquity. The mainstream archaeological reading — storage vessels for sacred scrolls or protective spells — fits the evidence far better.