Ancient technology theorists claim that long-dead civilizations were far smarter than our atomic age, and they might have a point, because the ancient Egyptians never had people carving hieroglyphics about how cavemen had secretly mastered pyramids already. Conspiracy theorists merely claim that every single scientist in the world is getting money for lying to morons, which sounds like a pretty sweet job. The ancient technology nutbar proclaims that every single scientist in the world is a moron, unable to see with hundreds of years of study what he discovered with only one lifetime of brain damage.

Their theories read like archeological slash fiction, screwing everything we know about ancient ruins. By bizarre coincidence most ancient civilizations died out at almost exactly our level of technology. There are no records of Babylonian steam societies, or the Tang dynasty fielding armies of isolinear robodroids. They all seem to have discovered the exact same technologies any madman would find with an extremely casual reading of modern science headlines, then died. Unfortunately our madmen only use the first half of that strategy. Very fortunately, they’re hilarious.

The Pyramid of Giza Laser Power Plant

Christopher Dunn claims that the great pyramid of Giza is actually a seismic power station, driven by a hydrogen generation cell running a vast maser cannon. And in a reversal of the normal language, that sentence makes even less sense when you know what all those words mean.

He believes it harvested power from the Earth itself by firing a microwave laser through its internal corridors. This powered the incredibly sophisticated machine tools used by the ancient Egyptians, including the teleporter they used to get rid of every single one of those tools before anyone could find one.

The core of his power station is the king’s chamber, where thousands of quartz crystals in the granite walls transduced earthquakes and became a huge resonator. If a stone-walled room could reflect microwave energy, a mirrored bathroom would oscillate you into a pure energy being. But what you do in the bathroom proves that you’re still very mundanely physical. And when a technological theory can be directly disproved by shitting, it’s probably not very good. It’s hard to explain to someone how bare granite walls can’t work as microwave laser reflectors, because they clearly already think they know what all those words mean and are equally clearly wrong.

Jesus’ Sputnik

UFOlogists claim that the Russian space program broke through space and into time itself, reappearing the fifteenth century. Which is weird, because if the Soviets had invaded the Earth four centuries ago I’m fairly sure we wouldn’t be living in a society with shows like Honey Boo Boo.

And I know we’re meant to see “the communists win” as the evil alternate universe but that sounds pretty good. They base this on “The Glorification of the Eucharist”, a painting by Italian renaissance painter Ventura Salimbeni.

Here we see the Holy Quaternary, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Soviet space program circa 1958. That’s some amazing symbolism – if an old man represents god, and a dove the holy spirit, then Sputnik has to be at least King Galactus of UltraHeaven. Or, if you’re sane, it’s just a “creation sphere” – a common symbol for Earth and the sky in renaissance art, including the sun and a moon which can, apparently, look like a camera lens. The detailed lines on the surface represent the Earth’s meridians and parallels, not the Earth’s future communist welding craftsmanship.

The “antennae” are the same sceptres seen in many religious works. Presumably to represent how these heavenly figures poke at us on the surface, clumsily and without wanting to interact with their own creation directly. Which is a real pity, because if Jesus ever discovered real radio technology it would honestly make prayer a lot more efficient.

Sanskrit Spaceships

The Vaiminika Shastra is a revolutionary work in ancient technology theory, an incredibly sophisticated attempted to make every other madman look credible by comparison. It was introduced in 1952 by a Mr Josyer, who got them from an exhibition, which got them from another guy, who maybe got them from an Air Commodore, who got them from a guy who took them down as they were dictated by a mystic, forty years earlier, when the immortal spirit of an ancient Hindu sage who knew how to build flying machines thousands of years ago told him. It’s like they’re trying to overload the argument of an unreliable source so that nobody can use it against them.

This “dictation-by-ghosts” theory is a great way to get around the problem of anyone carbon-dating the texts. Not because it’ll work, but because once you start talking about ghost-channeling they’ll know they don’t need to bother. The alleged mystic Pandit Subbaraya Shastry claimed that the text describes how the voices say spaceships work inside his head, and in that precise definition he’s entirely right. Once the ideas are released into a world of physics they don’t even fall flat, as that would imply them ever leaving the ground.

Analysis by the Indian Institute of Science didn’t just report that the ships wouldn’t work, but that “the geometries are unimaginably horrendous from the point of view of flying.” The machines are so confrontationally impossible they’d probably sink faster than gravity just so that they still get physics wrong even when they’re obeying it. The scientific impossibility of anything in this book working is masked by the larger impossibility of anyone getting past one of the designs before throwing it into a kindergarten for children to color in. Then returning and burning it instead, to make sure it didn’t damage the children’s intelligence.