I assume you mean if they are making claims that they are promoting as “scientific”…
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And indeed Von Daniken chose to ignore existing documented history and archeological evidence which would have refuted his arguments easily.
“These lines in the Nazca desert could only be viewed from space!”
(Actually you can get a pretty good view from the bordering hills)
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Those guys.
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I have to confess that I was very impressed by His books when I was a preteen. I became disappointed when I learnt that He was making crazy claims and that His alien timeline was at least flawed.
https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~coker2/index.files/spacegods.shtml
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yeah, i mean, not saying everyone has to be a scientist. it’s just that claiming “i’m not a scientist” doesn’t get one off the hook anymore than talking heads saying “i’m not a reporter”
if a person is claiming special knowledge, then we should look at them askance if they throw out the tools we have invented for evaluating knowledge. and we definitely shouldn’t provide them with a platform like netflix ( or cable tv ) to push those ideas
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Agreed! For particular kinds of knowledge, even non-professionals should be using the type of knowledge production that works and can be tested and re-tested!
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(It’s unfortunate that Sagan included Columbus. The knowledgeable people laughed at Columbus because they had a good idea of the real size of the Earth, and knew that China wasn’t a few weeks sailing across the Atlantic. And they were right.)
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Like Champollion, who wasn’t a scientist/scholar, and the Rosetta Stone. At least He had solid knowledge.
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“Is it possible that…”
Begins many a pseudoscience narrator’s paragraph.
Watch for it in this series.
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oh my gosh. that part on the side: “results do not align… that’s okay…”
that’s the area of scientific gold right there. i think 98% of scientific advancement ( this based on my own entirely accurate survey 
) proceeds from “results do not align”
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I came across this quack decades ago when he and Robert Bauval were promoting their theory that the three giant pyramids at Giza represented a map of the Belt of Orion. After thinking for about thirty seconds, I concluded that since the map was upside down and the three Giza pyramids were not constructed sequentially, that Hancock was another huckster who would soon disappear into obscurity…
…how wrong I was.
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For which he paid the terrible price of making millions of dollars in royalties. 
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And having a huge impact on cheesy SF writing for decades to come.
Doctor Who mined it for stories throughout the Tom Baker era.
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For that matter it’s unfortunate he included Bozo, a highly competent professional entertainer who was trying to make people laugh.
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Anti-science in 3 words… “searching for proof”.
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I’m pretty sure that guy is actually a Centauri.
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well there’s his problem
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and this one on the campus of ASU, in Tempe, AZ.
iirc, it is the Tempe City Hall
eta, to stay at the topic:
mum and i were chatting via zoom with Dear Brother (who just returned from Iraq, where he is director at Ur for Penn) about this very same asshole (Hancock). DB was very aware of him and his nonsense and puts him in the same category as Zack Stitchen and Icke. his eyes couldn’t roll any farther back than when he hears any of this - or “aliens built the pyramids” and such. working in the field, on the sites at Crete, tel a Sawat (Syria), and Lagosh, Ur and Nimrud for as long as he has, he has heard many challenges that he is “gatekeeping” for “Big Academia” and hiding teh facts™ that prove that the kooks are correct.
also gonna add a shameless plug for DB’s YT channel Artifactually Speaking:
he has some installments from tha site at Lagash, in addition to his other talks.
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Later in the series, upon pointing out that prehistoric structures all over the world share elements such as terraces, inner chambers, and astronomical (as in, the planets and stars) orientations, he asks, “Could we be witnessing the unfolding of some extraordinary master plan? A shared legacy from a lost global civilization that provided the seeds and the spark of inspiration from which many later civilizations grew?”
As many others have pointed out, that’s just applied science working the same around the world. Dovetails nicely with:
if you … took every Science book ever written and destroyed them, in a thousand years time those Science books would be back exactly the same, because the tests would always turn out the same.
– Ricky Gervais
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