GODS FROM THE STARS: Did Aliens Build the Mayan & Aztec Empires?

You are standing in the Yucatan jungle at sunset on the equinox, surrounded by thousands of people staring up at the pyramid of El Castillo at Chichén Itzá. Everyone is dead silent. As the sun dips toward the horizon, a shadow hits the northern balustrade of the pyramid. It joins up with a massive stone serpent head carved at the base of the stairs, and suddenly you are looking at a hundred-foot-long serpent made of light and darkness, slithering down from the heavens to the earth. The hosts call this "arguably one of the most sophisticated feats of geoengineering in the ancient world" — a structure aligned so precisely that it animates a stone statue using nothing but the sun. But the question that drives this episode is not how they did it, but why. Why mobilize an entire civilization, move tons of stone without wheels or beasts of burden, and align it with that level of mathematical precision just to make a shadow puppet twice a year? Unless it was a record of a visitor.

The central premise being tested is whether ancient myths are actually historical journalism. When the Maya carved a figure operating a machine, were they being symbolic or were they just drawing what they saw?

The Cargo Cult Lens