Did aliens build the Egyptian pyramids?

Anyone with the taste and common decency to be familiar with the (excellent) Blaze TV series Ancient Aliens will no doubt know all about the theory that extraterrestrials built The Great Pyramids of Ancient Egypt.

Whether there’s any truth to the hypothesis remains a topic of some consternation and controversy. Many scholars, academics and regular Joes will scoff at the notion. After all, it is a fairly wacky suggestion. Little green men assembling enormous triangular structures in the deserts of planets light-years from their own… It’s not the obvious answer.

But there are plenty of folk out there (scientists, researchers and - as we’ll discover - even science-y billionaires) who are convinced that aliens were behind the Great Pyramids of Giza.

As for us? Well, we can’t be sure either way. Ancient Aliens can be pretty persuasive, though. Did aliens build the Pyramids of Egypt? Here are some reasons why they just might have:

There is one principal argument that proponents of the theory that alien life constructed the giant pharaoh tombs refer to. They say that it just wouldn’t have been possible for humans to build them back then. The Pyramids are over 4,500 years old. Back then engineering was relatively basic and the task of assembling such huge polyhedrons was extraordinary.

Take The Great Pyramid, for example. The largest of Giza’s three structures and one of the Seven Wonders of the World. At nearly 500 feet tall, the thing is 756 feet long on each side and made up of more than 2.3 million stones. Each stone weighs nearly 3 tons each. That's a total mass of well over 6.5 MILLION TONS.

Even using the kind of construction equipment and technology available nowadays, that is a hugely intimidating project for anyone to undertake. Given the comparatively rudimentary tools and building knowhow available back in 2,560 BC, the job looks all but impossible to conceive for humans. Especially for unskilled slaves, no matter how many of them were forced into labour.

The Great Pyramids’ location is not insignificant. They weren’t just randomly plonked in the sands of Egypt. Not only do the three buildings align almost perfectly with the stars in Orion’s belt, they also have quite telling coordinates.

The exact geographic coordinates for The Great Pyramid itself are 29.9792458°N. The speed of light is - rather remarkably - exactly 299,792,458 metres per second. Ancient alien researchers point to this as proof to their claims. Precision, when it comes to measuring the speed of light, was only honed by man in the 1950’s, so the Ancient Egyptians couldn’t have known about it. 

The speed of light is central to the theory of time travel. The theory goes that aliens from the future travelled back in time and built the pyramids at 29.9792458°N on purpose. As something of a clue, perhaps.

On the 31st July 2020, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted: 'Aliens built the pyramids obv'. His confident statement received well over half a million likes on the social media networking site. 

He followed up with another tweet, correctly saying that 'The Great Pyramid was the tallest structure made by humans for 3800 years. Three thousand, eight hundred years.'

The South Africa-born tech billionaire is known for his controversial views, but the man’s no slouch when it comes to pulling off big projects and even dealing in outer space. So while his comments might not convince many, they do provide extra firewood for the already fiercely burning debate.

So, did aliens build the pyramids? Well, that was never really a question we were going to be able to definitively answer here. Opinions are split and we may never know the real answer. Likely they weren’t, but maybe - just maybe - they were…

Ancient Aliens might not be able to give you the full answers either, but they don’t half half offer up some interesting ideas on it all.