Hidden Italy: The Forbidden Cyclopean Ruins (2013)

Reads like a classic Erich van Daeniken piece.

Some pretty wild conclusions come up, but much of the base material is compelling. Extremely ancient megalithic stone constructions can be found world wide. While it is certainly not the case that "scholars are silent" as asserted here, there is still no particularly well accepted explanation. And it could be coincidence that some of the earliest societies built with large blocks with minimal ornament. It is unfortunate that crackpots dominate the discussion and so hamper reasonable exploration of the subject, but the idea that some extremely old human societies built monuments in this way is not actually all that radical.

And the cyclopean thing is an odd tangent, but does have a pretty well accepted modern explanation. Some fossilized skulls have extremely prominent nasal and sinus cavities that have long led amateur investigators to conclude that there were one eyed giants in the past. This is most likely nothing but a basic error of anatomical analysis. It is difficult to correctly understand fossilized skulls if you don't have a reasonable grasp of the kind of skulls that creatures living today have.

Is it known that those ruins are pre-Etruscan? To what period are they dated?

Iron age Greeks used the word cyclopean also to refer to the ruins of Mycenae nearby, dating from the bronze age only ~500 years before their time. It is comforting for me to know it was already a thing back then to resort to ancient aliens to explain stuff like this. They were coming up with these explanations far before any kind of modern curriculum or industrialization, and when their ability to make physical objects was still very much there, but somehow the technology and thinking had shifted. Ironically it appears it was their own partially forgotten ancestors who built those ruins, as the decoded script (Linear-B) from the previous era appears to still a Greek language.

> Anyone who lived in or visited a third world country and watched people produce works of astounding precision and perfect finish with their bare hands will understand that in the 1st world we are just not very capable with our hands since the industrial revolution.

This is too true. I realised this in the last few years after getting into wood carving and deciding to learn how to sharpen a blade properly. You don't need some fancy contraption or machine to put a good edge on a knife or other cutting tool, using just my hands and eyes with a few small stones I can put a consistent razor edge on just about anything. It's shocking to me how common it is for people to have dull or completely blunt chefs knives in their kitchen, freehand sharpening is a basic skill that I think 90% have the dexterity and capability to learn, but proper hand skills just aren't a priority anymore.

A lot of still quite relevant traditional building methods are being overlooked or forgotten too, a relative who does slate roofing and various other work for housing in the UK often expresses dismay at the state of building education and common practices.

I have a hope that eventually hand skills for maniplation of objects in 3D space might once again become something of a priority, with some kind of future haptic technology. See Bret Victor's excellent Humane Representation of Thought talk - http://worrydream.com/cdg/ResearchAgenda-v0.19-poster.pdf He doesn't know exactly how such technology could be made exactly, just that it probably will one day and we should think about designing software and interfaces to build towards that.

All we can really be sure of is that they are at least 2500 years old. But we know at least some of the white facing stonework was done about then, because we have (!) actual documents from a foreman.

There is a very great deal we still don't know about Egyptian stonework, and how it was done, that historians are aggressively not interested in discussing. Anyway what they insist was done is physically impossible. So, there is plenty left for our grandchildren still to puzzle out.

The Egyptians loved cutting tunnels, and new tech will help us locate the miles of still unexplored tunnels crisscrossing the sites.

Megalithic seems more fitting than cyclopean to me.

It sorta makes me wish there was a term that didn’t have the cultural baggage of “conspiracy theorist”.

There is a wide range of conspiracy theories, from “completely outlandish” to “unlikely” to “plausible.”

Consider these three:

1) The Soviets attempted to put a man into space before Yuri Gagarin. The attempt failed, he died, and the Soviets covered up the attempt to avoid the negative publicity.

2) The US has a second, secret space program managed by the military.

3) The US secret space program is based on recovered alien technology, which was reverse engineered and put into practice without ever being declassified. They have several very large spacecraft (“Solar Warden”) that are manned by people who are taken as young adults, spend twenty years of service in space, and who then have their memories wiped and are transported back in time to a point before they enlisted. This program is called “Twenty and Back.”

… there are people out there who believe all three of these.

I find the first to be completely plausible - even likely - though I’ve not seen enough evidence to be convinced it’s necessarily true. The second is plausible but unlikely to be true on a scale that would be really surprising. The third… c’mon.

As it is, as a culture we seem to lump people who are open to believing things like the first two may be true in with people who believe the the third. That’s probably doing us a disservice.