More Random Ancient Astronaut Wackiness from My Library

Let's take a look today at another bit of random verbiage from an ancient astronaut manifesto selected blindly from my bookshelf. Today's entry comes from Alan and Sally Landsburg (who wrote in the first person singular for some reason) in their bestselling 1974 work In Search of Ancient Mysteries, a tie in with the 1973 television "documentary" In Search of Ancient Astronauts, which Alan Landsburg produced, and the TV series In Search of, which would follow in 1976.

... I asked myself what else might have happened after the sky messages [i.e., the Nazca lines] had been put in place. What would the visitors do beyond this? Further expansion perhaps? Missions to a few other parts of South America, or to more remote lands? If so, then the colonizers might have wanted to put other "road maps" or signposts near these other places to guide incoming aeronauts or astronauts.
Source: Alan and Sally Landsburg, In Search of Ancient Mysteries (New York: Bantam, 1974), 68.

This passage, reminiscent of von Daniken's speculations about alien runways underlying the Nazca lines (an obvious inspiration of Landsburg, whose In Search of Ancient Astronauts was a von Daniken adaptation), contains two major points of interest:

• In the 1970s ancient astronaut theorists still believed that the aliens themselves built ancient art works such as the Nazca lines and other earthworks. As the Nixon administration might have said, this position is "inoperative" today, with many of the same theorists now arguing for a more nebulous "influence" on humans who built the monuments. This evolution was inevitable since no evidence of alien artifacts has ever been found in an ancient monument, and many ancient monuments are too poorly constructed to attribute to alien hands, unless aliens use lowest-estimate contractors.
  
• Ancient astronaut theorists are somewhat lacking in imagination. In the 1970s, it was still possible to imagine that aliens would descend to earth with only Apollo-era technology, but today thanks to ubiquitous GPS we can see that any civilization capable of traveling between the stars should also be able to map the planet they are visiting, a basic bit of recognizance that any "colonizers" would most likely have done well in advance of trying to take over the earth. After all, on pp. 147-148, the Landsburgs argue that ancient maps demonstrate that the aliens mapped the globe from their orbiting spaceships. So why do they need signposts to guide their UFOs? This only makes sense if you are attempting to project 1970s era technology onto the aliens.