As a child I dreamt that I went to Mars in a flimsy rocket, barely more than a tin box. It was a powerful dream, I was very aware of the fact that it was a one way trip and also greatly elated, as one can only be in dreams, at the thought of going there, as if it was my destiny to do so. I don't know what books or what films influenced me back then, but even decades afterwards I still feel pretty strongly about Mars, and I guess I'd take up any chance at all to get there.
The theory that we or our civilization stem from Martians, who fled a cataclysm that made their planet uninhabitable, is nice, but aren't we ourselves the greatest argument against it? We have become the greatest factor of danger to life on earth; wouldn't they, having just lost their planet, have made sure that we, their descendants, kept earth as safe as possible from harm?

Like agent Mulder, I want to believe. But I have grown very disillusioned with time. I've come to appreciate the simpler explanations. Not that I think they are better in themselves, or that rational explanations are more satisfactory, but at least, simple ones are harder to mystify. I used to think that von Däniken's interpretation of the engraving on Pacal's tomb was brilliant. But then you realize that von Däniken was thinking of 60’s-Apollo-style capsules and how absurd it would be for an advanced race to travel through space in such backward crafts. Von Däniken was absurd even before we learned to decipher Mayan writing and found out what Pacal’s tomb really was about.
Pyramids were built during a time span of thousands of years, starting at different times in different parts of the world and with different, even if related, purposes. Surely, there is no pyramid gene, not even an architectural “naturality” for pyramids, but I suppose, if you are going to build really huge structures, pyramids and cones are the way to go, even in our age of sophisticated materials.
We (western civilization) have been drawn to Egypt since the beginning. We’ve been putting Egyptian myth, and aesthetics into our culture for centuries and centuries. If Egyptian lore smacks of wisdom, it is because we have taken care over the ages, to link any wisdom of ours with Egyptian sources. If Egypt looks futuristic to us, then it is because we have made our visions of the future look like Egypt; look at metropolis with its pyramidal and palm leafed buildings, look at art deco, but also look at the Egyptian crazes of the farther past, in the Napoleonic era for example.
I’m not saying “there is a perfectly rational explanation for all of this”. On the contrary, I think that many rational, so called “explanations” are even the weakest of all options. But I’m also not buying on a pure coolness base anymore either, even though I want the universe to be a really cool place. If things don’t make sense, then let them at least be simple.
Maybe it’s as simple as John Crowley proposes in Aegypt:
“once, the world was not as it has since become”