Recently, some of my friends read a book about how ancient texts, like the bible and sanskrit texts or what not, have been mistranslated (so far so good). Apparently many of the original writings actually described flying spaceships and beings from the sky with breath masks and life-support backpacks on. They say that back then, obviously, such words didn't exist and so it was lost in translation (i.e. being subsequently replaced with "God"), but reanalyzing the originals would provide this possible interpretation.
Now, I firmly believe this to be an entirely ridiculous notion and I can't wait to see this crazy book and all its flawed reasoning myself, but my friends are currently stuck on this hopeful fantasy that there previously were aliens on earth, etc...
I'm sure the pyramid and 'gods from the skies' similarities have very reasonable and well studied anthropological and historical explanations, so if anyone could provide me with those, that'ld be great.
Also if anyone has already encountered the 'ancient texts describing space-men' theory and has had to deal with it, some more info on its origin and what validity there is to the new translation bit would be awesome.
As an architect the explanation for piramids is easy, when you build somehting in stone without an advanced construction tech (with this I mean mass stone buildings without arcs or vaults) you need to use the most stable form possible and that's a piramid where the base is the widest part and it becomes narrower as you go up so it could never fall. Aditionally one of the porpouse of all this constructions was to be durable so the stability was again an important thing. This reasons are obvious and universal so piramids appeared in many ancient civilizations even without contact between them.
The similarities are sometimes nothing more than pure chance. To illustrate this, compare the Egyptian pyramids with the large mounds created by native Americans along the Mississippi. Scholars, on finding the Mississippi mounds (which are the largest pyramid like structures in N. America), initially assumed they were built by kings to showcase their power (like the Egyptian pyramids). Recent archaeological studies, however, have shown that these mounds weren't built as pyramids from the beginning, however. They were originally low platforms (probably for annual dances and celebrations), which were added to little by little each year. They ended up looking like pyramids because, after many years, the new layers of soil had built up on top of each other to form that shape. But that was an unintended result, and their origin and function had nothing in common with the similarly shaped structures along the Nile.
So while it's tempting to see the pyramid-shaped structures found all around the world as revealing some sort of common history (aliens landed everywhere!), these similarities are often only superficial.
For a discussion of the Mississippi mounds, and how that have nothing in common with the Egyptian pyramids, see T. Pauketat, 'The Tragedy of the Commoners,' in Dobres and Robb, Agency in Archaeology (2000), pp. 113-129.