In celebration of Stranger Things Day, Netflix has released the first official map of Hawkins, Indiana, which was created by artist Kyle Lambert.

This map, which you can see below, gives fans their best look at a rough layout of Hawkins and a glimpse of many of the locations featured in the show and where they are relative to each other.

Not only do we get a look at Hawkins National Laboratory, Hawkins High School, the homes of the cast, Starcourt Mall, Hawkins Community Pool, and The Palace Arcade, we also see the monsters featured in the show and some of the other locations we've seen in the series, like Russia and Chicago, and places our characters will go in Season 4, like California.

Speaking of California, the Season 4 teaser trailer released for Stranger Things Day was focused on The Golden State as Eleven, Will and Jonathan find themselves living there and getting ready for a spring break that looks to not be as relaxing as one would hope.

This teaser follows another that was released during TUDUM: A Netflix Global Fan Event that focused on another location from Season 4 – the Creel House. This house was the home of Victor Creel, a man who became an inmate at Pennhurst Mental Hospital after committing a grisly murder in the 1950s.

For more on Stranger Things, check out the Magic: The Gathering cards based on Eleven and Hopper and the news that Stranger Things may set to get some spin-off shows in the future.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Netflix has revealed a new look at the fourth season of Stranger Things in the form of a teaser that gives a glimpse of Eleven, Will, Jonathan, and Joyce's new life in California and the dangers of their upcoming spring break.

Revealed on Twitter, the teaser comes with the words, "we're gonna have the best spring break ever." Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case.

we're gonna have the best spring break ever. pic.twitter.com/D6Xyx9VquE

— Stranger Things (@Stranger_Things) November 6, 2021

As with the other seasons of Stranger Things, this new life in California is anything but normal. While the teaser begins with Eleven writing a letter to Mike that tells him how wonderful her first 185 days of living in California are, we quickly see it is quite the opposite.

As spring break approaches, it looks as though Eleven is still having trouble making friends and fitting in at school. On top of that, the teaser also shows off gunfights, a creepy doll, windows shattering, Eleven being held by two men in suits, an undergound base of some sort, explosions, and much more.

This teaser follows another that was released during TUDUM: A Netflix Global Fan Event that focused on another location from Season 4 – the Creel House. This house was the home of Victor Creel, a man who became an inmate at Pennhurst Mental Hospital after committing a grisly murder in the 1950s.

For more on Stranger Things, check out the Magic: The Gathering cards based on Eleven and Hopper and the news that Stranger Things may set to get some spin-off shows in the future.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker has been delayed by two weeks and will now be released on December 7, 2021. To help with the wait, the team also released the expansion's launch trailer.

The news was announced by FF14's producer and director Naoki Yoshida, who wrote a letter to the fans explaining the decision and apologizing for the delay.

"There are several reasons for the postponement, but as I’m the one overseeing all aspects of the title as the head of the project, the responsibility falls solely on me," Yoshida wrote. "Allow me to convey my sincerest apologies to our players, our Warriors of Light around the world who have been looking so forward to the release of Endwalker. I am truly sorry."

As we previously mentioned, Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker will now launch on December 7, while the expansion's early access period will begin on December 3. There will also be two scheduled patches – Patch 6.01 and 6.05 – that will be released on December 21, 2021, and January 4, 2022, respectively.

Yoshida continued to say that the "biggest factor behind the release date change was my own selfishness as the game’s director." It all stemmed, according to him, from trying to balance the roles of producer and director.

"However, as we neared the end of development and I played through everything—from quests to battle content and the like—I just couldn’t contain my desire to further improve Endwalker’s quality, specifically because this expansion pack marks the first major culmination of events in FFXIV so far," Yoshida said. "Even as we look beyond Endwalker, the FFXIV story will continue for a long time and we hope to deliver many more enjoyable experiences in the game. However, it was precisely because Endwalker concludes the first major saga that I felt our team needed to push ourselves to the “limits” that I envisioned.

"As a result, we remained firmly resolved to adjust down to the smallest nuances and ensure our writing covers even the finest points of the vast and intricate story that has spanned these past 11 years since the original FFXIV to ensure that everyone can fully enjoy their adventure in Endwalker.

"Unfortunately, the consequence of this was that we ended up in a situation where we cut into the time required for final quality assurance checks due to this time spent on additional improvements."

As the launch day grew near, Yoshida realized that "there was a bigger risk of us reaching the release date without ensuring “stability” as one form of quality." It was this reason, and more, that led to the decision of a delay.

This will mark the first time Yoshida has ever delayed an annouced release date, although he did "once shift a release from Spring to early Summer." He also understands that many people made arrangements to take off work for the first day of Endwalker, and he humbly asks that everyone "forgive [him] for the decision [he's] made."

Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker will not only conclude the tale of Hydaelyn and Zodiark and bring to a close the story that began in A Realm Reborn, it will also feature two new jobs – one healer and one melee DPS – and will bring players to the moon.

For more on FF14, which recently surpassed 24 million players, check out why Endwalker's Stardew Valley-like mode sounds relaxing as heck and the changes the team has made to help ease server congestion.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Having finished Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition, it’s hard to fathom why this excellent action role-playing game was quite so controversial when it came out in 2012. Granted, the endings were revised to be both clearer and a bit more nuanced since – and they still aren’t all that good. But the bulk of its 50+ hours are the same, and on the whole it’s as much of a gut-punching, head-scratching continuation of the trilogy as ever. Is it the best Mass Effect? No, not quite – as I said the first time I played it, Mass Effect has followed the same pattern as Star Wars: the original trilogy’s second episode was the high point and the third. While still very strong and visually impressive, didn’t quite stack up (and everything after was questionable at best). Its final moments may not quite stick the landing, but just about everything up to that point is stellar.

As far as the remastering goes, Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition has seen the fewest changes of the Legendary trilogy. It looks roughly the same as Mass Effect 2’s Legendary version, holding up nicely thanks to its improved textures and more detailed models. I still remember being taken aback by the horribly smeared textures on uniforms in the opening scene when I first played on PC in 2012, but here they’re sharp as can be in 4K, right down to the medals on chests. Only a few things stand out as stiffly animated or chunkily low resolution (like Admiral Anderson’s weird armored baseball cap, for instance), and although you can still expect a fair number of animation glitches, I never hit anything more severe than that. Rest assured, watching numerous full-blown Reapers strut their high-definition stuff as they wreak havoc across a battlefield does feel like a great payoff to two games’ worth of buildup for this race of sentient war machines.

Also, the Legendary Edition is strictly single-player; the entire co-op multiplayer horde mode has been removed. You’ll still get to run through a few of its missions with your AI squadmates at least once as side missions, but otherwise it’s entirely gone. Granted, I never did like how I felt obligated to grind out points in multiplayer to make sure I wasn’t missing out on anything in my single-player campaign – that felt like a coercive means of making people participate in a mode they might not be interested in – and the multiplayer was always a sideshow to the huge RPG. However, it does seem to go against the spirit of the “Legendary Edition” to leave out such a significant chunk of what Mass Effect 3 originally was.

The only other notable change to the Legendary Edition (among a handful of minor tweaks) is that BioWare has toned down the cutscene camera’s gratuitous focus on womens’ butts a bit. There’s still quite a bit of cheek on display, but this time around the camera just knows when to use it more appropriately: it’s one thing to linger on some nigh-impossible curves when we’re in a flirtatious scene with one of Mass Effect 3’s multiple romance options, but quite another when we’re supposed to be taking someone seriously as they discuss the dire state of the galaxy. It’s more in line with what we saw in the previous two games, and that improved dignity didn’t come at the expense of the more intimate moments between characters.

Setting out into the Milky Way, the structure of Mass Effect 3 immediately feels more linear than that of ME2. That’s a natural consequence of the story being much more about winning a war for survival against the Reapers than it is about meandering around the galaxy, exploring and building a team at your own pace. BioWare also did away with scanning planets for mineral upgrade currencies almost entirely… and yet, as sick of that as I was by the time I finished ME2, going directly into ME3 I did miss some of that freedom and the sense that any planet might contain some valuable resource worth searching for. In hindsight, the incentive to just wander the stars that it and the clumsy Mako created were… probably worth it? That’s hard to say after having disliked those mechanics but now there’s a hole left where they were.

The accelerated pace and focus on guns-blazing action does work just fine, though, because Mass Effect 3 has an enormous pile of stuff to do – and I did just about all of it. That’s especially true with the impressively meaty Leviathan, Citadel, and Omega DLC expansions integrated into the campaign, making it feel bottomless while I was in the midst of it.

How much did I do? Hard to say. For some notoriously buggy reason, the “Time Played” game clock on my completed Mass Effect 3 save says I’ve been at it for 287 hours. I’m pretty sure that’s a wild exaggeration – our friends at HowLongtoBeat.com list an average completionist run of Mass Effect 3 at about 51 hours, and I might’ve been a tad slower than that because I played on Hardcore difficulty. But after playing through the entire expanded trilogy in succession over a period of months, that number doesn’t feel as wrong as it should. And Mass Effect 3 is the biggest of the three.

When it came to my new playthrough, though, I learned a lot. Because of EA’s extremely questionable decision to carve him out as launch-day DLC back when it first came out, this was my first time playing with the prothean companion, Javvik. His presence adds so much background and insight into the previous cycle’s ancient war with the Reapers and the true nature of the prothean culture that it’s mind boggling to think that he just… wasn’t there for my first playthrough. It’s a relief that no one who picks up Mass Effect 3 going forward will have that incomplete story experience. Also, Javvik’s cold, dispassionate demeanor is especially welcome considering how little of Thane Krios we get in this game, so I took Javvik with me on nearly every mission.

Though we have fewer available companions this time (a max of seven, down from ME2’s 12), just about everybody who survived ME2 will show up in some way during the story, and pretty much everything gets wrapped up one way or another. A whole lot of ground is covered, even as the threat of the Reaper invasion looms large: The Illusive Man gets a conclusion; the krogan genophage is resolved; the war between the geth and the quarians ends; a battle is fought for the future of the Omega space station; we learn who first created the Reapers; and we have a party which, naturally, is crashed by bad guys. All of these and more have significant decisions to make that determine their outcomes and who lives and dies, which is the key part of what makes a Mass Effect game shine.

In fact, there are so many characters in play that it feels gratuitous to introduce more, which may be why, outside of Javvik, there aren’t a lot of new standouts to add to the star-studded voice cast ensemble.

One terrible choice that BioWare made was to introduce, out of the blue, a new enemy: Kai Leng is a generic space ninja assassin with no meaningful impact on the story or interesting background to motivate him. He’s about as deep an antagonist as Darth Maul in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace; unless you read up on his story outside of Mass Effect 3, there’s not much to him other than blindly following the evil orders he’s given. The fact that he can be responsible for the deaths of major characters if you fail to stop him feels like a cheap way to end their stories. Thankfully, he doesn’t show up all that often.

Speaking of deaths, having played through as a Paragon back in 2012 I was impressed at how dirty I could get Shepard’s hands when choosing the Renegade options. More than one former squadmate died as a direct result of my ruthless actions, which gave satisfying heft to my choices. I’d have loved to have seen a bit more fallout from those decisions, especially since this was the final game of the trilogy and nothing had to be carried forward, but there was still plenty to think about as I threw as many people under the bus as I could in order to save Earth.

I have to say, though, with Mass Effect 3’s co-op multiplayer component removed in the Legendary Edition, I especially dislike the vestigial “war points” system that was likely made with it in mind. It tallies up your progress in building an anti-Reaper alliance with cold, hard numbers in a way that feels reductive and game-y, arbitrarily putting a point value on whatever soldiers or starships you recruit to your cause. That demystifies the outcome of the war for survival and turns it into a series of equations with right and wrong answers. This kind of thing has been there all along, but Mass Effect has been good about hiding the raw calculations from us until now.

My Vanguard-class Shepard relied heavily on pistols, keeping the load light so that my biotic powers recharged faster and I could dish out explosive combos that encourage the use of a variety of attacks for extra damage. I admire how well that equipment system is balanced; choosing instead to take lots of guns would dramatically increase the cooldown timer on my telekinetic blasts and throws, but I’d have a much larger pool of ammunition to work with in a fight. Playing on Hardcore I found it more valuable to have the unlimited ammunition of biotics to wear down tough enemies, but bullets are plentiful enough that it wouldn’t have been impractical to shoot my way through.

Enemy variety is a strong point thanks to the typical soldiers, alien creatures, and robots being joined by Reaperized versions that come at you in droves. They can certainly feel bullet spongey – especially the powerful Banshees and Brutes that are sent out in large numbers toward the end of the campaign, which have layers of shields and armor that must be peeled away with appropriate attacks – but there’s enough nuance to the combat to keep it interesting even for dozens of hours. I did find that it was often difficult to pick my squad on some missions without knowing what enemies I’d face and whose powers would be best suited to taking them down; that feels like something that you optimize for on your next playthrough using your knowledge of what’s to come, and it did lead to a few situations where I found myself poorly equipped for a fight and had to retry multiple times.

One disappointing thing is that no matter what you chose for the rachni queen’s fate in Mass Effect 1, you’ll still run up against Reaperized rachni artillery here. Inconsistencies like that take away from the promise of a contiguous Mass Effect story, and I’d love to have known that I was only facing them because I’d shown the rachni queen mercy and was now dealing with the consequences of being a Paragon (especially given how often they killed me).

Overall, combat is the best it’s been in the trilogy, and a fitting culmination of everything that came before it. I didn’t miss the lack of vehicle sections like the Mako or Hammerhead – Mass Effect 3 works great on foot, and the occasional cutscene showing an epic space battle kept it feeling like the scale was larger than an infantry skirmish.

Without getting into the spoilery nature of the ending itself, I can say that the possible conclusions to the story are certainly more fleshed out now than they were when I originally played. Where I was once left wondering who had survived and who had died, these expanded epilogues spell out the consequences of your final decision clearly and impactfully. However, the fundamental problem with the ending is that virtually nothing you’ve done up to that point matters in the decision or outcomes. You can artificially restrict your own choices if you want to keep your roleplaying consistent, but there was no tangible reward or punishment for my playing two full games as Renegade Shepard; as long as I’d done enough side missions to crank up my War Points I could still choose any ending, including the “good” one, if I wanted to (I didn’t).

Warning: Spoilers for the Eternals movie will be found about halfway into this story. We’ll warn you again when you’re about to hit them!

One of the big reasons Marvel Comics characters continue to resonate throughout the decades is their strong mythic underpinnings. For instance, Thor and the Asgardians are taken wholesale from Norse legend; Ghost Rider has his basis in spectral horsemen folklore gathered by the Brothers Grimm; Black Panther takes cues from Egyptian culture as well as 20th Century Afrofuturism; and what is The Hulk but a play on Robert Louis Stevenson's 19th century classic Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But what of cosmic superhero team The Eternals, whose own feature film from Marvel Studios arrived in theaters this week?

As it happens, one of creative powerhouse Jack Kirby's final major contributions to the expansive Marvel Universe was riding the wave of a new myth being perpetrated by a German author who began espousing his theories of mankind's evolution at just the right time. Those new myths would snowball over the ensuing decades into numerous popular sci-fi franchises and a mini-industry of pseudoscience books and documentaries.

Chariots of the Gods?

Coincidentally arriving the same year as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey depicted a mysterious alien monolith influencing early cave-dwelling hominoid monkey men, author Erich von Däniken's 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? (the question mark was removed in some later editions) sought to impart daring new revelations of how extraterrestrial life had a sphere of influence on man's development at crucial stages of civilization.

Much of the book's hypothesis is based around the assumption that earlier eras of man did not possess the capacity to accomplish the wonders they did, with alien intervention being the only probable explanation. Such achievements we were apparently too stupid to hack by ourselves include the construction of the Great Pyramids of Giza, which he suggests would have taken centuries to build with the technology Egyptians had at the time. That's right, humans could never have thought of using slaves and ramps to haul big stone blocks without a few courteous E.T.s.

Other miraculous structures that von Däniken considers to be artifacts of evidence to support his theory include England's Stonehenge, the Moai statues of Easter Island and the numerous Nazca Lines of Peru. The latter large glyphs visible only from the sky are, in his eyes, replicas of alien structures meant to be seen from space as a kind of cosmic "Help Wanted" sign to our previous alien masters. Another tact he takes is to reinterpret ancient paintings or passages of religious texts through the prism of depicting aliens, even when far more grounded explanations already exist from learned archaeologists.

Here is a prime example of von Däniken's specious reasoning from the book, which even includes the word "eternal":

"Could it be that God was an extra-terrestrial? What do we mean when we say that heaven is in the clouds? From Jesus Christ to Elvis Presley, every culture tells us of high-flying bird men who zoom around the world creating magnificent works of art and choosing willing followers to share in the eternal glory from beyond the stars. Can all these related phenomena merely be dismissed as coincidence?"

Who Is Erich von Däniken, Really?

Of course the fact that all of this is easily disproved nonsense did not stop Chariots of the Gods? from becoming a runaway bestseller, with it and von Däniken's other texts on the subject having sold over 70 million copies to date. This was aided somewhat by the popularity of the occult and paranormal within the counterculture at the time, also evidenced by mystic tomes like Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan. But what sort of scientific credentials did von Däniken amass to glean all these remarkable insights? None, actually.

In reality Erich von Däniken was a Swiss hotelier and con artist who had been imprisoned for embezzlement before publication of his first book, and then once again with the added charges of fraud and forgery afterwards for falsifying bank records so he could take out huge loans and live like King Gilgamesh. When confronted about the many factual errors in his works the author would become irate and highly defensive, as he does in the book's own introduction.

The fact is even some of the nuttiest theories in Chariots of the Gods? are not even his, with ideas "borrowed" from scientists like Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii as well as French author Robert Charroux. Additionally, it’s been alleged that some of the theories in the book may have been straight up plagiarized from a 1960 fantasy book called The Morning of the Magicians, which itself was influenced by the Cthulhu mythos of H. P. Lovecraft.

In August of 1974 Playboy contacted famed astronomer Sagan before interviewing von Däniken, and he made his views of the Chariots author quite plain:

"The kindest thing I can say about von Däniken is that he ignores the science of archeology. Every time he sees something he can't understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet."

In 2003 von Däniken opened a theme park in Switzerland called Mystery Park that showcased different "mysteries of the world" over seven giant pavilions, including Nazca, Giza and Stonehenge. Not surprisingly, the park drew controversy for promoting ideas of ancient aliens, and ultimately failed, though a different company took over and began reopening it in the summers as Jungfrau Park.

The Eternals Connection

It was obvious from the publication of artist and writer Jack Kirby's first issue of The Eternals in July of 1976 that he had Chariots of the Gods? on the brain. Ideas about the seeding of humanity by extraterrestrials play a central part in the story of the god-like Celestials creating Eternals and their centuries-long battle against the monstrous Deviants, all drawn in Kirby's increasingly cubist style. According to Ronin Ro's Marvel history book Tales to Astonish, Marvel wanted to title the series Return of the Gods in the same font as von Däniken's book. Luckily the legal department stepped in, and Eternals it was. Still, the second issue does say right on the cover, "More fantastic than Chariots of the Gods!"

Only lasting for 19 issues and one annual, Kirby's run on the book focused on the title group of heroes who evolved at the same time as humans but were gifted with glorious powers by the Celestials, and were then subsequently worshipped as gods throughout the eons. There is even a character who debuted in issue #13 named after the ancient Sumerian epic poem "Gilgamesh," about a posthumously deified Mesopotamian king. In the original text Gilgamesh was part-god/part-man who at one point rose up in the sky in a "space chariot" and described the Earth in remarkably accurate detail… at least according to von Däniken.

Here is a quote from Kirby in the "Eternal Utterings" afterword to that inaugural issue, which is full of references to the sunken city of Lemuria, Incan symbology, and Ships of the Gods:

"Despite the fact that I've contrived my own version of those momentous confrontations of prehistory, I take them from the de facto questions of today. What did happen in those remote days of men’s early struggle for civilized status? What is the true meaning of the myths which shared a global similarity among diverse peoples? Did beings of an extra terrestrial nature touch down among us and influence our lives to this present day? And then, the all-important question of the lot – are these beings in some cosmic orbit which will lead them back to us someday?"

Warning: Here come those spoilers for the Eternals movie…

Director Chloé Zhao's new $200 million dollar film version of Eternals is no different from its comic book source material in that the engine driving the narrative is ancient aliens theory. In the movie the Eternals team of varied superpowers consists of matter-manipulating Sersi (Gemma Chan), high-flying laser-eyed Ikaris (Richard Madden), energy-blasting Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), illusionist Sprite (Lia McHugh), technologist Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), way-fast Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), mind-controlling Druig (Barry Keoghan), super-strong Gilgamesh (Don Lee), quick-healer Ajak (Salma Hayek), and deadly swordswoman Thena (Angelina Jolie). They are named after many legends throughout history because they themselves inspired those tales.

Midway through the film Sersi learns that all the Eternals are merely synthetic beings/robots created by the Celestials to advance humanity over millennia in order to feed the new Celestial named Tiamut that is growing from within the Earth's core. The Deviants were also contrived by the Celestials to kill off the dinosaurs so that the more intelligent man could emerge and dominate the planet. The Eternals' main duty is to prevent the Deviants from killing Tiamut before he emerges from the Earth, which will result in killing all life on the planet.

So, essentially, our heroes are actually robots made to look like humans by giant interstellar beings who look like Everest-sized refrigerators with arms and are using Earth as their personal incubator. The Eternals don't take kindly to this new intel, having grown fond of humanity and all they've accomplished, including the felling of the Titan Thanos. They set out to stop the emergence of Tiamut despite obstacles from within their own ranks.

Interspersed amid the modern-day story are glimpses of some of the team's handiwork throughout the centuries, including the advancements of ancient Babylon and the warring culture of the Aztecs. The character of Phastos is particularly crucial, as he frequently wants to accelerate humanity's development with building and agriculture, as when he yearns to give the Babylonians engine-powered farming equipment but must settle for a simple plow. It seems a light touch is preferable when giving humans new ideas, or we'll all simply destroy each other… which would defeat the purpose.

All this is very heady material for a blockbuster, and whether its ensemble cast of immortal enhanced robots with superpowers can connect to a wide audience is yet to be seen. The one thing we do know is Eternals is nowhere near alone when it comes to incorporating ancient aliens stuff within a pop framework.

End of Eternals movie spoilers!

Other Films, More Chariots

Stargate

Many movies have carried forth the ancient alien theme, with the most prominent that comes to mind being Roland Emmerich's 1994 sci-fi epic Stargate. It follows James Spader as a modern-day scientist named Dr. Daniel Jackson who, through special stones, is able to open a wormhole gateway to another planet called Abydos. Similar in desert terrain and language to ancient Egypt, Jackson learns that the alien god Ra (Jaye Davidson) had used the Stargate to travel to Earth centuries ago to possess bodies and enslave humans in order to mine the mineral that powers his technology.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Working under some level of protest alongside story crafter George Lucas, Steven Spielberg directed 2008's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to the chagrin of many moviegoers. Unlike previous Jones adventures, which were based around religious artifacts, this one brought extraterrestrials into the picture. Or, as they're referred to in the film, "inter-dimensional beings." Using a crystal skull with telepathic powers unearthed from Area 51, Jones and his Russian adversaries seek to uncover the fabled city of Akator, in real life a debunked German myth of a kind of El Dorado-style city of gold near the Amazon. Along the way there are references to the Nazca Lines and aliens who came to Earth centuries ago as space archaeologists.

Prometheus

A semi-prequel to the first Alien movie, Ridley Scott's 2012 Prometheus was a massive budget sci-fi horror exploration of Chariots of the Gods? themes, including the idea that alien beings brought their own DNA into play during the early cycles of life's evolution on Earth, resulting in the human race. The lead archaeologist characters Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway draw questionable clues to the origin of man through specific symbols in primitive artworks and hieroglyphs from throughout time that point to a specific solar system. Armed with the trillion-dollar title spaceship (named after the Greek god who gave man the gift of fire) that’s packed with advanced equipment and scientists of varying degrees of intelligence, they set out across the stars to discover the beings (nicknamed Engineers) who created us. Take that, Charles Darwin! Fun side fact: The production company behind the Ancient Aliens TV show formed in 1999 is called Prometheus Entertainment.

Quatermass and the Pit

Pre-dating von Däniken's book is the 1958 BBC TV serial Quatermass and the Pit, which was remade as a feature by Hammer Studios in 1967. Written by Nigel Kneale, it sees the title rocket scientist and professor Bernard Quatermass stumble upon an alien ship in a London Underground station. As he investigates further, Quatermass learns the aliens inside had long ago genetically modified humans to gift a select few of them with psychic powers in order to breed a new race of people. Related: The BBC's 13th season episode of Doctor Who, "Pyramids of Mars," found Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor battling an Egyptian god named Sutekh, who is really a member of an alien race called the Osirians who use robot henchmen dressed as mummies.

The X-Files

Chris Carter's Fox series The X-Files dealt with these alien astronaut notions many times, as in a trilogy of Season 6 episodes starting with "Biogenesis" and revolving around a large metallic alien artifact that washes up on the Ivory Coast and which may be a clue to the fringe theory of panspermia, namely that aliens created life on Earth.

John Carpenter’s The Thing

Perhaps the best reference to von Däniken came in John Carpenter's classic 1982 horror remake The Thing, in which Palmer (David Clennon) schools Childs (Keith David) about the real deal behind alien visitations:

Palmer:

Childs, happens all the time, man. They're falling out of the skies like flies. Government knows all about it, right, Mac?

Childs:

You believe any of this voodoo bullsh*t, Blair?

Palmer:

Childs, Childs… Chariots of the Gods, man. They practically own South America. I mean, they taught the Incas everything they know.

A Mini Alien Industry

In 1970 von Däniken's pontificating was taken to the next level of public awareness with the release of the incredibly popular documentary feature Chariots of the Gods. Produced in Germany and inexplicably nominated for an Academy Award after becoming the ninth highest grossing film of 1970, the film is a fairly bland 90 minutes of stock footage covering various locales undermined by an even more boring narrator.

It was followed in 1972 by a shorter version edited for ABC television titled In Search of Ancient Astronauts and another doc in 1973 titled In Search of Ancient Mysteries, both narrated by Twilight Zone guru Rod Serling. In Ancient Astronauts Serling paints a picture of von Däniken as adventurous investigator on horseback, far different than what we actually know to be true:

"Erich von Däniken, a German professor possessed of the mind of a scientist and the imagination of a romantic, wrote a book called Chariots of the Gods. He stated that sometime in the distant past mankind was visited by intelligent beings from outer space. What in olden times might have been heresy is today intriguing speculation. Von Däniken travelled to all corners of the world gathering evidence in support of his theory… or is it a theory? Judge for yourself."

With that level of mythmaking, it's hard to imagine how these baseless theories wouldn't capture the public imagination, especially in an era where you couldn't simply click over to Google and discover how silly they really are. These TV specials eventually grew into the popular infotainment series In Search of… hosted by Leonard Nimoy, which explored various facets of the paranormal and other mysterious phenomena. (That series was revived in 2002 and again in 2018 with host Zachary Quinto.) But the show's effect on pop culture has nothing on a more recent program.

When discussing History Channel's long-running series Ancient Aliens, it's hard not to think of the hilarious scene in Anchorman 2 when Liam Neeson leads a brigade of historical soldiers representing History Channel, including the ghost of Stonewall Jackson and a Minotaur. James Marsden’s TV reporter Jack Lime cries out, "The minotaur isn’t even history. He’s mythology!"

One could say the exact same thing about ancient alien theories: that they are modern day myths being packaged as fact by infotainment vendors like A&E's History Channel, which has run the "reality" program Ancient Aliens for 17 seasons with no sign of slowing.

The show's parade of questionable sources (including human meme Giorgio A. Tsoukalos of the world's most ridiculous hairdo) has pervaded the popular imagination to such an extent that a 2018 study executed at Chapman University indicates that 41 percent of American adults believe that extraterrestrials have meddled in humanity's formative past. This is a sad development indicative of the nefarious strain of anti-intellectualism that has reared an ever-larger head in discourse as the age of social media misinformation dominates the landscape.

While Marvel's Eternals is pure entertainment and should not be lumped in with false idol "educational" shows like Ancient Aliens, it will be interesting to see what kind of intelligent discourse it generates on the topic, both in the middle school lunchroom and beyond.

For even more on the new Marvel movie, check out our Eternals ending explained, dig in on the Eternals post credits scene, and also contemplate the Eternals mid credits scene with that crazy cameo.