“Ancient Aliens” is a thing. On a scale from one to ten, how much does it offend you?

Okay, well, we’re gonna have to set some points of reference here first, like on our scale of 1 to 10, 1 would be something like someone farts at an inappropriate moment and 10 is a dude doing the Nazi salute in a KKK robe and waving a ‘god hates fags’ sign as he hurls incendiary bombs at a school for disabled children run by blind elderly nuns… so, I don’t know, I guess like a 4?  Honestly, I don’t really take my discipline seriously enough to be all that bent out of shape by people spouting that kind of drivel about it, nor do I take Ancient Aliens seriously enough to regard it as actually threatening.  Having said that, though, the thinking that goes into conspiracy theories of that stripe is certainly rather distressing.  Somehow, incredibly, it manages to both over-glorify the ancient past and belittle it at the same time.  On the one hand, it’s like the Pyramids are too grand and wonderful for us to possibly accept the idea that maybe they were built by people dealing with the same questions we’re still asking today – how to think about death, how to preserve our memories of great people, how to build bigger and better than ever before – no; anything so superlative must have been accomplished with a great, world-spanning agenda in mind that we can barely grasp in hindsight. But on the other hand, it’s like there’s no way those primitive, barbaric ancient Egyptians could possibly have done anything so amazing on their own; people are just too stupid to make such great leaps in engineering without someone incredibly brilliant to teach them.  Someone with spaceships.  I mean, seriously.