3. The Moai of Easter Island was NOT constructed by alien assistance but by the Rapa Nui people
The Moai, found on Easter Island in eastern Polynesia, are monolithic human figures carved out of stone sometime between the years 1250 and 1500 CE. Depicting the faces of deified ancestors the statues possess disproportionate head-to-body sizes, typically accounting for three-eighths of the whole statue, with the tallest, named “Paro”, almost 10 meters in height and weighing 90.4 tons. With approximately 900 placed around the perimeter of Easter Island, the Moai faced inland across their historic clan lands until they were toppled between 1722 and 1868; the reasons for this are contested, with some accounts suggesting natural earthquakes while others point to inter-factional disputes.
Due to the isolated condition of Easter Island, the primitive technological conditions of the Rapa Nui, and the bizarre nature of the Moai, ancient astronaut theorists have long asserted extraterrestrial assistance would have been required to produce and transport the giant stone constructions. Furthermore, theorists point to the unfinished state of an additional 400 Moai at the Rano Raraku quarry, as well as finished but unmoved monoliths at the site, as evidence that the island’s native inhabitants could not complete the work without extraterrestrial assistance that never returned.
However, these conspiracy theories failed to account for several key facts regarding the Moai, including that some statues were merely rock carvings never intended for completion, that others were never completed as they were abandoned after imperfections were found in the rock during carving, and that some were intentionally placed at the quarry itself. Regarding the transportation of the Moai, whilst the island possessed few trees by the time of European arrival modern pollen analysis has confirmed Easter Island was almost entirely forested during the time of Moai construction; the foremost hypotheses of transportation rely upon the use of wooden equipment. Among these ingenious but plausible practical methods, experimentation by Charles Love has shown that 10-ton Moai placed upright on two sled runners atop log rollers and pulled by 25 men could move a statue at a speed of 150 feet in two minutes.