I've met a handful of people in real life and online who take 'ancient astronaut' hypotheses very seriously. They honestly believe that our evidence for the construction of monuments by Egyptians is somehow unreliable or incomplete.

To me this is insane, I'm not an Egyptologist, but I've spent a lot of free time reading up on the archaeology and it just seems that nothing at all points in this direction. One all-penetrating claim is that Egyptians were incapable of carving stones with such precision as those found in the pyramids, but take a look at the casing stones of Menkaure's pyramid. You can see very clearly the process of carving these stones. Some people even go as far as claiming that nobody has ever found evidence of metal chisels anywhere in Egypt, but this is also not true.

Another wild claim is that Egypt could not have fielded enough people to have built the pyramids and that no archaeological evidence exists to the contrary. In fact, the discovery of the labor camps of the builders of the pyramids show very clearly that this was a massive undertaking. The sleeping facilities suggest tens of thousands of people were contracted to work in a veritable metropolis. This is also backed up by graffiti in the pyramids from labor teams.

Tens of thousands of people in the third millennium B.C. amounts to a "supercity" for that time. The largest city in the world, as far as archeologists know, numbered in the tens of thousands—sites like Ur and Uruk in southern Mesopotamia and Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley. If there were tens of thousands of people here building the Pyramids, where did they live? How were they housed? How were they fed?

Source

To me, it's a crime of deception that major television channels perpetrate this nonsense. As a young, impressionable kid, I was definitely swayed by these messages but managed to find some sense as I got older.

Is this a failure of Egyptologists and archaeologists to properly educate the public at large? So many of these academics and scientists are content to exist in their own sphere of discussion, they simply ignore what they perceive to be kooky individuals who hold no sway over Egyptology.

Or is this just one of the curses of the internet? Maybe all this freedom of knowledge has engendered a naive culture that clings to Hollywood-style conjecture because it's more interesting? Or because they were never exposed to facts?

In some ways, I think Carl Sagan may have pinpointed our failure:

“We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

- Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Do we have a responsibility to meet these claims head-on and debunk them? Or should we just allow them to exist and accept that many people cannot be talked out of it no matter what evidence you present?