This is part three in our Horizon Case series. It might not make sense without listening to the other two episodes/reading the other two articles first.

Part One: an Introduction to Horizon Cases and Cave Art

Part Two: the Wounded Man

the Niaux Cave UFO

Imagine you take a trip to southern France to tour a cave. You are given a flashlight, and as you cautiously walk down the steep, uneven pathway, you pass by incredible drawings of creatures you aren’t familiar with. Deeper down you go, your light casting shadows, bringing the dark drawings and their often overlapping, bulky bodies to life. Then, on the wall to your left, you see something that causes you to catch your breath. Something you even recognize. But, it doesn’t belong here… Above you, on a flat section of wall, is a painting of a UFO. And this cave? It was inhabited by humans as long as 19,000 years ago. As far as ancient aliens go, the UFO of Grotte de Niaux is everything you could hope for. Bright white linework on gray stone, it is hard to describe it as anything but a traditional UFO; it is an elongated, thin oval with a perfectly round, half-circle on top of the middle. You could describe it in many ways: a stretched ocarina, a simple sombrero, a poorly drawn cloud, but, most of all, a scrawled, yet cleanly depicted UFO. Under the saucer are two rows of solidly colored dots, nine on top, eight on the bottom, skewed so that the rows of circles are slightly diagonal from each other. Ancient alien articles, sites, books, and videos will use this image along with a caption describing it as a Paleolithic cave painting, dating it from 13,000 to 10,000 BCE. With such an intriguing claim and photo, I had to know more. Our second example of ancient aliens in Paleolithic cave art, where was this alleged UFO found in the cave? How was it made? And are there any other explanations for it?  

One of the few remaining publicly accessible caves containing Paleolithic artwork, Niaux Cave is filled with children’s handprints and spaghetti tracks, footprints, and drawings of animals–horses, ibexes, and bison. Like with the Wounded Man and pictures from Pech-Merle, these were made with ochre crayons and charcoal sticks. The pictures here, too, are referred to as “classic Magdalenian”; this is just a name for the art’s style, it was a common method of artmaking and aesthetic, specific to this region (Western and central Europe) and time period (the Late Upper Paleolithic). The drawings are all outlined in black with occasional splashes of red around the figure. Which makes our UFO strange. It is neither red nor black, but white. White is not uncommon in paleolithic art, though; white paints were easily made by grinding up or scraping baked bones or kaolin clay and mixing them with water. Still, it is the only one here.

The spots under the saucer are an aspect of paleo-art we haven’t covered yet. These circles were not made like the Wounded Man drawing or any of the surrounding animals we’ve talked about so far. They were not so much made with the hand, but the mouth. Called the “spit-spray” technique, minerals and pigments were chewed up and spat directly on a surface or through a hollow reed. The hand could cup the mouth, making crisper edges. Not all dots were made this way, just a lot. It was the best method, however, for filling in huge shapes, like coloring in a bison. Ochre and charcoal could also be rubbed on the hand and patted onto the wall with one’s palm. Using a pencil or crayon to make these shapes or color them in would be much more difficult, not to mention time-consuming! The odd angles and uneven surfaces made leaving lines behind hard enough.

Called stippling in art, it can give animals a fuzzy texture, denote a darker part of the body, and can also be purely decorative. Spotted horses are common in cave art; they are depicted with larger, more spread out dots, as their coats were probably actually like in real life. Dots have also been used alongside drawings of wounded animals or people, signifying pools or drops of red blood. There are also several cases, including one in Niaux Cave, of standalone spots: single, straight lines, rows, gentle curves, dramatic swoops, and ones that dot more abstract, chaotic shapes. These are hypothesized to be trails of blood, left by a fleeing target, like a speared bison. The ones under our UFO are clearly not blood, but perhaps a kind of shading, such as one might see in an abduction beam. But, that would be unbelievable… right? 

If you went and looked through a collection of photos from Niaux Cave, and even took the tour yourself, you would find our UFO missing. That’s because it is not, nor was ever, there. The painting is actually a piece of commissioned art. Titled Niaux Cave Painting - ?UFO, Toby Moate from the UK created it in 2014 with sand, glue, and acrylic paint, and the little trouble-maker used to hang in (the now closed) Bar 50 in Cheltenham.

Now, I don’t think this was a deliberate hoax by the artist or client. It was clearly labeled and described, no harm done, and it is a very cool painting, idea. This is nothing new with ancient alien sources; you know the ones, weird, grainy Facebook posts with shady links and bizarre UFO sites that make your whole computer slow down. These places don’t usually cite sources, and, well, they don’t use a lot of real information or images, especially since AI became a thing. While a brief Google could have cleared this up, it was instead posted and listed as legitimate prehistoric art from Niaux Cave, used as proof of alien visitation. As more and more places use this image and false title, description, it feeds a problematic cycle. The more places it is, the more it is shared, put in even more articles. The more places it is mentioned, the more it is legitimized, at least in the eyes of the internet.

This incredible ancient UFO was, in fact, too good to be true. It is never a waste of time to check something out and learn something new, so despite this Ancient Alien being a fraud, I hope you enjoyed our trek through another Paleolithic cave, nonetheless.

SOURCES

Guthrie, R. Dale. "The Nature of Paleolithic Art." The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Niaux Cave Painting - ?UFO

Cave of Niaux