9 Star Trek: The Animated Series Aliens That Should Appear In Live Action

In How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth, Native American writer Russell Bates and co-writer David Wise, took the concept of revealing that ancient people mistook aliens for divine beings and ran with it.

During the episode, the Enterprise crew discovered that the Mayan deity Kukulkan was really a snake-like ancient alien upset that humans no longer worshiped him.

The dour alien deposited several crew members in a magnificent city featuring architectural elements from Mayan, Chinese, and Egyptian cultures as well as several others.

This was Bates's response to the idea that Native Americans couldn't have built advanced cities without help by other cultures such as the Chinese, Phoenicians, Egyptians, the Atlanteans, or in the case of Erich von Daniken's popular book, Chariots of the Gods?, ancient aliens. Bates wanted to show that if Native Americans couldn't build cities without help from aliens, then neither could anybody else.

With the resurgence of the ancient alien concept, now seems like an ideal time for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds to reexamine this idea through another encounter with Kukulkan. However, today's writers have access to information about the Maya that wasn't known in the 1970s and would be able to craft a more accurate story.