FigureDavid Hatcher Childress (b. 1957)

Born in France to American parents in 1957 and raised in Colorado and Montana, Childress left the University of Montana in 1976 without a degree to travel and write. His Lost Cities series (from 1983) documents fringe exploration across Africa, Asia, South America, and the Pacific; in 1984 he founded Adventures Unlimited Press, which has published nearly 200 titles on alternative-history topics, and in 1992 the World Explorers Club. He is one of the most frequent talking heads on Ancient Aliens.

His themes — ancient aircraft (the vimanas of Sanskrit texts), suppressed antigravity technology, and lost continents such as Atlantis and Mu — are classic pseudoarchaeology. He calls himself a ‘rogue archaeologist’ while holding no formal credentials, and scholars have criticized his work; the archaeologist Charles Orser singled out his ‘racialized vision of Atlantis,’ including claims of blond Atlanteans building Tiwanaku that appear nowhere in the classical sources he invokes. The corpus catalogs him as a genre figure, not a source of record.