Short Answer: Yes (at least for some, like Erich von Daniken).

Slightly Longer Answer:  Yes, because some presume that humans in antiquity were so primitive they could not build these things without the assistance of non-human intelligence. Then, an elect super-race taught by aliens could mediate that esoteric knowledge to poor savages in the New World by a select / advanced super-race descended from the Atlanteans, the original inheritors of alien knowledge.

Still longer answer: read “Is Pseudo-Archaeology Racist?” by Keith Fitzpatrick Matthews (posted 2014) and the above link leading to Jason Colavito’s “The Astonishing Racial Claims of Erich von Daniken.”

Readers here will know I’m in agreement with a yes answer here. All (and I mean “all”) of the examples of “impossible” architecture foisted on viewers of shows like Ancient Aliens were indeed built by humans. They weren’t primitive savages just because they didn’t have cars, cell phones, or the internet. Their technology solved their problems and met their needs, not ours. All the techniques they used are demonstrable from applied physics (which isn’t a physics that needs atom smashers).

The Ancient Aliens idea is racist in that the non-European civilizations responsible for these engineering feats are said to have been too stupid to do it themselves — and so aliens, or angels, or nephilim or [fill in desired non-human intelligence] did it for them.  The technology then (somehow) made it across the Atlantic to North America where the [fill in master race here — descendants of Atlantis, to whom the alien gods gave the technology] built the great mounds and other amazing structures in the New World — which certainly cannot be credited to Native American savages (in either North, Central, or South America).

Certain people with a high view of the Bible are not immune from this thinking.  I’ll point out again that there are no Bible verses that have the nephilim building anything, or possessing super-knowledge. The notion in Hellenistic (non-biblical) Jewish material like 1 Enoch that certain points of knowledge were mediated by supernatural beings is an unspectacular list. There are no megalithic engineering skills mentioned. Instead, there are “technologies” that are very human in terms of practice or capacity — e.g., making weapons of war, using plants for altered states (drugs), using aids to seduction (cosmetics), star-gazing (again with no advanced astronomy beyond naked eye observation present). The reason is simple: books like 1 Enoch were concerned with the idea of intelligent evil lurking behind the human propensity toward self-destruction and idolatry, not architectural prowess or tyranny of the less enlightened savages through technology. Books like 1 Enoch and material in the Bible never put forth the idea of advanced human technology being bestowed to a master race for control of inferior races, or to condescendingly pass on their super knowledge. The concern is theological or moral, not the singling out of an elite race “blessed” by such knowledge.