Who built the Pyramids? Theories even crazier than Ben Carson

The engineering and architectural brilliance behind building the Pyramids of Giza has simultaneously fascinated and flabbergasted humanity for centuries. It's been more than 4,000 years and we still can't wrap our heads around it.

This has led to an outpouring of theories to figure out how and why they were built. Perhaps the most ridiculous however, are the theories about who built the Pyramids to begin with.

U.S. Republican front-runner Ben Carson made headlines last week when it was revealed that he believes the Pyramids were built by the Biblical Joseph to store grain, linking the Pyramids to the Old Testament story of Joseph in Egypt.

Never mind the fact that Joseph is believed to have come to Egypt literally centuries after the Pyramids were built, or that retired neurosurgeons with no experience in Egyptology are in no position to make claims about history without checking up on basic facts first.

But that's not the only crazy theory to have surfaced over the years, these are some of the others that have trampled on historical facts and common sense.

After studying the measurements of the Great Pyramid in 1859, British publisher John Taylor argued in his book ' The Great Pyramid: Why It Was Built and Who Built It ' that it was built using a unit of measurement that's nearly identical to the modern British inch.

He concluded that it must have been divine inspiration and that led him to Noah, because he was able to build Noah's Ark.

One of the Jehovah's Witness movement's leaders Joseph T. Rutherford wrote in the article " The Altar in Egypt "  in The Watch Tower magazine that "Satan the Devil" directed the ancient Egyptians to build the Great Pyramid as a "subtle scheme" to apparently "draw men away from Jehovah and his service."

U.S. congressman Ignatius Donnelly theorized in his book " Atlantis: The Antediluvian World " in 1882 that Plato's island of Atlantis was in fact real and that the rulers of this island colonized Egypt, established its civilization and just happened to build the Pyramids in the process.

Although the Pyramids were never mentioned in the Old Testament, scholars and researchers have claimed for many years that according to the Book of Exodus, Jews were forced to build the Pyramids as punishment by Egypt's pharaohs before they exited the country.

From "The Ten Commandments" in 1956 to "Exodus" in 2014, this claim has been immortalized in pop culture way too many times.

The popularized theory simply claims that man could not have possibly had the knowledge, tools or physical ability to build the Pyramids in that manner at that ancient time, so it must have been extra-terrestrial life that visited Earth to build the Pyramids and then conveniently leave, never to be seen again.