Aliens Of The Gaps

We atheists criticize the "God of the gaps" fallacy of some theist arguments. "Ancient Aliens" is built upon the "aliens of the gaps" fallacy. The theists say, "I don't understand this -- therefore, God must have done it." Giorgio Tsoukalos says, "I don't understand this -- therefore, aliens must have done it."

No. He doesn't understand this, and that, and that, either because he's an idiot, or because he's pretending to be -- which pretty much amounts to the same thing.

I really, really hate the show. I know that very many of you love it without taking it seriously, but I wonder if you realize how much more interesting and exciting TV shows on pyramids and angels could be if the very best scholars were allowed to assume the roles of Tsoukalos and his nimwit colleagues, and tell you what we actually know. Imagine: all those beautiful pictures that you see on "Ancient Aliens," but instead of them being accompanied by nonsense, what if you could actually learn something about them and the people who made them?

It can be done. All you need to do is drop "Ancient Aliens" and all the other crap from the so-called "History Channels," and turn instead to some real historians, and real archaeologists, and so forth.

The "History Channels" are right-wing operations who want to keep people stupid and voting Republican.

Donald Redford, for example, is a real archaeologist, who wants to lay some real knowledge on you.

Ain't nothin' like the real thing, Baby.

Why "Ancient Aliens" Sucks

Because much smarter people have asked the same questions and come up with much, much better answers.

Just because something is not easily explained is no reason to jump to conclusions such as "aliens did it." If you dig deeper into the work of academic historians and sociologists, I think you'll find that they've explained many things which the "Ancient Aliens" crowd calls "unexplained mysteries." For example, there's no mystery about why the Egyptians built pyramids: they believed in an afterlife. Pyramids were palaces for the Pharaohs to live in during that afterlife. They mummified corpses so that dead people would still have their whole bodies in the afterlife instead of being disfigured. If you're interested in eerie similarities between separate cultures, read The Golden Bough by James Frazer; you'll find a lot of very eerie similarities between separate cultures which have nothing to do with aliens. And Frazer was writing between 120 and 75 years ago, around the same time as Freud, who's also really good. More recently Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk and others have attempted analyses of worldwide cultural phenomena, in addition to all of those people who are more specialized in the histories of individual cultures. The real scholars are so much more interesting than the ancient aliens bunch. I don't think it's impossible that aliens have been among us, not at all. I just think that any culture advanced enough to visit us from another planet would have no difficulty whatsoever in concealing every last trace of itself from the likes of Giorgio Tsoukalos.

I Just Noticed: The Entire Year 2012 Came And Went And We're Still Here

This is disturbing. Not only because it seems to indicate that all of those symbologists and experts on ancient aliens and so forth may have been off in their calculations, but because it will give ammunition to all those "scientists" and "archaeologists" and forth -- you know. The ones who are professors and such and all think they're so G-D smart and are so G-D proud of their "peer-reviewed journals" and all -- in their worldwide conspiracy to hinder heroes like Däniken and Downing and Tsoukalos from telling the world the truth. The public might be more inclined to listen to "scientists" when they perpetrate awful smears such as saying that not only are Tsoukalos' interpretation of ancient Mayan and Egyptian heiroglyphics dubious, but that there's no actual evidence that Tsoukalos can actually read any heiroglyphics.

OMG -- this could damage the credibility of the History Channel!! People might start to doubt the messages we've gotten from the Bible code! They could start to doubt perfectly obvious truths such as that the angels and demons in old paintings are actually aliens, no matter how many times Tsoukalos smirks in the direction of a camera and exclaims that it's perfectly obvious!

People might stop believing in astrology! People might start to wonder whether people built the pyramids in Egypt and Latin America all by themselves, with absolutely no help from extraterrestrials! Where would that leave us?!

I'm afraid! Afraid for myself, and for Dan Brown.