In the vein of “what happened to history on the History Channel”, they have a show called Ancient Aliens. It’s not like History Channel has many serious history shows anymore, it’s Pawn Stars and Ice Road Truckers, but when you get down to pure pseudo-science, you’ve entirely left the reservation and Ancient Aliens is just as idiotic as they come.
Last night, I couldn’t sleep so I sat in front of the TV for a couple of hours watching a run of these stupid shows. As much as I could write an entire slew of posts about how ridiculous this show really is, something struck me about the way they talk on the show.
These people sound just like Christians.
Seriously, if you’ve spent any time talking to theists, you’ll hear almost the exact same types of arguments that you get from the crazy alien nuts. It applies to all the shows that I’ve seen, but most especially, I saw it in their Bigfoot show, where they tried to explain that Bigfoot is actually an alien, or an alien hybrid. How do they know this? Faith! Honestly, here’s the method they use.
- Sometimes, there are Bigfoot sightings in the same general area and at the same general time as UFO sightings.
- Some UFO researchers believe Bigfoot is an alien.
- Therefore Bigfoot is an alien…
Just because some people, who have no evidence whatsoever that their beliefs are true, have faith that something is so, they treat it like it must be so. As long as they can sneak their “and some experts believe that…” into the formula, they can declare anything they want to true and factual. They think that aliens excavated thousands of miles of tunnels in the Pacific Northwest for Sasquatch to live in. In fact, they think that any creature described in any ancient book must be a Bigfoot, which just proves that there are Bigfoots? Bigfooti? Bigfeet? around today.
But isn’t that exactly what we see from theists? They believe it, therefore they’re going to operate as though it’s factually true even if they’ve produced no evidence that it actually is. I’m sure that if you’d get any of these loons in a debate, from Erich von Daniken and Giorgio Tsoukalos, you’d get the same responses we see out of theists too.
And yes, before you ask, they actually think that the gods existed, they were just extraterrestrials:
It’s sad how far the mighty have fallen.
