I'm watching "Ancient Aliens" on the History Channel tonight, and let me tell y'all, it is woowoo central. It even features Lord-God-King Woowoo Erich Von Daniken. The program is full of people like Von Daniken and George Noory from C2C saying stuff like, "these ancient carvings/drawings/etc. look like space ships, therefore they are proof of alien visitations."

Not enough time is given, IMHO, to those who have rational (and correct) explanations for ancient discoveries.

I think an appropriate quote for this program was one made by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who said "Aliens didn't build the Great Pyramids, human beings did, because they're clever and they work hard."

What really gripes my rear about these "ancient aliens" enthusiasts is that they fail to realize that our distant ancestors were just as clever as we are, with a lot more time on their hands. It could also be construes as being racist. "Oh no, those little brown dudes couldn't have built that, it must've been aliens." It's just not right.

- Maha Vailo

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When you get down to it, Science answers how. Religion answers why. - hippietrekx

The Warp Point, my new geek culture blog.

They had to bring up the Nazca lines...I though that one had been put to bed with the determination that they'd mastered basic hot air balloon flight?

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The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs.

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I want to go back to the moon.
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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Quite right. The ancient Egyptian plebian classes were farmers for half the year, and construction workers the other half.

Which is probably what it is. You never hear suggested Roman architecture was created by E.T. The Romans had concrete and plumbing. Yet stacking stone blocks is somehow beyond ancient human ingenuity.

This guy figured out a way to move amazingly large stones in a very low-tech way. http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/
No aliens or sorcery required.

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The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

Since it was the History Channel, I'm surprised they didn't claim that the ancient astronauts were Nazis.

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

Nazis are now the main inspiration for programming on the Military Channel. I can see it now, a twelve-part series on how Hitler's bodyguard was an alien astronaut ...

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The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Now all the History Channel needs to do is create a series, "Ancient Nazi Astronauts -- On Ice!" Why not? It's not as if they have any credibility to lose or anything!

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Well, sure. Everyone knows Chichen Itza was home of the Whopper.

Nazis? I call Godwin!

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Right, and no doubt they would have the aliens providing the time travel technology that the Nazis used in an attempt to go back in time and change history.

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Who needs technology? According to History! (formerly The History Channel or THC, from which they seem to get most of their show ideas) there's a time-spanning wormhole in the Bermuda Triangle! Don't these producers share ideas anymore?

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I did like the raptor cockpit they dug up

No heretic, it inspired Chick-fil-A.

Am I crazy, or does he sound like he is channeling Zahi Hawass these days what with his voice? Not that Zahi wants anything to do with him of course. So help me--as they grow older, they are starting to resemble.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zahi_Hawass I wish more people would listen to Zahi. The wiki has him as a great skeptic.

Hee hee, I'm putting that one in my sig!

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Zahi kicks butt. I've read several of his books and am taking several languages after the advice for future archeologists he gave in them.

I'm honored. Seriously.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

i think yall should stop bashing these theories and open your minds. It is possible that some of these things are true. how can you explain the correlation between the pyramids of Tikal and formations exactly corresponding on Mars.

im not saying its true. .. but it just seems you people get off on bashing theories because they are a little "out there"

'exactly corresponding'? Evidence please.

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It is because of who is presenting the evidence and how.

A few years back a legend was tested. Ceaser crossing the Rhine. The producers got some archeologists and British army engineers together, and tested if it could be done only using what was available to the Romans

After a day of testing ideas, the soliders drover the first support in. Took eight hours, the second four hours. By the end of the day they were putting support beams in every half hour.

So with a little applied effort and sharp learning curves, a feat considered impossible became a reality

Just cause we are not clever enough to know how something was done, does not mean our ancestors were not

it's not like the pyramids were the only things the Egyptians built out of big stone blocks. they built pretty much EVERY public building out of big blocks for about a millennia before the first pyramids were built.
they had a lot of hands on experience with these things, so just becasue the people of today can't build a pyramid using stone age technology- people who haven't built things out of 2 ton rocks for a couple of millenia and have become reliant on machines for the vast majority of the heavy work we've done for the last thousand years or so- doesn't mean that the Egyptians couldn't do it. they had a LOT of people that had pretty much nothing to do for about half of the year, and they had to be kept busy and fed. working on the pyramids is now thought to have been a good job back then- good pay, good benefits, and you were serving your Gods and country.

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Unfortunately; I caught some of that show last night.

They did a lot of "there are x explainations"
1: aliens did it
2: aliens helped
3: supernatural
4: some skeptics say...but

But; the one statement that they made that really frosted me was when they showed how the great pyramid is being at the longest line of latitude (wrong) and the longest line of longitude (what?).

And Pumapunku? I've never heard of that before. There doesn't seem to be a lot of objective information on the net about it.
If this is 17000 years old, then how come the edges of the stones aren't weathered?

Another one of those, "take an assumption, and build a house of cards out of the omitted information" shows.

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First, welcome to BAUT Sippin'40z.

Second, I often am reminded of a quote from one of our members: "An open mind is like an open window, without a good screen, a lot of bugs get in".

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And they got the first ones wrong, to the point of realizing it in the middle of building one too steep and finishing it less steep.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

A, these do not have anything approaching enough evidence to be called "theories."

B, what makes you think we haven't looked at their evidence before and found it wanting? These shows aren't exactly new. We've heard all the ideas before. The level of evidence presented is insufficient to suggest anything. There's a lot of evidence that they're wrong. So you do the math. Open minds or just hyping what they think people will buy?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Hush now you are destroying the illusion We all known the Egyptians woke up one day and decided to build the complex at Giza without any previous experiments or 800 years of figuring stuff out

On a more serious note, I recall an archeologist being asked why did the Eygptians use 20 ton cut stones to build stuff

His answer "They never figured out how to move 30 ton blocks"

how much did some of the bigger obelisks weigh? they not only cut them out of the ground in one huge piece- they also loaded them onto barges, floated them down the river, unloaded them from the barges, dragged them across the land to where they wanted them, and stood them upright..
i suppose maybe the aliens might have done all the work with their fancy anti gravity machines..

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

If a large fraction of the work was cutting the blocks out then using the largest blocks that could be moved would be sensible.

And it is all about knowledge. I was watching a repeat of deadliest catch last night. One of the boats blew some pipe or other and was filling up with water. Cool as a cucumber the engineer cuts some rubber strips out, wraps them around the busted peice of pipe, a couple of twists of wire and good as gold

Me - I would have been running around in circles screaming, we are all gonna die.

Sometimes we are so guilty of thinking our ancestors were stupid, and could not work out or do anything. The reality is, we are here today cause they were as smart as smart can be.

Quite right. The Egyptian commoners were farmers for half the year and construction workers for the other half. Everyone able-bodied man was in civil service.

but that's only because the internet was terribly slow in those days, so it was extremely difficult to go online and talk smack about the accomplishments of everyone from other parts of the world that weren't as sophisticated as they were.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...