I have had a fascination with UFOs and aliens for a long time. This fascination tends to surface when I am a little inebriated at which time I lay around and watch extraterrestrial documentaries. Don’t judge. It’s kinda fun.
Do you see any similarities between aliens and god? Hear me out. I think aliens are used to explain the unexplained almost as much as god. God works in mysterious ways, but apparently, so do aliens.
I’ve often heard aliens are responsible for our ancestors’ impressive ancient monuments like Stonehenge and the pyramids in Egypt. Sure, these monuments were created with precision – incredible feats that we don’t always understand and would have required an incredible amount of manpower. We don’t know just how they were made, but if ancient people were alive today, don’t you think they’d be a little insulted that we didn’t think they were capable on their own? I would be.
Have you heard about technology being created by reverse engineering of alien space crafts? (Maybe I’ve watched too many of these documentaries.) Again, are we not capable as humans to develop our own technology?
Things are sometimes fuzzy. There’s a lot we don’t understand, but that doesn’t mean we explain the unexplained with god or aliens. Let’s give credit where credit’s due. It’s okay if our ancestors had some secrets. As humans, we are capable of amazing things.
Are aliens real? I don’t know. Is god real? Nope. But sometimes we just have to sit with the uncertainty.
Do you watch UFO documentaries? Are you sober when you do it? What do you think about aliens? Do you think they’ve visited or influenced humans?
“Aliens vs. God?” Neither, thankyouverymuch. I’m totally willing to believe there’s other sentient species out there, some possibly starfaring, but once I got past middle school I realized that all the claims I’d heard about alien visitations to Earth were utterly ridiculous bullshit, and too often outright lies and gross misrepresentation of places and historical events.
Erich von Daniken, THE premier hawker of alien-visitation stories, has been thoroughly debunked and exposed as a liar. So has that “Ancient Aliens” clown. And yes, the ancient Egyptians were indeed capable of building the Pyramids without high-tech alien help. How they got the measurements so exactly right, and how they got all those massive blocks into place, has been painstakingly demonstrated based on actual knowledge of architectural features of the Pyramids.
And no, the presence of little glass fragments in some ancient site in Peru does NOT mean there was a nuclear blast there. Why the AF would aliens need to nuke a town that didn’t even have steam power?
Do you watch UFO documentaries? Are you sober when you do it?
If I watch ’em sober, I just get angry and contemptuous. If I watch ’em stoned, I just laugh and say I can write better fiction, and design better spaceships, than anything those clowns try to pass off as factual claims. And let’s face it, even the alien technology in fiction shows like “BSG” or “The Expanse” is more realistic than the UFO “nonfiction”. An upside-down helicarrier? Really? That’s the best they can do? I’ll stick with Marvel’s right-side-up helicarriers — they’re more realistic, AND they look much cooler.
@ raging bee
Yeah, good old Erich. I remember reading some of his books when I was 12 or so and was somewhat impressed, but then I realized that he is just an old-earth creationist. In one of the chapters (dunno which book) he claimed the Aliens visited earth in the Devonian. He claimed that a trilobite fossil was crushed by a “boot”. The fossil in question was a trilobite smushed by a rock and you could see the relief of the rock. Sheesh, a fossil trace of a “boot” would leave an imprint, not a relief. And of course the not so hidden colonialist approach that the Mayans, Egytians and all the other cultures he drags in the ring to prove his point were a bunch of knuckle dragging savages that could never ever be able to do things of such magnitude.
And what finally made me stop reading his books were the “technical drawings” he had made up from some weird-ass descriptions in the bible. I guess it was Hennochs tale of him ascending to heaven to meet the angles. EvD cooked up some “drawings” of bell-shaped helicopter with four rotors mounted to stilts on the bottom(?) of the vehicle. The other one was a machine that produced “manna” that looked like a giant dildo. KTNXBY.
IIRC most of his “technical drawings” were from descriptions in Ezekiel. And he got them dead wrong. Anyone who actually reads Ezekiel (which Erich’s middle-school readers mostly didn’t) can tell you that whatever Ezekiel was describing, real or not, it wasn’t the secret-love-child of an upside-down helicarrier and a stockpot.
“Do you see any similarities between aliens and god?”
Trivial and incidental ones, sure.
Big difference is that God — the monotheistic Abrahamic one — is supposedly the Creator of our reality and omni-stuff. Aliens are, well, not Earthly, but otherwise not supernaturally powerful.
So. Different explanatory power, right away.
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Anyway. To go with previous comments, I suggest that if you want amusement, you may care to check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramidology. 🙂
the key difference i see between extraterrestrial life and God is that the former probably exists. i don’t believe that any has visited us, though. i certainly don’t believe any tales about extraterrestrial spacecraft. the fact that it’s being spoken of with any seriousness in the halls of government is laughable and probably a psyop or disinformation campaign of some kind or another.
One of the more entertaining classes I had in college, decades ago, was an intro class for logic. We spent the semester learning about fallacies and how to spot them, then we watched Chariots of the Gods and had to write a paper on the fallacies we spotted. Spoiler: there were so very many fallacies.
We’re going through an especially stupid period in time, and one of my in-laws has taken up von Daniken as a personal hero and guru. I was never so proud as when one of my kids piped up, “Pyramids are just things stacked on other things. Chimpanzees can do that, CROWS can do that, why do you think humans are too stupid to do that?”
I’m pretty agnostic about aliens from outer space. Theoretically I suppose there’s no reason life can’t exist anywhere else in the galaxy, but I highly doubt any have developed sentience and technology advanced enough to come visit us…and…tip over our cows?
Back in the 1970s, a comedian named Robert Klein had something to say about it: how come advanced intelligence never presents itself to world leaders or even journalists? No, UFO encounters are always being reported by people who have been drinking moonshine all day.” (Yes, before they were blaming opioids for being addicts, people were pickling themselves in homemade moonshine for generations).
Fun thing about the aliens is their sense of humor. Not only did they build the pyramids, they forced the Egyptians to create elaborate fake budgets for pyramid building, worker camps, quarries, the whole bit. It’s a good thing they didn’t decide to fake up christianity, too… Oh, wait, there’s less evidence for that than there is for the pyramids…
The aliens didn’t do that, the Egyptian bureaucrats and contractors did, to pad the bills and make sure at least some humans got paid for the project.
@MJR #7
Well, the fact that the aliens helped the pharaos to build the pyramids doesn’t mean they did it fro FREE. Those spaceships don’t pay for themselves, dontcha know. Fuel and maintenance and crew, that adds up quickly.
So Sneferu, you wanna have a pyramid? You better cough up the moola. Damn moochin’ pharao!
Whadda mean, WE screwed up your pyramid? What?! …………Collapsed, whaddya mean,collapsed,……what?….Hey, if you give us shoddy material that’s not on us. And might I add, the plans came from you…………hmmmmm…………..yeah, I know……..it’s hard to find good personell, but you know that…….hmmmm…..OK, you know what, I’ll throw in another pyramid……..you know, two for the price of one……….that OK with you?……..Good………… Where now?…..Da-what now? …….can you spell that for me? Delta Alfa Hotel Sierra Hotel Unoiform Romeo…….we’ll get to it. Bye!