What do we do with all these turtles, then?
My understanding is that the Turtles are now aliens instead of mutants. So we’re good.
I disagree with the first paragraph. The more advanced a technological society is, the easier it is to indulge in whimsical, nonsensical stuff.
Maybe the aliens interact with primative races because they like the way the others smell, or their Pope told them to, or something even more seemingly odd social reason.
I’ll give the HC a little more credit, but not much. I’ve assumed that they’ve covered the interesting parts of history already. They can either re-run previous shows, start covering the less interesting subjects, or come up with banality.
Yea. Saying “aliens wouldn’t do that” is kind of a silly argument. They’re aliens, who knows what they might get their jollies from doing. Certainly modern humans happily spend large amount of resources on stuff that doesn’t make a ton of objective sense.
Not that I think aliens built the pyramids or whatever. But there are better arguments against it then trying to talk authoritatively on what hypothetical intersteallar spacemen would do with their spare time.
I’ve asked this before, but I’ll ask it again. Just what sort of credentials do the “experts” on these shows have? Are these people who work in academia and publish in serious scholarly journals? Or are they just folks who’ve self-published a few books and gone too far down the rabbit hole?
Soooo…“Ancient Aliens” isn’t a reality series?
Nearly as bad as the Ancient Aliens show(s…there are multiple spinnoffs and even an Ancient Aliens WEEK) is the Unearthing America show. At first I thought it was kind of interesting, but as with all of these shows (the Curse of Oak Island show for instance) it rapidly descends into ridiculous woo and nut cases spouting their whack-a-do pet theories and unsubstantiated claims. It’s sad, as there are so many real and interesting things they COULD do shows on concerning history or archeology, but they always seem to go for the lowest common denominator in these things (probably because this sort of woo horseshit is what actually sells to the public…which really says something).
I’ll go farther and say it’s even worse than Brad Melzer’s Decoded, which far surpassed Ancient Aliens in terms of flights of fancy and pulling things out of one’s ass.
There’s an actual program on THC where the host traces anything and everything back to the Knights Templar. On one episode, he shows the Exxon logo. The red X’s on a white field represent the Cross of Lorraine, and the blue bar represents the Atlantic ocean the Knights Templar crossed to reach the New World.
:rolleyes:
The only one of those I’ve ever seen was a bizarre show about how there is no gold in Fort Knox…but I’d be surprised if it could possibly be more out of the ass than Ancient Aliens, which is woo start to finish. I DO rather like the guy with the wild hair and the googly eyes though. I mean, talk about a perfect fit of a crazy whack job into a prominent position in a show like that…it’s freaking brilliant. 
And I’ve noticed that they have actually brought him in as an ‘expert’ on some other of their woo oriented shows too.
Somewhere around here in Cafe Society, I’ve got a rant about the stupidity of America Unearthed and the racism of Ancient Aliens. Yeah, I said “racism”. Ever notice how the Egyptians and the Incas were just too dumb to build big things without outside help but the Romans and Greeks figured out concrete and stadiums all by themselves.
I like Oddities. The New York one. I cannot stand any of the staff in the California one. Poseurs, the whole lot of them.
As long as its not Triganic Pu’s, those don’t even count as money…
Actually, I believe the general assertion of the Ancient Aliens show isn’t that they are or were here for jollies, but that they had specific purpose. It seems to me that what that purpose is sort of changes depending on what best works with whatever they’re talking about, but it seems to generally be some combination of genetic experimentation and resources like previous metals. In fact, it seems like they’re often connected in that they were performing genetic experiments to create a race of workers to harvest the resources for them. If there were ancient aliens, this is about as plausible of a motivation as any. After all, this isn’t all that different from how the early European explorers treated that native populations in conquered lands.
That said, the part I find bothersome is how it’s all pretty much rampant speculation, and the underlying idea that somehow our ancestors just a few thousand years ago weren’t every bit as clever as we are. Hell, if anything, a lot of our modern technology hurts our ability to be innovative because we can brute-force a lot of things with superior technology. After all, necessity is the mother of invention. So, the idea that because we can’t figure out how they might have done something with the technology they had, it doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have done it. So, really, that’s the part that bothers me the most, just sort of a basic lack of faith in humanity.
Actually make that Triganic Ningis, they don’t count as money…
Stupid universal translator, that’s the last time I order from Vogon Refurbished Babel Fish Inc…
[QUOTE=Biggirl]
I like Oddities. The New York one. I cannot stand any of the staff in the California one. Poseurs, the whole lot of them.
[/QUOTE]
I knew a guy who was one of the “customers” on the SF show. He was supposed to be a guy interested in buying “animal freaks” - two head snakes, things like that. Every item they showed him as part of the store’s inventory were items that he, personally, had brought in for the taping so they’d have something to “sell” him, and every fact the staff repeated to him about the history of exhibiting (and making) such animals were things that he’d told them in the first place.
Apparently, Morticia Addams and Forehead Tattoo Guy are both dumber than posts, too. You may have thought you already knew this from watching the show, but apparently, the show is going out of its way to make the look as smart as possible.
Same here, and it’s not just engineering feats. I had to stop watching/reading anything about crop circles a couple of decades ago. It’s almost always about how aliens chose some farmer’s field in some out-of-the-way county in (usually) England and decided to make a pretty pattern. They Mean Something but no one can figure out what. Humans of course aren’t capable of making such patterns. Even when someone spills the beans and tells how they in fact did make a pattern using boards and ropes, wooey idiots say, sure, they made that one but they didn’t make them all, and the really complex ones? Only aliens could have made those. So shut up.
Argh! Wooers will woo, and those whose brains are filled with jello and scouring powder will believe any kind of bullshit, but it makes me mad. And sad. Crop circles are beautiful things and top my list of Temporary Art I love that fascinate me (sand sculptures, butter art, ice sculptures, Good graffiti, sidewalk art, and dozens of other things). Saying aliens were responsible is not only stupid, it takes the credit away from the innovative, interesting humans who made them. Why do the aliens never make crop circle patterns on the surface of a lake?
Another reason I really do not miss cable. That kind of stuff interested me when I was 13.
Cable had so many good channels, but unfortunately every one I like ended up getting so watered down that the original concept was lost or abandoned.
Excellent point about the Incas/Egyptians versus Romans/Greeks.
And I’m with you all the way on “Oddities”.