The pranksters that made most of the circles were consciously trying to get people to think they were made by aliens, so I’m not sure they have a lot of room to complain that some people are giving aliens all the credit.
Agree they’re pretty cool just taken as (terrestrial) art, though.
Looking at the episode guide for Ancient Aliens, it looks like they’ve attributed plenty of European monuments to aliens as well (Stonehenge, the Carnac stones, etc.) I suspect the Classical world gets a pass simply because the thoroughness of the written record regarding most of its more impressive structures.
(Though if they have to come up with material for another few seasons, I’d be pretty surprised if they didn’t go there anyways, Herodotus be damned!!)
Different channel (Science, not History), but… I used to live a couple blocks from the original New York Obscura shop (and then a few more blocks from their new location on Ave A). The shop is as you see it on the show, and so are Evan and Mike. Actually bought a deer skull from Evan–she’s quite nice and pleasant to chat with.
I once made the mistake of leaving one of those shows on in the background and I got so angry hearing it. The specific case was a UFO story including an alien corpse found in the 1800’s. The host said that this occured a few years before airships were invented so it was OBVIOUSLY an alien. Yes, that’s right. It’s *way more likely *that this was an extraterrestrial than just a guy ahead of the game on the dirigible front.
I was glad that I was bald because otherwise, I would have pulled my hair out.
And there’s the difference between the two shows. Evan and Mike are real people, relatively normal people who happen to have a keen interest in the outre and run a shop catering to its devotees. The outre people are the customers. The SF crew are playing outre characters as hard as they can.
It’s simpler than that: Television is a marketing medium that shows less overtly promotional content part of the time.
There may have been a time when the actual program content was the important aspect of television. Wherever you might choose to draw the line, that changed long ago. The content of television is entirely secondary to its role as the primary promoter for the cycle of consumption.
(Two notes: “Television” means all equivalent broadcast, widecast or narrowcast video portals. You also have to draw a distinction between *content *and commodity here. Content is what draws ads. Commodity is sold on its own merits - full length movies and premium programming shown without ads because they are paid for otherwise.)
Ya know, having read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death many years ago, I shouldn’t be so put out about all this nonsense; but sometimes the juxtaposition of what TV is and what it could be is just too much.
I think the early battles, like Minow’s comment about the vast wasteland and Murrow’s rants about the lack of serious focus, are lost. However, we have a thousand channels and I don’t know that it’s a crisis because not all of them concentrate on highbrow content 24/7/365.
That all but a fraction of television has been bent into a sales tool, and that marketing is allowed to bend and influence every aspect of it, is a far worse problem, and one that doesn’t seem to get addressed as much as the general whine that “TV is crap.”
Even if half of appeals to the dimmest tenth of the audience, TV doesn’t have to be crap. It’s crap because we let it be.
Well, sort of. While surfing the web and playing solitaire on my laptop, in between clicking around to see if anything else even remotely worth watching was on. Because I couldn’t believe it was really that bad. “Might be… it’s possible that… some say… could it be that…?” and POP! went yet another weasel. I think I wound up switching to some regional news channel’s weather report, then getting up to clean the cats’ litter boxes.
