I dont know how I get into these debates with some people…really I dont. however, my freshman college brother insists that UFO’s are real, and that they have been depicted throughout history, and largely ignored.
He sent me this website link. I just dont know enough about this subject. I did some searches, but couldnt find anything to refute this stuff. Am I being wooshed here? Or is this “evidence” of UFO’s being seen throughout history?
The thing is that the images that this site identifies as aliens and spaceships are not the subject of the artworks. They’re usually just part of the scene. If we accept the site’s interpretations of these images, we’d have to believe that spaceships and aliens were normal sights back in those eras and were considered part of the routine landscape.
Now imagine what would happen if an actual “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” spaceship landed in some medieval city and a bunch of Grays stepped out. The local population would hardly think this was something routine. There would be a huge commotion and all kinds of records would exist talking about the encounter and describing what happened. Look at the historical records of native people in Africa, Australia, and the Americas when they first encountered Europeans.
The logical explanation is that the images in these artworks are supposed to represent routine things. The objects in the sky are supposed to be the sun, the moon, and the stars. The manlike images are human beings. Any artistic license can be explained as … well … artistic license.
Hah! The one with the Two Dutch Ships looks like a depiction of haloes and arcs – it even has the prismatic color separation characteristic of many suich arcs. Trying to pass that off as a pair of UFOs is pretty lame.
Art and UFOs? has pictures of ancient “flying saucers” in art and more prosaic explanations. Thank to Night G, who provided it in a recent thread at the (combined) Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forums. For example, the “flying saucer” in La Tebaide on the “UFOs in Earth’s History” page? “Art and UFOs” has a less tightly framed version, which shows the saucer is a cardinal’s hat.
Its all pretty much BS…Chariots of the Gods type stuff. I did want to ask a related question. On the web site they show a picture of a plate with this heading:
Is this true or more BS? Looks pretty sophisticated for 12,000 years old. How did they date that and what other items were found in the same area from the same period? Assuming its true are there a lot of examples of such sophisticated art from that far back?
-XT
It’s all bullshit. Well, at least most of it looks like bullshit to me. I’d really like to know what cuneiform tablets where either the Summerians, Akkadians, or the Babylonians laid out the history of their kings over a 400,000 year period. I’m currently working on a research paper comparing the Mesopotamiam Civilizations to Egypt, what I found was that 1% of the several thousand Sumerian tablets found in Lagash were literary in nature, the rest were about commerce.1 I don’t think they could fit 400,000 years of history into just 1% of their cuneiform tablets.
What’s interesting is that the Sumerians didn’t even arrive in Mesopotamia until c. 3500 B.C.E. and their exact origins are unknown. though many suspect the Persian Highlands or the Indus Valley. I am willing to entertain the notion that high quality works of art could have been produced c. 12,000 B.C.E. but since the website offers no cites of it’s own I can’t confirm the veracity of their claims.
Marc