Ancient Aliens

[Texas Star]

Originally posted by mohavesam:
I read where physics professors proved beyond doubt that humankind could not survive velocities greater than the speed of sound. Just cannot happen. I also read that the entire planet and all of it's elements were made from dust in six days.

Twenty years ago I saw a closet light come on then turn off by itself (several times), in a closet where there was no light fixture.

I believe in English Setters sniffing a bird forty yards away in a howling November crosswind.

Did the power company bill for the use of the light?

Seriously, did you really see this? Can you tell the entire story?

I am a great fan of the late Jim Corbett, a naturalist in British India who was famed for his successful hunting of man-eating cats.

His books involved some strange tales, also. In one case, he saw lights that were being carried along a trail, up a mountainside...he thought. The next day, he was astounded to see that the mountain had no viable trail. When he mentioned this, local natives told him that the lights were well known, and were from the spirit world.

Possibly similar lights have been observed near Marfa, in west Texas.

There are many things not yet understood.

T-Star

 

[votan]

that's the thing. modern scientists haven't figured it out. the egyptians had the 'streaching of the cord' ceremony and they were astute observers and astronomers. but how do you move 80 ton blocks and lift them 100-200 feet in the air, position them and lower them in 2500 BC? how do you cut, move, lift, position 1500-2000(the weight of a WW2 destroyer) ton blocks? i think the ancient egyptians could accomplish anything they set their minds to doing. ancient people were far more interesting than most of us "modern" folk give them credit for being.

 

[lcdrdanr]

Many years ago I remember watching in a circus a bunch of clowns pulling a trick on another clown. Clown 1 was asleep in a rocking chair. As he rocked in the chair, others placed thin boards underneath the rockers, first in the back, then in the front. Pretty quickly, the rocking chair was about 6 feet up in the air.
Apply the same system to a 2 ton stone. Build a cradle or shape rockers on the stone and start rocking. Mix nile mud (which has a coefficient of friction amazinly less than many other substances) with high fat content milk and scoot the stone into place. You have unlimited manpower 'cause this is directed by the Gods, you have no OSHA, no workman's comp, no accident/safety investigations.......
Pretty simple
Dan R

 

[rundownfid]

I think it is a sad thing that the "History Channel" is covering aliens interaction with people (unless they are abducting and having sex with beautiful women which I might actually watch). Isn't there enough Hitler footage to fill their 24 hours?

 

[TNDixieGirl]

Originally posted by borrowed time:
Interesting show, if you really want to dig into something strange, check out thr Rh-negative blood factor. Seems there is nothing to account for the fact that interbreeding between the two blood groups (Rh-neg. and Rh-pos.) does not work out very well.

Huh?

 

[Careby]

Originally posted by borrowed time:
Interesting show, if you really want to dig into something strange, check out thr Rh-negative blood factor. Seems there is nothing to account for the fact that interbreeding between the two blood groups (Rh-neg. and Rh-pos.) does not work out very well.

I am a red-haired, B-negative blood type and I was unaware of my alien connection. It does explain a few things...

 

[votan]

scoot a 2 ton stone? how do you get it 300 feet in the air? how bout making a mud "scoot" and going over it 2.5 million times? i think it would be a bog in about 3 tries. how do we scoot an 80 ton block? 2000 tons? unlimted man power? where does everyone stand? the fact is we have NO idea how the pyramids were built. all is speculation.

 

[Careby]

Originally posted by votan:
scoot a 2 ton stone? how do you get it 300 feet in the air? how bout making a mud "scoot" and going over it 2.5 million times? i think it would be a bog in about 3 tries. how do we scoot an 80 ton block? 2000 tons? unlimted man power? where does everyone stand? the fact is we have NO idea how the pyramids were built. all is speculation.

It IS all speculation, but when there are several possible explanations for how the job could have been done, the one that doesn't involve extra-terrestrial assistance seems more reasonable to me. Just because the task looks impossibly difficult to you does not mean it was really impossible to accomplish with the resources available at the time.

 

[BarbC]

They had the same brains we do.

Right, except instead of trying to land on the moon or build a space station, they were working on different projects.

 

[glypnir]

Originally posted by Blackcloud2:
Geoff, interesting take. I did not see the show, but will look for it in re-runs. I believe that Mr. Wallington is truly able to pull this off, but what are the chances of having an engineering mind like his, without the aide of previous modern marvels to observe showing up in ancient Eygpt? I don't know who or what built them, but it seems odd to me that they wouldn't have also built dams, sustainable cities and large scale food-producing systems to go along with it. Plus, this fabulous technology only shows up in another continent with the south and central American indians? Again, they were simple savages except for their un-real calendar and the clear understanding of the stars...they must have all been from Detroit, the place keen minds congregate!

Actually, they were smarter than we are. They knew that food production is best done on a small scale. They knew that if they didn't built a dam, they would get the Nile to flood every year, clean out the old mess, and dump lots of nice free fertilizer on the farm land for them. And it would have all those nice trace minerals in it.

And their cities were more sustainable than ours were - built with natural materials, and small enough that they didn't need petrochemical powered transportation. And that the flood didn't really damage things much.

I remember a few years ago talking to an older Egyptian guy who remembered how the vegetables tasted before the Aswan dam was put up. He said that the ones that were fertilized with Nile river silt from the flood tasted much better than the ones grown with artificial fertilizers after the Aswan Dam stopped the flooding.

As an engineer, mechanical machines like levers and such that we are talking about are relatively easy to built. What has taken the slow accretion of knowledge is the extractive, refining, and machining industries. If you look at engines, for example, you really need modern machine tools, modern metallurgy, and modern petroleum refineries.

Bessemer's process - the oxygen furnace, and the electric furnace, the electrical processing of aluminum, all that refining of high octane fuel that helped us win WWII, thin wall castings, improved lubricating oil, improved bearing metal, modern heat treating, and on and on, a whole bunch of knowledge needed to get the knd of propulsion units we have now.

Let's not even talk about turbine engines.

The reason they used to build straight-8s, for example, is because they couldn't built a crank that would stand the concentrated stress of a high output V8. And they needed lots of bearing area, because the bearing material and the oil couldn't handle much PSI either.

Leonardo Da Vinci probably could have built a helicopter if he had had a modern internal combustion engine. He understood the machine, he just didn't have the technology.

 

[mohavesam]

Right. The "Egyptians" has PhD-level advanced mathematical skills, astronomical understanding rivaling that of late-20th century man, organizational skills to keep tens of thousands of workers and logistical support on-task for dozens if not hundreds of years, and engineering & manufacturing skills we don't even understand today.

And they did it all with a picture-based language.

Yet all their technology and record of how they accomplished their greatest feats ceased to exist without record.

 

[votan]

i never said i thought ETs built anything nor did i say it was impossible to accomplish with the rescources at the time. in fact, i said i believe the ancient egyptians were capable of accomplishing anything they se their minds to. i said that we can't replicate these structures today and given the 'primitive' tech available 4500 years ago these structures are all the more impressive.

 

[50Meter]

A lot of these programs are spawned from the “argument from ignorance”. Since the writers & participants fail to understand something, they wish to ascribe fanciful, mystical, or supernatural explanations. Sensational claims require sensational proof.

Bob Park, Professor & American Physical Society spokesman provides a list of possible “red flags” that may signal hoax, or pseudoscience:

I have identified seven indicators that a scientific
claim lies well outside the bounds of rational
scientific discourse. Of course, they are only warning
signs -- even a claim with several of the signs could
be legitimate.

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the
media. The integrity of science rests on the
willingness of scientists to expose new ideas and
findings to the scrutiny of other scientists. Thus,
scientists expect their colleagues to reveal new
findings to them initially. An attempt to bypass peer
review by taking a new result directly to the media,
and thence to the public, suggests that the work is
unlikely to stand up to close examination by other
scientists.

One notorious example is the claim made in 1989 by two
chemists from the University of Utah, B. Stanley Pons
and Martin Fleischmann, that they had discovered cold
fusion -- a way to produce nuclear fusion without
expensive equipment. Scientists did not learn of the
claim until they read reports of a news conference.
Moreover, the announcement dealt largely with the
economic potential of the discovery and was devoid of
the sort of details that might have enabled other
scientists to judge the strength of the claim or to
repeat the experiment. (Ian Wilmut's announcement that
he had successfully cloned a sheep was just as public
as Pons and Fleischmann's claim, but in the case of
cloning, abundant scientific details allowed
scientists to judge the work's validity.)

Some scientific claims avoid even the scrutiny of
reporters by appearing in paid commercial
advertisements. A health-food company marketed a
dietary supplement called Vitamin O in full-page
newspaper ads. Vitamin O turned out to be ordinary
saltwater.

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment
is trying to suppress his or her work. The idea is
that the establishment will presumably stop at nothing
to suppress discoveries that might shift the balance
of wealth and power in society. Often, the discoverer
describes mainstream science as part of a larger
conspiracy that includes industry and government.
Claims that the oil companies are frustrating the
invention of an automobile that runs on water, for
instance, are a sure sign that the idea of such a car
is baloney. In the case of cold fusion, Pons and
Fleischmann blamed their cold reception on physicists
who were protecting their own research in hot fusion.

3. The scientific effect involved is always at the
very limit of detection. Alas, there is never a clear
photograph of a flying saucer, or the Loch Ness
monster. All scientific measurements must contend with
some level of background noise or statistical
fluctuation. But if the signal-to-noise ratio cannot
be improved, even in principle, the effect is probably
not real and the work is not science.

Thousands of published papers in para-psychology, for
example, claim to report verified instances of
telepathy, psychokinesis, or precognition. But those
effects show up only in tortured analyses of
statistics. The researchers can find no way to boost
the signal, which suggests that it isn't really there.

4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal. If modern
science has learned anything in the past century, it
is to distrust anecdotal evidence. Because anecdotes
have a very strong emotional impact, they serve to
keep superstitious beliefs alive in an age of science.
The most important discovery of modern medicine is not
vaccines or antibiotics, it is the randomized
double-blind test, by means of which we know what
works and what doesn't. Contrary to the saying, "data"
is not the plural of "anecdote."

5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it
has endured for centuries. There is a persistent myth
that hundreds or even thousands of years ago, long
before anyone knew that blood circulates throughout
the body, or that germs cause disease, our ancestors
possessed miraculous remedies that modern science
cannot understand. Much of what is termed "alternative
medicine" is part of that myth.

Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is
unlikely to match the output of modern scientific
laboratories.

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation. The image
of a lone genius who struggles in secrecy in an attic
laboratory and ends up making a revolutionary
breakthrough is a staple of Hollywood's
science-fiction films, but it is hard to find examples
in real life. Scientific breakthroughs nowadays are
almost always syntheses of the work of many
scientists.

7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to
explain an observation. A new law of nature, invoked
to explain some extraordinary result, must not
conflict with what is already known. If we must change
existing laws of nature or propose new laws to account
for an observation, it is almost certainly wrong.

I began this list of warning signs to help federal
judges detect scientific nonsense. But as I finished
the list, I realized that in our increasingly
technological society, spotting voodoo science is a
skill that every citizen should develop.

Robert L. Park is a professor of physics at the
University of Maryland at College Park and the
director of public information for the American
Physical Society. He is the author of Voodoo Science:
The Road From Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University
Press, 2002).

 

[VAdoublegunner]

Robert L. Park is a professor of physics at the
University of Maryland at College Park and the
director of public information for the American
Physical Society. He is the author of Voodoo Science:
The Road From Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University
Press, 2002).

What does Snopes say about him...

(yeah, he's real, just kidding)

 

[therevjay]

I like those type shows,but I wish they were more balanced. As it is everyone involved is either a 'true beliver' or 'total(& sarcastic) skeptic.'

Why IS 'the history channel' so obsessed with Hitler anyway?

 

[kmyers]

Many people who know me think they are coming to take me back to my home planet.

 

[Careby]

Originally posted by kmyers:
Many people who know me think they are coming to take me back to my home planet.

My home planet is positively crawling with aliens these days.

 

[kmyers]

Originally posted by Careby:

Originally posted by kmyers:
Many people who know me think they are coming to take me back to my home planet.

My home planet is positively crawling with aliens these days.

People who know me in person claim I am a combination of River Tam and Ernest T. Bass.

 

[jkc]

A lot of these programs are spawned from the “argument from ignorance”. Since the writers & participants fail to understand something, they wish to ascribe fanciful, mystical, or supernatural explanations. Sensational claims require sensational proof.

This post, briefly quoted above, provides a substantive basis for an argument in favor of atheism. Check your religion's claims against the "checkpoints" cited, and see how it stacks up... Before you get defensive, substitute your personal religion for some other, and see how it stacks up. (And I don't mean you should compare Anglican to Espicopalian, one synod to another, reformed to unreformed, etc. ---- try testing the whole fundamental concept...)

 

[animalmother]

I saw it. It was thought provoking for me.