Ancient Aliens: USA! USA!

Now that my DVR is cooperating - for a while it refused to record any more episodes, then it started eating them - and my life is a little bit back in order, it's time for more Ancient Aliens! We're on season four now, I believe. And this post's episode is titled "Aliens in America" - nothing to do with the short-lived sitcom from the year that the TV writers struck - and it's labelled as "Signs of alien contact throughout America's history are examined" so here goes nothing:

So they start off with asking something about "evidence that the American continent has extraterrestrial origins?"

First of all, no, narrator, just no. There is not "The American continent." There are two American continents, North America and South America, and that's basic geography. Second, you seem to be using "American" to refer to the USA at one moment, and then the entire continent of North America at another point. It's making my head spin. We get a jiggly cell-phone video featuring a white dot, and some completely generic backstory, and then someone mentions that the US leads the world in UFO sightings. "But why? ....could aliens have a special interest in America?"

And that, my foreign readers, says pretty much everything you need to know about how the USA collectively views itself. In fact, I'm not even sure that wasn't a rhetorical question...

Then they go back to more ancient history where they refer to "America" to mean the continents, and the typical lines about Native American tribes and "star beings" and the obligatory shot of our very favorite piece of TARDIS rock art! (I don't know if the TARDIS rock art is on my bingo list, or my drinking game list, but it needs to be) They go on to talk about petroglyphs by ancient Native Americans that supposedly depict these "star beings" and they've taken to helpfully suggestively animating glowing highlights over portions of the rock art. They talk about these distorted proportions as evidence that the depictions are of aliens - I wonder what would happen if you carved a Picasso into a chunk of sandstone and showed it to them?


But they started talking about European colonists, and I kind of zoned out... I grew up in New England, so absolutely nothing in the world has the capability to bore me to death quite like people talking about European colonists. So help me, if I ever get dragged into another interactive "living history" village thing, I will start going on about witchcraft to all of the re-enactors.


Then they're back to some guy who discovered a "secret city" inside the Grand Canyon, full of mummies, and statues, and so on from all around the world...  supposedly evidence that the alien deities had given the inhabitants of this city things from all over the world! Because, how else would it get there? Gosh, how else would a bunch of mummies and treasure end up in a secret location in the 1920's? Remember, the era where it was totally cool to march into someone else's country and just take whatever cultural artifacts and shit that you wanted as long as they didn't put up any resistance (or, better yet, if your country had colonized them already). And don't you know, mummies were especially popular? So I'm going to leave it to you to decide whether this was a prehistoric cultural museum set up by alien beings, or a case of antiquities theft.


And there's a bit about animal mutilations, which is only remarkable because they got a real veterinarian to talk in front of a camera! Finally, someone who's not another author of another book about alien deities, but actually is an expert in the field being discussed!

*drops dead from shock*

So, now that we've got this out of the way, why? The leading theory here is that aliens are monitoring the cattle for viruses. Yep. I'll admit, us humans don't do a perfect job of it, but we can usually figure out where we picked up viruses (except for f*cking ebola, but I'll get into that during the inevitable episode that will blame hemorrhagic fevers on aliens) and once we find it, we will spread this fact all over every last fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can use to transmit information. Maybe we can't make cures on our own, but we sure as hell can figure out whether or not cows are sick on our own. Hell, we even managed to figure out "mad cow disease" and that's not even a virus - instead, it's a weird little thing called a "prion."


But now we get to the best part: the narrators go on to talk about how - unsurprisingly - there's lots and lots of flying objects around Air Force bases that are impossible for civilians to identify. But why? Apparently, this one time, the circuits on some nuclear missiles kind of died or something. The narrator says a lot of cryptic things about "electronic signals" and "electronic components" which, to be fair, is probably all that they could deduce about the operation of ICBM's.

So they suggest that the aliens are concerned about our nuclear weapons, as the sightings increased after the first atomic bomb was detonated. However, because apparently correlation between mysterious lights above military installations and the start of the Cold War doesn't make enough sense, they propose an even better theory: The aliens are worrying about whether or not we might pose a threat to other peaceful species in space.

Yep, that's right. Independence Day, or the movie version of Stargate, might make you think that aliens are vulnerable to the awesome explosive power of nuclear bombs! But... what about their technology?

No, really. What about alien technology? Or, for that matter, technology that has allowed us to reach alien races?
To quote Douglas Adams, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is." The nearest star to us is Alpha Centauri, which is 4.3 light-years away from us - or, four years and about four months traveling at the fastest possible speed in the universe, which is the speed of light. That's 41,153,298,600,000 kilometers away from us. Travelling in the fastest aircraft in the world, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird* with a top speed of over mach 3 it would take, according to my sloppy math, about 120,000 years for us to reach them - and yes, there's a tiny planet around there adorably named "Alpha Centauri Bb" but even then it's only been about 70 years since we developed atomic weapons.

In other words, whoever's gotten here has seriously pushed the laws of physics. Yes, you can get here from Alpha Centauri in 70 years without having to go faster than light, but you're still approaching speeds where your spaceship's mass will increase just because of how fast you're going (Hey, relativity is weird) not to mention the problems with trying to subject living organisms to the kind of inertia that happens when you'd accelerate to those speeds, and on top of that the narrators did suggest that these people came not just last year but very shortly after WWII... so I'd say it's safe to guess that even if these guys can't break the laws of physics, they can go a hell of a lot further than we can.

And other peaceful species in the galaxy? Hell, by the time we reach them or they reach us, whoever's left their home planet will be able to play with the laws of physics so much that our nuclear bombs will seem like no more than some pretty firecrackers.

*Hey, you want to see something really cool and actually relevant to this post? Click on that link, and look at the location where the video of the A-12 flight was filmed. "Groom Lake" is better known as "Area 51"


Then, they turn around and get even more US-centric. (Oh yes, they could) You see, they argue that aliens helped the US win the War of 1812, better known as "that one time that Canadians stopped being polite and invaded the US and burned down the White House." OK, technically they were English at the time, but they were English people from what's now Canada.

So anyways, in the summer of 1814, the British Army had gotten all the way into Washington DC. All of the politicians living in DC had seen this coming, and were like "nope!" and just packed up and got their butts out of there. That meant that the British Army could walk right in, unopposed, and do whatever they wanted which was setting fire to everything in this case. And, unlike today, the White House was just a house, built of boards and stuff, so it caught on fire pretty nicely.

And it's a hot summer day, so stuff burns really easily, right? OK, I guess. And then there's a thunderstorm! [if you don't live on the east coast, I will clarify: "hot" and "summer" are practically requirements for thunderstorms] which means that the fires started getting put out, conveniently. Then, in something that's actually not a daily occurrence in an east-coast summer, but sometimes comes with exceptionally large thunderstorms, there was a tornado.

So why do that?

Just because there wasn't enough US exceptionalism in here, they offer an explanation: The aliens wanted to help the US succeed because they valued the ideas of freedom of religion, and the concept of a democracy. But if that's the case, why not help out the guys whose country would eventually also have freedom of religion, a democracy, as well as free health care, with the nice little bonuses of Timmy's, and competent hockey commentary on broadcast TV?


So to close this all off, they say something about aliens, and show a completely ridiculous clip of a lens flare from Photoshop floating through the Grand Canyon.