Why don't people take UFOs and ancient astronauts seriously?

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I've always felt like AA theory was a good compromise between science and religion.

Well maybe they were 'demons' from the perspective of the people who did the cave paintings...

No hard evidence supports the theory.

The "theory" is at the level of von Danniken's crap.

ruveyn

The ones that I saw people making in a documentary were quite beautiful and intricate.

Humans make beautiful, intricate art all the time. It's what people do.


For those who didn't see the documentary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW3LsGmt55M

It has an interview with the original crop circle makers. They are old men now. They were young men then. They did it for the reason young men often do pranks- because it was mildly illegal and to mess with peoples' heads. Their first crop circles were indeed crude and not very intricate. They were literally circles and little else. They did it by putting a board with a rope on the ground and using it to stomp the wheat flat and using the rope affixed to a center spike to keep the circle even. They were delighted at the response and made more and kept it a secret for years.

The new generation of crop circle makers use computers to design the very intricate circles. They work only at night and must stay on the move to not only evade farmers who are furious at the continued crop destruction but also crop circle devotees. The crop circle devotees hate the crop circle makers (and are well aware they exist) and claim that they are trying to take cerdit for the superior design of the "real" crop circles. The crop circle makers say, "nope, we did those too". One group of crop circle makers say they were once caught by crop circle devotees in the middle of making a circle and had mud and rotten fruit thrown at them and had to abort the mission.

The most common criticism is that nobody could make a crop circle so intricate in one night. The documentary films in time lapse a very intricate crop circle being made (with a farmer's permission) in 5 hours. They made a 5 hour cap since that is the time you'd have roughly on a summer's night. They did it. Watch the documentary I linked.

One of the current crop circle artists is a curious blend of "the aliens did it" and "humans did it". He is well aware that he is making crop circles with a board and rope and centering spikes. But he also says that he meditates to get the designs and that "alien spirits" tell him what the design should look like. He wouldn't be the first artist to recieve artistic intructions from the voices in his head.

That just annoys the heck out of me. They act as though intelligence and creativity sprung into existence during the Renaissance (when of course amazing things were made) and ancient people could only make a mud hut unless an alien supervised their work. The human brain today is the same as it was then. We're just "standing on the backs of giants" and working with a database of knowledge painstakingly built up (and sometimes lost and re-learned) so that we can do what we do today.

I was a little kid in the 70's when there was a vogue for this "ancient astronaut" stuff. I saw pictures of the Nazca Lines (which humans "couldn't possibly" have done) and went into the backyard one snowy day to make them myself. I went upstairs and looked out a second floor window to plan my line project then went outside and stomped lines into the snow. Then I went upstairs and looked out the window. The lines I made were crude and wobbly and didn't much resemble what I had envisioned. But they sort of did. They did enough that I could see how multiple adults (instead of one little kid) with tools and time and practice,practice, practice and artistic talent could make the Nazca Lines. It's amazing what people can do when they put their minds to it. It does boggle me how people think the Sistine Chapel is an obvious creation of human talent, architecture, work and painting genius but they won't extend the same creative credit to anybody born >2,000 years ago.

They are always joking around

there were some amazing feats of ingenuity in the past,
just look at the antikythera mechanism


it is estimated to be from 100-150 BC

Mightabeen archaeologist alert - it is what got me into languages:

WHAT "cave paintings" are allegedly pictures of or by demons, and who said so? And which ones might be alien inspired? All the ones I have seen look pretty local.

As for archaeology being "wild guesswork" - it is the same "wild guesswork" that gives you all those lovely dinosaurs and theories of evolution. A little less wild, since in many cases we have contemporary records [sometimes documents from the place being checked out] and in many others we have close parallels in living human cultures. That there is "guesswork" - extrapolation, forming hypotheses - is true, but wrking scientists do not get that wild.

They do look pretty local. Mainly they look like pictures of animals and people hunting animals.

... all drawn by third-graders with no concept of proportion or perspective.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Right. We too easily assume that all ancients were stupid merely because we don't have written descriptions of their technology.

Actually, we do have written descriptions of the technologies used in many ancient cultures and not just in Henry Hodges' book Technology in the Ancient World but also in manuscripts from the eras such technologies were developed. At the very latest you have quite a few Greek historians, some historians of which didn't understand the methods of production explained to them but others who took the time to learn also. But as a demonstration of the intelligence of the ancients, would anyone be willing to attempt to make something which is considered quite simple: a stone knife from scratch with no previous instruction or knowledge?

Actually, it seems more like a religion of its own.

That is a reconstruction based to some degree on guess work derived from the actual device recovered from the sea. The actual device was corroded thoroughly. Fortunately X-ray analysis revealed enough of the original structure to formulate a pretty good guess on the original.

That device comes from the time of Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of antiquity up there along with Euclid and Eudoxus. We have to remind ourselves that the brilliant folks of ancient time were brilliant first and ancient second. Human beings of that recent a past were the same biologically as we are now. Their brains worked the same way and they had the same kind of urges, yens and curiosity we have now. In addition the had less going for them in the way of technology than we do now at present. So their accomplishments, are in a sense greater. The accumulation of knowledge and technique has given us moderns a free ride.

And think of the great stone works built even 5000 years ago. They didn't have our fancy power driven machinery and they didn't have computers. That means that managing the hundreds of thousands necessary to build the great stone works (Michu Pichu, the Great Pyramids, the Roman Highways etc.) were actually a greater management feat than we do nowadays. The hundreds of thousands had to be scheduled, fed, clothed and deployed with meany fewer means at hand to do so. So in addition to the stone itself, the management of the effort is as great a monument to their industry and intelligence as are the structures themselves.

ruveyn