Ancient Aliens, Outrageous Claims, and Scholarly Misconduct

I’d like a talk a little bit more about the ancient astronaut theory and what constitutes “evidence.” As is so often the case, “ancient astronaut theorists” (let’s call them AATs for short) complain that scientists are purposefully ignoring important evidence, or are too dogmatic to appreciate the stunning evidence that AATs have uncovered. But what, exactly, do they mean by evidence?

Last week, I explained that for Erich von Daniken, evidence apparently is something that one makes up as “poetic license” because popular audiences have less of a need for fact than scientific audiences. Von Daniken simply decided he would, by his own admission, make up stories about his visit to a cave in Ecuador filled with alien artifacts, a cave everyone involved admits he never visited, and which, later explorers found, has no alien artifacts.

Yesterday I explained that the AATs on Ancient Aliens think nothing of declaring mythological monsters to be alien hybrids without ever stopping to consider the history and the context of the myth and monster in question. More often than not, the history of the myth shows that the form they read about in popular mytholographies or other AAT books is a late, often very different form than the original. But for AATs, any text ever written is “evidence” even if it can be shown that it is completely different than earlier forms.

Today I’d like to look at what AATs consider textual “evidence.” Our example today will be the case of nuclear weapons in ancient India. Because there is so much to say about the subject, I've created a full online exlusive article explaining just how AATs fabricated a nuclear incident out of a froth of mistranslations, textual splicing, and misleading editing.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.