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Jacques Vallee's Deceptive Evidence for Ancient UFOs (Part 3)

4/30/2013

This week I’m looking at the “best” evidence for ancient UFOs as collected by ufologists Jacques Vallee and Chirs Aubeck (hereafter V&A) in Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times (2009). This will be my last post about specific cases and evidence. The pair assembled 500 “cases” from prehistory down to 1899, and there’s no way I could possibly go through all of them in anything shorter than a book. Today I’ll finish up my case-by-case review by looking at the last few cases V&A present from ancient history.

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Jacques Vallee's Deceptive Evidence for Ancient UFOs (Part 2)

4/29/2013

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This week I’m looking at the “best” evidence for ancient UFOs as collected by ufologists Jacques Vallee and Chirs Aubeck in Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times (2009). Since Vallee and Aubeck (hereafter V&A) claim to be a better breed of ancient astronaut theorist, their evidence is therefore proportionally more important than that presented on Ancient Aliens. As we saw in part 1, however, V&A share with Ancient Aliens the tendency to distort and selectively quote ancient texts to “improve” the message to conform to modern UFO beliefs.

Today I’m picking up with Roman-era texts.

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Jacques Vallee's Deceptive Evidence for Ancient UFOs (Part 1)

4/28/2013

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Jacques Vallee is not your typical ufologist, at least in the sense that he differs from Giorgio Tsoukalos in discounting the “nuts and bolts” aspects of alien spacecraft. Instead, he supports an idea he calls the “ultra-terrestrial hypothesis” (UTH) whereby aliens are to be understood as a culturally-bound manifestation of non-human intelligences that communicate with us from another dimension via human consciousness. That doesn’t stop him, of course, from looking for UFOs. In 2009, Vallee and ufologist Chirs Aubeck wrote Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times. This is Vallee’s version of an ancient astronaut book.

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Is There a Singular UFO Phenomenon?

4/27/2013

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If you receive my newsletter, you already know that the editor of Paranthropology has asked me to write a critique and evaluation of Steven Mizrach’s article on the “para-anthropology of UFO abductions.” I discussed this article a little while back, and you’ll recall that Mizrach suggested that the “ultra-terrestrial hypothesis” of Jacques Vallee, whereby the UFO phenomenon is to be understood as an intrusion of beings from another dimension, is the most fulfilling explanation for UFOs and alien abduction narratives. Mizrach wrote to offer some interesting questions about the UFO phenomenon that I’d like to discuss a bit more as I work on some ideas for my article. This is what Mizrach said:

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Ancient Astronauts at Baalbek

4/26/2013

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I’ve managed to fall behind on work today, so in lieu of a lengthy blog post, I’m going to recommend that anyone who hasn’t done so click over to Aaron Adair’s blog and read his wonderful discussion of how the massive trilithon stones—among the largest ever moved by humans—at Baalbek were moved into place under the Romans. The most important takeaway is that archaeology and engineering can explain all of the individual aspects of the trilithon, so there is no need to posit a supernatural or paranormal cause to explain the massive stones as a whole.

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Thomas Sheridan: Extreme Skeptics Are Mentally Ill, Have Shut off 50% of Brain

4/25/2013

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I imagine that by now you’ve heard about the Sirius documentary tied to the pseudo-Congressional UFO hearings going on in Washington. The “star” of the documentary is a six-inch corpse found in Chile that the filmmakers hyped as a potential extraterrestrial being. Apparently the body was discovered back in 2003. It looked to me like a carved doll, apparently but the film claims it is actually a six-year-old dwarf boy. Instead, an examination by a forensic specialist at Basque Country University determined that it is a mummified human fetus. This is sad and somewhat macabre, and I wonder why the Chilean government is OK with people digging up fetuses and selling them to hucksters and sideshow barkers like its current owner, Barcelona-based Ramon Navia-Osorio, of the Institute for Exobiological Investigation and Study, a UFO group.

But this sick display of grotesquerie is par for the course in the “alternative” world’s quest to exploit anything and everything in pursuit of a more satisfying and magical world.

I was perhaps less shocked but more disturbed by Thomas Sheridan’s painfully un-self-aware rant about how skeptics and debunkers are mentally ill.

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Reviewing Philip Gardiner's "Secret Societies" (Part 3)

4/24/2013

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This week I’ll be reviewing British author Philip Gardiner’s Secret Societies: Gardiner’s Forbidden Knowledge: Revelations about the Freemasons, Templars, Illuminati, Nazis, and the Serpent Cults (New Page, 2007). The book is a collection of essays which examines whether a secret cult of Shining Ones has left a trail of mysteries through history that only Our Hero, Gardiner, can unravel with the help of secondhand research from Zecharia Sitchin, Laurence Gardner, Graham Hancock, and more. This is part three.

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Reviewing Philip Gardiner's "Secret Societies" (Part 2)

4/23/2013

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Reviewing Philip Gardiner's "Secret Societies" (Part 1)

4/22/2013

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Philip Gardiner's "Shining Ones"

4/21/2013

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In reviewing Ancient Aliens yesterday, I noted that Giorgio Tsoukalos made reference to “The Shining Ones,” a term associated with Philip Gardiner, a British alternative history writer who has been described as “the next Graham Hancock” and takes Hancock as one of his key inspirations. A few other writers have also employed the term, including Laurence Gardner, Lloyd Pye, and William Henry. They tend to use it to describe the Elohim, for reasons I can’t fathom since that is not the translation of the term.

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<<Previous

Jacques Vallee's Deceptive Evidence for Ancient UFOs (Part 3)

Jacques Vallee's Deceptive Evidence for Ancient UFOs (Part 2)

Jacques Vallee's Deceptive Evidence for Ancient UFOs (Part 1)

Is There a Singular UFO Phenomenon?

Ancient Astronauts at Baalbek

Thomas Sheridan: Extreme Skeptics Are Mentally Ill, Have Shut off 50% of Brain

Reviewing Philip Gardiner's "Secret Societies" (Part 3)

Reviewing Philip Gardiner's "Secret Societies" (Part 2)

Reviewing Philip Gardiner's "Secret Societies" (Part 1)

Philip Gardiner's "Shining Ones"

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