Darn Those Aliens

My newest article for eSkeptic was published today. You can read it here, and I'll put it up on this site in a week or two, after its eSkeptic run.

The History Channel continues its impressive run of absolute lies. Last week, its Ancient Aliens series claimed, without proof, that the Egyptians (c. 1500 BCE) built obelisks to send electricity to an alien satellite in outer space to beam down to Easter Island (c. 500 CE) so they could use high technology to carve the giant statues there. The 2,000 year time difference and COMPLETE LACK OF EVIDENCE didn't bother anyone.

This week, the series went even nuttier. This week, David Hatcher Childress--the same fellow who insisted that the obelisks were electricity guns--told viewers that the moon is a hollow Death Star brought by the aliens to this planet as an orbiting space station. The aliens live inside and watch all of us on earth, and...I don't know...make reality TV out of it or something. The mind reels. The show says that the "proof" is that the moon is hollow and "rings like a bell" when spacecraft land on it. Also, life on earth is impossible without the moon, so it has to be from the aliens. But earth life began 1.5 billion years ago, so those aliens have sure been hanging around a long time.

Of course the theorists don't really believe the aliens have been here for a couple billion years. At heart, they're creationists (with aliens instead of God) and most are fairly certain, just like creationists, that life is only a few thousand years old at most. 

Maybe the secret is that the History Channel intended these shows to show the public just how ridiculous ancient alien theories really are and turn off viewers by negative example. Of course, that would be giving them far too much credit.