My New UFO Article and Graham Hancock's Cosmic Musings

In lieu of a lengthy blog post today, I’m going to send everyone over to the journal of Paranthropology (vol. 4, no. 3) where my new article, “Ultra-Terrestrials and the UFO Phenomenon,” has just been published. The entire issue is available to read for free, so please enjoy my discussion of whether alien abductions and UFO sightings truly originate in another dimension.

In a related note, you’ll also notice that the article immediately following mine is an interview with Graham Hancock where he espouses some strange ideas on prehistory. He claims, for example, that the Aztec misunderstood an ancient worldwide spiritual practice of “symbolic” sacrifice and, being dumb and brown and borrowing their culture from Atlantis, took it literally and started killing people, unlike the smart white folk in Europe. Do I even need to say that there is no evidence for this? In places as far afield as the Druids, the Tibetans, and the ancient peoples of India we find human sacrifices—there is nothing particularly special about Aztec sacrifice except for the extreme numbers, which were more of a function of Aztec imperial politics than a particular lust for blood. For Hancock, though, the existence of sacrifices and pyramids worldwide yields evidence of a prehistoric pyramid culture…blah, blah, blah…. Atlantis, but not really…blah, blah, blah.

Hancock then asserts that “science” tells us that there is no afterlife, but he has glimpsed this other realm through drug use, able to see the spirit world where an “intelligence” is directing our every move. He thinks this intelligence is speaking to us now because we are destroying its home in the rain forest: “Personally, I think that there’s an intelligence there, an entity who cares for us and for our species. This is what I’ve felt after fifty or so ayahuasca sessions. But I can prove nothing. … And so it is an interesting coincidence that just as the Amazon is being destroyed, this spirit that has always been confined to the jungle is moving around the world to deliver these teachings. I feel that there is some intentionality behind this.”

However, he draws the line at “mushrooms,” because they led the Aztecs down “a dark path.”

He then concludes by promising that the upcoming sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods, due out in 2015, will provide evidence that a lost civilization was destroyed by a massive comet impact in 10,500 BCE, thus abandoning finally Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) as his model and instead recycling Donnelly’s claims from that book’s sequel, Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), which argued that a comet destroyed an ancient civilization, etc. Everything old is new again.