Wednesday Roundup: Ancient Aliens Renewed, Blink-182 Member on UFOs, and Christians Against Dinosaurs

The H2 network announced that Ancient Aliens has been renewed for an eighth season, according to consulting producer Giorgio Tsoukalos, who tweeted the news yesterday. This means that we’re in for at least another year of repetitious and increasingly unhinged claims about time-traveling, psychic, interdimensional, supernatural “otherworldly beings” who are sometimes also “extraterrestrials.” Oh, joy! 

I can’t wait to hear Jason Martell crow about his claim about a brown dwarf star in a binary system with our sun has been proved right by reports today that an alien binary star system (a red and brown dwarf pair) traveled through our solar system 70,000 years ago at a distance of nearly one light year from the sun. According to scientists, the star system had very little effect on our solar system, but similar encounters with stars probably happen every 100,000 years.

Another person who will be interested in this finding is Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge, who has been a conspiracy theorist for two decades and recently explained to Paper magazine why he believes in ufology, ancient astronaut, and conspiracies: “I have sources from the government. I’ve had my phone tapped.” He said that he fears for his safety and believes that the government has silenced people who get too close to the truth. DeLonge also said that he had tapes in which “people from NASA, Rome, the Vatican” admitted to being involved in an effort to cover up the existence of aliens. While most of DeLonge’s conspiracy theories center on the U.S. government and modern UFOs, he did take time to endorse the ancient astronaut theory as well, claiming, like Giorgio Tsoukalos last week, that all religion is the result of ancient astronauts: “All the ancient religions were written down based on witnessing this phenomenon in various forms.”

On the other extreme, the media and the internet have been looking into a new creationist group called Christians Against Dinosaurs, which claims that dinosaurs were invented in the 1800s by Victorian scientists and that dinosaurs are a conspiracy meant to undermine God’s Word. According to CNET’s investigation, the group is serious about their anti-dinosaur beliefs and plan to protest against Kentucky’s Creation Museum for including dinosaurs among God’s creation.

One member of the group told CNET that she was personally aware of “shady” dealings in the paleontology industry, and she railed against the “Museum Industry Complex,” which she sees as indoctrinating children into false beliefs about prehistory.

Another member of the group posted on a British parenting website about the dangers posed by dinosaurs:

Dinosaurs are a very bad example for children. At my children's school, several children were left in tears after one of their classmates (who had evidently been exposed to dinosaurs), became bestially-minded and ran around the classroom roaring and pretending to be a dinosaur. Then he bit three children on the face.

Such posts, and similar YouTube videos, led many to speculate that the CAD group was meant as satire, but group members insist they are serious.

If true, the CAD claims are a less sophisticated version of arguments made by early creationists in the nineteenth century. Back then, creationists made many different arguments to dismiss the scientific evidence that extinction was a possibility. Some argued that fossils represented “archetypes”—rough drafts God used to plan the creation. As I reported back in 2012, some went so far as to deny that fossilized feces, known as a coprolites, were feces rather than works of art created by God in his infinite whimsy, as one English clergyman wrote in a pamphlet:

We cannot, believe in such thing as coprolites. They are only a curious form of matter commanded by Him who has made the flower to assume all shapes as well as all hues. He who would not allow so much as a tool to be lifted up on the stones that composed his altar, would certainly not allow the work of animals to compose his creation, much less, then, their dung. The geological assertion that the Creator of this world formed it in some parts of coprolites savors very much of Satan or Beelzebub, the god of dung. Geologists could scarcely have made a more unfortunate self-refuting assertion than this.

CAD updates the popular claim that the devil created fossils to fool humanity and replaces Satan with a more immediate bugaboo: government, scientists, and academics, the same elites that ancient astronaut theorists blame for suppressing the truth about aliens! But the ancient astronaut theorists think that the aliens wiped out the dinosaurs, though some fringe figures think that velociraptors became the Reptilians. It’s all so confusing! And how does any of this affect the peace treaty Giorgio Tsoukalos said that the aliens made with coelacanths before the extinction of the dinosaurs? “I think it is possible that the coelacanth survived due to a direct guarantee by extraterrestrials,” Tsoukalos famously said in explaining how aliens killed off the dinosaurs.