I remember when the Cylons were an alien biological species in the film release.
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I have little to say that hasn’t already been said upthread, suffice to say Hancock is a joke peddling dangerous psuedoscience.
Its disappointing to see Netflix takes the path of the History Channel and Discovery with this nonsense.
Interestingly, YouTube, previously the home of tinhat alien archaeology has had somewhat of a renaissance of great history and archaeology content.
This channel is one of my favourites.
Longform video essays examining past civilisations in great detail. No need for controversial theories when the reality of what we know is so fascinating.
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The late ’70s were a squeamish time for TPTB about violence on TV—inventing a completely mechanical enemy was a pretty good workaround
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The show that should have been made.
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and that led me to discover they’re making still more… or plan to
let no sleeping ip rest, i suppose
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It’s not like he made the story up about Quetzalcoatl
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Does anyone else remember that show on the History Channel called something like “The Nostradamus Effect”, which suggested that Obama was literally the Antichrist?
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I am contractually obliged to remind people that John Sladek has priority.
John Sladek (1974):
“They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Darwin, they laughed at Edison … and they laughed at Punch and Judy.”
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And that was a problem with Kepler’s heliocentric system – the elliptic orbits clearly fit the observations, but neither he nor anyone else could explain why the orbits were ellipses. “It just works like that, trust us!” seemed unconvincing for a lot of astronomers.
Then eventually Newton came up with universal gravitation, and suddely the elliptic orbits made perfect sense, and everything worked like a clock again. (Right until the point the observations got so good that astronomers noticed Mercury wasn’t quite where it should have been… cue lots of fruitless search for a planet further in whose gravity would explain the anomalies, until Einstein explained it with general relativity.)
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Which reminds me of…
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Do they have lasers?
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Part of the issue I think that makes the whole subject of teaching history even in an entertainment medium is the fact that most people don’t have a sense of scale. For example, most of us probably had a moment as a child that we thought our city was the country we lived in, as in the entirety of it, and that other cities far away were just another country, but then later we’d have the realization of really how big the country we live in actually is. That’s the problem of scale. It isn’t limited to size, large and small, but also time, recent and ancient.
Most people are amazed by how little things can change but equally how much things have changed depending on the time frame. When you add the question of the origins for our civilization (Yes, there was more than one origin since people settled different parts of the world which led to multiple origins for things like agriculture and settled villages) some folks just check out and let the idiot or grifter make up crap on the fly, so we get the Ancient Aliens tripe or worse.
Also, much of modern pop history has always been in service of white elites as a means to justify empire and the current state of things (why are African nations so poor? It can’t be due to the white elites stealing their wealth! /s). So the Ancient Aliens thing is a great distraction for them to fund, even if it’s not intentional (hey it makes money and keeps people from asking hard questions!).
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They were off by one president…
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Oh, he’s that guy…
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Obviously yes. Mel Brooks was the OG of Jewish Space Lasers, creating this action sequence back in 1981 when MTG was only 7 years old.
(I can only guess that she saw the film as a kid and it made quite the impression on her as a young antisemite.)
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That is in fact where all this stuff came from. It’s not an accident that “ancient aliens” theories all come from people who grew up with that book, any more than it’s an accident that UFO mythology all started after people raised on comic books about that stuff came of age. Conspiracy feelings manifest in whatever is the culture of the time.
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