My Big Problem with the ET Hypothesis

The point of this topic is to pose a question I raised multiple times in this thread that went unanswered by believers in the ET hypothesis. Now, I presuppose a lot of things in thread, but these are merely things that believers in the ET hypothesis readily accept.

First off, let's assume that all accounts of UFOs in history are true. If we look at the stories told they do share some commonalities with the modern close encounter. Even the occupants of these UFOs are similar to the Greys, Nords, Reptilians, etc. of modern accounts. There is however one key difference, the claims these occupants make as to their origins. It seems that their origin is directly tied to the location where they are sighted and Man's current level of technology.

If one accepts the premise of ancient astronauts, then in many of these cases UFO occupants originally claimed to be gods in the earliest accounts. This reflected a society that was polytheistic and attributed everything that couldn't be explained to deities. As the Abrahamic religions took hold over the world UFO pilots called themselves angels and demons, which reflected the widespread belief that there was only one God, however both he and Satan had messengers on Earth.

As we passed the Industrial Revolution the first UFO flap of the modern era became attributed to an eccentric inventor. Reports of a classic cigar shaped craft were connected with men speaking in English. Some even claimed to see the occupants and described them as human. One account even has a witness talking to the "inventor" himself.

When one looks at accounts across the world, these creatures have commonly referred to themselves as fairies in places where that belief is common such as Ireland. Whereas in Japan it is not uncommon to hear reports of the occupants calling themselves oni and in the Middle East djinn.

This then brings us to the modern post-WWII era of close encounters. With the advents in rocket science that the war brought it seemed like only a matter of time before we would finally achieve space travel. It is at this point that UFO encounters really started incorporating the ET hypothesis. Yet in these early years the UFO occupants claimed to be from within our solar system, from places like Venus. It was not until the Betty and Barney Hill encounter that claims began to emerge that the "aliens" were from outside our galaxy. This occurred in 1961, four years after the launch of Sputnik which gave us our first real look of the solar system. It was from these satellites that we learned just how impossible it would be for life to be sustained on other planets in our solar system. Since this time, UFO encounters have been linked with names like Zeta Reticuli, Draconis, and Andromeda.

All of this leads to the question I want to ask of ET hypothesis believers. How can you be so sure that these "aliens" are telling the truth now when they have changed their story so many times in the past? Isn't it even more likely that our technology and science is not advanced at this time to truly understand what these occupants actually are and that as we advance we will simply start hearing a new story?

Originally posted by Xcalibur254
All of this leads to the question I want to ask of ET hypothesis believers. How can you be so sure that these "aliens" are telling the truth now when they have changed their story so many times in the past? Isn't it even more likely that our technology and science is not advanced at this time to truly understand what these occupants actually are and that as we advance we will simply start hearing a new story?

Maybe in times past they never told anyone what they were and left the population at the time to label them as they wished. That would be a possible explanation.

Your post is based on the premise that we all believe in the Ancient Alien theory.

I think it is an interesting theory, but I am not a believer. I do think there is life out there, that it is intelligent and that it is possible some UFO cases are indeed extraterrestrial. But I think aliens as we know them are a more modern phenomenon.

It is possible that gods were just gods, fairies were just fairies, and angels and demons were just angels and demons. I think it is a bit of an unfounded stretch to claim that all humanoid mythological and religious entities were the aliens we speak of today.

Also there is no hard proof that anyone has indeed conversed with aliens, so their is no suspicion to me regarding the validity of their story, considering all signs point to their being a lack of a definite story.



[edit on 20-7-2010 by SubPop79]

reply to post by Xcalibur254


Yeah I have problems with the ET hypothesis too. I think Jung was on the right track. ET is real but not in the way Hollywood thinks. ET is an archetype of the collective unconscious in symbolic form.

"Such experiences are reported not as fantasy but as reality—often more intensely real than everyday life. Observers interpret them according to their expectations and culture. Religious pilgrims at Fatima saw a disk in the sky as a religious miracle; pilot Kenneth Arnold saw flying craft. Others may perceive ghosts of the dead, apparitions of the living, techno-elves, blobs of light, or extraterrestrials. Westerners tend to see technologically sophisticated spacecraft piloted by humanoids, straight out of the special effects and cast of a Star Wars movie. We expect to get radar hits on apparently solid flying machines, and sometimes we do.

One of the first to explore the notion of mythology manifesting as physical reality was psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who in 1957 published the book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. More recently, authors Jacques Vallee (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact) and Keith Thompson (Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination) and folklorists Peter Rojcewicz and Thomas Bullard have written about the parallels among UFOs, folklore, and mythology.

“Space-Age myth” does not imply that UFO sightings or encounters with angels, aliens, fairies, sprites, elves, or demons are fantasies. Rather, it suggests that some of these experiences may literally be psychophysical, blurring conventional boundaries between objective and subjective realities. Some may object that this proposal doesn’t account for the physical traces associated with some UFO reports, but this misinterprets what Jung and others have proposed. They suggest that the manifest world emerges from mind, that is, that mind shapes matter. Where have we heard this before?"

deanradin.blogspot.com...

[edit on 20-7-2010 by Student X]

I find it more plausible that we were visited thousands or even millions of years ago than in the last 100 years.

Many "universal truths" stay consistent throughout the universe. So if the Fermi paradox holds up everywhere as it seems to on Earth, then all species or beings have a limited time before they vanish or destroy themselves.

Then the question is not where are the aliens in our galaxy ... but WHEN are they.

For all we know, 800 million years ago, Mars gave birth to intelligent life. Our few thousand years of recorded history and 100 years of technological marvel is really not all that impressive in the big scheme of things.

Originally posted by NASA is ASAN

Originally posted by Xcalibur254
All of this leads to the question I want to ask of ET hypothesis believers. How can you be so sure that these "aliens" are telling the truth now when they have changed their story so many times in the past? Isn't it even more likely that our technology and science is not advanced at this time to truly understand what these occupants actually are and that as we advance we will simply start hearing a new story?

Maybe in times past they never told anyone what they were and left the population at the time to label them as they wished. That would be a possible explanation.

Exactly and then subsequently would you tell a bunch of barbarians where you lived !

I'm not sure whether there are any real inconsistencies or if so whether any meaning can be attributed. What would be interesting is to see whether there are any consistencies between physical appearance, supposed point of origin and earthly geographical location of contact.

Originally posted by Xcalibur254
All of this leads to the question I want to ask of ET hypothesis believers. How can you be so sure that these "aliens" are telling the truth now when they have changed their story so many times in the past?

Who says they have changed their story at all? Who says there is even a "they" to begin with? Could you be attributing a variety of phenomenon to a single source. And could humanity as a whole be projecting our beliefs on a set of phenomenon based on the current societal zeitgeist?

I am not a a "believer" by any means, but I certainly grant the possibility exists.

The problem with your argument however is that it sounds like you are expecting every single alleged, reported, and presumed or theorized alien report to fit into one neat theory or storyline, and then discarding the whole notion of aliens if they don't.

In reality though, it doesn't matter if 99.999% of all UFO stories are misidentifications, hoaxes, hallucinations, folklore, tricksters, interdimensionals, or anything else, because it only takes one actual proven extraterrestrial visit to prove the ET hypothesis was correct.

Of course my interpretation of the "ET hypothesis" is simply: aliens have visited earth in the past. That doesn't include all these accretions and speculations tacked on by ufologists over the decades for lack of anything better to do. Maybe you mean it differently.

The biggest problem with all of this is the whole idea of relying on eye-witness testimony as if it's gospel truth.

I have sat and watched a person come up with a story about how his DNA was different from everyone else and his doctor even had a way to show him a 'picture' of his genetic structure as being a tripple-helix (or, he may have meant it to be a third nucleotide placed in the middle). He was in front of his prom date, and a friend of my prom date, so I didn't blast his story apart, just smiled and nodded - but testimony is a funky thing to work with.

People fill in the gaps in their memory - not necessarily to be intentionally deceptive, but because they want to please you, and our entire society doesn't like accepting "I don't know." Even our school teachers tell us on tests: "If you don't know, there's no penalty for guessing."

This has some serious implications for people wishing to look at testimony regarding UFOs, aliens, cryptobiology, etc.

So, it is really hard to tell when someone is just yanking your chain, trying to sensationalize their memory for you, or is actually trying to give you an accurate, honest account. It is even more difficult when you don't know the person.

Apply this to ancient accounts, too - were people really seeing gods/angels, or were they seeing aliens, and simply attributing it to a familiar concept? Or were they filling in gaps in their memory: "Eh, I don't know what that thing said it was, but I think it was doing God's work, whatever it was." "Sounds good and won't get us killed for sorcery, let's put that down."

Just like people see a light in the sky that seems out of place, and instantly it becomes an alien space craft. While not every person is like that - enough of them are today that it is rather sound to expect that people in the past would have been just as ready to attribute the oddity to angels, demons, flying steam engines, etc.

Take just a few moments ago with me, for example - I saw something weird out of the corner of my eye, and got all paranoid and started trying to attribute it to my father (who recently passed away) - it's not the first time I've seen something or heard something that piqued my paranoia. I could sensationalize the experience to make it sound like the place is haunted - when, if anything, I am simply haunted by a memory and the sense of being alone in this house. Doesn't stop me from being creeped out ... but - I know that's mostly what it is - I've seen nothing to convince me it is anything else. But I can see how someone else with less reverence for logic as I do would think nothing of deciding to tell people about the more sensationalized version of events.

It would take some rather consistent reports from isolated individuals (from each other) with inherent underlying mechanics (everything follows rules and some concept of physics - you can't suddenly decide you don't follow gravity just as aliens can't decide to apply rules and logic only when it's convenient. Then I would start to entertain those testimonies as being true accounts of events, but, even then, due to everything I mentioned above - how accurate is their account?

And you also have the problem of many general concepts being repeated so often through forums like this that you have many different reports that are consistent with one view, but not another. There is the idea that aliens are benevolent, one they are malevolent, and so on and so forth.

I think there is something at work - that is probably extra-terrestrial. However, I am not so sure most of the accounts of ETs and the like have anything to do with the actual phenomena to be observed.

Originally posted by chunder
Exactly and then subsequently would you tell a bunch of barbarians where you lived !

I'm not sure whether there are any real inconsistencies or if so whether any meaning can be attributed. What would be interesting is to see whether there are any consistencies between physical appearance, supposed point of origin and earthly geographical location of contact.

Yeah, but don't tell TS that. Seriously, it's this type of dynamic thinking that will sink him and his kin.

Yo TS, if you're going to have a problem with the "ET Hypothesis", put some actual thinking into that problem. You're making it embarrassing for us.

The links between mythology, folklore and ufology are well known. Whether the obvious evolution is evidence in favor (or against - the same facts have been used both ways) of the psychosocial hypothesis (PSH), different civilizations visiting us (ETH), mysterious forces manipulating us, trickster gods, collective unconscious or "quantum" consciousness is anyone's guess.

There are many interesting stories, more or less believable, that have been used as evidence of [extra/ultra/supra/meta/intra/crypto]terrestrials (choose the appropriate prefix, all have been used). Unless cases are cherry-picked to fit preconceptions, there is no reason to choose one hypothesis over any other. This is the main reason why I remain skeptical of them all.

I agree with NASA is ASAN. I think it is much more likely that people labelled them according to their belief system. I also think that there are gaps in your alien history and theory, the Dogon apparently said that their ancient gods were from another galaxy and weren't the annunaki supposed to be from outside our solar system (or at least they certainly were seen to be extra terrestrial). I'm sure there are lots of other examples as well...

1. The ancient gods did not evolve on another planet and develop culture and technology and fly here through interstellar space in nuts n' bolts spaceships.

2. ET did not evolve on another planet and develop culture and technology and fly here through interstellar space in nuts n' bolts spaceships.

I come to these conclusions based on comparative mythology, comparative mysticism, comparative religion. These are fields which deserve to be studied in their own right, and in light of UFOlogy they show beyond reasonable doubt that the UFO phenomenon is indeed a modern mythology.

But thanks to the bizarre nature of reality and thanks to our unconscious collective psychic ability (or psi), we humans have a way of making our mythology real (vice-versa?). Therein lies the source of all mystical paradox. Tat tvam asi.

Through psi, mythology becomes living breathing metaphor - it is still symbolic even though it is "real". The symbolic form (in this case aliens) is always secondary even if manifested physically. The primary consideration is the esoteric meaning of the symbolic form.

All mythology bears the stamp of the human psyche. All mystical traditions use the same techniques. The structures are the same, the archetypes are the same, the common denominators are the same, the patterns are the same, the 'shamanic initiations' are the same, the psi is the same. The UFO phenomenon is not an exception. The differences are mere illusion and vanity.

[edit on 21-7-2010 by Student X]

I don't believe in the ancient astronauts theory. Most of the evidence used to support this idea is based on misidentified artistic symbolism, and a lack of understanding of the ancient peoples' belief systems and depictions of said beliefs. If most of the proponents of such theories bothered to take the time and study these facets, they'd realize that a gold disk in the sky emitting rays in a Renaissance painting really represents a common representation of the Holy Spirit (the same golden disc as a halo) vs. depicting a UFO, for example.

The early accounts about Venusians and Martians really don't have much to go on (and the Venusian accounts often feature concepts such as sexual encounters, etc.).

There does seem to be a marked progression between sightings and encounters, with the modern UFO era for sightings starting in the late 40's, and then actual encounters starting in the early 60's. Then again, who's not to say they didn't wait a couple of decades before abductions began?

Could it all be in our collective heads? Numerous photos and video would seem to cast some doubt here, as well as cases that have a good combination of different types of evidence such as the aforementioned Hill case.

It is my hypothesis (from examining the available evidence), that:

1). Aliens began visiting us in earnest, in the late 1940's.
2). On occasion (especially early in the visits), some of these craft crashed or were shot down, and recovered by the US military (and likely other foreign entities).
3). We lack the technology to fully utilize the recovered crafts' tech, but we have used it to make some strides.
4). While inferior, our own tech is sufficient enough to deter an alien occupation, OR they simply have no interest in doing so.

Now, if some overwhelming evidence comes out tomorrow that shows otherwise, and supports the idea that yes, it's all in our heads, or no, it was really secret projects, etc., then I'm perfectly happy to re-examine my ideas (not beliefs...which are much harder to change, so I have "ideas")...but based on the evidence out there now, I think they're visiting, don't have much stock in us, and don't feel compelled to either help or harm us directly.

As I said at the beginning I made a lot of presuppositions.Personally I am not a fan of the ancient astronaut theory. The main goal of this thread is to make those fervent believers of the ET hypothesis question. So many people on this site cling to that as the only possible explanation and disregard any other theory as being flat out wrong. While my logic may be a little disconnected I hope people can see what exactly I was trying to convey. As of now there are holes that the ET hypothesis cannot fill. Just as there are holes the experimental aircraft theory cannot fill. There is no theory proposed that is without flaw and as such we should not suppose something to be the truth before hand.

It is my belief that ufology took a major downturn when it became a foregone conclusion that UFOs were ET in origin. We stopped looking at the observable phenomenon and instead started focusing on an alien conspiracy that is impossible to prove. The field stopped being about empirical observation and science and became focused on wild speculation based on hearsay. Just look at the field today. There's no one like Hynek and Keyhoe, with the notable exception of Dolan. Instead with have people like Icke and other New Agers seeking to push an agenda. So, how can progress be made when those are our chief representatives?

well seeing this thread is from a true skeptic I am not sure I can change your mind on these things. I mean they are even told in such cultures as Sumerians, Babylonians, Akkadians, etc. They tell the story of how advanced beings came to earth and created us and gave us their knowledge of technology. You will also find evidence from DNA and the "junk DNA". Genetic manipulation has gone all the way back towards Sumeria.

If we are the only life forms on this galaxy, then GOD help us all....

I don't believe in the ancient astronauts theory. Most of the evidence used to support this idea is based on misidentified artistic symbolism, and a lack of understanding of the ancient peoples' belief systems and depictions of said beliefs. If most of the proponents of such theories bothered to take the time and study these facets, they'd realize that a gold disk in the sky emitting rays in a Renaissance painting really represents a common representation of the Holy Spirit (the same golden disc as a halo) vs. depicting a UFO, for example.

While I agree to an extent - why should one believe it is the 'holy spirit'? Why was that image chosen as a symbol of the holy spirit?

Think about it for a moment - if you were to believe someone called an alien an angel (or demon) - then why would a 'flying saucer' not be attributed to something like 'the Holy Spirit?'

Why do images like that seem to arise frequently in religious and spiritual symbols?

It's kind of like "why do Christians have crosses all over the place?" It may be 'just a religious symbol indicating affiliation' - but it has its origins in a real event.

Of course - I also think it's really cool looking (and almost spiritual) when light shines through the clouds in visible rays. So, there's always stuff like that to consider, too.

But - the point is, just because a "ufo" is used to depict the holy spirit does not mean the fact a "ufo" is depicted is somehow less significant.

4). While inferior, our own tech is sufficient enough to deter an alien occupation, OR they simply have no interest in doing so.

I don't think there would be much reason to invade to begin with. Space is full of plenty of other rocks and materials - the only thing special about our planet is another sentient life form (which may or may not be all that common in the galaxy - life most certainly is, and we're probably not much different from carbon based life on a planet with similar gravity, atmospheric, and solar conditions).

I'm also not certain our technology is all that inferior. While 'phasers' might be an interesting weapon concept - I've not seen any projected energy weapon that can really match a bullet in terms of lethality and effectiveness. Sure - they are far more practical when hopping from planet to planet (storage and generation of electrical energy is far less massive than chemical energy storage) - but not really all that great when you have the chemicals at your disposal.

There are also other technological concerns - computers, data transmission, materials and construction methods, design methods (IE - simple stuff like triangular structures, ribbed cylinders, etc - may not be all that apparent to another species for some reason). There's also biological technology - how well do they understand their own biological processes? They may wonder why in God's name we process and then consume mold (as an antibiotic) - may make no sense to them at all.

Or how about cultural and economic theories? Perhaps they are a hive intelligence and do not understand pursuits of the individual. Or, perhaps they are 'so advanced' they are, literally, individuals unto themselves - like someone who owns a yacht visiting a small tribal island.

In either case - they may have no understanding of diplomacy and economics. It sounds silly - but it would be just as silly to presume everything we hold true to apply to aliens.

Originally posted by dragnet53
They tell the story of how advanced beings came to earth and created us and gave us their knowledge of technology.

A manifestation of an archetype of the collective unconscious is also an advanced being coming to earth. Just not in the way one might think.

You will also find evidence from DNA and the "junk DNA". Genetic manipulation has gone all the way back towards Sumeria.

Mind-over-genetics.

If we are the only life forms on this galaxy, then GOD help us all...

Don't you guys see? Even your very statement is mystically flawed.

/sigh

Maybe humanity just isn't ready for meta-paradigm. Do we really need another mythology? Aren't we ready yet to withdraw our projections?

[edit on 21-7-2010 by Student X]

reply to post by Student X


wtf are you talking about? LOL

well at least you ain't saying something like Pleiadians or something.

Originally posted by dragnet53
reply to post by Student X

 

wtf are you talking about? LOL

well at least you ain't saying something like Pleiadians or something.

Yeah it can be very hard for people to understand the sort of Jungian/mystical approach I take to the UFO phenomenon, at first. But if you were to go back and carefully re-read my posts in this thread you might figure it out. Or you might need to read some Jung and some Campbell first. But try reading the pdf I link to.

[edit on 21-7-2010 by Student X]