Did aliens really visit us in the past?

@Charles Phipps: I go the opposite route in my own work. Humanity's the Only Sane Man in the galaxy. Aliens tend to be cloud cuckolanders, so humanity tried to ignore their existence so that they could take their lives seriously.

"I really don't understand why racists would find the idea of ancients astronauts appealing. After all, It's not as if the aliens are white..."

Back before the Greys became popular the most common close encounter stories were allegedly beautiful white people from Venus.

Got any actual sources for that?

I don't know about dates but check the third entry on this list. The "Nordic" alien archetype is more common outside the Anglosphere though.

A lot of those "white extraterrestrials" legends are tied deeply into Nazi mysticism, which should really tell you everything you need to know.

If aliens have visited us, they probably are just laughing at us and See our planet as a Tv Show.

Well we do have a TV celebrity in the Whitehouse.

I still like the joke theory that extraterrestrials took one look at us, said Nope, these guys are crazy a as shit and just decided to jump the hell away to the nearest galaxy.

edited 6th Jun '18 8:21:49 PM by Wispy

That's the Prison/Zoo theory. The aliens took one look at us, and decided that Humanity was too crazy and/or violent to be allowed to spread out into the galaxy. So they want to keep us bottled up in our own solar system...

My favorite theory is that the aliens who visit us are drunk frat boys, and crop circles and anal probes are their version of cow tipping.

Prison theory has a couple issues:

1. 1: Remember that we're also looking for the aliens, and it actually would be very difficult (probably flat-out impossible) for such a civilization to hide from us.

2. 2: People who invoke Can't Argue with Elves in real life are called "racists". The aliens would tend to be of the Scary Dogmatic Aliens variety to think this way. Legitimately benevolent aliens would want to come here and help us.

3. 3: Nature Is Not Nice and Perfect Pacifist People wouldn't make it past the stone age.

4. 4: If aliens were Scary Dogmatic Aliens, why don't they just shoot us? It's a good opportunity.

It's also a little ridiculous to think that a species would come all this way just to watch us or devote any significant resources to keeping us contained. It's not like we have a particularly robust space program anymore, after all.

This feels relevant:

It's a pretty in-depth look at both the Fermi paradox and many "ancient aliens" type ideas, debunking a lot of stuff and offering interesting alternative takes on others. I should warn you that the guy has a tendency to go on long tangents though.

I love Isaac Arthur; I'm actually friends with him on Facebook and I moderate his Facebook group.

This thread turned out to be a bit more interesting than I thought it might be. Plenty of good stuff.

The only time I have ever seen Ancient Aliens been useful as some sort of story plot. Namely the they don't really look human variety and are not exactly nice about their time on Earth.

edited 7th Jun '18 6:14:36 PM by TuefelHundenIV

As a skeptic against all things paranormal, of course I'm not convinced of any of these wild "theories" of space aliens getting involved in ancient human history. I mean, if they really did come over to visit Ancient Egypt, the best they could do was teach humans how to assemble stone blocks into pyramids? You think they'd have them build spaceships or something. And everyone else already pointed out how stupidly racist this all sounds.

While I don't believe in this either, I'm fascinated by the stories of people claiming to have suffered an Alien Abduction or otherwise encountered spacemen. Of course, they're most likely either making bullshit lies or suffering mental illness. Or experiencing some weird dreams and/or hallucinations (i.e. sleep paralysis).

But still, many of these crazy folks are genuinely convinced that they experienced something otherworldly, so I sometimes like to entertain the thought, "What if they were telling the truth?" If nothing else, these tales would at least make for some decently entertaining works of science fiction.

For example, these sorts of dubious anecdotes made by people on the Internet.^{Click here to read the content of this link} 

Edited by AHI-3000 on Jul 15th 2018 at 11:07:34 AM

There was this myth about Aurora Borealis being the gods riding the heavens, I forgot where it originated.

For most of our existence on this down-here planet, we were busy literally running after our next meal, at a time when we were about five meals away from certain death.
So when encountering an event or a phenomenon that defied our knowledge, we’d simply pull out of our arses a plausible-enough sounding explanation, inventing a myth or referring to an earlier one.
Thus the puzzling experience would no longer distract our mind and detract it from the task at hand, and we resumed running after our next meal.

We keep doing that as it comes so easy to us, with space aliens from planet X.

I have seen a remarkable quantity of of UFOs meself.

They were flying, definitely objects, and I was at a loss trying to identify them.

There’s no question that UF Os are real. Military pilots see them fairly regularly.

The thing is, theyre just not of extraterrestrial origin. They’re unregistered civilian aircraft, experimental weapons, weird stuff being tested by the Chinese and the Russians, or even atmospheric effects.

Just because something is unidentifiable doesn’t mean it’s alien.

That brings to mind a conspiracy theory I've heard somewhere before: that the government deliberately spreads more outlandish conspiracy theories (like aliens) to help cover up whatever they're really up to. I mean, what would sound more plausible and less batshit crazy; that UFOs are extraterrestrial spaceships, or that they're top-secret military aircraft made by humans?

But of course, the average "UFO" that happens to be a vehicle is probably just a plain old regular airplane, nothing unusual about it.

edited 9th Jun '18 5:32:19 PM by AHI-3000

The "alien DNA" thing is somewhat similar to the controversy regarding Neanderthal DNA. For the longest time, there was a controversy regarding whether or not they had been simply exterminated by humankind, died out on their own, or INTERBRED WITH HUMANITY. This became a very politicized issue because of the racial implications.

Racists tended to either deny it was possible (it fit their idea that since neanderthals had died out, race war was a "natural" part of civilization) or associated it with "inferior races." Now, we know neatherthal women at least did breed with humans and....well, their descendants we know about were whites.

Edit:

You can't really count the entire history of the galaxy. The first generation of stars were pure hydrogen, there wasn't enough of anything else out there to make planets. Ditto the second generation. Our sun is a third generation star, the first generation to have existed in a galaxy with enough dirt and crud that significantly large planets were a possibility. (Note that these generations are named backwards. The first stars we studied were stars like the sun, near us in the galactic disk, so we called them population I stars and distinguished them fro mthe more distant Population II stars in the core before realizing that the II stars were older. We've never seen apopulation III star in our galaxy because they didn't last very long.)

That having been said, it's not entirely clear how long third generation stars have been around. The sun is 4.5 billion years old, but is unlikely to have been one of the first of third generation stars. Estimates suggest that the Milky Way's disk (made of third generation stars) might be as little as 8 billion years old, though.

Which is still enough time for a civilization to have spread through it a few times, but not quite as much as some estimates I've seen that presume we've had since the beginning of the galaxy to grow civilizations. One thing we can say from earth is that while life seems to form fairly readily, there appears to be no particular hurry toward the development of physical complexity. Multi-celled life evolved maybe a dozen times on E Arth, but most of those times went nowhere execpt extinction.

There are several modern branches of mult-celled life, plants, animals, true fungi, and at least three, possibly more, unrelated groups called "slime molds", and we're not even sure how often multicellularity evolved in what we call "algae".

But out of all the times multi-cellularity evolved, only one really made any headway at all toward establishing the baseline for "civilization", and that was only the most recent to show up! Only the slime molds and animals developed the ability to locomote as independent units of being, only animals developed brains capable of rendering judgements about their environment by experience. (Slime molds can make judgements, but it's all instinctual.)

So some have adopted it as a reason they are superior now.

edited 9th Jun '18 6:03:41 PM by CharlesPhipps

Charles: You mean Eurasians, Ethiopians, and peoples from Central Africa. Skin colour has nothing to do with it. The Eurasian group is fairly broad given the region it encompasses. Which more or less translates to the majority of humanity on the face of the planet sharing varying quantities of that DNA from their distant heritage.

I heard it was only in white people.

Which goes to show you there's a lot of misinformation out there.

Its ok the information on that keeps getting updated on a regular basis. I do actually recall the belief that it was only white Europeans at one point but as with a lot of the studies with more technology and more people looking at the same thing the information usually changes.

It is most common in the Euorpean and Asian groups in general and can be as high as 2% in some cases. The traces in African descendants is very very minute if present at all. It has been found only in relatively small population groups IIRC. They also wound up changing their minds on how much Eurasian admixture there was in African populations as well. I believe it was because of faults found in some data equipment they used the first time around and it was looked at by a different group with different results. I have no doubt that the overall picture will change again as it undergoes continued study.

Neat. Next time I say all my coworkers are Neanderthals I have science to back me up.