lmao. There was some show I saw, I think it was on the History Channel. They were at some river in the South and they spent the entire episode with some guy who insisted that there was a giant 10-foot catfish in the river (maybe multiple giant catfish? I can’t remember), and that the catfish was responsible for the various pets and occasional people who went missing and were never found. They went off and talked with ichthyologists who talked about limits on catfish sizes, and I forget who else, exploring all the edge cases which might allow a giant ten foot catfish to live in the river. And at the end of the episode, they’re talking to the guy again, going over their findings that it’s possible, theoretically at least, that at a very very edge case, this giant catfish might exist, and the guy was like, “I knew it! Everyone around here keeps sayin’ it’s the alligators, but I jes’ knew it was th’ catfish!”
All an idiot needs is the teeniest tiniest iota of plausibility and all their preconceived notions are true and correct in their mind.
Of all the “crypto” type stories out there, the giant fish ones are the ones I’m most inclined to believe. Unlike a lot of other categories, there’s actually hard evidence for us pulling giant fish out of the water.
If the Detroit River can harbor sturgeon approaching 7ft long in this day and age, I’m not about to totally shoot down anyone’s fish story.
“Why do they say it’s a mystery how the pyramids were built when it’s obviously just big bricks in a triangle?” - Philomena Cunk
The wheel part reminds me of something I learned from 3blue1brown:
“Pi seems to magically appear everywhere, until you realize that wherever it appears there is usually a circle hiding”
Usually. Sometimes it really does seem magical. Sometimes the circle is very well hidden. Maybe we just haven’t found it yet.
Honestly I’ve learned more math from that guy than any math teacher I ever had - one of the few YouTube channels I would absolutely recommend to anyone scientifically inclined at all. He’s an incredible explainer.
Blow your mind with the video where he calculates pi through the repeated elastic collision of a pair of blocks… One digit at a time. If that sounds bizarre - yeah, watch the video.
https://youtu.be/jsYwFizhncE?si=swB8l4IpY6j6AeN-&t=190
The equations for conservation of energy and momentum can be mapped onto a circle in “phase space”
We want to think it’s aliens or some shit because we want to believe that we are super evolved and intelligent and every civilization before America was invented was composed of cavemen.
Ancient people were super intelligent. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy. Today’s most commonly used calendar in the western world, the Gregorian calendar, derives from the Julian calendar which in turn is derived from the ancient Egyptian calendar, which predates the Julius calendar by millennia and was impressively accurate as well (it loses only one day every four year), and that one has roots in Mesopotamian astronomy. For years our ancestors harvested herbs and plants to heal diseases and wounds. “Cavemen” were building megalithic temples in Malta thousands of years ago.
Just because they didn’t have Facebook and plastic bags, doesn’t mean that they were stupid.
I don’t doubt that this is a factor, but it’s not like the phenomenon is limited to just ancient inventions by non-white ethnicities.
I’ve definitely heard people saying that microwave ovens, very much not ancient tech, very much invented in America by a white person, were actually salvaged alien tech from crashed UFOs.
That’s true, but there’s sort of a network of these different beliefs that tend to chain together into a belief system that, I would say, strongly correlates with sorts of weirdly racist conspiratorial shit. If you’re willing to reject the invention of the microwave, this totally arbitrary thing, and say it was from aliens, it’s pretty easy to blow that up and say that maybe the pyramids were also aliens. Like, you already believe in aliens, you already believe in a well-organized conspiracy capable of hiding facts, it’s not that big of a leap to make that like, oh, maybe the aliens also did the pyramids. Maybe the aliens are here all around us already, and then bim bam boom bob’s your uncle and suddenly you believe all this fucked up shit.
Then, you know, kind of, spin it out even further, and then a lot of this misinformation and conspiracy is going to come from fucked up kind of racist narratives and shit like that. The realm of misinfo and conspiracy is more occupied by that, almost by necessity.
The history channel’s take, as well as others, that ancient civilizations could not have accomplished what they accomplished on their own, and therefore it’s aliens is peak Right-wing cope.
“Obviously those backwards non-white civilizations couldn’t have accomplished this on their own, because of their skin color. So therefore, the obvious solution is that they accomplished it because a hyper-intelligent space-fairing civilization took notice of their existence and arbitrarily decided to help them. This makes much more sense.” - Thought process of the utterly deranged.
Genuinely the only reason this smooth brain take is so popular is because its been echoed in media as an admittedly fun story-telling mechanism. But that’s all it is, a story. To put this on the history channel and claim it’s history is just one of the reasons why the History Channel has had their reputation sink in the past 20 years.
The racism of UFO conspiracies gets worse the deeper you go. For instance, it is a common belief that there are multiple races of aliens, but the really “good” ones are either the “Nordics” or the “Tall Whites.” They are generally described as being tall, white, blonde-haired and blue eyed.
I’m strangely proud of the effort these dummies put in to export their racism into the galaxy. Hell they’re taking ancient tribalism and backwards ideals into the new era! Extrapolating and expanding on the concept when provided new information! Embracing rather than attacking science! Can religion claim the same?
/s here juuust in case
The implication of ET genetic programs involving hybridization efforts between certain male and female Homo Sapiens and extraterrestrial beings is a huge subject that many people are scared to talk about.
lol—so this is basically ‘God made white people special because Reasons’ for non-religious people I guess
I’m more surprised with their logistics (documented) and the amount of slave labor (suspected) that needs to build these tombstones just to burry a dude, and sacrifice many people, animals, resources alongside them (discovered). Their fucking ego is of inhumane proportions. Maybe it’s better to believe in aliens than imagining this dick measuring contest of dead fuckers that probably killed way more people than their average wars. Pharaohs are the ultimate bastards. Instead of a damaged Sphinx, I’d love if someone punched off their noses instead.
Pyramids weren’t built by slaves, but there’s certainly class warfare going on in other ways. Egypt had a lot of farmers sitting around while the Nile was in its flood stage, and they appear to have paid them to work on monuments. Still, it’s a lot of work to feed the ego of one ruler.
Hugh, one another stereotype shattered I guess? But still, I don’t feel these people workmaxxed themselves just to be the supreme male alpha predators. If they could just sit around, they could’ve done just that, or organized their living space, or anything, instead of a very traumatic and power-consuming labor. It’s a different condition, but the dynamic seems close.
Yes, surely it’s because of their skin color and not because it was so long ago that people underestimate the amount of technology and labor they had access to.
Don’t they say the same things about Stonehenge?
Sort of, there’s a long train of things here. The Stonehenge theories primarily come from “Chariots of the Gods?” by Erich von Däniken who stole a lot of the Stonehenge stuff from Robert Charroux who thought that white people were actually descended from aliens and brought technology and civilization to the rest of the world.
