Reply #42: Thanks for posting this astonishing revelation. About UFOs, as a... [View All]

[newswolf56]

newspaperman I have always kept an open mind about them. Having seen one myself -- a 1959 sighting that was witnessed by hundreds -- I don't doubt they exist. I know too many credible people who claim to have seen them.

But I make no pretense of knowing what they are.

I do know this: there are eerie floating-light phenomena associated with certain geographical locales -- two such places are Brown Mountain in North Carolina and Clinch Mountain in East Tennessee -- and aboriginal folk tales from centuries before Columbus indicate the lights have been seen there since ancient times. If memory still serves me well, the Cherokee believe the lights are malevolent spirits. Which suggests at least some UFO reports are due to forces of nature we do not yet know or understand: aerial foxfire, st. elmo's fire, marsh gas or emissions from ancient graveyards, methane from the coal beds, some other misidentified biological, astronomical or meteorological phenomena -- indeed that is the explanation that most often (but not always) gets my vote as the closest approach to the UFO reality.

As to the other theories -- top-secret military aircraft, alien astronauts (whether from light-years away or from another dimension), unmanned scout-craft from some Mother Ship -- I remain mostly agnostic.

But I absolutely reject the contention of the von Dannikenoid Cult that patriarchy and its alleged civilizations are the legacy of Gods from Outer Space (which, if I remember correctly, is the exact title of one such manifesto). I regard this as a particularly cunning, especially reactionary effort to shore up the crumbling foundations of Yehvehistic religion and patriarchy in general by inventing the notion we were "saved from barbarism" by the intervention of some cosmic ubermenschen -- master-race benefactors we "primitive" humans viewed as gods.

The worst part of such a viewpoint is not its absolute untruth -- about which more in a moment -- but rather the psychological fact that once one has acknowledged an ubermenschen, one must also acknowledge der Fuhrerprinzip: which includes the right of the master race (or its representatives) to rule everyone else with absolute tyranny and utter mercilessness. Therefore, if Yehveh was really a spaceman...

It's called "theocracy," and I don't want to go there, even hypothetically.

The archaeological truth of course is far different from what von Danniken and his cultoid colleagues claim it to be. There is increasing and increasingly compelling evidence (Gimbutas et al) that the advent of patriarchy approximately 5000 years ago has been much more of a curse than a blessing: the destruction of a remarkably stable, remarkably accomplished human society, truly global in expanse, that had lasted at least 25,000 years (Marshack et al) and perhaps even twice that. The 3,000 years of mathematical and astronomical observation mirrored at what we call Stonehenge is truly breathtaking. The builders of Stonehenge, who were indeed part of that vanished human society, actually taught us something modern astronomy did not know: that solar and lunar eclipses operate in 56-year cycles (see Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded). And the Stonehengers acquired this knowledge not from cosmic ubermenschen but from the very human, infinitely painstaking process of observation and notation described by Marshack in The Roots of Civilization.

Most significant of all, however -- and I suspect this is what the von Dannikenoids truly despise -- is the ever-more-unassailable probability that all these ancient cultures that did so much with unassisted human skill seem to have been matriarchies, not patriarchies. Moreover these ancient peoples universally worshiped a goddess, not a god -- and based on the evidence (again Gimbutas et all) -- she was everywhere the same, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Americas.

I think it no coincidence at all that -- just as the outlines of this tragically lost world were becoming visible through archaeology and mythology -- the von Dannikenoids began to clutter our vision with space junk.