Just as you thought the Ancient-Astronaut-inspired Prometheus couldn’t get any more ‘UFOey,’ a new featurette for the movie reveals that the alien planet to which the human characters travel to meet their makers is none other than Zeta(2) Reticuli.

The link in the quotation leads to another SSS post about Prometheus that features the opinions of Alex Jones (“the high priest of the conspiracy community”).  For those who don’t know Alex Jones, he’s also famous for being the guy who saw Charlie Sheen’s hernia.

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Camper loads of happily deluded new-age pilgrim-hippies (pippies sounds like a good term to coin here) have descended upon the Pyrenean village of Bugarach, where a mountain overshadowing the tiny hamlet has been labeled the landing spot for an extraterrestrial Noah’s Ark that believers expect to arrive on December 21, the mythical Mayan doomsday.

I’ve been reading about this sort of nonsense for years, but I’m still amazed at how people can be so detached from reality and, in this case, normalcy. Honestly, would anyone you know give up their lives to go camp out at a mountain waiting for ET? I’ve been to several UFO conferences and can honestly say I’ve never met anyone who expressed this kind of wish (out loud, anyway). Then again, there really is a flat earth society.

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Granted, I don’t think all of Steiger’s work is this bogus. And to be fair, Steiger doesn’t seem to do research; rather, he “reports” things found somewhere (where?). But this material gets re-cast as though it were empirical, when the string of statistics drawn from his work in this post has absolutely no basis in empirical research. Without citations of actual studies or at least peer-reviewed article references, or URLs to lab reports for these “findings,” the enterprise is irresponsible.  Less academically: it’s faked statistical BS that leads to reinforcing a false view of reality and, for these folks, themselves.

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Bullard’s book is not light reading. It is an academic work. In my view, as an academic, it’s a wonderful volume. Bullard has detailed chapters, with the expected documentation in mainly academic sources, on all the major motifs of UFO studies: descriptions of alien craft, the aliens themselves, abduction narratives, and alien mission and homeworlds. In each case, Bullard painstakingly details how virtually all the UFO anecdotal evidence can be found in ancient, medieval, and early modern tales across the globe. Importantly, the vast majority of these correlations have nothing to do with other planets, inter-planetary travel, or extraterrestrials. That is, though the correlations are overwhelmingly present, it is only in the contemporary era that narratives about abduction and “otherworldly visitation” conforms to anything we would recognize as high technology. His point in this effort is to raise question of how any of the UFO phenomena could in reality be about visitors from space given the vast arrays of correlations. Good question.

Bullard’s (for the most part) explanation is the psycho-social approach. This is not a view that says a culture produces these episodes or encounters and their descriptions. Rather, it is the encounter with the anomalous that produces the descriptions — and the descriptions are far more likely to not be about genuine aliens from space than other deep-seated thoughts, fear, beliefs, yearnings, etc. The reason the overlaps are so high, reasons Bullard, is that experiences are parsed in such a way that new mythologies are constructed that serve the same fucntion or outlet as older ones.  The garb changes because we are living in a different era, our lives defined by technology and the “final frontier” of space.

Bullard doesn’t take a dogmatic stance on this, though. He simply feels it has high explanatory value, but not complete explanatory power. He leaves room for truly anomalous events that might include genuine extraterrestrial contact, and outlines in some details how such experiences might be winnowed from the those experiences for which the psycho-social explanation can best account.

I would encourage anyone interested in UFOs to read this book, and to keep it as a handy reference for its coverage and source material. In particular, those for whom the UFO subject goes beyond the nuts and bolts (questions of physics and reverse engineering which a priori assume that most UFOs are physical craft of non-human origin) will be well served by Bullard’s focus on how the UFO subject molds and produces religious experience and worldview.

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If you want to have your faith in your fellow man lowered (again) by such nonsense (but perhaps raised by the fact that there are those hardy souls who investigate this sort of nonsense), have a look at this post from Silver Screen Saucers.

This “controversy” revolves around the wacky claim made months ago that yet another enlightened researcher (Raul Julia-Levy) had new, incontrovertible proof that the Mayans had been contacted by an ET civilization and was going to release it to a dutifully astonished world. To tease the world Mr. Julia-Levy before his explosive documentary film (“Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond“) made history, he released unprovenanced (and surely not Photoshopped) pictures of saucers and Mayan sculptures. <GASP>

Even more shocking, the Catholic Church was purportedly in cahoots with this shocking revelation. <B-MOVIE FEMALE SCREAM>

Predictably, as the post details (with links), Mr. Levy seems to be nothing more than a con man.  Too bad. George Lucas’ Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull film was so awful that I was hoping this one would be better.

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