UFO Deliria

I can barely watch The History Channel’s Ancient Astronaut series (that airs during week nights on the obtuse cable channel).

While I can hardly object to AA speculation, I do find many of those extolling the idea(s) that extraterrestrials have interceded into the affairs of mankind, since time immemorial and are still doing so, a bit over the top.

One of the premises is that alien species have given humanity access to advanced methodologies and procedures that helped create edifices: stone buildings and walls, like the pyramids or temples such as Angkor Wat.

Those are advanced constructs?

Show me where mankind has pushed ahead by an alien intervention.

But that isn’t my problem with the show(s).

It’s the people who are chosen to narrate the speculations. (I’ll excuse my pal, Nick Redfern; he’s usually judicious and can use, I think, the few shekels he’s paid to make an appearance.)

The others, Linda Moulton Howe, David Childress, David Wilcock, and George Noory, not to mention the fellow with goofy hair (whom I like actually), Giorgio Tsoukalos, et al. have a kind of look, which is getting more temperamentally askew as the series has gone on.

One can find that look referenced in Andrew Scull’s book, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, From the Bible to Freud … [Princeton University Press, NJ, 2015], especially Page 13, where the frontispiece of Bucknill and Tukes Manual of Psychological Medicine [1858] shows visages of persons whose facial expressions “indicated” insanity. (That kind of determination has long been discarded and is outmoded, but it has a validity I’m going to use here.)

Watching those named above, one can see a kind of ecstasy that borders on delirium.

A recent show [9 p.m. Friday, 8/26/16] had Whitley Strieber and Dr. David Jacobs, the latter a bit more composed than Strieber, but still qualifying for a place on the Bucknill/Tukes frontispiece.

The series program was about persons allegedly abducted by aliens (extraterrestrials) and returned to their home planet (Earth) to await some kind of alien trigger to do something.

The descent into a more serious kind of delirium (or madness) seemed strikingly vivid to me, by virtue of head movements (Childress especially) and the state of ecstasy that appeared to control Strieber, who has come to believe his fictive writings are reality.

Like the topics of this blog, the Ancient Astronaut speculations have spread to speculations that take in every peripheral element extant: AA medicines, AA architecture, AA interest in cows, AA influence on fashion and the arts, et cetera.

And I’m open to such speculation(s) obviously, as silly as they are (as mine often are).

But I remain level-headed in topic or out and my visage (countenance) has remained rather steady.

I haven’t lapsed in to giddy, euphoric adumbrations quite yet.

Yet, anyone who has followed the Ancient Astronaut scenarios over the years will readily see a slippery slope leading to outrageous and delirious rumination.

It’s not just the eyes of these people, but their entire mannerisms and thought processes that are getting odder and odder.

They have actually come to believe their speculations.

RR