Try this: Ancient man did not make stuff up as we tend to say he did. Take Hell, for example.
It lies underground. It is a place of fire and brimstone. Horrible tortures. Eternal suffering.
To the Ancients, Hell or Hades was a literal place. That’s because it was a cave leading to a volcanic thermal vent. They crawled into darkness. It got hotter as they went, and noxious fumes — brimstone is sulfur — gave them hallucinations that tormented them. Vents of steam sounded like perpetual screaming. And there was, indeed, fire, even rivers and lakes of fire.
Troy was considered mythical until Schliemann found it. He also dug right through it to deeper layers but still, he did find it, by following Homer’s The Illiad.
Atlantis is probably Thera, on which we find the mysterious remains of a high civilization we’ve called the Etruscans. Atlanteans, perhaps? Very possibly. Thera is the crescent-shaped remains of an island blown to bits by a cataclysmic volcanic eruption/explosion. It would also have created tremendous tidal waves in the Mediterranean. Survivors of the initial blast would certainly have drowned, and very few would have been lucky enough to survive. Worst, ports and coastal cities all around the area would have flooded; this would have made an impact on history but a vague one perhaps, diffused by distances and confused by time and speculation. Few would have known for sure what had happened, but many knew something big happened; perfect ground to plan myth. Plato just wrote down what he’d heard, as he said.
And even if Atlantis proves to be elsewhere or otherwise, its basis in fact seems unsinkable.
And what of the tales of sky people? People from the sky who came down to teach man civilization, language, and culture feature in many of our oldest traditions, from Navaho and Zoroastrian to Sanskrit. Were these based on plain observation and simple fact?
According to most of these ancient tales, the people who came down from the sky had a falling out, fought a terrible war that included flying machines and death rays, then left, rising back up into the sky.
Most presume they came from and returned to the stars, but what if they just flew over the horizon, or the nearest mountain range, to and from another place on Earth? No space travel would be needed to explain an advanced Earth culture’s envoi to a much more primitive people. Even today we’ve seen cargo cults form in WW II from dropped supplies and planes flying over stone age people who knew nothing of the world beyond their limited horizon.
And if these people were advanced that far over our barely-civilized ancestors, and had they maintained their technological edge, how much more advanced than us might they still be?
Hello UFOs.
The entire ETH need not apply, although the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis appeals so strongly, now as then. that avoiding it is difficult. Where are they? skeptibunkers demand triumphantly, preening for cameras. How can such an advanced enclave be invisible?
They’re not, obviously, or we wouldn’t be talking about them. They are glimpsed regularly, everywhere. More often in first-world nations but not exclusively among the beneficiaries of technology; every primitive culture has its tales and sightings, too.
As to where they are, why we can’t see them with our fancy satellites and spy cameras in low earth orbit, they may be under the oceans, even underground under the oceans. Double insulation of that sort would provide them with nearly impenetrable protection from our brief forays into that realm. We know more about the surface of the Moon than the bottom of the seas. That truism demonstrates where they may be.
And, as if to support this notion, UFOs are often seen leaving and entering bodies of water, even traveling under the water. And if they can outmaneuver our planes and baffle our radar, do much slower ships and submarines, with their sonar, have much chance of tracking these things, what ever they may be?
The more one looks into the matter, the less the ETH is needed, although it may, of course, prove correct in the long run. We simply do not know.
What we do know is, these things are real, and no one knows what they are. This would seem to make them a glaring, perfect target for scientific inquiry but science, in the form of closed-minded scientists afraid of ridicule from colleagues and the public, and most especially vicious politicians following science-killing agendas, has so far refused to take UFOs seriously. Even if we call them Unknown Aerial Phenomena, (and yes, they represent a host of differing things, not a single consolidated thing), the ridicule is hurled like hoots, howls, and scat at the monkey house when the topic is broached. Talking heads of media are only too glad to smirk and sneer and make sad little jokes at others’ expense for once; lets them turn the tables a bit.
But the simple truth is, if we do not investigate unknown phenomena scientifically, we will not progress in our understanding of them.
This goes not only for UFOs, but for ghosts and other unexplained things. Manifestations of the paranormal abound, and are promptly laughed off or ignored. Such an abiding lack of curiosity about what is obviously a wider, wilder, weirder world than we choose to examine is puzzling. Yes, our senses filter; this is why technology is invented, to extend their range and subtlety, their sensitivity and complexity.
More practical than curiosity is the fact that genuine advancements, the kind that make discoverers and inventors famous, the kind that create entire industries and create huge wealth and scads of jobs, come from poking around blindly in the dark, playing far afield, and generally examining the unexplored areas of human knowledge. Potential payoffs for investigating fringe topics are astronomical, if also rare and precious and difficult to attain. In other words, most worth doing is the most arduous. Are we, then, lazy and avoiding work?
Charles Fort called the data science shoves aside with every intention of ignoring The Damned. All those rains of fishes, talking dogs that vanish in puffs of smoke, and UFOs, all those ghosts, all those things that go bump in the night of our disparate existences, have been tossed into the far, dark corner where science keeps its midden. We find there the broken crockery of its noble endeavor, the detritus of its discarded and disregarded willful ignorance. Sorting through it, we find wondrous things, potentially transformative things, and things we simply cannot yet begin to grasp.
We few who venture into that corner find marvels, or at least glimpse the marvels there to be found, if only we could bring some light, some science, to bear upon them.
Look back at how much of our so-called myth and legend prove to have a solid factual core, then ask yourself if we can afford, as our time on this planet grows short, to ignore any chance we might have of finding a way out of the mess we’ve made for ourselves.
If ancient man was being blunt, why should we prefer the fanciful? If ancient man stared at the world unflinching, why should we prefer escapist fantasy and willful ignorance of entire categories of thought and inquiry? Are we witnessing the decline of the human spirit, the one that drove us to discover and create so much over the past few centuries? Are we seeing mankind’s senescence taking hold?
If so, can we rejuvenate? That, too, was an old myth, along with longevity and maybe eternal life. How absurd and self-defeating if we tripped over the very things that might expand and elevate us, simply because we had our eyes stubbornly closed, our gazes archly turned aside, our thoughts kept strictly away from the very kinds of things that held our salvation.
And make no mistake, we need saved from ourselves, and only we can do it — if only we’ll open ourselves to all the experiences existence offers.
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