Ancient Aliens Debunked

Ancient Aliens Debunked is a 2012 three-hour documentary by fundamentalist Christian[2] Chris White, which aims to debunk the Ancient Aliens series – and mostly does it.[Note 1]

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From a film perspective, a bit of background on the filmmaker [Chris White] – who narrates in the first person – would have been helpful. It isn't clear until near the end [of the 3 hour long film] that he has something of a dog in this fight. White is a Christian (which I know because he told me so), and he has a Biblical perspective that leads him to propose, for example, that the flood of Noah really happened and that global myths are connected through one exceedingly ancient source (a la the Tower of Babel). This doesn't significantly impact the good work he does in his film (it's a very minor part of the story), but it would have been helpful to know two hours or so earlier.
Skeptic Jason Colavito[1]

Unlike the goons who appear on Ancient Aliens, White actually provides references for the individual things he claims, much to his credit.[Note 2] The documentary is lined with numbers that correspond to links on his website.[3]

The elephant in the UFO

The various elements of this story are too common in ancient cultures to be chalked up to coincidence in my opinion. But the details of these consistent reports do not benefit the Ancient Astronaut theory. In fact, if anything it supports the idea that the narrative of the Bible is true, or at the very least that the specific details of that narrative were believed by cultures as geographically diverse as the Americas, the middle east, Asia, Europe and Africa.
—Chris White,[4] not being skeptical

Unfortunately, Ancient Aliens Debunked goes overboard, suddenly suggesting that the muppetry described in the Bible actually happened – including the Nephilim.[Note 3] For someone so clearly capable of seeing through the flawed reasoning behind the stipulation that "Aliensdidit", White is sadly still much enthralled by the exact same claim in a wig.

He also goes into a somewhat off-topic discussion about which of the flood myths in the Book of Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh is older, concluding that since medieval Hebrew scribes were meticulous in their copying of the first-millennium BCE text, this must mean that ancient Hebrew scribes were just as careful, and that this means the first-millennium Genesis account is more reliable than the third-millennium Gilgamesh account. The relationship of this dispute to Ancient Aliens is not clarified in the film.

gollark: (rule by me myself and lack of aardvarks)
gollark: It will be an autocratic anaardvarkocracy.
gollark: Yes. I will make all governance decisions.
gollark: You might hope that they won't get over 50%, but they might.
gollark: *Did* they? I mean, there seemed to be a lot of people thinking he was actually cool and good™ somehow.

Notes

  1. Don't throw out the debunking baby with the Christian fundamentalism bathwater!
  2. Is such a thing even possible?
  3. A view White shares with David Icke – thus completing the circle of "Jesus-or-Aliens".

References

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