The post modern Western minds of the audience succumb to the present arrogant assumptions that we are more advanced than any of our predecessors. This makes it possible for pervayers of the _had to be aliens_ narrative to argue that a particular marvel of our ancient times could not have been of human origin a priori. This very assumption of our present-times superiority to the past peoples is supported in the mind of the audiences with technological anecdotes such as space walks, medical break throughs and so on.

However, these very anecdotes of our prowess are based on a measuring stick established by the very modern mind that judges us superior.

Shall we mention that the ancient Greeks, Western in attribution, believed that mankind actually regressed from its golden ages to its lesser state?

Shall we state that Socrates was arguably the first to die for the monotheistic faith?

Should we call to mind the Persian religion, namely Zoraster, who prefigured the more modern awareness that there is a battle of good versus evil in both the worldly and unwordly sense?

How about the accuracy of the ancients in math, geometry and more? Perhaps their calculation of the distance around the Earth being nearly exactly right?

Shall we point out the evidence for sub cranial surgery among the Greeks? Do we point to their invention of the steam engine?

None of these innovations are properly treated by the producers of alien astronaut as gods theories. If they were to be, it would undercut the whole point of their shows and the revenues that they draw.

Perhaps the Anthenian invention of democrary would be recalled by producers? While that democracy failed and none have lasted long, the republic it lead to under the Romans lasted for hundreds of years longer than any of our modern ones. Yes, even America's republic of just some 250 yrs.

If the producers of these shows were to widen the scale to measure western moderns against their forebears, then we would excel over them in more than just space and technological machines. Modern humans also excel their ancestors in matters of whole-sale killing of millions over less than a century, false tolerance and near universal enslavement to debt. Most certainly the moderns are superior in materialistic ways, but largely more deficient in the spiritual progress inherented from classical times.

Most notably it is the viewers themselves, who are encumbered not only by arrogance of superiority, but also by a different educational rigor that just a few generations ago. When the producers explain that the pyramids of Giza are beyond _even todays engineers_, it could only be something extra terrestrial that could have built them. For if we were to attribute such things to humans, we may just have to debuse ourselves of our assumptions.

Perhaps, just maybe, history is not a time line of linear developement -- forever improving on the past -- rather one of progression, squander of the knowledge, loss of knowledge, regression, and then to repeat again. After all, the Renaissance was really the re-discovery of ancient treatises so carefully preserved by Christian communities in the West, as well as those still in use among Eastern Christian when Islam came in contact with them -- and spread them westward. That is right, religion preserved science, arts and even the faiths of antiquity -- waiting for humankind to re-emerge from their dark days of losing one of the greatest civilizations. They preserved these things as a sign of their faith in God's presence in our history. And they started doing so, as their writings revealed that they saw the collapse of civilized man. Not unlike this very point in our immediate history.

Now, then, hopefully having made the reader second-guess the producers appeal to as the source for anomalies in the human historical record, he or she will permit that you cannot prove an argument from an assumption. And if the reader accept this, they may allow that the assumption of present superiority can not be used to prove that the alien did this or that.

Moving on, there is a wonderfully ingenious, addictive element in these shows, namely, a secret insiders view. Something you were sure you knew. Intelligence that you possess that only a few can comprehend. You the viewer have a special knowledge, an inner understanding, which is absent in others. You and we ( as in the shows producers) know something that others do not. Even worse, others do not have the where-with-all to comprehend -- like YOU can. Further, your forebears did not have access to the kind of knowledge that we do. You are a special club. You are in the _in group_. You are of the enlightened. You have secret insights, and stay with our in crowd and we will keep you in the loop. By the way, stay tuned for these important advertisements.

And this would rope anyone in. It is self-complimenting. It feeds the notion of superiority. Providing comfort. When you are in the intelligentsia, you are taken care of. In a words, there is nothing knew under the sun. In a different context, this would have been called gnosticism -- something that was roundly dealt with and defeated in the early years of Christianity. However, the gnosticism of today, and in this context, is akin to having knowledge and the intelligence to understand something that is inaccessible to others. It is the difference between intelligence, and wisdom. Both of which arguably in short supply today among the Western minds.

Often the alien as gods popularity, has a close cousin. The dead sea scrolls and the discovery of the gnostic books like Gospel of Thomas for example. Of course, such writings would not have been discovered unless religious groups of Judeo Christian origins had not carefully preserved them. Much like we discussed about the monastic scribes as the Western world fell the last time, these desert groups, who lived before, during and immediately after Jesus Christ, lived in community and made no judgement of the merit of what was being copied. Such was the Gospel of Thomas and other Christian gnostic texts. At that time recently after Christ, these books were of a type not unlike modern gnosticism of the special elite. The Book adds nothing to Christianity, except to argue that an undocumented knowledge is required salvation ; making Christianity a religion of the few and not the many from simpliest to the greatest. The elect only understand the hidden. And yet, this horrible vision of the few over the many, the special over the people, is readily embraced with all the trappings to distinguish us from them. Worse still, it is the modern _know-it-alls_ that bring their conspiracy, untrusting of authority et al into the equation. They see only suppression by the early church fathers as if it were a watergate-like event. Yes, these Church authorities defined which books defined the Bible, keeping some and tossing others like ones found in the caves of the Dead Sea. And they did this as these books reflected what Faith had been handed down and preserved since Christ. Alas, viewers do not understand the context from where it came. Indeed they do not allow for the possibility (true as it is)that this text of so-called Thomas was not the Christianity that Christ taught, nor of the scope for making believers of all nations. Rather it had more in common with the mystery cults of those times.

To be clearer even, the extension of modern gnosticism, with its appeal to the alien gods and obscure texts, leads to another assumption ; namely, the reading of historical events without care or grounding in the context of the times and peoples in which those events happened. Further, the modern mind absorbs what is fed and lacks the impetus to employ moderating questions. Even the modern mind applauds itself in believing it uses critical thinking as viewers -- whilst an advertisment blasts between segments.

While ignoring the book titles directly appearing under the names of nearly each expert they line up, there seems to be great suspicion regarding the Bible itself. While not defining the Bible as the one Christ Himself (actually) used as their Old Testament, nor defining the New Testament as the one the Church defined in the first few hundred years after Jesus, they zero in on stories of Enoch for instance. Enoch, no less, the figure wisked away to Heaven in a chariot of fire. For the biblical, primitive as he was, author mistook the chariot as alien tech. Feeding into this notion are those obviously evil Christian authorities of the 300s and 400s, who decided arbitrarily to suppress as much of Enoch as it own book. Yet these same authorities, presumed by moderns to be bad intentioned, included much more in the Canon (of the Scriptures) than the most modern of freedom figther, Luther, did in his re-defining of the Bible.

Before we judge these Church fathers as far from well meaning, perhaps we may allow for gaps in the viewer's education of matters of the last 2000 years. Unlike the producers, who go out of their way today to not appeal to God but rather to alien gods , these fathers of the early Christian days were beset by every imaginable heresy -- with a few of these notions represented by adherents that readily put the fathers to persecution and death. Well, perhaps today, we are also beset by many a heresy. But unlike then, the heresies of neo-paganism lack the novelty and intellectual rigors of our forebears.