John P. M. wrote:Sorry about 'resurrecting' this monstrosity, but I've just seen this documentary now that seems to be rather new, and which goes through pretty much all the 'evidence' cited by the 'Ancient Aliens' series on the History channel.

This documentary is over three hours long though , so set it to 720p HD, full screen view, grab a cup of coffee, tea or whatever, sit back and enjoy.

Some of it was known to me already, but a lot of it was new to me, or explains very vital details that are left out by Däniken and his ilk, who are lying for their beliefs (huh - here too, eh?). The lying, misrepresenting and quote mining is most evident about halfway through the movie, so if you don't want to watch all of it, jump past the first sections about building techniques, to about 1:21:00.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9w-i5oZqaQ[/youtube]

I like how it hits a brick wall at the last 30 minutes and adopts an equally batty position itself with a worldwide flood and NOAH.

Also, what it says about the Biblical Hebrew language having a rich vocabulary for its time - not really, in fact, Hebrew poetry utilized parallelism to such a degree simply because the tiny vocabulary made it challenging for such poetry not to come off as very boring repetitions of the same words. (If poetry were trivially easy to come up with, you'll usually see some other poetic devices adopted that force some kind of challenge onto the poets - how else would a poet be able to show off his skills? If half the words in your language rhyme with each other, using rhyme in poetry isn't going to be very impressive either.) (However, the point about the translation of the Ezekiel vision still is pretty good - he just adds a linguistically uninformed bit of bullshit to strengthen his argument.)

Zwaarddijk wrote:
I like how it hits a brick wall at the last 30 minutes and adopts an equally batty position itself with a worldwide flood and NOAH.

What? I watched the whole thing and didn't even notice? The only thing I can recall right now was that he mentioned how a flood story is told throughout many cultures, and that it would make sense if the stories had a common origin. I didn't catch him saying the biblical flood story was true though?

[edit] Damnit, I must have been doing something else at that point. He does in fact say that this supports the idea that they all had common ancestry from the few who survived the flood... There were a couple of other things that were said as well in support of the biblical narrative, but when I heard it the first time, I figured they meant that those stories were believed by those ancient people, not that they were actually true. Now I kinda feel like a boob for having posted the video in the first place... [/edit]


Still - I learned a few things and saw a few images during this documentary that were indeed a help in debunking some of these claims.

first things first, an ancient alien "debunking" from a christian? Really? Sky gods...sure...aliens...not a chance

http://www.philipcoppens.com/aaq_art5.html

Try listening at 2:49 onwards for about three minutes. He quite clearly says all of us share eight ancestors that have spent some time on a boat. At 2:52 onwards, he defends thinking that the Biblical story is superior in accuracy to Sumerian stories. He retrojects the Hebrew scribes' rules by some centuries - we only know this "meticulous attention to detail" to have appear in post-Temple times. The DSS bear this out: there's two main families of variations of it, Masorete-like renderings and LXX-like renderings, but if you take the rest of the variations - variations that are not Masorete- or LXX-like - that's a large percentage of the DSS texts. So we know that still in 2nd temple times, that kind of meticulous attention to detail was not universal among Jewish scribes.

Bullshit claims about the Hebrew language appears just a few seconds after the two hour mark. As a contrary argument, look at this decidedly religiously partisan source (also Christian):

http://www.biblicalhebrew.com/introduction.htm wrote:Biblical Hebrew has a very small vocabulary (about a quarter of the size of that used by Shakespeare and approximately 1% of the 660,000+ words contained in the Oxford English Dictionary).

That link is not in lieu of real sources, I just bet you don't want to read a Biblical Hebrew grammar in Danish (which is the first scholarly source I've seen to make that claim and the only one I have a copy of in my library, but it's not an unusual claim. It's probably not present in every grammar of BH, but you can find it often enough in relevant scholarly literature.) Strong's concordance lists 8000 roots - but many of those are artificially separated, and not a few are personal names (he seems to list the same root twice whenever it's used both as an ordinary noun and a name)

A further elaboration on this given in the same source:

In other words, dâbhâr means both the 'word' itself and its accompanying creative 'act'. It occurs over 1400 times in Scripture and is translated by 85 different English words in the KJV (Its root verb, dâbhar, occurs over 1100 times and required 45 different English words). This reinforces the need to know the underlying Hebrew text and language as misinterpretations can easily be made based upon different English words whilst the same Hebrew word can be behind all of them. Dâbhâr can also be translated by 'power', 'purpose', 'book', 'provision', 'reason', 'work', 'matter', 'thing', 'cause' or 'commandment' (e.g., the 10 commandments), it could be a written report, single utterance, whole book, or prophetic message.

Sure, English "word" can also be translated by more than one different word into Hebrew - dabhar or milla - those two probably overlap rather a lot as well (most of the semantic area covered by 'word' is covered by both of those), but not entirely - dabhar seems to be much wider in scope. However, dabhar can be translated into a wide wide range of words in English (word, book, statement, thing, action, order, ...), and millah is somewhat less wide in scope (word, statement, discourse, utterance, ...). Looking at a Biblical Hebrew dictionary, you will end up noticing that this kind of pattern prevails throughout Biblical Hebrew: words with very imprecise meanings, where context and grammar and so on helps specifying the meaning of the utterance. I don't say that Biblical Hebrew is exceptionally imprecise, but at least it's not exceptionally precise.

LIFE wrote:

Pyramids of Giza
Similar to many other megalithic sites around the world, the Pyramids of Giza have been repeatedly attributed to extraterrestrials throughout the years, mostly because of the sheer magnitude of their construction. According to believers, the technology needed to build the massive monuments was not available to the Egyptians during the time they were built. The cuts and placement of the stones are said to be so precise that we cannot recreate them even in modern times. The placement of the pyramids themselves and the measurements contained within are also said to support the Ancient Astronaut Theory, such as ... the three Giza Pyramids correlating with the constellation Orion. Modern measuring techniques have proven hopeful ideas like those to be false, yet the rumors persist. The Pyramids of Giza do display a remarkable knowledge of engineering and measuring for their time period.
...

IMO, the layout of the Giza pyramids very possibly DID reflect the idea in the then pharoah's mind that he needed to be transported to the Orion constellation. The stars certainly mattered to the ancient Egyptians. What many archeologists who attacked this particular point might have missed is that, when you look up at the stars, you get a mirror image of the map that you see when you look down at the ground.
Of course, the date of construction was "only" about 4.5KYr ago, not 10.5KYr ago as claimed by Graham Hancock, so no mystery advanced aliens are required.