I Don’t Want to Believe

First, let me get one thing clear: I don’t know anything.

When I wrote about “Two people who couldn’t possibly be real” there are a number of possibilities to account for my perception of them as uncanny or unnatural. I posited that the younger of the two, a teenager of ethereal beauty but possessing no physical or sexual attraction seemed to be completely fey and detached. The older woman spoke to her in language that seemed to be without structure, syntax, and no repetition of words or sounds. When she became aware that I was in range of her voice, she switched quickly to English, but that was weird. She pointed at the Corner restaurant which had “Baltimore’s Best Ribs” on window canopies, and I was stricken with the intuition that it was an obvious thing to say, but that she had never eaten there. A lie, a diversion, and far too obvious.

I don’t want to believe in faeries, no more than I want to believe in leprechauns, extraterrestrials or a precursor race called “The Annunaki.”

I don’t want to believe in “Planet X” or “Nibiru,” either.

This is all folk myths and pseudoscience, and although entertaining and sometimes scary, it’s utter crap.

God created us, not Akkadian, Sumerian or Babylonian sky gods. The persistent need to put a face to God gives rise to these things. We can’t understand God in any way that pleases us, making him and his laws terrifying. So humans create their own. The most historical pantheon divided God into many lesser gods with specialized powers. These were the Greco-Roman gods of centuries past, including the offspring of the Titans: Zeus, Hermes, Hera, Aphrodite.

The ruins of their temples still remain in many places in Greece, Rome and around the Mediterranean. But they weren’t real.

From ages past, the damage of these fictions are readily visible around us. The results are very frightening to me.

“History” is a cable and streaming host of everything but history, and according to experts, capitalizes on the credulity of improperly or unschooled people who find “Ancient Aliens” believable. What’s scary is that these people in turn demand evidence from their government, evidence they say has been covered up in many conspiracies.

This has caused me to hate conspiracy theories more than any other genre on YouTube, websites and TV. Oh, and books, which, sadly, include Time-Life, Reader’s Digest and more. Even “Christian” authors have published such garbage. And those are not Christians.

You can’t fit mythology that suits you into the text of the Bible. You can try to, but someone will always come forward and present a meticulous debunking of every word you’ve said or written.

Take giants for example. You’ve seen photographs online of graves carefully dug around to reveal an incredibly huge skeleton. But those kinds of hoaxes have been around for a century, and one such perpetrator was P.T. Barnum himself. Yeah, the guy who sewed a fish’s tail to a monkey’s torso and sold tickets to see a mermaid. I don’t know how convinced people were, but he made money. If he really claimed “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and this quote is disputed, he was right. People will believe almost anything, and there are always people around willing to capitalize on their gullible ignorance.

In the linked video, you’re going to see a very honest man talking about how buried skeletons are mis-measured, and I doubt that anyone like myself would make such mistakes because they’re so obvious as to be glaring.

As flesh decomposes, bones disarticulate. They spread out with the intrusion of soil, water and other things so that measuring a seemingly intact skeleton is never going to give an actual height.

Ancient bones or fossils of mammoths were once thought, because of their skulls, to be long-dead cyclopidians. One-eyed giants dating to ancient myth. Those kind. Yeah….

People are willing to believe fantastic stories, as proven throughout history. Would-be Messiahs and Antichrists alike have enjoyed the massive followings they gathered with lies and propaganda as tools. How this happened is different yet the same in every case: give people hope or promise revenge.

Therefore it is not difficult to understand that a photograph alone can fool a horde of people.

Two clever fakes from the past that still fool people today. Top: “Civil War soldiers” pose with a recently killed pteranodon. Bottom: a recently killed giant grasshopper. Both are fakes, but for the technology of the times, cleverly done.

Pterosaurs have been reported around the world, chiefly in Texas, USA, and New Guinea. Josh Gates tried hunting them in the latter, but due to the arduous journey and hostile terrain, had to abort the quest.

In the Congo River Basin, there were reports of living sauropods, or dinosaurs like the apatosaurus, formerly known as brontosaurus. The tales were told by the local tribes, and what Professor Roy Makal never guessed was that these locals had a sense of humor. He never found a dinosaur of any species. He found a ton of mosquitoes, though.

As far as extraterrestrials flying UFOs are concerned, there’s no credible evidence to support the notion that beings from across light years of space have ever been here. If there were, we would know. No possible cover-up could conceal it; someone with creds would talk. Of the ones who have, their accounts are unprovable. I don’t doubt that people see things they can’t account for, but I refuse to believe that they are aliens and UFOs.

Jesus did warn his apostles, though, that before he returned, there would be fearful signs in the heavens. This is from Luke 21, and it says that there will be earthquakes in divers (sic) places, and famines and pestilence (plagues) and terrifying signs from Heaven.

I don’t know what this means, because different versions place a comma in different parts of the dialogue. This is a sign of interpretation, something we are free to do, but not if it changes contextual meaning.

Interpretation of scripture and what is and isn’t in the canon is hotly debated. The dialogue in Luke 21 isn’t, but it does show how men have taken liberties with the original texts.

The idea of a worldwide flood may not be so fanciful as one might think. There is evidence for and against it, and I’m not in a position to enter any arguments about it. If the flood account is true, I believe it took place so far back from antediluvian times that we’ll never find evidence of it. And again, predating humanity, at any stage of evolution, we find no geological evidence of such a great event.

That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It may just mean that some things were hidden from us because faith isn’t supposed to be dependent on evidence. I keep reading click bait headlines about the tomb of Christ being found, or some other sensational find.

I’m cautious of what I read, watch or buy into, because the false paths are too numerous for me to navigate. I want to believe God. Not some AI headline made for clicks.

I’ve encountered many strange things in my life, including true, pure, evil. My best comfort is with God. Not a pill, not a drink, and certainly not in the words of others who want to use Jesus as a weapon.

Believe. Have the faith of a child, knowing that you know very little. That’s what faith is, not looking for evidence of giants, empty tombs or alien races which genetically engineered us.

One last thing. I know that there are those whose prejudices deny what humans have accomplished. They don’t believe that men could have built pyramids. Or Stonehenge. I know that people believe in weird creatures, the great Smithsonian cover-up, and more.

You’re free to examine these stories, but remember that God can make anything. With him, all things are possible. In the end, I don’t know what was giving me the weird vibes of those two women. Or if faeries are real.

I just don’t believe, and I don’t want to.

And that’s okay.

———–U F O———–

A report came out about UAPs which means unidentified aerial phenomenon. It made the news. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I’d already seen the videos of cockpit footage from the Pentagon or whatever department released it a year or more earlier. After 2020, it’s difficult to nail down the dates of certain things because that year was a hard reboot. The new software was a hog. It took up so much disk space that some things sort of seem distant in odd ways. The screen was now indicating that there had been a major system failure, and there was now a string of programs in place as a fail safe. But it doesn’t turn out to be helpful. The virus that led to a cascade failure left others dead, their computers rendered nothing more than tall coasters. Or a footrest for one foot as they sat at their desks.

Others had the virus, made it to reboot, but are compromised with leftover damage. Suddenly, nothing was the same anymore. We should all have known that nothing would ever be the same.

So forgive me, but I don’t much care about a report that I honestly think everyone should have known didn’t say much. My concern is you. So let’s talk.

A nine page report. Incredibly brief for an American government document, yes? Because if there’s one thing us Yanks are good at, indeed insist on, it’s printing a whole forest’s worth of bullshit on paper, even this far into the digital age. Nine pages can’t possibly say much when a House bill used up half the wood in the Rocky Mountain forests and the bill is only about who can access public restrooms.

Could have just used a page and say the same shit, saved the rest for music rolls to put in those restrooms. Or maybe we could just have spared the fucking trees and perhaps kept some endangered species from going extinct. Fucking paper pushers.

And yet the “report” is nine pages.

For a subject as big as UFOs.

That’s right. I still use that acronym. I’m tired of people changing shit there’s nothing wrong with.

And if you really thought that those nine pages actually contained anything new, the joke’s on you. It doesn’t. I finally did read an article about it. I just randomly clicked something that showed up in a Google search.

For what it’s worth, I don’t give a shit about UFOs, and you know why?

First, people are hungry. They’re sick. Poor. Dying. So WTF?

Second. The fucking bullshit stories of “contactees” who claim to be in telepathic communication with extraterrestrials. There are and have been more of them than you think and they’re not all acid-droppers. And it’s not some metaphysically weird thing, it’s called psychosis. I laugh. Seriously, I cringe first, but then I laugh. And I think of George Adamski.

He was a guy so keen to prove flying saucers were real that he made one, photographed it and then sold books and gave lectures. People believed him to the point of becoming a cult. Lectures brought big money and of course, back then being the era of the black and white home cameras that had film rolls one had to develop in a dark room, and pros still used plates, people paid cash for prints of his photographs. The cash rolled in and the fucker got rich screwing multitudes of gullible people.

What’s worse is that almost immediately debunkers went to work and this candidate for an asylum just kept raking in the currency.

He claimed to have met an extraterrestrial named Orthon. The guy was Venusian but somehow Nordic. Okay. A Venusian from the Netherlands. Gotcha.

A Hollywood photographer and a few personal friends failed to back his story up and Project Blue Book tore him apart.

He did things that could be prosecuted today as fraud. Possibly more, since he chose to tangle with the FBI. They just thought he was a kook and he was never arrested.

But he and others like him caused damage to the serious research that concerned UFOs. It was and remains a mysterious subject that has troubled people for ages. Stephen Hawking warned that if extraterrestrials ever did come here, they wouldn’t be friendly.

Some of the most fertile ground for hoaxes, UFOs are troubling by nature, but after the History Channel turned into the Erich von Däniken and the Giorgio Tsoucalos channel, it’s hard for me to take anything on the subject seriously.

It’s fair to call me on this; with the Travel Channel now having jack shit to do with travel, so many bullshit shows with fake or scripted content regarding the paranormal could well have you skeptical about my encounters with demons or whatever the hell they are. And I would understand. I’m personally a skeptic about Bigfoot and UFOs, but I do give others the benefit of the doubt. That something did happen in the sky or woods is not my problem; I don’t dismiss every witness as a liar or delusional. I just see little evidence of what’s being seen. To date there has never been a body, bodypart, live specimen or clear footage of a sasquatch. Does it conclusively prove the bloody things aren’t real?

I can’t say that.

There’s scant evidence of spirits, ghosts and demons too, but does that prove they aren’t real?

Hardly.

I’ve been through too many times when I knew good and well that truly weird shit was going on.

Like that fucking cat. And the Angel of Death. And that thing in my room, and the totally haunted houses I’ve lived in. And the time I masqueraded as a ghost hunter. Man was that a trip. In my life and times of being an asshole, that one stands out to this day as one of the most dumbass things I have ever done.

If you have had strange, unexplained things happen around or to you, then you honestly want to be believed. You don’t like being scorned or made sport of. And nobody enjoys being laughed at.

Same here, my friend. But this is why I demand of myself that I listen, without judgement, to people who are trying to simply understand what the fuck happened.

Because humans are damn intelligent creatures, inquisitive, curious, hungry for knowledge. When something that we don’t understand hits us upside the head, we may run away. Some of us never go back out of a desire for survival. There’s nothing wrong with that. Others will keep on sniffing around until they are worn out, find what they need, or sometimes both at once.

As for alien abductions, I’m a definite skeptic and that’s not likely to change. On this I make a stand:

•I believe that something did happen unless we’re being lied to.

•Theres an explanation.

•That explanation may not be the one people think of the most.

Because interstellar travel remains so improbable that I can scarce believe any race or species has ever accomplished it. If you look into a telescope at the star Betelgeuse, the light you see left that star only a few decades after Christopher Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue. Even travel to a nearby star system is a twisty problem for us, and to get to a system with what we figure is a habitable planet is far from our reach. To think that it’s possible other civilizations have mastered the physics, maths and technology to get to us is a bit of a stretch. As for UFOs which seem to change directions at high speeds, that is, speeds our fastest interceptors cannot attain, if extraterrestrials are inside, then they are definitely nothing at all like us. Weve seen so much science fiction that we think of aliens as humanoid but nothing like us could survive such maneuvers at-speed. If humanoid, however, they would have to have conquered the problems of density, gravity and physics for their craft’s interiors.

There’s a snag here, though. Aliens usually fall into the general descriptions of the “grays”, but many different descriptions of aliens have been reported. The odds of one species finding us are steep enough, but dozens of them, all from different planets? I think not.

Such technology would be so outside of our understanding that the reverse-engineering theory (or more accurately, conspiracy theory) is almost automatically ludicrous. We’re smart, but not that smart.

As for the theory that aliens work with our government, or have worked with it in the past, giving tutorials on bits of tech, I call bullshit. No, I’ve gone far enough with the benefit of a doubt and can’t go any further. This theory sometimes includes the government allowing aliens to abduct people for experiments in exchange for technology. What a crock of shit. Don’t expect me to eat out of it.

I guess in the end what we have is another bullshit ploy by the government to string people along. The real mystery is why. Why can’t our elected leaders be fucking honest with us?

I don’t give a damn if the cockpit footage was released, leaked or faked. It changed nothing as far as I’m concerned, and nine pages of more of the same can’t change that.

Stay skeptical. If you want some bullshit to digest that’s far less boring or insulting, follow a youtuber who posts scary videos. At least you’ll get a yuk or two out of it.