Ancient aliens who is the guy with the hair

Below are edited excerpts from the interview. Why do you think people are fascinated by the concept of space travelers, and even believe in them?

I think it inherently asks fundamental questions. Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? This idea that perhaps in ancient times, and even in modern times, we have been and are being visited by flesh and blood extraterrestrials, i. And that, to me, is quite fascinating. How do you guys make sure that the experts and commentators in the show present sound evidence on the topic rather than something like, some guy rambling on about aliens? You also have priests and academics appear on the show.

Are you involved in choosing these guests? The only thing that makes them different from you and me is that they have access to more advanced technology. I was very happy because this show started out as a two-hour documentary. Here we are, in season [11], over episodes, and the outpouring of support from fans worldwide.

Not just in the States but in the Philippines, worldwide! In some episodes, there are a lot of notions about the afterlife. Do you think this is inextricably linked to the concept of space travelers? Yeah, look. I think that there are certain levels of existence, different levels of reality. I think that when we die, it continues because consciousness or energy does not end. It continues in some sort of way or form. I disagree with this. Now, do I think that aliens and the afterlife are sort of the same?

Not really. Because the aliens I talk about are flesh and blood human beings like you and me and they at some point, too, will die. The only thing that makes them different from you and me is that they have access to more advanced technology, and perhaps technology with which they can travel from star to star.

When giving public presentations about evolution and creationism, Gish rapidly spouted off a series of misinterpretations and falsehoods to bury his opponent under an avalanche of fictions and distortions. Ancient Aliens uses the same tactic—the fictions come fast and furious. Despite what basic cable cranks might say, Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops were not driven to extinction by aliens.

While the main point of the episode is that aliens exterminated dinosaurs to make way for our species—a sci-fi scenario accompanied by some hilarious, mashed-together footage of dinosaurs fleeing from strafing alien craft, perhaps a preview of Dinosaurs vs.

Aliens the movie—the various ancient alien experts do little more than assert that such an event must have happened. Surprise, surprise, they provide no actual evidence for their claims.

Instead, they borrow evidence for fundamentalist Christians, who are never actually identified as such. Dye is credited as a biblical archaeologist without any mention of his young earth creationist views. Ancient Aliens producers clearly did not care about the credentials or expertise of the talking heads they employed—just so long as someone said the right things in front of the camera. Bird found human footprints associated with dinosaur trackways in the vicinity of Glen Rose, Texas.

And a few local people carved fake human tracks in the same stone. Bird actually saw a pair of such forgeries at a trading post in Gallup, New Mexico, along with dinosaur tracks removed from the Glen Rose area, shortly before he left to investigate the site himself. He saw them for what they were, and was much more interested in the real dinosaur tracks imprinted in the same stone. But some creationists, blinded by dogma, have put their faith behind fakes and even dinosaur tracks that they have misinterpreted as being human footprints.

When theropod dinosaurs squatted down, for example, the backs of their lower legs, the metatarsals, left slightly curved depressions in the Cretaceous sediment, and creationists have misconstrued these markings to be the footsteps of ancient people. Dye takes up the standard creationist line that humans and dinosaurs coexisted and reappears a little later in the episode to throw his support to a different icon of creationist nonsense—the Ica stones from Peru. These famous fakes are stones engraved with images of dinosaurs and humans interacting.

They were created by farmer Basilio Uschuya and his wife, using pop culture depictions of dinosaurs in books as their guides. Despite this, both Dye and the Ancient Aliens program present the stones as if they were authentic ancient artifacts that record the survival of dinosaurs such as Triceratops to almost the present day.

Dye says that ancient people must have known a lot about dinosaurs because the stones are engraved so precisely, even though we know that precision came from Uschuya copying midth century dinosaur art so carefully. Our narrator says that scientists are skeptical about the origin of the stones, but nothing more. The show offers a few other awful gems. Our narrator goes on at length about how carbon dating is unreliable for telling the age of dinosaurs, but paleontologists do not use carbon to estimate the age of non-avian dinosaurs.

Radiocarbon dating only works for carbon-bearing materials up to about 60, years old. Instead, paleontologists use different radiometric dating techniques to constrain the history of non-avian dinosaurs.

In uranium-lead dating, for example, geologists investigate the relative abundance of uranium and lead, the element uranium decays into, to determine the age of the rock the materials were sampled from. Different dating systems are used for rocks of different ages, and these techniques have put time estimates on when dinosaurs lived.

The key is finding layers such as ash beds that contain radioactive materials and are above or below layers containing dinosaurs. But my favorite bit of babble involves the ultimate fate of the dinosaurs. Fringe television personality Franklin Ruehl makes a case for the modern or recent existence of non-avian dinosaurs by way of the coelacanth.

These archaic lobe-finned fish, which Ruehl rightly points out were around long before the first dinosaurs evolved, were thought to be extinct before a live one was hauled up off South Africa in Since then, a handful of fossil coelacanth finds has bridged the gap between their modern representatives and those that lived at the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago.

As paleontologist Darren Naish has pointed out multiple times, though, the coelacanth is a red herring. In strata from the past 66 million years or so, at least, coelacanth fossils are rare and hard to identify.