Hello and welcome to Alien Week at the Spew! In order to honor the opening of Independence Day 2, possibly the silliest, stupidest, guiltiest pleasure franchise in movie history, The Spew will have a week long dedication to all things alien.

One of my favorite shows is Ancient Aliens; a hodgepodge of bizarre and random ‘logical’ spins on human history that try to shoehorn the idea that aliens have not only visited Earth, but interacted and aided mankind in some of their greatest achievements. Yes, it is absolute pap and I should be ashamed that I watch it, yet here I am writing about it, so go figure……

The root of the show is based on the ‘Ancient Astronaut’ theory, created by Erich von Daniken with his dime store book ‘Chariots of the Gods?’ in 1968. Like most faith-based philosophies, it takes some time to get enough idiots to follow the movement and become a more popular thing. This movement took about 40 years to get where it is now, and I guess that ‘where’ is on the History Channel.

Some of my favorite theories spouted off from this show include:

• Aliens caused the dinosaurs to be extinct

• Jonah was not swallowed by a whale, but by a USO (unidentified Submersible Object)

• Aliens introduced ‘Bigfoot’ to Earth during the Ancient Egyptian times and used them as slave labor to build the pyramids. When the aliens left, they forgot to take them all

• Hitler had help from the aliens

• They think this is proof there was a rocket ship in Ancient Mayan times:

• Not only is the ‘Sword in the Stone’ a real event, the sword was not in fact a sword, but an alien laser.

• Leonardo Da Vinci and Albert Einstein met with aliens and were used as tools for human advancement

• And my personal favorite: The moon is a sort of ‘Death Star’ that is used as an alien base while they study and observes our behavior

Sounds like a good show, huh?

Most of this stuff sounds too theatrical to be taken seriously and quite possibly is dramatized for the show. But what is true is the commentators fully believe in the idea that aliens have traveled billions of light years, with a technology so extreme we as humans could never imagine it, just to build some big sand castles in Egypt that point north and leave without a trace.

This type of reasoning reminds me of Ancient Greek mythology; anything that is slightly hard to grasp with conventional wisdom is easily explained with an interesting tale involving magical or supernatural events. It is fun to tell these tales, but does really anyone believe that Poseidon is making tidal waves or Zeus is bumping around the clubs hitting on hot women? Or does anyone really think that aliens visited Earth and is the explanation of all things that are mysterious and undiscovered in this amazingly complex and wonderful world?

Well, maybe this guy does…….