I've been viewing videos from your site, and following links to related videos. Some make sense, some are completely laughable, some are just weird. Especially when the subject is the Anunnaki and Planet X or Nibiru. Zacharia Sitchin is the primary source for this stuff, claiming to have translated the ancient Sumerian and Babylonian texts with special attention to anything that might refer to visitors from the heavens or beyond the stars. He takes it literally rather than as legend or metaphor. In video interviews he's calm, coherent and actually sounds very credible. His books seem to be the serious source for the more goofy rehashes or mash-ups of his ideas that appear on YouTube. Seeing all the wacky stuff people put on the web has been making me think a lot, about how poorly they make their cases, and how threadbare is the reasoning they use.
An ancient practice that is sited as proof that humans once wanted to emulate the bodies of giant, long-headed aliens believed to be gods is head-binding. Parents would shape the head of a new-born baby by tying it to a board tightly with cloth or cords. This is not painful or damaging to the brain but causes the head to remain in an elongated shape until the bones of the skull fuse and harden, so the elongation and flattening are permanent. The fact that it was popular with royalty in Central and South America has been known for a long time. I remember reading about the practice when I was a kid back in the early sixties. The Egyptians probably did the same thing, and that bas relief sculpture of Akhenaten, Tutankhamen and Nefertiti showing them with elongated skulls sure looked alien to me. I knew about this stuff by reading and looking at books when I was a kid.
The guys that make these videos seem to have discovered late in life that if you snoop around in old books you'll find out things you never heard of before. In the more hysterical videos the speakers seem to think these oddities were maliciously hidden from the public (rather than just ignored by students with micro attention spans) and that the obscurity of this knowledge somehow PROVES that ancient royalty intended to emulate the look of the alien overlords, and that in turn PROVES that the alien overlords existed and that their hybridized human descendants are still conspiring to hush it up.
What really bothers me is some of these videos about ancient alien visitors are put together by people with some strange axes to grind; anti-evolutionists, some peculiar racial theories, even anti-Obama rants in the middle of claiming the royal families of Egypt were of Irish or Celtic origin! Some of these ranters think race differences are more like species differences. When one species diverges into two, members of the two different species can mate but they won't produce offspring. If racial difference indicated different species there would be no mixed-race children in the world. The only differences between humans from different racial groups are superficial, and though they may be psychologically striking they are physically insignificant.
One author (on a call-in talk show in a video) was convinced the racial differences between africans, europeans and asians couldn't have evolved in so short a time without outside intervention. What evidence says it happened quickly? I guess this bolstered his belief that only Alien beings could provide the intervention. He doesn't understand the power of selective breeding, and how quickly it can change the regional external appearance of a species. Compare the small differences in human "racial" types to the gross variations in the shapes, sizes, fur, color, color patterns, and innate behaviors of dogs, yet all are in the same species, all are able to mate and produce offspring. And all this was achieved over a few hundreds of years just by selective breeding. Tremendous "genetic manipulation" has been acheived just by isolating wihich individuals get to mate and breed (no access to or understanding of DNA required, no in vitro fertilization or other high tech). Since the sea levels have risen and fallen over millennia human populations have been admitted to or barred from entire continents so populations have been separated for tens of thousands of years. Plenty of time to reproduce and reinforce the differences in these groups.
This same guy rejected the influence of geography and climate on appearance, and it would be silly to think that the sun "browns" people like buns in an oven. The presence of melanin in the skin makes it appear darker. Stimulated by exposure to sunlight melanin in the skin protects from sunburn. Less melanin leaves you vulnerable to the equatorial sun and looks weird to the darker locals. Our ancestors in Africa all probably started out dark with lots of melanin. But once humans start migrating away from Africa and going farther north, then less melanin becomes an advantage. If the sunlight is less intense and clear days more rare the lack of melanin allows for the easier absorption of scarce sunlight to make vitamin D. Pale skin becomes an increasing advantage in colder climates with fewer clear days and low-angle, less intense sunlight as you move closer to the poles. The individuals with less melanin get more vitamin D from what sun there is and are healthier. The healthy and robust are more likely to have offspring, because it's part of what makes humans attractive sexually. Though dark-skinned, vitamin D deprived individuals can survive in colder, darker locations, lighter-skinned individuals will just do better there. Picking healthier mates over weaker quickly breeds for mostly light skinned individuals over 5 or 6 generations. Living at high altitude results in greater lung capacity in two or three generations. Tough, pre-technological conditions weed out the weak pretty quickly, too. Geography and climate have provided plenty of intervention to spur all the variety to be seen in the human population as a whole.
Humans are also drawn to others who look like their original care-givers. For thousands of years long journeys on foot were hard to accomplish and required a long time to complete. Restrict yourself to a few weeks walking distance and the people you'd meet won't look much different. But the farther you get from the source in equatorial Africa the average human gets lighter, and dark individuals get rarer. Once migration gets far enough north, you NEVER see people who don't look like you. Then the general appearance of a regional population is reinforced by the natural preference humans have for others similar to the ones they were raised with. Pretty soon there are no black vikings, and albino inhabitants of the Congo were never common.
I also hear a lot of assumptions in these videos that the "truth" is suppressed due to resistance to new ideas, reluctance to admit error, pride, too much effort to change textbooks, that new, more effective theories are always hated by those invested in the old. This is limp reasoning. The difficulty of replacement of textbooks is no real barrier to a society that wants to control the official story, societies like the Soviet Union routinely called in all the textbooks and replaced them when they wanted to expunge an historical figure or group who had fallen from grace, just like they airbrushed the disgraced from official photographs. This could as easily extend to favored or disgraced scientific theories or endeavors. And yes, it seems pretty common for anybody invested in an old technology, its methods and established "facts", to fight against the new, disruptive technology tooth and nail, because it threatens income, social position, and way of life. Also scientific paradigms don't make any radical shifts without a lot of resistance from adherants to the old ones. Old ways of thinking about the world gradually yeild as evidence of the new ways produce more and more results that can't be argued with. Once fast-moving machines that could carry people became available no one continued to claim that traveling over 20 miles an hour would cause internal organs to collapse because there's ample evidence that it doesn't. Many resisted counter-intuitive theories like general relativity, and quantum mechanics, but they produce predictable results, so regardless of whether you like them or not, humans are a practical lot and they go with results.
Of course, evolution as a theory doesn't have a lot of visible, everyday results, because they take millenia to produce, so it can easily be argued with. Whereas what we know about geology, biology, chemistry and physics does produce tangible results (creationists don't argue with broadcasting their programs using satellite transmissions based on quantum theory because it works) an educated person accepts evolution as the best theory of the origin and development of life available because it is arrived at using those same bodies of knowledge that produce the visible results. It fits what we do know better than any other theory. Not because it's cute, or annoys old people, or upsets evangelicals, or sounds sophisticated, it's an integral part of the fabric of knowledge of what actually works, what produces results.
So until and unless someone really spots Planet X as it approaches the sun, calculates its orbit so we can predict where it will appear and then watch its progress across the night sky, its all up for grabs. You can't prove a negative and if Sitchin has translated the Sumerian correctly, all we know for sure would be that they believed it to be true. Does it make any difference in everyday life? Are there any specific predictions that will be obvious if they come true, and if not will the info be treated like that religious cult last year that predicted the world would end on a specific date and when it didn't, no problem, we'll just announce a new date?
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