Two of my coworkers frequently mention shows like "Encounters" or "Ancient apocalypse" or whatever. I'm not the best at debating or forming arguments against these though I do feel strongly that bold claims require better evidence than a blurry photo and an eyewitness account.
How do you all go about this?
Today I clumsily stumbled through conversation and said "I'll need some evidence" and was hit with "there's plenty of evidence in the episode 'Lights over Fukushima'". I didn't have an answer because I haven't watched it. I'm 99% sure that if I watch it it's gonna be dramatized, designed to scare/freak you out a little and consist of eyewitness accounts and blurry photos set to eerie music. But I'm afraid I just sound like a haughty know-it-all if I do assert this before watching.
These are good people and I want to remain on good terms and not come across as a cynical asshole.
(Sorry if language is too formal or stilted. Not my native tongue)
Because they (and by extension their audience) are not that bright.
If they cannot think of how it was done and they must be smart because they live with all this modern technology (which they didn't create and don't really understand) then there is no way for people in the past to have done it.
Therefore...aliens. Well, that is the modern thought. In the past it you just replace aliens with God or Gods or Demons etc.
Yeah replacing "god" with "aliens" pretty much sums up the mentality here.
One that really gets me (and I can't think offhand of where exactly it is at), is an artificial cave network that appears to date back to the last big ice age, around 10,000 years ago. "But they didn't have anything other than stone tools, so it couldn't have been created by humans!" You're telling me that if the only thing you know about is stone, that you wouldn't have some understanding that some types of stone are harder than others? We're talking about people living in one place for millennia with nothing to do except go out hunting for food and sitting in the cave, and in all that time they couldn't have slowly cut out more caves to make their homes larger? Seems like such a simple idea to me, and yet it seems to go right over the heads of all these people discussing those caves. "Mommy I'm bored!" "Grab a rock and start grinding, dear."