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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Back to aliens again- I haven’t seen this posted yet. https://abc7.com/amp/mexico-aliens-corpses-ufos/13776957/

Tdlr is Mexico’s congress has what are claimed to be mummified alien bodies ‘with eggs inside’ which is a significant escalation if you assume they’re copying the US congress.

Now obviously I don’t believe in aliens, and it’s going to take a bit more effort than that to convince me. But one government is pushing an aliens narrative, and now a different government which has a lot of official tensions with it is pushing an aliens narrative. There’s got to be some reason governments would do aliens.

My question is why? Is it something that just makes sense to government officials?

This whole thing is genuinely hilarious, the fact that the "mummy" bears an uncanny resemblance to E.T. and the repeated assertions by the press that scientists managed to "draw DNA evidence using radiocarbon dating" makes this perhaps the most unintentionally funny thing I've read in a while. Guys, I measured the velocity of a moving car using mass spectrometry, please believe my results.

At this point, I would be glad to never hear about ayy lmaos again - I'm actually interested in the topic but the ayy craze has crossed the line into sheer parody. It's particularly frustrating because there are more credible (albeit circumstantial) pieces of evidence out there they could grab onto like the Viking Lander biological experiments, but their case has hinged around ridiculous UFOlogy and eyewitness testimony and now apparently they're resorting to using ridiculous E.T. looking mummies that obviously aren't faked at all.

draw DNA evidence using radiocarbon dating

I had to look this up to see what was actually meant by this: I don't think even the zaniest urologist would make this claim.

Apparently, the radiocarbon testing and DNA testing were separate, unrelated tests, with radiocarbon dating suggesting a date of 1700 years ago when these poor wayward alien souls got lost in a pile of algae muck. And the DNA evidence suggest that a full 30% of the DNA specimen was "unknown" and therefore of extraterrestrial origin, since only 70% matches terrestrial sources. Presumably it's some alien-human hybrid.

And the DNA evidence suggest that a full 30% of the DNA specimen was "unknown" and therefore of extraterrestrial origin, since only 70% matches terrestrial sources. Presumably it's some alien-human hybrid.

If it is of, as the history channel says, extraterrestrial origin, which I don’t believe, the more plausible explanation would be a contaminated sample, would it not?

Contamination through and through, which is to be expected. The issue is when they suggest that the 30% unknown is alien DNA, instead of more plausible terrestrial contaminants.

How, exactly, would this alien-human hybridization even work?

This was covered extensively in the hardcore 90's documentary The XXX Files: Lust in Space

This was covered extensively in the hard science 90's documentary The X-Files.

My post was sarcastic, though probably overly ungenerous to the Ayys. Most likely they would say it's extraterrestrial DNA that's been contaminated by various terrestrial sources, including humans.

You can take a sample of mud from your backyard and do a comprehensive DNA sequencing on it and end up with more unknown DNA than that.

Exactly. We do environmental genetic testing all the time in our lab, and even in the best case the results are full of "unknown" -- partly because most DNA gathered is too damaged to be identified, and partly because we don't have genetic data available for all random protists and bacteria that are swarming in every cubic millimeter of dirt.