beachmaster

Greetings,

This is my first post on this forum as you can tell. And a fantastic forum it is... been doing a lot of reading from it. Great stuff! Ok, on to the point here.

I've searched the web for skeptic reviews of art works from centuries past which appear to contain UFO's and so far have not bee able to find any articles from the skeptic pages on this subject.

Here are a couple of sites which show the art works in question:

www.ufoartwork.com/

www.ufoindia.org/article_ps_ancientufos.htm

Can any reader here please direct me to some good skeptic's sites which debunk these? I like to try to get all sides of a story and so far can only find one side.

Thanks in advance,
Beachmaster

Marduk

The author himself notes which ones may be hoaxes or misinterpretations (4th link from top)
Though I didn�t have time to look at them all, many are authentic (my favorite is the Madonna & Child with Flying Saucer from the 16th Century) They are pretty cool though aren�t they?
Don�t know what to make of them other than possible stylized, anthropomorphic versions of things people saw in the sky, comets and such. People have been writing about things in the sky for thousands of years. I really liked the drawings of robots from Pakistan 900 years ago or something, that one I saw on TV. Did this guy include it? They had antennae and everything, just like the ones I drew in grade school.
Old Hindu Vedic text are full of stories and drawings of flying machines and people from somewhere else.
I don't think Hurley claims to be the one to discover these paintings, AFAIK they first appeared in an Italian magazine on astronomy. I don't recall the womans name who first collected them.

Arken

It could very well be that the 'flying saucer' shape is some sort of instinctive concept which we are generally genetically disposed to imagining up, just as cultures all over the world independently came up with abstract concepts like perspective drawing and musical notation.

Marduk

"It could very well be that the 'flying saucer' shape is some sort of instinctive concept which we are generally genetically disposed to imagining up"

Maybe, Jung brought that up back in the 1950's, something to do with the tit, or so he said. (I'm more of a leg man)

Arken

Sometimes an anal probing alien research vessel is just an anal probing alien research vessel.

Magic Primate

i came a cross a thorough debunking of this notion - mostly they are known religious symbols of the period in question - but I can't find the darned thing now. I'll keep you posted.

beachmaster

Not me dude! Yes they are cool too, but not as fun to play with (imho).

Maybe now I understand my facination with flying saucers (but only the ones with the nipple looking thing at the top! )

lasers are brilliant

Tackling the second site is easier.

Most of the paintings that feature ufo-like objects are portraying the influence of god in some part of the bible.

The objects are clearly representational 'prescences' of god in representational paintings rather than a document of an actual object in an actual scene.

The only point at which ufos can be inferred is when you consider why the artist chose to portray god as an object we could interpret as a UFO. It becomes irrelevant at this point, as there's no way to prove that any of the artists saw UFOs, and there are much more appealing arguments for that kind of representation in the imagery of the bible and celestial stuff like comets, meteors and galaxies (which would appear as fuzzy elipses of light to renaissance artists).

The killer blow for me is that if there really were alien disks in the sky back then, and enough to be associated with God, I'm sure there would have been much more fuss about them before the 20th century and the arrival of modern ufology.

Magic Primate

Here it is:

ART and UFOs? No thanks, only art...

Not all of it has been translated from the original Italian I'm afraid.

beachmaster

Seems like I've seen that one somewhere but I don't know if it's on one of those sites or not. Hey that reminds me, I actually met Ray Walston (my favorite martian) when I worked on the set of the TV series "Superboy" back in '89. I forgot to ask him if he still has his antennae. I'd sure like to have some of those!