Thursday, June 11, 2015

The Roswell Analogy



Just about everyone is familiar with the story of what allegedly happened in Roswell New Mexico back in the summer of 1947. Historian Richard Carrier makes an interesting analogy between the Roswell UFO incident and the origin of Christianity, in what he calls the Roswell Analogy.


What really happened? A guy found a bunch of sticks and tinfoil in the desert.
What was said to have happened? Immediately afterwards people claimed it was debris from a crashed UFO.
What was said to have happened within just thirty years? A flying saucer and alien bodies crashed and the US military recovered them and they autopsied the aliens and kept it all secret from the public.


And this all happened in the 20th century, in the era of universal literacy, modern journalism, TV and radio. If such a legend can grow so fast and still have millions of believers in modern times, how easy do you think it was for a legendary Jesus to have been made up and believed in by people during antiquity, where literacy was probably 5 percent or less, there was widespread superstition, and there were no newspapers, or journalism, or mass communication?

  • The "tinfoil in the desert" is analogous to the "revelations of the archangel named Jesus."
  • The "flying saucer and alien bodies" would be analogous to the "historical Jesus of Galilee."

Now imagine if all we had were the stories written by the Roswell believers from thirty years later and information derived from them and nothing else. We would not know about the tinfoil. All we would know about was the testimony about the flying saucer and alien bodies that were recovered. Neither of which ever existed.

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