Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Permit me to begin this with something of a disclaimer—or an apologia, if you will. As FOX News more and more allowed collectivist bottom-feeding scum like Chris Wallace and Donna Brazile to smear up the inside of my TV screen with their smarmy lies, and especially since the blatantly phony election in which FOX openly betrayed its constituency, as a child of the 1950s, I have looked for something else to run while I was doing other things around the house. Eventually, I hit on Ancient Aliens. Mostly, barring the occasional interesting factoid, I regard it as little more than cartoons or musical wallpaper.

From time to time, to support their claim that our ancestors were visited and influenced by extraterrestrials, they will tell a lie or two themselves. Usually, given their relative cultural insignificance, I have let them pass. (In all honesty, I think the ancient Egyptian pyramids were built by—gasp!—the ancient Egyptians.) However this morning it got more than a bit personal, and, given the overwhelming predominance of lying in our society today, I thought it was important to correct the liars, even in this one small way.

Children and ignorant individuals have always wanted to believe that human beings and giant thunder-lizards lived at the same time. Hell, one of my favorite boyhood short stories is L. Sprague de Camp’s "A Gun For Dinosaur". (Make mine a .416 Rigby.) It may even be why I got interested in firearms in the first place. On Ancient Aliens, they point endlessly to carvings and inscriptions on ancient stone ruins that, if you squint at them just right, look like people palling around with paleosaurs. This is not proof, nor is it even evidence. If it were, thousands of cartoon panels showing caveman Alley Oop riding his trusty brontosauroid steed Dinny would more than make their case.

Roland T. Bird was a real-life adventurer cut from the same cloth as Indiana Jones, except that he was a paleontologist (fossils), rather than an archaeologist (ruins). In the 1930s he explored Mexico and the American west on his sidecar-equipped Harley-Davidson motorcycle, on the lookout for dinosaur specimens for his boss, Barnum Brown, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I know about him and admire his work because I used him as a character in one of my books. I gave him a fedora and a leather jacket like Indy.

At some point Bird discovered a pile of stone slabs for sale in a shop in Gallup, New Mexico that were purported to show the giant, fossilized footprints of human beings said to have been found alongside the prints of dinosaurs, who were their contemporaries. Bird knew better, of course. The last dinosaur died sixty-five million years before the first human evolved. Suspicious, he inspected the footprints and found they had been altered from something else. Ancient Aliens falsely claimed that he had verified the human footprints were genuine. He did not.

In the real world, Bird traced the souvenir slabs to the Paluxy riverbed, near Glen Rose, Texas. There, he laboriously walled off the middle of the riverbed with sandbags. What he found on the bottom was the time-frozen trail of a sauropod (Brontosaurus was a sauropod), paralleled by the trail of a two-legged, three-toed predatory theropod of some kind. It was the therapod’s prints in Gallup that had been crudely chiseled to resemble those of a human. They were a fraud. When the popular press gushed that the meat-eater had probably been stalking the plant-eater, Bird retorted angrily that there was no scientific evidence for that.

So much was Bird’s regard for the truth.

Yes, it’s a small thing. Of a million such small things is our present debacle constructed. How many lies have we let the left get away with because it was too much trouble to correct them? No matter how the current mess is resolved, I will do my best, from now on, not to let commies and proto-commies slide. The virtual pages of L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise are open to those who can correct similar lies.

Where We Go 1 We Go All.