Plausibility of ancient extraterrestrials

[Thumpalumpacus]

The whole alien thing has been a wonderful natural experiment in culture creation.  Culture doesn't have to make sense itself, it's job is to make sense of other things.  I'd put ufology right alongside cargo cults as an example of the creation of a religion in modern times, with cameras rolling.  Honestly, I think ufology is a cargo cult.

At least cargo cultists had real airplanes bringing real cargo from entirely unknown areas. We've got shipping records and plane manifests and flight schedules. They interpreted it wrong, sure, but it was definitely based on factual events So I think cargo cults have a little more solid grounding, though still very wrong in interpretation.