(October 7, 2023 at 2:27 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: ...and here's fire breathing historicist richard carrier, this year
Quote:I often use the analogy of the “Roswell saucer crash”:
What Really Happened: In 1947 a guy found some sticks and tinfoil in the desert.
What Was Immediately Said to Have Happened: That this was debris from an alien spacecraft.
What Was Said to Have Happened within just Thirty Years: An entire flying saucer was recovered, complete with alien bodies that were autopsied by the government.
A few more items in the comedy of errors helped things along. The sticks and tinfoil were an USAAF project called Mogul that was designed to record Soviet atomic tests. When it crashed the highest priority of the military was to obscure the nature of the project, so they said it was one of Kenneth Arnold's "flying saucers" from a month earlier (and that itself was a reporter's garbled take on the nature of their flight, not the shape of the objects, which were probably meteors). They covered the crash up. But the flying saucer story drew more attention than the Mogul narrative so the military backtracked and said no, it was just a crashed weather balloon. They covered up the coverup. Later they declassified Mogul and said it was Mogul all along. This is what they called, in Watergate, a modified limited hangout. All these changes to the story were only rocket fuel for the conspiracy theorists. The difference in the First Century is no one had anything to cover up. No one would have been motivated to create a character ex nihilo when similar Messiah figures cropped up every decade or so anyway.
