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Re: Beyond hairlessness
Phillip Bigelow (n8010095@cc.wwu.edu)
20 Nov 1995 12:35:26 -0800
>>From: <103111.2710@compuserve.com>
>>Forgive me for this but the strange thought occurred to me while I was half asleep.
>>In all the reports of alleged contact with alien beings has anyone ever reported any that were hairy?
>>Is this some sort of subconscious assumption of theirs (the ones doing the "sighting") that a lack
>>of hair means superior intelligence? If so, where does this come from?
This has interested me for some time too. It may be that our subconscious
mind projects "idealized" anthropomorphic character traits to mythical
entities. We rarely report hairy, spiny, scaley, or feathered mythical space
aliens.
In the Middle Ages, northern Europeans believed in trolls. Trolls were
non-human creatures who, curiously, had an appearance identical to humans.
The norsemen knew of only one way to tell a troll from a human: hack at it
with a iron sword. Trolls were well-known to be immune to attack from iron
weapons. Not surprizingly, the norsemen considered most of the non-viking
world to be possible trolls. Being good scientists, the vikings ran
single-blind tests to prove or disprove their hypothesis. The rest is
history.
In the 20th Century, our counterpart to trolls, elves, fairies, gremlins,
etc., are Sasquatch, Loch Ness monster, and space aliens.
Sasquatch is not just hairy but VERY hairy...clearly a reflection of where
we assume it hangs on the evolutionary tree.
Space aliens are hairless because we wouldn't have it any other way. And
so, too, is A. afarensis, at least if you have as much blind faith as the
pro-AAT people do.
<pb>
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