"Camp - Little Green Men From Afar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Camp L. Sprague de)

Its endurance would be assured, if by nothing else, by the fact that there is money in it. Donald Menzel wrote a book effectively debunking flying saucers, and more recently Lawrence Kusche has published one debunking the Bermuda Triangle. You may be sure that the sales of these books have been only a tiny fraction of the sales of books promoting the original vagaries. If I undertook a thorough analysis of one of von Daniken's books, the result would be a book several times the size of the original. It would take years of my time; and if I were mad enough to write it, who would then read it?
Nor should we expect help from the government. When the government gets into such a dispute, its weight is thrown to the beliefs of its leaders, and they can be as wrong as anyone else. Governmental intervention resulted in the compulsory. Aryaniam of Hitler's Germany and the rule of Lysenko's pseudogenetics in Stalin's Russia. In the United States, the Fundamentalist crusade of the 1920s, led by the eminent William Jennings Bryan, sought a constitutional amendment against the teaching of evolution. Luckily, that effort petered out. In recent years, however, it has been revived, especially in California. There it had the blessing of the then governor Ronald Reagan. Goodness knows what might happen if a real, red-hot Fundamentalist were to become President of the United States.
Still, this is no reason for not knocking a head off this particular hydra whenever we can. The scientific debunker's job may be compared to that of the trash collector. The fact that the garbage truck comes by today does not mean that there won't be another load tomorrow. But if the garbage were not collected at all, the results would be worse, as some cities have found when the sanitation workers struck.
So let us do our best to get rid of this ideological garbage, lest it inundate the earth. Our work will never be decisive,

since old cults are almost unkillable and new ones keep springing up; but that is no reason for not doing what we can. If we can save even a few from the lure of the higher nonsense, our efforts will have been worthwhile.
To close on a lighter note, I dabble in light verse and have composed a jingle called "The Little Green Men." It runs like this:

Ah, little green fellows from Venus
Or some other planet afar:
From Mars or Calypso or, maybe,
A world of an alien star!

According to best-selling authors-
Blavatsky to von Daniken-
They taught us the skills that were needed
To make super-apes into men.

They guided our faltering footsteps
From savagery into the dawns
Of burgeoning civilization
With cities and writing and bronze.

By them were the Pyramids builded;
They reared the first temples in Hind;
Drew lines at Peruvian Nazca
To uplift the poor Amerind.

With all of these wonders they gave us
It's sad these divine astronauts
Revealed not the answers to questions
That foil our most rational thoughts.

Such puzzles as riches and paupers,
The problems of peace and of war,
Relations between the two sexes,
Or crime and chastisement therefore.

So when we feel dim and defeated
By problems immune to attack,
Let's send out a prayer electronic
"O little green fellows, come back!"