Sky People: Untold Stories of Alien Encounters in Meso-America

Sky People: Untold Stories of Alien Encounters in Mesoamerica is the second book by Dr. Ardy Sixkiller Clarke I’ve read. I reviewed her first work, Encounters with Star People: Untold Stories of American Indians, some time ago here. Information on Dr. Clarke’s background can be found in my first review.

Unfortunately, as was the case with her first work, this book was disappointing. But readers should know that this is because of what I hoped to gain from such books. If readers like stories told by apparently sincere people, then the books might be worth their time. But I want more than that.

As I pointed out in my first review, I was expecting the author to produce and present ancient oral traditions of Native Americans about contact with “star people.” The importance of such traditions — presuming they included details like the star people traveling from a distant celestial object in a vehicle that flew, should be obvious. Such accounts would provide starting points for the question of ET visitation to earth. But that isn’t what the first — or the second — book gives readers. Instead, both books consist of reproduced anecdotes deriving from conversations with native peoples. To be blunt, I’ve read a good deal of contactee literature and other scholarly material that documents how contactee “messaging” is directly traceable to the content of comic books (back into the 1930s), novels (reaching back to the late 19th century), television, and films that I consider such collections of anecdotes of little value. Stories passed down through families and friends fail at establishing traditions prior to any sort of technological culture. Anyone familiar with the UFO/alien contactee literature of the 50s through the 70s will find nothing new in these books, save the cultural flavoring of the encounters.

Clarke seems to sense this problem. She suggests early on that she wants to chronicle ancient traditions, but appears to confuse the term “ancient” with “indigenous”; they are not the same. That an indigenous person has a very personal encounter, or was related to someone who had a personal encounter, which might contain elements of stories told by a grandmother or village elders, does not establish a line of oral tradition that reaches back to a time when there’s no possibility of cultural-technological influence (more below on what I’m actually looking for in that regard). Since written material from these cultures is so sparse, when I pick up a book like these I’m hoping someone has gone back into the journals or accounts of, say 16th century Spanish priests to ferret out stories from indigenous people with very specific details that overlap on the sorts of things that mime contactee accounts of more modern times. But again, this isn’t what’s happening in either book. Hence my disappointment.

In the end, anecdotes are hearsay. Granted, even the sort of thing I’m interested in finding would be 16th century hearsay, but what I’m looking for is harder to fabricate. To be clear, I’m not talking about tales of the sun and moon fathering ancient peoples, or visiting earth to interact with people. Every culture has that stuff. What I’d like to see are stories that have the gods depending on craft to make journeys from distant celestial places described as inhabited — something that sounds like an interstellar journey. It may surprise readers to note that, despite all the time I’ve spent studying and debunking ancient astronaut silliness, I’ve yet to come across an ancient story with that specificity — something that tells us the gods came here using technology. What you get are stories about gods traversing the sky with the sun and moon — re-imagined as boats or other primitive transports known to people of the day (and even those don’t have an origin point in what we’d call outer space — they originate at the horizon). Instead, all you get is stories built from naked eye observations of known celestial objects without the gods needing transport (e.g., shuttling back and forth to and from earth in vehicles). That’s far less compelling than coming across descriptions of vehicles or journeys that we who have a knowledge of outer space would recognize as being beyond naked eye astronomy — precisely what we wouldn’t expect from ancient people.

In other words, show me the ancient story of an encounter or journey from a place only a modern person with knowledge of deep space — beyond the naked eye — would recognize, and one that shows dependence on flight technology. Now that would be impressive. But I have yet to encounter one in any ancient tradition. That may surprise you — but think about what I’m asking for. If the ancients were really visited by extraterrestrials from other worlds in space ships, those stories should be evident. They aren’t.¹ Those details are regularly imported into ancient tales that lack them, tales that merely talk about gods who live in the heavens (which are quite observable with the naked eye — and one logical place where gods would come from, as humans don’t and can’t inhabit that domain).