Ancient Aliens: “Early in the 20th century, tomb robbers searching among the Magdalena River stumbled upon a grave site dating back 1,500 years to a pre-Columbian civilization known as the Tolima. Among the funerary objects found there were 100s of small 2-3 inch gold figurines.”

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AA: “Many of those [figurines] looked like insects and fish. However, out of those 100s that they found, they also found about a dozen that are eerily reminiscent of modern-day fighter jets.”

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Okay, so he admits that when these things were found there were hundreds of them that were clearly representing insects and animals and only about 10 of them that looked like jet airplanes.

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Now, before we get into the specifics I want to appeal to your sense of logic. Almost all of these little figurines are depicting fish, birds, insects, lizards and frogs, and we can see when we look at the figurines where we know what they were trying to depict – like these frogs -we can see huge amounts of variation and clearly stylistic elements that are not found in nature.

So we know they weren’t trying to be ultra-realistic here, which you can see by looking at their depictions of this man, or this cat, or this alligator. The Tolima were artists, and like most artists they had a certain style that they brought to the subjects they were depicting.

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Considering that all the other objects they found are animals, and considering the objects in question, like all the others, have eyes and teeth and so on, isn’t it more logical to assume that these objects are probably like all the others? That is, that they are also depicting some kind of animal in a stylized way?

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Ahh, but wait, Ancient Aliens has a false dilemma for us.

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AA: “They have nothing in common with anything similar in nature.”

AA: “There is not a single insect in the world which has got its wings at the bottom. Now, when you exclude the possibility that it’s an insect, one of the things which remain is that this thing is actually what it looks like – yes, a plane.”

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Okay, let’s see if we have this logic straight.

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Since no insect has these characteristics, it leaves us with only one other choice, which is an airplane? But I thought there were fish, birds, lizards, bats and cats found too in the other 100 figurines? It would seem to me that he is kind of skipping a few options here on his way to the airplane conclusion.

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Let’s take the most famous one for example. This is the one we will see later that they made a model airplane out of. The tails of all these figures are vertical, which would make me think of fish, which also have vertical tails.

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One fish that the Tolima would have been familiar with is the sucker mouth Catfish.[1] This might explain the round head and the big eyes, and even the small protrusions on the front of the fins. You can see that some varieties of this species of catfish have small protrusions on its fins as well.

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When you look at the other gold figurines you can see that not only were fish a common subject, but many different species of fish were represented as well.

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Because of the number and placement of the fins, fish are proposed for some of the other figurines as well. So when he says that no insect has its wings on the bottom so it must be an airplane, I can only see that line as deceptive considering the placement and angle of the fins are perfectly accounted for in many fish species that were available and important to the Tolima culture.[2] In other words, airplanes don’t have a monopoly on being aerodynamic.

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To prove one of these figurines was aerodynamic which, according to Ancient Aliens proves it was a plane, they built a model of it. Here is what they say about it.

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AA: “It was rather simple because we don’t need to put [many] parts into this shape because this shape is perfect. Everything was already done by the native people 2,000 years ago.”

AA: “They did not add an inch or remove an inch; they just essentially just blew the thing into a larger size. I mean, this is sensational.”

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No they didn’t add an inch or remove an inch, unless you count things like totally removing the big curls on the front of the wings which would have rendered the model totally useless for flying. They also added curvature to the wings; they added flaps, a landing gear and, one more little thing, a propeller and an engine.

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Finally, I want to appeal to your logic on the following point:

Consider that all we know about this culture reveals them to be simple farmers, fisherman, and artisans[3]; people that lived of the land and, considering that there is nothing in the extensive amount of archeological material from this culture that would suggest knowledge about planes landing and taking off all the time, is it logical to assume that aliens landing and taking off in their back yards made so little impression on them that they only devote 10 of the 100s of figurines to it, and only in one tomb?

Or is it more logical to assume that, just like the other hundreds of figurines with eyes and teeth and fins, that they are highly stylized animals, like fish, that they knew about and relied upon in their daily lives.

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I think even a die-hard Ancient Astronaut theorist would have to admit that logic is not on their side on this one.

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[1] Nelson, Joseph, S. (2006). Fishes of the World. John Wiley & Sons, Inc..

[2] Fishbase.org. “List of Freshwater Fishes for Colombia.” List of Freshwater Fishes for Colombia, August 15, 2007. http://fish.mongabay.com/data/Colombia.htm.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pijao_people

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