Space Aliens To Mongols: Bugger Off!

Those wacky folks at the History Channel are at it again. Not content with merely turning Musashi into a god, one of their plethora of UFO programs is retrofitting flying saucers into Japanese history. I only caught the last fifteen minutes of the 'Dragon's Triangle' (obviously being compared to the Bermuda Triangle) but it was enough. In short, any time there's a maritime disaster in Japanese history or some kind of portent in the sky, it's attributed to flying saucers and an undersea UFO base. It's also sad to say that Japan seems to be as full of nuts as the USA, as most of the 'experts' were Japanese.

Highlights of the fifteen minutes that will live in infamy:

-the fabled 'Dragon King's palace' of legend is said to be a UFO base that has been controlling the Dragon's Triangle for centuries.

-Commodore Perry's sighting of a comet/meteor in 1853 was really a sighting of a flying saucer. No, rly, it was.

-a shipwreck survivor of 1803 was an alien being and her ship, the Utsuro Bune (Hollow Ship), was a spaceship. Since this story takes place in different locales with different details at different times in different books during the Edo period, it couldn't possibly be simple folklore. Nah!


-sightings of various meteorological phenomenon taken as omens throughout history (dating back to the Kamakura Period) are also flying saucers.

-It's strongly hinted that Japan was closed to the outside world for all those years in the Edo period because the authorities were under the sway of aliens that wanted to keep their operation under wraps.

-best of all, the Mongol Invasions of both 1274 and 1281 were destroyed by storms created by the 'sekrit' alien base. The timing couldn't have been a coincidence, ya know. Never mind that the Mongols were stupid enough to invade during typhoon season in an area that regularly saw the storms blow through and in the case of the second invasion hung around long enough to make sure encountering one was a statistical probability. The clueless nature of the production is further reinforced by using the long outdated troop numbers for the Mongols and stating that the Japanese had absolutely no hope of stopping the Mongols...even though that's what actually happened BEFORE the typhoon hit.

While it was at least probably more accurate than the Musashi special, it was another in a long line of howlers that makes one wonder why there's a History Channel if it's not going to bother with history.