On Cryptohistory, the Paranormal and William Shakespeare

One of the oddities of contemporary culture is how persons who ordinarily find history dull suddenly become attentive when someone mentions "aliens"--in the sense of extraterrestrials having been a part of it.

The explanation of this seems to me to be that those persons' interest is still not in history, but the possibility that the claims for the existence of extraterrestrials visiting Earth has been validated.

But that raises the question of why precisely they should care to prove that such visitations have happened. Why should so many people be invested in this?

About that I am not at all clear, but I have noticed a similar interest in much more down-to-Earth, less world-shaking, subjects, such as the possibility of the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays by someone other than William Shakespeare. It seems that, just as with history, people who are not normally interested in Shakespeare, and not knowledgeable about Shakespeare, get interested when, for example, Edward de Vere or Francis Bacon or Walter Raleigh or somesuch is mentioned as the real author of his works. The result is that if some are quite invested in the controversy and make detailed claims on the basis of Shakespeare's plays (all the evidence is indirect in nature), a significant number of people far from capable of making or appreciating such arguments still find interest in the essential claim--which comes down to people being fascinated by the thought that productions they have not read or seen or cared about that have been attributed to one historical figure of whom they know next to nothing actually being attributable to another figure of whom they likely know even less.

Considering both obsessions it can seem symbolic that Roland Emmerich, who made the aliens-visited-Earth-in-the-past movies Stargate (1994) and Independence Day (1996) later directed a movie dramatizing Edward de Vere's writing the plays and using Shakespeare as a front, Anonymous (2011). Didn't see it? That's okay, pretty much no one did, and it would not seem that you or they or anyone else missed much in not doing so--certainly to go by David Walsh's take on the film some years ago (which, as may be expected of those who have read Walsh at his best, is most certainly attentive toward and insightful into the pseudo-controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare's works, which he went so far as to follow up in a second item on the matter).