Hi Rob, Jim, and John,
I'm really delighted with that analysis about how the development of the physical imagery for extra-natural visitations has paralleled the history of human technological progress. Quite delighted. It implies that people have been "seeing" things for a long time, "real" or not, and that (1) their descriptive metaphors grow from what they see every day, and (2) that these subjective experiences don't need a consistent physical basis. That's psychology for you. Whatever the deep nature of our experiential reality is, humans can only see or think in the ways we have evolved to see and think, and we will impose a narrative upon our chaotic samples of sense input at all costs. (Even if each day we woke up in a different world entirely, our brains, built for survival, would put together some kind of story.)
Occam's razor is still a good first response tool.
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