Come On, Weirdos...

While cleaning my house and trying to stem the tide of a spider invasion, I had the TV on.  NASCAR at first, but that doesn't last forever, so I tuned to the History channel.  Which is, increasingly, less about history and more about the same dreck that drags down all the other crap cable channels.
  Today the topic was 'ancient astronauts.'  Not much history there, but tons and tons of uninformed speculation.  It's one of those shows that assumes its own premise - that aliens did visit ancient cultures - and then spins every sentence to try to support that.  For the pure science parts they have real scientists,* and these guys do not speculate.  They just say, for instance, that the Maya lived in what is now Mexico.  Fact.  Provable.  For the other stuff, the wacky 'ancient astronauts' stuff, the producers get other guys, you know the kind, crazy eyebrows, insanely-coiffed hair, oddly-accented English that you just can't pin to a real country, enthusiastic assertions of pure hokum.
  Weirdos.
  The kind of people who, if they weren't on TV, would be ranting on a street corner or begging for today's dose of lithium at the psychiatric hospital.  They look tetched, like they might start babbling incoherently at any moment.  The mad-scientist hair and wriggling eyebrows and wide-eyed, fanatical earnestness do nothing to help their cause.  At least not with me.
  You ever hold a conversation with a crazy person?  I have.  Many times.  I may have told you of my experience with homeless people of all stripes, most of whom were a few nuts short of a fruitcake.  There's a distance between you and crazy people, an emotional distance, even if you're standing side-by-side.  You get the feeling they're not really seeing you, maybe they're seeing a talking dog or a shopping bag caught in an updraft, or a burning bush.  You get the idea.
  These UFO weirdos are the same way.  They can't not be, because what they're asserting is crazy.  They're starting out at a deficit.  So why, why why why why why why why do they all insist on presenting an appearance that is so off-putting?  I know if I were trying to convince someone that, say, an alien from another galaxy hid ghosts of dead aliens in Earth's volcanoes, I'd want to present as friendly and well-groomed a front as possible.  Maybe I'd recruit A-list actors to my scam.  But for sure  I'd cut any wiry eyebrows I might have.  I'd shampoo my hair.  Repeatedly.  I'd wash my face.  I'd practice not squinting, or not screaming, or not giggling like a serial killer, or whatever tic I had that made regular people call the cops.  And I'd learn how to present my batshit crazy ideas as if they were as well-reasoned and widely-accepted as trickle-down economics.
  Come on, weirdos, if you're going to be on TV you might as well learn how to play the game properly.

 * The scientists have initials behind their names like PhD or MD.  The Weirdos just have labels like 'UFO Researcher' or 'Speculative Anthropologist.'