I remember this old battered paperback that was passed around my father’s family — I think it was my uncle who got it first, and eventually it settled down on a bookshelf at my house. I read it, because I read every book that found its way to my home, but I disliked it rather thoroughly. It contained nothing but glib superficial explanations of the behavior of human cultures rooted in a belief that we couldn’t possibly have done anything. Everything was given to us by godlike alien beings. Every great accomplishment by non-European societies was in service to creatures in flying saucers who bestowed their technology on all the brown people who were otherwise helpless.
It annoyed me. Also the fact that the author based everything on the most superficial, biased analyses.
My father ate it up with a spoon, though, so I can sympathize a little with all those people who made his books so popular. Erich von Däniken had hit a sweet spot in the zeitgeist; trigger a little curiosity with odd phenomena and exotic places, and then satisfy it with pseudo-scientific explanations that sounded persuasive, it you’re most sophisticated analyses were the kind of thing you’d hear from a church pulpit. He’d tickle, then pretend to scratch the itch. It has become a familiar strategy for con artists who want to get rich off normal human curiosity, but who didn’t want to do the hard work of actually studying something in depth. Graham Hancock is the latest parasite to glom onto the game.
Well, von Däniken is dead. His hustle lives on, unfortunately, as long as there are inquisitive, gullible people who are satisfied with answers that are wrong, but that fit into an existing bias.
I remember being shocked when I discovered von Daniken was still alive. Based on his ideas, I had assumed he was writing in the early 20th century.
I read his books when I was 12 or so, I think the first one was even a Xmas gift from my parents. They were nice stories and theories, but even back then I remember thinking, yeah, nah.
As far as pseudoscientific hogwash goes, I preferred reading Heuvelmans. At least that stuff wasn’t offensive most of the time.
On top of everything else, he influenced the Alien franchise. It had already been hurt by the alien vs predator garbage but then Prometheus came along. Not even Noomi Rapache could save that film.
.
A more plausible approach was the Expanse TV series; finding very old alien tech.
There is also the approach in “Wayside Picnic” by the Strugatsky brothers; finding the junk left behind by a visit and failing to make sense of it. It was the inspiration for Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
If you want to have a stroke, read the …’books’…by David Icke. He is an unfortunate person who describes symptoms of schizophrenia but refuses to acknowledge it as such. He started the “shape shifting reptilian” BS.
@4 birgerjohansson
In a similar vein, Hard to Be a God. But here humans are the ancient astronauts.
Forget Däniken. Bob Weir is dead.
Not to worry. von Däniken will live on in the form of TicTok and other social media.
Good point.
I saw them three times as an older teenage kid, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Owsley was there doing the sound system.
They weren’t even that famous back then.
If you live long enough, you get to see your favorite musicians, artists, and authors die.
Also all your friends and family.
And, these days, you can see our democracy and the USA dying as well.
I’m just going to say it. Life is difficult sometimes.
Isaac Asimov did an excellent take down on von Daniken. He started by acknowledging that many criticisms of the works were of areas outside of the critic’s expertise. So Asimov went after the errors in von Daniken’s biochemistry.
I read that book when I was in the military. In addition to all the obvious flaws, I remember feeling vaguely insulted when he suggested using members of the military as labor for excavation sites “since we were all just sitting around not doing anything anyway.”
Checked out this book and another of his from the library when I was a kid. I had found the ancient alien stuff incredibly interesting when I encountered it in stories and wanted to know if there was anything to it in reality.
Only learned that EvD was an idiot who didn’t seem to realise he didn’t really understand what he was writing about.
Also important to remember, EvD was a racist: https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/erich-von-daniken-puts-out-official-statement-attacking-me-by-name
Also, the current publisher of his Dreck here in Germany is a well known distributor of right wing propaganda and conspiracy theories.
specialffrog@1: Considering D.s ideas are mostly based on colonial era racism, theosophy and H.P. Lovecraft, it’s no wonder you placed him in the past.
Funny thing about the article mordred cites @12: the subsequent comment thread seems to be swamped with people arguing about the use of words for “Afro-German” people. In other words, lots of apologists desperately trying to pretend EvD’s words weren’t “really” as racist as they sounded, with no reference to the substance of EvD’s claims.
Raging Bee@14: Yeah, the discussions on Jason’s site pretty much look like that whenever he mentions the racist aspects of that ancient aliens stuff. Or HP Lovecraft’s racism.
I remember when his trashy book came out. My friends and I called him Eric von Dunnycart as a nod to the shit printed therein.
Holy this and that he was still alive? Maybe some of his alien friends zapped him with a longevity ray? Impressive.
Another unfortunate aspect of his “writing” is that he inspired a whole slew of imitators. In Italy we had one, Peter Kolosimo, and for a while in the late 70s-early 80s his books were absolutely everywhere – a sad case, in that he was a reasonably competent person who decided that money was more important than making sense.
As an example (if memory serves) he contended that the Maya had off-road vehicles because some of their carved stone dragons look a bit like a Jeep viewed from the front, headlights and all…
I remember finding his claims at least a little believable, back when I first read his stuff at age 13-14 (I was seriously into “Star Trek” and SF in general then). Looking back, I’m really surprised NONE of my parents’ liberal social circle was heard speaking up about all the express and implied racism in his claims. (Maybe the worst racist shit didn’t come out until after I’d moved on and left all that “Chariots of the Gods?” stuff behind?)
PS: And yes, Mr. Harshman, Bob Weir will be missed a lot more than von Daniken.
I read a couple of von Daniken’s books when I was 11 or 12, and I’ll admit that I found them interesting, if highly speculative, way back then. As I got older it became more clear to me that the claims were nonsense. Looking at them more skeptically, I am struck both by the racism of his “ancient astronaut” claims (it’s always non-European civilizations that he says needed alien help to build their monuments), and also a kind of temporal prejudice, in which pre-industrial peoples (at least non-European ones) are not given credit for having any problem-solving skills or imagination.
I get the impression that the whole idea of alien influence on ancient civilizations was fading somewhat by the beginning of this century, but then the “History” channel revived the bs with “Ancient Aliens” and other similar shows.
Before von Daniken was Immanuel Velikovsky “Worlds in Collision” a mad-brained book about how the history of Earth was the result of a celestial game of pool in the solar system. When I was a teenager a neighbour, knowing I was a science student, leant it to me, saying I would find it interesting and informative because I was studying science.
Velikovsky led to von Daniken led to the madness of the present day woo/anti-science/conspiracy madness.
I later learned the many reasons that von Daniken was so very wrong in so many ways, but my first difficulty with his otherwise mildly amusing scenario-building is that the present-day world I was living in clearly, absolutely clearly, was not derived from his claims about the past. If aliens had been messing about on Earth some vague 5,000 to 10,000 years ago the modern world would be very different from what I saw around me. There would be alien microbes, and probably plants and animals, there would be lots more interaction between people from all over the world than what we observe. There would be all sorts of technological remains showing up, even if the aliens had as much of a care about their trash as I was being raised to have. And so on, and so on, and so on. Still, a science-fiction series that starts off with several First Contact stories as the aliens meet various human groups and those groups meet each other. Then some stories of humans psychologically and culturally adapting to all the changes the aliens brought (and from interactions with humans from different continents, etc.). Then an epic story that provides an explanation as to why the aliens stopped coming (mostly stopped coming?) [probably some great war, or maybe a profound cultural change, or…], and then some stories set hundreds and thousands of years later, showing the continuing consequences of the aliens messing about. Could be epic….but the producers and show-runners would need to be careful to keep it obvious that the whole Ancient Astronauts/Atlantis!!!!! noise was nonsense, even as they mine the clichés for plot arcs.
@16 Hilarious! For non Australians. A dunny is a toilet, and a dunny cart is vehicle that transports night away from said dunny.
I am struck both by the racism of his “ancient astronaut” claims (it’s always non-European civilizations that he says needed alien help to build their monuments)…
To be fair, I could point out that the aliens seem to have given the most help to nonwhite peoples, such as Egyptians, which kinda put those nonwhite peoples ABOVE us whites — and we Europeans got most of our culture and knowledge from Egyptians, Persians, Mesopotamians, Africans, etc. anyway. The aliens may have helped ancient Celts build Stonehenge too, but that really doesn’t compare to the Pyramids.
From the cited obit:
In 1985 von Däniken wrote “Neue Erinnerungen an die Zukunft” — “New Memories of the Future” — ostensibly to address his many critics: “I have admitted (my mistakes), but not one of the foundations of my theories has yet been brought down.”
And that’s true, because his “theories” were never built on facts or objective reality to begin with.
I read the book in my early teens, but was miffed because he protrayed ancient peoples as too stupid to do anything.
They weren’t stupid, dumbass, they were ancient. They were just as smart as we are (and seemingly, many were smarter than you.)
Then, later I became acquainted with the Classic Maya, and, Daniken uses one of the most famous pieces of Mayan carving, the tomb cover of Sun-Lord Pacal (he wasn’t just a king, he was a sun-lord) in that book as a straight-out depiction of a ancient astronaut in his space ship. It’s one of Daniken’s biggest “proofs” of his thesis.
When you actually learn the Mayan meaning of those carvings, Daniken’s description is shriekingly funny and mind-numbingly stupid and simplistic. The carvings’ meanings are a lot deeper and more profound that anything that Daniken has every written. It’s quite moving, actually, as great art is. The ancients weren’t quite as stupid as Daniken thought.
I dimly remember reading some of his stuff in the (very) early 1990s, also because my father bought them.
The first one was kinda interesting, I don’t remember much racism but that may have come later or young me didn’t recognize it. It was mostly You Can’t Do That Without Modern(ish) Tech, and finding vaguely scifi-looking stuff in ancient artwork.
After that he upped the pseudo-science to 11, rambled about evolution being wrong because aliens etc., and regurgitated the same shit over and over. That’s where I permanently lost interest, and as far as I know, so did my father.
And the idiot press continues to promote the worst people. EvD was a racist (Egyptians and South Americans were far too stupid to make those things that only Europeans and outer space aliens could make) and a stupid grifter. He cropped photos and the gave them nonsensical labels “Is this an alien craft landing field?” is the label of a photo cropped to hide the person standing at the top, showing that the “landing Field” is no more than a few feet in size. The aliens must have been Lilliputians.
Another photo shows a (likely insane) Catholic priest with all the gold he took from an alien site, excepting the brass toilet tank float that casts some doubt on the claims that any of it is actually gold. And did these aliens also invent the common household flush toilet? Wow! Absolutely Amazing! Note that the press release refers to him as an “amateur archeologist”, rather than as a racist, anti-science obscurantist and grifter and his evidence claims are “theories” when they can’t even pass the hypothesis criteria.
To show just how stupid he was, in one Mayan carving photo he finds the “alien astronaut” has his (aliens are often a he) foot on the accelerator pedal! Who knew that rocket pilots “drive” their rockets with an accelerator pedal, just like in an automobile. Where is the brake pedal? And does it have a clutch pedal, or are all the alien rockets automatics? He never had to look anything up because he could very conveniently just continually invent excuses. The popular press promotes this garbage because it drives viewership, and investigative reporting cost more money for intelligent reporters instead of moronic talking heads*, and investigation is much more difficult that just quoting idiots. Cold Fusion was being peddled a full year after it had been shown to be false. Every new “scientific” breakthrough is Amazing, even when not a breakthrough and even completely non-scientific. Joseph Newman got a lot of press for his “Energy Machine”, even in trade journals. A barely literate highschool educated “inventer” makes a very low efficiency 2 pole permagnet DC motor, and claimes it can run itself and other electrical machinery with no external source of power forever, solving the worlds energy crisis, and members of the press ran with it. Hucksters like creationist Ken Ham come to the US (he was laughed out of Austrailia) because they know there is an eager audience for their line of BS.
*I saw a “news” show a while ago where the “announcer” proceeded to pedal astrology. And the samething happens with religion peddlers.
@ ^ garnetstar : Fascinating thanks! Please could you elaborate and suggest some good sources for the Mayan art & cultural meanings?
There was an old anime cartoon I absolutely loved watching as a kid in the 1980’s called The Mysterious Cities of Gold* ( intro here – 1 min & 45 scs long ) with its heros exploring and working with Incans and Mayans and fighting the European invaders who were the viillains of the story including Pizarro. It also had lttle mini-doco segments at the end of episodes that got me intrested in them although in hindsight some of the info in them is wrong. Admittedly, I never professionally or seriously studied the Incas or Mayas or pre-Columbian cultures generally – just read a bit and don’t really understand that much. Would love to satisfy my curiousity and learn more.
The very much science fictional story* in that cartoon at least considered the Incans and Mayans decendents of an ancient empire of Hiva (Mu) – think Atlantis lost civilisation myths – rather than using the ancient aliens trope. It was very VERY loosely based on Scott O’Dell’s historical novel ‘The King’s Fifth”** .- think a few of the character names and general quest and themes – which in turn was based on the Francisco Vázquez de Coronado expedition of 1540 – 1542 and the story of Estevanico the Moor, a black Muslim slave, shipwreck survivor, early American explorer and man with a remarkable and still mysterous real life story.**
.* Wikibasics here – incidentally still being shown on NITV here in Oz :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Cities_of_Gold
I admit I do still watch it sometimes for nostalgia and whilst it has its flaws, I reckon it stands up pretty well for its time & the music… Wow, just the music in it!!! It and its some of its sequels are available on SBS on Demand if folks are intrested and can access that. Watching that was the absolutle highlight of my day as a boy back then…
.** See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King%27s_Fifth
.*** See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estevanico
And scientifically illiterate morons like Bill O’Rielly announces: “The tides go in, and the tides go out, and there is ever a miscommunication. Nobody can explain that.” as “evidence” for his “god”. Yet, some members of the press still run to this absolute know-nothing idiot to get his “opinions” on the latest “important topics”. They won’t actually be happy until everyone starts eating dirt, because someone on TikTok/Xitter/TruthSocial/FauxNoise/HHS said it was the best possible type of food.
@10 whheydt :
Wghich for those who don’t know was Asimov’s field oif qualified scientific expertise. See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Education_and_career
Read at least one of Erich von Däniken’s
novelsbooks as a kid and even as an uncritical reader back then my reaction was basically “Yeah, cool story bro!” disbelief.It and the later ‘Ancient Aliens’ stuff does at least raise awareness of some amazing things many ancient civilisations have built and come up with in a broad sense although of c polluting that good with their racist and silly ancient aliens nonsense and directing people towards woo and worse conspiracism. Have wtache dsome – just afew – Ancient Aliens eps I do like mentally substitition “crackpot conspiracist” for their every mention of “äncient alien theorists suggest..” ;-)
macallan@27
For EvD, all that rock cutting and handling tools on Easter Island are not evidence that the locals carved the large stone heads. It is, instead, evidence showing they all just threw their tools down over the entire island at the same time, after realizing they could not possibly carve the rock. Writing for a moronic audience, and it worked on so many.
@ ^ zetopan : EvD actually said that!? Fucking hell.
StevoR, zetopan is being facile, but did not claim that to be a literal claim.
(Writing for a credulous audience works, though)