In January, which somehow seems like it was a year ago, the world lost Erich von Däniken. It’s entirely possible that you may have missed it, because outside of the skeptic and conspiracy world he’s a bit of an unknown… unless you watch the “History” Channel, in which the show he inspired is the longest running show on that channel.
Von Däniken is the author(-ish) of the book “Chariots of the Gods?”, and the person most responsible for popularising that theory. Däniken’s theory covered most of the bases of skepticism – UFOs, conspiracy theories, alternative history, psychics; but ultimately his theory was pseudo-archaeology which can be summarised as: aliens did it. If, by “it” you mean an ancient structure, that is massive, and non-European, a UFO did it and not people.
He also introduced the world to memetic former bodybuilder George Tsoukalos, who you will know as the guy from the meme with the crazy hair (and I mean that in a good way) and the caption “I’m not saying it’s aliens but it’s aliens.”
This is not a dance-on-the-man’s-grave article. That’s crass, and there’s plenty of worse people for whom I’ll read an obituary with great pleasure; I write this because von Däniken is one of those people who pulled me out of my conspiracy phase, because I absolutely devoured his book when I first read it.
First, let’s talk about the man himself.
Erich von Däniken was born in Zofingen, Switzerland. He was raised Catholic, though the Church’s teachings apparently did not take, and he was arrested at the age of 19 for theft – which would begin a running pattern for his life. After his four-month suspended sentence, he moved to Egypt to work in a hotel… where he was again arrested, and convicted for fraud and embezzlement. This is where his ancient aliens theory began, which von Däniken claimed came to him in a vision. His vision became an article titled “Besuch aus dem Weltraum?” (“Were Our Ancestors Visited by Extraterrestrials?”), and eventually this would become the book “Chariots of the Gods?”.
First published in 1968 and with the infuriating punctuation that requires us to ask the title, the book was not initially a hit. In fact, it had a rough time even seeing publication. It wasn’t so much his ideas that were holding the book back, but his writing style: the book would only be published after an extensive rewrite by Wilhelm Roggersdorf. While this would normally be fine – lots of books go through intense rewrites – Roggersdorf was the pen name of Utz Utternman, the former editor of the official Nazi party newspaper “Völkischer Beobachter”. After the rewrite the book is published to a surprisingly receptive audience. By 1974 the book had topped five million sales, and by today it has sold over 70 million copies worldwide.
If a reader flips through this book they might wonder how it was that a convicted fraudster was able to travel to all of these archaeological sites for research. The prosecution on a subsequent fraud trial claimed that he was falsifying records and using the hotel’s books, that he was managing to take out personal loans, which he claims to have spent on research for his book. His defence was that the banks should have done a better job at researching before issuing the loans – which is kind of fair, but when you submit a loan application you’re not supposed to be lying about it. Nevertheless, he served one year of a three-year sentence.
In reality, there is very little evidence that he actually traveled to any of the places in his original book. Eventually he did, when the book makes him famous and wealthy, but initially the book seems to have developed from the research desk. Again, this is fine, but to say that the book was drawn from extensive research is incorrect. The book shows some severe similarities with two other works, primarily Robert Charroux’s “One Hundred Thousand Years of Man’s Unknown History.” In fact, the similarity between these two works was so intense that later editions of von Däniken’s book, where the “?” has been dropped, contain citations to Charroux’s work.
However, like the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, we can’t stop at just one plagiarism. Von Däniken’s book (and possible Charroux’s) owes a lot to the fictional work “The Morning of the Magicians” by authors Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, published in 1960. This is where the tale gets interesting. Just after World War II, the French were stuck reading American Pulp magazines, because of the devastation of the war. Jason Colavito argues that one of the most popular authors for the postwar French was H.P. Lovecraft. If you were on the internet in the 00s, Lovecraft’s work enjoyed a bit of a resurgence. The two most popular tales are The Call of Chthulu and At The Mountains of Madness; both tell of archaeological discoveries that are otherworldly in nature.
These were fictional stories written for pulp magazines like Astounding Tales. Such stories inspired Pauwels and Bergier to write their speculative “Morning of the Magicians”, which wasn’t especially popular in France but enjoyed some popularity in Germany – so much so that a different lawsuit would place the German translation of Morning of the Magicians (Aufbruch ins dritte Jahrtausend) in later editions.
Von Däniken’s work would continue despite the lawsuits, frauds, embezzlements, and importantly his ignorance of both history and archaeology. His work also persuades William Shatner to narrate Mysteries of the Gods (based on Daniken’s Messages of the Gods). In 1973, the Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling would host the Xerox-produced documentary “In Search of Ancient Astronauts.” This episode would spawn the “In Search of…” television series hosted by Leonard Nimoy, which – in addition to widely publicising cryptozoology, conspiracy theories, and the Holy Blood, Holy Grail claims – is also the series that is very likely where your uncle got the “They used to say that the climate was cooling but now its warming?” reason to deny climate change.
The thing about von Däniken’s primary book, Chariots of the Gods?, is that it’s easy to read. You can blast through it in a short afternoon; because it’s not written for you to read it. A proper history book wants you to understand the story it’s telling — a book like von Däniken’s (and just about every conspiracy book that I’ve read) just wants you to get the gist. If you start paying attention to the book, you’ll notice that it doesn’t hold up. The book suffers from an Aristotelian Prime Mover problem: if we needed aliens to build monoliths, then someone must have taught the aliens.
There is very little evidence for von Däniken’s claims. The very best we could give him is that yes, sometimes things built in the past look impossible for us to make. They, however, only look that way, and we know that they weren’t impossible because they are there, right in front of us. The entirety of the Ancient Alien hypothesis leans so heavily on the famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” that Clarke should be considered a co-author.
The thesis is so much an argument from ignorance that we almost forget the special pleading that it involves. Special pleading is a fallacy that wants you to make a great intellectual leap first and if you do so, the rest of the argument will make sense. In this case we have to believe that ancient people did not understand what was happening around them, so they used the only reference they had – religion – to describe events.
When von Däniken points out a helicopter in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, his theory would make sense provided we are completely ignorant of hieroglyphics’ meaning (in this case the pharaohs Seti I and Ramesses II). The people of ancient Egypt just made those words up for helicopter apparently. When the Hindu Mahabharata mentions flying chariots, they can only mean spaceships. And then there is my favorite example, when the god of the Old Testament destroys Sodom, of which von Däniken writes:
Admittedly these are awkward questions about a serious matter. But since the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, we know the kind of damage such bombs cause and that living creatures exposed to direct radiation die or become incurably ill. Let us imagine for a moment that Sodom and Gomorrha were destroyed according to plan, i.e. deliberately, by a nuclear explosion. Perhaps—let us speculate a little further—the ‘angels’ simply wanted to destroy some dangerous fissionable material and at the same time to make sure of wiping out a human brood they found unpleasant. The time for the destruction was fixed. Those who were to escape it—such as the Lot family—had to stay a few miles from the centre of the explosion in the mountains, for the rock faces would naturally absorb the powerful dangerous rays. And—we all know the story—Lot’s wife turned round and looked straight at the atomic sun. Nowadays no one is surprised that she fell dead on the spot. ‘Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrha brimstone and fire…’
Chariot of the Gods?, page 35
Take a look at that excerpt once again. He’s using so many weasel words that we should call it a boogle (I had to look that up). Every claim that he makes is a ‘maybe’ or an assumption; he tells us to “imagine” that what he is saying is the truth. The evidence for this story, even Biblically, is spurious, but we do know that ancient cities come and go (looking at you, Troy), while evidence for nuclear detonation lasts for millennia.
Perhaps in the 1960s we might forgive von Däniken for some of his ignorance, because today we know roughly how all of his examples were constructed. It turns out the Great Pyramids were built by laborers paid in beer, Stonehenge was built with leverage and sleds, and the Aztec ziggurats were built with labour. It turns out that if you have enough people and a little ingenuity, you can build a great many things. von Däniken would agree… provided you were European.
One of the most popular criticisms of von Däniken has been the racism implicit in his theory. It’s not just a little thing either, because von Däniken goes out of his way to choose examples from every culture not European. The Egyptians, the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Rapa Nui all needed starship help, while the Romans and the Greeks did not. Europe’s ancient world does not lack monoliths, but for some reason von Däniken ignores them.
This is despite how easily some of these monoliths fit into his theory. The Parthenon, the most famous of the temples of the Acropolis of Athens, for example: the entire design seemingly reflects a mathematical relationship that would have been cutting edge for the Greeks but, more importantly, the columns have a slightly inward inclination that if we drew a straight line from the tops of them would meet a point 1.5 miles in the air. My example here is no different than the Peruvian Nazca lines that, according to him, only make sense from the air (or the large, elevated hill right near the Nazca plain), yet Greeks could do it while the Peruvians could not.
Apologists like to hem and haw about knowledge base, and maybe that would be a good point if von Däniken didn’t continue: in Sign of the Gods (1979) he asks:
The evolutionists say that man descends from monkeys. Yet who has ever seen a white monkey? Or a dark ape with curly hair such as the black race has? … Was the black race a failure and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then programme a white or a yellow race?
Which is followed by the tired “I’m just asking questions” defence. It becomes rather obvious why he thinks that Romans can build aqueducts, but Egyptians can’t build triangles.
Von Däniken’s book pulled me out of conspiracy theories because it is only compelling as long as you never look anything about the subject up. Ever. In the 1960s there was no Wikipedia, but there were archaeologists like David Soren who were extremely dismissive of von Däniken’s work, and scientists like Carl Sagan who would write the preface to a thorough debunking of Chariots called “The Space Gods Revealed”:
That writing as careless as Von Däniken’s, whose principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies, should be so popular is a sober commentary on the credulousness and despair of our times. But the idea that beings from elsewhere will save us from ourselves is a very dangerous doctrine—akin to that of a quack doctor whose ministration prevent the patient from seeing a physician competent to help him and perhaps cure his disease.
It’s not just a goofball theory with no effects. The belief in the theory that von Däniken made popular not only promotes a racist view of the past, and it not only denies the ingenuity of the ancient people, but it also prevents us from understanding our history and our future.
With thanks to editor of The Skeptic, Michael Marshall, for assistance with some of the biographical details.
