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Erich von Däniken has died

135 points by Kaibeezy 9mo ago

https://x.com/vonDaeniken/status/2010314306894828023 https://x.com/vonDaeniken/status/2010314306894828023

thesaintlives 9mo ago
[flagged]
ahazred8ta 9mo ago
Bio on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken Notable for "Chariots of the Gods" (1968).
cratermoon 9mo ago
von Däniken was the original Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, aka "aliens" meme guy. He never met an archeological artifact that didn't look like alien technology to him.
- cgriswald 9mo ago
  What really drives me nuts about von Däniken (and Tsoukalos, Childress, et al. …) is that he contradicts himself. (Sorry, I don’t care about this stuff enough to have a recent example.) His position isn’t consistent. Zecharia Sitchin’s arguments are also frequently not good but he at least seemed to be trying to construct a consistent whole whereas these other guys will just say anything.
  - lukan 9mo ago
    Yes. I stopped reading von Däniken, after there were multiple contradictions on the very first page of the first book I tried. I like fantasy, but it should be at least a little bit consistent.
  - nephihaha 9mo ago
    Sitchin's biggest defence is that very few people can read cuneiform. Even less than hieroglyphics seemingly. Certainly less than Hebrew, Sanskrit or Greek. That means there aren't a lot of people able to dismiss his translations properly.
    - cratermoon 9mo ago
      This also happens with Mayan script. When the group led by Linda Schele made major leaps in the 70s, to the point where 90% of the glyphs have now been deciphered, scholars mostly considered their meaning settled. That obviously hasn't kept cranks from asserting all kinds of wild ideas, but there are still scholars who dispute the accuracy and meaning of the interpretations.
- p-e-w 9mo ago
  I heard Däniken speak about 30 years ago, and exchanged a few words with him afterwards. He was a brilliant orator and came across as highly sophisticated. His arguments were contrived and I recognized that even as a child, but he was nothing like the natives of the YouTube era who do it for the likes and memes. He was completely sincere in his own belief of what he said.
  - nephihaha 9mo ago
    He is a great showman in his way. He was far from being the first to write on this subject, but I think he was pretty much the first to popularise it on television.
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  VD wasn't the original, not even close. Peter Kolosimo had best sellers on the same subject years earlier, as did others. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts
  - cratermoon 9mo ago
    TIL. I remember my parents had von Däniken books. I, on the other hand, was deeply into Isaac Asimov, both his fiction and non-fiction. He was a pretty good debunker.
    - nephihaha 9mo ago
      I read both. I have to admit I was never much of a fan of Asimov's non-fiction or work outside of SF... I could take it or leave it. I do find most of EVD's examples to be ridiculous... The Nazca lines, for example, were clearly never landing strips, for a variety of reasons, although they may have been meant to be seen from above. What Von Däniken did teach me as a child was to have a sense of wonder about the ancients and their achievements. Maybe not spaceships and electricity necessarily, but their feats of masonry and sculpture. I've seen dolmens capped by stones the size of a bus, that I felt uncomfortable walking under, even though they had managed to stay like that for thousands of years. We struggle to replicate some of these things today yet they apparently did so without metal tools, proper ropes or any number of other things. The planning alone would have taken many years.
- 0928374082 9mo ago
  Ancient Aliens ought to be required viewing in schools, because they are very careful to employ enthymeme and reported speech to make a series of statements each one of which is technically true, yet have implications which are false. Gaining the skill to recognise when these kinds of claims are being made is, I feel, essential for the electorate in a democracy.
  - cratermoon 9mo ago
    There's an important difference between facts and truth. There was a time when I read a stream of articles and blog posts titled something like "I'm a liberal, but I agree with ... <obviously far right thing>" After reading enough of them, I realized the common structure was to state a number of relevant facts, then make a leap across an unstated and unsupported premise, hoping the reader won't notice. The final section would assert the conclusion based on this premise.
WhatIsDukkha 9mo ago
Sagan comes in with a great quote - The problem is summed up by Carl Sagan: “Every time he [von Däniken] sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet” (Playboy 1974:151). Unfortunately its true of so many people, and the information revolution we were all promised seems to have made it worse, not better.
- Terr_ 9mo ago
  This also applies to certain "conspiracies." In both cases, it's their God of the Gaps. (Not to be confused with the Boss of the Ross. Or Hermes. Or Nike.)
  - nephihaha 9mo ago
    One of the problems is we do have massive gaps. Mainly because we have no written records from the Stone Age, and barely anything from certain other cultures. Von Däniken exploits that.
  - dhosek 9mo ago
    Conspiracies are wonderfully self-reinforcing: anything that doesn’t support the conspiracy is clearly the work of the conspirators hiding their existence.
    - nephihaha 9mo ago
      The problem is that does happen in real life. Intelligence services and organised crime work actively to hide their tracks. As do corrupt officials and some of the military. We live in a society where corruption is rife and ordinary people are largely excluded from most major institutions ... That is the atmosphere that breeds these things.
      - Terr_ 9mo ago
        My favorite way to cut apart those two is to ask: How many people need to keep a secret, how long and how perfectly would they need to succeed, and what motive do they have to do a good job?
blacksmithgu 9mo ago
I have a family member who is quite into "ancient aliens" and who has read all of von Danikens books. The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that rigor and science did not really matter and would not convince them of anything. It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize how humans went from mud to computers. They don't believe in human creativity being powerful enough to lead to modern society and think an external force was required. Ancient aliens is a convenient and fun theory for how it could have happened.
- acdha 9mo ago
  I’ve known a few people like that, and it had a darker undercurrent: they didn’t disbelieve that, say, the Greek or Roman monuments were built by those civilizations because they viewed those as predecessors of their own, but they considered the pacific or Central/South American cultures inferior and didn’t want to believe they were capable of great engineering. Beyond the strong whiff of racism, I think there was also this idea that civilization went on a single path (grain, the wheel and domesticated horses/oxen/mules, bronze, iron, guns, steam, etc.) and so anyone which didn’t follow that path was basically developmentally challenged. This definitely did not consider the possibility that not every region had the prerequisites to follow the same path.
  - mx7zysuj4xew 9mo ago
    My own favorite example of this is how the pyramids (and all the advanced trigonometry required) were built by the Egyptians prior to their discovery of the wheel
    - WalterBright 9mo ago
      > advanced trigonometry There's a ratio involving pi between the base lengths of the pyramid and its height. This is been interpreted by enthusiasts that the Egyptians knew about pi. But, consider a measuring wheel, where you can mark off distances very accurately by counting revolutions of the wheel, say, 1 cubit in diameter (I know, I know, what's a cubit?). Then, if the height is laid out in cubits, the ratio of pi is there while being completely ignorant of it.
mannanj 9mo ago
In regards to the space ship that people see, I've seen photos of some Egyptian pyramid hieroglyphs myself, I hear this often "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" This stupendous gaslighting mirrors what I took away early in this article. It used several Appeal to Authority and Epistemic Invalidation and is quite clearly pathetic. Hard to read the clearly biased claims.
accidentallfact 9mo ago
Pretty much all such claims can be easily dismissed by pointing out that such advances 1. Can obviously be made 2. Can be made very fast There is simply no reason why major advancements in metallurgy couldn't have been made between 4453 and 4382BC, completely unknown to us, and later forgotten. If fact, it's a mystery why we can't see more of such ancient artifacts, if anything. The article doesn't even go far enough by blaming the oiling on some accidental dumb ritual, while it used to be common knowledge that iron can be protected from rusting by oiling it, and it was done completely on purpose.
- WalterBright 9mo ago
  The reason better toolboxes have felt inside the drawers is you put a drop of oil on the felt, and it will keep the tools rust-free.
  - Luc 9mo ago
    It's the other way around. Think about it, how would the oil travel to the rest of the tool that's not touching the felt? Felt is bad, it wicks away oil from the tool's surface and often absorbs moisture from the air. Tools placed on clean felt will often rust where they touch the felt. You need to mitigate its wicking and hygroscopic properties by applying lots of oil to it. Use rubber mats instead.
    - WalterBright 9mo ago
      I've never had any tools rust in my toolbox. The oil migrates around as the tools are taken out and put back in.
bregma 9mo ago
von Daniken's work inspired me to travel to Nazca PE and charter an airplane to see the alien landing strips for myself. Certainly a worthwhile trip. I may even have convinced the local guide I was a True Believer, of which I am sure he has encountered his share. I have also take a page from his books by expostulating outlandish theories to explain facts with a straight face, always ending with a quick "of course there are other explanations". It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.
- geekamongus 9mo ago
  I have always enjoyed bringing in the "you know, the bible could be read very differently if you consider God to be an alien" to certain philosophical conversations I've had with people over the years, ever since reading von Daniken's work. As you allude to, there are always other explanations.
  - pavlov 9mo ago
    Nobel-winning author Doris Lessing wrote a novel called Shikasta in 1979 that (to my recollection) is a rewriting of the Old Testament and Earth history from the point of view of an alien community who played the role assigned to the divinities and angels in human myths. I read it as a teenager and it really stuck with me as a completely different, more spiritually influenced take on science fiction and “ancient aliens” theories of the era. She won the Nobel Prize on the strength of her more autobiographical and feminist prose, so Shikasta is an outlier in her own body of work too.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
      Shikasta is an incredible book. Completely out of left field for her, and a timely mix of politics and raw SF. Incredibly depressing, but also unique. Neither the mainstream lit world nor the SF world knew what to make of it. It's not so much a retelling of the OT as a suggestion that alien interference wouldn't look like flying saucers landing on the White House lawn, it would look like despicable politicians doing inhuman things.
theturtle 9mo ago
Didn't Carl Sagan (no stranger to selling books) pretty much stomp von Däniken's "theory" into cornmeal well before the turn of the century?
cheese_van 9mo ago
I read von Daniken as a very young kid and loved it. But I read it, and enjoyed it very much, as a science fiction genre. I never bought it, but I admired the effort. And so I thank him for stimulating a child's imagination. Well done Mr. V!
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  His books are entertaining, I'll give him that. Some of his archaeological interpretations are laughable but now and then he has a head scratcher.
  - _ph_ 9mo ago
    The world is full of "head scratchers". But that makes it more important not just to yell "aliens!", but to exercise scientific curiosity. This is what makes me most angry about his works, he discourages people from trying to work out solutions for mysterious phenomena.
- dhosek 9mo ago
  This was the first book that I picked out to buy for myself as a child (I remember pestering my parents for it at the Kroch’s and Brentano’s on Lake Street in Oak Park back in the 70s). I read it over and over and thanks to that, when I later came to stories like the Hebrews wandering the desert in Exodus, it was hard to put the von Däniken nonsense out of my mind. Psychologists have there own version of this (which managed to achieve a sort of respectability) in Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which has the same sort of furtive/animistic fallacies are put forth to justify a questionable conclusion.
  - Propelloni 9mo ago
    Hey, Julian Jaynes! Haven't heard that name in a while. I remember that book fondly, compelling story telling. IMO Richard Dawkins said it best, it's either fucking nuts or fucking genius, no in between.
- djmips 9mo ago
raverbashing 9mo ago
It's easy to dismiss the most obvious cases where EvD is wrong But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss Archeology by itself is always going to have limitations, and there are vast swatches of history we are almost completely ignorant about EvD is certainly guilty of taking himself much more seriously than the evidence suggests. But there's always going to be that "what if"
- diego_moita 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - raverbashing 9mo ago
    Strawman. Thanks for proving that "skeptics" are very happy to use fallacies as well
  - gitaarik 9mo ago
    Some things you can easily dismiss with the proof of the opposite or something conflicting. But some parts of the hypothesis can't be either disproofed or proofed. You could personally dismiss it, but you can't proof your point either. Like general archeology says humanity is only as old as the oldest evidence of it ever found, and some pseudo scientific hypothesis might say humans are older. You can't prove or disprove that. But you can't prove or disprove either that humanity is exactly as old as the oldest evidence we have. But when some older bones are discovered then you have proof that humanity is at least that old. So yeah, absence of evidence doesn't disprove the hypothesis.
- protocolture 9mo ago
  >But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss Its an unproven hypothesis. It doesnt need to be "dismissed" it needs to be proven. You could make up any number of hypotheses. You wouldnt "dismiss" any of them. If you were interested in one you might design a test to prove it. But failing that its not worth worrying about. When you write like 49 books trying to convince people of your untested claim, it seems like grifting instead of working towards evidence.
nephihaha 9mo ago
The most obvious problem with this article is that it assumes Von Däniken came up with this idea. Years before "Chariots of the Gods", Peter Kolosimo already had best-selling works discussing ancient aliens. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts "However, the fifties and sixties were more dominated by European works. The Italian Peter Kolosimo wrote several books as early as 1957, but his Timeless Earth (1964) became an international best seller and was translated into several languages. French-language authors included Henri Lhote who proposed that prehistoric Saharan rock art depicted close encounters, Bergier and Pauwels' Morning of the Magicians (1960), Robert Charroux's One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963) and Misraki's Flying Saucers Through The Ages. A few British authors also published before Von Däniken, such as Brinsley Le Poer Trench, John Michell and W. Raymond Drake who wrote Gods or Spacemen? in 1964. "Although Von Däniken claims he was formulating his ancient astronaut ideas throughout his school days, it is clear that many others had already published their books on the subject, long before he became notable with Chariots of the Gods? in 1968."
- Morromist 9mo ago
  Good point. I was introduced to the idea that aliens came to earth long ago and invented humans and built lots of weird monuments through The Mountains of Maddness by H P Lovecraft, written in 1930.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
    I loved the book (usually, Lovecraft’s work drives me nuts, because adjectives), but I assumed that The Great Old Ones were Cretaceous-era native lifeforms that had basically gone extinct. He wrote his books at a time, when significant parts of the Earth were still a mystery. I sort of feel envy for that.
    - Morromist 9mo ago
      Yeah, there was something great about being a child who hasn't bing-read wikipedia for years. Lots of mystery out there. Then you read about the world and you know all this interesting stuff about it but the mystery is gone.
bell-cot 9mo ago
Skimming through this item, a couple points I don't see being made: - If you claim that the assistance of alien visitors is needed to explain the milestone leaps or technological achievements of ancient human civilizations...are you walking into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down logic trap? Because obviously "our" alien visitors would have need even greater leaps and achievements in their own past, to be able to travel to the earth. And their visitors similar, and so on. - Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?
- pixl97 9mo ago
  I think a lot of it is based on how little of time most people knew existed in a tangible way. Until the last few centuries you were born into a world where most technologies you use had already been around so long they just might as well have existed forever. And the stories of how any talked about technologies were generally myth, folklore, or completely false. The idea the earth was around for billions of years wasn't really a thing for most cultures. Maybe you believed it was around forever, or that a mythological creation even happened in the 'more recent' past and the earth popped up like it was. The idea their was a beginning a long time ago, but it only started out with the most basic shit (ionized hydrogen mostly) and everything after that is because of an ever increasing entropy gradient is just not an idea that seems to pop into our heads.
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  I don't see why it would require a "turtles all the way" down logic trap. There would be a few ET civilisations which would develop the long and hard way, but then they could accelerate or seed civilisation elsewhere. A sort of reverse Prime Directive.
  - CRConrad 9mo ago
    Yes it is: If those civilisations could "develop the long and hard way", why couldn't we?
tekla 9mo ago
Also the guy that was the inspiration for Daniel Jackson in the original Stargate movie. Rest in ascension.
- unnah 9mo ago
  Most likely his ancient astronaut theory was the inspiration for the entire Stargate franchise. Of course to make the movie believable they had to give Jackson a more academic background than von Däniken had.
bhaak 9mo ago
He was the first person who introduced me to the idea that if you look at a thing with different mindsets, from different points of view, you can arrive at quite different opinions about the “true” nature of that thing. At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible. He had a way of describing things with a vigor that is quite rare. It was a fascinating read as a kid, blending science fiction with history and archaeology. Of course, later learning about the scientific method, or even just Occam’s razor, made it clear that the theory of ancient aliens is very unlikely, but the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time. A quite unique and interesting person departed this planet yesterday.
- deleted 9mo ago
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- humanfromearth9 9mo ago
  Incapable: that happens when the acceptance of an idea implies that their perception of their identity is flawed and has, logically to change in order to adapt for the new reality where the idea has its place. Denial is a protection mechanism, and it is very effective when the reality is too difficult to support as it is. Identity is so essential in our beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that most of us won't accept anything that requires it to change. Unless we accept that failure is part of our identity and that this means that our identity sometimes has to evolve. But that has to be done willingly, explicitly (in our minds).
- abetusk 9mo ago
  I share your confusion about how ideology clouds judgement but I have a little anecdote. I sometimes give people the Monty Hall problem. When they get it wrong, it often falls into the category of staying with the initial pick increases chances or switching has equal odds. I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference. If they insist that it makes no difference, I then start to play the actual game with them, writing down the prize door before the game starts and then proceeding with the game as normal. Only after a few rounds of them losing do they accept the proofs of what the optimal strategy is. My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.
Beijinger 9mo ago
He said, he wanted to "ask questions and entertain". I guess he does, but he does not use the scientific method. Also, he does not claim to use the scientific method. I think it is more surprising that we have not found any alien artifacts by now. Godspeed Erich.
darepublic 9mo ago
They come from above!
someoldgit 9mo ago
Graham Hancock's Mentor.
- JetSetIlly 9mo ago
  Not really. Von Daniken talks about ancient aliens. Hancock talks about ancient human civilisations.
  - lproven 9mo ago
    > Hancock talks about ... a load of made-up absolutely drivel. Just in case anyone out there was in any doubt whatsoever. I've read a little of his stuff, but more to the point seen him speak live, and that was enough to quickly tell me he is nothing more than a fantasist and complete fraud.
MarkusWandel 9mo ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 9mo ago
  Please don't comment like this on HN, no matter who or what it's about. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
diego_moita 9mo ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 9mo ago
  You've broken several guidelines with this comment. Please make an effort to contribute thoughtfully if you want to participate here. Be kind. Don't be snarky... Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer... Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46580643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46580643 and marked it off topic.
awful 9mo ago
As a youngster I (the country?) was so excited, entranced for a bit, I read Chariots and Outer Space, stopped at maybe Gold of the Gods? I matured and grew, though I wanted it all to be real, there was little to no progression of the claims and evidence. Like Batboy or all the National Enquirer articles, it was clear it EVD was a crank.
thrill 9mo ago
Eric didn’t die - he just went home.
gaigalas 9mo ago
This dude got famous by polluting the public discourse on archaeology to sell books. I cannot respect him as an author or thinker, only as a human.
- defrost 9mo ago
  Still easily a seven on the grifting scale from used carpet spruiker to current POTUS.
  - gaigalas 9mo ago
    They look all the same to me.
    - defrost 9mo ago
      Fair enough, no shame there, not everyone can tell a hawk from a heronsaw. Carpet spruikers draw the crowd in to get a punter to buy a ratty old carpet with a backstory. It's a grift but the mark leaves with a carpet, just not a good deal. Erich is selling the idea of aliens. There are no aliens in truth in his tales, but he is at a least (largely) a true believer (to the best of my knowledge). Others know from the outset they're lying, misleading, and profiting from vaporware. The promise of better healthcare that doesn't come about, the myth of a better country again, etc.
deleted 9mo ago
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tzs 9mo ago
EvD is a good illustration of how we were more resilient against crackpots back then. His book "Chariots of the Gods" was a best seller. I remember reading it probably in the early '70s, when I would have been somewhere in the 10-12 year old range. I'm pretty sure I believed he was probably right, as did a couple friends who also read it. We also believed in some other bunk, like various psychic and paranormal stuff, much of which came from reading "Fate" magazine. But without internet there was really no way to connect with a larger community of people who also believed those things. With just books, magazines, and maybe if we were really into it a couple newsletters it was hard to become obsessed with this stuff. Furthermore we also read popular science magazines, and Asimov's monthly column in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction". They would publish rebuttals to the more significant crackpot claims going around (although I don't think Asimov ever specifically commented on EvD). The mainstream news magazines, like Time or Newsweek, would often include comments by prominent skeptics such as Carl Sagan when writing about these things. Because mass communication was expensive (and often also slow) new questionable theories took some time to start getting widespread acceptance. That gave scientists (or other relevant experts for non-science based crackpot theories) time to write refutations. It is more work (often much more work) to refute crackpots than it is to generate crackpot theories. Now we are awash with widespread belief in crackpot theories. A new one can spread very fast and very wide on social media and be established before refutations can be written. And when the refutations do come out the social media algorithms might not show them to the people that those same algorithms fed the theories to. They get more clicks and engagement if they instead show those people new crackpot theories instead of refutations of the crackpot theories they were showing a week or two earlier.
- eru 9mo ago
  Maybe. On the other hand, it was also harder to find refutations of crackpot theories that the mainstream happened to believe in.
  - adornKey 9mo ago
    Nowadays the popular mainstream cults openly go against hard data - and nobody bothers... Witch hunting was popular in Europe for more than 300 years. Last conviction in court in Europe was 1944... The mainstream is much more insane than people are aware of. Modern cargo cults have a lot more evidence going against them than witch hunting ever had (doing statistics about the number of lightning strikes reduced by burning witches wasn't that popular at all).
anonymousiam 9mo ago
Belief in aliens and UFOs was popular in the 1970's. Looking back on it now, it's amazing to me how gullible everyone was. Maybe it was the high lead content in everything...
- eru 9mo ago
  Claimed UFOs sightings seem to have become less common since everyone is expected to carry a digital camera with them all the time (in their phones). Similar for Loch Ness etc. But it's not like people don't like their outlandish theories anymore. Alas, they've become very politicised, too. To give an example that's hopefully not too polarising: many people like to blame inflation on greed.
  - consp 9mo ago
    > Claimed UFOs sightings seem to have become less common Now it's mostly drawn down to explaining people what sensor and perspective glitches are.
  - 453yuh46 9mo ago
    UFO phenomenon peaked with TV and Movies of 1950s. There is no other better explanation for UFO than influence of mass media on human minds, where some of them could not distinguish reality and what they saw on screen.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  > it's amazing to me how gullible everyone was I have some bad news for you.
  - DonHopkins 9mo ago
    Yeah, I know what you mean! I tried looking up "gullible" in the dictionary, and it was censored! Don't believe me: do your own research.
- ZebraOtoko 9mo ago
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zoklet-enjoyer 9mo ago
I loved his books in junior high. I was into cryptids and aliens UFOs and secret military base conspiracies and stuff like that for a long time. It's like making up sci-fi explanations for the real world. He's up there riding that chariot now.
classified 9mo ago
Bummer, who are the aliens to contact now if they want to phone Earth? Rest in peace, your ideas were good entertainment.
DonHopkins 9mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42226224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42226224 DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Hundreds More Nazca Lines Emerge in Peru's Desert FYI, Erich von Däniken's book "Chariots of the Gods?" is racist pseudo-scientific claptrap. My Archaeoastronomy professor at the University of Maryland, John B. Carlson, despises it. It attributes the achievements of ancient non-European civilizations to extraterrestrial visitors, undermining their intelligence and capabilities, promotes speculative theories without empirical evidence, misinterprets artifacts, ignores scientific consensus, perpetuates harmful cultural stereotypes, and plagiarizes French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy >Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the interdisciplinary[1] or multidisciplinary[2] study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used these phenomena and what role the sky played in their cultures".[3] Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern astronomy is a scientific discipline, while archaeoastronomy considers symbolically rich cultural interpretations of phenomena in the sky by other cultures.[4][5] It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice.[6] A Brief History of the Center for Archaeoastronomy https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~tlaloc/archastro/cfaintro.html https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~tlaloc/archastro/cfaintro.html DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–] Archaeoastronomy was one of the most interesting courses I took at uni, and professor Carlson was extremely enthusiastic about it. It really opened my mind to how smart and motivated ancient people were, not at all like our stereotypes from "The Flintstones" and "Chariots of the Gods?". For example, The Anasazi Indians made significant astronomical observations that they integrated into their architecture and cultural practices. They tracked solar and lunar cycles, aligning their buildings and ceremonial sites with celestial events like solstices and equinoxes. A fascinating example is the "Sun Dagger" at Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, where they used sunlight and shadow patterns on petroglyphs to mark important times of the year. They deserve an enormous about of credit for what they achieved without all our received technology, and left behind for us to reverse engineer. https://spaceshipearth1.wordpress.com/tag/anasazi-indians-astronomy/ https://spaceshipearth1.wordpress.com/tag/anasazi-indians-as... https://www2.hao.ucar.edu/education/prehistoric-southwest/sun-dagger https://www2.hao.ucar.edu/education/prehistoric-southwest/su... It's disappointing when people reflexively attribute ancient achievements like that to religion (or aliens), when it's actually hard objective observation based science that deserves credit! >[then vixen99 took issue at my use of "FYI" and tried to argue that we should respect irrational and racist opinions by framing proven objective facts as opinions, just to be fair to loonies: "How about IMO rather than FYI ? We can make up our own minds."] DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–] Sometimes (and often) pseudoscientific bullshit is just objectively wrong, and you'd have to be completely out of your mind, or just trolling, to "make up your own mind" to believe it. No sane flat earthers in this day and age actually believe the earth is flat, or deserve to have their presumed beliefs respected or even humored, because they're just being contrarian and trolling for attention, so it's perfectly valid to say to them "FYI, the Earth is not flat." I refuse to couch my firm disbelief that the Earth is flat as an opinion that might possibly be wrong, by saying "IMO, the Earth is not flat." Flat Earthers (also Young Earthers) certainly aren't couching their crazy beliefs as opinions, so don't deserve it in return. "Chariots of the Gods?" is also that objectively wrong: there is no possible universe in which its claims are true. It's all based on historically ignorant Argument from Incredulity and inherently racist assumptions. In the 50th anniversary edition, von Däniken refused to address, admit, or correct any of the many widely proven errors in the book that made him so much money and fame, so he doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity Believing in pseudoscientific claptrap like Homeopathy, or the objectively false stories of Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark is just as ridiculous. They're physically and mathematically and logically and practically impossible. So it's also fine to say "FYI it's biblical fiction, and the Earth is definitely not 6000 years old, and you absolutely can not fit and feed and clean that many animals in a wooden ark." It's not my opinion, it's objective information. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4OhXQTMOEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4OhXQTMOEc To pretend otherwise feels like humoring a small child who still believes in Santa Claus.
fithisux 9mo ago
His fairytales were wild, but they train you to see existing things in a new perspective. Debunking the new perspective is what makes you more knowledgeable. But sometimes you see current reality with a different eye, not necessarily in E.v.D. way and surely not in the establishment's way.
KellyCriterion 9mo ago
When I was young, I liked his stories & perspectives and it carried some "myth into the world" When I got older and understood how media industry works, I liked his "product execution & market fit" even more :-)
gethly 9mo ago
The Chariots of the gods was impressive piece of work to read when I was a child and it definitely started something that lasts to this day. Although I must admit, Daniken was more of a sensationalist than a serious author. Thanks to him though, I have discovered Sitchin and all his body of work and thanks to him, few other authors - mainly the O'briens. So I guess Daniken did his job after all and got me interested in these topics.
seymores 9mo ago
:-( I stumbled upon his work when I was very young and could barely read, but damn, it was the first book that opened my eyes to our crazy world and taught me that our textbooks are just convenient truths.
- DonHopkins 9mo ago
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ReptileMan 9mo ago
We haven't had a person witnessing technological decline in their lifetime for probably 400 years or so. It is not surprising that it is a conceptual blind spot, especially for quacks.
NedF 9mo ago
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ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
I read Chariot of the Gods when I was young and thought it was great - exciting ideas about how the world isn't quite how it's boringly portrayed. And aliens! However, I tried re-reading it when I was a bit older and it was just laughably bad. Seemed to be a whole bunch of leading questions and then throwing random assumptions into the mix. When I was older, I started reading a bunch of Robert Anton Wilson books and was introduced to The Sirius Mystery by Robert K G Temple - now that's a much more serious investigation into Ancient Aliens visiting the Dogon people. Of course, we should really be tracing back the Ancient Alien theory to Lovecraft's fiction.
hare2eternity 9mo ago
> It is with great sadness and shock that we must announce that Erich von Däniken passed away on January 10, 2026. Not sure what is 'shocking' about someone in their 90s passing away. Surely at that point you start expecting it?
- ZebraOtoko 9mo ago
  Yeah, honestly, if anything, congratulations are in order: if you die in your 90s, you did quite well in the longevity contest. Most people die before their 90th birthday, many long before. Not too many people make it to their 100th birthday.
- layer8 9mo ago
  It’s a general societal expectation to be saddened and shocked by death.
- sophacles 9mo ago
  Given how much he knew about the alien tech, youd thik he would use it to be immortal, or at least very long lived.
Fnoord 9mo ago
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arethuza 9mo ago
I remember reading a von Däniken book when I was quite young, 9 or so, I think and being absolutely fascinated. Then after a while I realised it was pretty much all made up and what has stayed with me ever since was my blazing righteous anger that someone could make up a pile of stuff and put it in a book and claim it was true. That feeling has stayed with me far long than anything from the book itself.
- vixen99 9mo ago
  Perhaps most of us can assess something like this and decide for ourselves on the available evidence as to its truth and relevance. What the author claims seems, to me at least, a minor issue. I get it that you do not agree. More generally aside from outright lies and pure stories, there are always analogical levels of interpretation. Presumably, if an unbeliever, you're irate at many of the world religions.
  - arethuza 9mo ago
    Well, I was 9 at the time and it was probably the first "science" book that I had read and got excited about. And no - never been impressed by any of the major religions - although (possibly influenced by Philip Pullman) I do wonder if there was a completely normal bloke in the middle east at the relevant time who suggested it might be good to stop being complete shits to each other...
    - dcminter 9mo ago
      "...nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..." - Douglas Adams
      - Barrin92 9mo ago
        this is a fashionable sentiment, but as Nietzsche (a man who cannot be accused of having much sympathy for Christianity) pointed out: The notion that a slave, humiliated and crucified, was as worthy of mercy and equal was nothing short of a complete overturning of the moral order of the world. Far from obvious it was radical and subversive. The kind of modern atheist who doesn't see this does so because he has Christian values so deeply in his bones he doesn't even realize it.
retrocog 9mo ago
In many ways, I think we've underestimated our ancestors. They may have been more capable than we often give them credit for.
mahrain 9mo ago
When I was young and having access to internet (but pre social media) I loved looking into these theories, prompted by Discovery Channel's "Quest for the lost civilization" and stumbling upon these books from the 1970s. It felt like doing research and archaeology on the nascent internet. I was surprised to see these ideas becoming so mainstream with Ancient Aliens, and then somehow finding overlap with the alt-right, antivax and Covid-doubters. This made me really turn off of taking this seriously.
abraxas 9mo ago
In the 80's he was considered a crackpot and a menace. In 2026 he'd make a fine member of the US government if he was a bit younger. Not much younger as it's a geriatric ward through and through but just a wee bit.
- blablabla123 9mo ago
  I remember him from 90s TV shows among other similar people. It seemed more like an obscurity but it was interesting to watch. Obviously he highlighted things which just hadn't been fully understood yet. To me it seems that was a time when society still had a healthy relationship to conspiracies, para sciences etc. (Maybe it's true but very much probably not...)
tete 9mo ago
Like many I also read his and related work as a young child. It's fantastic stories. Later I also learned that he is a charismatic dude that can also laugh about his work, which is something I will always appreciate in people. I think he believed bits and pieces he wrote or at least found them interesting overall. A lot of it is just also viewing ancient cultures from different angles. It's very different from people today that turn everything into a cult and is "us vs them". Something I cannot stop to notice is how a lot of actual science (not pseudo-sience like what Däniken does) have very fringe ideas nowadays. There is that weird "advanced civilization" context that feels like humans will turn into weird "philosophy robots". The whole "they will make themselves robots" with the idea that somehow that brings eternal life when most even more simple machines don't last as long as humans. There is that weird idea that it will be fine to go on generational ships. There is the idea that people will be fine with simply freezing themselves completely abandoning any contact with any human they ever interacted with. Very weird concepts, but somehow they are essentially "aliens must be like that" when empirically... aliens have been drinking, partying and enriching themselves, waged wars, plundered and raped for thousands of years with essentially no sign for change. You have horrible times (middle ages, world wars) and you have good times (post napoleonic times/long peace, post WW2 and times during Pax Romana). People for thousands of years dream of some world, be it mythical creatures or aliens that somehow are just philosophers and scientists. This seems almost as absurd. Yet there are people that call themselves scientists and believe those things almost considering them for granted. (the whole Kardoshev Scale is essentially fringe science as soon as you consider it anything but a completely arbitrary scale) But that's not bad. In fact it's good. The whole dreaming up stuff to motivate to explore more is a strong driver for science. Doesn't matter if it's discovering a new continent, dreaming up machines that allow for global communication, or what could lie hidden in a pyramid. The channels on Mars might have been imaginations, but I am certain if that fascination wasn't there astronomy would be a lot poorer. And while Däniken had a lot of imagination and didn't apply the scientific method I think that he made a lot of people interested in both the stars and ancient cultures. I really wished that in today's society there would be more space between science, fantasy and what is essentially charlatans, cults, sects and so on. Being curious can and should exist outside of academics. And disagreeing and questioning things should exist outside of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccers. And maybe it should be more than some video game or Netflix series lore. And I mean curiosity that isn't just endless YouTube video watching, but something a bit more active. There is nothing wrong with challenging truths. Like there is nothing wrong with finding good arguments for abstruse ideas (earth being flat or something) to learn something new. Nothing wrong to come up with "science" behind vampires and zombies. It's just bad that suddenly you wake up in some weird cult and are shunned for thinking a bit out of the box and using imagination. And for not making clear lines and distinctions. I hate how a lot of that makes people part of groups or something and how they somehow find their way into politics. It's bizarre and given that this seems to be a somewhat new development I think it's also completely unnecessary. Even with "futurists" and scientists the whole "fusion vs fission vs other ways of power generation" is sometimes a bit weird to watch. I think a bit more imagination would be a good thing in today's world. Viewing things from different, even fantastical angles would be beneficial. Imagining where things could go doesn't have to be left to hypothetical alien civilizations. There was a time when people thought Esperanto would mean that people could all talk to each other on equal footing. There was a time when the US, Europe and Russia were building space stations together. There was a time when national borders seemed to become less important. From today's perspective a lot of these things seem like fever dreams, and it feels like we're heading into the dark ages yet again.
animanoir 9mo ago
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davidwritesbugs 9mo ago
Read his books as a schoolboy, stopped taking him seriously when in one of his books he reproduced an ancient picture of a skeleton and said “this was /centuries/ before x-rays were discovered. How would they know bone structure without [alien advanced tech]” I kinda laughed and threw away his books. Still, he grifted a good living so props.
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throw4847285 9mo ago
Luckily there is a category for people like him, and one that is underused. "He was wrong about everything, but he sure was a great writer." Just because somebody paints a pretty picture does not mean that anything they say should be taken seriously.
ping00 9mo ago
RIP. If I may share a memory: I still remember visiting Jungfrau Park with my parents on a vacation to Switzerland back in 2005; as a scifi-leaning kid even back then (4th/5th grade), I had a ton of fun in all the different exhibits. IIRC, different wings of the park were dedicated to different mysteries/monuments, so you'd have the Aztec and Egyptian pyramids, Peruvian (Nazca, and my favorite one) desert drawings, ancient Indian flying chariots, etc. A great time, and I'm honestly quite surprised (in retrospect) that my dad chose to go there, given our time-limited schedule. It was also my first time trying Weisswurst in the JP cafetaria (being a Hindu kid growing up in the UAE, I seized every opportunity to try beef and pork when I could lol) -- I'm sure it was fairly mid, but I thought it was fantastic! If nothing else, it helped me establish some pop cultural 'throughlines' in that I was able to digest (so to speak) other "aliens were here first and they taught us a bunch of things" trope that cropped up later in my life (like Aliens vs. Predators, Prometheus). I can't say for sure, but it might have been my earliest encounter with the Big Question: "Why are we here? Is there a plan?" -- even though I discounted the alien theory pretty young, it was still an exciting way to get started on the subject (and is still fun to me to this day). I suppose a portion of credit for ongoing interest in science fiction is directly attributable to my time at Jungfrau Park :) Weirdly enough, I was just in Switzerland a couple of months back and we happened to drive by Jungfrau on our way to Lauterbrunnen -- JP is still there, which stirred up the ^ memory, but I learned on the trip that it had been shut down sadly. Thanks for being a part of such a surreal memory Mr. Daniken.
geldedus 9mo ago
A crook less in the world. Good riddance

135 points by Kaibeezy 9mo ago

https://x.com/vonDaeniken/status/2010314306894828023 https://x.com/vonDaeniken/status/2010314306894828023

thesaintlives 9mo ago

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ahazred8ta 9mo ago

Bio on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken Notable for "Chariots of the Gods" (1968).

cratermoon 9mo ago

von Däniken was the original Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, aka "aliens" meme guy. He never met an archeological artifact that didn't look like alien technology to him.

cgriswald 9mo ago
What really drives me nuts about von Däniken (and Tsoukalos, Childress, et al. …) is that he contradicts himself. (Sorry, I don’t care about this stuff enough to have a recent example.) His position isn’t consistent. Zecharia Sitchin’s arguments are also frequently not good but he at least seemed to be trying to construct a consistent whole whereas these other guys will just say anything.
- lukan 9mo ago
  Yes. I stopped reading von Däniken, after there were multiple contradictions on the very first page of the first book I tried. I like fantasy, but it should be at least a little bit consistent.
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  Sitchin's biggest defence is that very few people can read cuneiform. Even less than hieroglyphics seemingly. Certainly less than Hebrew, Sanskrit or Greek. That means there aren't a lot of people able to dismiss his translations properly.
  - cratermoon 9mo ago
    This also happens with Mayan script. When the group led by Linda Schele made major leaps in the 70s, to the point where 90% of the glyphs have now been deciphered, scholars mostly considered their meaning settled. That obviously hasn't kept cranks from asserting all kinds of wild ideas, but there are still scholars who dispute the accuracy and meaning of the interpretations.
p-e-w 9mo ago
I heard Däniken speak about 30 years ago, and exchanged a few words with him afterwards. He was a brilliant orator and came across as highly sophisticated. His arguments were contrived and I recognized that even as a child, but he was nothing like the natives of the YouTube era who do it for the likes and memes. He was completely sincere in his own belief of what he said.
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  He is a great showman in his way. He was far from being the first to write on this subject, but I think he was pretty much the first to popularise it on television.
nephihaha 9mo ago
VD wasn't the original, not even close. Peter Kolosimo had best sellers on the same subject years earlier, as did others. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts
- cratermoon 9mo ago
  TIL. I remember my parents had von Däniken books. I, on the other hand, was deeply into Isaac Asimov, both his fiction and non-fiction. He was a pretty good debunker.
  - nephihaha 9mo ago
    I read both. I have to admit I was never much of a fan of Asimov's non-fiction or work outside of SF... I could take it or leave it. I do find most of EVD's examples to be ridiculous... The Nazca lines, for example, were clearly never landing strips, for a variety of reasons, although they may have been meant to be seen from above. What Von Däniken did teach me as a child was to have a sense of wonder about the ancients and their achievements. Maybe not spaceships and electricity necessarily, but their feats of masonry and sculpture. I've seen dolmens capped by stones the size of a bus, that I felt uncomfortable walking under, even though they had managed to stay like that for thousands of years. We struggle to replicate some of these things today yet they apparently did so without metal tools, proper ropes or any number of other things. The planning alone would have taken many years.
0928374082 9mo ago
Ancient Aliens ought to be required viewing in schools, because they are very careful to employ enthymeme and reported speech to make a series of statements each one of which is technically true, yet have implications which are false. Gaining the skill to recognise when these kinds of claims are being made is, I feel, essential for the electorate in a democracy.
- cratermoon 9mo ago
  There's an important difference between facts and truth. There was a time when I read a stream of articles and blog posts titled something like "I'm a liberal, but I agree with ... <obviously far right thing>" After reading enough of them, I realized the common structure was to state a number of relevant facts, then make a leap across an unstated and unsupported premise, hoping the reader won't notice. The final section would assert the conclusion based on this premise.

WhatIsDukkha 9mo ago

Sagan comes in with a great quote - The problem is summed up by Carl Sagan: “Every time he [von Däniken] sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet” (Playboy 1974:151). Unfortunately its true of so many people, and the information revolution we were all promised seems to have made it worse, not better.

Terr_ 9mo ago
This also applies to certain "conspiracies." In both cases, it's their God of the Gaps. (Not to be confused with the Boss of the Ross. Or Hermes. Or Nike.)
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  One of the problems is we do have massive gaps. Mainly because we have no written records from the Stone Age, and barely anything from certain other cultures. Von Däniken exploits that.
- dhosek 9mo ago
  Conspiracies are wonderfully self-reinforcing: anything that doesn’t support the conspiracy is clearly the work of the conspirators hiding their existence.
  - nephihaha 9mo ago
    The problem is that does happen in real life. Intelligence services and organised crime work actively to hide their tracks. As do corrupt officials and some of the military. We live in a society where corruption is rife and ordinary people are largely excluded from most major institutions ... That is the atmosphere that breeds these things.
    - Terr_ 9mo ago
      My favorite way to cut apart those two is to ask: How many people need to keep a secret, how long and how perfectly would they need to succeed, and what motive do they have to do a good job?

blacksmithgu 9mo ago

I have a family member who is quite into "ancient aliens" and who has read all of von Danikens books. The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that rigor and science did not really matter and would not convince them of anything. It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize how humans went from mud to computers. They don't believe in human creativity being powerful enough to lead to modern society and think an external force was required. Ancient aliens is a convenient and fun theory for how it could have happened.

acdha 9mo ago
I’ve known a few people like that, and it had a darker undercurrent: they didn’t disbelieve that, say, the Greek or Roman monuments were built by those civilizations because they viewed those as predecessors of their own, but they considered the pacific or Central/South American cultures inferior and didn’t want to believe they were capable of great engineering. Beyond the strong whiff of racism, I think there was also this idea that civilization went on a single path (grain, the wheel and domesticated horses/oxen/mules, bronze, iron, guns, steam, etc.) and so anyone which didn’t follow that path was basically developmentally challenged. This definitely did not consider the possibility that not every region had the prerequisites to follow the same path.
- mx7zysuj4xew 9mo ago
  My own favorite example of this is how the pyramids (and all the advanced trigonometry required) were built by the Egyptians prior to their discovery of the wheel
  - WalterBright 9mo ago
    > advanced trigonometry There's a ratio involving pi between the base lengths of the pyramid and its height. This is been interpreted by enthusiasts that the Egyptians knew about pi. But, consider a measuring wheel, where you can mark off distances very accurately by counting revolutions of the wheel, say, 1 cubit in diameter (I know, I know, what's a cubit?). Then, if the height is laid out in cubits, the ratio of pi is there while being completely ignorant of it.

mannanj 9mo ago

In regards to the space ship that people see, I've seen photos of some Egyptian pyramid hieroglyphs myself, I hear this often "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" This stupendous gaslighting mirrors what I took away early in this article. It used several Appeal to Authority and Epistemic Invalidation and is quite clearly pathetic. Hard to read the clearly biased claims.

accidentallfact 9mo ago

Pretty much all such claims can be easily dismissed by pointing out that such advances 1. Can obviously be made 2. Can be made very fast There is simply no reason why major advancements in metallurgy couldn't have been made between 4453 and 4382BC, completely unknown to us, and later forgotten. If fact, it's a mystery why we can't see more of such ancient artifacts, if anything. The article doesn't even go far enough by blaming the oiling on some accidental dumb ritual, while it used to be common knowledge that iron can be protected from rusting by oiling it, and it was done completely on purpose.

WalterBright 9mo ago
The reason better toolboxes have felt inside the drawers is you put a drop of oil on the felt, and it will keep the tools rust-free.
- Luc 9mo ago
  It's the other way around. Think about it, how would the oil travel to the rest of the tool that's not touching the felt? Felt is bad, it wicks away oil from the tool's surface and often absorbs moisture from the air. Tools placed on clean felt will often rust where they touch the felt. You need to mitigate its wicking and hygroscopic properties by applying lots of oil to it. Use rubber mats instead.
  - WalterBright 9mo ago
    I've never had any tools rust in my toolbox. The oil migrates around as the tools are taken out and put back in.

bregma 9mo ago

von Daniken's work inspired me to travel to Nazca PE and charter an airplane to see the alien landing strips for myself. Certainly a worthwhile trip. I may even have convinced the local guide I was a True Believer, of which I am sure he has encountered his share. I have also take a page from his books by expostulating outlandish theories to explain facts with a straight face, always ending with a quick "of course there are other explanations". It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.

geekamongus 9mo ago
I have always enjoyed bringing in the "you know, the bible could be read very differently if you consider God to be an alien" to certain philosophical conversations I've had with people over the years, ever since reading von Daniken's work. As you allude to, there are always other explanations.
- pavlov 9mo ago
  Nobel-winning author Doris Lessing wrote a novel called Shikasta in 1979 that (to my recollection) is a rewriting of the Old Testament and Earth history from the point of view of an alien community who played the role assigned to the divinities and angels in human myths. I read it as a teenager and it really stuck with me as a completely different, more spiritually influenced take on science fiction and “ancient aliens” theories of the era. She won the Nobel Prize on the strength of her more autobiographical and feminist prose, so Shikasta is an outlier in her own body of work too.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
    Shikasta is an incredible book. Completely out of left field for her, and a timely mix of politics and raw SF. Incredibly depressing, but also unique. Neither the mainstream lit world nor the SF world knew what to make of it. It's not so much a retelling of the OT as a suggestion that alien interference wouldn't look like flying saucers landing on the White House lawn, it would look like despicable politicians doing inhuman things.

theturtle 9mo ago

Didn't Carl Sagan (no stranger to selling books) pretty much stomp von Däniken's "theory" into cornmeal well before the turn of the century?

cheese_van 9mo ago

I read von Daniken as a very young kid and loved it. But I read it, and enjoyed it very much, as a science fiction genre. I never bought it, but I admired the effort. And so I thank him for stimulating a child's imagination. Well done Mr. V!

nephihaha 9mo ago
His books are entertaining, I'll give him that. Some of his archaeological interpretations are laughable but now and then he has a head scratcher.
- _ph_ 9mo ago
  The world is full of "head scratchers". But that makes it more important not just to yell "aliens!", but to exercise scientific curiosity. This is what makes me most angry about his works, he discourages people from trying to work out solutions for mysterious phenomena.
dhosek 9mo ago
This was the first book that I picked out to buy for myself as a child (I remember pestering my parents for it at the Kroch’s and Brentano’s on Lake Street in Oak Park back in the 70s). I read it over and over and thanks to that, when I later came to stories like the Hebrews wandering the desert in Exodus, it was hard to put the von Däniken nonsense out of my mind. Psychologists have there own version of this (which managed to achieve a sort of respectability) in Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which has the same sort of furtive/animistic fallacies are put forth to justify a questionable conclusion.
- Propelloni 9mo ago
  Hey, Julian Jaynes! Haven't heard that name in a while. I remember that book fondly, compelling story telling. IMO Richard Dawkins said it best, it's either fucking nuts or fucking genius, no in between.
djmips 9mo ago

raverbashing 9mo ago

It's easy to dismiss the most obvious cases where EvD is wrong But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss Archeology by itself is always going to have limitations, and there are vast swatches of history we are almost completely ignorant about EvD is certainly guilty of taking himself much more seriously than the evidence suggests. But there's always going to be that "what if"

diego_moita 9mo ago
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- raverbashing 9mo ago
  Strawman. Thanks for proving that "skeptics" are very happy to use fallacies as well
- gitaarik 9mo ago
  Some things you can easily dismiss with the proof of the opposite or something conflicting. But some parts of the hypothesis can't be either disproofed or proofed. You could personally dismiss it, but you can't proof your point either. Like general archeology says humanity is only as old as the oldest evidence of it ever found, and some pseudo scientific hypothesis might say humans are older. You can't prove or disprove that. But you can't prove or disprove either that humanity is exactly as old as the oldest evidence we have. But when some older bones are discovered then you have proof that humanity is at least that old. So yeah, absence of evidence doesn't disprove the hypothesis.
protocolture 9mo ago
>But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss Its an unproven hypothesis. It doesnt need to be "dismissed" it needs to be proven. You could make up any number of hypotheses. You wouldnt "dismiss" any of them. If you were interested in one you might design a test to prove it. But failing that its not worth worrying about. When you write like 49 books trying to convince people of your untested claim, it seems like grifting instead of working towards evidence.

nephihaha 9mo ago

The most obvious problem with this article is that it assumes Von Däniken came up with this idea. Years before "Chariots of the Gods", Peter Kolosimo already had best-selling works discussing ancient aliens. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts "However, the fifties and sixties were more dominated by European works. The Italian Peter Kolosimo wrote several books as early as 1957, but his Timeless Earth (1964) became an international best seller and was translated into several languages. French-language authors included Henri Lhote who proposed that prehistoric Saharan rock art depicted close encounters, Bergier and Pauwels' Morning of the Magicians (1960), Robert Charroux's One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963) and Misraki's Flying Saucers Through The Ages. A few British authors also published before Von Däniken, such as Brinsley Le Poer Trench, John Michell and W. Raymond Drake who wrote Gods or Spacemen? in 1964. "Although Von Däniken claims he was formulating his ancient astronaut ideas throughout his school days, it is clear that many others had already published their books on the subject, long before he became notable with Chariots of the Gods? in 1968."

Morromist 9mo ago
Good point. I was introduced to the idea that aliens came to earth long ago and invented humans and built lots of weird monuments through The Mountains of Maddness by H P Lovecraft, written in 1930.
- ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
  I loved the book (usually, Lovecraft’s work drives me nuts, because adjectives), but I assumed that The Great Old Ones were Cretaceous-era native lifeforms that had basically gone extinct. He wrote his books at a time, when significant parts of the Earth were still a mystery. I sort of feel envy for that.
  - Morromist 9mo ago
    Yeah, there was something great about being a child who hasn't bing-read wikipedia for years. Lots of mystery out there. Then you read about the world and you know all this interesting stuff about it but the mystery is gone.

bell-cot 9mo ago

Skimming through this item, a couple points I don't see being made: - If you claim that the assistance of alien visitors is needed to explain the milestone leaps or technological achievements of ancient human civilizations...are you walking into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down logic trap? Because obviously "our" alien visitors would have need even greater leaps and achievements in their own past, to be able to travel to the earth. And their visitors similar, and so on. - Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?

pixl97 9mo ago
I think a lot of it is based on how little of time most people knew existed in a tangible way. Until the last few centuries you were born into a world where most technologies you use had already been around so long they just might as well have existed forever. And the stories of how any talked about technologies were generally myth, folklore, or completely false. The idea the earth was around for billions of years wasn't really a thing for most cultures. Maybe you believed it was around forever, or that a mythological creation even happened in the 'more recent' past and the earth popped up like it was. The idea their was a beginning a long time ago, but it only started out with the most basic shit (ionized hydrogen mostly) and everything after that is because of an ever increasing entropy gradient is just not an idea that seems to pop into our heads.
nephihaha 9mo ago
I don't see why it would require a "turtles all the way" down logic trap. There would be a few ET civilisations which would develop the long and hard way, but then they could accelerate or seed civilisation elsewhere. A sort of reverse Prime Directive.
- CRConrad 9mo ago
  Yes it is: If those civilisations could "develop the long and hard way", why couldn't we?

tekla 9mo ago

Also the guy that was the inspiration for Daniel Jackson in the original Stargate movie. Rest in ascension.

unnah 9mo ago
Most likely his ancient astronaut theory was the inspiration for the entire Stargate franchise. Of course to make the movie believable they had to give Jackson a more academic background than von Däniken had.

bhaak 9mo ago

He was the first person who introduced me to the idea that if you look at a thing with different mindsets, from different points of view, you can arrive at quite different opinions about the “true” nature of that thing. At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible. He had a way of describing things with a vigor that is quite rare. It was a fascinating read as a kid, blending science fiction with history and archaeology. Of course, later learning about the scientific method, or even just Occam’s razor, made it clear that the theory of ancient aliens is very unlikely, but the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time. A quite unique and interesting person departed this planet yesterday.

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humanfromearth9 9mo ago
Incapable: that happens when the acceptance of an idea implies that their perception of their identity is flawed and has, logically to change in order to adapt for the new reality where the idea has its place. Denial is a protection mechanism, and it is very effective when the reality is too difficult to support as it is. Identity is so essential in our beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that most of us won't accept anything that requires it to change. Unless we accept that failure is part of our identity and that this means that our identity sometimes has to evolve. But that has to be done willingly, explicitly (in our minds).
abetusk 9mo ago
I share your confusion about how ideology clouds judgement but I have a little anecdote. I sometimes give people the Monty Hall problem. When they get it wrong, it often falls into the category of staying with the initial pick increases chances or switching has equal odds. I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference. If they insist that it makes no difference, I then start to play the actual game with them, writing down the prize door before the game starts and then proceeding with the game as normal. Only after a few rounds of them losing do they accept the proofs of what the optimal strategy is. My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.

Beijinger 9mo ago

He said, he wanted to "ask questions and entertain". I guess he does, but he does not use the scientific method. Also, he does not claim to use the scientific method. I think it is more surprising that we have not found any alien artifacts by now. Godspeed Erich.

darepublic 9mo ago

They come from above!

someoldgit 9mo ago

Graham Hancock's Mentor.

JetSetIlly 9mo ago
Not really. Von Daniken talks about ancient aliens. Hancock talks about ancient human civilisations.
- lproven 9mo ago
  > Hancock talks about ... a load of made-up absolutely drivel. Just in case anyone out there was in any doubt whatsoever. I've read a little of his stuff, but more to the point seen him speak live, and that was enough to quickly tell me he is nothing more than a fantasist and complete fraud.

MarkusWandel 9mo ago

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tomhow 9mo ago
Please don't comment like this on HN, no matter who or what it's about. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

diego_moita 9mo ago

[flagged]

tomhow 9mo ago
You've broken several guidelines with this comment. Please make an effort to contribute thoughtfully if you want to participate here. Be kind. Don't be snarky... Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer... Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46580643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46580643 and marked it off topic.

awful 9mo ago

As a youngster I (the country?) was so excited, entranced for a bit, I read Chariots and Outer Space, stopped at maybe Gold of the Gods? I matured and grew, though I wanted it all to be real, there was little to no progression of the claims and evidence. Like Batboy or all the National Enquirer articles, it was clear it EVD was a crank.

thrill 9mo ago

Eric didn’t die - he just went home.

gaigalas 9mo ago

This dude got famous by polluting the public discourse on archaeology to sell books. I cannot respect him as an author or thinker, only as a human.

defrost 9mo ago
Still easily a seven on the grifting scale from used carpet spruiker to current POTUS.
- gaigalas 9mo ago
  They look all the same to me.
  - defrost 9mo ago
    Fair enough, no shame there, not everyone can tell a hawk from a heronsaw. Carpet spruikers draw the crowd in to get a punter to buy a ratty old carpet with a backstory. It's a grift but the mark leaves with a carpet, just not a good deal. Erich is selling the idea of aliens. There are no aliens in truth in his tales, but he is at a least (largely) a true believer (to the best of my knowledge). Others know from the outset they're lying, misleading, and profiting from vaporware. The promise of better healthcare that doesn't come about, the myth of a better country again, etc.

deleted 9mo ago

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tzs 9mo ago

EvD is a good illustration of how we were more resilient against crackpots back then. His book "Chariots of the Gods" was a best seller. I remember reading it probably in the early '70s, when I would have been somewhere in the 10-12 year old range. I'm pretty sure I believed he was probably right, as did a couple friends who also read it. We also believed in some other bunk, like various psychic and paranormal stuff, much of which came from reading "Fate" magazine. But without internet there was really no way to connect with a larger community of people who also believed those things. With just books, magazines, and maybe if we were really into it a couple newsletters it was hard to become obsessed with this stuff. Furthermore we also read popular science magazines, and Asimov's monthly column in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction". They would publish rebuttals to the more significant crackpot claims going around (although I don't think Asimov ever specifically commented on EvD). The mainstream news magazines, like Time or Newsweek, would often include comments by prominent skeptics such as Carl Sagan when writing about these things. Because mass communication was expensive (and often also slow) new questionable theories took some time to start getting widespread acceptance. That gave scientists (or other relevant experts for non-science based crackpot theories) time to write refutations. It is more work (often much more work) to refute crackpots than it is to generate crackpot theories. Now we are awash with widespread belief in crackpot theories. A new one can spread very fast and very wide on social media and be established before refutations can be written. And when the refutations do come out the social media algorithms might not show them to the people that those same algorithms fed the theories to. They get more clicks and engagement if they instead show those people new crackpot theories instead of refutations of the crackpot theories they were showing a week or two earlier.

eru 9mo ago
Maybe. On the other hand, it was also harder to find refutations of crackpot theories that the mainstream happened to believe in.
- adornKey 9mo ago
  Nowadays the popular mainstream cults openly go against hard data - and nobody bothers... Witch hunting was popular in Europe for more than 300 years. Last conviction in court in Europe was 1944... The mainstream is much more insane than people are aware of. Modern cargo cults have a lot more evidence going against them than witch hunting ever had (doing statistics about the number of lightning strikes reduced by burning witches wasn't that popular at all).

anonymousiam 9mo ago

Belief in aliens and UFOs was popular in the 1970's. Looking back on it now, it's amazing to me how gullible everyone was. Maybe it was the high lead content in everything...

eru 9mo ago
Claimed UFOs sightings seem to have become less common since everyone is expected to carry a digital camera with them all the time (in their phones). Similar for Loch Ness etc. But it's not like people don't like their outlandish theories anymore. Alas, they've become very politicised, too. To give an example that's hopefully not too polarising: many people like to blame inflation on greed.
- consp 9mo ago
  > Claimed UFOs sightings seem to have become less common Now it's mostly drawn down to explaining people what sensor and perspective glitches are.
- 453yuh46 9mo ago
  UFO phenomenon peaked with TV and Movies of 1950s. There is no other better explanation for UFO than influence of mass media on human minds, where some of them could not distinguish reality and what they saw on screen.
jacquesm 9mo ago
> it's amazing to me how gullible everyone was I have some bad news for you.
- DonHopkins 9mo ago
  Yeah, I know what you mean! I tried looking up "gullible" in the dictionary, and it was censored! Don't believe me: do your own research.
ZebraOtoko 9mo ago
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zoklet-enjoyer 9mo ago

I loved his books in junior high. I was into cryptids and aliens UFOs and secret military base conspiracies and stuff like that for a long time. It's like making up sci-fi explanations for the real world. He's up there riding that chariot now.

classified 9mo ago

Bummer, who are the aliens to contact now if they want to phone Earth? Rest in peace, your ideas were good entertainment.

DonHopkins 9mo ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42226224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42226224 DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Hundreds More Nazca Lines Emerge in Peru's Desert FYI, Erich von Däniken's book "Chariots of the Gods?" is racist pseudo-scientific claptrap. My Archaeoastronomy professor at the University of Maryland, John B. Carlson, despises it. It attributes the achievements of ancient non-European civilizations to extraterrestrial visitors, undermining their intelligence and capabilities, promotes speculative theories without empirical evidence, misinterprets artifacts, ignores scientific consensus, perpetuates harmful cultural stereotypes, and plagiarizes French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy >Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the interdisciplinary[1] or multidisciplinary[2] study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used these phenomena and what role the sky played in their cultures".[3] Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern astronomy is a scientific discipline, while archaeoastronomy considers symbolically rich cultural interpretations of phenomena in the sky by other cultures.[4][5] It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice.[6] A Brief History of the Center for Archaeoastronomy https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~tlaloc/archastro/cfaintro.html https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~tlaloc/archastro/cfaintro.html DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–] Archaeoastronomy was one of the most interesting courses I took at uni, and professor Carlson was extremely enthusiastic about it. It really opened my mind to how smart and motivated ancient people were, not at all like our stereotypes from "The Flintstones" and "Chariots of the Gods?". For example, The Anasazi Indians made significant astronomical observations that they integrated into their architecture and cultural practices. They tracked solar and lunar cycles, aligning their buildings and ceremonial sites with celestial events like solstices and equinoxes. A fascinating example is the "Sun Dagger" at Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, where they used sunlight and shadow patterns on petroglyphs to mark important times of the year. They deserve an enormous about of credit for what they achieved without all our received technology, and left behind for us to reverse engineer. https://spaceshipearth1.wordpress.com/tag/anasazi-indians-astronomy/ https://spaceshipearth1.wordpress.com/tag/anasazi-indians-as... https://www2.hao.ucar.edu/education/prehistoric-southwest/sun-dagger https://www2.hao.ucar.edu/education/prehistoric-southwest/su... It's disappointing when people reflexively attribute ancient achievements like that to religion (or aliens), when it's actually hard objective observation based science that deserves credit! >[then vixen99 took issue at my use of "FYI" and tried to argue that we should respect irrational and racist opinions by framing proven objective facts as opinions, just to be fair to loonies: "How about IMO rather than FYI ? We can make up our own minds."] DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–] Sometimes (and often) pseudoscientific bullshit is just objectively wrong, and you'd have to be completely out of your mind, or just trolling, to "make up your own mind" to believe it. No sane flat earthers in this day and age actually believe the earth is flat, or deserve to have their presumed beliefs respected or even humored, because they're just being contrarian and trolling for attention, so it's perfectly valid to say to them "FYI, the Earth is not flat." I refuse to couch my firm disbelief that the Earth is flat as an opinion that might possibly be wrong, by saying "IMO, the Earth is not flat." Flat Earthers (also Young Earthers) certainly aren't couching their crazy beliefs as opinions, so don't deserve it in return. "Chariots of the Gods?" is also that objectively wrong: there is no possible universe in which its claims are true. It's all based on historically ignorant Argument from Incredulity and inherently racist assumptions. In the 50th anniversary edition, von Däniken refused to address, admit, or correct any of the many widely proven errors in the book that made him so much money and fame, so he doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity Believing in pseudoscientific claptrap like Homeopathy, or the objectively false stories of Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark is just as ridiculous. They're physically and mathematically and logically and practically impossible. So it's also fine to say "FYI it's biblical fiction, and the Earth is definitely not 6000 years old, and you absolutely can not fit and feed and clean that many animals in a wooden ark." It's not my opinion, it's objective information. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4OhXQTMOEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4OhXQTMOEc To pretend otherwise feels like humoring a small child who still believes in Santa Claus.

fithisux 9mo ago

His fairytales were wild, but they train you to see existing things in a new perspective. Debunking the new perspective is what makes you more knowledgeable. But sometimes you see current reality with a different eye, not necessarily in E.v.D. way and surely not in the establishment's way.

KellyCriterion 9mo ago

When I was young, I liked his stories & perspectives and it carried some "myth into the world" When I got older and understood how media industry works, I liked his "product execution & market fit" even more :-)

gethly 9mo ago

The Chariots of the gods was impressive piece of work to read when I was a child and it definitely started something that lasts to this day. Although I must admit, Daniken was more of a sensationalist than a serious author. Thanks to him though, I have discovered Sitchin and all his body of work and thanks to him, few other authors - mainly the O'briens. So I guess Daniken did his job after all and got me interested in these topics.

seymores 9mo ago

:-( I stumbled upon his work when I was very young and could barely read, but damn, it was the first book that opened my eyes to our crazy world and taught me that our textbooks are just convenient truths.

DonHopkins 9mo ago
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ReptileMan 9mo ago

We haven't had a person witnessing technological decline in their lifetime for probably 400 years or so. It is not surprising that it is a conceptual blind spot, especially for quacks.

NedF 9mo ago

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ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago

I read Chariot of the Gods when I was young and thought it was great - exciting ideas about how the world isn't quite how it's boringly portrayed. And aliens! However, I tried re-reading it when I was a bit older and it was just laughably bad. Seemed to be a whole bunch of leading questions and then throwing random assumptions into the mix. When I was older, I started reading a bunch of Robert Anton Wilson books and was introduced to The Sirius Mystery by Robert K G Temple - now that's a much more serious investigation into Ancient Aliens visiting the Dogon people. Of course, we should really be tracing back the Ancient Alien theory to Lovecraft's fiction.

hare2eternity 9mo ago

> It is with great sadness and shock that we must announce that Erich von Däniken passed away on January 10, 2026. Not sure what is 'shocking' about someone in their 90s passing away. Surely at that point you start expecting it?

ZebraOtoko 9mo ago
Yeah, honestly, if anything, congratulations are in order: if you die in your 90s, you did quite well in the longevity contest. Most people die before their 90th birthday, many long before. Not too many people make it to their 100th birthday.
layer8 9mo ago
It’s a general societal expectation to be saddened and shocked by death.
sophacles 9mo ago
Given how much he knew about the alien tech, youd thik he would use it to be immortal, or at least very long lived.

Fnoord 9mo ago

[flagged]

arethuza 9mo ago

I remember reading a von Däniken book when I was quite young, 9 or so, I think and being absolutely fascinated. Then after a while I realised it was pretty much all made up and what has stayed with me ever since was my blazing righteous anger that someone could make up a pile of stuff and put it in a book and claim it was true. That feeling has stayed with me far long than anything from the book itself.

vixen99 9mo ago
Perhaps most of us can assess something like this and decide for ourselves on the available evidence as to its truth and relevance. What the author claims seems, to me at least, a minor issue. I get it that you do not agree. More generally aside from outright lies and pure stories, there are always analogical levels of interpretation. Presumably, if an unbeliever, you're irate at many of the world religions.
- arethuza 9mo ago
  Well, I was 9 at the time and it was probably the first "science" book that I had read and got excited about. And no - never been impressed by any of the major religions - although (possibly influenced by Philip Pullman) I do wonder if there was a completely normal bloke in the middle east at the relevant time who suggested it might be good to stop being complete shits to each other...
  - dcminter 9mo ago
    "...nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..." - Douglas Adams
    - Barrin92 9mo ago
      this is a fashionable sentiment, but as Nietzsche (a man who cannot be accused of having much sympathy for Christianity) pointed out: The notion that a slave, humiliated and crucified, was as worthy of mercy and equal was nothing short of a complete overturning of the moral order of the world. Far from obvious it was radical and subversive. The kind of modern atheist who doesn't see this does so because he has Christian values so deeply in his bones he doesn't even realize it.

retrocog 9mo ago

In many ways, I think we've underestimated our ancestors. They may have been more capable than we often give them credit for.

mahrain 9mo ago

When I was young and having access to internet (but pre social media) I loved looking into these theories, prompted by Discovery Channel's "Quest for the lost civilization" and stumbling upon these books from the 1970s. It felt like doing research and archaeology on the nascent internet. I was surprised to see these ideas becoming so mainstream with Ancient Aliens, and then somehow finding overlap with the alt-right, antivax and Covid-doubters. This made me really turn off of taking this seriously.

abraxas 9mo ago

In the 80's he was considered a crackpot and a menace. In 2026 he'd make a fine member of the US government if he was a bit younger. Not much younger as it's a geriatric ward through and through but just a wee bit.

blablabla123 9mo ago
I remember him from 90s TV shows among other similar people. It seemed more like an obscurity but it was interesting to watch. Obviously he highlighted things which just hadn't been fully understood yet. To me it seems that was a time when society still had a healthy relationship to conspiracies, para sciences etc. (Maybe it's true but very much probably not...)

tete 9mo ago

Like many I also read his and related work as a young child. It's fantastic stories. Later I also learned that he is a charismatic dude that can also laugh about his work, which is something I will always appreciate in people. I think he believed bits and pieces he wrote or at least found them interesting overall. A lot of it is just also viewing ancient cultures from different angles. It's very different from people today that turn everything into a cult and is "us vs them". Something I cannot stop to notice is how a lot of actual science (not pseudo-sience like what Däniken does) have very fringe ideas nowadays. There is that weird "advanced civilization" context that feels like humans will turn into weird "philosophy robots". The whole "they will make themselves robots" with the idea that somehow that brings eternal life when most even more simple machines don't last as long as humans. There is that weird idea that it will be fine to go on generational ships. There is the idea that people will be fine with simply freezing themselves completely abandoning any contact with any human they ever interacted with. Very weird concepts, but somehow they are essentially "aliens must be like that" when empirically... aliens have been drinking, partying and enriching themselves, waged wars, plundered and raped for thousands of years with essentially no sign for change. You have horrible times (middle ages, world wars) and you have good times (post napoleonic times/long peace, post WW2 and times during Pax Romana). People for thousands of years dream of some world, be it mythical creatures or aliens that somehow are just philosophers and scientists. This seems almost as absurd. Yet there are people that call themselves scientists and believe those things almost considering them for granted. (the whole Kardoshev Scale is essentially fringe science as soon as you consider it anything but a completely arbitrary scale) But that's not bad. In fact it's good. The whole dreaming up stuff to motivate to explore more is a strong driver for science. Doesn't matter if it's discovering a new continent, dreaming up machines that allow for global communication, or what could lie hidden in a pyramid. The channels on Mars might have been imaginations, but I am certain if that fascination wasn't there astronomy would be a lot poorer. And while Däniken had a lot of imagination and didn't apply the scientific method I think that he made a lot of people interested in both the stars and ancient cultures. I really wished that in today's society there would be more space between science, fantasy and what is essentially charlatans, cults, sects and so on. Being curious can and should exist outside of academics. And disagreeing and questioning things should exist outside of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccers. And maybe it should be more than some video game or Netflix series lore. And I mean curiosity that isn't just endless YouTube video watching, but something a bit more active. There is nothing wrong with challenging truths. Like there is nothing wrong with finding good arguments for abstruse ideas (earth being flat or something) to learn something new. Nothing wrong to come up with "science" behind vampires and zombies. It's just bad that suddenly you wake up in some weird cult and are shunned for thinking a bit out of the box and using imagination. And for not making clear lines and distinctions. I hate how a lot of that makes people part of groups or something and how they somehow find their way into politics. It's bizarre and given that this seems to be a somewhat new development I think it's also completely unnecessary. Even with "futurists" and scientists the whole "fusion vs fission vs other ways of power generation" is sometimes a bit weird to watch. I think a bit more imagination would be a good thing in today's world. Viewing things from different, even fantastical angles would be beneficial. Imagining where things could go doesn't have to be left to hypothetical alien civilizations. There was a time when people thought Esperanto would mean that people could all talk to each other on equal footing. There was a time when the US, Europe and Russia were building space stations together. There was a time when national borders seemed to become less important. From today's perspective a lot of these things seem like fever dreams, and it feels like we're heading into the dark ages yet again.

animanoir 9mo ago

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davidwritesbugs 9mo ago

Read his books as a schoolboy, stopped taking him seriously when in one of his books he reproduced an ancient picture of a skeleton and said “this was /centuries/ before x-rays were discovered. How would they know bone structure without [alien advanced tech]” I kinda laughed and threw away his books. Still, he grifted a good living so props.

deleted 9mo ago

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throw4847285 9mo ago

Luckily there is a category for people like him, and one that is underused. "He was wrong about everything, but he sure was a great writer." Just because somebody paints a pretty picture does not mean that anything they say should be taken seriously.

ping00 9mo ago

RIP. If I may share a memory: I still remember visiting Jungfrau Park with my parents on a vacation to Switzerland back in 2005; as a scifi-leaning kid even back then (4th/5th grade), I had a ton of fun in all the different exhibits. IIRC, different wings of the park were dedicated to different mysteries/monuments, so you'd have the Aztec and Egyptian pyramids, Peruvian (Nazca, and my favorite one) desert drawings, ancient Indian flying chariots, etc. A great time, and I'm honestly quite surprised (in retrospect) that my dad chose to go there, given our time-limited schedule. It was also my first time trying Weisswurst in the JP cafetaria (being a Hindu kid growing up in the UAE, I seized every opportunity to try beef and pork when I could lol) -- I'm sure it was fairly mid, but I thought it was fantastic! If nothing else, it helped me establish some pop cultural 'throughlines' in that I was able to digest (so to speak) other "aliens were here first and they taught us a bunch of things" trope that cropped up later in my life (like Aliens vs. Predators, Prometheus). I can't say for sure, but it might have been my earliest encounter with the Big Question: "Why are we here? Is there a plan?" -- even though I discounted the alien theory pretty young, it was still an exciting way to get started on the subject (and is still fun to me to this day). I suppose a portion of credit for ongoing interest in science fiction is directly attributable to my time at Jungfrau Park :) Weirdly enough, I was just in Switzerland a couple of months back and we happened to drive by Jungfrau on our way to Lauterbrunnen -- JP is still there, which stirred up the ^ memory, but I learned on the trip that it had been shut down sadly. Thanks for being a part of such a surreal memory Mr. Daniken.

geldedus 9mo ago

A crook less in the world. Good riddance