Erich von Daniken, who claimed aliens visited Earth, dies at 90

[ZURICH] Erich von Daniken, the best-selling Swiss author and self-styled maverick archaeologist who propagated the theory that thousands of years ago an advanced alien species visited Earth, mated with ancient humans and gave them the technology, and the intelligence, to erect such marvels as the Great Pyramids, died on Jan 10 in Switzerland. He was 90.

Von Daniken was 32 and managing a hotel in Davos, Switzerland, when he published his first and by far most popular book, Chariots of the Gods, in 1968. In breathless prose, saturated with exclamation points and folksy interjections such as “Hey, presto!” von Daniken posited that virtually the sum of human knowledge and ability had been bestowed by extraterrestrials.

With little evidence and a lot of innuendo, he proclaimed that the Egyptian pyramids could have been built only with alien expertise. The birdman cult of Easter Island, von Daniken declared, developed as a way to honour the supreme beings who had flitted down from the outer atmosphere to land on that remote spot in the Pacific, off the coast of South America.

Because an iron rod in a temple in Delhi, India, appeared impervious to rust, it must have been made from a celestial alloy, he insisted.

Similarly, he said, when viewed from the air, the geoglyphs of Nazca, Peru, are obvious landing strips for spaceships. And artwork on a Mayan sarcophagus depicts not a king descending into the underworld, he concluded, but an astronaut-god piloting a spaceship.

Critics were unsparing. “Chariots of the Gods,” one anthropologist wrote, was “a warped parody of reasoning, argumentation, as well as a vigorous exercise in selective quotation, misrepresentation and error based on ignorance”.

Astrophysicist Carl Sagan said of von Daniken: “Every time he 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.”

But for a certain kind of reader – and, to scientists’ alarm, there were many of them – von Daniken’s theories registered not only intellectually but also spiritually, constituting something like the catechism of an enlightened new faith.

Chariots, which begins, “It took courage to write this book, and it will take courage to read it,” positioned itself squarely against the establishment, scientific or otherwise – not a hard sell in 1968.

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By incorporating into his argument ancient texts such as The Mahabharata and The Epic of Gilgamesh and a literal yet novel interpretation of the Bible – Ezekiel saw not fiery wheels in the sky but alien spacecraft – von Daniken appeared to unite the world’s religions, its foundational mythologies and its scientific understandings in a way that seduced both the questioning and the faithful.

And he did so just as the Space Age was proposing that a we-are-exceptional-in-the-universe point of view was embarrassingly naive.

Within a few years, Chariots had sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and von Daniken’s flock had transformed him into a prophet of the New Age.

In 1973, NBC aired a documentary based on von Daniken’s theories, and more than a quarter-million copies of Chariots sold in two days.

Braniff Airways began offering, for about US$8,000, 15-day pilgrimages to South America, allowing devotees to pay respects at some of the sites that von Daniken had brandished as evidence.

Over the next half-century, he published over 40 more books, which were translated into some 30 languages, and, though none of them offered much variation from his original themes or ideas, they collectively sold more than 70 million copies.

His energy seemed without limit. At one point, von Daniken was travelling 100,000 miles a year, surveying archaeological sites across the globe and lecturing in thickly accented English to like-minded brethren. NYTIMES