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.
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).
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.
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.
I've heard this claim many times, and yet I remember VD books (and similar ones like Kolosimo's) discussing Prehistoric Europe including cave art and megaliths. The Ancient Aliens TV series does have episodes on Ireland, the Norse and Graeco-Roman mythology.
Even today, these types bring up Baalbek's massive triliths on a regular basis, and state they could not have been built by such classical civilisations.
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
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!
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Yesterday, my daughter asked me if it was “a round earth day or a flat earth day” thanks to my habit of providing outlandish explanations for things, often contradicting myself in the course of a single conversation in the process (they’ve come to enjoy trying to poke holes in some absurd explanation I’ve come up with).
A whole bunch of current disinformation comes from people having fun with misinformation and dumb people believing it until the idea makes a life of its own.
It's not harmless at all. A lot of explicitly nefarious people use this technique to engineer the population so they can be controlled.
"Erich Von Daemlichen" in typical schoolboy wordplay when I was a kid in Germany in the 1970s - when this nutjob stuff was still current, and frustratingly believed by otherwise sensible people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Conspiracies are wonderfully self-reinforcing: anything that doesn’t support the conspiracy is clearly the work of the conspirators hiding their existence.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Don't lament it. We're living in a golden age of stupid conspiracy theories and pseudocience.
Go to social media and you'll find a lot of them.
Or, better yet, let the U.S. government pick some of them as policy guidelines for you.
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.
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.
I've heard this claim many times, and yet I remember VD books (and similar ones like Kolosimo's) discussing Prehistoric Europe including cave art and megaliths. The Ancient Aliens TV series does have episodes on Ireland, the Norse and Graeco-Roman mythology.
Even today, these types bring up Baalbek's massive triliths on a regular basis, and state they could not have been built by such classical civilisations.
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
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!
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.
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.
For context: Erich von Däniken died on January 10, 2026 at the age of 90 years: https://x.com/vonDaeniken/status/2010314306894828023
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
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yesterday, my daughter asked me if it was “a round earth day or a flat earth day” thanks to my habit of providing outlandish explanations for things, often contradicting myself in the course of a single conversation in the process (they’ve come to enjoy trying to poke holes in some absurd explanation I’ve come up with).
I've created table-top RPG campaigns by cobbling together these kinds of wack theories and building a world where they are true.
>It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.
A whole bunch of current disinformation comes from people having fun with misinformation and dumb people believing it until the idea makes a life of its own.
It's not harmless at all. A lot of explicitly nefarious people use this technique to engineer the population so they can be controlled.
Poe's Law applies.
"Erich Von Daemlichen" in typical schoolboy wordplay when I was a kid in Germany in the 1970s - when this nutjob stuff was still current, and frustratingly believed by otherwise sensible people.
Graham Hancock's Mentor.
Also the guy that was the inspiration for Daniel Jackson in the original Stargate movie.
Rest in ascension.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.)
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.
Conspiracies are wonderfully self-reinforcing: anything that doesn’t support the conspiracy is clearly the work of the conspirators hiding their existence.
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.
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.
[dead]
Article is (1987) btw
Added. Thanks!
Aye, thx. Meant to.
I’ll try to confirm the actual original source, you know, just for the article.