Ancient Aliens, Ancient Lies: The Seductive Pseudoscience of Erich Von Däniken
Ancient Aliens, Ancient Lies: The Seductive Pseudoscience of Erich Von Däniken
The death of the author of Chariots of the Gods prompts a reckoning with what made his alien-astronaut theories so captivating—and why, in an era of rampant conspiracy thinking, they can no longer be dismissed as harmless nonsense.
Erich Von Däniken has died. The author of Chariots of the Gods? (1970, 1969 in the UK, 1968 in Germany) was 90 years old and died at Interlaken Hospital, not far from Mystery Park, or as it’s now called Jungfrau Park, the theme park built by Von Däniken in 2003 featuring replicas of Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and the Nazca lines of Peru. He left behind 24 books, 2 documentary films (one narrated by William Shatner), 8 comic books, and a History Channel series, Ancient Aliens, based on his books and featuring Von Däniken as occasional presenter, as well as countless talks and interviews. As well as the theme park.
Von Däniken was the quintessential hedgehog, the one big-idea person, to use Isaiah Berlin’s term (foxes, on the other hand, having lots of ideas and multiple perspectives). His big idea was aliens. In humanity’s ancient past, aliens visited the earth, found a primitive primate species, and turned them into us. Or something that would become us. The details varied – Von Däniken couldn’t make up his mind between genetic manipulation or interbreeding – and the alien’s ultimate purpose was never clearly explained (if Von Däniken even knew it), but the effect was critical. The evidence is all around us, in the world’s many ancient artifacts whose nature and origins remain mysterious and astonishing.
How were the pyramids built and for what purpose? (Just tombs? Really?) How were the massive boulders cut and moved across country to Stonehenge? Or the huge stone heads set up on Easter Island? What explains the hundreds of miles of lines carved into the Nazca desert in Peru, or the miraculously rust-free iron pillar in Delhi? Aliens. And look at all the ancient drawings and descriptions of spaceships, ray guns, helmets, antennae, lightbulbs. Who knows what was stored in the Treasure House of Atreus at Mycenae? And what of the piles of gold and library of engraved metal plaques in the Tayos Caves in Ecuador? Could the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of wheels within wheels in the middle of the sky be a description of space travel?
Nope. The alien stuff is all nonsense. But like so many other readers back in the 70s and since, I was curious and spellbound. So many of the places, peoples, structures, and artifacts were strange, unfamiliar, and exotic. Stonehenge, Knossos, and Giza, sure. But Temuen, “the Island They Call Nan Madol”? The underground cities at Derinkuyu? The 716 Dropa Stones from Baian Kara Ula, telling of aliens stranded on the third planet 12,000 years ago? Or similar records in the rupestrian paintings in the Sete Cidades in Brazil? All “proven facts,” as the book jackets assure us.
At best, Von Däniken was a man with an overactive imagination and inadequate scientific standards; at worst, an opportunistic fraud, a gifted snake oil salesman. So why do I feel some sense of loss at his death, a wistful nostalgia for those days when I wondered, against my growing better judgement, what if? When I confessed this on Facebook, I was struck by how many others responded with similar feelings, many of them, like me, career scholars and academics. Why this ambivalence about so obvious a case of pseudoscientific rubbish? I wouldn’t feel the same way about a flat-earther or Creationist, and certainly not about a eugenicist, a Holocaust denier, or an advocate of conversion therapy.
Von Däniken was born in 1935 in the small but picturesque Swiss town of Zofingen, 30 miles south and a bit east of Basel. Its population is only a little over 12,000, mainly German-speaking Protestants. Zofinger has its share of historic sites, including a Roman agricultural estate with rich mosaic floors. Von Däniken’s family belonged to Zofingen’s Catholic minority, and Von Däniken Sr. sent the young Erich to school at Saint-Michel, a Jesuit gymnasium in Fribourg. A conviction for theft ended Von Däniken’s career at Saint-Michel. Though Erich got a suspended sentence, his father withdrew him from the school and apprenticed him to a Swiss hotelier.
The hotel business was no place for a man with Von Däniken’s imagination and ambition, and he left the job in 1964 for adventures in Egypt, where he was involved in a shady jewelry deal and then convicted of fraud and embezzlement on his return to Switzerland. He served nine months. In Egypt, he also wrote his first article, “Were Our Ancestors Visited by Extraterrestrials?,” curiously published in Der Nordwestern, a small Winnipeg paper for German Canadians. After his release, Von Däniken somehow (paternal intervention again?) became manager of the Hotel Rosenhügel in Davos, the town now famous as the site of the annual World Economic Forum. While in this job, which seems to have left him lots of free time, he wrote the first draft of the book that became Chariots of the Gods?
Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (“Memories of the Future”), in its German title, caught the interest of the Düsseldorf publisher Econ Verlag, though they required a substantial rewrite. The ghostwriter they hired was Wilhelm “Utz” Utermann, who used the pseudonym Wilhelm Roggersdorf, though he isn’t credited by any name in Chariots. Utermann had been a screenwriter and film producer in the 50s and 60s, but in the 30s and 40s he had been an ardent Nazi. He edited the Party paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, and enthusiastically celebrated Hitler and promoted Nazi ideals in several other books. Like many run-of-the-mill Nazis, Utermann fell below the radar of the Nuremberg Trials, and moved into the German film industry. Among the films he produced was, ironically, a musical based on the von Trapp family’s escape from Nazi-occupied Austria (1956) as well as its sequel, Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika (1958). Utermann’s von Trapp films inspired the Broadway director Vincent J. Donehue with the idea that led to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and film.
Utermann’s experience proved useful when he co-wrote the screenplay for the 1970 documentary of Chariots of the Gods? film. The German documentary was re-edited and dubbed into English for U.S. release in 1973, by which time Von Däniken had published several more books. Gods from Outer Space (1972, a reprint of the 1970 Return to the Stars) featured a preface, “About Erich Von Däniken” by Wilhelm Roggensdorf. It begins, “Erich Von Däniken is not a scholar.” Roggensdorf (Utermann) meant this as praise.
If not a scholar, Von Däniken was, however, a swindler, and he was arrested again in 1968 for stealing $130,000 [YS1] from the Hotel Rosenhügel, money he had used for further travel to research Chariots. He was convicted of embezzlement, fraud, forgery, and served one year of a three-and-a-half-year sentence. He could console himself that the German original of Chariots was a popular success, and the English version made the New York Times bestseller list. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1971 and was adapted for TV as In Search of Ancient Astronauts, narrated by Rod Serling. Von Däniken was in demand on the lecture circuit, gave an extensive interview for Playboy, and was making far more money than he ever stole or embezzled. Von Däniken’s books ultimately sold over 70 million copies and were translated into 32 languages. He died a wealthy man.
Reflecting on my own fascination with Von Däniken (my reading also included Gods from Outer Space and Gold of the Gods), I was not aware of his criminal history, nor that Chariots of the Gods? was (substantially) co-written by a former Nazi. Whether these facts, sensational as they are, have relevance for Von Däniken’s arguments is unclear. Despite Utermann’s despicable past, he was in later life just a writer for hire, whether for film comedies or pop science books. Erwin Barth von Wehrenalp, the founder and director of Econ Verlag also had a Nazi past, writing for various Nazi publications, and he was picked to be editor-in-chief of the SS publishing house Nortland, though the appointment fell through. This might explain how he knew Utermann, but it doesn’t taint all Econ Verlag’s publications, which include books by John F. Kennedy, Lee Iacocca, and Peter Ustinov. Von Däniken obviously had a problematic attitude to the law, but his alarming easiness with financial fraud doesn’t necessarily mean he was an intellectual fraud as well. For one thing, it would have taken extraordinary prescience for a hotel manager to predict he would make millions by claiming aliens had guided the development of humanity. For another, at least some of Von Däniken’s illegal gains were invested in his travels and research. It seems possible he genuinely believed in what he preached, though it’s likely we’ll never know.
Of course, a stupid idea is no less stupid because the person promoting is a believer. In any case, my attraction to Von Däniken’s books had little to do with him personally, since all I knew was on the book jackets. What attracted me were the mysteries and the startling explanations for them. This wasn’t really any different from the appeal of National Geographic, which my family subscribed to, as so many others across America did. In July 1969, between the German and American publications of Chariots, Apollo 11 astronauts planted the National Geographic Society flag on the Moon, and in the December issue of the magazine readers saw the first photographs of the Earth taken from outer space. Von Däniken’s timing was perfect. When astronauts stepped onto the Moon on July 20, 1969, as many as 150 million Americans were watching on TV, three quarters of the entire population. Another half-a-billion people were watching around the world. Nothing else ever screened on television has been watched simultaneously by so many people. At no time in human history have so many people been fixated on astronauts and outer space.
But National Geographic regularly brought together stories about space, futuristic technologies, and ancient mysteries. The November 1970 issue featured a story on the computer revolution and another on the ability of computers to help reconstruct an ancient Egyptian Temple of Akhenaten at Karnak. The August 1969 cover promised, “Solving the Mystery of Mexico’s Great Stone Spheres,” the December cover story was about the temples built by Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, and the August 1970 issue told of the “Voyage to the Planets” and also “Columbia: From Amazon to Spanish Main” (including sculptures of pre-Columbian gods and legends of the Incas). No astronaut gods, but plenty of outer space adventures and ancient earthly mysteries. But if this explains why an avid young reader of National Geographic might also be drawn to Chariots of the Gods?, a more mature and educated reader should be able to recognize the difference between scientists exploring astonishing mysteries on and off the earth and a man without credentials offering unreasonable solutions without real evidence.
Two things trouble me now about Von Däniken’s books and prevent me from seeing my youthful enthusiasm as anything but a perhaps forgivable diversion into foolishness. The first brings me back to those Nazis. That in the introduction to Chariots Von Däniken thanks Wernher von Braun, one-time SS Sturmbahnfūhrer and head of the Nazi rocket program, makes it harder to dismiss the Nazi careers of his publisher and ghost writer. It may be that ex-Nazis were simply thick on the ground in German-speaking countries or, in the case of von Braun, the United States. But Von Däniken himself has been credibly accused of racism, for instance in the assumption that ancient peoples around the world were incapable of architectural, engineering, or scientific achievement without alien intervention. Furthermore, though Chariots does mention Stonehenge, most of its wonders are from non-white cultures. In Signs of the Gods (1980), Von Däniken explicitly tackles the subject of race, asking why modern humans exhibit so much racial variety and what race men first belonged to. He stresses that all humans are one species, he specifically condemns Hitler’s “racial lunacy,” and even asserts, “I am not a racialist.” But to read Von Däniken asking, “Was the black race a failure and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then programme a white or a yellow race?” makes one’s skin crawl. (Von Däniken deduces that the first humans were black, since “who has ever seen a white monkey?”) An article on the Southern Poverty Law Center website notes the number of more recent proponents of alien-astronaut theories who are explicitly white supremacist and antisemitic.
What also makes me more sharply critical of Von Däniken’s theories than I was a half century ago is the proliferation and even promotion of anti-intellectual conspiracy theories during the Trump presidencies, first and second. Even apart from the revival of neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations like the Proud Boys, the Patriot Front, the Aryan Freedom Network, and Blood Tribe, the Trump era has been marked by a rejection of science, a distrust of expertise, and a belief that there are no objective facts beyond politics. Von Däniken’s alien astronaut theories may once have seemed innocent idiocy, but in a time of so-called “alternative facts,” when an anti-vaxxer is Secretary of Health and Human Services, the global scientific consensus on climate change is rejected in favor of corporate profits, deliberate, or even ignorant, irrationality is dangerous. Wind turbines cause cancer, vaccines implant microchips, legal immigrants are kidnapping and eating pets, the mass murder of children at Sandy Hook was a staged political hoax.
As fondly as I look back on enjoying the seeming wonders of Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, I now know him to be a charlatan, and perhaps worse, and I must condemn his lifelong commitment to spreading ideas which he might have understood to be false, had he paid any attention to actual scientific method and verifiable facts. But of course genuine scientists and scholars rarely make millions from their publications, since pseudoscience attracts more readers. If only our society, and its leaders, valued knowledge, professional expertise, reasoned argument, truth, this might be different.
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https://pghrev.com/ancient-aliens-ancient-lies-the-seductive-pseudoscience-of-erich-von-daniken/
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