In art historical terms, his evidence is rubbish-- I’ve seen some threads over at JREF boards with some reproductions posted and at least for the European art he cites it’s gibberish (“uh… in color reproductions it’s obvious that the UFO there is a cloud. . .”), with the possible exceptions of some of the 16th-c German broadsheet reports of apparitions in the sky, but when you take those in context it’s hardly evidence of anything.
Not really. Someone, I think it was Asimov, once said that scientists just couldn’t be bothered with crackpots such as Däniken and Velikovsky, much less tearing out their hair.
Who’s sweeping what under the carpet? The Nazca lines have been studied by archaeologists for 70 years. A lot of the straight lines have small holes at either end, and some of these holes have bits of wood still in them. Pieces of textile up to 100 yards long have been found. Is your idea that space aliens from the planet Zog flew millions of light years to visit planet earth and left us a straight line that they had to draw using a couple of sticks and a ball of string?
Here is a book refuting Chariots of the Gods. It seems seriously out of print. I have it, and thought it pretty convincing. I read the original also. For example, we know exactly how the pyramids were built, so no advanced aliens are needed. The need for someone planning the Nazca lines from space is falsified anytime people at a sports game hand out cards to the attendees which will create a picture.
The fact that we now know MUCH more about preColombian cultures than we did back in the 1960s and that we actually have a very good set of hypotheses about how and why the Egyptian and meso-American pyramids were made puts us at a decided advantage over an amateur archeologist. I read the book back in the 1970s and found it interesting, but not compelling. If our planet has been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations then ‘they’ have done a very good job of covering their tracks.
If they WANTED us to discover their existence, then it would have been a fairly easy job to leave behind something on the far side of Luna to be found when we finally sent orbital probes to our satellite.
Fermi’s paradox popped into my mind just now for some odd reason.
Fiction, if we’re being kind. Pseudoscience or crackpottery if we’re being honest.
Maybe their GPS was broken?
EVD’s work has been the most popular, but he owes a lot to other trailblazers in the genre, such as Robert Charroux and Jacques Bergier.
Dad claimed to know someone who met Von Daniken and chatted with him about the book Chariots. Von Daniken wasn’t shy about laughing at the money he was making from the book and how little factuality was included in it.
My uncle’s best friend met a guy at a dinner party that knew that same guy!
I loved this stuff when I was a teenager. What convinced me it was bunk was the racism behind it. Why did the aliens only visit non-white people to help with their ancient projects?
He’s been convicted of fraud and embezzlement. I would say that ups the chances that he’s a con artist quite a bit, no matter what he seems like in person. A successful con artist has to manage to seem like someone who’s not a con artist.
I tend to put the Chariots of the Gods books in the same category as Baigent’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Had they been orginally marketed as fiction, I would consider them fun what ifs, as is they are crackpottery. However, they are great fun to give to creationists and ID proponents or better yet introduce as “evidence” into arguements with them. Seriously, a great way to counter “creation science” is by demanding equal time for Chariots of the Gods.
How about let’s get specific as to why Von Danken’s books are crackpot?
I used to LOVE that book when I was younger. I remember a cave painting being described as being “twentyth century” style.
My favorite example of Von Daniken bullshit was some old Mayan pottery that had a picture of a skeleton on it - "hundreds of years before the X-ray was invented!". This was from a book called Von Daniken’s Proof, IIRC.
I’ve noticed recently that he’s been making something of a come back. There was a 2 hour special on the History Channel called something like Ancient Astronauts which was a pretty wide eyed and credulous pro-von Daniken piece (most of the skeptics were given brief one line responses, where as the faithful were allowed to ramble on for as long as they liked). It was all the same fascinating non-sense I remember from the 70’s…how the pyramids couldn’t possibly be human built, Nasca lines must be alien air ports, carvings that must be depictions of ancient astronauts (or alien/human hybrids or whatever). They dragged in the Baghdad Battery again for another go around (as well as purported Egyptian carvings ‘clearly’ showing the use of electric lights and such) as well as something new (at least that I don’t recall from the 70’s) in the Antikythera mechanism). They also brought up Puma Punku as ‘clear evidence’ of alien technology…or something.
It was all very entertaining and complete horseshit. Von Daniken was at his best, saying that he’s just ‘asking questions’, but that the mainstream archeologists and anthropologists just don’t want to stretch themselves to seriously look at the questions and give answers (which, of course, is horseshit, since they’ve done so numerous times). One of the most entertaining parts of the show was some radio disk jockey (who I never heard of) talking (with authority, by the gods!) about how there is no way the Egyptians could have possibly built the pyramids.
-XT
I think we need the OP to provide some examples of bits that he/she thinks are not crackpot - if we start addressing bits at random, they just won’t turn out to be these bits:
Von Daniken’s book really wasn’t anything new. A lot of his claims had appeared earlier in the works of Frank Edwards and others, including many of his specific examples, and the “Ancient Astronauts” idea. Van Daniken put them all together, and either was in the right place at the right time, or else was a wizard at self-promotion, and got his stuff into the spotlight. The guy even was the subject of a Playboy interview (take that, frank Edwards!)
But, as has been noted, his claims don’t stand up to much scrutiny. Nazca lines marking ancient landing strips? get serious – they’re barely scratched into the plateau they’re sitting on. If the place weren’t so isolated and dry they would’ve disappeared a long time ago. An army exercise (lots of guys marching around near one of them) almost obliterated it. Real wheels from heavy craft, or blasts from landing jets would have not only done far worse, they would’ve left ebven more obvious marks.
Regarding the Nazca Lines, isn’t there some evidence that those people (the Inca?) had hot-air balloon technology at one time? There were some pots with images to suggest that and apparently, their weaving skills are up to the task of making the balloon. Is this notion taken seriously?
Thanks,
Rob
It’s only evidence if you really work at believing.
Someone did build a hot-air balloon using what ought to have been existing technology, and it worked, but thinking that the locals actually did that seems a stretch. One could as easily argue that medieval Europe could have had hot air balloon technology. The only real reason for thinking of it in the case of the Nazca folk is because the figures are more easily visible from up there, and some folks think the only way to make them is to look down from a height. It ain’t true. as many have pointed out, you can see what the shape is supposed to be from the ground. Skeptic Joe Nickell reproduced one of the Nazca figures “lifesize” without using hot air balloons, or reproduction grids, or anything that wasn’t available to the ancient folks. His reproduction looks spot-on when photographed from an airplane.
When I was an undergrad anthropology student I wrote a paper for an archaeology class summarizing the debunking of various extraterrestrial theories for the building of the Egyptian pyramids. I got a good grade, but the professor included a mild rebuke at the end that “Von Daniken and his ilk are easy prey” and that I should have concerned myself with something more scientific.
When I was a young teen, I thought that the works of various ancient peoples were so amazing that having help from aliens made sense.
When I got a bit older, I realized that the truly amazing thing was the ability of humans to make wonderful things using their own ingenuity.
Another think I realized was that folks with low tech were just as clever as folks today, and capable of getting a lot out of what tech they had.