After leaving school in 1954, von Däniken worked as a waiter and barkeeper for several years, during which he was repeatedly accused of fraud and served a couple of short stints in prison.
In 1964, he was appointed manager of a hotel in the exclusive resort town of Davos and began writing his first book. Its publication and rapid commercial success were quickly followed by accusations of tax dodging and financial impropriety, for which he again spent time behind bars.
Von Däniken was the first recipient of the Ig Nobel Prize.
Wow, I would have thought he was older yet. I haven’t thought about him since the early 80s. He was pretty much a bad joke that sold a lot of crappy books.
Seriously, a lot of the pop science BS / Ancient Aliens harbored latent racism, encouraged a disbelief of science, and promoted conspiracy theories for generations. Sure, it’s fine and encouraged in actual science to “trust but verify” but we’re reaping the whirlwind of generations of inculcated disbelief and skepticism, as well as Conspiracy theories.
No - the question mark remains in the current editions.
Its a useful thing to note, because then Betteridge’s Law applies and comes up with the correct answer.
Von Daniken’s entire output of books, which would still form an impressive pile even when you culled the filler guff and repetitive content, is not the only egregious pseudoarchaeology we’ve had to contend with, but has been a core component since the end of the 1960s. He pioneered and perfected the dead bat (cricket term, nothing to do with covid etc) techniques of non-response to scientific criticism which has since been used by Graham Hancock and others to great effect.
i read the book. Watched the movie (Sun Classic Pictures). Was interested, but by Junior High, I was perturbed enough by the mysterious evidence that kept on being misplaced or lost, or seemingly made up…that I lost any dain I had of him.
I remember the television ads for that movie – like a number of other Sunn Classic films (In Search of Noah’s Ark, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams), they saturated the TV stations in our market with ads for it, the ads ending with a voiceover announcer who rattled off the local cities and theaters where it’d be playing (and massacring the pronunciation of many of the small Wisconsin towns).
The WIkipedia entry on Sunn Classic says that they used the “four-wall” distribution strategy, in which they rented out the theater space for their films, and retained all of the box-office receipts.
I ate his stuff up when I was 13. It let you believe in crazy shit without having to turn to religion. Throw in Big Foot, UFOs, ESP, and catastrophically colliding aligned planets, the 1970s was a really fun time to be a kid. Who needs Santa Claus when you have the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, and Evel Knievel ?
True, I guess in trying to discuss the genres in general I was too nice to EvD.
I’m also a bit young for actually following EvD as a primary source, more the endless reams of stuff that treated his works as the template for their own BS in the mid to late 80s.
But I accept your gentle correction, and will try to be mindful.
I had a lot of those books in the early 80s including Erica Jong’s Witches. I don’t remember Chariot of the Gods, but we did have a cool book called Phenomenon that included a chapter on spontaneous human combustion and I loved the Spock narrated series In Search Of. It’s been so long, as with Santa Claus, I can’t tell you the precise moment I went from believing this stuff was real to understanding it wasn’t.
I used to really enjoy these kids of conspiracy and pseudoscientific theories, but events over the last decade have really soured me disposition.
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