This reminds of Sagan’s other excellent book, The Demon Haunted World. It explains why people fall for crap like this, they either don’t understand the scientific method yet or are just plain scared or don’t care to understand science.
Was he really a Von, or did he make that bit up as well?
for literature.
Fiction section?
Yes, he was, but he was a Swiss Von. Does that even count?
I remember eating his stuff up in the mid to late 70s when I was around 10 or so. It all made so much sense and seemed obvious. It was the same time as I watched In Search Of and just about any “documentary” on Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and the like.
HA! You fellow Wisconsinite! I STILL make fun of that!
Man eh TOE Wok. Ash wa BEEN non. Wah KEY shaw
No sir, we are NOT relations!
OTOH my otherwise seemingly great 7th and 8th grade teacher gave a presentation on Immanuel Velikovsky’s bizarre history theories. I think the presentation was given in seriousness, not as a learning exercise on critical thinking. If there was follow up, I missed it or don’t remember.
Same with me. 10 is the perfect age for it. Some people never grow out of it. In Search of was my favorite show.
Ezekiel saw a wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw.
And Shah WAH no. 
“My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I’m a free citizen.”
—G.B. Shaw, Arms and the Man
I learned of it when I was 13 and browsing the paperbacks at the corner store. An anti-Däniken book titled Crash Go the Chariots. It refuted claims made in Chariots of the Gods? so that I never had any respect for EvD. It was by a Christian fundamentalist author, who based his arguments on the Bible, but nonetheless it destroyed EvD for me permanently before I even read CotG?. I bought it, hate-read it and sneered at it the whole time.
When I was 17, I took a Judaism class for Catholic kids taught by a rabbi. When he was talking about events in the Torah, one of the kids suggested CotG? as insight into Jewish history. The class took up the idea and decided to have a field trip to the rabbi’s office in the synagogue to watch the movie. It was a videotape cassette viewed on a TV set, as was done back in the 1970s. We didn’t take it seriously in the least, so we smoked a lot of pot on the way there and got so stoned the whole thing became a joke. But the rabbi was a good sport about it. One chill dude.
The first I learned of Velikovsky was reading Isaac Asimov’s takedown of Worlds in Collision when I was 14. So I never had any respect for Velikovsky either. Asimov mocked him for confusing hydrocarbons with carbohydrates, LOL.
I seem to recall a TV show that did a systematic take down of CotG. Maybe it was an episode of Nova?