A naïve prophet of the space age

"Chariots of the Gods" was Erich von Däniken's first book, and became an instant best-seller all over the world. It was translated to at least a dozen languages, including Swedish, Slovak, Turkish and Bengali. In Czechoslovakia, the book became so popular that the Czechoslovak Academy of Science had to publish a popularized refutation. After a visit to Turkey, a critic of Däniken said: "Even the police officers read the book. And trust me, those guys usually don't read anything at all".

"Chariots" was published in 1968. It started a craze that lasted over a decade. Däniken became an international celebrity, and is still occasionally seen on Discovery and other cable networks. Naturally, he wrote a lot of sequels, and there even used to be an organization devoted to his ideas, the Ancient Astronaut Society (AAS).

In hindsight, it's easy to laugh at Däniken's sensationalist "revelations". Those were simpler times. The book is naïve, ridiculous and prejudiced. Perhaps that explains its stunning success. The book is tailored for scientifically illiterate readers. In the US, it was originally serialized in the National Enquirer. Where else? Kids believe it too. Like many other customer reviewers, I also believed in Däniken when I was around 12 years old. No well-educated person can possibly be fooled by "Chariots of the Gods". If you want to fool the well-educated, please start a new religious cult!

Däniken claims that aliens from outer space visited our planet long ago. Our primitive ancestors worshipped them as gods. (How could the ape-men even have a religion? That takes intelligence.) The aliens impregnated some human females, thereby giving our evolution a tremendous boost forward. (Why have no alien DNA been found in our genes? And how can alien DNA be compatible with that of terrestrial primates?) The aliens then left, but evidence of their presence is still all around us: ancient monuments, cave paintings, the Nazca lines, the Mahabharata... (But no alien technology!)

This entire chain of argument is breathtakingly credulous. Nor is the rest of the book much better. To Däniken, the Egyptian gods can't be half-animal, for surely you don't worship what you eat for lunch? Ergo they were space aliens. Some cave paintings look like astronauts appearing in a haze. Therefore, they must *be* astronauts appearing in a haze. What could be simpler? And why would the pharaohs have ordered the mummification of their dead bodies, if they hadn't expected the space aliens to return and resurrect them? Why indeed...

A large part of the argument is based on chronological snobbery. It's also hopelessly Euro-centric. 40 years ago, prejudiced Westerners naturally couldn't believe that ancient, "primitive" peoples in the Third World could possibly have erected large monuments. Surely, Giza, Tiahuanaco, Sacsahuaman and Easter Island must have a supernatural explanation? Parthenon and Colosseum are, of course, something else again. I suspect a large part of Däniken's success is that his books, perhaps unconsciously, pander to this kind of prejudiced opinions. Another reason may be the interest in UFO's during the Cold War. But at bottom, Däniken is something more than a writer pondering to the philistine.

He is a prophet.

His ideas make it possible to drop the old religion (Christianity), without completely dropping gods and miracles. True, the gods are really space aliens, but they are still our "creators". By turning the gods into mysterious and high-tech aliens, Däniken makes it possible for modern man to re-enchant the world, while still being firmly rooted in the space age. This, I think, is the real key to the strange success of "Chariots of the Gods". Däniken launched a pseudoreligion. And religions are a more marketable mass commodity than science.