I had read the first of the Daniken books (Chariots of the Gods) a long time ago. It was all the rage in the late 1960’s the time of counter culture: aliens, nirvana, booze, drugs and the dawn of science fiction movies like 2001 A Space Odyssey. Now there are too many of these ’’alien’’ types of books, and they still cater to a large extraterrestrial and UFO fan lobby in the US and Europe.
Daniken was a swiss hotel keeper and not an atronomer or scientist.
I was indeed rather impressed by Danikens seemingly impressive claims the time I had read it. But I have followed Danikens career out of interest for quite a while and some of his outrageous claims have been exposed as fraud by the West German TV in the 1970’s. He has doctored line diagrams in the Maya tomb to make it resemble an astronaut flying a space vessel. And the famed ’’Nazca space runway’’ picture was a zoomed view of a very small piece of land of a few meters.
Danikens claim basically is that in the distant past a race of aliens came to Earth as fugitives and genetically designed human beings from apes - or whatever - but he gives few scientific proofs of this or the reason for aliens to do this. His way of ’’proof’’ is to show pictures of ancient monuments, sculptures, buildings and ask dramatically: how can they have made it without the help of aliens? Or: that part looks like a helmet used by aliens. Or: that part looks like a laser gun. It is just his word and thats it.
Another troubling aspect of Daniken is his lack of consistency in the sequels such as Gold of the Gods which are simply churned out to make money. In these books, his imagination reaches a feverish pitch where he mentions a sub-group of refugee aliens inhabited some caves in South America, after having fought a space battle with another group of aliens. Daniken himself claimed to have visited this cave and discovered some materials of alien origin there. But he was unable to show this cave or any material to scientists and gain an instant nobel prize!!
Daniken is a clever guy who has made millions from a gullible section of the population. But his books are amusing to read and they are a product of the times.
I dare say