I read von Daniken as a very young kid and loved it. But I read it, and enjoyed it very much, as a science fiction genre. I never bought it, but I admired the effort. And so I thank him for stimulating a child's imagination. Well done Mr. V!
I was very naive when I discovered his books as a child in my fathers bookshelf. Luckily my father told me that I should be careful not to take anything as "the truth" from any of Däniken's books. It helped me a lot with keeping the necessary scepticism while still enjoying the books and I was really grateful for this advice.
This was the first book that I picked out to buy for myself as a child (I remember pestering my parents for it at the Kroch’s and Brentano’s on Lake Street in Oak Park back in the 70s). I read it over and over and thanks to that, when I later came to stories like the Hebrews wandering the desert in Exodus, it was hard to put the von Däniken nonsense out of my mind.
Psychologists have there own version of this (which managed to achieve a sort of respectability) in Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which has the same sort of furtive/animistic fallacies are put forth to justify a questionable conclusion.
Hey, Julian Jaynes! Haven't heard that name in a while. I remember that book fondly, compelling story telling. IMO Richard Dawkins said it best, it's either fucking nuts or fucking genius, no in between.
And I watched The Flintstones as a very young kid and loved it. And it deeply influenced how I thought cavemen lived. Well done, Hanna-Barbera!
The problem is that Erich von Däniken's "science fiction" was pseudo-scientific claptrap, which he sold as the truth, that perpetuated harmful cultural stereotypes, was patronizingly racist, also plagiarized French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians", and he never admitted he was wrong despite mountains of indisputable evidence.
At least Hanna-Barbera framed The Flintstones as fiction. Yabba Dabba Doo!
And at least Scooby Doo's whole schtick was that supernaturalism is just creeps wearing rubber masks. Scooby Doobie Doo!
The lesson we should have learnt from Scooby Doo is that most of the world's problems are created by rich old guys trying to protect their money/investment.
Just peruse the list of great works that Ancient Aliens proponents claim could not have been built by the people who built them. Do they make that claim about the Parthenon? No. Other than Stonehenge, it's all stuff built outside of Western Civilization.
It could be a series of coincidences, or it could be old strains of racist anthropology, briefly suppressed by Boasian Cultural Anthropology, finding a new conspiratorial outlet.
So Trump is racist therefore von Däniken is also? There’s plenty to criticize about ancient alien bozos, we don’t need to fabricate additional reasons to dislike them
> Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians"
Charroux didn't write that one, he was likely influenced by it.
> an earlier French work, The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (1960), which is likely to have been a direct inspiration for both Charroux and Von Däniken
The world is full of "head scratchers". But that makes it more important not just to yell "aliens!", but to exercise scientific curiosity. This is what makes me most angry about his works, he discourages people from trying to work out solutions for mysterious phenomena.
