alt Hacker NewsErich von Däniken has died
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He was the first person who introduced me to the idea that if you look at a thing with different mindsets, from different points of view, you can arrive at quite different opinions about the “true” nature of that thing.
At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
He had a way of describing things with a vigor that is quite rare. It was a fascinating read as a kid, blending science fiction with history and archaeology. Of course, later learning about the scientific method, or even just Occam’s razor, made it clear that the theory of ancient aliens is very unlikely, but the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.
A quite unique and interesting person departed this planet yesterday.
In the 80's he was considered a crackpot and a menace. In 2026 he'd make a fine member of the US government if he was a bit younger. Not much younger as it's a geriatric ward through and through but just a wee bit.
The most obvious problem with this article is that it assumes Von Däniken came up with this idea. Years before "Chariots of the Gods", Peter Kolosimo already had best-selling works discussing ancient aliens.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts
"However, the fifties and sixties were more dominated by European works. The Italian Peter Kolosimo wrote several books as early as 1957, but his Timeless Earth (1964) became an international best seller and was translated into several languages. French-language authors included Henri Lhote who proposed that prehistoric Saharan rock art depicted close encounters, Bergier and Pauwels' Morning of the Magicians (1960), Robert Charroux's One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963) and Misraki's Flying Saucers Through The Ages. A few British authors also published before Von Däniken, such as Brinsley Le Poer Trench, John Michell and W. Raymond Drake who wrote Gods or Spacemen? in 1964.
"Although Von Däniken claims he was formulating his ancient astronaut ideas throughout his school days, it is clear that many others had already published their books on the subject, long before he became notable with Chariots of the Gods? in 1968."
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!
Pretty much all such claims can be easily dismissed by pointing out that such advances
1. Can obviously be made
2. Can be made very fast
There is simply no reason why major advancements in metallurgy couldn't have been made between 4453 and 4382BC, completely unknown to us, and later forgotten.
If fact, it's a mystery why we can't see more of such ancient artifacts, if anything.
The article doesn't even go far enough by blaming the oiling on some accidental dumb ritual, while it used to be common knowledge that iron can be protected from rusting by oiling it, and it was done completely on purpose.
When I was young and having access to internet (but pre social media) I loved looking into these theories, prompted by Discovery Channel's "Quest for the lost civilization" and stumbling upon these books from the 1970s. It felt like doing research and archaeology on the nascent internet.
I was surprised to see these ideas becoming so mainstream with Ancient Aliens, and then somehow finding overlap with the alt-right, antivax and Covid-doubters. This made me really turn off of taking this seriously.
I have a family member who is quite into "ancient aliens" and who has read all of von Danikens books. The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that rigor and science did not really matter and would not convince them of anything. It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize how humans went from mud to computers. They don't believe in human creativity being powerful enough to lead to modern society and think an external force was required. Ancient aliens is a convenient and fun theory for how it could have happened.
"Erich Von Daemlichen" in typical schoolboy wordplay when I was a kid in Germany in the 1970s - when this nutjob stuff was still current, and frustratingly believed by otherwise sensible adults.
In many ways, I think we've underestimated our ancestors. They may have been more capable than we often give them credit for.
EvD is a good illustration of how we were more resilient against crackpots back then.
His book "Chariots of the Gods" was a best seller. I remember reading it probably in the early '70s, when I would have been somewhere in the 10-12 year old range. I'm pretty sure I believed he was probably right, as did a couple friends who also read it.
We also believed in some other bunk, like various psychic and paranormal stuff, much of which came from reading "Fate" magazine.
But without internet there was really no way to connect with a larger community of people who also believed those things. With just books, magazines, and maybe if we were really into it a couple newsletters it was hard to become obsessed with this stuff.
Furthermore we also read popular science magazines, and Asimov's monthly column in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction". They would publish rebuttals to the more significant crackpot claims going around (although I don't think Asimov ever specifically commented on EvD). The mainstream news magazines, like Time or Newsweek, would often include comments by prominent skeptics such as Carl Sagan when writing about these things.
Because mass communication was expensive (and often also slow) new questionable theories took some time to start getting widespread acceptance. That gave scientists (or other relevant experts for non-science based crackpot theories) time to write refutations. It is more work (often much more work) to refute crackpots than it is to generate crackpot theories.
Now we are awash with widespread belief in crackpot theories. A new one can spread very fast and very wide on social media and be established before refutations can be written. And when the refutations do come out the social media algorithms might not show them to the people that those same algorithms fed the theories to. They get more clicks and engagement if they instead show those people new crackpot theories instead of refutations of the crackpot theories they were showing a week or two earlier.
von Daniken's work inspired me to travel to Nazca PE and charter an airplane to see the alien landing strips for myself. Certainly a worthwhile trip. I may even have convinced the local guide I was a True Believer, of which I am sure he has encountered his share.
I have also take a page from his books by expostulating outlandish theories to explain facts with a straight face, always ending with a quick "of course there are other explanations".
It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.
When I was young, I liked his stories & perspectives and it carried some "myth into the world"
When I got older and understood how media industry works, I liked his "product execution & market fit" even more :-)
> It is with great sadness and shock that we must announce that Erich von Däniken passed away on January 10, 2026.
Not sure what is 'shocking' about someone in their 90s passing away. Surely at that point you start expecting it?
As a youngster I (the country?) was so excited, entranced for a bit, I read Chariots and Outer Space, stopped at maybe Gold of the Gods? I matured and grew, though I wanted it all to be real, there was little to no progression of the claims and evidence. Like Batboy or all the National Enquirer articles, it was clear it EVD was a crank.
He said, he wanted to "ask questions and entertain". I guess he does, but he does not use the scientific method. Also, he does not claim to use the scientific method.
I think it is more surprising that we have not found any alien artifacts by now.
Godspeed Erich.
Bio on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken
Notable for "Chariots of the Gods" (1968).
The Chariots of the gods was impressive piece of work to read when I was a child and it definitely started something that lasts to this day. Although I must admit, Daniken was more of a sensationalist than a serious author. Thanks to him though, I have discovered Sitchin and all his body of work and thanks to him, few other authors - mainly the O'briens. So I guess Daniken did his job after all and got me interested in these topics.
His fairytales were wild, but they train you to see existing things in a new perspective. Debunking the new perspective is what makes you more knowledgeable.
But sometimes you see current reality with a different eye, not necessarily in E.v.D. way and surely not in the establishment's way.
von Däniken was the original Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, aka "aliens" meme guy. He never met an archeological artifact that didn't look like alien technology to him.
Skimming through this item, a couple points I don't see being made:
- If you claim that the assistance of alien visitors is needed to explain the milestone leaps or technological achievements of ancient human civilizations...are you walking into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down logic trap? Because obviously "our" alien visitors would have need even greater leaps and achievements in their own past, to be able to travel to the earth. And their visitors similar, and so on.
- Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?
I read Chariot of the Gods when I was young and thought it was great - exciting ideas about how the world isn't quite how it's boringly portrayed. And aliens!
However, I tried re-reading it when I was a bit older and it was just laughably bad. Seemed to be a whole bunch of leading questions and then throwing random assumptions into the mix.
When I was older, I started reading a bunch of Robert Anton Wilson books and was introduced to The Sirius Mystery by Robert K G Temple - now that's a much more serious investigation into Ancient Aliens visiting the Dogon people.
Of course, we should really be tracing back the Ancient Alien theory to Lovecraft's fiction.
Eric didn’t die - he just went home.
We haven't had a person witnessing technological decline in their lifetime for probably 400 years or so. It is not surprising that it is a conceptual blind spot, especially for quacks.
This dude got famous by polluting the public discourse on archaeology to sell books.
I cannot respect him as an author or thinker, only as a human.
Also the guy that was the inspiration for Daniel Jackson in the original Stargate movie.
Rest in ascension.
Bummer, who are the aliens to contact now if they want to phone Earth?
Rest in peace, your ideas were good entertainment.
They come from above!
Sagan comes in with a great quote -
The problem is summed up by Carl Sagan: “Every time he [von Däniken] sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet” (Playboy 1974:151).
Unfortunately its true of so many people, and the information revolution we were all promised seems to have made it worse, not better.
I loved his books in junior high. I was into cryptids and aliens UFOs and secret military base conspiracies and stuff like that for a long time. It's like making up sci-fi explanations for the real world.
He's up there riding that chariot now.
In regards to the space ship that people see, I've seen photos of some Egyptian pyramid hieroglyphs myself, I hear this often "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"
This stupendous gaslighting mirrors what I took away early in this article. It used several Appeal to Authority and Epistemic Invalidation and is quite clearly pathetic. Hard to read the clearly biased claims.
It's easy to dismiss the most obvious cases where EvD is wrong
But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss
Archeology by itself is always going to have limitations, and there are vast swatches of history we are almost completely ignorant about
EvD is certainly guilty of taking himself much more seriously than the evidence suggests. But there's always going to be that "what if"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42226224
DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Hundreds More Nazca Lines Emerge in Peru's Desert
FYI, Erich von Däniken's book "Chariots of the Gods?" is racist pseudo-scientific claptrap. My Archaeoastronomy professor at the University of Maryland, John B. Carlson, despises it.
It attributes the achievements of ancient non-European civilizations to extraterrestrial visitors, undermining their intelligence and capabilities, promotes speculative theories without empirical evidence, misinterprets artifacts, ignores scientific consensus, perpetuates harmful cultural stereotypes, and plagiarizes French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy
>Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the interdisciplinary[1] or multidisciplinary[2] study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used these phenomena and what role the sky played in their cultures".[3] Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern astronomy is a scientific discipline, while archaeoastronomy considers symbolically rich cultural interpretations of phenomena in the sky by other cultures.[4][5] It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice.[6]
A Brief History of the Center for Archaeoastronomy
https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~tlaloc/archastro/cfaintro.html
DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–]
Archaeoastronomy was one of the most interesting courses I took at uni, and professor Carlson was extremely enthusiastic about it. It really opened my mind to how smart and motivated ancient people were, not at all like our stereotypes from "The Flintstones" and "Chariots of the Gods?".
For example, The Anasazi Indians made significant astronomical observations that they integrated into their architecture and cultural practices. They tracked solar and lunar cycles, aligning their buildings and ceremonial sites with celestial events like solstices and equinoxes. A fascinating example is the "Sun Dagger" at Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, where they used sunlight and shadow patterns on petroglyphs to mark important times of the year.
They deserve an enormous about of credit for what they achieved without all our received technology, and left behind for us to reverse engineer.
https://spaceshipearth1.wordpress.com/tag/anasazi-indians-as...
https://www2.hao.ucar.edu/education/prehistoric-southwest/su...
It's disappointing when people reflexively attribute ancient achievements like that to religion (or aliens), when it's actually hard objective observation based science that deserves credit!
>[then vixen99 took issue at my use of "FYI" and tried to argue that we should respect irrational and racist opinions by framing proven objective facts as opinions, just to be fair to loonies: "How about IMO rather than FYI ? We can make up our own minds."]
DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–]
Sometimes (and often) pseudoscientific bullshit is just objectively wrong, and you'd have to be completely out of your mind, or just trolling, to "make up your own mind" to believe it.
No sane flat earthers in this day and age actually believe the earth is flat, or deserve to have their presumed beliefs respected or even humored, because they're just being contrarian and trolling for attention, so it's perfectly valid to say to them "FYI, the Earth is not flat."
I refuse to couch my firm disbelief that the Earth is flat as an opinion that might possibly be wrong, by saying "IMO, the Earth is not flat." Flat Earthers (also Young Earthers) certainly aren't couching their crazy beliefs as opinions, so don't deserve it in return.
"Chariots of the Gods?" is also that objectively wrong: there is no possible universe in which its claims are true. It's all based on historically ignorant Argument from Incredulity and inherently racist assumptions. In the 50th anniversary edition, von Däniken refused to address, admit, or correct any of the many widely proven errors in the book that made him so much money and fame, so he doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity
Believing in pseudoscientific claptrap like Homeopathy, or the objectively false stories of Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark is just as ridiculous. They're physically and mathematically and logically and practically impossible. So it's also fine to say "FYI it's biblical fiction, and the Earth is definitely not 6000 years old, and you absolutely can not fit and feed and clean that many animals in a wooden ark." It's not my opinion, it's objective information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4OhXQTMOEc
To pretend otherwise feels like humoring a small child who still believes in Santa Claus.
Didn't Carl Sagan (no stranger to selling books) pretty much stomp von Däniken's "theory" into cornmeal well before the turn of the century?
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Belief in aliens and UFOs was popular in the 1970's. Looking back on it now, it's amazing to me how gullible everyone was. Maybe it was the high lead content in everything...
:-(
I stumbled upon his work when I was very young and could barely read, but damn, it was the first book that opened my eyes to our crazy world and taught me that our textbooks are just convenient truths.
I remember reading a von Däniken book when I was quite young, 9 or so, I think and being absolutely fascinated. Then after a while I realised it was pretty much all made up and what has stayed with me ever since was my blazing righteous anger that someone could make up a pile of stuff and put it in a book and claim it was true. That feeling has stayed with me far long than anything from the book itself.