>It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.
A whole bunch of current disinformation comes from people having fun with misinformation and dumb people believing it until the idea makes a life of its own.
It's not harmless at all. A lot of explicitly nefarious people use this technique to engineer the population so they can be controlled.
Poe's Law applies.
I agree. Von Däniken instilled a lot of bad ideas in people's minds. People like to complain about religion, but at least that brings some ethos. Von Däniken's ideas did nothing except create a rift with science.