alt Hacker NewsEvD 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.
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Maybe. On the other hand, it was also harder to find refutations of crackpot theories that the mainstream happened to believe in.
I think it was a manufactured bestseller. Selling books is a for-profit exercise. I don't think crazy theories are anything new, "new age" beliefs are really a continuous thing since the second great awakening at least. But in the 70s, bookstore chains realized that a certain demographic bought a lot of books, and you no longer could leave all that profit to ill-run independent crystal-selling bookstores just because of some high-minded concern for truth. Give the voracious book buyers the books they want, let the marketplace sort out what's true or not. That was the ethos of the time.
This demographic was called "new age" by the marketers, but almost no one who bought such books called themselves new age.
But people who wrote such books became very aware of the demographic profile too. And while there had certainly been grifter cult leaders before who didn't sincerely believe what they preached, now they realized that they could go straight to profit, just by writing a book. No need for the messy high-intensity "make a cult" step. The bookstores were on their side now.