“Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs” — Stalin
I was in college a million years ago and enjoying all those free campus lectures when I wandered into Carolina Coliseum to catch Erich von Daniken. This was ages before I got sucked into the UFO thing.
Published in 1968, Chariots of the Gods? was a radical prospect, even amid gushers of radical prospects flung from the global Boomer-driven counterculture movement. Humanity descended from space aliens? Yowza. That was more anti-establishment than trying to levitate the Pentagon.
I hadn’t read Chariots at that point, so I came into van Daniken’s riff cold. The stuff was way over my head. ETs directly involved in the construction of Stonehenge, the Giza pyramids, the wondrous Easter Island heads sculpted from volcanic rock? I couldn’t process it. I barely knew what or where those weathered monuments even were.
I picked up the book a few years later, but couldn’t finish. The writing was awkward and spiked with avid leaps of logic. The way von Daniken arrived at his theories conflicted directly with what I had learned about journalism in school, as well as what I was beginning to discover about evidence and fact-gathering on the street. But I kept an eye on the guy from afar because, in 1985, he wrote a book-length mea culpa, sort of, called Did I Get It Wrong? Although he was still pushing alien-intervention cryptohistory, von Daniken repudiated some of the more pedestrian and falsifiable claims he could’ve averted with better reporting on the front end. But belated corrections are better than none.
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