The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Is Erich von Däniken a genius we can't still understand or is he a charlatan who can't distinguish between myths, facts or conspiracy theories?

In my opinion, I feel that these kinds of things being told to us is just another way to brainwash people into thinking that it's non-existent.The author intelligently tells us how we should react when we don't understand a concept discussed by a genius. In reality, "mathematicians" means Dionysius Lardner, an astronomer, who did indeed believe that travelling at a sufficiently "high speed" would result in asphyxiation - but the 21 mph is a random figure plucked out of the air by von Daeniken to make himself look more informed. The appeals to authority and popularity - the various 'Professor Kuehn's - that are too vague to actually be a form of accountability.

HAVING BEEN TO EL CASTILLO AT CHICHEN ITZA,MEXICO MYSELF, IT IS VERY OBVIOUS TO ME THAT THESE ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS SUCH AS THE MAYANS POSSESSED TECHNOLOGIES FAR ADVANCED OF WHAT WE BELIEVE THEM TO BE CAPABLE OF. I have always been intrigued about the possibility of alien life, so, crazy as this guy is, its a fun subject. But they must have been wooden rollers, otherwise there would not be even the feeblest technical explanation of the building of the pyramids.The concept of ancient extraterrestrials has been used as a plot element in television shows and movies like Star Trek (which actually addressed the question before von Däniken's book was published), Stargate, The Thing, The X-Files, the Alien franchise (most notably, Prometheus), Neon Genesis Evangelion, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Eternals. except I accidentally opened it on a random page and felt the stupidity was too overwhelming not to comment on. The global media rights to the book have since been purchased by Media Invest Entertainment which is developing a "360-degree entertainment" franchise entitled Chariots of the Gods. I soon lost my grin, became profoundly curious, and what followed was a wonderful experience, unusual in evert respect, an undertaking which was done exclusively in my spare time, since NASA, my employer, is not engaged in such matters. To sum up the belief the author, in the past, aliens visited pre homo sapien man, bred with the women and came back later to check up on us and breed a bit more.

He lives in Switzerland but is an ever-present figure on the international lecture circuit, traveling more than 100,000 miles a year. There are some popular books that will disappoint you when you read them for the first time due to your expectations, but you will be totally impressed by them and the author's writing skills when you reread them after a few years.Von Däniken's book, and much of his subsequent publications such as Gods from Outer Space and The Gold of the Gods, have drawn largely negative receptions from the academic mainstream despite being popular best-sellers. Compare photographs of American space centre launch sites to the constructions on the plains of Nazca in Peru. According to von Däniken, humans considered the technology of the aliens to be supernatural and the aliens themselves to be gods.