Farewell to an era

Erich von Daniken and the Age of Aquarius

“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 spinning off 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 von 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.

What the dormouse said

By time the mid-1990s rolled around, having been startled by an anomalous sighting myself, I was all over the high strangeness map. And so, apparently, was American culture. As the 50th anniversary of the legendary UFO crash in Roswell lumbered toward a blowout costume party in a New Mexican cow town, geography was incidental to the phenomenon:

An eponymous drama starring Kyle MacLachlan and Martin Sheen premiered on Showtime. The GAO was under orders to scour the archives for Roswell records (it failed). Art Bell’s gripping conspiracy theories were dominating late-night radio. “Independence Day” introduced Area 51 to popcorn culture. An alien species was infiltrating humanity in NBC’s “Dark Skies.” An honest-to-god real-life impossibly humongous flying machine on leisurely cruise control materialized over Phoenix in concert with the Hale-Bopp comet; hundreds looked on, and the Air Force dropped flares after it was over to make witnesses feel stupid. A New Age cult outside San Diego ingested fatal doses of phenobarbital in hopes of hitching a ride.

And in the summer of 1997, when I was reporting for Florida Today, Erich von Daniken came to town to sign books.

News of the prolific Swiss author’s death last weekend at age 90 transported me into the comfort zone of the last decade of the last century. It was the sleepy dawn of the digital age, mystical in its novelty, the potential for reality-altering enlightenment just a few keystrokes away (maybe). LSD guru Timothy Leary dubbed the new frontier “Cyberia.” Fellow day-trippers like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Douglas Engelbart, and a host of computer pioneers were energized by acid too. How might the insights they gained by chasing rabbits — when logic and proportion/have fallen sloppy dead — transform their visions into utility? Where would it lead us?

Sideways in the ditch

Comtech’s early possibilities were infinite and threatening, but I had high hopes for what decentralized media could mean for UFO coverage. Michael Corbin, cofounder of the computer bulletin board ParaNet, predicted attempts to contain news of a UFO crash on the World Wide Web would be like trying to enforce wee-wee-free swimming pools. “Unlike ’47, when the authorities were able to censor the wire services,” Corbin predicted in 1995, “there’s less of an ability to conceal data and information in the event of another incident like that. They’d have to shut the whole thing down. But we’re too big, we have no geographical boundaries anymore.”

What a time it was – the democratization of media, the accumulated knowledge of humanity at our fingertips, the rising tides of harmonizing wisdom lifting us all onto a beachhead of clarity and consensus, dictated not by an effete corps of impudent snobs, but by anyone and everyone with access to the “information superhighway.” So many walls coming down, so much optimism, all those giddy young democracies, history’s end.

Then came the cat videos.

I used to think – and still do, to a point – the UFO mystery was and is the consequential issue of our age. But with the lights dimming on what filmmaker Ken Burns calls “the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ,” it’s a little hard to get worked up over UAP transparency and disclosure right now. The American experiment is lying sideways in a ditch, windows slathered in oil. All is dark, and unprecedented on these shores. Our institutions are being pounded into memory holes. The gross domestic product is rabies, futures are up, and Ignorance Is Strength.

But what if he’s right?

Enter the man who floated the blasphemous proposal that homo sapiens are engineered with extraterrestrial DNA. Given what our species is accomplishing at the presumed apogee of its evolutionary journey, the unfolding implications of Erich von Daniken’s gobsmacking theory are downright grotesque. If he’s right, alien coding has programmed us to destroy ourselves, and our planet, via connectivity, under the Trojan horse of community.

If he’s wrong, if the ancient astronaut thread turns out to be bullshit, von Daniken’s legacy will need only minor tweaks. He will be remembered as an iconoclast who was among the first to popularize legitimate questions about the sprawling gaps in our knowledge of human history. New tools – ground-penetrating radar, satellites, lidar mapping – keep blowing holes in the timelines of sacred prehistoric cows. Orthodoxies have begun to rethink their scriptures on totems like the Clovis culture and pre-Ice Age architecture. Where it all goes from here will be decided by whoever wins America’s war on science.

Labeling humans “a species with amnesia,” equally prolific author/researcher Graham Hancock repeatedly clashed with von Daniken over ancient astronauts (he wasn’t buying it). But the two shared important common ground. “I think we are quite lost in many ways,” Hancock said of the fog shrouding our distant past. “And we live in a society that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy in ensuring that we stay lost.”

At least something’s working.

This is getting too long to read

Anyway, I’m nostalgic for the Nineties. Blue dress and all, the Macarena and Pearl Jam and “Space Jam,” livin’ la vida loca, “Pulp Fiction,” Boris Yeltsin, Joey Buttafuoco, M.J., even O.J. We were so vulnerable and unsuspecting. Laptops were still years away from being the gateway drug to outrage addiction. A sheen of order prevailed, and people still read newspapers.

The printed word polished subscribers’ brains into exclamation points by commanding undivided attention. Not that long ago, making sense of the world beyond our direct field of view depended exclusively on a specialized set of skills. No other apex predator on Earth possessed the ability to translate written symbols — i.e., an alphabet — into images we ourselves manufacture from personal experience. That set us apart. Today, Cyberia supplies all the images we need. Painting with a thousand words when a picture will suffice is at best inefficient, but probably obsolete.

Backstroke to normal times, to August 1997, when Erich von Daniken strolled into Barnes & Noble in West Melbourne. With a box of books, little fanfare, and the approachable demeanor of a soft-sell retail salesman, he took a seat at the autograph table. He was world-traveled, his ideas were challenging. There is no available audio or video of our interview, just a bunch of words on a page. So we leave the final word to the man who offered a novel take on how we got here:

Florida Today: Why are we seeing such an intense interest in the subject of extraterrestrials now?

Eric von Daniken: It’s a complicated story. I think, thousands of years ago, some extraterrestrials created, by deliberate mutation, our intelligence. This does not contradict Darwin’s theory of evolution. But it’s just one step forward. If you would accept this as a theory, that we have some extraterrestrial genes in us, then these genes, at one day, they will grow and open.

If you have a tree with fruits, at a certain time the fruits are ripe and they fall off the tree. The fruit is the message of the extraterrestrials. At a certain time in human history, the knowledge will come into our brain.

So why, now, is there more and more interest in extraterrestrials? In my opinion, it’s because we have it in our genes. The time is right. So you cannot stop the Internet – it is growing and growing with the year 2000. The millennium has only to do with Christianity. The other societies – the Jewish community, the Islamic community – have different calendars altogether.

FlaToday: How does this not conflict with Darwinism?

EvD: Darwin’s theory of evolution is something that we learn and we generally have to accept. We have the bones and family trees that show that we basically come from apes. But apes are still primitive today. We are the only ones from this tree who have become intelligent. Why only we? Because, I say, we are a deliberate mutation made by extraterrestrials. Or as the religious texts say, the gods created man after their own image.

FlaToday: You take a lot of swipes at fundamentalist interpretations of ancient texts and you enjoy it. Why do you enjoy it?

EvD: Because I am a deep believer in God. I am one of those people who still prays every day. God has to be timeless. A god who has to create experiments to wait for what the results will be cannot be God. God has to be all present, so he does not need a vehicle in which to move around, a vehicle with smoke and fire and thundering. God, naturally, does not make mistakes.

If you read the Bible, you find a god who is driving around in chariots, what the prophet Ezekial describes very clearly. Or you find that God makes mistakes. According to the Bible, God created in five days the Earth, the plants, the trees, and on the sixth day he made Adam and Eve. And then, according to the Bible, God said it was good. But shortly after, he decided it was not good, because he decided to destroy humanity with a great flood.

So I think these people (fundamentalists) are not praying to the real God.

FlaToday: Are you saying they’re stupid?

EvD: No, not stupid, just educated in this flaw. I myself am educated as a Catholic. And naturally, I was a deep believer in the way of God as I was educated. But later, I realized some of the descriptions in the Old Testament could not be accurate descriptions of God. God is much bigger, and indescribable.

FlaToday: So the early accounts got it all wrong?

EvD: The first gospels weren’t written down until 40 years after the death of Jesus Christ. And the later gospels weren’t even eyewitnesses to what happened. But the later stories went into that time because, like all the other times, it too was a political time. And the family of (Holy Roman Emperor) Constantine and his wife created a new religion (in 300 AD), which became Christianity.

It was a wonderful story, you know, Jesus Christ, the son of God, finally ascended to heaven. Long before Christianity, there were many gods in other traditions who went to heaven. So naturally, Jesus had to ascend as well. In reality, the ascension never took place. The resurrection never took place. Not like depicted in the Bible. The tomb of Jesus is in Kashmir. I have photographed it many times.

FlaToday: Why do we need an ET factor to make us realize we’re all from the same seed of life?

EvD: No, we don’t need the ET factor, but it’s helpful. Looking from the outside at this planet helps us realize we’re all from the same place. What if the astronomers announced that there is something artificial out there? What would happen? We would immediately understand that all intelligent beings on this planet are one race, not the blacks and the whites and whatever. And it makes no sense to make war.

FlaToday: So if an announcement of that type would have this positive, unifying effect, why do you suppose – given the growing body of evidence we have on UFOs – that it hasn’t happened?

EvD: Our society is not only composed of the few people who make the government. Our society is much more complicated. You have very strong power in religion, very strong power in science, in many other fields of society. And all these parts would be against this. They don’t want to have a loss of orientation. If there is a change in thinking about extraterrestrials, it should not happen by revolution, by fighting each other, we are right, you are the idiots. It should go by evolution, slowly. Passing two or three generations. Because they have a responsibility to society.

FlaToday: Do you think that’s what we’re watching now, culturally? A slow acclimation?

EvD: Yes. In my short life, I had a very curious experience. I learned that we have two types of human beings. One type is educated scientifically. They absolutely believe in evolution, mutation, selection. But at the end of this process of evolution, we are the greatest, the top of the evolution.

The other part is educated in a religious way. So they believe in the concept of, God created all this . . . (and) we are at the top of all this, because God made us finally. So it doesn’t matter whether you look at it as a scientific or religious matter. In both cases – the top of evolution or the crown of creation – we are the greatest.

We don’t like extraterrestrials. We don’t want extraterrestrials, we are afraid of them. It’s a psychological problem – we are not ready to accept that we are not the greatest.

FlaToday: One of the criticisms is that your ET theories short-sell our own imagination, our own creativity.

EvD: That’s rubbish. Carl Sagan and the others who’ve attacked me, I’m sure, have never read my books. Naturally, it’s nonsense to believe that any extraterrestrials created any buildings on Earth. Of course our ancestors created these wonderful temples and pyramids. Our ancestors developed the culture, the religion. But the question still has to be answered – for what purpose?

I believe, thousands of years ago, ETs were here. Maybe only a small group of people saw them. But then it went into interpretations of gods, power, descended from heaven. The next generation never saw them, never understood what they were. The Maya, for instance, created incredible pyramids in Central America. You have to ask the Maya, Why have you done these pyramids? For the gods? What gods? Scientists say, the god of nature, the thundering, the lightning, the strong forces they admired but could not understand. But that’s again rubbish. The natural does not speak.

The Maya, for example, explain that Kukulkan gave them astronomical knowledge and mathematics. I’m sorry, the lightning does not speak, “divide this by this to get that,” and so forth.

FlaToday: OK, let’s talk about the sarcophagus lid of King Pacal in Palenque, the idea of him being at the control panel of a spaceship. Isn’t there enough ambiguity in this baroque avalanche of hieroglyphics to say that what has been described as flames and rocket exhaust could also be flowers, as the traditional mayanists contend?

EvD: In our century, we have learned a new cult appeared. It’s called the cargo cult. Whenever a high-technological society comes into contact with a primitive society, the primitives believe that some of the technology of the higher society is magic. If they can’t understand it, it must have something to do with gods. When Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, the natives believed he was a god – in the beginning. When Francisco Pizarro showed himself to the Inca, with his chains glittering in the sun, the priests all fell on the ground, believing him to be the son of the sun.

. . . In ancient Hindu literature 4,000 years ago – they don’t give a date – gigantic cities surrounded around the Earth, and from these cities, smaller vehicles came down. The ancient Indians named these smaller vehicles vemanas, some had the shape of an egg, some had the shape of Ezekial’s spaceship, and so forth. In modern terms, it would be translated into a mother ship off the Earth with different types of shuttles coming from space stations.

The extraterrestrials, they study the people, and maybe they give some of the people information. And one of the priests tries to chisel this ET, and his vehicle, in stone. The man understands nothing of the technology, like (uncontacted) people on the island of Bebak (in WWII) who don’t know what an aircraft was. He chiseled what he saw.

[Note: I may have misunderstood or misspelled von Daniken’s reference at the time. There is no Bebak island associated with cargo cults. Perhaps he was talking about Vanuatu — BC.]

Today, there are nine different explanations for this Palenque figure in the books. They tell us it is the tomb of Pacal, the dynasty that ruled Palenque, and according to the inscription, this ruler should be the second to last Pacal. On the other side of the temple, we have datings of Pacal.

But the oldest date does not correspond to what we know about the Maya. It’s translated to 3114 BC, the very beginning of the Maya calendar, but long before the Maya appeared. So let’s look at it in terms of misunderstanding technology, which is what we see today in our cargo cults. It’s just a suggestion.

FlaToday: You’ve made it easy for your critics, the time you spent in jail for fraud and embezzlement, that sort of thing.

EvD: But that’s all rubbish. I was found guilty of tax fraud in 1971, ‘72, something like that.

It took years and years until the court went to the Swiss federal court and then back again, and it was overturned (in 1982) and I was found not guilty. Still, I spent about 15, 16 months in jail. It was terrible.

You can do nothing. But years had passed and I was not eager to bring it all up again. It’s 30 years past. I mean, if that’s what they attack you for, what happens in private, then you cannot believe any politician, certainly. And you cannot even believe in Jesus, who was jailed – forget it.

FlaToday: How have your writings changed since Chariots of the Gods?

EvD: You learn that you make mistakes. In Chariots of the Gods are many things that I would never repeat again. Just because I was young. I was manager of a hotel at the time, and when you are young you are not self-critical enough, and you are enthusiastic. And you believe rubbish as the truth and you write it down.

In Chariots of the Gods, I had something like 238 question marks. Nobody saw the question marks. Today, there are not as many.

FlaToday: Do you think NASA would play straight about discovering extraterrestrial intelligence?

EvD: No, not NASA – it is government science.

More than four years ago, a German engineer made his robot that goes into the (Giza) pyramid. It found a door to a chamber. And why have the Egyptologists not opened the door? Or if they have, why have they not published what they found? Why? You have a sensation! A door, 65 meters, in a shaft, the robot clearly showed the door.

It has been said they are maybe afraid of exposing this to oxygen after all the centuries, but that’s garbage. Because there is a corner on the bottom of the door that is missing. The door is not directly on the ground because we see a laser beam that goes under and through the door, meaning oxygen has been coming in since eternity. So nothing happens. The question is, what’s wrong with science?

[Note: Nearly 30 years later, the chamber has never been breached, and the door theory remains just that. One speculative thread suggested the chamber is sealed, and the door handles are ornamental decor, not functional — BC]

In astronomy, we have one part of astronomers that work in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Well, at the last SETI conference, the astronomers who are looking for radiowaves coming from outside, honest and serious people decided on – what in English? – self-censorship.

If he finds what he is looking for, he is not allowed to publish, he has to contact this circle and this circle and this circle. Why? Where’s the freedom of information?

FlaToday: Maybe they’re trying to protect their Nobel Prize.

EvD: OK, but why then is the same community attacking us for saying they are hiding something? I’m sorry, but they are hiding something. Or will be. See the Dead Sea Scrolls. Why have scientists working on the Dead Sea Scrolls shut their mouths for more than 20 years? Something is there.

FlaToday: Do you think you’ll live to see a confirmation of your work?

EvD: No. I would be lucky. Even if someone could find an object definitely not of this planet and they could give it to the scientific communities, I’m sure it would take much too long for this society to accept that something extraterrestrial exists.

I have started something. There are 56 million copies of my books worldwide. But now it is not just Erich von Daniken. It is others, many others, as well. You cannot kill the idea anymore, never.