Other exposés followed and von Däniken’s reputation was on the ropes.
His defence – that it had been necessary to fabricate evidence in order to convince people of the truth of his thesis – showed impressive chutzpah but failed to lend him much credibility.
Sounds very like politics and NGOs, doesn’t it?
Poor sod. These days, that’s a pretty accepted method if you belong to the ‘right’ side.
“It has been proved in many, many countries that implementing digital ID and banning social media has seen the scientifically measured happiness quotient of nations soar from 9.38 to 11.63 and so this government is bound by International Law to enact such measures for your own good. Besides, there have been lots of pictures of the Prime Minister in a bikini on X, obviously concocted by Grok which is also against International Law so Ofcom is liaising with our EU allies to arrest Elon Musk and his accomplice, Donald Trump.”…
Von Daniken was the fruit loops’ fruit loop, the conspiracy theorists’ conspiracy theorist….Compare and contrast Spud, RFK jr, Graham Hancock…
Von Daniken at least was entertaining…
One of the reasons he actually got away with it, is that the Official Science™ explanations were built on just as much thin air and Opinion as his fancies.
So it wasn’t as if there was a solid body of evidence that his ideas were nonsense.
The “professional Archeologists” were just as bad, far more boring, and only published in dusty tomes you couldn’t even *get* in a normal library…
What was “translated” from them into Popular Science mags us Youf could get was ….shall we say… just as Sensationalist… to boost Sales…
Von Daniken was simply part of a Market in Speculative Science, just as Carl Sagan and several other were at the time.
Each to his own, I suppose. I couldn’t finish Chariots of the Gods. It was such obvious bilge. Von Daniken imagined his obsessive interpretations and vague associations were somehow objective evidence. Also, he was clueless about Occam’s Razor. And his stupidity was pitiful rather than amusing.
An example:
Once there was a columnist called Polly. She tweeted (it was called Twitter back then) that we needed to tax the rich more to pay for the NHS. This was officially liked by a “tax expert and campaigner” called Richard Murphy.
“Are you sure, Richard?” I tweeted. “You don’t believe tax pays for anything; remember?”
“It’s what people understand”, he replied. “You clearly don’t understand the duality”.
“You clearly don’t understand the duality”.
Quantum Economics!
I loved reading his books, which I regarded as an interesting branch of science fiction dressed up as science. Some of the things are still puzzles. For example ‘unidentified flying object’ is just what it says, not a ‘flying sauced manned by aliens’ or perhaps even a Nazi science project/ My late father in law loved them too, but now it’s too late to ask. I had read some of the theories Daniken plagiarised even before he burst on the stage.
I am (sadly) related to some nutters who believe ‘ley lines’ are magical lies of force, rather than their ‘dicoverer’ believed, prehistoric pathways.
The point is that some things don’t have true explanations (yet, maybe), and even when they do, some people prefer the quasi religious ones..
I’ve not paid attention since reading von Daniken as a teenage hippy (alongside Albert Watkins’ “The Old Straight Track” and Carlos Castenada – Tolkein was a gateway drug) but I have yet to see a plausible explanation for those lines in the Atacama desert. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
Why do you need an explanation? Most of the world just exists to us, without our understanding.
Personally, I believe subsistence farmers scratched them in the dirt.
“Did a vehicle come from somewhere out there, just to land in the Andes?”
As Ford Prefect explained to Arthur Dent:-
Remember “crop circles”? Proof of alien visitation… until they weren’t.
Indeed. I certainly don’t imply that these marks were made by aliens, or people supplicating to them, but as with other huge constructions taking place around the world in that era they absorbed massive amounts of resources and manpower, which don’t come cheap. There has to be some compelling reason to do this, which of course can be (and probably was) religion. Look at the Norman cathedrals, FFS, whilst almost everyone was living in Pythonesque shit.
The interesting thing about the Atacama stuff is its scale, and therefore the problem of surveying it, never being able to get an overview.
Look at the Norman cathedrals, FFS, whilst almost everyone was living in Pythonesque shit.
But you need to consider how long they took to build. Salibury’s a quick one at 38 years. Winchester took almost a century. Some of them took 2 or 3 centuries. It’s a lot of labour but spread over a long time. And the costs, likewise.
…and everyone continued to live is shit for the duration. That’s quite a trade-off.
…and then they had to pay tithes to the Prince Bishops.
And mound people. Monks Mound at Cahokia is believed to contain 22,000,000 cubic feet of earth. At one cf per trip, this would require 22,000,000 trips up with a basket of dirt.
Persistence of the ancients.
…and it sank into the swamp…
I often wonder what drove generation after generation of Neolithic Man to create structures like Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill. Its got to be some pretty powerful juju to keep them going at something like that for centuries when the average lifespan was 30-35. And we literally have no idea what it was that drove them forward. Or how they did it. Ditto the pyramids etc.
So a spaceman turning up and doing it with a magic wand makes about as much sense, frankly.
John Maynard Keynes
Once agriculture increased the food supply, you have to make work for the idle proles, or they’ll kill you. So build stone circles, pyramids, autobahns,…nothing changes under the sun.
Once they discovered how to make beer . . . .
What drove them? Religion. Burials. Common Culture. Parties!!
Y’know… the stuff that’s universal in Mankind. And in which a *lot* of “non-productive” man-hours are sunk.
We’ll never know *exactly* what drove them, because there’s no whingy commentary of a Monk or Scribe descibing the Deplorable Practices of the Horrible Youf.
( most we know about written history is because of Unpaid Bills, and “Chroniclers” complaining about “Decline of Old Values” in true Potato fashion….)
What we *can* say is that they damn well knew what they were doing, and, judging from what’s known of, for instance, Stonehenge nowadays, didn’t whip the thing up in one go, but started small, and improved structures over *centuries* as techniques and ideas allowed them to Go Bigger.
Starting from *three* versions of “Woodhenge”, adding stone rings, and then finally setting up the thing we see nowadays.
Yes… major construction work.. But…. How long have they been working on that Spanish Monstrosity again? and *that* is done with modern technology….
Von Däniken and his ilk posed those structures were built in one go. They weren’t. They *evolved* over time. Getting improved along the way.
But but but!! They couldn’t have moved those rocks without Modern Equipment!!…..
Yes they could. Plenty of experiments that show you can. “Easy” even.. with just a couple of burly blokes.
But but but!! The distances!! They could never have!!
Yes they could… Ever heard of Winter and stuff, *especially* marshes and shallow lakes, freezing up?
Amazing how fast you can make a Bloody Big Rock move once you’ve got it going on ice on a couple of logs.
And peeps don’t know or forget that *quite a lot* of the english and welsh landscape was exactly that at the time… shallow lakes and marshland, connected by creeks…
( it’s funny how archeologists are crowing over finding the old wooden walkways once in them as Major Engineering, and never realised that that was actually the Answer to how they got those Bloody Big Rocks from A to B….)
See? Don’t need Aliens to build stuff from Bloody Big Rocks.
As for “Life Expectancy” … Never trust gross averages on a couple of finds…
People *did* die younger, it was a pretty dangerous workld…,but as far as we can determine nowadays, once you got past the Childhood Risks, you pretty much stood a good chance to hit 50-ish.
And they *didn’t* spend the first 25 years of their life getting a “Degree”..
Actual *productive* life of the average human then was roughly 35-40 years… starting probably at 5 yr. old.
Because he who didn’t Work, didn’t Eat…
Nor were they soy-noodle armed weaklings like the Academics who “envisioned” their life.
That lot has trouble with lifting a bucket of water twice.. And don’t last a day in even a modern period re-enactment cencampment, let alone in actual Real Life™ of the time.
An hour of chopping firewood has them blistered, bleeding, and crying for their warm office… Wusses….
You don’t have to tell me how much more physically strong the ancients must have been. My late father used to tell me about a worker his father had on the farm who could lift one of the old style milk churns (the conical ones) full of milk off the ground and onto a trailer bed in one easy movement. Thats about a 80kg deadweight lift at arms length. I suspect that would tax the average ‘worlds strongest man’ competitor these days.
‘An hour of chopping firewood has them blistered, bleeding, and crying for their warm office… Wusses….’
I didn’t know we were acquainted, Grikath!!
Din’t know you haunted Clogland/western Germany, BB…. 😛
But all sillyness aside.. we regularly have (amateur) archeologists or students in our encampment, because they want to “Experience the Life”.
Almost all of them vanish after a single encampment, some even halfway, because they find out Doing Things Right requires lots of physical labour and daily chores, especially *grin* weapons practice….
And yes… chopping firewood…
At one event the organisers provide us with lovely oak cuts, so we can demo the Splitting of the Wheel. Cutting it all the way down to the wood we use for dinner and breakfast the next day.
( the real Beasts split logs into planks… That’s a “I’m getting too old for that shyte” thing… )
interesting about the average age, it is likely skewed by a lot of early childhood deaths. If you reached a healthy adult age (and avoided wars) you could easily live to 60-80 or so, a healthy lifestyle in general. The vulnerable died quickly. so amongst the able population the short lifespan is not so evident. Just FWIW.
Oh and Von Daniken, even as a youngster, I recall reading his books and being astonished by how thin was the “evidence” he offered, and how just flakey speculative it all was. Amusing on one level, but hardly useful.
Alfred. I remember standing on Aylestone Hill in Hereford and seeing the church steeples line up. Some decades later I stood on a mound in Richmond Park and saw the same thing. I’m afraid that neither persuaded me to believe in Flying Saucers.
As a teenager I thoroughly enjoyed his books, along with those of Carlos Castenada.
Then I grew up.
Funny thing is, Castenada was not entirely wrong. There definitely is a spot in any room where one feels most comfortable, and another where one doesn’t.
Comfy chair by the fire vs draughty corner?
Yup, can be down to that, but even so some people don’t feel comfortable with the door behind them. Look at the problem of “good” and “bad” tables in restaurants. The bad ones are not all draughty, noisy, or close to heavy traffic.
Seems to describe Feng Shui. Some common sense recommendations, some utter BS.
I seem to recall Jeffrey Archer having a feng shui ‘expert’ give his flat a going over. Told Jeff it had good chi or whatever it is because the water in the river was flowing from west to east. River Thames that is, which as far as I know is tidal at that point…..
But some are directly on the way to the toilets, and that is always a bad table !
A plot point in Sherlock Holmes episode last night. “Would you think this was the normal position for this chair, right in the draught…”
Yeah, but when you’re doing interior design, rooms have focal points. In both directions. Where a room is best appreciated from. Where in the room you are drawn to. Then you have to look at the psychology of the individual. Some people will wish to be at the focal point of the room whilst others will feel uncomfortable there.
I think of this when I’m booking tables in restaurants. For the birthday girl it’s a table at the focus of the room with her at the center, so she feels she’s on a stage. For tete a tete you want somewhere on the periphery. Ideally a back corner
Incidentally, if you’re doing the latter, seat her with her back to the room so you have her undivided attention, with you opposite to make signalling for service better. Ideally, you want to center of view from where the servers enter. Done right she’ll feel you’ve been in total control of the encounter. If that’s the impression you want to give…
Admiral’s uniform, too? 🙂
I do regard seduction as a form of warfare.
Take no prisoners!
So you get the banquette and she gets the chair. And you’ve got her feeling good about it?
Nice one.
Might work with a whore but most normal women would prefer to sit on the banquette so they can have their handbags beside them and so they can see what the other women are wearing…
… and any cat is sure to know it!
See!
“…it had been necessary to fabricate evidence in order to convince people of the truth of his thesis…”
This is the current state of climate science in a nutshell. They now have something called attribution or some such where any weather event is said to be caused or made more severe by climate change. There isn’t a scrap of credible evidence for this but it is necessary to fabricate such evidence to convince people of the truth that we are facing a climate crisis.
As I may have said before, the reason aliens don’t visit us from outer space is that the last time one did we nailed him to a cross.
I see your Van Daniken, and I raise you George Adamski.
Didn’t work for CBS / Dan Rather either.
Or Piers |Morgan.and the Mirror.
It’s not like it’s novel – it’s the go to tactic of politicians and academics the world over and throughout history.
In genetics class, ~1968, we were told that Gregor Mendel faked his 1866 work. Slightly. He stated, for example, that of 100 pea plants, 25 would have one trait, say color, and 75 would have another color. Interplay of dominant and recessive genes.
He didn’t actually get those results, but he dare not print the truth. He might get actual distributions of 73/27, or 78/22. They didn’t know much about statistics in 1866, so he was forced to go with fake – ideal – distributions.
That was our introduction to the “Mendelian Fudge Factor.” Gamecock confesses to rubbing out a few fruit flies in lab.
“Rubbing out” has an interesting different meaning in English English argot. Or, perhaps, a possible alternative.
Fruit flies would be, umm, odd.
…and require tweezers. Very small ones. Perhaps zircon-encrusted.
Two Zappa references in one day!
See also the issue with Millikan measuring the charge on the electron in 1909, measuring the deflection of drops of oil in a magnetic field.
He got it almost exactly right but was a little low (he had the wrong value for the viscosity of the air, apparently) but because he’d won a Nobel Prize in Physics for it, for decades anyone getting a different result from that experiment shuffled their feet and redid the numbers until they matched Millikan’s value.
It was one of Richard Feynman’s examples of how, to try to avoid being fooled, you have to start by not fooling yourself…