SCHOLARS DISMISS THEORIES AS PSEUDOSCIENCE
Academics wrote books refuting his theories, criticising him as a purveyor of some of the more fantastical notions of pseudoscience. German news magazine Der Spiegel even had a 1973 cover story titled “The Daeniken Hoax”.
Nevertheless, legions of fans snapped up his more than 40 books and watched his television specials and documentary films. The over 70 million books that he sold were translated into more than 30 languages.
Von Daeniken spent the early part of his working life managing a hotel in eastern Switzerland, where a fraud conviction landed him in jail for 18 months.
But as his book took off, he emerged from prison as a best-selling author.
Still, he never presented the smoking gun to fulfil astronomer Carl Sagan’s famous adage that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.
“He…says that the astonishing astronomical information ancient civilisations, such as the Mayan, had is proof that there were some space travellers around to teach it to them. This fits in with his general questioning of the ability of the Egyptians to build the pyramids, or the Easter Islanders to erect those massive stone heads,” the New York Times wrote in 1974.
“His method is to use a negative – ancient peoples couldn’t have done or thought all the things they did – to prove a positive – that the ancient people were the beneficiaries of some kind of cosmological Point 4 (development assistance) programme.”
Such criticism never knocked von Daeniken off his stride.
“We owe it to our self-respect to be rational and objective,” he wrote. “At some time or other, every daring theory seemed to be a Utopia. How many Utopias have long since become everyday realities!”
Television specials about his books made him a well-known figure in Europe and the United States. In 2003, he opened a Mysteries of the World theme park in Interlaken – although it went bust after three years.