I remember this old battered paperback that was passed around my father’s family — I think it was my uncle who got it first, and eventually it settled down on a bookshelf at my house. I read it, because I read every book that found its way to my home, but I disliked it rather thoroughly. It contained nothing but glib superficial explanations of the behavior of human cultures rooted in a belief that we couldn’t possibly have done anything. Everything was given to us by godlike alien beings. Every great accomplishment by non-European societies was in service to creatures in flying saucers who bestowed their technology on all the brown people who were otherwise helpless.
It annoyed me. Also the fact that the author based everything on the most superficial, biased analyses.
My father ate it up with a spoon, though, so I can sympathize a little with all those people who made his books so popular. Erich von Däniken had hit a sweet spot in the zeitgeist; trigger a little curiosity with odd phenomena and exotic places, and then satisfy it with pseudo-scientific explanations that sounded persuasive, it you’re most sophisticated analyses were the kind of thing you’d hear from a church pulpit. He’d tickle, then pretend to scratch the itch. It has become a familiar strategy for con artists who want to get rich off normal human curiosity, but who didn’t want to do the hard work of actually studying something in depth. Graham Hancock is the latest parasite to glom onto the game.
Well, von Däniken is dead. His hustle lives on, unfortunately, as long as there are inquisitive, gullible people who are satisfied with answers that are wrong, but that fit into an existing bias.
