Erich von Daniken: visionary, nitwit or big fat liar?

My problem isn't neccessarily with the wee aliens. It's just that there's more than a hint of racism - or at least culturism - to assume that "primitive" peoples - especially non-Caucasian "primitive" people could not have acheived these technological feats.

The same symbols and images occur in many different unrelated cultures around the world. Spacemen or beings from other plants dressed in spacesuits and everything. Does this mean that earth was visited by spacemen? Or does it mean that there is a collective unconscious archetype among all humans yearning for an otherworldly proof of their genesis?

And have we made spacesuits etc. in an unconscious image *of* our conceptions of what a spacesuit should look like? Remember that many aspects of space travel today were actually derived from science fiction. We *thought* space travel should operate like so, so we made it so. The countdown, for example - it was an element added by an early scifi movie to provide suspence and tension. And now every real life spaceshot involves a countdown!

Naught to do with Von Daniken (who I think is a nutjob) but interesting, still.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/easter/move/images/pastdaniken.gif

His line of reasoning often boils down to "these archeological artifacts feature things which LOOK like astronauts and LOOK like UFOs = Oooo gosh this is...well...perhaps suggests (wink, wink) that THESE folks REALLY met aliens (pant, pant)!" which I think only shows the poverty of his imagination -- he wasn't factoring in the possibility of fifth-dimensional holographic supercomputers without faces, etc.

Professional skeptics have also pointed out that in his earlier books, he uses alien intervention as a convenient deus ex machina to explain why certain non-European civilzations could develop certain technologies because he clearly assumed they didn't have the brains to so themselves. Obviously such thinking was hardly uncommon to 'credible' archologists but THAT DOESN'T MAKE IT RIGHT. (Which is what is Kate says - YAH KATE - but I spent ten minutes writing this so I'm posting it anyway.)

I'm not sure that the world needed a Von Daniken to make archeology sexy, what with all the 20c Egyptophilia.

but my point is, his thesis allowed people to be comfortable with their own non-specialist speculation, and this could be part of the fun and the excitement and the engagement (suspicion of experts as a cabal of fuddyduddies frightened of the truth is an idea which reaches epidemic proportion in the late 60s and 70s)

(interesting that sun ra got there earlier)

If you read these books as fiction, they can be quite entertaining.

Isn't this Daniken's argument though? (Except he said it wz older than the Greeks, and rooted in experience not imagination.)

Hazlitt is grebt, though this is the first time EVAH he has been compared to Von Daniken, surely? (T0m Paul!n to thread!)

A self-reinforcing meme. Two thousand years from now an amateur achaeologist will find a stash of daniken/sci-fi books, then use this to "prove" that aliens built the pyramids.

Until the 60s, one mainstream archaeology's basic concepts was that invention is hard, especially for 'primitive' people; therefore, it was much more likely that inventions would have spread from a single origin rather than occurred separately and independantly in multiple places. It also seemed obvious that the most 'sophisticated' culture would be the one doing the most inventing; so, the main theory of European prehistory was that everything new was invented in either Iraq or Egypt, and slowly spread northwards and westwards. This only started to go slowly out of the window in the 50s with radiocarbon dating, and was only really killed off in the late 60s, when radiocarbon calibration was invented and showed that metal-working was first discovered in the Balkans.

(ideally, of course, people would have wanted a single origin for everything, but that was buggered up by the fact that writing was clearly invented at least three different times in the Old World, all of them pretty much unrelated)

(at least one major pre-radiocarbon archaeologist allegedly killed himself when radiocarbon dating came along, and put his major life's work on rather shaky ground)

oddly enough daniken's theory combines a populist-equalitarian element as well as a humans-come-in-grades element:
i: we the people (= i, erich von d. the bold autodidact) can deliver theory and learning as true as any so-called scholar with his silly museum-talk
ii. we of the present are massively intellectually superior to our silly brutish ancestors who must have learnt everything of any use from clever wee aliens

http://www.uwec.edu/greider/Indigenous/Student.Web.Pages/hanning.mesoamericanarchitecture/images/pacala-maya-small.jpg

An exact parallel of even more historical significance would be all the scholars of end-time prophecy who also started finding mass popularity around the same time as Daniken, most famously Hal Lindsay.

Haha! Dave Q I kiss you. :-) Great thread, and the racism/patronizing comments are all spot on...

haha christians are the von danikens of debunking

ppl we could also discuss:
velikovsky (surely no longer a contednah?)
the holy blood/holy grail ppl (never seen on tv: why not?)
the off-coast archeology ppl (*excellent* tv)
various great pyramid cranks (also very telegenic)

he has a big tiresome dose of "conventional archeology is in league against me" --> as far as i can see (from his own TV progs, not least), conventional archeology actually says "this is a very interesting idea, fund us or give us the resources to buy nice scuba equipment and midget submarines and stuff, and we'll have a look"

The bits being underwater is very interesting. It seems to me that much of England's archeological heritage was in that bit of England which was underwater or bog for half the year - the Summer Country and all that.

http://users.bestweb.net/~kali93/oct98/yona13a.jpg

The book is a great read, though, because nearly every page goes something like, "We couldn't believe what we were seeing, but we couldn't ignore the facts! As unlikely as it seemed, as impossible as it was ..." and then goes on to suggest something that had been popular folk belief since like the 1100s, as if the authors were the first ones ever to think of it (except for the Top Sekrit Super-Templars).

i liked how they left it, that the pharoah wz maybe *still* trying to find his way out of all the scret shafts and trapdoors into heaven!!

The only anthropology course I took as an undergrad was this great class called ... shit ... "Fables and --" .. no, I was going to say "Fables of the Reconstruction," that's very wrong. "Fables and Something." Skepticism, maybe. It was a course freshmen could take, and it was good for social science credit, which everyone needed one of, so it was sort of this "Don't be a dumbass, here's how to approach things critically" course. A week on UFOs, a day on "the curse of the Mummy's tomb," a day on Thor Heyerdahl, and so forth.

It was great, but it was also weird that every time we got to a new topic, there'd be someone in the class who hadn't clued in to the fact that everything we discussed would be debunked, so someone would go on about how pyramids in South America and pyramids in Egypt meant Egyptians had colonized South America, and the prof would have to say, "No, people just like to build pyramids, and there were people living in both Egypt and South America." And then he'd whip out half a dozen journal articles.

I recently read in the news that Atlantis has been conclusively, finally, and once-and-for-all discovered. It's Ireland. Apparently, it fits the literary evidence exactly, which probably surprised all those people who say that the Sargasso Sea, Santorini, Troy, Antarctica or (fill in location here) also fit it exactly.

I was looking for the thread where we talked about this stuff... (full disclosure: I was reminded of this stuff biz I made the mistake of looking at Mr C’s tweetstream and it was chockablock full of all this whackadoo ~Quantum Buddhism~ woo, like oh dear...) I was kind of shocked to see it still going around, because it’s become so very unfashionable, compared to more recent internet phenomena.

I fully admit and it’s obvious upthread that I’m fascinated by this stuff, it’s deeply interesting to me - but from a point of view of... but *WHY* do people believe these things? What cultural or intellectual ~heavy lifting~ do these belief systems do? (Neurotypicals believe lots of completely bizarre and nonlogical stuff, why are some belief systems accepted as ~just culture~ and others treated as fringe or woo or even conspiracy?)

I’m sure there were more ‘why do people get so heavily invested in woo?’ threads but this was the first I could find.)

Sigh, I think that anyone who was at all interested in such topics has long gone from ILX, but in the interests of some kind of completion beyond reviving 20 year old threads...

Again, the caveat that this is spiderwebbed in to current obsessions: a Very Serious Russian Friend of mine who is v v into mythology, folklore, etc. saw me posting a bunch of Shamen (the band) related stuff, and her response was very much "Ha! These warbling Scotsmen are *half* right, but if you want to know Serious Studies in Siberian Shamanism, check out these Very Serious Slavic Studies!" and foisted a bunch of books on me (including e.g. Mircea Eliade, whose subtitle "archaic techniques of ecstacy" totally has featured in a couple of Shamen album tracks) but it's actually quite interesting.

One of these Serious Siberian Shamanic Studies fellows (not Eliade but another one) came up with a very interesting point, releated to the concerns about racism and ethnocentrism in the ancient archaeology = ALIENS! points above. SSSSF talked a lot about altered states of consciousness, meditation, trance, drug experiences, etc. and how there were definite patterns and tendencies in the kinds of experiences the human mind tends to produce in trance, that are completely trans-cultural, and widely repeated around the globe. That these included: the sensation of flying or visiting an over-world; of meeting 'spirits', gods, angels or other super-intelligent beings; of being tested, probed, even being dismantled and reassembled by said uber-beings. These experiences are inherent parts of common shamanic initiation rites and 'journeying' in trance states, around the world, and many, many cultures have these kinds of containing myths and traditions that explain and provide a context for the experiences in altered states. That people's understandings of what these experiences *are*, are highly mediated by the culture they are in, but The West had completely lost these traditional contexts for interpreting and understanding the things that happen in these states.

Many, many people in the 60s and 70s noted the similarity between ~alien abduction~ narratives, which thrived in the cultural context of the Cold War and the Space Race - and shamanic journeying experiences. (You levitate and fly to a higher plane, you meet 'spirits', they test you.)

Due to the ethnocentrism of the day - people went the von Daniken route. Clearly, ancient shamans who had had these experiences - MUST HAVE BEEN ENCOUNTERING ALIENS!!! Because aliens and scifi were, at the time, the popular and fashionable paradigm.

But the SSSSFs flipped the script, and said... what if 20th Century Americans who had absolutely no cultural context or understanding of altered states of consciousness, and were wholly unprepared for them - what if, what they *were* experiencing were not alien abductions at all, but unwitting and unintentional shamanic journeying, which is a thing that the brain, apparently, spontaneously produces under certain conditions such as trance states?

Like, the whole thing is the wrong way round. Ancient people never encountered 'aliens'. But modern people encountering ancient states of consciousness they were unprepared for, read those experiences as 'aliens', and projected their interpretations onto the archaeology?

Anyway, I found it very interesting in terms of connecting long-forgotten dots, but I think ILX is no longer the kind of place where people are interested in that kind of thing.

I’m just reading the Mothman Prophecies at the moment and John Keel posits that aliens, faeries, Bigfoot, religious experiences and angels are all different ways of the brain interpreting the same basic anomalous experience. Like during the witch trials panic a light in the sky would obviously be interpreted as a lantern attached to a witch’s broomstick, but in the 1970s it would be a ufo. But they’re really all some sort of ultra terrestrial experience.

itt: real alien erasure

i am still up to chat abt these phenomena tbh but also super-busy currently

(to answer the OG question: von daniken wrote his first book while in jail for hotel fraud)

Oh my goodness the incantations were propitious, and I have summonsed one of of the genuine ILX Elder Gods!

Mark, did you ever get around to watching that Nigel Spivey documentary I reccommended, where he went peering into electronic dream machines and attended shamanic rituals and travelled to Göbekli Tepe before breathily coming to the conclusion in full Cambridge Art Professor stylee, that ... ancient cavemen invented Art while tripping balls?

IAUYW, I am looking up John Keel and 'ultra terrestrial experiences' and this is bringing me to Interdimensional hypothesis - so all esoteric phenomena: witches, spirits, angels, UFOs are not just from another planet, but from another *dimension*? Which is an amusingly fabulous idea, but... still effectively a variant of the 'angels are aliens' typology. (i.e. the cultural context which was fashionable in the late 20th Century.)

(I'm still rooting for team "angels, aliens, and other phenomenon are coming from ~INSIDE THE BRAIN STEM~" but the 'they're all altered states of consciousness' paradigm is even more unfashionable than UFOs these days.)

no i earmarked it then got distracted by some garbage (life or TV, i forget which, probably both) and forgot

i was looking at my own recent ancient alien tweets earlier today -- thx to this thread -- and göbekli tepe is of course mentioned (presumably what led to our conversation) and demands further exploration

Watch it, it is really wonderful! (no aliens, tho - but lots of hot dream machine action and cave painting reenactments.)

I just googled ultra-terrestrials and Ancient Aliens says they are HOLOGRAPHIC DJINNS I'm dying!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCKNRigsTBU