He was the first person who introduced me to the idea that if you look at a thing with different mindsets, from different points of view, you can arrive at quite different opinions about the “true” nature of that thing.
At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
He had a way of describing things with a vigor that is quite rare. It was a fascinating read as a kid, blending science fiction with history and archaeology. Of course, later learning about the scientific method, or even just Occam’s razor, made it clear that the theory of ancient aliens is very unlikely, but the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.
A quite unique and interesting person departed this planet yesterday.
> At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
Are you describing Erich von Däniken's inability to change his mind when evidence clearly contradicted his theories?
Incapable: that happens when the acceptance of an idea implies that their perception of their identity is flawed and has, logically to change in order to adapt for the new reality where the idea has its place.
Denial is a protection mechanism, and it is very effective when the reality is too difficult to support as it is.
Identity is so essential in our beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that most of us won't accept anything that requires it to change.
Unless we accept that failure is part of our identity and that this means that our identity sometimes has to evolve. But that has to be done willingly, explicitly (in our minds).
I share your confusion about how ideology clouds judgement but I have a little anecdote.
I sometimes give people the Monty Hall problem. When they get it wrong, it often falls into the category of staying with the initial pick increases chances or switching has equal odds. I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.
If they insist that it makes no difference, I then start to play the actual game with them, writing down the prize door before the game starts and then proceeding with the game as normal. Only after a few rounds of them losing do they accept the proofs of what the optimal strategy is.
My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.
Leave it to people in the tech industry to ask interview questions that confused Paul Erdös for days and expect their interviewees to reason through things during an interview.
I'd get the Monty Hall problem question right off the bat, but only because I've encountered it before, not because I can naturally reason through it better than Erdös.
We used to ask job candidates a variation of the door in an infinite wall question [1]. The initial answer of many interviewees is to choose a direction and walk in that way forever, which is understandable, as infinity makes the question weird.
What is more interesting is, even after I pointed out that this answer has a 50% chance of finding the door and I'm looking for a 100% solution, some candidates refused to give it a second thought, didn't change their answer, and insisted that this is the best course of action.
The only reason people get confused about the Monty Hall problem is that the problem description rarely if ever makes it clear that the host knows where the car is and deliberately chooses a different door.
It's inconceivable (for example) that Paul Erdos, a world class mathematician, would fail to solve this problem if it were actually communicated clearly.
It is incredibly annoying that in the case where the host doesn't know where the car is but opens a goat door anyway, the probability goes back to 50-50
> I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.
Yeah this is the way I found it the easier to understand intuitively
The N=100 is a 'lazy' (or abstract if you prefer) way to look at it, it doesn't really explain anything.
It's hard to show how to explain the problem just writing about it, but by making them choose one of 3, and then making assumptions about which door will reveal the car, and if it is better to switch. You can easily demonstrate that in two out of three situations it is actually better to switch.
For the 3 case, since 2/3 is relatively close to 1/2, it's hard to build intuition from just a few examples.
The N=100 build intuition very quickly. I disagree that it doesn't explain anything. After playing, people quickly understand that the likelihood that they chose the correct door initially is very small and when all 98 other doors are revealed, the remaining door provides a red flag that their intuition is off.
Note that often I would explain the logic behind switching and still have them not believe me. Their intuition wouldn't be shaken by arguments or even small demonstration. Only when actually playing an the N=100 case would they start to understand.
One way or the other he still was a bullshitter, blowhard, huckster,...
That means that in the end, the "single way of thinking" was the right way of thinking.
But don't despair, there is still a lot of pseudoscience around: creationism, global warming denialism, anti-vax, astrology, etc. Some of these are even oficial policy for governments around the world.
> why some people are incapable of changing their point of view
Do you really want the answer?
People don't always say what they think and aren't consistent because they may hold multiple conflicting beliefs. This isn't lying or a lack of curiosity. It's the opposite, and perfectly rational.
Actually, if you don't think you have any conflicting beliefs you should think about it harder or seriously question how open-minded you really are.
You can give someone all the evidence that convinced you about something, but it will only convince them if they share enough of your foundational assumptions. At the core of all beliefs lie some assumptions, not facts.
This quickly becomes philosophy, but I encourage you to seek more if you really want this answer. You are pulling on a thread that I promise will bring enlightenment. I wish more people asked this more often and really meant it. It would resolve a lot of pointless conflict.
What I see instead, especially on places like HN or Reddit, is people trying to reassure themselves because they want to settle a question "once and for all" instead of seeking better answers. They want praise for what they "know" and to take a break, but there is no perfect truth, just better answers, and this process never ends.
> the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.
This stops being as relevant when you're put under pressure to make real decisions based on what you believe is true. You are forced to weigh the consequences of the decision, not just what you think might be true. This is a compromise, but I struggle to call this dishonesty.
The most obvious problem with this article is that it assumes Von Däniken came up with this idea. Years before "Chariots of the Gods", Peter Kolosimo already had best-selling works discussing ancient aliens.
"However, the fifties and sixties were more dominated by European works. The Italian Peter Kolosimo wrote several books as early as 1957, but his Timeless Earth (1964) became an international best seller and was translated into several languages. French-language authors included Henri Lhote who proposed that prehistoric Saharan rock art depicted close encounters, Bergier and Pauwels' Morning of the Magicians (1960), Robert Charroux's One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963) and Misraki's Flying Saucers Through The Ages. A few British authors also published before Von Däniken, such as Brinsley Le Poer Trench, John Michell and W. Raymond Drake who wrote Gods or Spacemen? in 1964.
"Although Von Däniken claims he was formulating his ancient astronaut ideas throughout his school days, it is clear that many others had already published their books on the subject, long before he became notable with Chariots of the Gods? in 1968."
Good point. I was introduced to the idea that aliens came to earth long ago and invented humans and built lots of weird monuments through The Mountains of Maddness by H P Lovecraft, written in 1930.
I read von Daniken as a very young kid and loved it. But I read it, and enjoyed it very much, as a science fiction genre. I never bought it, but I admired the effort. And so I thank him for stimulating a child's imagination. Well done Mr. V!
This was the first book that I picked out to buy for myself as a child (I remember pestering my parents for it at the Kroch’s and Brentano’s on Lake Street in Oak Park back in the 70s). I read it over and over and thanks to that, when I later came to stories like the Hebrews wandering the desert in Exodus, it was hard to put the von Däniken nonsense out of my mind.
Psychologists have there own version of this (which managed to achieve a sort of respectability) in Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which has the same sort of furtive/animistic fallacies are put forth to justify a questionable conclusion.
Pretty much all such claims can be easily dismissed by pointing out that such advances
1. Can obviously be made
2. Can be made very fast
There is simply no reason why major advancements in metallurgy couldn't have been made between 4453 and 4382BC, completely unknown to us, and later forgotten.
If fact, it's a mystery why we can't see more of such ancient artifacts, if anything.
The article doesn't even go far enough by blaming the oiling on some accidental dumb ritual, while it used to be common knowledge that iron can be protected from rusting by oiling it, and it was done completely on purpose.
I have a family member who is quite into "ancient aliens" and who has read all of von Danikens books. The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that rigor and science did not really matter and would not convince them of anything. It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize how humans went from mud to computers. They don't believe in human creativity being powerful enough to lead to modern society and think an external force was required. Ancient aliens is a convenient and fun theory for how it could have happened.
I’ve known a few people like that, and it had a darker undercurrent: they didn’t disbelieve that, say, the Greek or Roman monuments were built by those civilizations because they viewed those as predecessors of their own, but they considered the pacific or Central/South American cultures inferior and didn’t want to believe they were capable of great engineering.
Beyond the strong whiff of racism, I think there was also this idea that civilization went on a single path (grain, the wheel and domesticated horses/oxen/mules, bronze, iron, guns, steam, etc.) and so anyone which didn’t follow that path was basically developmentally challenged. This definitely did not consider the possibility that not every region had the prerequisites to follow the same path.
I've heard this claim many times, and yet I remember VD books (and similar ones like Kolosimo's) discussing Prehistoric Europe including cave art and megaliths. The Ancient Aliens TV series does have episodes on Ireland, the Norse and Graeco-Roman mythology.
Even today, these types bring up Baalbek's massive triliths on a regular basis, and state they could not have been built by such classical civilisations.
There you go trying use logic on racism. Of course it's not going to work.
The question isn't whether the ancient aliens framework logically supports racism, since it's false anyway and racists don't care about logic (otherwise etc etc). The question for racists is which frameworks most conveniently provide tidbits for them to distort for their own purposes. No logic, pure association and confirmation bias.
My own favorite example of this is how the pyramids (and all the advanced trigonometry required) were built by the Egyptians prior to their discovery of the wheel
There's a ratio involving pi between the base lengths of the pyramid and its height. This is been interpreted by enthusiasts that the Egyptians knew about pi.
But, consider a measuring wheel, where you can mark off distances very accurately by counting revolutions of the wheel, say, 1 cubit in diameter (I know, I know, what's a cubit?). Then, if the height is laid out in cubits, the ratio of pi is there while being completely ignorant of it.
The pi ratio is strong evidence that a wheel is used somewhere in their surveying tools.
When I was a boy, I asked my mom how the Egyptians made their pyramid foundations straight. Without looking up from her book, she replied "pull a string tight". Then I thought I'd trip her up with how they made the foundation level. Without hesitation she said "dig a trench and fill it with water."
Most civilizations discovered. No one care about a wheel. The wheel itself is useless. Not everyone discovered the axle though, and even less created roads.
I have responded to a sibling comment with more information or examples. I hate this because I don't care about pyramids or Egypt, but I feel myself compelled to respond, I'm so sorry it's not against you, It's a recent pet peeve.
The 'wheel' itself was discovered everywhere. Round things are easier to move, but you need an axle to make it useful. And roads or flat terrain to make use of that. Incas had pulley systems, which indicates they could probably have built an axle quite easily too, but had no use for it, because, well, no flat roads.
And even then Northern Manchurians knew about the wheel for sure, and knew about roads, but still used sleds until at least the Russian conquest.
Sorry, I'm quite boring about this, but it bothers me when people talk about 'inventing the wheel' like it was something special. The wheel itself is meh. The axles are what makes it usable, and the roads make it useful.
Roads were also innvented everywhere. There were cultures with flat roads and no wagons. I would say the axle and then the spoked wheel were likely the big deals.
> The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that <my beliefs> did not really matter and would not convince them of anything
> It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize...
And for you, too.
Science the method is pretty damn great. Science the institution is closer to any other agenda-driven information source. If you’re doing first-hand, first-principles science, great. But if you’re doing the “here’s a study...” game, you’re relying on external authority you aren’t equipped to interpret, which, in practice, isn’t so much different from the people who think CNN or Fox News or Ancient Aliens is gospel.
Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe. I guarantee you, it makes sense, once you know enough information (it always does, even if they’re actually insane, that helps it make sense). But to say, ”this person won’t even accept science” and hand wave it off as a “them” problem, emotional religion etc, are the words of a politician, not a scientist.
Asking for evidence isnt a "belief system" its a coming to know things system. Equating a request for scientific rigor, to contrarian ancient aliens is nonsensical.
If someone wants to hold something up as true, its correct to disbelieve it until evidence is provided.
These people don't provide evidence, what they do is show you something cool and then beg the question. "Look at this cool rock in this place it might be hard to get a rock to, really makes you wonder who put it there huh". Literally any dumb science "content producer" is going to be able to get you closer to truth than listening to that bunk.
Not to mention that:
>It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize
>Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe.
Seems like you quoted them having investigated it.
von Daniken's work inspired me to travel to Nazca PE and charter an airplane to see the alien landing strips for myself. Certainly a worthwhile trip. I may even have convinced the local guide I was a True Believer, of which I am sure he has encountered his share.
I have also take a page from his books by expostulating outlandish theories to explain facts with a straight face, always ending with a quick "of course there are other explanations".
Yesterday, my daughter asked me if it was “a round earth day or a flat earth day” thanks to my habit of providing outlandish explanations for things, often contradicting myself in the course of a single conversation in the process (they’ve come to enjoy trying to poke holes in some absurd explanation I’ve come up with).
That seems like a good game to play with your children. If it teaches them to regard any dubious statement skeptically and use critical thinking to figure out how likely it is to be true, that's a valuable life skill.
I have always enjoyed bringing in the "you know, the bible could be read very differently if you consider God to be an alien" to certain philosophical conversations I've had with people over the years, ever since reading von Daniken's work.
As you allude to, there are always other explanations.
Nobel-winning author Doris Lessing wrote a novel called Shikasta in 1979 that (to my recollection) is a rewriting of the Old Testament and Earth history from the point of view of an alien community who played the role assigned to the divinities and angels in human myths.
I read it as a teenager and it really stuck with me as a completely different, more spiritually influenced take on science fiction and “ancient aliens” theories of the era. She won the Nobel Prize on the strength of her more autobiographical and feminist prose, so Shikasta is an outlier in her own body of work too.
Shikasta is an incredible book. Completely out of left field for her, and a timely mix of politics and raw SF.
Incredibly depressing, but also unique. Neither the mainstream lit world nor the SF world knew what to make of it.
It's not so much a retelling of the OT as a suggestion that alien interference wouldn't look like flying saucers landing on the White House lawn, it would look like despicable politicians doing inhuman things.
A whole bunch of current disinformation comes from people having fun with misinformation and dumb people believing it until the idea makes a life of its own.
It's not harmless at all. A lot of explicitly nefarious people use this technique to engineer the population so they can be controlled.
Belief in aliens and UFOs was popular in the 1970's. Looking back on it now, it's amazing to me how gullible everyone was. Maybe it was the high lead content in everything...
Claimed UFOs sightings seem to have become less common since everyone is expected to carry a digital camera with them all the time (in their phones). Similar for Loch Ness etc.
But it's not like people don't like their outlandish theories anymore. Alas, they've become very politicised, too.
To give an example that's hopefully not too polarising: many people like to blame inflation on greed.
As a youngster I (the country?) was so excited, entranced for a bit, I read Chariots and Outer Space, stopped at maybe Gold of the Gods? I matured and grew, though I wanted it all to be real, there was little to no progression of the claims and evidence. Like Batboy or all the National Enquirer articles, it was clear it EVD was a crank.
He said, he wanted to "ask questions and entertain". I guess he does, but he does not use the scientific method. Also, he does not claim to use the scientific method.
I think it is more surprising that we have not found any alien artifacts by now.
"Erich Von Daemlichen" in typical schoolboy wordplay when I was a kid in Germany in the 1970s - when this nutjob stuff was still current, and frustratingly believed by otherwise sensible adults.
EvD is a good illustration of how we were more resilient against crackpots back then.
His book "Chariots of the Gods" was a best seller. I remember reading it probably in the early '70s, when I would have been somewhere in the 10-12 year old range. I'm pretty sure I believed he was probably right, as did a couple friends who also read it.
We also believed in some other bunk, like various psychic and paranormal stuff, much of which came from reading "Fate" magazine.
But without internet there was really no way to connect with a larger community of people who also believed those things. With just books, magazines, and maybe if we were really into it a couple newsletters it was hard to become obsessed with this stuff.
Furthermore we also read popular science magazines, and Asimov's monthly column in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction". They would publish rebuttals to the more significant crackpot claims going around (although I don't think Asimov ever specifically commented on EvD). The mainstream news magazines, like Time or Newsweek, would often include comments by prominent skeptics such as Carl Sagan when writing about these things.
Because mass communication was expensive (and often also slow) new questionable theories took some time to start getting widespread acceptance. That gave scientists (or other relevant experts for non-science based crackpot theories) time to write refutations. It is more work (often much more work) to refute crackpots than it is to generate crackpot theories.
Now we are awash with widespread belief in crackpot theories. A new one can spread very fast and very wide on social media and be established before refutations can be written. And when the refutations do come out the social media algorithms might not show them to the people that those same algorithms fed the theories to. They get more clicks and engagement if they instead show those people new crackpot theories instead of refutations of the crackpot theories they were showing a week or two earlier.
I think it was a manufactured bestseller. Selling books is a for-profit exercise. I don't think crazy theories are anything new, "new age" beliefs are really a continuous thing since the second great awakening at least. But in the 70s, bookstore chains realized that a certain demographic bought a lot of books, and you no longer could leave all that profit to ill-run independent crystal-selling bookstores just because of some high-minded concern for truth. Give the voracious book buyers the books they want, let the marketplace sort out what's true or not. That was the ethos of the time.
This demographic was called "new age" by the marketers, but almost no one who bought such books called themselves new age.
But people who wrote such books became very aware of the demographic profile too. And while there had certainly been grifter cult leaders before who didn't sincerely believe what they preached, now they realized that they could go straight to profit, just by writing a book. No need for the messy high-intensity "make a cult" step. The bookstores were on their side now.
von Däniken was the original Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, aka "aliens" meme guy.
He never met an archeological artifact that didn't look like alien technology to him.
Ancient Aliens ought to be required viewing in schools, because they are very careful to employ enthymeme and reported speech to make a series of statements each one of which is technically true, yet have implications which are false. Gaining the skill to recognise when these kinds of claims are being made is, I feel, essential for the electorate in a democracy.
What really drives me nuts about von Däniken (and Tsoukalos, Childress, et al. …) is that he contradicts himself. (Sorry, I don’t care about this stuff enough to have a recent example.) His position isn’t consistent.
Zecharia Sitchin’s arguments are also frequently not good but he at least seemed to be trying to construct a consistent whole whereas these other guys will just say anything.
Sitchin's biggest defence is that very few people can read cuneiform. Even less than hieroglyphics seemingly. Certainly less than Hebrew, Sanskrit or Greek. That means there aren't a lot of people able to dismiss his translations properly.
TIL.
I remember my parents had von Däniken books.
I, on the other hand,
was deeply into Isaac Asimov,
both his fiction and non-fiction.
He was a pretty good debunker.
I read both. I have to admit I was never much of a fan of Asimov's non-fiction or work outside of SF... I could take it or leave it. I do find most of EVD's examples to be ridiculous... The Nazca lines, for example, were clearly never landing strips, for a variety of reasons, although they may have been meant to be seen from above.
What Von Däniken did teach me as a child was to have a sense of wonder about the ancients and their achievements. Maybe not spaceships and electricity necessarily, but their feats of masonry and sculpture. I've seen dolmens capped by stones the size of a bus, that I felt uncomfortable walking under, even though they had managed to stay like that for thousands of years. We struggle to replicate some of these things today yet they apparently did so without metal tools, proper ropes or any number of other things. The planning alone would have taken many years.
I heard Däniken speak about 30 years ago, and exchanged a few words with him afterwards. He was a brilliant orator and came across as highly sophisticated. His arguments were contrived and I recognized that even as a child, but he was nothing like the natives of the YouTube era who do it for the likes and memes. He was completely sincere in his own belief of what he said.
He is a great showman in his way. He was far from being the first to write on this subject, but I think he was pretty much the first to popularise it on television.
DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Hundreds More Nazca Lines Emerge in Peru's Desert
FYI, Erich von Däniken's book "Chariots of the Gods?" is racist pseudo-scientific claptrap. My Archaeoastronomy professor at the University of Maryland, John B. Carlson, despises it.
It attributes the achievements of ancient non-European civilizations to extraterrestrial visitors, undermining their intelligence and capabilities, promotes speculative theories without empirical evidence, misinterprets artifacts, ignores scientific consensus, perpetuates harmful cultural stereotypes, and plagiarizes French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians".
>Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the interdisciplinary[1] or multidisciplinary[2] study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used these phenomena and what role the sky played in their cultures".[3] Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern astronomy is a scientific discipline, while archaeoastronomy considers symbolically rich cultural interpretations of phenomena in the sky by other cultures.[4][5] It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice.[6]
A Brief History of the Center for Archaeoastronomy
Archaeoastronomy was one of the most interesting courses I took at uni, and professor Carlson was extremely enthusiastic about it. It really opened my mind to how smart and motivated ancient people were, not at all like our stereotypes from "The Flintstones" and "Chariots of the Gods?".
For example, The Anasazi Indians made significant astronomical observations that they integrated into their architecture and cultural practices. They tracked solar and lunar cycles, aligning their buildings and ceremonial sites with celestial events like solstices and equinoxes. A fascinating example is the "Sun Dagger" at Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, where they used sunlight and shadow patterns on petroglyphs to mark important times of the year.
They deserve an enormous about of credit for what they achieved without all our received technology, and left behind for us to reverse engineer.
It's disappointing when people reflexively attribute ancient achievements like that to religion (or aliens), when it's actually hard objective observation based science that deserves credit!
DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–]
Sometimes (and often) pseudoscientific bullshit is just objectively wrong, and you'd have to be completely out of your mind, or just trolling, to "make up your own mind" to believe it.
No sane flat earthers in this day and age actually believe the earth is flat, or deserve to have their presumed beliefs respected or even humored, because they're just being contrarian and trolling for attention, so it's perfectly valid to say to them "FYI, the Earth is not flat."
I refuse to couch my firm disbelief that the Earth is flat as an opinion that might possibly be wrong, by saying "IMO, the Earth is not flat." Flat Earthers (also Young Earthers) certainly aren't couching their crazy beliefs as opinions, so don't deserve it in return.
"Chariots of the Gods?" is also that objectively wrong: there is no possible universe in which its claims are true. It's all based on historically ignorant Argument from Incredulity and inherently racist assumptions. In the 50th anniversary edition, von Däniken refused to address, admit, or correct any of the many widely proven errors in the book that made him so much money and fame, so he doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
Believing in pseudoscientific claptrap like Homeopathy, or the objectively false stories of Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark is just as ridiculous. They're physically and mathematically and logically and practically impossible. So it's also fine to say "FYI it's biblical fiction, and the Earth is definitely not 6000 years old, and you absolutely can not fit and feed and clean that many animals in a wooden ark." It's not my opinion, it's objective information.
Skimming through this item, a couple points I don't see being made:
- If you claim that the assistance of alien visitors is needed to explain the milestone leaps or technological achievements of ancient human civilizations...are you walking into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down logic trap? Because obviously "our" alien visitors would have need even greater leaps and achievements in their own past, to be able to travel to the earth. And their visitors similar, and so on.
- Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?
I think a lot of it is based on how little of time most people knew existed in a tangible way. Until the last few centuries you were born into a world where most technologies you use had already been around so long they just might as well have existed forever. And the stories of how any talked about technologies were generally myth, folklore, or completely false. The idea the earth was around for billions of years wasn't really a thing for most cultures. Maybe you believed it was around forever, or that a mythological creation even happened in the 'more recent' past and the earth popped up like it was. The idea their was a beginning a long time ago, but it only started out with the most basic shit (ionized hydrogen mostly) and everything after that is because of an ever increasing entropy gradient is just not an idea that seems to pop into our heads.
I don't see why it would require a "turtles all the way" down logic trap. There would be a few ET civilisations which would develop the long and hard way, but then they could accelerate or seed civilisation elsewhere. A sort of reverse Prime Directive.
I loved his books in junior high. I was into cryptids and aliens UFOs and secret military base conspiracies and stuff like that for a long time. It's like making up sci-fi explanations for the real world.
The problem is summed up by Carl Sagan: “Every time he [von Däniken] sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet” (Playboy 1974:151).
Unfortunately its true of so many people, and the information revolution we were all promised seems to have made it worse, not better.
The explanation is in the word "novel": it's a fictional book that is explicitly presented as fictional. Fiction means "made up", not claimed to be based on facts.
Around a decade back, I and a bunch of colleagues explored these theories and despite knowing they were all bunkum, the sheer entertainment value they served was gold.
Think of it like Marvel universe stuff.
We'd go on long walks and let our 'what if' imagination run wild.
One of the problems is we do have massive gaps. Mainly because we have no written records from the Stone Age, and barely anything from certain other cultures. Von Däniken exploits that.
Conspiracies are wonderfully self-reinforcing: anything that doesn’t support the conspiracy is clearly the work of the conspirators hiding their existence.
The problem is that does happen in real life. Intelligence services and organised crime work actively to hide their tracks. As do corrupt officials and some of the military.
We live in a society where corruption is rife and ordinary people are largely excluded from most major institutions ... That is the atmosphere that breeds these things.
My favorite way to cut apart those two is to ask: How many people need to keep a secret, how long and how perfectly would they need to succeed, and what motive do they have to do a good job?
That's a fair question, but we do live in a surprisingly secretive society. I think that shifted over a lot during the Cold War period. It became acceptable to hide large sections of public spending from the public.
We also live in a corrupt society and occasionally that emerges as a scandal.
Certain secrets are kept better than others. Now and then real conspiracies do become public knowledge like the Tuskegee Experiment or Scientology's infiltration of parts of the US government.
In regards to the space ship that people see, I've seen photos of some Egyptian pyramid hieroglyphs myself, I hear this often "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"
This stupendous gaslighting mirrors what I took away early in this article. It used several Appeal to Authority and Epistemic Invalidation and is quite clearly pathetic. Hard to read the clearly biased claims.
>But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss
Its an unproven hypothesis.
It doesnt need to be "dismissed" it needs to be proven. You could make up any number of hypotheses. You wouldnt "dismiss" any of them. If you were interested in one you might design a test to prove it. But failing that its not worth worrying about.
When you write like 49 books trying to convince people of your untested claim, it seems like grifting instead of working towards evidence.
Sure - it was considered a near certainty planets orbited other stars given all that was known about the formation of our solar system.
That said, it's still an extremely low probabilty that life from other systems came and visited our particular rock some time in the past million years (and interacted with humans).
He was the first person who introduced me to the idea that if you look at a thing with different mindsets, from different points of view, you can arrive at quite different opinions about the “true” nature of that thing.
At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
He had a way of describing things with a vigor that is quite rare. It was a fascinating read as a kid, blending science fiction with history and archaeology. Of course, later learning about the scientific method, or even just Occam’s razor, made it clear that the theory of ancient aliens is very unlikely, but the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.
A quite unique and interesting person departed this planet yesterday.
> At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
Are you describing Erich von Däniken's inability to change his mind when evidence clearly contradicted his theories?
Incapable: that happens when the acceptance of an idea implies that their perception of their identity is flawed and has, logically to change in order to adapt for the new reality where the idea has its place. Denial is a protection mechanism, and it is very effective when the reality is too difficult to support as it is. Identity is so essential in our beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that most of us won't accept anything that requires it to change. Unless we accept that failure is part of our identity and that this means that our identity sometimes has to evolve. But that has to be done willingly, explicitly (in our minds).
I share your confusion about how ideology clouds judgement but I have a little anecdote.
I sometimes give people the Monty Hall problem. When they get it wrong, it often falls into the category of staying with the initial pick increases chances or switching has equal odds. I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.
If they insist that it makes no difference, I then start to play the actual game with them, writing down the prize door before the game starts and then proceeding with the game as normal. Only after a few rounds of them losing do they accept the proofs of what the optimal strategy is.
My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.
Leave it to people in the tech industry to ask interview questions that confused Paul Erdös for days and expect their interviewees to reason through things during an interview.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140413131827/http://www.decisi...
I'd get the Monty Hall problem question right off the bat, but only because I've encountered it before, not because I can naturally reason through it better than Erdös.
We used to ask job candidates a variation of the door in an infinite wall question [1]. The initial answer of many interviewees is to choose a direction and walk in that way forever, which is understandable, as infinity makes the question weird.
What is more interesting is, even after I pointed out that this answer has a 50% chance of finding the door and I'm looking for a 100% solution, some candidates refused to give it a second thought, didn't change their answer, and insisted that this is the best course of action.
[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3915578/door-in-an-...
The only reason people get confused about the Monty Hall problem is that the problem description rarely if ever makes it clear that the host knows where the car is and deliberately chooses a different door.
It's inconceivable (for example) that Paul Erdos, a world class mathematician, would fail to solve this problem if it were actually communicated clearly.
It is incredibly annoying that in the case where the host doesn't know where the car is but opens a goat door anyway, the probability goes back to 50-50
> I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.
Yeah this is the way I found it the easier to understand intuitively
The N=100 is a 'lazy' (or abstract if you prefer) way to look at it, it doesn't really explain anything.
It's hard to show how to explain the problem just writing about it, but by making them choose one of 3, and then making assumptions about which door will reveal the car, and if it is better to switch. You can easily demonstrate that in two out of three situations it is actually better to switch.
For the 3 case, since 2/3 is relatively close to 1/2, it's hard to build intuition from just a few examples.
The N=100 build intuition very quickly. I disagree that it doesn't explain anything. After playing, people quickly understand that the likelihood that they chose the correct door initially is very small and when all 98 other doors are revealed, the remaining door provides a red flag that their intuition is off.
Note that often I would explain the logic behind switching and still have them not believe me. Their intuition wouldn't be shaken by arguments or even small demonstration. Only when actually playing an the N=100 case would they start to understand.
Why doesn’t it explain anything when it clearly demonstrates the point?
Yeah, whatever...
One way or the other he still was a bullshitter, blowhard, huckster,...
That means that in the end, the "single way of thinking" was the right way of thinking.
But don't despair, there is still a lot of pseudoscience around: creationism, global warming denialism, anti-vax, astrology, etc. Some of these are even oficial policy for governments around the world.
> why some people are incapable of changing their point of view
Do you really want the answer?
People don't always say what they think and aren't consistent because they may hold multiple conflicting beliefs. This isn't lying or a lack of curiosity. It's the opposite, and perfectly rational.
Actually, if you don't think you have any conflicting beliefs you should think about it harder or seriously question how open-minded you really are.
You can give someone all the evidence that convinced you about something, but it will only convince them if they share enough of your foundational assumptions. At the core of all beliefs lie some assumptions, not facts.
This quickly becomes philosophy, but I encourage you to seek more if you really want this answer. You are pulling on a thread that I promise will bring enlightenment. I wish more people asked this more often and really meant it. It would resolve a lot of pointless conflict.
What I see instead, especially on places like HN or Reddit, is people trying to reassure themselves because they want to settle a question "once and for all" instead of seeking better answers. They want praise for what they "know" and to take a break, but there is no perfect truth, just better answers, and this process never ends.
> the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.
This stops being as relevant when you're put under pressure to make real decisions based on what you believe is true. You are forced to weigh the consequences of the decision, not just what you think might be true. This is a compromise, but I struggle to call this dishonesty.
The most obvious problem with this article is that it assumes Von Däniken came up with this idea. Years before "Chariots of the Gods", Peter Kolosimo already had best-selling works discussing ancient aliens.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts
"However, the fifties and sixties were more dominated by European works. The Italian Peter Kolosimo wrote several books as early as 1957, but his Timeless Earth (1964) became an international best seller and was translated into several languages. French-language authors included Henri Lhote who proposed that prehistoric Saharan rock art depicted close encounters, Bergier and Pauwels' Morning of the Magicians (1960), Robert Charroux's One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963) and Misraki's Flying Saucers Through The Ages. A few British authors also published before Von Däniken, such as Brinsley Le Poer Trench, John Michell and W. Raymond Drake who wrote Gods or Spacemen? in 1964.
"Although Von Däniken claims he was formulating his ancient astronaut ideas throughout his school days, it is clear that many others had already published their books on the subject, long before he became notable with Chariots of the Gods? in 1968."
Good point. I was introduced to the idea that aliens came to earth long ago and invented humans and built lots of weird monuments through The Mountains of Maddness by H P Lovecraft, written in 1930.
I read von Daniken as a very young kid and loved it. But I read it, and enjoyed it very much, as a science fiction genre. I never bought it, but I admired the effort. And so I thank him for stimulating a child's imagination. Well done Mr. V!
This was the first book that I picked out to buy for myself as a child (I remember pestering my parents for it at the Kroch’s and Brentano’s on Lake Street in Oak Park back in the 70s). I read it over and over and thanks to that, when I later came to stories like the Hebrews wandering the desert in Exodus, it was hard to put the von Däniken nonsense out of my mind.
Psychologists have there own version of this (which managed to achieve a sort of respectability) in Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which has the same sort of furtive/animistic fallacies are put forth to justify a questionable conclusion.
Exactly - a fun storyteller!
His books are entertaining, I'll give him that. Some of his archaeological interpretations are laughable but now and then he has a head scratcher.
Pretty much all such claims can be easily dismissed by pointing out that such advances
1. Can obviously be made
2. Can be made very fast
There is simply no reason why major advancements in metallurgy couldn't have been made between 4453 and 4382BC, completely unknown to us, and later forgotten.
If fact, it's a mystery why we can't see more of such ancient artifacts, if anything.
The article doesn't even go far enough by blaming the oiling on some accidental dumb ritual, while it used to be common knowledge that iron can be protected from rusting by oiling it, and it was done completely on purpose.
The reason better toolboxes have felt inside the drawers is you put a drop of oil on the felt, and it will keep the tools rust-free.
I have a family member who is quite into "ancient aliens" and who has read all of von Danikens books. The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that rigor and science did not really matter and would not convince them of anything. It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize how humans went from mud to computers. They don't believe in human creativity being powerful enough to lead to modern society and think an external force was required. Ancient aliens is a convenient and fun theory for how it could have happened.
I’ve known a few people like that, and it had a darker undercurrent: they didn’t disbelieve that, say, the Greek or Roman monuments were built by those civilizations because they viewed those as predecessors of their own, but they considered the pacific or Central/South American cultures inferior and didn’t want to believe they were capable of great engineering.
Beyond the strong whiff of racism, I think there was also this idea that civilization went on a single path (grain, the wheel and domesticated horses/oxen/mules, bronze, iron, guns, steam, etc.) and so anyone which didn’t follow that path was basically developmentally challenged. This definitely did not consider the possibility that not every region had the prerequisites to follow the same path.
I've heard this claim many times, and yet I remember VD books (and similar ones like Kolosimo's) discussing Prehistoric Europe including cave art and megaliths. The Ancient Aliens TV series does have episodes on Ireland, the Norse and Graeco-Roman mythology.
Even today, these types bring up Baalbek's massive triliths on a regular basis, and state they could not have been built by such classical civilisations.
There you go trying use logic on racism. Of course it's not going to work.
The question isn't whether the ancient aliens framework logically supports racism, since it's false anyway and racists don't care about logic (otherwise etc etc). The question for racists is which frameworks most conveniently provide tidbits for them to distort for their own purposes. No logic, pure association and confirmation bias.
My own favorite example of this is how the pyramids (and all the advanced trigonometry required) were built by the Egyptians prior to their discovery of the wheel
> advanced trigonometry
There's a ratio involving pi between the base lengths of the pyramid and its height. This is been interpreted by enthusiasts that the Egyptians knew about pi.
But, consider a measuring wheel, where you can mark off distances very accurately by counting revolutions of the wheel, say, 1 cubit in diameter (I know, I know, what's a cubit?). Then, if the height is laid out in cubits, the ratio of pi is there while being completely ignorant of it.
But that doesn't explain things if it's true that they hadn't discovered the wheel!
The pi ratio is strong evidence that a wheel is used somewhere in their surveying tools.
When I was a boy, I asked my mom how the Egyptians made their pyramid foundations straight. Without looking up from her book, she replied "pull a string tight". Then I thought I'd trip her up with how they made the foundation level. Without hesitation she said "dig a trench and fill it with water."
She shoulda been an engineer!
It is as far as I understand only wheeled transportation that was late in Ancient Egypt. They used wheels for pottery before they had wagons.
Most civilizations discovered. No one care about a wheel. The wheel itself is useless. Not everyone discovered the axle though, and even less created roads.
I have responded to a sibling comment with more information or examples. I hate this because I don't care about pyramids or Egypt, but I feel myself compelled to respond, I'm so sorry it's not against you, It's a recent pet peeve.
Discovery of the axles and roads.
The 'wheel' itself was discovered everywhere. Round things are easier to move, but you need an axle to make it useful. And roads or flat terrain to make use of that. Incas had pulley systems, which indicates they could probably have built an axle quite easily too, but had no use for it, because, well, no flat roads.
And even then Northern Manchurians knew about the wheel for sure, and knew about roads, but still used sleds until at least the Russian conquest.
Sorry, I'm quite boring about this, but it bothers me when people talk about 'inventing the wheel' like it was something special. The wheel itself is meh. The axles are what makes it usable, and the roads make it useful.
Roads were also innvented everywhere. There were cultures with flat roads and no wagons. I would say the axle and then the spoked wheel were likely the big deals.
> The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that <my beliefs> did not really matter and would not convince them of anything
> It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize...
And for you, too.
Science the method is pretty damn great. Science the institution is closer to any other agenda-driven information source. If you’re doing first-hand, first-principles science, great. But if you’re doing the “here’s a study...” game, you’re relying on external authority you aren’t equipped to interpret, which, in practice, isn’t so much different from the people who think CNN or Fox News or Ancient Aliens is gospel.
Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe. I guarantee you, it makes sense, once you know enough information (it always does, even if they’re actually insane, that helps it make sense). But to say, ”this person won’t even accept science” and hand wave it off as a “them” problem, emotional religion etc, are the words of a politician, not a scientist.
Asking for evidence isnt a "belief system" its a coming to know things system. Equating a request for scientific rigor, to contrarian ancient aliens is nonsensical.
If someone wants to hold something up as true, its correct to disbelieve it until evidence is provided.
These people don't provide evidence, what they do is show you something cool and then beg the question. "Look at this cool rock in this place it might be hard to get a rock to, really makes you wonder who put it there huh". Literally any dumb science "content producer" is going to be able to get you closer to truth than listening to that bunk.
Not to mention that:
>It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize
>Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe.
Seems like you quoted them having investigated it.
But having done so you call them a politician.
Bummer, who are the aliens to contact now if they want to phone Earth?
Rest in peace, your ideas were good entertainment.
von Daniken's work inspired me to travel to Nazca PE and charter an airplane to see the alien landing strips for myself. Certainly a worthwhile trip. I may even have convinced the local guide I was a True Believer, of which I am sure he has encountered his share.
I have also take a page from his books by expostulating outlandish theories to explain facts with a straight face, always ending with a quick "of course there are other explanations".
It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.
Yesterday, my daughter asked me if it was “a round earth day or a flat earth day” thanks to my habit of providing outlandish explanations for things, often contradicting myself in the course of a single conversation in the process (they’ve come to enjoy trying to poke holes in some absurd explanation I’ve come up with).
That seems like a good game to play with your children. If it teaches them to regard any dubious statement skeptically and use critical thinking to figure out how likely it is to be true, that's a valuable life skill.
I have always enjoyed bringing in the "you know, the bible could be read very differently if you consider God to be an alien" to certain philosophical conversations I've had with people over the years, ever since reading von Daniken's work.
As you allude to, there are always other explanations.
Nobel-winning author Doris Lessing wrote a novel called Shikasta in 1979 that (to my recollection) is a rewriting of the Old Testament and Earth history from the point of view of an alien community who played the role assigned to the divinities and angels in human myths.
I read it as a teenager and it really stuck with me as a completely different, more spiritually influenced take on science fiction and “ancient aliens” theories of the era. She won the Nobel Prize on the strength of her more autobiographical and feminist prose, so Shikasta is an outlier in her own body of work too.
Shikasta is an incredible book. Completely out of left field for her, and a timely mix of politics and raw SF.
Incredibly depressing, but also unique. Neither the mainstream lit world nor the SF world knew what to make of it.
It's not so much a retelling of the OT as a suggestion that alien interference wouldn't look like flying saucers landing on the White House lawn, it would look like despicable politicians doing inhuman things.
I've created table-top RPG campaigns by cobbling together these kinds of wack theories and building a world where they are true.
>It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.
A whole bunch of current disinformation comes from people having fun with misinformation and dumb people believing it until the idea makes a life of its own.
It's not harmless at all. A lot of explicitly nefarious people use this technique to engineer the population so they can be controlled.
Are you talking about religion?
Yes. Ancient Aliens, Flerf nonsense, Tartarian nonsense. All religions.
Poe's Law applies.
Belief in aliens and UFOs was popular in the 1970's. Looking back on it now, it's amazing to me how gullible everyone was. Maybe it was the high lead content in everything...
Claimed UFOs sightings seem to have become less common since everyone is expected to carry a digital camera with them all the time (in their phones). Similar for Loch Ness etc.
But it's not like people don't like their outlandish theories anymore. Alas, they've become very politicised, too.
To give an example that's hopefully not too polarising: many people like to blame inflation on greed.
> Claimed UFOs sightings seem to have become less common
Now it's mostly drawn down to explaining people what sensor and perspective glitches are.
As a youngster I (the country?) was so excited, entranced for a bit, I read Chariots and Outer Space, stopped at maybe Gold of the Gods? I matured and grew, though I wanted it all to be real, there was little to no progression of the claims and evidence. Like Batboy or all the National Enquirer articles, it was clear it EVD was a crank.
He said, he wanted to "ask questions and entertain". I guess he does, but he does not use the scientific method. Also, he does not claim to use the scientific method.
I think it is more surprising that we have not found any alien artifacts by now.
Godspeed Erich.
Bio on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken
Notable for "Chariots of the Gods" (1968).
"Erich Von Daemlichen" in typical schoolboy wordplay when I was a kid in Germany in the 1970s - when this nutjob stuff was still current, and frustratingly believed by otherwise sensible adults.
Graham Hancock's Mentor.
Not really. Von Daniken talks about ancient aliens. Hancock talks about ancient human civilisations.
EvD is a good illustration of how we were more resilient against crackpots back then.
His book "Chariots of the Gods" was a best seller. I remember reading it probably in the early '70s, when I would have been somewhere in the 10-12 year old range. I'm pretty sure I believed he was probably right, as did a couple friends who also read it.
We also believed in some other bunk, like various psychic and paranormal stuff, much of which came from reading "Fate" magazine.
But without internet there was really no way to connect with a larger community of people who also believed those things. With just books, magazines, and maybe if we were really into it a couple newsletters it was hard to become obsessed with this stuff.
Furthermore we also read popular science magazines, and Asimov's monthly column in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction". They would publish rebuttals to the more significant crackpot claims going around (although I don't think Asimov ever specifically commented on EvD). The mainstream news magazines, like Time or Newsweek, would often include comments by prominent skeptics such as Carl Sagan when writing about these things.
Because mass communication was expensive (and often also slow) new questionable theories took some time to start getting widespread acceptance. That gave scientists (or other relevant experts for non-science based crackpot theories) time to write refutations. It is more work (often much more work) to refute crackpots than it is to generate crackpot theories.
Now we are awash with widespread belief in crackpot theories. A new one can spread very fast and very wide on social media and be established before refutations can be written. And when the refutations do come out the social media algorithms might not show them to the people that those same algorithms fed the theories to. They get more clicks and engagement if they instead show those people new crackpot theories instead of refutations of the crackpot theories they were showing a week or two earlier.
I think it was a manufactured bestseller. Selling books is a for-profit exercise. I don't think crazy theories are anything new, "new age" beliefs are really a continuous thing since the second great awakening at least. But in the 70s, bookstore chains realized that a certain demographic bought a lot of books, and you no longer could leave all that profit to ill-run independent crystal-selling bookstores just because of some high-minded concern for truth. Give the voracious book buyers the books they want, let the marketplace sort out what's true or not. That was the ethos of the time.
This demographic was called "new age" by the marketers, but almost no one who bought such books called themselves new age.
But people who wrote such books became very aware of the demographic profile too. And while there had certainly been grifter cult leaders before who didn't sincerely believe what they preached, now they realized that they could go straight to profit, just by writing a book. No need for the messy high-intensity "make a cult" step. The bookstores were on their side now.
Maybe. On the other hand, it was also harder to find refutations of crackpot theories that the mainstream happened to believe in.
von Däniken was the original Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, aka "aliens" meme guy. He never met an archeological artifact that didn't look like alien technology to him.
Ancient Aliens ought to be required viewing in schools, because they are very careful to employ enthymeme and reported speech to make a series of statements each one of which is technically true, yet have implications which are false. Gaining the skill to recognise when these kinds of claims are being made is, I feel, essential for the electorate in a democracy.
What really drives me nuts about von Däniken (and Tsoukalos, Childress, et al. …) is that he contradicts himself. (Sorry, I don’t care about this stuff enough to have a recent example.) His position isn’t consistent.
Zecharia Sitchin’s arguments are also frequently not good but he at least seemed to be trying to construct a consistent whole whereas these other guys will just say anything.
Sitchin's biggest defence is that very few people can read cuneiform. Even less than hieroglyphics seemingly. Certainly less than Hebrew, Sanskrit or Greek. That means there aren't a lot of people able to dismiss his translations properly.
Yes. I stopped reading von Däniken, after there were multiple contradictions on the very first page of the first book I tried.
I like fantasy, but it should be at least a little bit consistent.
VD wasn't the original, not even close. Peter Kolosimo had best sellers on the same subject years earlier, as did others.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts
TIL. I remember my parents had von Däniken books. I, on the other hand, was deeply into Isaac Asimov, both his fiction and non-fiction. He was a pretty good debunker.
I read both. I have to admit I was never much of a fan of Asimov's non-fiction or work outside of SF... I could take it or leave it. I do find most of EVD's examples to be ridiculous... The Nazca lines, for example, were clearly never landing strips, for a variety of reasons, although they may have been meant to be seen from above.
What Von Däniken did teach me as a child was to have a sense of wonder about the ancients and their achievements. Maybe not spaceships and electricity necessarily, but their feats of masonry and sculpture. I've seen dolmens capped by stones the size of a bus, that I felt uncomfortable walking under, even though they had managed to stay like that for thousands of years. We struggle to replicate some of these things today yet they apparently did so without metal tools, proper ropes or any number of other things. The planning alone would have taken many years.
I heard Däniken speak about 30 years ago, and exchanged a few words with him afterwards. He was a brilliant orator and came across as highly sophisticated. His arguments were contrived and I recognized that even as a child, but he was nothing like the natives of the YouTube era who do it for the likes and memes. He was completely sincere in his own belief of what he said.
He is a great showman in his way. He was far from being the first to write on this subject, but I think he was pretty much the first to popularise it on television.
Eric didn’t die - he just went home.
This dude got famous by polluting the public discourse on archaeology to sell books.
I cannot respect him as an author or thinker, only as a human.
Still easily a seven on the grifting scale from used carpet spruiker to current POTUS.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42226224
DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Hundreds More Nazca Lines Emerge in Peru's Desert
FYI, Erich von Däniken's book "Chariots of the Gods?" is racist pseudo-scientific claptrap. My Archaeoastronomy professor at the University of Maryland, John B. Carlson, despises it.
It attributes the achievements of ancient non-European civilizations to extraterrestrial visitors, undermining their intelligence and capabilities, promotes speculative theories without empirical evidence, misinterprets artifacts, ignores scientific consensus, perpetuates harmful cultural stereotypes, and plagiarizes French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy
>Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the interdisciplinary[1] or multidisciplinary[2] study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used these phenomena and what role the sky played in their cultures".[3] Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern astronomy is a scientific discipline, while archaeoastronomy considers symbolically rich cultural interpretations of phenomena in the sky by other cultures.[4][5] It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice.[6]
A Brief History of the Center for Archaeoastronomy
https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~tlaloc/archastro/cfaintro.html
DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–]
Archaeoastronomy was one of the most interesting courses I took at uni, and professor Carlson was extremely enthusiastic about it. It really opened my mind to how smart and motivated ancient people were, not at all like our stereotypes from "The Flintstones" and "Chariots of the Gods?".
For example, The Anasazi Indians made significant astronomical observations that they integrated into their architecture and cultural practices. They tracked solar and lunar cycles, aligning their buildings and ceremonial sites with celestial events like solstices and equinoxes. A fascinating example is the "Sun Dagger" at Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, where they used sunlight and shadow patterns on petroglyphs to mark important times of the year.
They deserve an enormous about of credit for what they achieved without all our received technology, and left behind for us to reverse engineer.
https://spaceshipearth1.wordpress.com/tag/anasazi-indians-as...
https://www2.hao.ucar.edu/education/prehistoric-southwest/su...
It's disappointing when people reflexively attribute ancient achievements like that to religion (or aliens), when it's actually hard objective observation based science that deserves credit!
DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–]
Sometimes (and often) pseudoscientific bullshit is just objectively wrong, and you'd have to be completely out of your mind, or just trolling, to "make up your own mind" to believe it.
No sane flat earthers in this day and age actually believe the earth is flat, or deserve to have their presumed beliefs respected or even humored, because they're just being contrarian and trolling for attention, so it's perfectly valid to say to them "FYI, the Earth is not flat."
I refuse to couch my firm disbelief that the Earth is flat as an opinion that might possibly be wrong, by saying "IMO, the Earth is not flat." Flat Earthers (also Young Earthers) certainly aren't couching their crazy beliefs as opinions, so don't deserve it in return.
"Chariots of the Gods?" is also that objectively wrong: there is no possible universe in which its claims are true. It's all based on historically ignorant Argument from Incredulity and inherently racist assumptions. In the 50th anniversary edition, von Däniken refused to address, admit, or correct any of the many widely proven errors in the book that made him so much money and fame, so he doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity
Believing in pseudoscientific claptrap like Homeopathy, or the objectively false stories of Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark is just as ridiculous. They're physically and mathematically and logically and practically impossible. So it's also fine to say "FYI it's biblical fiction, and the Earth is definitely not 6000 years old, and you absolutely can not fit and feed and clean that many animals in a wooden ark." It's not my opinion, it's objective information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4OhXQTMOEc
To pretend otherwise feels like humoring a small child who still believes in Santa Claus.
Also the guy that was the inspiration for Daniel Jackson in the original Stargate movie.
Rest in ascension.
They come from above!
Skimming through this item, a couple points I don't see being made:
- If you claim that the assistance of alien visitors is needed to explain the milestone leaps or technological achievements of ancient human civilizations...are you walking into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down logic trap? Because obviously "our" alien visitors would have need even greater leaps and achievements in their own past, to be able to travel to the earth. And their visitors similar, and so on.
- Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?
I think a lot of it is based on how little of time most people knew existed in a tangible way. Until the last few centuries you were born into a world where most technologies you use had already been around so long they just might as well have existed forever. And the stories of how any talked about technologies were generally myth, folklore, or completely false. The idea the earth was around for billions of years wasn't really a thing for most cultures. Maybe you believed it was around forever, or that a mythological creation even happened in the 'more recent' past and the earth popped up like it was. The idea their was a beginning a long time ago, but it only started out with the most basic shit (ionized hydrogen mostly) and everything after that is because of an ever increasing entropy gradient is just not an idea that seems to pop into our heads.
I don't see why it would require a "turtles all the way" down logic trap. There would be a few ET civilisations which would develop the long and hard way, but then they could accelerate or seed civilisation elsewhere. A sort of reverse Prime Directive.
I loved his books in junior high. I was into cryptids and aliens UFOs and secret military base conspiracies and stuff like that for a long time. It's like making up sci-fi explanations for the real world.
He's up there riding that chariot now.
Sagan comes in with a great quote -
The problem is summed up by Carl Sagan: “Every time he [von Däniken] sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet” (Playboy 1974:151).
Unfortunately its true of so many people, and the information revolution we were all promised seems to have made it worse, not better.
Weird critique from Sagan, who wrote a bestselling novel based on the idea of contact with extraterrestrials.
The explanation is in the word "novel": it's a fictional book that is explicitly presented as fictional. Fiction means "made up", not claimed to be based on facts.
Around a decade back, I and a bunch of colleagues explored these theories and despite knowing they were all bunkum, the sheer entertainment value they served was gold.
Think of it like Marvel universe stuff.
We'd go on long walks and let our 'what if' imagination run wild.
This also applies to certain "conspiracies."
In both cases, it's their God of the Gaps.
(Not to be confused with the Boss of the Ross. Or Hermes. Or Nike.)
One of the problems is we do have massive gaps. Mainly because we have no written records from the Stone Age, and barely anything from certain other cultures. Von Däniken exploits that.
Conspiracies are wonderfully self-reinforcing: anything that doesn’t support the conspiracy is clearly the work of the conspirators hiding their existence.
The problem is that does happen in real life. Intelligence services and organised crime work actively to hide their tracks. As do corrupt officials and some of the military.
We live in a society where corruption is rife and ordinary people are largely excluded from most major institutions ... That is the atmosphere that breeds these things.
My favorite way to cut apart those two is to ask: How many people need to keep a secret, how long and how perfectly would they need to succeed, and what motive do they have to do a good job?
That's a fair question, but we do live in a surprisingly secretive society. I think that shifted over a lot during the Cold War period. It became acceptable to hide large sections of public spending from the public.
We also live in a corrupt society and occasionally that emerges as a scandal.
Certain secrets are kept better than others. Now and then real conspiracies do become public knowledge like the Tuskegee Experiment or Scientology's infiltration of parts of the US government.
In regards to the space ship that people see, I've seen photos of some Egyptian pyramid hieroglyphs myself, I hear this often "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"
This stupendous gaslighting mirrors what I took away early in this article. It used several Appeal to Authority and Epistemic Invalidation and is quite clearly pathetic. Hard to read the clearly biased claims.
It's easy to dismiss the most obvious cases where EvD is wrong
But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss
Archeology by itself is always going to have limitations, and there are vast swatches of history we are almost completely ignorant about
EvD is certainly guilty of taking himself much more seriously than the evidence suggests. But there's always going to be that "what if"
>But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss
Its an unproven hypothesis.
It doesnt need to be "dismissed" it needs to be proven. You could make up any number of hypotheses. You wouldnt "dismiss" any of them. If you were interested in one you might design a test to prove it. But failing that its not worth worrying about.
When you write like 49 books trying to convince people of your untested claim, it seems like grifting instead of working towards evidence.
Existence of extra-solar-system planets was an unproven hypothesis until the 90's but of course anyone could take a guess at its probability.
Sure - it was considered a near certainty planets orbited other stars given all that was known about the formation of our solar system.
That said, it's still an extremely low probabilty that life from other systems came and visited our particular rock some time in the past million years (and interacted with humans).
> But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss
Speak for yourself. I find it very easy to dismiss.
Just as I find easy to dismiss horoscopes, creationism, anti-vaxers, global warming denialism, etc.
Strawman. Thanks for proving that "skeptics" are very happy to use fallacies as well