Chariots of the Gods

The argument is that ancient monuments and myths are evidence of visits by extraterrestrials, on the grounds that our ancestors couldn’t have built or imagined these things unaided. The Nazca lines are landing strips. The Pyramids required outside help. Religious texts describe spacecraft, and the vision of Ezekiel is a landing.

It and its sequels sold in the tens of millions across dozens of languages, and the book produced a documentary film and created an industry that’s still running. Everything in the genre since, including the television series that eventually pushed me into writing a book about all of it, traces back here.

Where did Richard Lowe first read Chariots of the Gods?

My grandmother had a room full of UFO books and conspiracy books, and we visited on holidays. That’s where I found von Daniken.

I didn’t skim them. I read all of them, cover to cover, several times, and I was hooked. Chariots, then Gods from Outer Space, then the rest as they appeared.

The reason explains the book’s success better than any argument about evidence.

It was the science-fiction feel that hooked me, and belief had nothing to do with it. Those books read like speculative fiction, and that’s what I loved about them. A child sitting in a room full of them is reading an adventure that happens to be shelved under nonfiction.

Watch: Experts Reveal The Truth Behind Chariots of the Gods | Erich von Daniken, Erich von Däniken Official

How does the argument in Chariots of the Gods work?

The method is consistent and it’s worth learning to recognize, because it turns up everywhere and not in this genre alone.

Take a scrap of coincidence or a misread artifact. Present it as a question nobody can answer. Let the reader supply the conclusion. The claims are rarely stated flatly enough to be falsified, and the questions are structured so that ignorance reads as evidence.

The Nazca lines are the clean example. Von Daniken asks who they were built for, since they can only be appreciated from the air. The question sounds devastating and it contains a smuggled premise: a thing visible from above must have been made to be seen from above. Remove the premise and the question dissolves, and the archaeological answers about ritual pathways and ceremonial procession become available again.

He also relies heavily on the reader not knowing what the specialists know. Where a claim is checkable it’s generally been checked and found wrong, and the corrections have never caught up with the book, because a correction isn’t a story.

What is the main problem with Chariots of the Gods?

Underneath the method is an insult that took me years to see.

The argument requires that ancient Egyptians, Mesoamericans, Polynesians, and everyone else were incapable of their own achievements. Somebody else must have shown them. That premise is doing more work in this book than any artifact, and it’s applied consistently: the civilizations that supposedly needed help are almost never European.

Von Daniken doesn’t state it that way and I’m not persuaded he consciously intended it. The pattern is there regardless, and once you notice it the whole genre looks different. The second problem is the cost. Real archaeology now spends time and credibility answering this material, and a public that’s absorbed the ancient-astronaut frame is measurably harder to teach actual prehistory to. That’s a real harm and it’s downstream of a book somebody wrote to be entertaining.

Is Chariots of the Gods worth reading now?

As a specimen, yes. Read it to understand the machinery and not the argument.

It’s the origin document for a genre that’s cost a great deal in public understanding of archaeology, and it’s a useful training exercise for anyone learning to spot how a claim gets built out of nothing. If you can read this book and identify each move as it happens, you’ll recognize the same moves in health claims, in financial pitches, and in political argument.

That’s what I ended up doing with it. Ridiculous Things People Actually Believe is a field guide to conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and the machinery that manufactures them, and my standing to write it comes from having been inside this material as a boy and loved it.

Verdict

Read it for the machinery and ignore the argument. As a boy I loved it, and the loving was reasonable, because it’s a well-constructed piece of speculative entertainment. Then I grew up, a few brain cells came online, and I saw the theories for what they were: grand claims assembled from a scrap of coincidence or a misread artifact and presented as revelation. As an adult I wrote a book about why it doesn’t hold.

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