Customer Reviews

In Search of Ancient Gods

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When you look at Erick von Daniken's detractors, they are usually people who have some sort of personal/professional motive for rejecting his theories and it is usually due to archaic religious beliefs, or that other great religion of arrogance and intolerance, modern science. It is easy to find fault with a book as provacative and compelling as this if that is what you set out to do, but no matter what minor faults the debunkers are able to sift out, it doesn't change the fact that Von Daniken's conclusions are very well supported by natural evidence and common sense. I'll trust my own eyes over a scientific theorem any day. I would like to see 100 of his critics be given tools of wood and flint and try to recreate even one of the giant "Heads" on Easter Island. I don't think their fancy math and smug explanations would be of much help to them. Even the world champion of "Hack and Haul" theories, Thor Heyerdahl, admitted it couldn't be done without very modern equipment and know-how.
Von Daniken's merits far outweigh his errors and these "errors" are usually blown way out of proportion by people whose cosmology is most threatened by his theories and his proofs. He is a bold and brilliant man, a small but powerful voice adrift in a sea of willfull ignorance and pseudo-intellectual snobbery.

This book is a colossal fraud; von Daniken takes a series of images of ancient structures and artwork and in all cases interprets it in a manner that suggests that it is a visual memory of aliens visiting Earth. He completely ignores any other more reasonable explanations, even when archeologists and the records of the people themselves dictate otherwise.
The lack of scientific rigor is conclusively demonstrated on page 25, where there is a caption under the image of a tree. The caption is "Four bases (adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine) produce sugar and phosphoric acid molecules, and these in turn amino acids. It is quite obvious that this is no normal `tree'." In the first place, these four bases are the building blocks of DNA, not sugar and phosphoric acid molecules, so von Daniken demonstrates an ignorance of basic science. Secondly, his use of the term "quite obvious" is way beyond what any reasonable person could conclude from the simple image of a winding tree.
It is fortunate that it appears that von Daniken's ideas had a brief bout of fame in the 1970's and then faded from the scene. He was a fraud and deserves to be forgotten.