SCHOLARS DISMISS THEORIES AS PSEUDOSCIENCE
Teachers wrote books refuting his theories, criticising him as a purveyor of among the extra fantastical notions of pseudoscience. German information journal Der Spiegel even had a 1973 cowl story titled “The Daeniken Hoax”.
Nonetheless, legions of followers snapped up his greater than 40 books and watched his tv specials and documentary movies. The over 70 million books that he bought have been translated into greater than 30 languages.
Von Daeniken spent the early a part of his working life managing a resort in jap Switzerland, the place a fraud conviction landed him in jail for 18 months.
However as his ebook took off, he emerged from jail as a best-selling writer.
Nonetheless, he by no means introduced the smoking gun to fulfil astronomer Carl Sagan’s well-known adage that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”.
“He…says that the astonishing astronomical data historical civilisations, such because the Mayan, had is proof that there have been some house travellers round to show it to them. This suits in together with his normal questioning of the power of the Egyptians to construct the pyramids, or the Easter Islanders to erect these huge stone heads,” the New York Instances wrote in 1974.
“His methodology is to make use of a unfavorable – historical peoples could not have completed or thought all of the issues they did – to show a constructive – that the traditional folks have been the beneficiaries of some form of cosmological Level 4 (growth help) programme.”
Such criticism by no means knocked von Daeniken off his stride.
“We owe it to our self-respect to be rational and goal,” he wrote. “At a while or different, each daring principle gave the impression to be a Utopia. What number of Utopias have lengthy since turn into on a regular basis realities!”
Tv specials about his books made him a well known determine in Europe and the USA. In 2003, he opened a Mysteries of the World theme park in Interlaken – though it went bust after three years.
