For those who never heard of him, he came up the idea that Earth was visited in the past by aliens, which can be seen from certain arefacts. He also maintained that ancient civilisations could not have been built without the aid from these advanced alien visitors.

In the 1970's / 1980's the BBC TV series Horizon totally rubbished his ideas.

Today experimental archaeology has reclaimed some of the feats for ancient peoples.

Is Eric still around today and does he still maintain his claim that artefacts prove we were visited by aliens in the distant past?

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Well the only amazing feat really left is the building of stone henge as the rocks came from wales and took a massive trip. But i still think it was people... if not the builders of stone henge were obviously the more advanced alien race :wink:

First, you gotta spell his name right.

Welcome to the World of Mysteries of Erich von Däniken

A theme park. Pfft.

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Check out the big, gold, shiny edition of the movie Stargate on DVD. One of the extras is called Is there a Stargate? However, it's really just an excuse for Daniken to promote his views and book. This edition only came out a year or so ago.

...which theme park is already open (his website needs updating).

http://www.mysterypark.ch/

Opened in May of 2003.

The real mystery is why people still buy into this stuff :roll:

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Hey this guy doesn't even want to make any real money
Personaly i'd like something that was still a legit currency

Grumble...grumble... No offense is ment but this guy is easily on the lines of Hoagland. He believes what he says and absolutely refuses to hear anything to prove him wrong.

He may actually be worse. Hoagland may just be delusional. Von Daeniken has actually admitted - on film - to faking evidence in order to promote his theories.

-Taibak

The Swiss Franc still exists.

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The Swiss Franc is as legit as the English Pound. England isn't the only European country not rushing into the Euro

In Belgium cars ride on the right side, and trains on the left. Europe is about as complex as relativity (and follows almost the same principles )

On topic, if Hoagland ever wanted to open a theme park, someone please stop him from calling it Hoaxland [-(

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Two quotes come to mind

"There's a sucker born every minute" and "A fool and his money are oft soon parted"

I actually was in to EVD when I was a child and read his book, Return to the Stars.

The Horizon programme was a real eye opener

One of the pieces of evidence in his book as "alien runway markings" on a South American pampas was actually quite small. The phot had been quite deceptive. There was a subsequent TV show here about that region of South America where the Archaeologists reclaimed it. This is the place where giant animals were drawn. It all seems to be connected to Shamanism, early narcotics and drug trips thought to be spiritual experiences.

Mind you I have heard people claim that the first chapter of the book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament is an eye witness testimony of a flying saucer :roll: ](*,)

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OTOH, they have each won an Ig Nobel prize.

Ig Nobel home page

His book, Chariots of the Gods, is very convincing.

Convincing of what?

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That the human eye can see common day, modern things in ancient drawings and writings not intended to show those things.

The only good thing I can think of about von Daniken is that without him there probably wouldn't have been a Thor Heyerdahl. (sp?)

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I mean that I know the stuff's not true, but his writing really makes me think from the other perspective.

Thor Heyerdahl was operational well before EVD showed up to promote silliness. Thor H is noted for being nearly always wrong in his theories, but doing so within the methodology of science and being recognized as a 'gentleman' at all times. He was inspirational as hands on experiencer of what the ancients had done or might have done.

Some of his earlier expeditions

The Kon-Tiki Expedition (1947)
After the war, Heyerdahl continued his research, only to meet a wall of resistance to his theories amongst comtemporary scholars. To add weight to his arguments, Heyerdahl decided to build a replica of the aboriginal balsa raft (named the "Kon-Tiki") to test his theories. In 1947, Heyerdahl and five companions left Callio, Peru and crossed 8000 km (4300 miles) in 101 days to reach Polynesia (Raroia atoll, Tuamotu Archipelago). Despite skepticisim, the seaworthiness of the aboriginal raft was thus proven and showed that the ancient Peruvians could have reached Polynesia in this manner.

he Galapagos Expedition (1952)
Following the success of the Kon-Tiki Expedition, Heyerdahl organized and led the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to the Galapagos Islands. The group investigated the pre-Columbian habitation sites, locating an Inca flute and shards from more than 130 pieces of ceramics which were later identified as pre-Incan. The Galapagos Islands are located about 1000 km off the coast of Ecuador and thus South American archaeology was extended for the first time in to the open Pacific Ocean. Parallel to this expedition, Heyerdahl worked with experts in rediscovering the lost art of the guara, a kind of aboriginal center-board used by the indians of Peru and Ecuador for navigation. From this tool, not used on the Kon-Tiki voyage, it become clear that ancient South American voyagers had the means to navigate as well as travel great distances in the Pacific.

The Easter Island Expedition (1955-56)
Following his successful work, Heyerdahl was encouraged to direct a major archaeological expedition to the Pacific's most isolated island: Easter Island. An expedition of 23 persons reached the island and began the first sub-surface archaeological excavation every attempted. They soon discovered that Easter Island had once been wooded until deforested by its original inhabitants, who also planted water-reeds and other South American plants.

Carbon dating showed that the Island had been occupied from about 380 A.D., about one thousand years earlier than scientists previously believed. Excavations indicated that some ancient stone carvings on the Island were similar to ancient traditions in Peru. Some Easter Islanders claimed that according to their legends, they orginally arrived from the far away lands to the East. The results of Heyerdahl's work were widely discussed and presented at the Tenth Pacific Science Congress in Honolulu (1961) where they were supported by the unanimous statement: "Southeast Asia and the islands adjacent constitute one major source area of the peoples and cultures of the Pacific Islands and South America". Thus, Heyerdahl's eastern migration theory had gained considerable influence.

Yep he did that, his books were one reason I studied Archaeology - and found out very quickly he was driving an intellectual unicycle with a flat.

Eh

It probably came from the Same Place.

Where exactly that is, is Anybody's Guess ...

But, it probably had to do with Some Psychotropic Manna ....

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There was a book written on that back in the '70s. I tried to do a quick Google, but didn't turn it up. The title was something like "Ezekiel's Spaceship." Actually quite fascinating. From what I remember there were extensive diagrams of the "spaceship." I think the author had determined it used an aerospke nozzle and looked a bit like an upside down Apollo command module (but much larger) with three landing legs using sophisticated wheels able to roll in any direction. It was a nuclear rocket design, obviously.

At the age I read it I was much less skeptical, but even then this went way beyond what I could accept. I was mostly interested in the spacecraft design, though. And you have to admire the guy for his audacity.

I remember this drawing.

Are you dutch? Anyway, the dutch on this board might remember a serial of big black books from the seventies called "Grote mysteries". The subtitels were: "Onze Aarde, raadsel in het Heelal; Mysterieuze gebieden op Aarde; Onverklaarbaar verdwenen landen en culturen; Raadselachtige vondsten uit het verleden; Raadselachtige verdwijningen; Vliegende schotels en andere raadsels van het Heelal; Oosterse leefwijzen en medische raadsels; Duistere sekten en zwarte kunst; Geheimzinnige wetenschappen; Mysterieuze monsters; Toekomstvoorspellingen; Mysteries van de droom; Wonderlijke krachten van de menselijke geest; De mens en zijn goden; Mysteries van leven en dood; Is er leven na de dood?"

A lot of hoaxes and nonsense in those books, but I didn't realise that when I was a kid in the seventies. Anyway, the drawings were amazing. The space ships à la von Däniken who were planting the statues on eastern island, the adamski ufo, the laser driven spaceship (that made sense), and oh yes, the ezekiel space ship.

Sorry, I'm American. The "Van Rijn" pseudonym comes from Poul Anderson's "Nick Van Rijn" character. Much of my ancestry IS Dutch, however, perhaps why I felt a connection to that character.

I remember much the same thing in the '70s, though, with a number of writers feeding off the von Daniken "Ancient Astronaut" and the flying saucer craze. I was young and it was very exciting, but somewhere along the line as I read more, I started getting very skeptical.

The Spaceships of Ezekiel, by Josef Blumrich.

http://www.world-mysteries.com/awr_1doug1.htm
The relevant Bible passage begins here.

Back in the early 1970's there was a TV show about operation Blue Book. It was produced by Jack Webb of "Dragnet" fame. In the opening sequince Jack did a voice over that opened with "Ezekiel saw the wheel...." then went on to describe the Blue Book project. I guess the premis was to add credibility to the show since the Bible talked about alien UFO's. :roll: :roll:

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Jigsaw: this is a typical example of only taking out of a text what confirms your view (I mean not your view, but Blumrich's), and ignoring the rest.

This comes also from that text you link to. What is the explanation of this in a spaceship?

Francis

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I was also an avid reader of Von Daniken when I was 12 or 13. I got Chariots of the Gods, Return to the Stars, Gold of the Gods, and According to the Evidence. It took me a while to get over it! The Horizon programme planted a lot of doubts, then the Ronald Storey book The Space Gods Revealed, a debunking book, finally broke my addiction.

In a way, it did inspire me. A lot of my interest in archaeology stems from around that time, the idea that other civilisations did some great things and that we can still visit the ruins of them today. Many of the places Daniken mentioned in his books, I've since been to myself - including the famous rocket-driving God Pacal, on his tomb lid at the Temple of the Inscriptions in Mexico.

I never saw Heyerdahl in the same pseudoscience league as Von Daniken. He at least didn't invent evidence wholesale, or invoke space aliens. I take Heyerdahl more in the slightly maverick, "Look at this odd looking evidence here. Look, ancient peoples really could have done this thing a different way" mould.

Rob

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I believe he has revised his Nazca "theories" a bit. Since it is painfully obvious to anyone who has actually been there that the Nazca "lines" can not possibly be the remants of an airport/spaceport whatever, he now claims that the Nazca people found the "real" spaceport out in the desert somewhere at some location that is now lost to history and that the "real" Nazca lines are really an artistic representation of this desert artifact no one other than EVD seems to know anything about. In short, he can never, ever be wrong.

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