Eric von Daniken, the founding father of Ancient Aliens, passed away in early January at 90. If there were a Mount Rushmore of Big Wigs regarding the extraterrestrial presence, he’d be on it (My UFO mount Rushmore includes the first civilian researcher, Major Donald Keyhoe (ret.) EVD, nuclear physicist, UFO researcher Stanton Friedman and intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel (ret.), who confessed the truth about Roswell to Friedman, one of the greatest UFO researchers).
I was a little boy when von Daniken’s seminal work, Chariots of the Gods was first published. I remember how excited we all were in my family by the book.
My father was a physicist and a chemical engineer by trade, who had at one point, conceived of a “Relativity Clock” that could keep time on a spaceship as it traversed interstellar space, which he submitted to the infamous German rocket scientist, Wherner von Braun.
Von Braun wrote back to my father something to the effect that he was about a hundred years ahead of his time. Unfortunately, my father kept the letter in the desk drawer in his factory office, which burnt down, destroying our lives, at the time, and the letter.
The von Braun letter probably still exists in one of his numerous libraries (there are four, one of which exists in Germany), although I haven’t been able to find a copy online, but I digress…
Erich van Daniken’s Ancient Alien theories took the world by storm, going viral before there was such a thing, but he had his detractors in mainstream science and he admitted to some mistakes that he’d made.
The scientific establishment labeled his theories pseudoscience, which is what they do when they get embarrassed having been caught with their pants down. (see Mallove, MIT cold fusion fiasco).
Some even went so far as to claim that von Daniken got his ideas from reading Sagan’s Intelligent Life in the Universe, which speculated about extraterrestrial visitation that might have occurred in the past- but there’s a much simpler explanation.
As von Daniken himself explained, it wasn’t he that was saying that we’d been visited by gods from the heavens, it was what they (ancient civilizations) said about themselves in their historical writings.
In fact, it’s fair to wonder if Sagan got his ideas from the ancient writings about gods visiting from the sky instead of the other way around.
Over time, von Daniken has been largely vindicated by anomalous archaeological discoveries, including including the Kailasa Temple in India, Puma Punku in Bolivia and the churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia among others, that make the mainstream science position that these structures were built by ancient peoples without the benefit of advanced technology implausible.
And he’s also been vindicated by the government’s admission that UFOs are real.
I’m happy he got to see that before he died, unlike Stanton Friedman, who died just before the New York Times article that changed everything in 2017.
When I issued a press release about my book The Day After the Singularity in 2020, I made sure the Ancient Aliens people were on the list. I don’t know if he ever got to read it. Sometimes it takes awhile before someone gets around to it, just like it took former Canadian Minister of Defense, Paul Hellyer, over a decade (long after Col. Phillip Corso was dead) before he finally got around to reading and vetting Corso’s The Day After Roswell.
I don’t know that The Day After the Singularity will ever achieve Corso-type notoriety, but I do know it hit the mark, which is one reason I ended up on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland broadcast.
If von Daniken had gotten the opportunity to read TDATS, I think he would’ve felt the ultimate vindication for his ancient alien theories. The one thing missing from EVD’s AA theory is the “why” question. Why would technologically advanced aliens have an interest in our development?
The Day After the Singularity answers that question. I hope he got to check it out before he checked out…