Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods made it to television in September, hosted by Richard Karn, better-known as Al on ABC's Home Improvement. The show was quite enjoyable -- hilarious, in fact -- with von Däniken indulging in his usual flights of fancy, unfettered by the faintest trace of skepticism. Enjoyable, that is, if you did not think about the fact that a major television network carried these flights of fancy with no anchoring of sensibility. (Sorry about the mixed metaphor.) Karn was careful to say "Von Däniken believes..." and similar phrases, but that was about the only concession to a realistic assessment of the facts.
Much of the show was straight from the book. For example, the carving of a supine figure from the temple at Copan was displayed. Von Däniken claimed it looked suspiciously like an astronaut in a rocket; to me it looked like von Däniken had interpreted some artistic flourishes to fit with his fixed idea of long-ago visitors from other planets. The same argument applies to all of the other pictures of "aliens."
More interesting to me was the idea that the orientation of certain Mayan buildings and Celtic megaliths demonstrated a grasp of mathematics and astronomy not available to the cultures that built them. A stepped pyramid in central America was marveled at because of its precise orientation that allowed snake-like shadows to be formed at the solstices. Surely this demonstrates the existence of advanced knowledge that the Mayans could not have gained on their own! Sorry, but no. By our standards ancient people were ignorant and had primitive technology, but they were not stupid. Observing the position of the sun over time and noticing the solstice is hardly a remarkable feat, and the building of a structure to take advantage of the phenomenon was well within their reach. It took ingenuity, but they weren't short on that. Besides, they didn't have TV to distract them.
Von Däniken seemed to be much impressed that each of the four stairs on the pyramid had 91 steps, because 91x4+1=365. The one is for the final "step" on the top of the pyramid. The Mayans had already observed the solstice, designed a building to take advantage of it, but then the idea of making the number of steps add up to the number of days per year is surprising? I don’t think so.....
The mathematical complexity of the megaliths in western Europe -- the Brittany region of France in particular -- was glossed over quickly. The Pythagorean theorem was mentioned, but with no indication of how it was used in positioning the stones. I would have preferred more details of the actual math, but all that was shown was a diagram with some triangles drawn on it, which I guess was supposed to be impressive.
Actually moving the rocks is another place where von Däniken let his imagination roam. Some of these rocks are pretty damn big, and I confess that it does seem improbable for people to have moved them without modern machinery. But consider some of the feats you have seen yourself. It only takes a few people to overturn a car; imagine what hundreds of people with ropes and beams can do. Perhaps they didn't have the wheel. That is a handicap, but stones can be rolled or at least flopped to another position. The lever is one of our oldest machines, and I don't doubt that it was used in positioning the megaliths. Pulleys, although helpful, are not strictly necessary. Sorry again, Erich, but there is another solution that requires less outré assumptions than aliens.
Von Däniken also speculated that the Egyptians might have had a form of electric light. He showed a carving that had a vaguely bulb-shaped feature, and then using modern technology, created a bulb similar in appearance that actually glowed. Could the Egyptians have stumbled on to a primitive battery and light bulb, or as von Däniken would have us believe, could they have picked up the technology from aliens? It's certainly not impossible. They would possibly have used it as a "magical" item, in much the same way as lodestones were used for centuries. But ask yourself which you consider more likely: the ancient Egyptians had electricity, or von Däniken sees evidence for aliens in nearly anything?
It is impossible to cover in a short space all of the bits of "evidence", but the lines at Nazca are one place where I am truly puzzled. I have no idea why people would build long lines on the plains, carve figures on the hills, and generally construct things for no apparent reason. They lived in a different time and culture, and their motives are unknown, for, to the best of my knowledge, they left no writings behind; only the strange lines. Von Däniken (or was it Richard Karn? I can't recall.) also crawled around in a bunch of caves underneath some city. He carried a flaming torch; for effect, I suppose, although I think a good flashlight would have been much more functional. The caves had, according to him, been carved by the people living there, possibly to shelter them from enemies from the sky. I'd never heard of them before, and have no idea what purpose they served. Still, I would prefer to exhaust terrestrial explanations before turning to extraterrestrials to explain the peculiar actions of ancient people. Are we so confident that we do not build things that future ages, if they were deprived of our words of explanation, would marvel at them and wonder why we expended such effort for apparently useless structures?
Von Däniken has travelled the globe looking for evidence to support his idea that aliens visited us in the distant past. There is nothing particularly wrong with that. Theories are useful in shaping the way we look at things, and often determine just what things we look at. Since I will freely admit that I think intelligent, technological life elsewhere in the universe is possible, maybe even probable, why would I ridicule von Däniken for trying to find evidence that we have been visited? Well, it is not the trying that I mind, but the specious arguments he puts forth for believing that we have been visited. Ancient people made something we don't completely understand? Ancient astronauts were involved. Legends speak of gods from the clouds? Could it be aliens? They were funny-looking. Yes, definitely aliens. Stories speak of flying through the sky? People long ago could never have had enough imagination to visualize flying, so it just had to be aliens.
Yeah, right.
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