Erich von Däniken, author of the chuckle-headed best-seller Chariots of the Gods?, died on Jan. 10. He was 90. The Swiss-born von Däniken wrote Chariots of the Gods? while working as a hotel manager in Davos (he served a year in jail for embezzling from the hotel, and wrote his second book, Gods from Outer Space, while in stir). Chariots was rewritten by a former Nazi author, and became a surprise hit amongst the nincompoop crowd. Von Däniken claimed that ancient peoples were too dumb to have created the Pyramids, the Easter Island heads, Stonehenge, etc., so logically, space aliens must have landed, created these works, and then sodded off. Scientists gave von Däniken the hoss-laff, but he went on to write numerous follow-ups (Miracles of the Gods, In Search of Ancient Gods, History Is Wrong, Cufflinks of the Gods—no, wait, that was an SNL parody). “I had doubts in my own education,” von Däniken told interviewer Jake Kleinman in 2018, “and I wanted to know if other communities in antiquity had similar stories or if we the Christian and Jewish community are the only ones with these stories. So that was the beginning of Chariots of the Gods?” He added that “I am a deep believer in God. I’m one of these figures who prays every evening.”
