Remembering Erich von Däniken, 1935 – 2026

​When Erich von Däniken died in Interlaken, Switzerland, at the age of 90 on January 10, I was offline for the weekend. My parents had come to visit their grandson after a major snowstorm had delayed their usual Christmas trip, and we were busy celebrating a somewhat belated holiday. I did not find out about the ancient astronaut theorist’s death until twelve hours after his daughter announced it in conjunction with his disciple, Giorgio Tsoukalos.
 
It was, perhaps, appropriate that my parents were in town when Erich von Däniken died since it was due to my father that I had any idea who von Däniken was in the first place.

Back in the 1970s, when Erich von Däniken was briefly a major celebrity and his bestseller Chariots of the Gods a cultural phenomenon, my father had become enamored of the ancient astronaut theory after watching the 1973 NBC-TV adaptation of Chariots, In Search of Ancient Astronauts, hosted by Rod Serling. As a result, he purchased von Däniken’s The Gold of the Gods, at that time his newest book, and the book moved with him to the apartment he shared with my mother after they wed and then to the home where I grew up. It sat on the living room shelf alongside my mother’s college textbooks and my father’s reference books, untouched until I found it and read around the age of twelve. He kept it largely because it was a hardcover. Had it migrated to the trash with his other tattered paperbacks of the era, my life might have turned out very differently.
 
That’s not because von Däniken was a major influence on me. Indeed, even as a teenager I found his books to be sloppy, poorly written, and much less engaging than those of authors who presented themselves more seriously—Graham Hancock, for instance, seemed more respectable. However, no author of ancient mysteries managed to become as big a celebrity as von Däniken, nor has any subsequent author become as synonymous with ancient aliens and prehistoric lost civilizations as he was. And no author in the genre became as immune to criticism through sheer audacity and force of will as von Däniken.
 
I’m afraid we will not see his like again. The genre will be poorer without him in it, if only because his imitators steal from their sources with less panache and spend their days in anger and outrage. If nothing else, von Däniken always seemed to be smiling, even when upset. He was a natural conman, and he played the part as well as any of the other famous hoaxers and grifters of the middle twentieth century.
 
Erich Anton Paul von Däniken was born in Switzerland in 1935, raised a strict Catholic, and in Catholic school developed an interest in UFOs, like many youths in the early 1950s. He had a criminal record. He was convicted of theft when he was 19, and he left school to become a hotelier. He was convicted of embezzlement after leaving that job. He took another hotel position, and he stole money there, too, by falsifying records in order to obtain tens of thousands in fraudulent loans to finance his interest in space aliens and what the court later called his “playboy lifestyle.” The court psychiatrist declared him a pathological liar. Eventually, he would be convicted of embezzlement and fraud yet again, serving a year in prison.

In 1960, two French authors who were interested in the occult, Nazis, UFOs, and H. P. Lovecraft put out a book called Morning of the Magicians in which they tried to show that Lovecraft’s vision of ancient astronauts could be correlated to the “occult” truths of Theosophy and the UFO movement. Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels put together the entire case for ancient astronauts as we currently know it—from the claims about ancient atom bombs to the claims about “impossibly” precise and heavy stone architecture. Their book inspired several by Robert Charroux, who presented Bergier’s and Pauwel’s discursive, disorganized ideas in a more popular and readable format. These authors were not the first to write about “ancient astronauts”—versions of the idea dated back decades by that point—but they turned the ideas into books that sold well and broadly at a time when young people were especially open to the suggestion.

In 1964, von Däniken simply appropriated this material wholesale for a magazine article, and on the strength of the magazine article, he received a book deal for what became Chariots of the Gods. In his zeal to fill the book, he in places came close enough to plagiarizing Pauwels, Bergier, and Charroux that lawyers convinced the publisher to add those authors to the book’s bibliography, and in the sequels von Däniken specifically credited them by name, as if to assuage hurt feelings. Von Däniken went a step beyond his sources, though, in deciding that Jesus was a space alien along with the pagan gods.
 
The publisher, Econ, found the manuscript less than satisfactory, and they tasked an ex-Nazi film producer, writer, and editor, Wilhelm Utermann (also known as Wilhelm Roggersdorf), the former editor of the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, to punch it up. En route he cut out claims about Jesus’ alien origin, and von Däniken forever after asserted Jesus was the exception to the alien rule. To avoid saying anything demonstrably false, Utermann phrased every assertion as a question—238 rhetorical questions, in fact—leaving the book long on unproven speculation and very short on evidence and facts.
 
Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past was published in February 1968 as Erinnerungen an die Zukunft: Ungelöste Rätsel der Vergangenheit (Memories of the Future: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past) and rapidly achieved bestseller status, selling more than 200,000 German-language copies in its first year of release and launching a wave of what German media called Dänikitis, or the obsessive desire to talk about ancient astronauts. An English translation by Michael Heron soon followed, released in Britain in 1969 and the United States in 1970, both as a book and as a serialization in the National Enquirer. Although the book was neither the first nor the best to discuss the ancient astronaut theory, its fortuitous timing, coming during the heyday of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Apollo moon missions, and careful revision Utermann, turned what even the publisher later conceded was largely a plagiarism of earlier authors like Jacques Bergier, Louis Pauwels, and Robert Charroux into a synonym for the ancient astronaut theory. This status was cemented by the popular movie version, originating in an Oscar-nominated German adaptation and best known from the reedited version narrated by Rod Serling that aired on NBC in 1973 as In Search of Ancient Astronauts​. The book was adapted for television at least three more times, as In Search Of... (1977-1982), a spin-off of the movie, as a 1990s-era ABC pseudo-documentary starring von Däniken and Richard Karn, and as Ancient Aliens (2009 pilot, series 2010-present), the longest running and most successful ancient astronaut series in television history. 

Utermann’s version of Chariots met with great success, but much to von Däniken’s dismay, the contract he had signed with Econ stripped him of most of the profits from the book and its adaptations for thirty years, until the control of the copyright returned to him in 1998. What money he did make went to pay off debts from the embezzlement and fraud; so, with little choice but to forge ahead, while serving his prison sentence in 1970, von Däniken wrote Gods from Outer Space, a sequel he would sell to publishers worldwide on more favorable terms, and the foundation for his future financial success. After about 25 books (of which I’ve read half, all of the non-fiction volumes translated into English), von Däniken was a millionaire several times over.

His success afforded him the luxury of admitting that he lied, cheated, and committed fraud whenever and wherever it suited him. He told Playboy that he had lied—he called it using “theatrical effects”—about seeing a golden library of alien texts in Ecuador, and he admitted to others that he fabricated evidence to make his ideas seem more solid. All was fair, he said, when fighting “a war we have to win” to overturn modern science. He saw his ancient astronaut theory as a way of promoting traditional moral values and combating socialism and communism. Specifically, he told Pres. Gerald Ford that socialism was the greatest danger facing the world and conservatives needed to embrace UFO believers to win elections, and he later wrote that the aliens would punish the sexually unchaste as well as uppity feminists when they returned in 2012. (They didn’t.) While Ford had rejected von Däniken’s advice, other conservatives took up the cause, and today UFO conspiracies and ancient aliens are a part and parcel of far-right mythologies radicalizing young men the world over.
 
Von Däniken could get away with lies and fabrications and worse, with only the occasional rebuke. In Signs of the Gods (1979) he called the Black race a “failure” and speculated that aliens created white people as a “chosen race” to correct their error with Black folks. After September 11, 2001, von Däniken became an outspoken critic of Islam, and in the 2010s, the aging ancient astronaut theorist made many eye-watering statements about women and transgender people. But because he cultivated the personality of the bon vivant, charming and cheerful and more than slightly ridiculous, none of it stuck to him. He could appear on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson or in the pages of Playboy and laugh off even the most serious of criticism because he never seemed to be a serious man. He was, he liked to say, just asking questions. And he became a celebrity for it. Von Däniken’s greatest achievement was to make himself bigger than his ideas. At the height of his fame, the story was all about von Däniken, not about the aliens. His books were all about making him famous.
 
That may be why attempts to refute his half-digested copies of other people’s ideas, notably PBS’s Nova episode devoted to debunking him or books critical of his idea like Clifford Wilson’s Crash Go the Chariots (1972), did little to dent von Däniken’s book sales. Instead, what killed the first wave of von Däniken mania was imitation and oversaturation. By the end of the 1970s, so many authors were writing “ancient mysteries” books (or republishing books von Däniken had borrowed from shamelessly) and von Däniken himself had written so many flimsy sequels to Chariots that market simply could not absorb so many books on the same theme, and the market collapsed, falling into a twenty-year stupor.
 
Instead, von Däniken’s greatest legacy was vast influence that his single idea—and a secondhand idea at that—had not just on the paranormal nonfiction genre but far beyond it. The 1973 NBC-TV special adapted from Chariots of the Gods was seen by 28 million Americans on the day of its first broadcast and led to 250,000 additional sales of Chariots in 48 hours—the single largest audience for ancient astronaut media in history. So many people saw and believed that references to von Däniken’s ideas showed up everywhere. Movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and The Thing (1982) referenced von Däniken’s claims or his books directly. There were countless comic books that echoed his ideas. Production documents from Raiders of the Lost Ark show that George Lucas and Steven Speiberg drew on Chariots of the Gods in creating the film, modeling the villainous European archaeologist on von Däniken and designing the Ark of the Covenant’s powers around von Däniken’s speculative account in Chariots, itself stolen wholesale and without credit from older German sources.
 
Nevertheless, von Däniken never again would achieve the same level of celebrity and fame that he saw in the 1970s. His attempt to revive interest with a von Däniken theme park in Interlaken, Switzerland ended in financial failure, as did a later attempt to franchise a Chariots of the Gods interactive entertainment experience. He continued to publish books into his 80s, but these were mostly rehashes, or even self-plagiarisms, of earlier, better books, gradually becoming shorter and less coherent as his publishers became smaller and editorial assistance weaker. He remained a fixture on the speaking circuit, but the renewed popularity he achieved in his final decades wasn’t due to any new claims or — heaven forefend! — any research.
 
It was instead a reflection of the success of those he influenced. Graham Hancock credited von Däniken’s Ark of the Covenant speculations in Chariots with inspiring him to search for the Ark in The Sign and the Seal (1992) and launched Hancock’s career in ancient mysteries. Although Hancock would later distance himself from von Däniken, von Däniken would piggyback on Hancock’s books and release his own versions of them, notably 1996’s Eyes of the Sphinx, written to ride Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) mania—ironic given Fingerprints’ title being chosen to echo Chariots. Ancient Aliens (2009-present), originally an adaptation of Chariots fronted by von Däniken’s onetime personal representative and acolyte Giorgio Tsoukalos, brought a new generation to von Däniken’s books (having written none of his own, ever), and von Däniken made frequent appearances in the show’s early seasons, but gradually faded from the show as he aged and the show’s focus shifted.
 
I never spoke directly to Erich von Däniken despite writing about the same subjects for twenty-five overlapping years and even appearing in the same documentary with him once. I tried to interview him in 2004 when I was writing my book The Cult of Alien Gods. This was long before I had a reputation as a critic of ancient astronautics, though I had published an article about von Däniken’s borrowings from Morning of the Magicians and thus indirectly from H. P. Lovecraft in Skeptic magazine. Giorgio Tsoukalos prevented me from speaking with him. He had taken a dislike to me when I was in college (he had gone to the same school and lived down the street from campus) and interviewed him for a class assignment, so he told von Däniken’s private secretary than I had “malevolent intentions” and to forbid me from speaking with von Däniken. We were once invited to the same conference, and the organizers canceled my invitation, apparently because von Däniken told them to. In 2015, I appeared in an episode of Codes & Conspiracies with von Däniken, but we did not shoot our interviews together. He insisted that on being interviewed in the back of a limousine traveling to some destination or another, while I shot my part here in upstate New York.
 
I will probably miss reviewing von Däniken’s zany books, which were usually fun to pick apart precisely for the reason they were easily forgotten—they never seemed all that serious, even if they were larded with racism, colonialism, and anti-intellectualism. Compared to the apocalyptic tone of today’s fringe history and the dark patronage the U.S. government affords to Ancient Aliens and its carnival of kooks, the playful nature of the first generation of ancient astronaut writers stands in stark contrast. If nothing else, I will mourn the loss of innocence. 


(Note: This post incorporates, revises, and updates some material originally published in earlier blog posts.)