chariotsWith that provocative question mark in the title and the enticing subtitle, “Memories of the Future–Unsolved Mysteries of the Past,” Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? became a huge success in the English-speaking world, following its translation from the German of its original 1968 publication.  ”Was God an Astronaut?” the American version’s dust-jacket asks:  ”All over the world there are ruins and improbable objects which cannot be explained by conventional theories of archeology or religion.  But supposing you look at them in the light of today’s knowledge about space travel.  A remarkable consistency emerges.  They suggest the appearance of beings from other planets in prehistoric times and pose the question–Was God an Astronaut?”

Von Däniken, identified only as a “famous Swiss author,” was just 33 when the book was published.  ”It took courage to write this book,” he tells us in the book’s first line, “and it will take courage to read it.”  ”Scholars will call it nonsense,” he correctly predicts about a book that claims to reveal that the “past teemed with unknown gods who visited the primeval earth in manned spaceships” and that these “’strangers’ annihilated part of mankind existing at the time and produced a new, perhaps the first, homo sapiens.”   Von Däniken sees evidence of visitations from prehistoric astronauts in cave paintings showing “the extraordinary obsession primitive man had with figures on suits and unusual headgear,” and in Incan and Aztec ruins and landscape formations.

Von Däniken’s theories became even more widely known in the 1970s with the TV “documentary,” In Search of Ancient Astronauts. Later eruptions of Von Dänikenism came with the TV series Battlestar Galactica and Stargate.  In fact, the Chariots of the Gods phenomenon, although clearly a product of 1960s gullibility, apocalypticism, and fascination with all things “scientific” and astronautical, has never really gone away, and may in fact be even stronger today.  One has only to turn to that bellwether of nutty popular credulity, the History Channel, for proof.  The cable channel (which owns the domain name “history.com”), once dubbed the “Hitler Channel” for its devotion to WWII documentaries, has lately turned increasingly to content based on conspiracy theories, mythology, pseudo-science, extraterrestrials, and mythical monsters like Sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster.   In March 2009, it first aired a program called Ancient Aliens (it’s being shown again tomorrow night, November 29).  Its promotional materials claim that “millions of people accept the theory that intelligent life forms visited Earth thousands of years ago and were worshiped as gods by primitive man. Are monuments like Stonehenge and Easter Island the last remains of an ancient alien visitation?”

As the final frames of the famous 1958 movie The Blob once asked:  “The End?”

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