Von
Däniken's Chariots: A Primer in the Art of Cooked Science "I
am not a scientific man, and if I had written a scientific book, it would have
been calm and sober and nobody would talk about it." - Erich von Däniken
Playboy:
Are you, as one writer suggested, "the most brilliant satirist in German
literature for a century"? Von
Däniken: The answer is yes and no. ... In some part, I mean what I say seriously.
In other ways, I mean to make people laugh. John
T. Omohundro -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Were
it not for the fact that Erich von Däniken has millions of otherwise intelligent
people discussing his book and theories seriously, I would prefer to write a parody
of his style. But I fear his readership might believe me too. I ignored his books
for four years, but now I cannot teach my students or talk to my academic colleagues
without his name souring my day. It is out of his hands, now, this chariot thing.
It has reached the people, and for reasons that are their own they have made von
Däniken a prophet (profit?) and me a defender of the Establishment. Why
is this book so popular? Von Däniken, it seems, has written one of the scriptures
of a new cult. What he says, people obviously want to hear. Throughout
history, cultures subjected to stressful situations have responded with cataclysmic
religious reformations, often as a substitute for or supplement to political rebellion.
The Zulu Uprising in Africa, the Sepoy Rebellion in India, the New Guinea Cargo
Cults, the Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians, the Taiping Rebellion in China,
and the Luddites and Anabaptists in Europe are some of the famous examples. Anthropologists
call them revitalization movements, messianic cults, and so forth, and take them
quite seriously. Though they vary greatly, they have certain characteristics in
common: a humorless fanaticism, prophets, a new world view, and a stiff distaste
for the Establishment. Most of these movements are rooted in obvious and serious
crises, and frequently are part of a religious and political change in the culture.
The entire von
Däniken affair, even much of the UFO interest associated with it, is, I think,
very much like these movements. Only hindsight will give a good perspective on
this point in American history, but the "we are not alone" attitude
has become an important element of our culture's religious cosmology. A frustration
with science's not having delivered all that it promised, a distaste for the specialization
of scientific research, and a continuing need to believe in an intelligence beyond
our own are the main characteristics of this antiscience mysticism. It does not
take much imagination to see that science has been for many in our culture the
New Religion, with its white-frocked priests talking in strange tongues about
a universe we couldn't even understand. (Try to grasp the idea of a boundless
universe doubling back on itself, a la Einstein.) The priests' accomplishments
in a few areas like technology and medicine were enough to satisfy the faithful.
But as a religion science didn't stand the test of time. The contrast between
what we could do in space with what we could do for ourselves on earth was like
watching a priest celebrate mass with his zipper down. Science is rather stale
as a religion, and it cannot substitute for one. The man-in-the-street prefers
a richer religion than that. If
von Däniken 's thesis is part of your religious cosmology, so be it. I don't
argue religion; I try to study it and see how it relates to human life. But if
von Däniken seems like science to you, shame on you. What
follows is an attempt to lay open von Däniken 's approach as a warped parody
of reasoning, argumentation, as well as a vigorous exercise in selective quotation,
misrepresentation, and error based on ignorance (presumably, if it is not intentional
fibbing). For students his work does serve two valuable purposes: first, it raises
their interest in the cultures and myths which he so badly mishandles; and second,
like Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Chariots of the Gods? is a challenge
to study and determine all that is wrong with it. So it is by no means a complete
waste of one's time (either his, yours, or mine). Briefly
stated, Chariots of the Gods? proposes that scientists have overlooked or refused
to inform the world of the many pieces of evidence which suggest that we have
been visited, probably several times, by intelligences from other planets. Von
Däniken argues that an open-minded approach to the ruins of past cultures
and their art and myths raises many unanswered questions which can best be answered
by accepting the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitors. Data from Incan, Mayan,
Sumerian, Egyptian, and many other cultures which suggest the hypothesis include
cave painting, architectural and technological accomplishments, and mythological
events of great similarity around the world. Von Däniken` says that the explanations
given by scientists of these data are too smug, and that now that space travel
is possible for us, we must at least admit that his hypothesis is as viable as
anyone else's. Some
of my professors used to tell me that hypotheses are a dime a dozen; people make
them up all the time. Making an hypothesis is not science; it's what you do with
an hypothesis that more or less is science and is to be judged by others. Von
Däniken is entitled to his hypothesis. But what does he do with it? The
straw horse, red herring, and other ruses
Argumentation is an art which can
easily be perverted. One technique to make yourself sound good is/the straw horse:
misrepresent the thing you wish to argue against. Von Däniken 's characterizations
of archaeology and anthropology - fields which focus on precisely the kind of
data he studies - are abysmal. ...
in the future, archaeology can no longer be simply a matter of excavation. The
mere collection and classification of finds is no longer adequate. Other branches
of science will have to be consulted and made use of if a reliable picture of
our past is to be drawn, (p. 14. This and future references from von Däniken
are to Chariots of the Gods?) Let
us say that someone decides to become an anthropologist and he reads and learns
a lot about anthropology, about bones and apes and all those details. (Ferris,
p. 58) By denying
the breadth of these fields and the wealth of data in them he has left somewhat
of a vacuum into which to float his own ideas, which I hope to show are clearly
not based on any background in archeology or anthropology. These are not the only
disciplines he chops. His critics are nearly unanimous in accusing him of misrepresenting
or failing to understand even the rudiments of geology, mythology, psychology,
chemistry, astronomy, and physics (Ostriker 1973, p. 239). His
technique is successful in part because there are many presumably educated people
who don't understand these fields, or even the ways of scientists in general.
He has played to the prejudices and stereotypes of those who are not "scientists"
(priests of the old religion). The tone of "you and I, dear reader"
places him and his readership in an underdog position against the monolithic Establishment
of picky pedants who represent the scholars. Another
technique that works well for misleading the mind is the red herring. The object
is to confuse the reader by introducing an extraneous issue so that he will not
catch you on your main point. Politicians might introduce Motherhood and Apple
Pie, but von Däniken has his reflections on truth, atomic war, and propagandizing
for space research. His comments in these red herrings seem startlingly in contrast
to his arguments. We
owe it to our self-respect to be rational and objective ... (p. 5) We
may be as religious as our fathers, but we are certainly less credulous, (p. 37)
Anyone who really
seeks the truth cannot and ought not to seek it under the aegis and within the
confines of his own religion, (p. 53) It
is unworthy of a scientific investigator to deny something when it upsets his
working hypothesis and accept it when it supports his theory, (p. 66) It
is depressing what many people - and sometimes whole occult societies-make out
of their ostensible observations. They only blur our view of reality and deter
serious scholars from dealing with verified phenomena. . . (p. 120) These
comments are quite irrelevant to his arguments and serve only to glaze the reader's
critical judgment. One
final technique that is useful in argumentation is to warn the reader in advance
about the criticisms which will be leveled by one's opponents. This is not the
same thing as dealing with those criticisms, but neatly puts the critic on the
defense when listeners say, "Aha! Von Däniken said you would say that!"
thus somehow scoring a point for the home team. For example: "Impossible?
Ridiculous? It is mostly those people who feel that they are absolutely bound
by laws of nature who make the most stupid objections" (p. 84). Our
ancestors, the dummies
What most depresses my fellow anthropologists and me
is the way people accept von Däniken 's unnecessarily anthropocentric and
ethnocentric views of other people in the world and in history. Anthropocentricism
is the assumption that other living, sentient, or intelligent creatures must feel
and think or evolve as humans do. Ethnocentricism is the even more narrow assumption
that other people must think, behave, or evolve as we do. Further, there is usually
a heavy flavor of cultural superiority in such assumptions. Chariots
of the Gods? plays upon most people's inability to break out of these assumptions.
It implies that up until the last thousand years or so the world was filled with
primitives, heathens, savages, dummies. Their intelligence matched their simple
technologies; their languages were simple, their cultures were primitive, they
were brutes. If they seem to have come up with something quite fantastic by our
standards, someone smarter than them must have given it to them. They then proceeded
to garble it up in their ingenuousness; they certainly didn't do those things
for the same reason that we would have. (Caucasoid-like
figurines of Summer):. .. very difficult to fit into the schematic system of thought
and its concept of primitive peoples, (p. 27) [The reasoning: primitives can't
be Caucasians.] Since
we are not prepared to admit or accept that there was a higher culture or an equally
perfect technology before our own, all that is left is the hypothesis of a visit
from space! (p. 28) [A sillygism! See the next section.] (The
Yahweh of the Semites): It is ... difficult for enlightened children of this age
to think of an infinitively good Father who gives preference to "favorite
children" such as Lot's family, (p. 37) [The reasoning: You modern Christians
aren't going to believe all this Biblical stuff about a harsh God.] ..
. descriptions of extraordinary things that could not have been made up by any
intelligence living at the time the tablets were written, any more than they could
have been devised by the translators and copyists who manhandled the epic over
the centuries, (p. 49) [The reasoning: Only moderns have enough intelligence to
be imaginative.] Since
the question of space travel did not arise 100 years ago, our fathers and godfathers
could not reasonably have had thoughts about whether our ancestors had visits
from the universe, (p. 4) [Just plain wrong.] The
Mayans were intelligent; they had a highly developed culture.... it is difficult
to believe that it originated from a jungle people, (p. 55) [The reasoning: Jungle
people are somehow, dumber than most. Just look at Africa.] (The
Egyptian, Chinese, and Incan civilizations): Who put the idea of rebirth into
the heads of these heathen peoples? (p. 63) [The reasoning: Heathen heads are
empty.] (Egyptians):
How did such a highly developed civilization arise at such an early date? . ..
Who gave them their incredible knowledge of math and a readymade writing? (p.
65) [Anyone that was civilized before us cheated. What ever happened to the Honor
Code?] (Ancient
storytellers had strong imaginations): So it must be that the ancient storytellers
had a store of things already seen, known, and experienced at hand to spark their
[otherwise dull?] imaginations, (p. 65) How
on earth could people in the dim past arrive at different perceptions of one and
the same thing, when the horizon was very limited? (p. 66) (Egyptian
mummification): Who put the idea of corporeal rebirth into the heads of the heathen?
(p. 81) If the
stone age cavemen were primitive and savage, they could not have produced the
astounding paintings on the cave walls, (p. 87) (The
Mexican flying serpent Quetzalcoatl): How could anyone worship this repulsive
creature as a god, and why could it fly as well? (p. 104) [Answer: government
subsidy.] These
are really just a handful of examples which reveal ethnocentricism. Von Däniken
's reasoning, conservatively stated, is: there are some real mysteries in the
past because it is obvious that people who lived then are not solely responsible
for those remarkable things. There are indeed real mysteries in the past, but
they are usually not the ones von Däniken sees. When one consciously puts
aside the prejudices of his own culture and examines the cultures of the peoples
mentioned in Chariots of the Gods? one begins to see the way myth, art, architecture,
politics, kinship, and technology relate to one another, reflect and react to
one another. The "fit" of many of these seemingly bizarre practices
in the rest of their culture is often in itself a wonder to behold. The
sillygism and cooked science
Von Däniken 's book is a virtual goldmine
of logical fallacies, implications by innuendo and rhetorical questions, and failures
to apply "Occum's Razor." Alicia Ostriker, who interviewed von Däniken
for Esquire, wrote, "So what if the fallacies fly by in flocks like mallards
heading south?" She was captivated by the man's enthusiasm and chose to overlook
his "gee-whiz style fit only for kiddies." She chose to overlook his
flaws - but many other people don't see them. A
non sequitur, or logical fallacy, makes a conclusion which does not follow from
the premise. The book starts out with a few non sequiturs. On page vii von Däniken
argues that if you ignore his book, then you are a layman who refuses to face
the adventurous and mysterious past. On page 2 he says that if one accepts the
possibility of developed life elsewhere in the universe, then it must have been
a civilization. Here is an example, phrasing the main thesis of the book: "Since
we are not prepared to admit or accept that there was a higher culture or an equally
perfect technology before our own, all that is left is the hypothesis of a visit
from space!" (p. 28). A
rhetorical question places the entire burden of proof on the reader, who either
acquiesces because of the generally bewildering style of the argument or passes
the burden of proof on to the "scholars." When contemplating the ruins
of Tiahaunaco, in Bolivia, von Däniken writes: "Had our forefathers
nothing better to do than spend years - without tools - fashioning water conduits
of such precision?" (p. 21) Applying
Occum's Razor means that when two explanations for one set of facts are possible,
one adopts the simplest explanation, that is, the one that assumes the least number
of "ifs." Von Däniken has argued (Ferris 1974) that space travel
is a simple explanation, since it is now possible by us. However, it is not the
possibility of space travel or of extraterrestrial intelligence that is questionable.
The thesis of Chariots of the Gods? fails by Occum's Razor because it constructs
a gigantic house of cards, each card requiring a new "if." The "ifs"
are held together by faith alone and patently contradict most of the principles
which "science" had begun to see as a rather unified system. Look, for
example, at von Däniken 's thesis that modern humans are the act of deliberate
breeding by extraterrestrial intelligences. The fossil record of humanlike creatures
and the culture they possessed stretches back more than a million years. Through
the millennia, by rather gradual steps, we see the body approaching modern shape
and the brain approaching modern size. Cultural developments like fire, sophisticated
stone tools, burials, tailored clothing, and so forth appear long before modern
Homo sapiens. To see ourselves as a continual development of those trends, moving
and adapting to the changing climates, creatures, and contours of the land, is
much tidier than introducing some undefined, undated appearance of superior "breeders."
Von Däniken
plays heavily on the reader's readiness to conclude that a long string of random
possibilities equals a certainty. By the same reasoning, it is a virtual certainty
that you will get six heads in six coin tosses, since there is a real possibility
(50 percent, to be exact) that one toss will come up heads. Last,
and perhaps most disturbing, is von Däniken's misrepresentation of the very
process of "doing science." He does not exhibit, nor does he anticipate
in the reader, any real facility in the nature of a "fact," an hypothesis,
developing a theory, and proof (or more accurately, demonstration). At one point
von Däniken disclaims that he is compiling a sequence of proofs of prehistoric
space travelers: "that is not what I am doing. I am simply referring to passages
in very ancient texts that have no place in the working hypothesis in use up to
the present" (p. 66). The
author doesn't know what a working hypothesis is, nor is he embarrassed to stamp
"Q.E.D." on an enormous gaggle of tautologies (assume something, create
an hypothesis, test, claim to have proved your assumption). He avoids ever stating
anyone else's explanation in reasonable terms. He is loose with his concept of
proof, with which he bludgeons unidentified others for not producing. More than
any other characteristic, it is this blithely ignorant toying with the method
of scientific reasoning which marks the book's shabbiness. Just
plain wrong
A review of Chariots of the Gods? in Book World says, "To
check his 'facts' would take months of research, since he never cites his authorities."
His highly selective choice of what to introduce as data follows absolutely no
discernable criteria. His translations make critics howl (with glee if they have
a sense of humor, with rage if they do not). Many of the "facts" which
von Däniken presents have been checked out. A few of these are presented
below. The Piri
Reis maps (p. 14). (Amazing maps, but far from accurate.) The
Tiahuanaco culture of Bolivia (p. 20ff). (Cf. Lanning to remove a few of the mysteries
von Däniken sees here.) The
Sumerians (p. 24). (Braidwood and Adams among others have quite fine ideas about
where the Sumerians came from.) "Isn't
there something rather absurd about worshipping a 'god' whom one also slaughters
and eats?" (p. 33). (No. The world has a number of people who do so: Australian
Aboriginies, Mesopotamians, Ainu, and others.) The
copper furnaces at Ezion Geber (p. 44). (The dating given is wrong; also the source
has withdrawn his speculation: the rooms are storage rooms.) The
breeding experiments of space travelers on prehumans (p. 52). (The Esquire interviewer
points out that von Däniken doesn't even believe this stuff himself. Then
why say it? It defies all the principles of genetics and evolution. Ironically,
he calmed down in Gods from Outer Space, and the book didn't sell.) The
"suddenness of Egypt" according to Egyptologists (p. 74). (This leads
you to suspect someone put it there - bingo. In fact it developed out of a Neolithic
farmer culture a thousand years after the civilizations began in Mesopotamia.)
The Cheops pyramid:
the height formula, pi formula, and wood hypothesis. (Cf. Wilson. Even von Däniken
's math is bad.) "Did
the Egyptians learn the possibility of mummification from nature? If that were
the case, there ought to have been a cult of butterflies or cockchafers .. . there
is nothing of the kind" (p. 84). (Worship of the scarab beetle was widespread.)
The Chinese tomb
with 41 dead without violence (p. 86). (How about disease or starvation, a common
threat in Chinese civilization?) Terra
cotta heads in Jericho ten thousand years ago: "That, too, is astonishing,
for ostensibly this people did not know techniques of pottery making" (p.
87). (Wrong on several counts, one being that terra cotta had been made into statues
for over ten thousand years before this.) "I
would suggest, on tolerably good grounds, placing the incident I am concerned
with in the Early Paleolithic Age - between 10,000 and 40,000 (p.88). (The early
paleolithic ended about 200,000 years before this. What he is describing is called
the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic.) The
"Chinese" jade necklace in Guatemala (p. 93). (This one threw me for
a minute, but Wilson says jade is indigenous to Central America.) "...
in Christ's day the concept of a heaven with fixed stars taking into account the
rotation of the earth did not exist" (p. 105). (Let me quote Ostriker again:
"What the average reader of von Däniken probably doesn't know is that
the idea of life on other worlds is not exactly a new one." She further points
out that before Ptolemy's geocentric world view came along, a number of cultures
were not far off the view we hold now.) Outline
drawings of animals which simply did not exist in South America ten thousand years
ago, namely camels and lions (p. 106). (Perhaps they are llamas and pumas, native
to the area.) "There
are artificially produced markings, as yet unexplained, on extremely inaccessible
rock faces in Australia, Peru, and Upper Italy" (p. 106). (Speaking just
for Australia, the aborigines have been seen to make the same markings in their
totemic rituals). Engravings
of cylindrical rocketlike machines in Kunming, China (p. 107). (They are! The
Chinese invented gunpowder and shot rockets.) These
are some of the items I caught. Others are pointed out in the articles mentioned
in the bibliography. Rustless iron columns in India, the Easter Island stones,
and so forth are not quite the mystery von Däniken claims. This
review has been aimed at those readers of von Däniken who feel that in the
interests of science and reasonableness we should consider his argument. I have
sketched some of the reasons why, when one considers his argument, one discovers
no science or reasonableness in it. The mass popularity of Chariots of the Gods?
doesn't derive ultimately from any interest in science or reasonableness but,
as I have suggested, stems from a reaction against it. There is some justification
for such a reaction; I even advocate a dose of insanity in everyone's life. Von
Däniken 's book is a good read if you need a dose of enthusiastic delirium.
But I do not mix my insanity and my science. REFERENCES
Ferris, Timothy 1974. "Playboy Interview: Erich von Däniken."
Playboy. August. Pp. 51 ff.
Ostriker, Alicia 1973. "What If We're Still
Scared, Bored and Broke?" Esquire, December. Pp. 238 ff.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
If your interest has been stimulated by the controversy surrounding Chariots
of the Gods?, I recommend the following works as just as interesting but more
sound. Braidwood,
Robert. Prehistoric Men. 7th ed. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1967. Through
the stone age and into the civilizations of Mesopotamia.
Deetz, James. An
Invitation to Archaeology. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Natural History Press,
1967. Scientific archaeology.
Eiseley, Loren. The Immense Journey. New York:
Random House, 1957. Human evolution.
Frankfort, Henri, et al. Before Philosophy.
Baltimore: Penguin, 1966. An excellent exposition on an old myth.
Lanning,
Edward. Peru Before the Incas. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. One
of the few general books.
Sanders, William T., and Barbara J. Price. Mesoamerica:
The Evolution of a Civilization. New York, Random House, 1968.
Shklovskii,
I. S., and Carl Sagan. Intelligent Life in the Universe. New York: Dell, 1966.
Exobiology by experts.
Wallace, Anthony. Religion: An Anthropological View.
New York: Random House, 1966. A way of looking at non-Western religions.
Wilson,
Clifford. Crash Go the Chariots. New York: Lancer Books, 1972. | 
