Erich von Däniken

One of the most successful and influential of all ‘fringe’ archaeologists is the Swiss hotelier, Erich von Däniken (born 1935). He caused controversy in the late 1960s with his popularisation of what has become known as the ‘ancient astronaut hypothesis’, although he was by no means the first to propose it. His first book, Chariots of the Gods?, published in 1967 after no fewer than twenty-two rejections, became a worldwide bestseller, thanks in no small part to its tone: a strident attack on hide-bound academia by one who dared to speak his mind. He was not the first fringe writer to adopt this stance and he has not been the last: expert bashing has become an important cultural cliché over the past half century or so. The ups and downs of his career have seen him arrested for fraud, become a global media personality and, ultimately, made him wealthy through the sale of over sixty million copies of his books.

During an early career as a waiter, he was able to save for extensive travels in which he hoped to find evidence for an idea he had developed through reading the Bible (and, although he does not admit as much, through his reading of the works of speculative writes such as Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier): that extraterrestrials had meddled in human history. The most convincing piece of evidence he has ever produced is the cover slab of the tomb of the Lord Pacal in the Pyramid of the Inscriptions at Palenque, weak stuff though it is. He saw it as a representation of a humanoid being in a space capsule and it became the cover image for the hardback publication of the English edition of Chariots of the Gods? Subsequent books took his search for evidence farther afield and he even dabbled in analyses of religious visions (Miracles of the Gods) and Greek mythology.