The ‘fringe’

Other developments in the search for extraterrestrial life were taking place, however, in the area of research generally characterised as ‘fringe’ from the mid 1960s. The works of Erich von Däniken, beginning in 1968 with Erinnerunger an die Zukunft (‘Memories of the Future’, published in English as Chariots of the Gods? [i]), became best sellers within weeks of their publication. His hypothesis that various features of the human past were best explained in terms of extraterrestrial intervention was largely ignored by mainstream archaeology, but found a wide acceptance among the general public. Although he received a great deal of international publicity, his first book drew heavily (and virtually without acknowledgement) on a cult classic, Le Matin des Magiciens, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, a work that combines philosophical speculation based around the thinking of the mystic Gurdjieff with pseudo-scientific conjecture. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a whole industry developed around the growing belief of extraterrestrial interference in human history, mostly regurgitating the same pieces of evidence that von Däniken had taken from Pauwels and Bergier; there was little attempt at originality in most of this work, much of it poorly researched and increasingly derivative. These writers failed to produce a single object of extraterrestrial origin.

However, by the early 1980s, claims were being made about discoveries of artificial structures on Mars. Unlike the claims of the earlier speculative writers, these claims were based on the physical evidence of satellite photographs from the Viking programme of the mid-1970s and were therefore amenable to testing and (potentially) falsification. However, just as with the claims of von Däniken, mainstream archaeologists generally chose not to test these claims, simply to ignore or reject them. Given the climate of conspiracy that had developed around the UFO phenomenon and that had gradually infiltrated most areas of the ‘fringe’, it is unsurprising that denials of artificiality from NASA were seen as deliberate disinformation. It was against this background that the present paper had its origins.