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"Chariots Of The Gods" BBC NOVA Program

That's almost as ancient as the imagined astronauts. This must be due for a revival soon, after people get tired of the flat earth revival.
IRCC correctly one of old Erik von D's supposed mysteries was that there wasn't evidence of the 100s of workers you'd need for construction projects like the pyramids. Archaeology's moved on a bit since then and they've identified several settlements on the Giza plateau that would support the number of workers you'd need for massive quarrying and building operations.
 
Can't we just all admit 'Con' Daniken made up a lot of old cobblers in order to sell books and move on? Zzzzzz...
 
Mythopoeika said:
He did inspire a lot of people, though. Got people thinking.
That's good.
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Agreed.

I recently finished his latest book - Impossible Truths, which focuses on strangeness in meso and South America. I also skimmed my late father's original copy of Chariots of the Gods as a sort of primer.
I do find it somehow comforting that renegades like Von Däniken still have the passion and energy to keep the faith well into their 80s and, whilst many of his claims (notably the ooparts) have been subsequently debunked, you're quite right in praising him for getting us to question scientific orthodoxy.
Where I would criticise him is in underestimating how inventive humankind was in ancient times. I think the Baghdad batteries and antikithera mechanism are far more down to clever ancient human inventors than any alien intervention.
 
It's good that von Daniken got folks to think about it, so I have to give him credit for that. Where I fault him is in his fabrication of evidence and events. He also ignores evidence that does not fit into his theory.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Agreed.

I recently finished his latest book - Impossible Truths, which focuses on strangeness in meso and South America. I also skimmed my late father's original copy of Chariots of the Gods as a sort of primer.
I do find it somehow comforting that renegades like Von Däniken still have the passion and energy to keep the faith well into their 80s and, whilst many of his claims (notably the ooparts) have been subsequently debunked, you're quite right in praising him for getting us to question scientific orthodoxy.
Where I would criticise him is in underestimating how inventive humankind was in ancient times. I think the Baghdad batteries and antikithera mechanism are far more down to clever ancient human inventors than any alien intervention.
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Minor quibble, the batteries aren't batteries, but scroll jars. They're well attested in the area and time, and their location being buried under the floor attests to it.

That's my problem with Daniken and others of his sort. But also Archaeology, there is a lot of material written about these sites and artifacts, but very little gets to the public. Part of it is general interest, there's a reason the history channel moved away from real history programs. But a lot more could be done to reach out to the public. Like with other sciences.
 
..
Nonsense. Telling lies and spreading misconceptions is never good. He encouraged lots of people to believe the most appalling garbage...

So did Moses.

And we are still living with the consequences.

INT21
 
INT21 said:
Nonsense. Telling lies and spreading misconceptions is never good. He encouraged lots of people to believe the most appalling garbage... So did Moses. And we are still living with the consequences. INT21
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Agreed. It would be so much better if these things could just be nipped in the bud, or buds, preferably by a hungry bear, and until the perpetrator bleeds out.
 
This doc is actually a fairly thorough demolition of several of VD's points. He does get a rebuttal to each, but none too convincing.
 
I'll give Von Daniken this much. It is distinctly odd that so many human cultures say that they have ancestors or gods who came from the sky. Much like the existence of ghosts, it seems to be such a common trope that in most societies it is all but assumed by most societies that don't question too closely. Now we know this isn't true, because the fossil record shows a clear evolutionary path for humanity all the way back to Sahelanthropus, back when genus homo and apes were the same bunch all those millions of years ago. So, is the connection to the sky merely wishful thinking, or an inspiring detail of a good story? So many stories feature people who can fly, you could be mistaken for thinking that we were doing it before 1903, and by a number of other means, including shape-changing.

Ultimately I don't think archaeology is where we will prove alien contact. I think any conclusive proof will come from biology. I am particularly interested in the ubiquity of chirality in proteins and sugars across all species, when there is no evolutionary advantage in this.
 
AlchoPwn said:
. I am particularly interested in the ubiquity of chirality in proteins and sugars across all species, when there is no evolutionary advantage in this.
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There might be a small advantage for a chiral biochemistry, as opposed to a racemic biochemistry where both chiral forms are present. In a racemic biochemistry some reactions might be more difficult, or inhibited, because the molecules would prefer to react with others of the same chirality. So I'd guess that racemic biochemistries are rare.

On the other hand (he he) there should be no advantage between left-handed and right-handed biochemistries, so I'd guess that ours is purely the result of chance; we won't really know until we've examined a representative selection of alien biospheres in the universe- assuming we ever get that opportunity.
 
I should add that the documentary (though the picture quality is poor) features some amazing footage of contemporary Easter Islanders building a head using only ancient technology.
 
AlchoPwn said:
I'll give Von Daniken this much. It is distinctly odd that so many human cultures say that they have ancestors or gods who came from the sky. Much like the existence of ghosts, it seems to be such a common trope that in most societies it is all but assumed by most societies that don't question too closely. Now we know this isn't true, because the fossil record shows a clear evolutionary path for humanity all the way back to Sahelanthropus, back when genus homo and apes were the same bunch all those millions of years ago. So, is the connection to the sky merely wishful thinking, or an inspiring detail of a good story? ...
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The common association of the sky with abstract, philosophical, and / or religious elements of a worldview or cosmology never struck me as odd. If anything, it always seemed fairly straightforward to me.

If there are transcending or supra-ordinary elements overarching one's mundane existence, they would presumptively be (e.g.):

- out of reach for mundane engagement and / or manipulation;
- persistently present or perceptible no matter where or when; and
- recurrently intrusive in terms of affecting everyday life.

Our ancestors existed in a physical environment which to some extent shaped their most basic model of reality. They were terrestrial, so the land was the stage on which mundane existence was played out. Certain terrestrial landscapes abutted the sea, but not all landscapes afforded access to a sea.

If there were something 'above and beyond' the ordinary, it would be manifest in a space or region extending beyond the everyday terrestrial realm or plane. The key factor here is 'extension' in two senses: (a) extending beyond the reach of ordinary engagement; and (b) extending from the mere ordinary toward or to some transcendental / ultimate otherness.

For some proto-cultures in the right locations, such extensions could have been attributed to realms extending out to sea (at the seashore) or downward into subterranean realms (where there were deep caves). Indeed, some ancient traditions and mythologies invoke the subterranean and the marine as the context for 'the beyond'. However ...

All proto-cultures experienced the sky, and the sky realm met all the basic requirements for a transcending space. It was out of reach, not manipulable, always there above you, and affected you every day via weather.

As localized animistic beliefs gave way to all-encompassing abstract mythologies / religions, the sky provided the most universally recognizable realm or space for the professed location of supernatural elements and agencies (e.g., gods).
 
eburacum said:
On the other hand (he he) there should be no advantage between left-handed and right-handed biochemistries, so I'd guess that ours is purely the result of chance; we won't really know until we've examined a representative selection of alien biospheres in the universe- assuming we ever get that opportunity.
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You suggest there is no advantage in left-handed and right-handed biochemistries. On the other hand, human beings eat left handed sugars and get no nutrition from them. Surely there would be an advantage in gaining nutrition from both left and right handed sugars and we would naturally select for "ambidexterity"? Incidentally I have heard that some firms are considering using left handed sugars to help people have their cake and avoid the weight gain, given that it passes the system without being absorbed. You would think that with the commonality of left handed sugars that there would be more organisms that could gain nutrition from them, but apparently not. It is therefore likely that the selection for chirality happened very early in the story of life on Earth. I am surprised there aren't hundreds of biology PhDs on the subject.
 
EnolaGaia said:
The common association of the sky with abstract, philosophical, and / or religious elements of a worldview or cosmology never struck me as odd. If anything, it always seemed fairly straightforward to me.

If there are transcending or supra-ordinary elements overarching one's mundane existence, they would presumptively be (e.g.):
- out of reach for mundane engagement and / or manipulation;
- persistently present or perceptible no matter where or when; and
- recurrently intrusive in terms of affecting everyday life.

Our ancestors existed in a physical environment which to some extent shaped their most basic model of reality. They were terrestrial, so the land was the stage on which mundane existence was played out. Certain terrestrial landscapes abutted the sea, but not all landscapes afforded access to a sea.

If there were something 'above and beyond' the ordinary, it would be manifest in a space or region extending beyond the everyday terrestrial realm or plane. The key factor here is 'extension' in two senses: (a) extending beyond the reach of ordinary engagement; and (b) extending from the mere ordinary toward or to some transcendental / ultimate otherness.

For some proto-cultures in the right locations, such extensions could have been attributed to realms extending out to sea (at the seashore) or downward into subterranean realms (where there were deep caves). Indeed, some ancient traditions and mythologies invoke the subterranean and the marine as the context for 'the beyond'. However ...

All proto-cultures experienced the sky, and the sky realm met all the basic requirements for a transcending space. It was out of reach, not manipulable, always there above you, and affected you every day via weather.

As localized animistic beliefs gave way to all-encompassing abstract mythologies / religions, the sky provided the most universally recognizable realm or space for the professed location of supernatural elements and agencies (e.g., gods).
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This is a very well reasoned perspective and I like it immensely. Very well put and well argued. It should be in an anthropology textbook; it is seriously well written and thought out. But I do have a quibble... I mean, if we merely agree then there is nothing to discuss... so let me play the contrarian for a moment...

While your answer covers most of the ground, we run into a particular problem. In some ways it explains everything, and leaves no room for alternative answers. It is a bit like the French Academy of Science when it made the pronouncement "there are no rocks in the sky, ergo rocks cannot fall from the sky". Now we know that rocks do indeed fall from the sky, but it isn't a common phenomenon that can be controlled in a laboratory, and they are commonly known as meteorites.

So the question is, if a technologically advanced society met humans from a stone age society, how would that affect that stone age society? Would they engage in strange ritualized behaviors and build odd structures to venerate the visitors and encourage them to return (for the stone age people's own vested interests) ?


This Dawkins video deals with the cult of John Frum on the Island of Tana in the Vanuatu chain. I enjoy the irony of using his work as a defense of Von Daniken, though I could have chosen many other videos on the subject, this one has the advantage of being under 7 min long too.

My point being, here we have an example of a "UFO cult" that occurred for completely understandable historical reasons, and it looks a lot like other religions might in a similar setting. What is to say that aliens haven't intervened, and observed a scrupulous biological quarantine to protect us, and been careful to "pick up after themselves" like good campers, anthropologists, and biologists? I am sure the evidence for their passing would be very equivocal too. (Unlike the USA during the Pacific Campaign in WW2, who littered the region with military debris and introduced the invasive bittervine to the region like the red weed in HG Wells' War of the Worlds. That is where the example's value and similarity ends.)
 
Shadowsot said:
But also Archaeology, there is a lot of material written about these sites and artifacts, but very little gets to the public. Part of it is general interest, there's a reason the history channel moved away from real history programs. But a lot more could be done to reach out to the public.
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In UK HE public outreach and impact are part of the job and count towards the appraisal of the individuals and the unit/department. Same with bodies like Historic Scotland. :)
 
Surely there would be an advantage in gaining nutrition from both left and right handed sugars and we would naturally select for "ambidexterity"?
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I don't think there would be much of an advantage. If enzymes need to react with molecules with the same chirality (which is often the case) then you'd need twice as many enzymes, and reactions would occur at half the rate because you'd have to wait twice as long for the right enzyme to turn up in each case. If the entire biome uses a single chirality, then enzymes are always the right way round.

I think it is possible that some alien biospheres would have both chiralities present. but in separate organisms (for the most part) with largely separate evolutionary paths. It would then be advantageous as a predator or omnivore to be 'ambidextrous' as you put it, since it could then eat organisms from both biomes.
 
eburacum said:
It would then be advantageous as a predator or omnivore to be 'ambidextrous' as you put it, since it could then eat organisms from both biomes.
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Umm... I thought we were predators and omnivores? Not all of us are vegan you know :dinner::cow:
 
AlchoPwn said:
This is a very well reasoned perspective and I like it immensely. Very well put and well argued. It should be in an anthropology textbook; it is seriously well written and thought out. But I do have a quibble... I mean, if we merely agree then there is nothing to discuss... so let me play the contrarian for a moment...

While your answer covers most of the ground, we run into a particular problem. In some ways it explains everything, and leaves no room for alternative answers. ...
Click to expand...

The question you originally posed was why there seemed to be a strong association of supra-normal forces or agencies with the sky. My response was to illustrate that there were identifiable reasons why this association would be generally ascribed, without the need for assuming interaction with anyone or any being visiting from the sky.

I didn't say there was nothing to discuss (i.e., that this explanation absolutely refuted claims of extraterrestrial visitations). The point was the reverse - i.e., that one need not be compelled to insert literal, historical visits or influence from above to explain why the association is so ubiquitous.


AlchoPwn said:
So the question is, if a technologically advanced society met humans from a stone age society, how would that affect that stone age society? Would they engage in strange ritualized behaviors and build odd structures to venerate the visitors and encourage them to return (for the stone age people's own vested interests) ?
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I'd say this is a distinct possibility, as evidenced by recent times' cargo cults. However, it's merely a possibility rather than a guaranteed outcome. It's not the case that every first contact with (e.g.) European explorers initiated a cargo cult. Neither is it the case that technologically advanced newcomers were automatically categorized as gods.
 
EnolaGaia said:
I'd say this is a distinct possibility, as evidenced by recent times' cargo cults. However, it's merely a possibility rather than a guaranteed outcome. It's not the case that every first contact with (e.g.) European explorers initiated a cargo cult. Neither is it the case that technologically advanced newcomers were automatically categorized as gods.
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The issue of the size of the technological gap does seem to be important. For example, the Aztecs (Mechica) allegedly thought the Spanish were deities, but the actual Hindu Indians had no illusions about Vasco De Gama being human,as there was no enormous tech gap. The Japanese often regarded shipwrecked sailors as being "Oni" (devils), being red skinned and having large noses. It is even arguable whether the John Frum cult really regarded John Frum as a god, as opposed to a great alien supplier of goods and services.
 
AlchoPwn said:
The issue of the size of the technological gap does seem to be important. For example, the Aztecs (Mechica) allegedly thought the Spanish were deities, but the actual Hindu Indians had no illusions about Vasco De Gama being human,as there was no enormous tech gap. The Japanese often regarded shipwrecked sailors as being "Oni" (devils), being red skinned and having large noses. It is even arguable whether the John Frum cult really regarded John Frum as a god, as opposed to a great alien supplier of goods and services.
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Current work tends to treat the Aztecs treating the Spanish as gods as propaganda.
The issue with your idea above is its flatly untestable.
But we know religions arise spontaneously. They still do. And powers of flight and sky beings still have a hold on our cukture and media. Super heroes, scifi, and even the most scientifically minded believer tends to link god to the heavens and tge devil being down below.
 
AlchoPwn said:
Umm... I thought we were predators and omnivores? Not all of us are vegan you know.
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Yes, but we live on a world where only one chirality of sugars and proteins is extant. Perhaps there were mirror-image organisms in the early biosphere, but they died out; we only need to eat food with one set of steroisomers in the current era, because that is all that occurs naturally here.
 
A review of Impossible Truths.

...Impossible Truths is set up as a picture book providing images of artifacts and locations that the author, henceforth abbreviated EVD, believes are associated with space aliens.

In this, it is very similar to his much earlier book In Search of Ancient Gods: My Pictorial Evidence of the Impossible (1973), but that book took the whole world as its canvas, and here EVD confines himself almost exclusively to the Andes Mountains, without ever really establishing that this was his goal. Instead, the sloppiness of the book—which has no real opening or closing—suggests that it was cut down from a longer work to make a series of shorter books, or else that EVD wrote the book from one set of notes on one topic and then grew bored and decided to stop.

In an apparently tacked on introduction almost entirely unrelated to what follows, EVD states that he assembled—“wrote” is too generous a term—this book because “a new generation” of people has never read his earlier, better, but hopelessly old books and is entirely ignorant of the ancient astronaut theory. That this introduction is utterly at odds with the book he published less than two weeks before this one, The Gods Never Left Us, in which he crowed that Ancient Aliens had spread his ideas to nearly all corners of the world and to a new generation, goes unnoticed. That he repeats the same contradictory claim later in this very same book speaks only to EVD’s general sloppiness in his dotage.

The remainder of the book is actually a volume on the mysteries of South America, but neither the author nor the publisher seems to have noticed or appreciated the fact that the focus never leaves the Andes. Instead, all involved treat this as a general, global ancient astronaut book.

The first chapter focuses on Pre-Columbian South American deities and presents a number of photographs of pre-Incan masonry and carvings of various gods. EVD is particularly incensed by the stele and slabs of Chavín de Huántar, which he says defy human understanding because they depict jaguar gods with iconography that defies explanation. After noting that archaeologists describe the image as a man-jaguar, EVD suggests that it is actually a robot wielding a sword, which he illustrates with a silly cartoonish computer-rendered image, borrowed from mystery-monger Wolfgang Volkrodt, of what was basically a robot from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/r...extraterrestrial-contact-by-erich-von-daniken
 
I remember this TV show - or something pretty much identical except with a British accented commentary -as a BBC Horizon programme circa 1977 - and being shattered by it.
I don't (necessarily) subscribe to `Paleo-Seti`, but I do feel compelled to say a few things in its partial defence.

Daniken was only the populariser of this trend - others had gone before. A prominent Soviet Russian scientist was proposing that ancient astronauts were responsible for religious myths as far back as the 30's (I forget the name off-hand, but I've written about it elsewhere on this site before). Then in the fifties the Italian Peter Kolosimo took up the thread.

I think Daniken's pre-eminence owed to the fact that (with the initial help of a ghost writer) he could write in a tabloidesque style that made him an easy read for most people and the fact that his publications coincided with the moon shots and hence really hit the zeitgeist.I think a lot of the animosity towards him is inspired by jealousy (he is one of the most popular writers of all time and was but a humble hotelier before that). Some animosity also springs from religious motives (this was certainly the case with the Swiss government back in the sixties and seventies, less so now perhaps).

Daniken started young and has developed with age. Some of his works have appeared in German only and so we in the Anglophone world don't get the full story. For example,one of his books is called something like `Where I was Wrong` and is a response to some of the many criticisms that he drew early on.For example, he no longer contends that the pyramids were built by aliens - only that they were built for aliens.Furthermore,he has always been at pains to point out that his books are liberally splashed with question marks.

I have said before (and was lightly pilloried for it) and I will say it again: the Nazca lines are very, very hard to account for...without positing something like them having been produced for airborne spectators. Humans produce art for other people to look at. Why would a people go to such extraordinary lengths to produce something that none of them would ever see? Just to please imaginary sky-gods? Then, pray,where are the other examples of such art forms?

That this is a problem for archeologists too can be seen by the fact that some of them have postulated that the Peruvians had access to balloon technology! This seems lame to me and doesn't cut it. Even if they had such technology -for which there is zero pictorial evidence - it wouldn't explain why they would produce intricate and extensive designs that could only be viewed by the privileged few who would have got to use it.

The Nazca lines are spooky - and Daniken and co were right to draw our attention to the fact.

It must also be noted that the same TV programme (in the OP) is rather more guarded and complimentary in its coverage of Robert Temple and the `Sirius mystery`. It is not the out and out detonation job that it initially appears to be,
 
Zeke Newbold said:
Humans produce art for other people to look at. Why would a people go to such extraordinary lengths to produce something that none of them would ever see? Just to please imaginary sky-gods? Then, pray,where are the other examples of such art forms?
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People can and do produce art for themselves. Not for consumption by other people - for some it is the act of creating that matters.

Mediaeval religious buildings have carvings which can't be appreciated from the ground. Vestments and other clothes are decorated where they won't be seen by human eyes - think of Amish socks!
 
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