Human artefacts record their presence on earth

Von Däniken uses an assortment of out-of-place artefacts and spectacular monuments to provided evidence for his thesis. He seems to regard all of them as human creations, albeit aided or inspired by space travellers (unlike Alan Alford, who claimed that the Great Pyramid had been built by the Anunnaki as an apparatus for splitting water molecules to provide hydrogen fuel for spacecraft…). Nevertheless, he believes that the artefacts he uses to suggest alien contact could not have been developed the peoples using them: the ‘Batteries of Babylon’, for instance, cannot be an invention of the Persians of the first millennium BCE, but must be a degenerate version of something originally more sophisticated of extraterrestrial origin. Most of these pieces of evidence involve the same argument: these creations are too complex to be the unaided products of ancient humans because those humans lacked the technical expertise to create them.

Much of the argument is almost racist: the people of distant times lack the mental capacities of the alien ‘gods’ – just as the people of distant places in more recent centuries lack the mental capacities of the ‘superior’ Europeans who ruled them.

Among the artefacts, though, are pieces unknown to conventional archaeology, such as the gold objects allegedly found in cave systems in Ecuador. In addition, for the most part, he provides no references to where the material has been published or where it can be viewed. This poses problems for the serious researcher who may wish to follow up claims about specific pieces of evidence. Parts of Chariots of the Gods?, for example, consist of lists of artefacts that are effectively meaningless as they lack any contextual information or detail.

More to come…

The gods themselves left nothing behind

Whilst some sceptics might consider it necessary to identify the products of the aliens themselves, this does not appear to be a problem for von Däniken. He seems to believe that, unlike humans, the space travellers were able to do all sorts of things while on earth that have left no trace in the archaeological record. The only evidence is evidence by proxy: the anthropogenic material he identifies as inspired by the aliens.

More to come…

This page was last updated on 28 July 2007
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews