The ‘gods’ of ancient myth were flesh-and-blood

Like so many fringe writers, von Däniken cannot accept that ancient peoples had spiritual experiences or imaginations. Whenever people in the past wrote about ‘gods’ and ‘heaven’ they were thinking about how to express their incomprehension of vastly superior technology.

More to come…

The ‘gods’ of ancient myth were astronauts

Because the gods of so many ancient cultures are associated with the sky or with objects in the sky, such as the sun and moon, von Däniken believes that there must be a literal connection. In a late twentieth-century context, they can be identified with the beings who were being recorded from the early 1950s onwards as pilots of Unidentified Flying Objects, who claimed to those with whom they made contact that they had come from other planets. Although von Däniken remains surprisingly agnostic about UFOs, the connection is clear: the gods of ancient myth were space travellers whose craft are identical with those phenomena that UFO enthusiasts regard as historical records of ‘flying saucers’.

More to come…

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