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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

von Däniken was the original Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, aka "aliens" meme guy. He never met an archeological artifact that didn't look like alien technology to him.

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I heard Däniken speak about 30 years ago, and exchanged a few words with him afterwards. He was a brilliant orator and came across as highly sophisticated. His arguments were contrived and I recognized that even as a child, but he was nothing like the natives of the YouTube era who do it for the likes and memes. He was completely sincere in his own belief of what he said.

He is a great showman in his way. He was far from being the first to write on this subject, but I think he was pretty much the first to popularise it on television.

Ancient Aliens ought to be required viewing in schools, because they are very careful to employ enthymeme and reported speech to make a series of statements each one of which is technically true, yet have implications which are false. Gaining the skill to recognise when these kinds of claims are being made is, I feel, essential for the electorate in a democracy.

There's an important difference between facts and truth.

There was a time when I read a stream of articles and blog posts titled something like "I'm a liberal, but I agree with ... <obviously far right thing>" After reading enough of them, I realized the common structure was to state a number of relevant facts, then make a leap across an unstated and unsupported premise, hoping the reader won't notice. The final section would assert the conclusion based on this premise.

What really drives me nuts about von Däniken (and Tsoukalos, Childress, et al. …) is that he contradicts himself. (Sorry, I don’t care about this stuff enough to have a recent example.) His position isn’t consistent.

Zecharia Sitchin’s arguments are also frequently not good but he at least seemed to be trying to construct a consistent whole whereas these other guys will just say anything.

Yes. I stopped reading von Däniken, after there were multiple contradictions on the very first page of the first book I tried.

I like fantasy, but it should be at least a little bit consistent.

Sitchin's biggest defence is that very few people can read cuneiform. Even less than hieroglyphics seemingly. Certainly less than Hebrew, Sanskrit or Greek. That means there aren't a lot of people able to dismiss his translations properly.

This also happens with Mayan script. When the group led by Linda Schele made major leaps in the 70s, to the point where 90% of the glyphs have now been deciphered, scholars mostly considered their meaning settled. That obviously hasn't kept cranks from asserting all kinds of wild ideas, but there are still scholars who dispute the accuracy and meaning of the interpretations.

VD wasn't the original, not even close. Peter Kolosimo had best sellers on the same subject years earlier, as did others.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts

TIL. I remember my parents had von Däniken books. I, on the other hand, was deeply into Isaac Asimov, both his fiction and non-fiction. He was a pretty good debunker.

I read both. I have to admit I was never much of a fan of Asimov's non-fiction or work outside of SF... I could take it or leave it. I do find most of EVD's examples to be ridiculous... The Nazca lines, for example, were clearly never landing strips, for a variety of reasons, although they may have been meant to be seen from above.

What Von Däniken did teach me as a child was to have a sense of wonder about the ancients and their achievements. Maybe not spaceships and electricity necessarily, but their feats of masonry and sculpture. I've seen dolmens capped by stones the size of a bus, that I felt uncomfortable walking under, even though they had managed to stay like that for thousands of years. We struggle to replicate some of these things today yet they apparently did so without metal tools, proper ropes or any number of other things. The planning alone would have taken many years.

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