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Comment by bregma | Hacker News Reader

von Daniken's work inspired me to travel to Nazca PE and charter an airplane to see the alien landing strips for myself. Certainly a worthwhile trip. I may even have convinced the local guide I was a True Believer, of which I am sure he has encountered his share.

I have also take a page from his books by expostulating outlandish theories to explain facts with a straight face, always ending with a quick "of course there are other explanations".

It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.

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Yesterday, my daughter asked me if it was “a round earth day or a flat earth day” thanks to my habit of providing outlandish explanations for things, often contradicting myself in the course of a single conversation in the process (they’ve come to enjoy trying to poke holes in some absurd explanation I’ve come up with).

That seems like a good game to play with your children. If it teaches them to regard any dubious statement skeptically and use critical thinking to figure out how likely it is to be true, that's a valuable life skill.

I have always enjoyed bringing in the "you know, the bible could be read very differently if you consider God to be an alien" to certain philosophical conversations I've had with people over the years, ever since reading von Daniken's work.

As you allude to, there are always other explanations.

Nobel-winning author Doris Lessing wrote a novel called Shikasta in 1979 that (to my recollection) is a rewriting of the Old Testament and Earth history from the point of view of an alien community who played the role assigned to the divinities and angels in human myths.

I read it as a teenager and it really stuck with me as a completely different, more spiritually influenced take on science fiction and “ancient aliens” theories of the era. She won the Nobel Prize on the strength of her more autobiographical and feminist prose, so Shikasta is an outlier in her own body of work too.

Shikasta is an incredible book. Completely out of left field for her, and a timely mix of politics and raw SF.

Incredibly depressing, but also unique. Neither the mainstream lit world nor the SF world knew what to make of it.

It's not so much a retelling of the OT as a suggestion that alien interference wouldn't look like flying saucers landing on the White House lawn, it would look like despicable politicians doing inhuman things.

It doesn't need aliens. The people would have to encounter such things as the ruins of Jericho (destroyed at the beginning of the new kingdom period), or later cities burned down during the late bronze age collapse. Either could easily represent an extent of destruction incomprehensible to unsophisticated herdsmen. Later it was Greece or even Rome itself, before the area became a part of the empire. It's pretty clear that angelos was something like a courier or mailman, for example, and only later it acquired the mystical meaning.

There are documented cases where aliens weren't needed for that, either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomio_Kivung

Obligatory Calvin & Hobbs mention: https://preview.redd.it/quintessential-dad-explanation-v0-p5...

I've created table-top RPG campaigns by cobbling together these kinds of wack theories and building a world where they are true.

>It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.

A whole bunch of current disinformation comes from people having fun with misinformation and dumb people believing it until the idea makes a life of its own.

It's not harmless at all. A lot of explicitly nefarious people use this technique to engineer the population so they can be controlled.

Poe's Law applies.

Are you talking about religion?

Yes. Ancient Aliens, Flerf nonsense, Tartarian nonsense. All religions.

Not particularly.

Flat earth, anti-vax, alt-right -- a significant influencer in these things and others were early trolls ... being trolls.

The fun of keeping a straight face while you say ridiculous things isn't so fun when you see everyone in the presidential administration doing it. People who didn't get the original joke took the bait and ran with it.

I agree. Von Däniken instilled a lot of bad ideas in people's minds. People like to complain about religion, but at least that brings some ethos. Von Däniken's ideas did nothing except create a rift with science.

>People like to complain about religion, but at least that brings some ethos.

It does? In America at least, the dominant religion seems to be teaching a really terrible and harmful ethos. I don't see how Von Däniken's ideas could possibly be worse.

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