Von Daeniken addresses a press conference in Bern, Switzerland, in October 1999.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
Best-selling Swiss author Erich von Daeniken, who built a lucrative career on his argument, rubbished by scientists and archaeologists, that humanity owes much of its development to the intervention of extraterrestrial beings, has died aged 90.
Chariots of the Gods?, published in 1968, sold millions of copies with its thesis that advanced aliens had repeatedly visited the earth, leaving their mark in the form of Inca and Egyptian ruins, cave drawings and other physical monuments.
“It took courage to write this book, and it will take courage to read it,” the work begins.
It acknowledged that scholars would dismiss it as nonsense, but insisted that “the past teemed with unknown gods who visited the primeval earth in manned spaceships”.
Academics wrote books refuting his theories, criticising him as a purveyor of some of the more fantastical notions of pseudoscience. German news magazine Der Spiegel even had a 1973 cover story titled ‘The Daeniken Hoax’.
Nevertheless, legions of fans snapped up his more than 40 books and watched his television specials and documentary films. His books were translated into more than 30 languages.
Von Daeniken spent the early part of his working life managing a hotel in eastern Switzerland, where a fraud conviction landed him in jail for 18 months.
But as his book took off, he emerged from prison as a best-selling author.
Still, he never presented the smoking gun to fulfill astronomer Carl Sagan’s famous adage that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.
“He … says that the astonishing astronomical information ancient civilizations, such as the Mayan, had is proof that there were some space travellers around to teach it to them. This fits in with his general questioning of the ability of the Egyptians to build the pyramids, or the Easter Islanders to erect those massive stone heads,” the New York Times wrote in 1974.
“His method is to use a negative – ancient peoples couldn’t have done or thought all the things they did – to prove a positive – that the ancient people were the beneficiaries of some kind of cosmological Point 4 (development assistance) programme.”
Such criticism never knocked von Daeniken off his stride.
“We owe it to our self-respect to be rational and objective,” he wrote. “At some time or other every daring theory seemed to be a Utopia. How many Utopias have long since become everyday realities!”
Television specials about his books made him a well-known figure in Europe and the United States. In 2003 he opened a Mysteries of the World theme park in Switzerland that went bust after three years.
In a treatise on his website, von Daeniken said he was not an esoteric, and that his work served to debunk “a world of religious and unfortunately often scientific humbugs”.
“From countless old written records I know that these ‘gods’ promised to return. Then we will experience the god shock, a total catastrophe in religion and science. And everything would have been so easy to understand – without this god shock. The evidence speaks a clear language. That is what drives me.”
Published – January 12, 2026 01:43 pm IST
