Chariots of the gods

During the 1970s, a Cinerama film with the same title as this post was exhibited and advertised with the following words: Can we say that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings has been proved?

Although watching the film was worthwhile, because it shows many wonderful landscapes and artistic works, I was not convinced by the point it was trying to make. Eric von Däniken, author of the book of the same title, in which the film is based, seems to have very little faith in man’s creative capacity. As soon as a human production seems difficult, he always attributes it to the intervention of aliens. He does so with the pyramids of Egypt, the Mayan astronomical observatories, the mortar of the Incas, and many other things.

Let us look at some of von Däniken’s arguments. There are many more like these, but I have already mentioned one in another post.

• Aliens shown in cave paintings: The film shows one and describes it so: Flying saucer, fish shape, drawing on a rock. The drawing is done in black and clearly represents a rocket with its wake. However, in the film one can see how the speaker’s hand retouches with black paint a much lighter-toned drawing in a rock, where only a lot of imagination lets one see that shape. Regarding the Altamira caves, they say the following: Despite how famous this cave is, visited by thousands of tourists year after year, a sensational fact is completely ignored: in one of the rarely frequented rooms there are flying saucers. An imaginative hypothesis is presented as a proven fact, as anyone who sees the referred image will be able to verify.

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  Madrid stele

  The chronology of American civilizations: The film tries to make them much more ancient than they are. The reason is clear: the older the archaeological objects found in Central America and Peru, the more inexplicable the technique required for their building. American historians and prehistorians agree that the first archaeological remains in America are several thousand years old, while the great Mesoamerican and Peruvian constructions date back to 500 BC. The city of Tiahuanaco, in Bolivia, was built some 2,000 to 2,500 years ago. A curious argument is used in the film to say it was built in a remoter age. The argument can be summarized as follows: It is evident that a certain construction of Tiahuanaco was used in its time as a pier. Therefore, Lake Titicaca had to reach that point, while today it is about 300 meters away. Since the lake currently recedes at the rate of about 3 millimeters per year, how old are those remains? Thus, an age of 100,000 years is suggested. This argument contains two fallacies: The slope of the land is assumed to be constant, and it is assumed (without saying it) that the lake waters have always receded at the same rate.
• The astronaut god of Palenque: This stela shows a sculpted figure that, according to von Däniken, represents an astronaut. To question what the film says, it is enough to observe the Madrid stele, which can be seen in the Museum of America in Madrid, which comes from the same period, also from Palenque, and represents a man with the same appearance and dress, exactly like the astronaut, but as he is in another position, he does not suggest a spaceman.

My school magazine

Von Däniken’s theories were popular during the seventies, when the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs became fashionable once again. His ideas had many followers, some of whom wrote newspaper articles spreading them. Outraged by the attention the media was giving this pseudoscience (even in important Spanish newspapers), I felt compelled to write an article against it. Published in the Diario Español de Tarragona on November 30, 1974 (page 17), this was my first popular science article to appear in print, apart from those I wrote when I was a teenager for my school magazine.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca

Have a happy vacation. See you on mid-August.