Erich von Däniken, the best-selling Swiss author and self-styled maverick archaeologist who propagated the theory that thousands of years ago an advanced alien species visited Earth, mated with ancient humans and gave them the technology, and the intelligence, to erect such marvels as the Great Pyramids died on Saturday in Switzerland. He was 90.
His death was announced on his website.
Mr. von Däniken was 32 and managing a hotel in Davos, Switzerland, when he published his first and by far most popular book, “Chariots of the Gods,” in 1968. In breathless prose, saturated with exclamation points and folksy interjections such as “Hey, presto!” Mr. von Däniken posited that virtually the sum of human knowledge and ability had been bestowed by extraterrestrials.
With little evidence and a lot of innuendo, he proclaimed that the Egyptian pyramids could have been built only with alien expertise. (“Is it really a coincidence that the height of the pyramid of Cheops multiplied by a thousand million — 98,000,000 miles — corresponds approximately to the distance between the earth and sun?” he wrote.)
The birdman cult of Easter Island, Mr. von Däniken declared, developed as a way to honor the supreme beings who had flitted down from the outer atmosphere to land on that remote spot in the Pacific, off the coast of South America.
Because an iron rod in a temple in Delhi, India, appeared impervious to rust, it must have been made from a celestial alloy, he insisted. Similarly, he said, when viewed from the air, the geoglyphs of Nazca, Peru, are obvious landing strips for spaceships. And artwork on a Mayan sarcophagus depicts not a king descending into the underworld, he concluded, but an astronaut-god piloting a spaceship.
Critics were unsparing. “Chariots of the Gods,” one anthropologist wrote, was “a warped parody of reasoning, argumentation, as well as a vigorous exercise in selective quotation, misrepresentation and error based on ignorance.”
The astrophysicist Carl Sagan said of Mr. von Däniken: “Every time he sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet.”
And The New York Times said that Mr. von Däniken’s prose, which it categorized as “Early Terrible,” was such a “mixmaster of facts, speculations, rhetorical questions” that reading it left one’s mind “the consistency of a rich Swiss fondue.”
But for a certain kind of reader — and, to scientists’ alarm, there were many of them — Mr. von Däniken’s theories registered not only intellectually but also spiritually, constituting something like the catechism of an enlightened new faith.
“Chariots,” which begins, “It took courage to write this book, and it will take courage to read it,” positioned itself squarely against the establishment, scientific or otherwise — not a hard sell in 1968. By incorporating into his argument ancient texts such as “The Mahabharata” and “The Epic of Gilgamesh” and a literal yet novel interpretation of the Bible — Ezekiel saw not fiery wheels in the sky but alien spacecraft — Mr. von Däniken appeared to unite the world’s religions, its foundational mythologies and its scientific understandings in a way that seduced both the questioning and the faithful.
And he did so just as the Space Age was proposing that a we-are-exceptional-in-the-universe point of view was embarrassingly naïve.
Within a few years, “Chariots” had sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and Mr. von Däniken’s flock had transformed him into a prophet of the New Age.
In 1973, NBC aired a documentary based on Mr. von Däniken’s theories, and more than a quarter-million copies of “Chariots” sold in two days. (An earlier documentary on “Chariots” had not moved product at the same pace but had been nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature; it lost to a film on the Woodstock music festival.)
Braniff Airways began offering, for about $8,000, 15-day pilgrimages to South America, allowing devotees to pay respects at some of the sites that Mr. von Däniken had brandished as evidence.
Over the next half century, he published over 40 more books, which were translated into some 30 languages, and though none of them offered much variation from his original themes or ideas — subsequent titles included “Gods From Outer Space,” “The Gods Were Astronauts” and “Arrival of the Gods” — they collectively sold more than 70 million copies.
His energy seemed without limit. At one point, Mr. von Däniken was traveling 100,000 miles a year, surveying archaeological sites across the globe and lecturing in thickly accented English to like-minded brethren.
If the “ancient astronaut” theory has never been accepted into mainstream scientific circles, it long ago implanted itself into popular culture. In the mid-1970s, Marvel began a series of comic books, “The Eternals,” in which “alien celestials” pay a call to Earth and forge a race of superhumans. (The series was made into a movie in 2021.)
Ridley Scott incorporated ancient aliens into his 2012 film, “Prometheus.” The most famous maverick archaeologist ever, Indiana Jones, finds the answer to one vexing riddle in Peruvian geoglyphs: “From the ground, they don’t look like anything. But from the sky, only the gods can read them,” he says in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008).
In 2003, Mr. von Däniken and a group of investors opened Mystery Park, near Interlaken, Switzerland, where visitors can appraise his theories as they amble through pavilions resembling pyramids and ziggurats. (In 2009, the destination was renamed JungfrauPark.)
“I think it is snake oil,” one magazine writer confessed in considering Mr. von Däniken’s ideas, “but, yes, what if it is all true? I am putty in his hands.”
Erich von Däniken was born on April 14, 1935, in the town of Zofingen, in northern Switzerland. His father, Otto von Däniken Sr., was a tailor who owned a small clothing factory, and his mother, Magdalena Weiss, helped run the restaurant her family owned.
When Erich was 17, his father pulled him out of the Collège Saint-Michel, a Jesuit secondary school in Fribourg, Switzerland, and apprenticed him to a Swiss hotelier. Erich never returned to school of any kind, but the biblical passages that the Jesuits forced him to translate from Latin and Greek into German propelled him to a larger examination of the world’s religions and mythologies. That deities across cultures so often revealed themselves to humans from the sky, he said, led him to formulate his astronaut-god theory. (He later acknowledged that others had proposed similar theories first.)
He wrote the manuscript for what became “Chariots of the Gods” while managing the Hotel Rosenhügel in Davos. At the hotel’s bar one day, he met the editor of a Swiss science magazine, who introduced Mr. von Däniken to an executive at Econ-Verlag, a Swiss publishing house. Econ-Verlag agreed to print 6,000 copies of what was originally titled “Erinnerungen an die Zukunft,” or “Memories of the Future,” but only after hiring Wilhelm Roggersdorf, who had edited the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, to rework much of it.
By December 1968, the book was a best seller in Germany. An English translation appeared the next year.
Mr. von Däniken wrote his second book from prison. In 1970, a Swiss court convicted him of fraud, forgery and embezzlement, determining that, as a hotel manager, he had falsified financial records to subsidize what the court called a “playboy” lifestyle. He served about a third of a three-and-a-half-year sentence.
Critics pointed to Mr. von Däniken’s criminal history as proof of a penchant for deception. But Mr. von Däniken seemed unfazed, even comparing himself to Jesus. “People don’t ask if Christ was convicted of a crime,” he told Playboy in 1974. “What has that to do with the message Christ brought?”
Mr. von Däniken married Elisabeth Skaja, a homemaker, in 1960. They had two children, a son, Peter, who was born in 1960 and died two years later, and a daughter, Cornelia. Survivors include Mr. von Däniken’s wife, his daughter and two grandchildren.
He hated vacations and refused to retire, buoyed later in life by the success of the History Channel’s “Ancient Aliens,” which debuted in 2009 and on which he sometimes appeared.
He also regularly spoke at AlienCon, an annual gathering in the United States of E.T., U.F.O. and astronaut-god enthusiasts. A Chapman University poll in 2018 found that more than 40 percent of people in the United States believed aliens visited Earth in prehistory.
For Mr. von Däniken, that had always been less a belief than a calcified fact.
“Today, I know definitively that earth, our home, has been visited by extraterrestrials in the distant past,” he wrote in the foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of “Chariots.” He added, “I also know that those visitors promised our forebears they will return to earth. They will return — so humanity had better come to grips with that thought.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
Mike Peed is an editor for arts and culture.
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