Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken (Bantam Books, 1971)

In my last post, I mentioned Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? to introduce a Ken Bulmer (as Manning Norvil) heroic fantasy trilogy. When I first read Chariots, as an imaginative young lad of 13 or so, I believed he was on to something, and I went looking for more “exposes” of hidden history.

Boy did I find them. The book’s success, which appeared in German in 1968 and in English in 1971, spawned a TV movie In Search of Ancient Astronauts (1973), which was hosted by Rod Serling. And almost immediately other and related books and films began to appear.

Older books written about similar “lost history” and about UFOs got new life and were republished in new formats. And new works on the theme continued to be published all the way to… now. Von Däniken continued to write them himself, until his death on January 10 of this year.

For about three years as a young teen I read quite a few of these kinds of books, with growing skepticism, and finally with a bit of ire at people writing fictions as nonfiction. I also began reading books that looked behind the scenes of such fare, like Crash Go the Chariots.

Crash Go the Chariots by Clifford Wilson (Lancer Books, 1972)

Note that I’m not advocating for anyone to read Chariots of the Gods? or any of the follow ups or even the “precursors.” I’m just showing you the ones I read. I don’t deny that the universe is a mysterious place and things happen that science does not understand, but I’ve been trained in the scientific method and the arguments made in these books are not compelling as real history.

I have, however, used these books in my college classes to teach students about skepticism and how to recognize science versus pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is often wrapped in exciting packages, and a characteristic of humans is that we love a mystery and love to “know” things others don’t. These kinds of books feed those needs, but — when treated as nonfiction — they actually retard our development of an understanding of the universe.

As I first explored these lost history books myself, I found there’d been a long thread of them before von Däniken, dating back — perhaps — to Plato and his writings about the lost land of Atlantis. In 1926 a British author named James Churchward wrote a book called The Lost Continent of Mu, and a sequel called The Children of Mu (1931), which I read in much later editions. A third Mu book (Sacred Symbols) was published just before Churchward died but reissued in 1972 on the heels of Chariots of the Gods. Mu had supposedly existed in the Pacific Ocean.

I also read Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision, which was first published in 1950, where he advocated for a catastrophic history of our Solar System. Specifically, he argued that Venus had once been part of Jupiter, was expelled by the gas giant and sent on a course to its present location right through the orbits of Earth and other inner planets to cause great disruptions.

Although all these ideas have been rejected by science, they have inspired numerous fictions. I already discussed Ken Bulmer’s Odan series. Churchward is mentioned in some of Lovecraft’s short stories. Philip Wylie’s When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide owe a debt to Velikovsky, and quite a few of Lin Carter’s works, including his Thongor and Zanthodon series are based on these sorts of ideas.

When taken with the proverbial grain of salt, they can be great fun.

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Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.