Chariots of The Gods-Blasts From The Past

10 November 2009, 10:29 pm

“Chariots of the Gods” by Erich von Daniken was one of those books that helped make Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of so much fun to watch. For some reason The History Channel was walking down the familiar paths of Chariots of The Gods this morning in a program called “Ancient Aliens” and I caught about an hour of it. It was a fun show that gave the ideas a little more credit than they likely deserve.

The basic idea here is that space aliens were busy about four or five thousand years ago helping the ancient humans build things like pyramids and calendars and supplying them with really detailed maps of parts of the worlds they would never go anywhere near. This is all great stuff.

Of course, almost everything in Chariots of The Gods has been debunked and shown to be at best exaggerations and at worst out right fraud. Like Dianetics, it makes a good read, so long as you don’t spend too much time thinking about what it says.

Among the many cool and interesting things in Chariots of The Gods is the idea that human could not have built the pyramids by themselves in only 22 years, that there are a number of ancient toys that look a lot like more airplanes, and that a dessert in South America is filled with odd lines that look a lot like airport runways.

As Mulder was so famous for saying, I Want To Believe, but I have some of unsolved mysteries have since been solved. The Mayans didn’t just disappear one day, they over-farmed the land and starved to death. It is difficult for us today to think about building the pyramids by hand, but them we don’t have a near infinite supply of slave labor to do all the heavy lifting for us. Giant figures that can only see identified from the air are interesting, but they are possible to make with nothing more than two people, a long rope, and design.

Still, like UFOs and The Loch Ness Monster, there is something irresistible about the idea that our destiny was shaped by some unknown aliens who seemed to have a little too much time on their hands. Chariots of The Gods is interesting, and it is fun to think about.