Ancient Aliens – The Von Däniken Legacy: A young man’s spiritual journey. A controversial bestseller. And a scientific theory that threatened to change the world. Just what are the facts behind Erich von Daniken and the Ancient Astronaut theory?
Ancient Aliens is an American television series that premiered on April 20, 2010, on the History channel. Produced by Prometheus Entertainment in a documentary style, the program presents hypotheses of ancient astronauts and proposes that historical texts, archaeology, and legends contain evidence of past human-extraterrestrial contact. The show has been widely criticized by historians, cosmologists, archaeologists and other scientific circles for presenting and promoting pseudoscience, pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology.
Ancient Aliens – The Von Däniken Legacy
Erich von Däniken puts forward many beliefs about the Great Pyramid of Giza in his 1968 book Chariots of the Gods?, saying that the ancient Egyptians could not have built it, not having sufficiently advanced tools, leaving no evidence of workers, and incorporating too much ‘intimate’ knowledge about the Earth and its geography into the design. However, the technique of construction is well understood, the tools the Egyptians used are known, marks left in the quarries by those tools are still visible, and many examples of the tools are preserved in museums.
Von Däniken claims that it would have taken the Egyptians too long to cut all the blocks necessary and drag them to the construction site in time to build the Great Pyramid in only 20 years; but a Nova documentary demonstrates how quickly a block of stone can be cut with the available tools and shows examples of the rollers used in their transportation.
Von Däniken also said that there were too many problems with their tools, and, according to him, the Egyptians had no prehistory so they could not have possibly built these large pyramids, even though there are pyramids in Egypt that were built before the Great Pyramid. Because he believed that there was no prehistory, von Däniken put forward that there is nothing known about how, when, or why these pyramids were built.
