An error of 6 percent is hardly the accuracy to be expected from interstellar navigators. Such a numbers game is easy to play, even if one takes the effort to get one’s numbers right. As was pointed out on an episode of National Educational Television’s Nova program titled “The Case of the Ancient Astronauts,” which was first broadcast in 1978, the height of the Washington Monument multiplied by forty gives the distance in light years to the second nearest star, Proxima Centauri. About the year 5330, will some von Daniken-like charlatan claim that ancient Americans were much too dumb to have built such a magnificent monument themselves and must, therefore, have had help from space travelers from a planet in the Proxima Centauri system?
Von Daniken (1970) also claimed that the building of the Pyramids was impossible for the Egyptians because they lacked the necessary technology. He says that the method of building the Pyramids remains unknown and that conventional methods could not have been used since the Egyptians didn’t have rope or trees to make rollers to move the stones. All this, as the reader might expect, is false. The methods of building the Pyramids are recorded in the Pyramids themselves. Rope, for example, was available in great quantity, and examples are preserved in many museums. Logs for rollers were widely used. The methods of quarrying the stone and transporting it by barge from the quarries to the site of the pyramids are also known (Story 1976).
If pyramids baffle von Daniken, mummies pose even more of a puzzle for him. Their existence suggests to him that the Egyptians were given the secret of immortality by their extraterrestrial visitors. Further, the extraterrestrials will be able to bring the mummies back to life when they return. In an interview broadcast on the Nova program mentioned above, von Daniken said the extraterrestrials might have told Pharaoh, “Listen, we come back let’s say in 5,000 years, we are able to reconstruct your body, if you only take care that we find at least a few living cells of your body, but be careful, take your brain away into a separate pot because if we want to construct also the same memory as you had, we need your brain separately.” In his 1970 book he says that mummies are “incomprehensible” (p. 101) and that the techniques of mummification remain a mystery to modern science. This is all totally false.
Like the techniques used to build the Pyramids, the techniques used in mummification developed gradually during the history of Egypt. Harris and Weeks (1973) describe this development briefly and then discuss in more detail the thirteen separate steps involved in mummification during the New Kingdom. Examination of the steps shows the ridiculous nature of von Daniken’s claims regarding the purpose of mummification. Advanced as they were, the ancient Egyptians had little knowledge of the brain’s function. They viewed the brain as an organ of little importance (the understanding that the brain is the organ of the mind is a very modern one, dating only from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western thought). Thus, when the body was mummified, the brain was pulled out bit by bit through the nose, using long tweezers, and thrown away. Unlike the other internal organs, it was not saved in a separate jar. So much for bringing back Pharaoh, complete with his memories.
Von Daniken (1970) claimed that the Egyptians mummified their leaders and important individuals so they could return from the dead and suggests they got the idea of immortality from the ancient astronauts. He says that mummification was intended to help preserve the body for later restoration. In fact, the elaborate mummification ritual was designed to aid the trip to the other world. The internal organs (except the brain) were preserved because the dead would need them in the other world, just as in this one. Pets and servants were often killed and mummified so they could accompany the deceased to the other world. The Egyptians clearly did not believe that people came back from the dead. This is shown in the lovely “Song of the Harpers,” found inscribed on the walls of several tombs from the Middle Kingdom period:
In his later writings, von Daniken (1984) suggested that the famous curse on King Tutankhamen’s tomb may have been the result of some sort of extraterrestrial protection given the tomb. According to the usual legend, many of the individuals who opened Tut’s tomb when it first was found in 1922 died shortly thereafter under mysterious circumstances. The deaths are attributed to the curse allegedly placed on anyone who defiled the tomb. This curse was said to be inscribed on the door of the tomb when it was found. Randi (1978) analyzed the deaths supposedly due to the curse and found that the death rate was just what would be expected, given that many of the members of the expedition were quite elderly and that they were living in a country where modem sanitary facilities and health measures were lacking.
It has further been revealed (Frazier 1980–81) that the curse was a hoax in the first place. The security officer for the expedition, Richard Adamson, stated in 1980 that the curse story was dreamed up to keep would-be robbers away from the opened tomb. The news that the Curse of Tut had been a hoax did not stop an enterprising San Francisco policeman from suing the city for disability payments when he suffered a stroke while guarding the King Tut museum exhibit while it was in San Francisco in 1979. He claimed that Tut’s spirit “lashed out at him,” causing the stroke. The suit was dismissed (p. 12).
VON DANIKEN IN PERU
Another favorite von Daniken pseudomystery is the set of large designs found in the Nazca Desert of Peru. Intricate patterns of lines, pictures of giant birds, monkeys, spiders, and other animals, cover an area sixty by ten miles. Von Daniken suggested that the lines are the remains of an ancient “spaceport” and landing field. He doubted that primitive peoples could have produced the lines and figures without some extraterrestrial help through “instructions from an aircraft” (von Daniken 1970, p. 33).
In reality, the lines in the Nazca plain represent a complex astronomical calendar and observatory, testifying to the astronomical sophistication of the peoples who created them (Story 1976; Kosok and Reiche 1949; Krupp 1978; Hadingham 1987). Von Daniken’s contempt for “primitive” peoples is shown when he belittles their ability to create such large figures on their own. How, he asks, could they have created the nearly perfect circles found in some of the figures? Simple—dig a hole and place a stake in it. Tie a rope of a certain length to the top of the stake. Stretch the rope to its full length and then walk in a circular pattern. The stake, moving freely around in the unfilled hole, will turn and the rope, maintaining its length, will allow one to trace out a nearly perfect circle. Certainly the people who created the Nazca designs thought of this simple method. Nickell (1982–83) has shown that it is possible to produce a full-size duplicate of a Nazca drawing—440 feet long—using only “sticks and cord such as the Nazcas might have employed” (p. 42). It took six people about a day and a half to complete the figure.
In his other six major books, von Daniken creates hundreds of other pseudomysteries. The books are masterpieces of distortion, evasion, and deceptive writing, all in support of his half-baked ideas. Like a true proponent of pseudoscience, von Daniken does not revise his theories or claims in light of new evidence. For example, in
