I flagged here last year that a new Erich von Daniken book was on the way (though it was only in German at the time). Well… now it’s on the way (August 2009) in English, too, courtesy of Legendary Times Books, with the openly provocative title “History Is Wrong“.
Curiously enough, EvD not only takes on all the usual fringe suspects (the Voynich Manuscript, the Piri Reis Map, the Antikythera Mechanism, etc), but also talks of nn underground labyrinth in Ecuador containing “an extensive library of thousands of gold panels“. And yes, you’re way ahead of me: he does indeed put forward evidence linking this not only to the Book of Enoch, but also to the Mormons.
Of course, there are plenty of people out there who would readily retitle this latest Danikenian meisterwerk as “von Daniken Is Wrong“: and I’d be hard-pressed to say from what I’ve read of it so far that this would be vastly unfair. All the same, perhaps his book will reach out to a whole new generation of gullible open-minded readers, who have managed to spend their short lives without being exposed to his individual breathless brand of cultural syncretism. Or, given the million websites that have sprung up to follow on his footsteps, might he have left it too late to return to the fray – essentially, has the Net made von Daniken redundant?
While von Daniken does get you to realize that there are a lot of facets of history that don’t quite fit — his theories do an immense disservice to the simple fact that humans throughout history have been able to come up with both bizarre ideas and stupendous feats of engineering all on their own without any assistance from ancient “little green men”.
The sad fact is that the interest generated by the whole “Ancient Astronaut Phenomenon” side-tracked a lot of genuine research. The study of medieval “Portolan Maps” detailed in Charles Hapgood’s book “Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings” being a prominent example.