A review by violetturtledove
Chariots of the Gods: 50th Anniversary Edition by Erich von Däniken

reflective medium-paced

1.0

Oh boy. So I did go into this book with a sort of morbid curiosity and a good handful of salt. I expected hilarious rubbish but to be honest the hilarity is minimal. 

This actually reads more like a manifesto on the future of research rather than putting forth proof of a theory, and some of this I can get behind. I can see the value of being open-minded and not trying to make new evidence fit pre-existing theories. I'm less convinced about the 'focus all our research on space travel' idea. 

The actual 'evidence' such as it is, is presented in quite a random order, scattered among lectures about the importance of space research and looking at evidence impartially. The latter of course being undermined by the authors assumption that everything we can't explain must be aliens.

There's also a strong undercurrent of all sorts of unsavoury theories (primitive people couldn't possibly have been this intelligent, space travellers 'impregnating females' to improve the race etc) so it's not entirely a surprise when the author goes to a Nazi scientist for a quote (although hilariously the nazi doesn't even agree with him - oh to be a fly on the wall for that conversation!)

So, i went into this expecting it to be bad, and it was but not quite in the entertaining way I thought it would be. Still a historical document of a sort, with all the conspiracy theories it influenced, and a demonstration of how optimistic people were about space travel at this time.