The hotel manager who invented an alien genre

Well, let's get away from the American descent into fascism for a minute, and note that Erich Von Daniken, who presumably made a squillion dollars from inventing a whole genre of amateur speculation about aliens in history, has died.

Here's the lengthy New York Times story about him.   I mean, I suppose he gives hope to anyone who thinks their crackpot theories might make them very rich:

When Erich was 17, his father pulled him out of the Collège Saint-Michel, a Jesuit secondary school in Fribourg, Switzerland, and apprenticed him to a Swiss hotelier. Erich never returned to school of any kind, but the biblical passages that the Jesuits forced him to translate from Latin and Greek into German propelled him to a larger examination of the world’s religions and mythologies. That deities across cultures so often revealed themselves to humans from the sky, he said, led him to formulate his astronaut-god theory. (He later acknowledged that others had proposed similar theories first.)

He wrote the manuscript for what became “Chariots of the Gods” while managing the Hotel Rosenhügel in Davos. At the hotel’s bar one day, he met the editor of a Swiss science magazine, who introduced Mr. von Däniken to an executive at Econ-Verlag, a Swiss publishing house. Econ-Verlag agreed to print 6,000 copies of what was originally titled “Erinnerungen an die Zukunft,” or “Memories of the Future,” but only after hiring Wilhelm Roggersdorf, who had edited the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, to rework much of it. 

By December 1968, the book was a best seller in Germany. An English translation appeared the next year.

Mr. von Däniken wrote his second book from prison. In 1970, a Swiss court convicted him of fraud, forgery and embezzlement, determining that, as a hotel manager, he had falsified financial records to subsidize what the court called a “playboy” lifestyle. He served about a third of a three-and-a-half-year sentence.

 I think the book and his ideas only became popular in the rest of the world after this:

In 1973, NBC aired a documentary based on Mr. von Däniken’s theories, and more than a quarter-million copies of “Chariots” sold in two days. 

I guess that is the documentary I have a vague memory of watching as a 13 or 14 year old on Australian TV.  (Or was there a movie release of a documentary?  I can't remember.)   Whatever I saw, I remember it was big was on the spooky music and atmosphere.

But, I was never convinced.  It wasn't long that the pushback from actual experts was out, within a year or two, and I felt justified in my original cautious approach.   

I am sure I have mentioned this before, but I do remember being a little creeped out by another "aliens and religion are connected" idea, which struck closer to my Catholicism.  There was a book in my high school library about the "miracle of the sun" at Fatima in 1917 which pointed out that some descriptions of what people said they saw sounded awfully like a disk shaped object in the sky putting itself between the people on the ground and the sun.   Of course, this was 40 years before disk shaped UFOs became something in the popular imagination.   (It is also before the vastness of the universe was even understood.)

I can't find details of that book through Perplexity.  It notes that there was a book from Portuguese authors in the 1990s on the same topic, but it can't find a whole book about it from the 1970's.  But I am sure it was a high school library book I found - and therefore I am sure it was from well before the 1990's.

Perplexity does point out that famous UFO researched Jacques Vallee was the first to claim it was a UFO event as part of his 1970's books.   But I have never read them, and I am 100% sure that it was a book entirely devoted to the Fatima miracle.

This isn't an important topic, but its curious that such a book would be lost to AI....