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Chariots of the Erich von Däniken
40 Plays5 years ago
This week Josh and M investigate one Erich von Däniken and his "Chariots of the Gods?"
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
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Transcript
Introductions & Accents
00:00:09
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Conspiracy? I'm going to be making statements as questions. You're going to talk like a New Zealander? But even more so. How can you speak even more so than a New Zealander? I don't know, because I, Josh Addison, am a New Zealander, as is Dr. M. R.X. Dendith. Although sometimes I do live in Romania. It's true. But yeah, I mean, the New Zealand accent is known for the rising terminal. You just said that's true?
00:00:47
Speaker
That's true. Aw, yeah. Aw, yeah. That's pretty true, eh?
World's Sexiest Accents & Listener Loyalty
00:00:52
Speaker
Blow it in the pie. But that's an accent thing. The world's sexiest accent. The world's sexiest accent. South Africa was second though.
00:01:03
Speaker
Sorry to our South African listeners, but you do not have a sexy accent. No, no, I'm sorry, you really don't. I mean, there are a couple of South African accents, of course. There's sort of, there's kind of the English one and then there's the Africana one. And then there's one that Kevin Kline did in that film, Escape from Something, where he played the South African photographer who helped
00:01:26
Speaker
Black South Africans escape South Africa and attempt one of the world's worst Afrikaans accents. It's amazing. We could not butcher the Afrikaans accent the way that Kiven Kline butchered that accent. So this is why you come to the podcast as guides.
00:01:44
Speaker
Not that. It's the pop culture stuff which really brings you back week after week after week and winnows down our audience to a very select base of people who probably should be giving us more patron money, shouldn't they Josh? They should. See that was a statement that I phrased it as a question. There's a reason why we're going to be saying statements but appending a question mark to the end. Really? It will become relevant when we get to the main topic. Maybe we should just leave there as a tantalising hint of what might lie ahead.
00:02:13
Speaker
What might lie ahead? What might lie ahead? Should we do the news?
Conspiracy Theories in the News
00:02:17
Speaker
That was an actual question. Yes we shall. Yes we shall. Breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news.
00:02:29
Speaker
In local and also stupid news, like the story about the satanic horse stabber in small town Aotearoa earlier this year, we have another occult story. This time it's about an Auckland couple who discovered, when they replaced their carpets, apparent satanic symbols on their floorboards. Said symbols are a, and I quote, ritual circle,
00:02:52
Speaker
which is literally a circle, and something which looks like a five-pointed star enclosed in a circle. And as one of the occupants of the house said, there's no weird feeling or vibes or things like that, it's just a normal family home with strange drawings on the floor we never knew about. As to why they think the symbols are occultic in nature, well,
00:03:14
Speaker
I believe there is something occult about it because of all read or seen movies with those items described, but I haven't had a chance to explore. A quality news article from one of the country's only leading newspapers. I think you're a little uncharitable there.
00:03:30
Speaker
I mean, I don't think it's evidence of some sort of satanic cult. It's probably just evidence of Goths. But it's not like Celtic New Zealand where they're interpreting random squiggles as satanic symbols. It's a very clear pentagram pentacle. What do you call it when it's a five-pointed star inside a pentagram rather than a five-pointed star inside a circle? Because it's one of those anyway.
00:03:53
Speaker
It is indeed, correct. I'm sure one of our listeners who's actually au fait with the occult will be able to correct Josh as to what a pentacle versus a pentagram is. I'm just focused on the, we've all read or seen movies with those items described, but I haven't had a chance to explore, along with there are no funny feelings about the house. It's not a news story.
00:04:15
Speaker
It's interesting. I don't know. I personally know people who have put weird things on the floor before they laid down carpet just to mess with the people. I removed a mirror from a house once, drew things behind and then put the mirror back on the wall. Well, there you go. So it could be exactly that sort of shenanigans. Three people die of a heart attack because
Social Media Bans & Reactions
00:04:34
Speaker
of that.
00:04:34
Speaker
And frankly, if I played that sort of a joke, I would want to see it in the newspapers. I'd feel like my life had had some sort of meaning. You've done a lot of house renovations. Have you ever been tempted to put things behind floorboards or leave suspicious Blair Witch Project style stuff between skirting boards?
00:04:55
Speaker
It's such a pain in the ass that I haven't really had time for that. I should. I acknowledge that I should do that sort of thing. I mean, you've been putting on a roof in your laundry recently. Sure. You should have been putting something up there. Like one of your children. Well, yeah, I don't know this time yet. We're not done. But anyway, anyway, anyway.
00:05:12
Speaker
You're probably all very aware that Facebook and its subsidiary, Instagram, that's right, Facebook owns Instagram. And WhatsApp. Have banned some notable people of late. Paul Joseph Watson, Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones. Which is the second time he's been banned. The word banned doesn't seem to mean what it used to mean. Indeed. And Laura Loomer.
00:05:33
Speaker
Luma, a formal rebel media reporter and someone who worked with James O'Keefe. That's the name I can never remember every time we mentioned Jacob Wohl. And I say, who's that other guy? I couldn't recall whether we mentioned that on the main episode or the bonus episode. Otherwise, I was going to make that point in the news. It's not the first time I got there. Anyway, James O'Keefe, a name I shall never forget from now on, he worked with him on Project Veritas.
00:06:01
Speaker
who stated mission was, and I quote, to investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more ethical and transparent society. In short, exposed liberals for the socialist scum that they are.
00:06:20
Speaker
Anyway, Luma, who protested her loss of a Twitter account by chaining herself to the door of Twitter HQ for several hours, uh, when it got too cold she had to beg for her shekels to be cut free. Which is true. Shekels, rather, not her shekels. I assume she wanted to hang on to them in case she was wanting to.
00:06:35
Speaker
to buy stuff from Israel. I don't know. That's not, is that even currency anymore? I think it's ancient currency. There we go. She had to be set free. She's also lost her Facebook and Instagram accounts for, for example, advocating that the Santa Fe High School shooting was a false flag, painting a conservative bomb maker as a member of Antifa and the like. Now, she recently appeared on an Alex Jones show and it went something like this.
00:07:05
Speaker
Does anybody understand how ruined my life is? I'm sick of it. I don't want to listen to people tell me that I'm a conspiracy theorist. They don't know what it's like to be me. Life is ruined, Alex.
00:07:19
Speaker
No, I understand. I just think you need to go with it. Now, we're not playing that clip to cast dispersions on Luma for her obvious distress. Throughout the 20-minute segment on the show, she is overall quite calm and measured in the discussion. Rather, it's the quite cold and calculating way Jones talks to her, as evidenced in that short snippet, saying that she just needs to go with the flow and accept that she's a conspiracy theorist. It's almost chilling how little Jones seems to care about the situation generally. I guess the advertising dollars on InfoWars are still okay.
00:07:46
Speaker
And they must be, because they're still raking it in as far as anyone is concerned. I mean, it does seem that for certain people, like say Milo Yiannopoulos, being deplatform from social media really has destroyed his career. But Alex Jones didn't need social media. He had an empire before social media existed, per se.
00:08:09
Speaker
And so he's been able to muddle on through whilst Johnny come lately to mix all of my metaphors, having a much harder time of it as their social media access appears to be disappearing, which takes us to our next news item. Because Jones might be calm in the face of the storm, but we can't say that about his protege, one Paul Joseph Watson, who is now arguing for full communism now.
00:08:38
Speaker
Well, that seems to be the consequence at least of the argument he's putting forward, that social media access is a civil right, and the government should step in and regulate the corporations which run social media to enforce that right. Now we here at the podcast's guide to the conspiracy are all for state regulation of all of the things, so we're glad to see even alt-writers
00:09:03
Speaker
are now admitting things could be better if the state stepped in and curtailed private interests. Although, I do suspect this isn't what Watson and Company really want. They don't want full communism now. Rather, they want their identity as conservatives to be protected.
00:09:23
Speaker
which is odd given their opposition generally to identity politics and the idea there should be safe special places for snowflakes, say, like themselves.
00:09:35
Speaker
Well, yes, I don't think a measure of hypocrisy should be any sort of big surprise coming from these people. And I mean, there are legitimate issues to be had with a private corporation like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like, having the ability to essentially control access to audiences. Although claiming that having social media is a civil right
00:10:02
Speaker
does seem like a fairly interesting extension of the notion of civil rights. It's not as if people have a right to a platform, which is essentially what Watson is arguing for. Yeah, I read an interesting article by Corey. Now is it Dr Al or Dr Ov?
00:10:21
Speaker
Dr L. I think. Called steering with the windscreen wipers. I did it recently. That doesn't sound very useful for steering a car. Exactly, but it's a metaphor. Metaphor for what? Basically antitrust regulation kind of got gutted in the 80s under Reagan, which would be the tool you'd want to use to take down these sort of monopolies
00:10:44
Speaker
like your Googles and your Facebooks. And because the government no longer has that tool, they're fiddling around the edges with other things, but it doesn't have any effect because the things they're fiddling with aren't designed to do what they wanted to do. So it's like steering a car with your windscreen wipers. Are you talking about the inadvertent effects of capitalism from the 80s?
00:11:03
Speaker
A little bit. Good. Good. Keep that up. I like it. I like it a lot. Anyway, here on the podcaster's guide to communism now. Full communism. We don't want any half-hearted communism. We want full communism. And where do we want it?
00:11:19
Speaker
Now? Good. Right. I want the full communism. Sounds a little bit like some sort of oddly specific sex act. Or a really, really boring meal for brunch. I want the full communism. So it'll just be beans, more beans. And the potato. And the potato uncooked, yes. I want the full communism. And I want it now.
00:11:40
Speaker
Right, well let us continue communistically. Which means the beans will be cold. Well, obviously. Cold beans, now. With communism ringing in our ears, we should carry on to the update section, I suppose. With no retractions. Updates. And retractions.
00:12:02
Speaker
Military whale update. My favourite kind of update. Last week we discussed the Russian military beluga whale found off the coast of Norway. Well it seems said whale has defected. It's refusing to leave Norwegian waters and so has likely decided it no longer wants to be part of the Russian military complex. Either that or it's now a dangerous underwater double agent. Whatever the case we'll keep you updated on military whale news while it's still hot.
00:12:26
Speaker
And hot it is. Defecting whales from Russia. Are we going to expect some kind of poisoning attempt in Norway?
00:12:33
Speaker
I assume, but a bit of polonium off the coast of Norway. Would be an absolute disaster. Yes. Communism. Check out Wall Update. Last week we brought you the news about the latest Wall-based smear campaign where he and one Jack Berkman tried to fabricate sexual molestation charges. Well this week Wall is at it again. A planned protest of a Wall Berkman press conference turned out to be organised by
00:13:00
Speaker
Jacob Woah! Yes, the Eventbrite page of the event, the Protest Against Homophobic Bigots, listed as a contact address and email Woah had used previously to run a petition against Ilhan Omar. Now, you might
00:13:16
Speaker
saying, well, that's conveniently stupid, must be a false flag. But given Wall's other acts of gross negligence and stupidity, this really is par for the cause when it comes to Jacob Wall and his inability to organise a conspiracy with even one other person. He really just does seem to be heroically incompetent, that guy.
00:13:39
Speaker
Marvelous, isn't it? It is a little bit. Unfortunately, he's just still he still keeps getting airtime somehow much like James O'Keefe a man whose name I've never ever forgotten in my life. It's true. You're always talking about James O'Keefe. Remembering his name exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So what was the thing they're investigating with Project Veritas? That was the the supposed sexual assault things against Robert Mueller trying to discredit the investigation there. Are you sure about that? No.
00:14:09
Speaker
Cool. Was it when they were investigating Acorn? I don't know. James O'Keefe, that's the name I remember. Don't ask me about your project Veritas. And, and fecal, I don't know how to say fecal matter produced by Planned Parenthood, but I actually mean to say fetal matter produced by... Yeah, fetal matter, right. So what did they call the malaria sexual assault smear? Did they not have a cool, cool codename?
00:14:31
Speaker
wasn't that wasn't the the Mueller thing actually Jacob Wahl yes you know nothing John I know there's a man called James O'Keefe that's all that's the only thing I know now I can't remember my children's names anymore but James O'Keefe will live forever in my mind children's names are James and O'Keefe well it all works then okay before we go any further down this dark alley perhaps we should go to the main topic
Erik von Däniken & Ancient Aliens
00:15:00
Speaker
The main topic? The main topic? Let's jump in a chariot and storm right on through. Like the gods? Hmm. That didn't work. That worked a little bit.
00:15:15
Speaker
I do feel I should start with... Yep, that'll do. You got all your Stargate out of you a couple of episodes ago. It builds up like a pustule which has to be released every so often with the lancet of Eric Von Daniken.
00:15:38
Speaker
Fair enough. Yes, Eric Von Daniken. So we did, a month or so ago now, we were talking about your stargates and so on and so forth, which was based on the bit of the old ancient alien hypothesis, Anunnaki coming and giving us stargates and stuff like that. But we mentioned Eric Von Daniken at the time and at the time said, you know, we've never really devoted a whole episode to Eric Von Daniken. And then we said, we probably should devote an episode to Eric Von Daniken. And so today we're devoting an episode to Eric Von Daniken.
00:16:08
Speaker
Will you just keep making that noise as long as I keep talking? If I stop, will you say something instead? It's basically the resumption of the phenomena, which is a really, really old reference by podcast things. Now, whenever we talk about ancient avianskin,
00:16:26
Speaker
I will do that all episode long unless you stop there. I assume you're actually always doing it in your head at all times and it's just sometimes you let it out. Sometimes like a bagpipe I get the pressure around the stomach and it just blurts out and when you say Eric Von Daniken I feel this kind of
00:16:43
Speaker
pressure around my vital organs that forces out a... You probably want to get that looked at, but not now, because now what we're looking at is Erik Fontanikin, who of course was made famous in the late 1960s with his book, Chariots of the Gods, with a quite deliberate question mark that we'll get
00:17:03
Speaker
We'll get to that question mark, but we will be referring to it by chucking in a completely unnecessary gratuitous is the word I'm looking for. Gratuitous question marks all over the place. All over the place. Now tell me Josh, who is Eric Von Denneken?
00:17:20
Speaker
Well, Erich von Denneken, he's a man. A man with a book, a book called Chariots of the Gods. Where's he from? He's from, I assume, Germany. Actually, I didn't even bother looking at you. Swiss German. Swiss German. Oh, there we go. With a name like von Denneken. So he's been at it since the 1960s, but it's still going strong today. And indeed, the book is now 50 years old, isn't it? Because it was officially gone. Indeed, it is a anniversary edition.
00:17:45
Speaker
late last year, beginning of this year, I'm a little bit hazy on timeframes at the moment, doing a lot of writing and thus, basically the only thing I understand are my own deadlines and not calendar time. But there was a 50th anniversary edition of Chariots of the Gods, lacking a question mark that came out very recently. And Vondenik has written a lot of books.
00:18:09
Speaker
Let's go through these books. I'll say one, you say the other. Just to get an idea of, and there's one we'll probably end up stopping on and go, huh? To get an idea of the kind of genre Erich von Denneken works on. So, cherry to the gods? Return to the stars. Gods from outer space. The gold of the gods. Miracles of the gods, a hard look at the supernatural. In search of ancient gods, my pictorial evidence for the impossible.
00:18:36
Speaker
According to the evidence, signs of the gods, the stones of Kiribati pathways to the gods, the gods in their grand design, the eighth wonder of the world, the eyes of the Sphinx, the newest evidence of extraterrestrial contact,
00:18:51
Speaker
The return of the gods, evidence of extraterrestrial visitations. Arrival of the gods, revealing the alien landing site of Nazca. The gods were astronauts, evidence of the true identities of the old quote-unquote gods. Odyssey of the gods, an alien history of ancient grace. History is wrong. Evidence of the gods. Twilight of the gods, the mine calendar, and the return of the extraterrestrials. Tomy and the planet of lies.
00:19:19
Speaker
Is that one of his to do did he write a kid's book or something? He wrote a fiction book based upon his supposedly non-fiction work. If you go to Amazon or Goodreads and look up reviews of Tomi and the Planet of Lies, even Eric Von Daniken's Storchis fans recommend he never write a piece of fiction
00:19:42
Speaker
ever again. Even true believers find this book to be an embarrassment because it's so badly written. And yet it wasn't enough to put him off writing altogether, because after that there was still remnants of the gods, a visual tour of alien influence in Egypt, Spain, France, Turkey and Italy, and... The gods never left us.
00:20:02
Speaker
And I should say these ones, so Chariots of the Gods, it's down here as 1969. I had it as 1968, but at any rate, he does one book every sort of two or three years from the late 60s to the mid 80s, takes a bit of a break, picks up again in 1996 and has again been putting out a book every two or three years up until just a few years ago. Indeed, Evidence of the Gods and Twilight of the Gods both came out in the same year. I'm not sure what the deal was there, but
00:20:32
Speaker
I wouldn't be surprised if large sections of both books are exactly the same or it's the one book which has been cut and twam. Indeed. He does repeat himself a lot. So he's been at it for a long time is the point. And you'll note he's really into the gold and the extraterrestrials.
00:20:51
Speaker
So, perhaps we should let him speak for himself here when it comes to spelling out exactly what he thinks and what all his books are about. If you go to his website, www.danakin.com, on the homepage he has this summary of his beliefs. This is what happened. Extraterrestrials visited our Earth many millennia ago. I'm going to do the study of fame over the top. Over the top. I'm sure you are. Shall I start again?
00:21:20
Speaker
This is what happened. Extraterrestrials visited our earth many millennia ago. They behaved similar to how current ethnologists behave today. They studied a few languages, visited different tribes, gave suggestions and disappeared sometime, however, with the promise to return in the distant future. Our Stone Age ancestors could not grasp what happened back then. They wrongfully believed that the extraterrestrials were gods. The supposed gods then wandered into our mythology and became the founders of many religions.
00:21:47
Speaker
And he then sort of goes on to talk about how he's been studying this for the last 65 years. In fact, he says, my work is now present in 40 volumes. So not just his own work and introductions to other books and reviews of other books and chapters and other books and presumably a whole parallel reality, which is just filled with Eric Von Dannigan's.
00:22:08
Speaker
And he sort of goes on to talk about a little bit of how science isn't willing to believe the things. They're not picking up what he's putting down. They're not buying what he's selling. But that's just because they're not ready to deal with it all. But they're going to be coming back. The gods will return. And then finally he runs it up. Then we will experience the god shock, which again sounds like some sort of obscure sexual practice.
00:22:34
Speaker
or one of those Norwegian death metal bands. God shock. God shock, yes. Be our God shock.
00:22:42
Speaker
So anyway, so he started in the early 68s with a title with a question mark at the end of it, but I think the question mark metaphorically disappeared fairly quickly and he seems to have been not dissuaded. Now, I'll quite happily admit, as a teenager, I read a lot of Erich von Däntniken, not because I was a believer in the ancient astronaut hypothesis,
00:23:04
Speaker
I simply found the kind of genre of ancient astronaut hypotheses to be quite fascinating because of the way it used evidence. And also was actually quite interesting for finding out little historical bits and pieces you didn't find out elsewhere. And I remember reading, I think, evidence of the gods. No, gold of the gods, which I had in a hardback, which had color plates in the middle. And one of the color plates is of
00:23:32
Speaker
Azteca or Mayan art, which Von Denneken says this is clearly a circuit diagram. And my father, being an electrician, I showed this to him and he pointed out it's obviously not an electronic diagram because nothing in the pictorial art is connected up. So things that might be resistors or LEDs or whatever you want to have it wouldn't work because they're not connected to anything whatsoever.
00:24:01
Speaker
So his grasp on evidence is always a little interesting. Yeah, maybe we'll look at evidence a little in a minute. That should be said to begin with though, he didn't invent the ancient alien hypothesis. He may not even have done any original work in the alien hypothesis. He certainly was
00:24:23
Speaker
has done the most to promote it, to get the theory out there. He's got the most attention, I would say. But yeah, so, His Charites of the Gods was published in 1968. In 1963, there was a book called 100,000 Years of Man's Unknown History by Robert Sheroux and Mr, I assume, Monsieur Sheroux,
00:24:44
Speaker
accused Von Daniken of copying him. Von Daniken then said, we probably both copied the 1960 book, The Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Poel and Jacques Bergier, which we'll talk about a little bit later as well. Which is a fairly interesting defense against plagiarism, which is what you're claiming, I plagiarized you. But we both know we plagiarized another third source now, don't we? And what's interesting about this
00:25:10
Speaker
is that both Robert and Eric settled and agreed to cross-promote each other's material. Also, subsequent editions of Chariots of the Guards also now credit Robert Chiroux and Poelz and Bouge as reference texts in the book. So Von Daniken at least admitted that the ideas had common currency, but what's more interesting is that Chiroux and Von Daniken went
00:25:40
Speaker
We can come to some kind of chord now, can't we? A gentleman's agreement about ancient astronauts.
00:25:47
Speaker
reminds me when someone wrote into the latest page of the comic, Preacher, and said, hey, Garth Ennis, the way you know how Jesse Custer's always talking to an imaginary John Wayne, didn't you just rip that off from True Romance, where Quentin Tarantino had Christian Slater's character talking to an imaginary Elvis? And Garth Ennis was like, I'm pretty sure he ripped off the same thing that we both ripped off the same thing. It's a thing writers do, I suppose. But there seems to, whereas that's one point of Preacher.
00:26:16
Speaker
That's what we call fiction. Well, it is fictional. So this is one of the fascinating things when we look at the Da Vinci Code and the way that the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail tried to sue Dan Brown for plagiarism. And as people pointed out, if Holy Blood, Holy Grail is a work of history, then it's quite appropriate that an author
00:26:43
Speaker
who uses history as a source for their fiction, can take historical events and then fictionalize them. You can really only accuse
00:26:55
Speaker
Dan Brown of plagiarising Holy Blood, Holy Grail, if you're also making the claim that your book is fictional too, at which point you can make some claim about ownership of the story. So in the same respect, you know, fiction writers will borrow ideas from other places, but when you're meant to be producing history, it's a slightly trickier situation.
00:27:23
Speaker
And also it's been pointed out that in 1966, Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovsky, I'm afraid I don't know who he is, but they wrote, in one of their books, they wrote about the possibility, or rather, in the context of talking about the possibility of alien life existing elsewhere in the galaxy, apparently they sort of mentioned the idea that, you know, they could have visited Earth back when we were cavemen, and we wouldn't have known not to make of it then.
00:27:47
Speaker
So it kind of sounds like one of those things about an idea whose time had come. A bunch of people were talking about it, and he was the one who managed to really capture the public's imagination. Well, I mean, when you think about the 60s, it is the great period of time where people start talking. The expanding of minds. But also talking about life outside the Earth, missions outside of Earth using space, using astronauts to investigate things. And then the obvious question, well, if we're going out into space to explore,
00:28:15
Speaker
have people come to us in the past, at which point seems reasonable to say, well, let's see if there's any evidence of that. And that's precisely the kind of thing that these authors we're talking about engage in, which is why it's Chariots of the Gods.
00:28:33
Speaker
Initially, at least. Yeah, because it is putting forward the hypothesis that maybe the stories of our ancient gods and our mythology is kind of a misremembered past when people from other planets came to visit us.
00:28:52
Speaker
and we weren't able to interpret that as people from other planets because we had no notion of that, so we re-encoded those stories and the miracles they performed, apparent miracles, as being the actions of our gods. Although, as we'll come to later on in this episode, only some of those stories are about
00:29:14
Speaker
gods being aliens. It turns out if you're a particular kind of white person, you don't tend to have ancient astronauts in your prehistory. But yes, you mentioned evidence so you should probably look at it. We've got Eric Von Dannock and he's putting forward the hypothesis
00:29:31
Speaker
The idea of what they call paleo-contact, that in our prehistory alien beings came to Earth, imparted alien wisdom on our prehistoric forebears, and the stories of these visitations has got encoded as sort of myths and legions of gods. So how does he try to go about proving this hypothesis?
00:29:54
Speaker
through archaeological evidence, Joshua. Let me tell you about some of his evidence. Please do. We're both from the reach of the world known as Polynesia. You'll be aware of a set of islands known to Europeans as the Easter Islands, and you'll be aware that these giant stone hens
00:30:16
Speaker
Stonehenge. Stonehenge. Stonehenge. So I'm mixing up saying Stonehenge and Stonehenge at the same time and now I'm of course thinking of that great song from Spinal Tap about Stonehenge and the tiny Stonehenge that they can make and the dwarf. And now I'm thinking about that Norwegian comedy song, Why Did They Build Stonehenge, which is actually one of the greatest comedy songs of all time.
00:30:42
Speaker
and you should definitely look up why did they build Stonehenge on YouTube. It's an absolute treat. Anyway, so you'll be aware that these Moai, the stone hens or heads of Easter Island are fairly famous. And of course for a long period of time they were famous because no one knew why they were built and no one could understand why they were quarried out of one part of the island and then moved to another. And more to the point how?
00:31:13
Speaker
how we didn't through massive deforestation or actually as people walked out actually walking them literally walking them with ropes to that they're actually fairly easy to move in much the same way you'll sort of wiggle a refrigerator into space just by
00:31:28
Speaker
Into space? Into us space, into the space. No, I just like the idea that you're wiggling refrigerators. Yes, I'm wiggling refrigerators into space. The world's lowest space program. And they say we don't have a space program in this country. Well, Josh is just wiggling refrigerators. A wiggle-based space program. So basically they got there by aliens. And also they're there because of aliens. And what do they represent, Joshua? Aliens. Yes.
00:31:54
Speaker
Yes, so there's a lot of this. There are sort of ancient megastructures like the Maya of Easter Island, like the Great Pyramid of Giza, like other great pyramids. Indeed, I believe some of the ones in Central America are even bigger than the ones in Egypt, some of the Mayan ones. He talks about the Nazca lines. He talks about the iron pillar of Delhi. Well, he did for a while. For a while, he talked about the iron pillar of Delhi. The pillar that never rusts.
00:32:21
Speaker
And it's as an example of something that we—you know, we don't know how this thing was made, and therefore the knowledge of how to make it must have been given to us by aliens, and we've since forgotten it because we never really understood it in the first place. And, unfortunately, in pretty much all of these cases, the claims that he's making about what we know about these things are just plain wrong.
00:32:43
Speaker
Yes. He'll say things like, we don't know who made the Great Pyramid of Giza. We don't know where the workers were, what they did. And he'll say, no, no, we know exactly where they were. We found the ruins of the settlements where the workers who worked on the pyramids lived. We also do know how they did it. We actually, you know, there has been a lot of work done and we know how it works. We also know why they did it. They're big, big tombs. Big, big tombs. I mean, that was the thing about Egyptian culture.
00:33:11
Speaker
Egyptians believed that because life was ephemeral and after life was forever, you built your cities and things basically out of wood because they were temporary structures, and because only certain people actually went to Egyptian heaven, notably the rich and the powerful, you built their
00:33:29
Speaker
last respites their homes and death out of stone so they would in fact last forever and ever and Nothing seems to last quite as long as a pyramid a giant stone pyramid. Yes And indeed the iron pillar of Delhi. It's it's I mean, it's basically it's a feat of Metallurgy, I suppose it's to do with the chemical composition It's got phosphorus or something mixed in with the iron which causes a thin layer on the outside that basically is a layer of oxygen
00:33:57
Speaker
which protects it from rusting. Yep and although apparently it does it has rusted just a little bit anyway but so a lot of that stuff is him making concrete claims about we do or don't what we do or don't know and those claims are just plain wrong then you get into the the more interpretive side of things.
00:34:16
Speaker
Like light bulbs in Egypt. Light bulbs in Egypt, yes. And space men on the cover of the seal, the blids of Mayan sarcophagi. So one of the things he points out, the one thing I remember from chariots of the gods, no, sorry, two things I remember from chariots of the gods. One is chariots of the gods. It's getting to be like, you know, in the outcast song with Jackson, where it's forever, forever, ever.
00:34:44
Speaker
I can't hear the lyric forever without cocking my head to one side, and I can't say Chariots of the Gods without the same thing happening now, and I'm afraid I'm going to do myself an injury. This is the real thing. Don't, don't.
00:34:59
Speaker
So, I remember a picture of, I can't even remember where the picture was from, of a figure with basically a big round circle around their head, a very sort of primitive stylised figure, and that being obviously a picture of a person wearing a space suit.
00:35:16
Speaker
But the main one, and the one which sort of gets brought up a lot, is the cover of the sarcophagus of Pakal from the Mayan city of Palenque, which is the one that he believes shows an astronaut sitting in a spaceship taking off. You have this man, this figure sort of crouched seemingly with his hands at some sorts of controls with sort of a mechanism below him that appears to have flames coming out the bottom and some sort of structure above him. And he basically looks at that and says that's clearly a depiction
00:35:44
Speaker
of a spaceship by people who didn't know what a spaceship was. Now the problem with this is that A, making interpretations from ancient art without the context under which the art was made is always a fool's
00:35:59
Speaker
errand, but also there's a particular problem with this particular image in that it's not an image on its own. No. It's part of a sequence of images showing the person in question being devoured. So you get basically
00:36:18
Speaker
Stage one, stage two, I think there are five images in the sequence. And Von Denneken kind of centers himself on the middle one that looks the most like someone in a spaceship, ignoring the before and after shot effectively that show, no, the context of the image is quite different.
00:36:38
Speaker
And the people who know anything about mine iconography will say, well, no, those things coming out the bottom, those are serpent, those are bearded serpents, a common thing in mine. Things like what appear to be flames are actually the beards of the serpents. That's a bird above. It's sort of showing his showing him being caught between sort of the underworld and the afterlife.
00:36:58
Speaker
Von Daniken makes a point of the fact that his hands appear to be grasping these controls of the spaceship, and yet they point out, well, no, that's a hand symbol. I assume it's sort of analogous to the various sort of two-finger-up things that you get in Christian iconography. It's just, you know, it's a symbol you see them making. And indeed, there are other figures in other parts of this phrase that are making the exact same symbol, but their hands aren't anywhere near anything that look like spaceship
Technology, Religion, and Alien Theories
00:37:23
Speaker
controls.
00:37:23
Speaker
Obviously they're using the control interface from Minority Report. Obvious, well good point. Maybe he was just a little bit behind his time. He doesn't have the imagination to be able to think that maybe controls will be based upon using a really bad Kinect sensor for the Xbox. Yeah, so do you mean the user Kinect on an Xbox?
00:37:44
Speaker
Ah, no. Great idea, terrible implementation. Yeah, well terrible implementation for a game console. I saw a really cool thing at the Auckland Museum one time, had this thing where it was like a big box of, you know that sort of kinetic sand stuff kids play with? It was kind of like grey kinetic sand and there was a projector above and it was projecting images of little worms crawling around on the sand and you could dig
00:38:08
Speaker
tunnel dig dig trails in the sand and the worms would follow the trails that you dug and it was really clever and I looked up and it was an Xbox connect that was that was the Mapping the surface of the thing and I was thought so that was so they could be quite clever But not as a motion. Why are we talking about the Xbox connect minority report? Right minority report that
00:38:30
Speaker
Not quite great, not quite terrible. Steven Spielberg, Thomas, Thomas Cruise? I mean, I suppose he is Thomas Cruise. Probably, yeah. But anyway, so there's there's more of that stuff there. I mean, we've all I'm sure read about the whole sort of UFOs and the Bible thing.
00:38:46
Speaker
But again, people familiar with the iconography of the ages when those paintings were made would say, well, no, this is a common Christian symbol, a common thing of divine light or stuff like that. That's just the thing that you see. To us, without knowledge of the context, we sort of put our own interpretation on it. But that doesn't mean that's what it's a picture of. And that seems to be the general...
00:39:11
Speaker
problem. Then you get things like using the pre-map from the 16th century. So 14th century, 1500s, 14th century.
00:39:26
Speaker
No. 16th century the other way, yes. That's why we say 1500s because that's a good point. It really is a good point because I've just completely fouled that up person who lives in the 23rd century like I do. As explained at the beginning of this episode, not coping well with calendar time, only deadline time at the moment.
00:39:48
Speaker
But no, the periodized map is a Turkish map. It's sort of a map of the known world. It was kind of combined, compiled by someone from the Ottoman Empire, which supposedly shows things like the geography of Antarctica, which
00:40:06
Speaker
People couldn't have known about back then. And yes, no, apparently it doesn't. There was the whole idea of Terra Australis or something. People thought there was this giant southern continent. Which was basically meant to be a counterweight to the continent on the northern hemisphere because it was felt had to be balanced in the north and the south. So given that we knew about Europe, Eurasia and the like, and also Africa,
00:40:30
Speaker
we had there had to be a counterweight in the southern part which was going to be what is now known as Australia that's where the name comes from and so it was hypothesized and put on lots of maps it's just that the claims that this map accurately shows things like Antarctica and the like just doesn't actually there any
00:40:56
Speaker
investigation when you actually start looking at well the bits of the map which are correct once we go with that scheme no actually sorry the uh there's also a land bridge there which doesn't exist and all sorts of other issues hmm and so yeah i mean that's that's the general tenor of the the argumentation of chariots of the gods but um
00:41:18
Speaker
It's basically carried right through to his works to the present day, from what I can tell. I mean, things like the Iron Pillar of Delhi, where I think as early as the 70s, he was told, actually, no, we do know exactly how that was made. And he said, you know, I don't believe that was made by extraterrestrials anymore. So he'll drop things if they're proven to be untrue. But then he just picks up other ones and just seems to be carrying on with the same line. Now, what's interesting is that Von Daniken would appear to be a fairly committed Christian.
00:41:46
Speaker
So he's a firm believer in the old story of one Jesus Christ. And it's quite fascinating that Jesus Christ is not an alien God. Or is he? According to Von Denneken, no he's not. It's a shame. I mean, it would be more fantastical if it was a God told me to style scenario, a perfect Larry Cohen film. Have you seen God told me to? I have not.
00:42:12
Speaker
I mean, I don't want to spoil it for people who might go off and watch it is well worth watching. It's probably one of Larry Cohen's best films. And it's about a police detective who is investigating a series of random violent events in New York.
00:42:28
Speaker
where the perpetrators before they kill themselves tell people that they've committed these atrocities because God told them to. And then it quickly turns into a kind of Illuminati conspiracy thriller and then it just goes weirder and weirder. Including a really, really weird sexual organ in a location you're not expecting it to be.
00:42:56
Speaker
Ooh la la. I know. That's all I got to say. I'm a little disappointed in you actually, to be honest. If you're talking about the idea of Jesus being an alien, the pop culture reference you didn't immediately leap forward was Prince of Darkness by John Carpenter. I was thinking of going to John Carpenter, although we have touched upon Prince of Darkness in the past. Yes, yes we have.
00:43:17
Speaker
But, and then there must be some way of linking that, of course, maybe via John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness to H.P. Lovecraft. Ah, yes. Tell me about H.P. Lovecraft. He's a kind of source, I'm assuming, at Four Ones Junk. And the H.P. Lovecraft. The H.P. Lovecraft sounds like a writer of Victoria and Erotica, doesn't it? It is also the name of a porn store in London. Oh, there you go.
00:43:46
Speaker
So, yeah, people have claimed—we mentioned The Morning of the Magicians up front is one of the books that Von Daniken is known to have been influenced from and indeed appears to have, in some cases, sort of swiped things wholeheartedly from. The Morning of the Magicians, it's kind of a—the full text of it's available on the internet, and I had a quick flip through, but it's very, very sort of stream of consciousness-y, just sort of generally wide-ranging discussion on occult stuff and alchemy and paranormal phenomena and—
00:44:14
Speaker
And there's a chapter called The Vanished Civilizations, which goes into the sort of idea of these things about the world that we don't understand, and the idea that they could have been given to us by visiting alien races. And then people have said that The Morning of the Magicians itself was influenced by Call of Cthulhu and other works of H.P. Lovecraft, and of course Lovecraft writing back in the 20s,
00:44:38
Speaker
did do a good line in alien races, having visited Earth in the past and leaving behind weird civilizations and stuff like that. So basically, old von Daniken is HP Lovecraft. That's what I'm saying. Some time listener of the show, Jason Colavito, either be nodding his head or shaking his head at this particular point in time, because he is the expert when it comes to ancient aliens and HP Lovecraft.
00:45:02
Speaker
Oh, well, there you go. He's written a book, you know, quite a long time ago, continues to publish very widely. And Jason, I'm really looking forward to your recaps on the next season of America on Earth, something that we all need to talk about in the very near future, because I know you like geography and I know you like forensics, but do you like forensic geology?
00:45:24
Speaker
I assume I would. Geology or geography? I meant to say geology the first time. Let's just pretend I did. Very well. Well, that's something to look forward to. And if it's given that we're looking forward to subsequent episodes, I think that probably shows we've pretty much done with this episode, although we should probably touch on the racism. Yes, we can't really talk about H.P. Lovecraft or Eric Von Daniken without talking about racism. And it's the kind of racism we've encountered before with the whole sort of Celtic New Zealand hypothesis and stuff.
00:45:50
Speaker
which is basically the local, is suspicious of any person of colour whose civilizational ancestry engaged in high art or the construction of monumental architecture because apparently people of colour just couldn't do that stuff in the past but when it comes to Europe
00:46:15
Speaker
The same kind of how did you do that doesn't seem to apply. Now, on one level, that might be because when a lot of this monumental architecture was being built elsewhere in the world, Europeans were still living in mudhuts. So maybe it just doesn't apply to those simple Europeans and their primitive cultures at the time. But it does seem to be more the case that Erik von Daniken seems to think that brown people in particular can't actually make pyramids.
00:46:45
Speaker
very simple structure when you think about it wide base narrow top structurally very sound so no it must have been aliens. And indeed he compares the likes of the pyramids to things like Stonehenge here as basically we know how Stonehenge was made and it was a lot of effort so surely the pyramids would have to have been so much effort that no human beings could possibly do it.
00:47:12
Speaker
if we white folks can barely stack one block on top of two other blocks. But yeah, it's certainly, there's a lot of, I mean, I don't know, partly it's because, when did white people start to exist? Like when were there actual white people? As in the concept of whiteness? Yeah, because essentially you go back more recently than say white nationalists or white supremacists thing.
00:47:34
Speaker
Because you don't need to go back very far and pretty much all people are non-white. All of Africa, including Egypt, the ancient Greeks and Romans, they kind of get made honorary whites these days, don't they?
00:47:50
Speaker
on the notion of the Irish and Italians in particular not being proper white people and people coming up with justifications. The whole idea of race science is actually a fairly recent invention, truth be told.
00:48:06
Speaker
I mean, there's some evidence that the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans denoted skin colour in individuals, but they didn't seem to then classify individuals by skin colour. They would do more interesting things like classifying them by temperament. And the temperamental stuff was often actually based upon where in the world they lived. So you came from a cold climate, you had cold climate style behaviours.
00:48:32
Speaker
and not focusing on their skin is dark but they come from this place it's hot hot people do these things so our systemic prejudice will be based upon location not colour. Yeah so there's a lot there and it's it's all complicated wibbly wobbly stuff but when we're talking about Eric Von Denneken though yeah he just doesn't seem impressed by the accomplishments of people who's
00:48:56
Speaker
And in part, more men have gifted it's because of his Christianity doesn't want Jesus to be a space alien.
00:49:05
Speaker
Well, yes, there's got to be part of it, yeah. And so basically, he doesn't want to ask the same questions of his own culture. He demands we ask about other cultures. Which is probably a good way of leaving things, I suppose. He's very influential. Can't deny he's a widely influential person. Still widely influential this day. Makes the occasional guest appearance, I think, on ancient aliens in the life. He must be getting on him, though.
00:49:34
Speaker
If he was, how old is he now? He must be, what, 18? About 9,000 years old? Yeah, so good for him in that case. But yeah, there are certain structural-slash-systemic flaws, I think, you can see him. He had a theme partner on. Did he? Yeah.
00:50:13
Speaker
I did not know that.
00:50:20
Speaker
No, you do. It's one of those things where you vamp for a little while on something most likely to do the whole talk. Yes, I was going to say, you mentioned The Fortean Times. Charles Fort, who I see, was he the founder of The Fortean Times? Or was it based on this? He was. So Fortiana is based on the works of Charles Fort, the Books of the Dead. The Fortean Society came out of that, and the Fortean Times is a product of the Fortean Society.
00:50:44
Speaker
I've been published in the Fortean Times. Ooh la la. Charles Fort, his name comes up as well, and he's mentioned in the Morning of the Magicians, indeed, in the chapter, The Vanished Civilizations, where they talk about the Eric Von Dannick and his stuff. So maybe I don't actually have to say no an awful lot about the works of Charles Fort. Is he something we could base an episode on, or is he not so much conspiratorial as just sort of...
00:51:07
Speaker
So, thought's hard to classify because thought himself resisted systemisation of thought. So, thought basically sat down at the British Library. He was an American living in London. And he would go through newspapers to find reports of anomalous events.
00:51:26
Speaker
And then he would simply write them up in kind of catalogue, so rains of frogs and other unusual rains, visions of cities in the sky and things like that. And then he would just make up explanations and some of these explanations would contradict other explanations he had made prior.
00:51:45
Speaker
because he wasn't interested in resolving things, he was interested in cataloguing anomalies, and as he had resisted any kind of systematization to try and make sense of these things, he delighted in the anomalistic nature of the research he engaged in. So, I mean, we could do an episode on Charles IV, but it wouldn't be so much on conspiracy as it would be on, if you don't care about rules of evidence,
00:52:14
Speaker
or consistency, what kind of worldview do you develop? You develop a very Fortean one.
Von Däniken's Theme Park & Farewell
00:52:21
Speaker
And that's kind of unfair to Forteans today, because Forteans today do seem to be rather keen on trying to make sense of the world. It's just that Forteans, and I do consider myself to be a bit of a Fortean delight in reading about anomalies and thinking about things which aren't easily explained by current concepts of sight.
00:52:43
Speaker
There you go. Now, yes, before we end this episode, tell me about the Vondänneken theme park. What have you found? About the Vondännefrau park. According to Wikipedia, it's an amusement park located near Interlaken in Switzerland. Now, it opened as the mystery park in 2003 and closed three year later. Three year later.
00:53:03
Speaker
three years later due to financial difficulties and low turnout and the park was designed by Eric Von Daniken, consisted of seven pavilions, each of which explored one of several great mysteries of the world being the Nazca lines, cargo colts, Stonehenge, the Mayan calendar, the great pyramid of Giza, the Vamana, the flying palaces and chariots described in things like the
00:53:33
Speaker
theater and spaceflight and Mars exploration. And it was controversial at the time because von Daniken, as is known, advocated the notion of ancient aliens influencing world history. And the history park was labeled at the time a cultural Chernobyl by the Swiss Academy of Science and Technology.
00:54:00
Speaker
And basically, low turnout meant that it kind of closed out. It turned out there wasn't a demand to go see an Eric von Denneken Park and a hard to get to part of Switzerland, a country which itself is hard to get to at the best of times. And so, yeah, it had it was expected to get about half a million guests per year and at best only got around about 200,000.
00:54:30
Speaker
But it was reopened in 2009 by New Inspiration Incorporated. And it just reopens occasionally now from looks of it. And there is no news about it being turned into a creationist theme park that may well have just been scuttle, but on the internet. Well, there you go.
00:54:50
Speaker
So, I think that brings us to the end. So for our fabulous patron-y backer types who patronise us and back us up with their patronage, we'll be going on to talk about things like Sonic the Hedgehog and Winston Peters fighting killer robots. But the rest of you, I think, can just go off and keep watching the skies. Or the skis! Ancient aliens coming back, because they're gonna, apparently.
00:55:15
Speaker
And they're going to bring the takeaways we asked for. It's been a long time coming, but that chicken tikka masala can be pretty cold. So, goodbye. Goodbye.
00:55:38
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:56:39
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there. But not quite where you think you left it.