Where ancient astronaut theory actually came from

The site covers the claims. It has covered them subject by subject: Puma Punku, Baalbek, the Nazca lines, Sitchin’s Anunnaki. What it had not covered is where the framework itself came from, which turns out to explain a great deal.

The line of descent

Charles Fort, in the 1910s and 1920s, collected anomalies from newspapers and journals and speculated that Earth might be property. He was a satirist of scientific certainty more than an advocate, but he supplied the method: assemble unexplained items, imply a pattern.

Theosophy, from the 1880s onward, supplied the content — lost continents, root races, ancient wisdom from elsewhere. Much of the later material about Lemuria and Atlantean survivors comes from this stream rather than from any archaeology.

In 1960 Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier published Le Matin des magiciens, which assembled occultism, fringe science and speculation into a bestseller and made the genre commercially viable in Europe.

In 1968 Erich von Däniken published Chariots of the Gods?, which sold in the tens of millions and set the template: a rapid tour of sites, a question mark after each, and no return visit.

What the sites had in common

They were, in 1968, genuinely under-excavated and mostly non-European.

That is the pattern nobody names. Stonehenge appears; so do Nazca, Puma Punku, Egypt, Easter Island, the Maya. Chartres cathedral does not, though it is architecturally extraordinary and built by people with no more machinery than the Inca had.

The framework asks who really built the monuments of Peru, Egypt and Mesoamerica. It does not ask it of Europe. Whatever the intent, the effect is to remove achievement from the societies that are least able to answer back in the popular press.

The one claim that was tested properly

Von Däniken argued that the Nazca lines were runways or markers laid out for something in the air, on the ground that they cannot be appreciated from ground level.

The response was experimental. In 1982 Joe Nickell and a small team reproduced a large Nazca figure — the condor — using only stakes, cord and the technology available to the original makers. It took a few people a few days, and aerial photographs of the result matched the original closely.

The lines are also made by clearing surface stones to expose lighter ground beneath. That is a technique for marking a desert floor, not a surface capable of bearing anything landing on it.

What has happened since

The archaeology filled in. Puma Punku’s stonework has been reproduced experimentally. Baalbek’s quarry contains the abandoned block and the tool marks. Nazca’s lines have been made by modern volunteers with wooden stakes and cord. Sacsayhuamán’s construction is described in colonial-era chronicles.

Almost every specific claim in Chariots of the Gods? has an answer now. The books that followed it did not update; they added sites.