• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Erich von Daniken RIP

I actually once attended a talk he gave. It was to an audience who did not have a clue who he was. I waas to young and shy to ask a question and ISTR no one else did either.
 
As I said in the Notable Passings thread, the day before he died I'd debated with myself about binning the books I have of his.

Now I'm debating whether to try and sell them or to remove them from the book gene pool.
 
Get them out of the gene pool. Give science a chance. I read them all myself. I am still waiting for the solid and irrefutable evidence that he said was coming. But thankfully I wasn't holding my breath in the last 40 years.

Now Giorgio Wildhair can safely re-twist his scribblings into new conflicting evidence for whatever brainfart he wants to prove.
 
alfaniner said:
I'm curious as to how an audience would attend a talk where they didn't know the subject or the speaker.
Click to expand...
I thought someone might ask that. It was a computer club and the program chairman had complete control of who he invited. About half the time the speakers had nothing to do with computing.

Other speakers included Arthur C Clarke (Clarke mentioned Olaf Stapledon as one of his seminal authors and no one but I knew who he was) and a whole bunch of others who I'd have to strain my brain to remember at this late date).

:w2:
 
Carrot Flower King said:
Yer man's death has just been announced.

Was it aliens wot dun it? Inquiring minds need to know...
Click to expand...
While I won’t mourn him in particular, I will credit him with starting me on my sceptical path as a young teen.
I was deeply disappointed when first reading CotG and finding that the explanation for all these extraordinary things in our world was,
1768255875233.png
 
Last edited:
EHocking said:
While I won’t mourn him in particular, I will credit him with starting me on my sceptical path as a young teen.
I was deeply disappointed when first reading CotG and finding that the explanation for all these extraordinary things in our world was,
View attachment 68015
Click to expand...
Exactly the same here. Glancing at his books as a very young child led me towards Arthur C Clarke and Carl Sagan and other proper thinkers and communicators.
 
I also have to give the guy some credit. I read several of his books as a kid and was totally taken in. Then I saw the Nova episode that debunked most of the stuff in his books. I especially recall how what he described as an "ancient runway in the desert" turned out to be a small part of a drawing of a bird. So, in a sense, his books helped me on my path to sceptical thinking.
 
Last edited:
Orphia Nay said:
As I said in the Notable Passings thread, the day before he died I'd debated with myself about binning the books I have of his.

Now I'm debating whether to try and sell them or to remove them from the book gene pool.
Click to expand...

One possibility is to write up notes on a computer, print them, and add them to the book. I think lightly gluing them to the existing pages would work so the debunking information is there at the same time someone is reading the nonsense.
 
Orphia Nay said:
As I said in the Notable Passings thread, the day before he died I'd debated with myself about binning the books I have of his.

Now I'm debating whether to try and sell them or to remove them from the book gene pool.
Click to expand...
Sell them. The world was different back then, and is by now so flooded with bonkers conspiracy theories, that his books will not even cause the tiniest of ripples in the general deluge...

And getting some money back from an utter grifter, however dead, counts as a win😊
 
I'll have a couple of his books somewhere. They were very popular and very funny.
Belgian thought said:
I had read the book along with other tosh in my teens and it was a BBC Horizon programme from November 1977 "The Case of the Ancient Astronauts" which changed my way of thinking.
Click to expand...
That was such an amazing programme, I can recall many, many editions that opened up new worlds for me, from ones about the likes of Erich von Daniken which were very entertaining to absolutely horrifying editions such as "Killer in the Village" in 1983 which was about the new disease AIDS, which I think was the first time it made mainstream programming.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom