Erich von Däniken is a shifty, good-natured salesman of horseshit who became something of a sensation in the 1960s when he published the best-selling Chariots of the Gods? and kicked off an “ancient astronauts” fad that posited that it was plausible that extraterrestrials had visited Earth at the time of the dawn of humans and had mingled with–and even procreated with–our ancestors. Each time science pointed out the holes in his “theories,” the author was canny enough to revise and reposition his arguments, changing the shoe size of his Bigfoot, packing a little more powder onto his Abominable Snowman. In 1974, an incredulous Playboy magazine interviewed von Däniken–a “stocky Swiss ex-convict” is how they described him. The interview’s opening:

Playboy:

Since your theories appear to change somewhat with the times, can you tell us what you currently believe?

Erich von Däniken:

I say in my books not only that we have been visited from outer space in ancient times but that those visitors had sexual intercourse with our ancestors. Many scientists reply, “That is damned nonsense, because even if we accept that there are extraterrestrial beings and that they can travel in space, why should they come to Earth, out of all the billions of planets? And why should visitors from outer space look like us and have a similar way of thinking?” This point of view–and it is certainly a serious one–is, in my eyes, wrong. If we admit that the visitors had intercourse with us and altered, by artificial mutation, our intelligence, then it means we are the products of them. A child can never ask, ‘Why should my parents look like me?” There is no other possibility; he came from his parents. This does not deny Darwin and his theory; I fully admit that we came from apes. My question is why and how we became intelligent. To this question each mythology, each old religion gives the same answer: The gods created men after their own image.•