Playboy Interview: Erich Von Daniken

Few things are as hard to predict as a fad, and when Erich von Däniken wrote "Chariots of the Gods?" eight years ago, nobody guessed that this stocky Swiss exconvict would become, to millions of people around the world, a chronicler of ancient astronauts. But that is just what's happened. As an American phenomenon, Von Däniken ranks in popularity (as we go to press) somewhere between streaking and the exorcism craze. "Chariots" is in its 44th paperback printing, with U. S. sales estimated at 5,000,000 copies. A film based on the book rose to the top five on Variety's box-office list--an eye-opening performance for a documentary--and a TV special narrated by Rod Serling drew good ratings. At 39, Von Däniken has become a talk-show regular and is even the subject of a German biography. So many people are excited by the idea that spacemen have visited Earth that Carl Sagan, the astronomer and exobiologist, says, "I can no longer lecture anywhere on the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence without someone asking a question about Von Däniken's theories."

Von Däniken speculates that Earth was explored at least twice in prehistoric times by intelligent beings from another world. According to him, they mated with humans, bestowed the gifts of intelligence and civilization and may have helped build such monuments as the pyramids. Sometimes they got angry and acted less pleasantly, blowing up Sodom and Gomorrah with an atom bomb and causing the great flood that Noah survived. Evidence of their visits, Von Däniken believes, can be found in mythology, in the Bible, in the great earth- and stoneworks that survive in various parts of the world and in cave paintings of people with bubble heads.

As he admits, Von Däniken thought up very little of this; other writers came up with the same theories and evidence when he was still a schoolboy. Von Däniken attributes his success to a questing, irreverent intelligence, a willingness to think the unthinkable--and an ability to convey those thoughts in a bombastic, superenthusiastic writing style. Critics say it's because he plays fast and loose with the truth. "Shilling the rubes," The New York Times has called his work. "A fine, naked, unscrupulous 12-year-old mind," said Esquire. "The Clifford Irving of the Cosmos"--The Miami News. And an archaeologist familiar with Von Däniken's work said flatly: "He simply lies." But that kind of talk doesn't seem to bother Von Däniken. "I'm the only author who has really frightened the critics," he says. "Other writers sit at home and wait for miracles. I'm making the miracles."

He also feels he's witnessed a few. Born in Zofingen, Switzerland, in 1935, Von Däniken experienced at the age of eight something that resembled a scene from one of his books: An American bomber crash-landed near his home and, as Von Däniken watched, its crew emerged and walked past him silently in their flight suits. A psychiatrist might detect the germ of Von Däniken's vision in that, but he dismisses that sort of interpretation as "ridiculous"--one of his favorite English words.

By his own account, he grew up under the twin shadows of a stern father and the Catholic Church, eventually rebelling against both. At Saint-Michel, an international Catholic school in Fribourg, he soon ran into trouble, he says today, because he refused to accept Church interpretations of the Bible. His interest turned to astronomy, flying saucers--anything extraworldly. Von Däniken got into more trouble, at the age of 19, when he was convicted of stealing money from an innkeeper and from a camp where he worked as a youth leader. Though he drew a four-month suspended sentence, an examining psychiatrist said he displayed a "tendency to lie." Erich's father withdrew him from school and apprenticed him to a Swiss hotelier. He stayed at the job for a while, then ran away to Egypt and involved himself in a dubious jewelry deal that resulted, upon his return to Switzerland, in a conviction for fraud and embezzlement, for which he served nine months.

While in his cell, he claims, he experienced an intense vision. Von Däniken won't discuss the nature of the vision, but whatever it was, it failed to keep him clear of the law. For 12 years he took frequent vacations from his job as a hotel manager to travel around the world, gathering material for his first book. The authorities began to wonder how a hotelier of modest means could afford it. The answer appeared to be that he was spending other people's money. By the time prosecutors caught up with him--in Vienna, returning from another junket--he was in debt to the tune of $130,000, money a Swiss court ruled he obtained by falsifying hotel books. Von Däniken was convicted of "repeated and sustained acts of embezzlement ... fraud ... forgery"--and served a year in prison. At his trial, a court-appointed psychiatrist described him as a liar and a criminal psychopath.

But by that time, after being rejected by a dozen publishers, "Chariots of the Gods?" had been published and had become a best seller in Europe. "Scholars will call it nonsense," Von Däniken correctly predicted in the first paragraph, but nonsense or not, it allowed him to pay back the $130,000 and move on from his shattered career in the hotel business to become a writer.

"Chariots" is a book filled with question marks and exclamation points: Could lines in the Peruvian desert be the remains of an ancient airport? Does a cave painting show a man in a space suit? Was this old map made from the air? But of course! While in jail, Von Däniken wrote a second book, "Gods from Outer Space," rehashing much of the same material in a calmer style. Sales were disappointing, so in a third book, "The Gold of the Gods," he returned to punchy sentences and sensational claims--including the discovery of a huge cave in Ecuador allegedly holding a treasure in gold artifacts left behind by visitors from outer space. A fourth Von Däniken book, "My World in Pictures," is now being translated into English, and he is at work on a fifth.

Bookstores may stack Von Däniken's books unceremoniously under Fantasy and scientists dismiss him as a con man, but to millions of readers, what he writes is closer to gospel. Von Däniken stays on the move, traveling over 100,000 miles a year, lecturing, autographing books, making breakneck tours of archaeological sites to scoop up new material, keeping a jump ahead of his critics. To draw a bead on this highly mobile man, Playboy dispatched Timothy Ferris--a New York-based writer who is devoting much of his time to a book about the search for the edge of the universe--to interview Von Däniken at his home outside Zurich, where he lives with his wife and 12-year-old daughter. Ferris reports:

"I was greeted at the door by Von Däniken himself, a short, pudgy man with dark hair and bright eyes, a tight smile and an air of inexhaustible energy. Talking rapidly in thickly accented English--he speaks five languages--Von Däniken showed me into a sunny, compact living room furnished with a giant color-television set, a few hundred books and a garish oil painting of an astronaut floating among the pink cherubim of a cathedral fresco.

"With pride in his voice, Von Däniken explained that he had just paid off the mortgage on the house. It's not a large place, and the boast seemed a bit odd coming from an author who had sold some 25,000,000 books world-wide, but in fact he isn't a very rich man. Rights to 'Chariots' have been sold over the years to a series of publishers in a system that works out like a writer's nightmare. Each partner in this elaborate bucket brigade skims off 50 percent of the money and what's left may take as long as three years to reach Von Däniken. So whatever else he can be accused of, he is not profiteering from his theories.

"During the three days of the interview, we talked at first upstairs, then in Von Däniken's favorite room, his basement office, where the walls are lined with bright red, green and orange file cabinets filled with news clips and letters from readers. As we talked, he sipped black coffee and sucked on a tubular pipe shaped something like a space capsule. Occasionally he asked that the tape recorder be turned off while he rummaged through books and papers in search of material to back up his claims. He seemed satisfied even if the books yielded no evidence at all: He is a man who enjoys the trappings of scholarship--old maps and books scrutinized through tobacco smoke far into the night--at least as much as scholarship itself. We began by asking him to summarize his studies for us".

[Q] Playboy: Since your theories appear to change somewhat with the times, can you tell us what you currently believe?

[A] Von Daniken: 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 our 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 certainly is 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 just why and how we became intelligent. To this question each mythology, each old religion gives the same answer: The gods created man after their own image.

[Q] Playboy: A psychiatrist might say that your theories, with all this talk about mankind as children of superior beings, were generated by your unhappiness as a child who didn't get along with his father. Do you see anything in that?

[A] Von Daniken: Well, yes and no. I did have difficulties with my father and with my Catholic upbringing, but it's not true that because of this I am now, as an adult, trying to defeat Christianity. That's not so. On the other hand, each person has some reason to do what he is doing. For example, you are a journalist. Why? Because you like to do it. Maybe you like to ask questions, to see if people tremble and say the wrong things. Perhaps there is a psychiatric explanation for that. My reason for doing what I do is because I want to find the truth. I wonder why the hell I live here on this planet.

[Q] Playboy: What is the most convincing evidence you have that Earth has been visited from outer space?

[A] Von Daniken: Two kinds of proof: proof by hard facts and proof in mythologies, holy books, legends, and so forth. We have very good proof in hard fact. In Palenque, a little place in Yucatan, there is a tomb covered by a large stone. On this stone is a wonderful relief. It shows a man sitting in a kind of frame. He is bending forward almost like a motorcyclist, and at his nose he has what I would call an oxygen mask. He is operating some controls with his hands, turning something on--you can recognize every detail--and the heel of his left foot seems to be on a pedal which has different adjustments. Behind him you see some circles, some boxes, all kinds of mysterious things. And outside is a flame like an exhaust.

[Q] Playboy: We're familiar with the stone, which also depicts a bird in front of him. What's it doing there?

[A] Von Daniken: Oh, I don't know. Perhaps it represents flight, you know? Anyway, around the stone is a writing saying the relief shows a Mayan priest who died because of "the hot wind." Archaeologists say this shows the poor guy was sick and died in a hot summer season. I see it completely differently, that the hot wind was maybe the blast from a spaceship. I would not say this if we did not have, in many other old texts, similar things where someone is killed by the "hot wind of the gods." You find these hot winds in the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic, and in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, where Engidu dies because he has been in contact with the gods and their hot wind.

Some of the best proofs, I think, are in mythology and in the holy books. You know the book of Enoch? It is one of the Apocrypha, a book from O'd Testament times, though not in the King James Bible. In chapters 14 and 15 of his book, Enoch says watchmen of the sky have been here and have had sexual intercourse with the daughters of this planet, and that the product of this intercourse was, in the first generation, giants. You might say this is just mythology. But in the same book of Enoch, we find a chapter about astronomy, where the watchmen of the sky tell Enoch about our solar system. They tell where the moon's light comes from, how much light at which date, and they speak about the names of the stars. They give complicated astronomical details which, I feel, nobody could have known at the time of Enoch, because this whole story happens before the great flood.

[Q] Playboy: When did you become convinced that these theories were true?

[A] Von Daniken: I guess only in recent years. I wrote Chariots of the Gods? in 1966, so for me it's an old book. When I wrote it, I was not at all convinced. By the second book, Gods from Outer Space, I was more certain, but not absolutely. The basic thing is to be convinced that the fundamental theory is right, that we have been visited from outer space and those visitors altered our intelligence by artificial mutation. Of this I have felt certain for the past four years or so.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Von Daniken: Studying mythology and ancient religion was what made up my mind. When you find in mythology some fact or technological development that nobody could have had at that time, something maybe that we ourselves discovered only recently, then you have something. If it only happens once, that is one thing; but when it happens several times, then you can say, "Now we have proof."

[Q] Playboy: If ancient astronauts explored the Earth, why didn't they leave anything behind? Why haven't we found any relics?

[A] Von Daniken: Let's say you and I are extraterrestrials; we are ending our stay on Earth and we want to leave behind an object to record that we were here. We can create such an object, a time capsule or a plaque or whatever, but what do we do with it? We cannot give it to a leader of human society and tell him, "Listen, my dear friend, we have to go to the stars now, but here is something very important for your descendants 4000 years in the future. Keep it carefully." Because we know that the guy will be dead in 20 years. There will be wars and the winners will destroy the temples and libraries of the losers, and the object will be lost.

One possibility would be to construct something so big that nobody could destroy it. In fact, there are such things on our planet; the Great Pyramid is one. Yet even today, no archaeologist has looked deep down under the pyramids to see what is there. The pyramid is almost 500 feet high; we should look 500 feet beneath it. But nobody does. Even at that, I do not think the chances are good of finding a monument of the ancient astronauts' anywhere on Earth, because they must have known that with floods, earthquakes, and so on, it could be destroyed.

[Q] Playboy: So you're saying that these visitors walked all over the Earth, altered the course of human history and departed without leaving a trace?

[A] Von Daniken: This is more complicated than you think. If they did leave a monument, such as a monitoring device to inform them when humans developed the hydrogen bomb, it may still be hidden somewhere. But it would be hidden very well. It was not in the best interests of the visitors to put it where it could be discovered by technologically advanced people, who could maybe take it apart with a screwdriver.

Some say: What about a crash of an ancient spaceship? But you know, today, if an aircraft is crashing, the pilot tries to steer away from the villages so nobody will be killed. I'm sure an ancient astronaut would have done the same. Only one one hundredth of one percent of the globe has been investigated by archaeologists, and they explore precisely where they know there were villages and communities, not out in the middle of nowhere. So the remains of a crashed spaceship could exist, but we haven't found it.

[Q] Playboy: What makes you think creatures from another star would have an intelligence akin to ours?

[A] Von Daniken: It could be that the universe contains billions of different types of intelligence, but beings who can travel in space will visit beings similar to themselves. They will look for planets with conditions like those of their home planet, where life would have developed the same way. The beings who visited us may have had three eyes, seven fingers or long ears--what does it matter? That's not important. They were basically like ourselves, and by artificial mutation they changed our intelligence to something like their own.

Let us dream a little dream together. Let's say that in 5000 years we have found all the answers concerning our own planet. We know everything about man's brain, about the deep sea, plants and animals. Maybe we have world peace, so it's a wonderful future to dream of. What is next? Because we are intelligent, we look up at the little lights in the sky and we ask, "What the hell are they?" We have no alternative but to travel in space sooner or later. And all this came from those visits so long ago.

You ask for evidence. In the United States, Mr. Josef Blumrich, chief of the systems-layout branch of NASA, has published a book, The Spaceships of Ezekiel. He comes to the definite conclusion, with scientific methods, that the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel described the landing of a spaceship in 592 B.C. If there were such a landing, it would have gone into mythologies around the world. And as a matter of fact, we have such mythologies, speaking of visitors from heaven. We find the story in Babylonian tales and in the mythology of northern Europe. In Australia we find rock paintings showing flying beings, men and women with halos and helmets, and so on. We have hundreds of them.

[Q] Playboy: The part of the book of Ezekiel you and Blumrich talk about does sound impressive, with wheels of fire up in the sky and all that. But the same book has long sections you don't quote that are very different. For example, Ezekiel says, describing the creatures you call astronauts, "Every one had four faces, and every one had four wings.... As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side; and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle." If the spacemen looked like humans, as you say, how could they also look like lions, oxen and birds?

[A] Von Daniken: Here, look at this picture. It shows the first Gemini spaceship. Now I turn it upside down. Imagine you were a primitive man and you had never seen a spaceship, then you saw this. How would you describe it?

[Q] Playboy: It looks vaguely as if it had two eyes, but there isn't anything that looks like an eagle.

[A] Von Daniken: I don't see it either. But there is an explanation, which Blumrich gives. Your American World War Two pilots had paintings on their aircraft, remember? Paintings of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, young ladies or whatever. And they had names on their planes. Even your moonships had names--like Eagle. Maybe the same thing happened with these visitors; maybe the spaceship was big and Ezekiel saw just a picture on it. We really don't know.

[Q] Playboy: Ezekiel also says he saw a heap of dry bones turned into an army of living men.

[A] Von Daniken: Oh, really? I don't remember this passage. It must have been a miracle. As wild speculation, I could say maybe he saw a movie or something.

[Q] Playboy: If the creature who spoke to Ezekiel was an astronaut, why did he keep insisting he was God?

[A] Von Daniken: I have just the opposite recollection, that he did not say he was God. I guess it depends on the translation you use.

[Q] Playboy: In the King James version of the Bible, this being repeats many times, very clearly, that He is God and Ezekiel had better listen to Him.

[A] Von Daniken: Well, if I came down to a primitive people, they would look upon me as God. Everything I did would make me God in their eyes, because I could fly, kill animals with a single shot, and so forth. So maybe Ezekiel called him God. But I definitely do not think the commander of the spaceship said he was God. If he did, it would be proof to me that he was a liar.

[Q] Playboy: This being is quoted as saying "I am the Lord" over and over again.

[A] Von Daniken: But what is the Lord? The commander.

[Q] Playboy: So you're saying the text is letter-perfect when it describes the so-called spaceship but completely inaccurate when it records what the pilot had to say. Isn't that an inconsistent position?

[A] Von Doniken: I'm very sorry, but theologians are in the same position. It's true that I accept what I like and reject what I don't like, but every theologian does the same. Everyone accepts just what he needs for his theory, and to the rest he says, "Well, that's a misunderstanding."

[Q] Playboy: Except that you claim to be offering science, not theology, and you say you don't have much regard for theologians.

[A] Von Daniken: I have regard for theologians if they are really honest in their hearts. I have some theologian friends and we have long discussions into the night, and they are nice persons. But in the dep:h of their hearts they are believers. Theology would be a science if they would study all religions, not just the one they believe in.

[Q] Playboy: You're something of a believer yourself, aren't you? Don't your theories constitute a sort of religion?

[A] Von Daniken: I don't see it. I must admit that some people make a kind of religion out of this, but they are very few and that is not my intent. Religions promise things, that if you live a certain way, don't do sexual things, you will go to heaven. Or if you do wrong, you will go to hell. Each religion makes promises nobody can verify. But in my books there are no promises at all; I never implore people to act in a given way. Also, organized religions have churches, congregations, and so forth, and my books have nothing to do with that. I received 22,000 letters from readers around the world, and I would estimate that only about one in a thousand feels this is some sort of religion. Of course, it is true that I often mention the Bible in my books. Have you read the Bible?

[Q] Playboy: Yes.

[A] Von Daniken: Do you believe it?

[Q] Playboy: There are different sorts of belief. A criticism could be made that you resemble conservative priests who insist on literal interpretations of everything in the Bible.

[A] Von Daniken: Oh, on the contrary.

[Q] Playboy: Well, Robert Graves says that all through human history there have been two languages--poetry, often expressed in mythology, and prose--and that people are always getting history confused when they try to convert mythology into literal prose. Don't you do that?

[A] Von Daniken: Even if we have these two languages, it doesn't change anything. A scientific world will still hand down its message in scientific language and not in poetry.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you often ridicule scientists, accusing them in your books of being shortsighted and plodding?

[A] Von Daniken: I have thought about this a lot lately. In science today, each person must be a specialist. There is no other possibility; the knowledge is too big. Let's say that someone decides to become an anthropologist and he reads and learns a lot about anthropology, about bones and apes and all those details. His wish is to prove that man comes from the ape, to find which was the first man, what ape came after another ape, and so forth. I think this whole way of thinking is a tunnel view. If you talk with a specialist, you find he knows everything about his profession, he has read every book and knows all his colleagues 200 years back. But because of his specialization. I would say he is unlikely to arrive at the truth. One truth, yes. But never the truth.

[Q] Playboy: Are you sure you understand how scientists work? In Chariots of the Gods? you wrote, "At the conference tables of orthodox scientists, the delusion still prevails that a thing must be proved before a 'serious' person may--or can--concern himself with it." Do you really think that's an accurate account of what goes on among scientists?

[A] Von Daniken: No, I would not say so anymore. It's correct for some scientists, but absolutely not for others. Not, for example, among astronomers or astrophysicists. But in archaeology, I have the feeling that scientists already have their minds made up when they find each little object. I mean, I have been in the field many times and have watched the diggings of archaeologists and they do a fantastic job. I am an admirer of them, really. But there is no fantasy in those brains. There is no speculation. They find an object and they say, "Well, it has to do with such-and-such culture, so now we see they were eating with forks and knives." Who cares about that? I wonder where the forks and knives came from.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about some of the mysteries you say the archaeologists ought to be studying. In your book The Gold of the Gods, you describe taking a voyage through enormous caves in Ecuador where you claim to have seen ancient furniture made of plastic, a menagerie of gold animals, a library of imprinted metal plates and other evidence of a great early civilization. You call this "the most incredible, fantastic story of the century" and say you were guided through the caves by a South American adventurer named Juan Moricz. But Moricz says he never took you into any such caves. Which of you is telling the truth?

[A] Von Daniken: I guess we both are telling half the truth.

[Q] Playboy: Which half is yours?

[A] Von Daniken: I have been in Ecuador several times. I have met Moricz several times and we have been together at the side entrance to those tunnels. But before we went in that entrance. Moricz made it a condition that I would not be allowed to give the location or to take photographs inside. I could understand that, because he didn't want people going in there. So I agreed, we shook hands and we left. And, as a matter of fact, in my book I have not told the truth concerning the geographic location of the place, nor about some various other little things. In German we say a writer, if he is not writing pure science, is allowed to use some dramaturgisch Effekte--some theatrical effects. And that's what I have done. But finally, the whole controversy over whether I have been down there in those caves or not seems ridiculous. The main question should be: Does the library of gold plates exist or not? This should be the main question, not whether Mr. von Däniken has seen them or not.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying you have never been inside the caves?

[A] Von Daniken: I have been inside the caves, but not at the place where the photographs in the book were taken, not at the main entrance. I was at a side entrance. And we were down there for six hours.

[Q] Playboy: Did you, in fact, see the things you describe? Seven chairs made of a plasticlike material, a zoo of solid-gold animals, a library of gold plates?

[A] Von Doniken: Definitely. No doubt. Though I must say I am not at all sure, anymore, if the so-called zoo is made of gold. It could be something different.

[Q] Playboy: In the book you say Moricz led you in darkness, then gave the command. "Switch on your torches!" You write, "We are standing dumfounded and amazed in the middle of a gigantic hall." Is that what really happened?

[A] Von Daniken: No, that is not true. It is what I call theatrical effect.

[Q] Playboy: Were you and Moricz even in the caves?

[A] Von Daniken: Yeah, sure. He saw everything.

[Q] Playboy: Moricz says, "Von Däniken was never in the caves; when he states he has seen the library and the other things himself, he is lying. We never showed him these things."

[A] Von Daniken: I know those statements, because he has written to me the same thing, and I can well understand it. In 1969, Moricz organized an expedition down there. All the crew members signed documents promising to say nothing about whatever they might find. This was reported in the Ecuadorian press. So when The Gold of the Gods appeared, I think members of the 1969 expedition must have told Moricz, "Listen, this isn't fair. Von Däniken has made the thing public. We could have made money with it, but we were pledged to silence." I feel this was the main reason, though there were others, why Moricz now says the whole thing is a hoax. But again, to me the main point is not if I have seen these things or not. I just don't care. The question is, do they exist?

[Q] Playboy: Didn't your German publisher finance an expedition to the caves in order to decide just that question?

[A] Von Daniken: Yes. They sent a leading German archaeologist to Ecuador. He was there more than six weeks. He had been to Ecuador many times before and his purpose was to organize an expedition into the caves, but he came back and said it was impossible. He could not find Mr. Moricz, and the archaeologists in Ecuador knew nothing of this discovery.

[Q] Playboy: Why not lead an expedition into the caves yourself?

[A] Von Daniken: I cannot. I'm a little afraid to go there now. Mr. Moricz, under Ecuadorian law, is something like an owner of the caves, together with the government, and he has the right to defend his property. After this controversy, I have the feeling I should not go there, and I really don't care too much anymore.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to have bad luck when it comes to caves. In your second book, Gods from Outer Space, you tell of a cave in China explored in 1938. You say an archaeologist discovered odd, thin-boned skeletons there, along with a set of stone disks bearing inscriptions. According to your story, these inscriptions, deciphered in 1962, say spacemen have crash-landed on Earth and been hunted down and killed by Earth people. When the book appeared, Dr. Kwang-chih Chang of Yale University investigated your story. He says that, as a specialist in Asian archaeology, he knows personally every dig conducted in China in or around 1938 but has never heard of this one. He says there has never been a Chinese archaeologist named Chi Pu Tei, the one you say discovered the skeletons, nor a Peking professor named Tsum Um Nui, whom you identify as the translator of the inscriptions. In fact, there are no such names as Tei and Nui in the Chinese language; Dr. Chang says they sound to him like words made up by a Westerner trying to sound Chinese.

[A] Von Daniken: When I wrote that story, I didn't have enough background information; I had only a discussion with a friend in Moscow and two or three publications. Since then, an Austrian journalist named Peter Krassa has investigated further. He visited Russia and China several times and he had only one thing in mind--to find out about this story. He found out definitely that it is true. The stones exist, the skeletons also, but the names and some of the dates are wrong. Krassa has written a book about it, which will soon be published in America, and he has a letter from a Chinese minister proving it is the definite, absolute truth.

[Q] Playboy: We'll reserve judgment, then. What about the so-called prehistoric cave painting from Uzbekistan that appears in the film version of Chariots of the Gods? It shows vividly a modern-day astronaut and a flying saucer, and if it's prehistoric, as the script says, it would be very solid evidence for your theory.

[A] Von Daniken: You have a wonderful way of touching on every point which is uncertain. I feel like I'm being prosecuted. I'll tell you, about 95 percent of the things I write about I have seen with my own eyes. But there are a few things, especially in Russia and China, which I couldn't have seen. This is one such case. I have never seen the painting, never been there. Dr. Saizev, a philologist at the Lenin State University, published this painting in the Soviet magazine Sputnik, April 1, 1968, and I took the story. The film crew went to Moscow and interviewed Dr. Saizev. He showed them the picture and told them the same thing, that the painting was ancient. I wasn't there with the crew. Then the funniest thing, Peter Krassa, the journalist I was telling you about, wrote to Dr. Saizev, and Saizev answered that the picture was actually modern, not prehistoric. Now, that's really fantastic, don't you think? First he published an article saying it was old, then he told the movie crew the same thing, and only now does he say it is not old at all.

[Q] Playboy: When did you discover that the painting was a hoax?

[A] Von Daniken: I'm still not sure it is. I have had some interesting experiences with people in Russia and China. You can never be sure when they tell you something that they really mean it. They sometimes have reasons to say one thing in private and another in public.

[Q] Playboy: People all over the world have seen the film, and they haven't been told that the origin of the painting is doubtful or that it might be a hoax. They're being told it's genuine. Isn't that irresponsible?

[A] Von Daniken: The film starts with questions and ends with questions, not answers. In the film you see Dr. Saizev being interviewed, you see him give this picture to the movie crew. I'm very sorry, but the interview is a fact. And the commentary says simply, "Dr. Saizev showed us this...."

[Q] Playboy: Reading from the film script, it says: "We must look and look again to grasp the significance of this prehistoric drawing. A creature wearing the headgear of an astronaut." And so on.

[A] Von Daniken: Here I'd like to say that the commentary to the film was not written by me. Also, there are many things in the film that I would never have said in that way. For example, concerning Nazca, Peru, where there are great lines laid out in the desert, the film commentary says something like, "No doubt, it must have been an airfield." I never made such a statement. I said, "It looks like an airfield." There's quite a difference.

[Q] Playboy: OK, let's get back to your books, then, where we know you can be held responsible. What is it about the pyramids of Egypt that makes you think they have something to do with creatures from outer space?

[A] Von Daniken: Archaeologists say that as far as the Great Pyramid of Cheops is concerned, there's no mystery at all. Everything is clear. The pyramid was built in 20 years with a few thousand slaves, using wooden rollers, sand ramps, and so forth. But the same archaeologists agree that the Great Pyramid is composed of 2,300,000 blocks, ranging from a ton or so each to 12 tons for some of them. Now, 2,300,000 blocks divided by 20 years is 115,000 blocks a year needed to build the pyramid. Say the working year lasted 300 days--which is quite a long year, because some archaeologists maintain that the Egyptians were free to work on the pyramids only four months a year, while the Nile was flooding. Allow a damned long working day of 13 hours. You will find that nearly every two minutes a stone had to be set in place. Every two minutes! Try to repeat that today.

[Q] Playboy: Which archaeologists say the pyramid builders used wooden rollers?

[A] Von Daniken: More or less all of them.

[Q] Playboy: They say wooden sledges, don't they? And aren't there Egyptian tomb paintings showing teams of men transporting huge stone blocks in just that way?

[A] Von Daniken: Those paintings represent the way they worked at the time the paintings were made. At that time, they did transport stones on wooden sledges, or rollers--it doesn't matter which--but not necessarily before. I'll tell you another area where I don't agree with the archaeologists about Egypt. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus says in the second book of his history that when he visited Egypt, the priests showed him 340 statues, each representing the lifetime of a high priest of the past. Each of the guys in his lifetime had to complete his own statue. The priests told Herodotus those 340 generations represented 11,340 years and that before then, gods from the sky had come to Earth and taught the priests how to build such things.

[Q] Playboy: Even assuming your recollection of Herodotus isn't a little garbled, don't you have to keep in mind that those priests were telling him about things ancient even to them? The age of the pyramid builders was at least as remote from Herodotus as he is from us. Isn't it expecting a lot to think they told him exactly what happened thousands of years before their own time?

[A] Von Daniken: That's true, but still, those priests talked about 11,340 years, and our idea of Egyptian history is nothing close to that. We think of Egypt going back to maybe 4000 years B.C.

[Q] Playboy: You wrote that the Great Pyramid "divides continents and oceans into two equal halves and also lies at the center of gravity of the continents." What does that mean?

[A] Von Daniken: I am referring there to many other writers. It is not just the invention of Mr. Erich von Däniken himself. As I understand them, if you took all the water away from the Earth and pushed the continents together--so, for example, South America fit up against Africa--then the pyramid would be right in the middle. That's how it was explained to me. I've never tried it.

[Q] Playboy: Another ancient mystery you write about, not so old, is the 16th Century map put together by the Turkish cartographer Piri Reis. You write, "There is no doubt that the maps must have been made with the most modern technical aid--from the air.... Whoever made them must have been able to fly and also to take photographs!" You went on to call the map "absolutely accurate" and you said it coincides with a view of Earth from a spaceship in orbit above Cairo. The trouble is that the Piri Reis map is not "absolutely accurate," nor does it coincide with a view from space.

[A] Von Daniken: I'm not so sure about this, really. According to my information, it does.

[Q] Playboy: We can take out a copy of the Piri Reis map and a modern globe and look at the two of them and see that they don't agree.

[A] Von Daniken: Yes, the movie crew did something similar. But for the whole map to coincide with a view from a great height is impossible, because from Cairo you cannot at the same time see the North American continent and Antarctica.

[Q] Playboy: Here's a copy of the Piri Reis map. If you look at the way it represents South America, for example, you'll find that whole missing. Yet this is the map you call absolutely accurate.

[A] Von Daniken: Look, the Piri Reis map is not one map. It was composed by Piri from several other old maps. So we have to deal with a mixture of several things, and some of it, such as the antarctic coast line, looks as it would from a great height. I don't have other information.

[Q] Playboy: You had a copy of the map when you wrote your book, didn't you?

[A] Von Daniken: Sure, I had one.

[Q] Playboy: And you had access to a globe of the Earth. All you had to do was compare them.

[A] Von Daniken: It's not so easy. Really, it's not. Look, here on the map, we have a connection between Chile and the Antarctic Continent. There is no such connection today, but maybe there was 12,000 years ago. Who knows? And there are islands off Antarctica. You explain to me how they knew about those islands.

[Q] Playboy: It's a fascinating question, but not one that necessarily requires ancient astronauts to answer. Do you have any qualms about telling your millions of readers that this is an absolutely accurate map, when, in fact, some parts of it are accurate and other parts are wrong?

[A] Von Daniken: I really don't know. I must find out about what you say. If I find that what I've written is wrong, then I will be the first to correct it. At least in my next book, I'll say this was wrong. At the time I wrote the passage, that was my information; I never invent anything.

[Q] Playboy: Is it your opinion today, as it was when you wrote the book, that the Piri Reis map could have been drawn only from the air?

[A] Von Daniken: No, absolutely not. My opinion is that some parts of the map, especially Antarctica and the islands, are a great mystery.

[Q] Playboy: What about the iron column in Delhi, India, which you write has resisted rust for thousands of years and is made of "an unknown alloy from antiquity." In fact, that column does have rust on it and the process by which it was made is well understood. Do you still find it mysterious?

[A] Von Daniken: No, not anymore. But when I wrote Chariots of the Gods? the information I had concerning this iron column was as I presented it. Since then, I have found that investigations were made and they came to quite different results, so we can forget about this iron thing.

[Q] Playboy: Those investigations had been made even before you wrote the book, hadn't they?

[A] Von Daniken: I didn't know of them. Even if they were made, other authors, who are listed in my bibliography, said the same thing I did, and some of those authors are very serious, quite well known.

[Q] Playboy:Chariots of the Gods? has been through a number of editions; have you made any effort to correct these errors?

[A] Von Daniken: Oh, God, I have so many times tried to correct things, and my experience has been that the corrections are almost never made. Or it takes, I don't know, maybe a year and a half and about 20 letters to get it done. They have these modern ways of printing; they photograph the whole page and it goes into a machine. I have sent four letters to various publishers asking to make corrections and I see that, even in the fourth edition of some of my books, still nothing has been changed. It's a catastrophe. But usually I do it in following books. For example, in the most recent one, called My World in Pictures, there is a brand-new text and I correct things from the earlier books.

[Q] Playboy: Are you familiar with a principle in science called Occam's razor? It means, generally, that if two explanations will account for something, you ought to give preference to the simpler. For example, if you throw a snowball and it knocks off a man's hat, you conclude that the snowball did the job, not that a host of invisible angels came down and plucked away the hat just as the snowball arrived. What do you think of that as a working principle?

[A] Von Daniken: Here we must not forget that the question--which explanation is really simpler--is always a question of date. Up until a few years ago, when we saw cave paintings of men with helmets and halos and all, it was simpler to say they were ceremonial headgear of a religious cult or something like that. But today we have space travel and we know how helmets look. Isn't it fair to ask if that explanation is simpler? With my eyes today, I no longer think the explanations offered by anthropology and archaeology are the simple ones.

[Q] Playboy: You wrote in Chariots, "We cannot possess the truth; at best we can believe it." What did you mean by that?

[A] Von Daniken: I meant that there is no final proof; there are only indications. Some of the indications I have in my books may be completely wrong, absolutely wrong. But we have never made excavations beneath the pyramids or some of the other monuments. Why not try to do it, if only to disprove this guy Von Daniken? When my critics say, for instance, there is no reason to bring in ancient astronauts to explain these monuments, I'm afraid I must say they don't know what I know about some of the sites. They know only what archaeological books tell them. They have not been there and seen the things I have. Those little things aren't in the books because the archaeologists who write the books don't think they're important, but in my eyes they are important. The archaeologists have a different way of thinking from mine. What's the truth? I don't know.

I am accused of ignoring scientific facts. But scientists believe their facts are facts because other scientists told them so. Now I, with my own theory, came to the conclusion that they were wrong. There are only a few of us working on my theory, and it's like a war we have to win. First we must change the minds of the public, especially the young girls and boys in high schools and universities, so that when they come to the scientists they will look at the facts with new eyes. One or two generations will pass; maybe today's truth will no longer be the truth tomorrow.

If I gave you a list of hundreds of scientific "truths" of 50 years ago, we could see how few are still thought to be true. Guys like Darwin--I don't want to compare myself to such a nice gentleman, but it was always someone like Darwin against a whole world of so-called scientific facts. He had to doubt them. If you don't doubt them, you're at a standstill. And I think people are beginning to do that. In Toronto last December, I had a great debate on TV. That was the name of the program, The Great Debate. My opponent was Dr. Ruth Tringham; she's a Harvard professor of anthropology.

On this program, first she was allowed to attack me for six minutes. I didn't get to say anything. She crushed me down completely. Then I got five minutes to reply, like in court. I did that, and then there was a commercial. During the break they put our chairs closer together, with a table in the middle, and for the next 20 minutes we were allowed to talk and interrupt each other with our arguments. Another break, and then, for the last 20 minutes, the audience asked questions. And at the end of the hour, the audience voted who had won. Dr. Tringham won with 120 points against my 112.

This was a diverse audience, with a number of scientific people, and I think it's really very interesting that I came out against a Harvard professor with a difference of only 120 to 112. I was able to demolish the audience's certainty that she had the truth about the development of man. I did this talking about my theories in a calm and sober way, not saying things I couldn't prove. But you know, some scientists criticize my first book because of its style of writing. I had no choice, however. I am not a scientific man, and if I had written a scientific book, it would have been calm and sober and nobody would talk about it.

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps another reason scientists dislike your books is that you get so many simple things wrong. You say the book of Genesis reports the creation of the Earth "with absolute geological accuracy." According to Genesis, the oceans were formed before the stars and the whole process of building the Earth and the universe took four days. Is that absolute accuracy, in your opinion?

[A] Von Daniken: No, no, certainly not. What I mean is that in Genesis, water comes first, then the land, then plants and (concluded on page 151)Playboy Interview(continued from page 64) finally man. If anyone was just dreaming up the whole story, he might have said man first, then water. He might have mixed it all up.

[Q] Playboy: You also write about tachyons, the theoretical particles, not yet discovered, that would travel faster than light. You write, "Scientists know that tachyons must exist." Can you think of any scientists who have said that?

[A] Von Daniken: Yes. Several.

[Q] Playboy: Who?

[A] Von Daniken: Well, whether they go so far as to say "must," I couldn't be sure.

[Q] Playboy: Do astronomers I. S. Shklovski and Carl Sagan believe, as you assert in Chariots, that the moons of Mars are artificial?

[A] Von Daniken: In their book, Intelligent Life in the Universe, they have published such studies.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't there a difference between reporting a study and advocating it yourself?

[A] Von Daniken: Yes, I should have said "suggest." In the German version, it says they "say yes" to the theory.

[Q] Playboy: So it's a problem of translation?

[A] Von Daniken: Yes. Sometimes translators don't know what they're translating.

[Q] Playboy: Unfortunately, millions of English-language readers are being told that these two astronomers believe Mars has artificial moons.

[A] Von Daniken: That's utterly wrong.

[Q] Playboy: On another subject, you write, "Our radio astronomers send signals into the universe to make contact with unknown intelligence." But, in fact, no such experiment has ever been performed.

[A] Von Daniken: Oh, it has. Sagan should know this very well.

[Q] Playboy: Well, we asked Sagan about it. He called it a common misconception. He added, as an opinion of your work: "The kindest thing I can say about Von Daniken is that he ignores the science of archaeology. Every time he sees something he can't understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet."

[A] Von Daniken: Yes. Well, once in the States I watched a TV program with Sagan, J. Allen Hynek, the UFO specialist from Northwestern University, and two or three other gentlemen. One was a helicopter pilot who said he encountered a UFO that turned the air blue. He and three other men aboard the helicopter tried to make a quick landing, but some unknown force lifted them up thousands of feet, then suddenly went away. Sagan said they must have suffered from a delusion. Hynek said, "What about the altimeter? Did it have a delusion, too?"

After the program, those of us watching decided that a man like Sagan thinks he is the only one to whom everybody else should listen, and people who see UFOs should have to convince scientists like him that what they say is true. We decided, no, they should not have to convince such scientists, because the scientists do not want to be convinced.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you have arguments with UFO enthusiasts yourself, because you don't believe in flying saucers?

[A] Van Daniken: Yes, but it's a difficult subject. I have never seen a UFO. What I know about them is second-or thirdhand, from a newspaper story or what someone tells me. I see no reason they could not exist, but many of the reports you get do not seem serious. I have received several hundred photos in the mail from my readers, but not one of them has impressed me as an authentic UFO photo. Not one.

[Q] Playboy: What other sorts of letters do you get?

[A] Von Daniken: From all sorts of people. Recently I did an article for a Sunday newspaper in Germany. They analyzed the mail that came in and they found letters from 12-year-olds, from grandmothers, cabdrivers and top scientists. I've also received about 20 letters--all from the United States; they must be especially silly there--from people swearing they are extraterrestrials. They say, "I'm from outer space, I'm only here for a short time, you can meet me at such and such a time and place." It's usually someplace like Nevada. I have never gone to any of those meetings.

[Q] Playboy: Do you concern yourself with legends like the Abominable Snowman? Do you think he might be an astronaut?

[A] Von Daniken: That is not in my field of research.

[Q] Playboy: What about stories of fish raining from the skies, people turned into frogs, magic slippers?

[A] Van Daniken: I have to be careful here, because I do this sort of thing myself--I mean, this is what archaeologists say about some of my stories--but I think most of these things have natural explanations.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about the book you're working on now.

[A] Von Daniken: In one short chapter, I speak about Jesus. I give many lectures and constantly I am asked questions by people who say Jesus was an astronaut. That makes me laugh. I'm definitely sure Jesus had nothing to do with astronauts, and I want to say so once and for all.

[Q] Playboy: Jesus did fly up into space, in a sense.

[A] Von Daniken: Yes, and he said, "In my father's house are many mansions," and on the mountain he was surrounded by fire. There are things in the Bible about Jesus which, if you wanted to do it, you could press into such a theory.

[Q] Playboy: Yes?

[A] Von Daniken: But it's silly. There is no reason to say Jesus came from space. Why, then, did he die on the cross? What did he leave behind? Not Christianity; that didn't come for several generations, in a completely different way, put together by Saint Paul.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe Saint Paul was an astronaut.

[A] Von Daniken: Oh, God, forget it.

[Q] Playboy: Should the fact that you are a convicted fraud and embezzler influence whether or not people listen to what you have to say?

[A] Von Daniken: You know, many people who have been in jail say they were not guilty. I say the same thing. I have never committed fraud or embezzlement, although it is true I have been convicted of those things. I was improperly convicted three times, but each time for the same thing. It was all part of the same chain.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] Von Daniken: It was ridiculous. In 1968 I left for a world trip. There was a tax bill open, true, but before I left, I made arrangements with the tax office, so arresting me on my way back, in Vienna, was ridiculous. All the big newspapers were on my side and wrote against the prosecutor, and so he had to defend himself. He found a damned chain of things I should have done years before, concerning money I had borrowed and later repaid. It was all a construction by the prosecutor.

I really don't want to go into details, because I don't think it has anything to do with my work. It's very easy to say that because a person has been in jail he's not serious, and you can't believe what he says. Personally, I find that way of thinking very arrogant and unfair. People don't ask if Christ was convicted of a crime. What has that to do with the message Christ brought? What does my having been in jail, guilty or innocent, have to do with my work?

[Q] Playboy: A last question comes to mind because of our favorite of your theories--the one in Gold of the Gods in which you suggest that the banana was brought to Earth from space. Were you serious?

[A] Von Daniken: No, and not many people realize that.

[Q] Playboy: That leads us to ask if all your writing is a put-on. Are you, as one writer suggested, "the most brilliant satirist in German literature for a century"?

[A] Von Daniken: The answer is yes and no. We have a wonderful term in German: jein. It's a combination of ja and nein, yes and no. In some part, absolutely not; I mean what I say seriously. In other ways, I mean to make people laugh.

[Q] Playboy: Well, you've succeeded in both aims.