My First Attempt at Writing Short Fiction

Recently, I had to take a writing class as part of my degree, and one of the assignments was to write a short story. I’ve long wanted to write fiction, but I always felt unprepared. The class I took was pretty great though. The instructor’s attitude was; “I don’t care if you don’t feel ready. You’re handing me in a story at the end of the week, so shut up and get to work.” It was the kick up the hole that I needed.

There were no topics assigned, but it was suggested that we write about something that we were interested in. Before putting pen to paper, I had to sit down to think about what interests me. I glanced at my desk, noticed the books on aliens and black magic that I had been reading, and shrieked, “Eureka!”

Here is the story I came up with. It may not be a masterpiece, but I feel that it’s a decent first attempt, and I think that anyone with an interest in the books I review will probably enjoy it. I definitely plan to write more short fiction in the future.

Night Shift – Duke De Richleau

Preparing for Contact: A Metamorphosis of Consciousness – Lyssa Royal and Keith Priest

Royal Priest Research – 1994

Worst of the blurst. This is a new low.

This is a book about how to prepare yourself to communicate with aliens. It’s made up of a series of messages that were sent from a several different extra terrestrial entities through a channeler named Lyssa Royal (now Lyssa Royal Holt). These entities are doing their best to help us prepare to change humanity’s mass consciousness in order to make free and open contact with the inhabitants of other worlds.

On deciding to read this book, I took one look at the cover and thought to myself; ‘Sweet Jesus, this is going to be worse than Whitley Strieber’s bullshit.” Oh, you can only imagine the hearty pat on the back that I gave myself when I opened it up to see that the first chapter opens with a quote from Transformation. (There’s another at the beginning of the 11th chapter, and the 10th opens with a quote from Communion.) Think about that for a second; the people who create this book actually look up to ol’ WhitStrieb.

Channeling is something that annoys me greatly, and nobody makes me want to publicly fill my britches with scat more than J.Z. Knight, the horrendously ugly mutant woman who has undergone failed plastic-surgery and claims to be a channel for Ramtha, a 35,000 year old, Atlantean paedophile. One day, I was watching a video of her and sticking pins into my gooch when one of the related videos caught my eye on account of its title being written in Chinese. I clicked it, and I was very glad that I had done so. It was a video of a bald man pretending to be an alien. At one point in the video, the alien’s accent becomes a hilarious mixture of Indian and the way Irish people sound in American movies. I became fascinated with this character, and I’ve spent more than a reasonable amount of time watching his videos. His name is Darryl Anka, and the alien he channels is named Bashar. Now this might seem only tangentially relevant, but as it turns out, Bashar actually appears in this book! Lyssa intrudes on Darryl’s turf and summons Bashar into her body in one of the final chapters of the book. Reading that part was like meeting an old friend.

Of course, there are others, most likely students of Anka or Priest, who summon the same types of aliens. Here’s another channeling Bashar. This one seems particularly challenged. Fuck, the world is a silly, crazy place.

I’m not going to provide a cohesive summary of the book as that would require looking through it again. Instead, I’ll just mention a few of the more memorable ideas contained in this collection of silly nonsense.

Don’t expect to make face to face contact with an alien. Aliens don’t ‘exist’ in our ‘reality’.
Sometimes aliens ‘exist’ in our ‘reality’.
How will you know that you’re actually talking to an alien and not just yourself? Well, it doesn’t really matter; aliens are often just our future selves.
Aliens live too far from Earth to actually come down and visit us.
Sometimes aliens come down to visit us.
If we really want to communicate with aliens, the best thing to do is draw pictures and feel good.
Every one of us has already made contact with aliens. In fact, we make contact with aliens on a regular basis. Whenever we enter the ‘theta reality’ we communicate freely with all kinds of entities. The theta reality is basically the state that we exist in between dreaming and waking up.

There were legitimately interesting aspects of this book. I was actually quite impressed with the comprehensive nature of the dogma that the authors are setting down. If you want to hear voices in your head badly enough, you will. The only difficulty with this will be for you to accept that the voices in your head are other than your own. If you manage to convince yourself that these voices are actually aliens, even if they’re only mildly alien versions of yourself, then it’s going to be quite difficult to argue with you; however, although I can’t prove that the voices in your head aren’t aliens, I can avoid you and tell all my mates that you’re a stupid cunt.

This is basically a new-age self help book with a bit of science fiction thrown in to spice it up. (It’s full of the same “let’s enter the next stage of human evolution” crap as Morning of the Magicans and the last chapter of Wilson’s The Occult.) The ideas are utterly moronic, but the author’s aren’t trying to convince their readers to kill themselves; they’re trying to encourage people to get together and be creative and open-minded. It was a shitty experience to read this book, but that’s because it was boring, repetitive and stupid. At least it wasn’t boring, repetitive, stupid and morally reprehensible like a christian self help book. I’ve also watched some videos of Lyssa Royal (skip to 12:50 to get to the summoning bit), and she’s simply too silly to dislike.

This book was written more than 20 years ago, and those 20 years have seen none of its predictions come true. That being said, there’s still people who are into this nonsense. It really does baffle me when I think of how weird and insane the human race can be. It seems that some people feel the need to believe in something greater than themselves, and all things considered, I suppose that telepathic aliens aren’t the lamest available option.

Oh, and just to remind you; there is a facebook page for this blog for anyone that wants to keep updated with all of the newest posts.

Library Sale – Sweet Finds

Transformation (The Breakthrough) – Whitley Strieber

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Avon – 1989
A few months ago, I reviewed Whitley Strieber’s Communion. I had planned to wait a year or two before reading the sequel, but I was leaving for work the other day and I needed a book for my train ride that would fit in my back pocket. Transformation was the first within reach.

Communion was garbage, and Transformation is worse. At this stage, Strieber is no longer hanging out with Budd Hopkins, and barely considers the possibility that his ‘visitors’ are from outer space. Strieber wants to be seen to be as carrying the cross of every human being who has ever claimed to have had an encounter with the paranormal, and to state that he was abducted by Martians might prevent him from being able to speak on behalf of all those loonies who believe that they have met fairies, elves, or Gods. Instead, Whitley has decided that the visitors are likely trans-dimensional inhabitants of Earth. They may not be from this planet, but nor are they not from this planet.

Strieber was 41 when Communion came out. That means that it contains roughly 40 years worth of abduction experiences. Transformation came out just one year after Communion, and Strieber had only managed to get abducted once or twice during this period. Accordingly, the aliens take a back seat in Transformation; Strieber’s philosophical side is the unwelcome visitor here. 80-85% of this book is taken up with him explaining how he came to terms with his weird experiences. (And in fairness to him, I’m sure it took a lot of effort and time to get over having his hemorrhoidy anal pouch violated by hobgoblins.)

In my review of Communion, I wrote from the perspective of Strieber to give my followers a sense of what reading that book was like. I’ll re-summon Whitley for a bit to give you some more insight into this one.

“I was petrified, but I desperately wanted to let the visitors know that I had accepted my role in their plans and that I was willing to do whatever I could to please them. These strange creatures terrified me, but I understood that this fear was necessary. As time passed, I realized that I was not so much afraid the visitors as I was afraid that they would not be happy with me. This fear had evolved into a combination of uncertainty and isolation. I resolved to do whatever I could to entice the visitors to keep me as one of their subjects. I stopped locking the doors to our cabin, and I began playing with my bum during masturbation (to make it looser for future probing). Ease of access is key when you’re dealing with these sinister, yet magnificent beings.

Once I crossed the threshold of uncertainty, I began to comprehend the visitors’ plan for me. Although the terror and discomfort were difficult to bear, they ultimately made me a stronger, more open person. Perhaps the visitors are so used to crossing boundaries that they do not understand or notice the negative aspects of fear, especially fear of the unknown. I now believe that they intentionally frightened me so that I could ultimately become less frightened. In any case, we must be willing to transcend our emotions if we hope to accompany the visitors into realms of unheralded experience…”
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Although there’s not as many alien encounters in this one, it does include a lengthy section on Strieber’s astral projections. He finds a way to allow his soul to escape from his body in a little bubble, and he uses this bubble to float around his gaff. He also finds a way to appear to people in different parts of the country. He tells of how he would think of a friend and then how that friend would immediately call him and tell him that she had just seen his disembodied head lurking in her bathroom. I’m not even taking the piss; he actually expected people to believe this twoddle.
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More like Twitley Strieber, amirite?

Oh, there’s a bit in here where Strieber claims that Aliens speak Irish. (Well in fairness, he actually says that a different lad named Leonard Keane has made that claim.) Unfortunately, the article that Striebs references was unpublished at the time, and it looks like it has remained unpublished. (I wonder why!) I can’t find any about Keane online either. Keane’s argument is supposedly based on an abductee’s memories of alien speech. The abductee in question was hypnotized and began to spout off the different things that the aliens said to her.

Let’s break this down piece by piece.

1. This is what the abductee claims to have heard: “oh-tookurah bohututahmaw hulah duh duwa maher Duh okaht turaht nuwrlahah tutrah aw hoe hoe marikoto tutrah etrah meekohtutrah etro indra ukreeahlah”

2. Keane claims that this sounds identical to “ua-tuaisceartach beo t-utamail uile dubh dubhach mathair dubh ocaid tuartha nuair lagachar t-uchtarach athbheoite maireachtala-costas t-uachtarach eatramh meancog t-uachtarach eatramh indeachrachlach”

3. If those words were actually pronounced in Irish, they would sound something like this: “oowa-tooishkyartock byoh tootamawl illyeh duv duvock mawher duv uckad toorha noor lagacar tooacktorock awtveeohithye marrocktawllah custos tooacktarock yatriv myancug tooachtarock yatriv indyakracklock”
Compare the two phonetic versions there. Do the sounds match up?

3. The Irish words that Keane heard in the abductee’s rant translate directly as: “descendants of Northern peoples living groping all darkness mournful mother dark occasion forebode when weakness in high places revives cost of living high interval mistakes in high places interval fit for distressing”

4. I’m not sure who was responsible, Keane or Strieber, but somehow that jumble of words was put into the following order: “The living descendants of the Northern peoples are groping in universal darkness. Their mother mourns. A dark occasion forebodes when weakness in high places will revive a high cost of living; an interval of mistakes in high places; and interval fit for distressing events”

What a load of shit…

Leonard Keane’s article was supposed to be called “Keltic Factor Red”; on the off-chance that somebody knows where I could find a copy, please let me know! I want to thank my friend Lorcan for helping me with the Irish phonetics above. I’ll sign off with Lorcan’s message for any of the visitors that might be reading this post;

“Ná cuir aon rud suas mo hole, ET”

Communion – Whitley Strieber

Avon – 1988

Wow, what an utterly ridiculous book. Although the accounts herein are presented as fact, this book is often listed as fiction. Fiction or not, it’s not a plot driven book, and I feel that the most appropriate way to review it will be to paraphrase the entire text:

“My name is Whitley Strieber, and this book is an account of my abduction experiences. Twice in the year of 1985, I was taken from my bed by a gang of little men who then took me to a weird room in a crystal in the sky and stuck an ugly pipe into my crapper. That’s right folks. I was abducted, and the things that took me decided to jam a piece of their technology into my rectum; the alien contraption punctured my wrinkled rim and ruptured my shite-filled poobag. The dirty little bowsies were collecting a sample of my gick! [You might find it peculiar that anyone would want Whitley Strieber’s shit, but in fairness, Communion has sold 2 million copies!] Oh yeah, there was another weird lifeform in the crystal too. It looked like an insect, and it raped me. Well, I say rape, but I was actually pretty hard at the time! Can you blame me?

After this happened, I decided not to jump to any conclusions. I did however, start hanging out with Budd Hopkins, the UFO abduction expert. He recommended that I go see a hypnotherapist. I took heed of this good advice, and the hypnotherapist proved to me that I had actually been abducted a bunch of times throughout my life. He reminded me of the time that I built a rocket engine in my bedroom when I was a little kid. The aliens had told me how to make it, but afterwards they decided that I shouldn’t have that information so they burned down my parents house. How did I forget that? Silly me!

I’ve used the word ‘aliens’ a few times, but I’m not actually sure that it’s spacemen who are abducting me. I’ve no real reason to believe that they’re from another planet. They might just be elves or fairies. Whatever though, they probed my asshole and I got the shag; I hope they come back soon!

At this point, I don’t really have much else to say, but I feel like I can probably write another 150 pages or so. I suppose I’ll just fill up space with eventless interview transcripts and a ton of mystical speculation. Fuck it, yeah, I’ll just make allusions to mythical figures and tarot cards, and my book will get really popular with brainless, new-age morons. They’ll ignore the fact that nothing in this book is remotely compelling, and they’ll all think that I’m really smart.”

That’s pretty much the entire book, although I’m not quite sure I’ve captured the arrogance of Strieber’s tone. It really surprises me that something this utterly trashy could be taken seriously by anyone.

I also watched the film version of Communion with Christopher Walken playing Strieber. I have to say that this was one of the few cases in which I far preferred the movie to the book. The film has pretty bad ratings according to what I have seen, but I thought it was as good a movie as could possibly be made of this rag. There’s something really awkward about the whole film, and the special effects are bizarrely bad. It mostly follows the book’s plot, but it gets fucking weird towards the end. The most bizarre scenes almost feel like a satire on the most bullshitty parts of the text. In fact, part of the reason that I liked the movie so much was that it felt like it was making fun of the book; you could watch the film and argue that it depicts nothing more than a dysfunctional family’s bizarre descent into hysteria.

There’s a story that Strieber saw Walken’s depiction of him and told the actor that he was playing the character too crazy. Walken allegedly responded, ‘If the shoe fits…’ I have liked Christopher Walken as an actor for a long time, but if that story is true, he is truly a king amoungst men.

The book was shit, but I enjoyed reading it. I have the sequel, Transformation, and I’m sure I’ll get around to reading that one too. If you do read the book, make sure to watch the film. I’m not sure if the film would be as enjoyable if you hadn’t read the book, but if you’ve made it this far through my review, you have all the information you need. (Although I still think it might take reading the 350 pages of the book to be able to really savour the embarrassment that the film must have caused Strieber.)

School is a nightmare at the moment, and posts will definitely be slow for the next couple of months, but I have some serious gems coming in the post that you are going to want to read about.

The Outer Space Connection – Alan and Sally Landsburg

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Bantam Books – 1975

Well, here we go again; another dumb book about ancient aliens. This one is really bad too. It’s based on the making of a film that was itself based on this book. Does that sound awkward? Yeah, it is. To get the full picture, you really have to watch the movie too. (Don’t worry; it’s online.) The soundtrack is fucking awesome, and the guy from the Twilight Zone does the narration. It turns out that Alan Landsburg worked on Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods movie (also available online), and it shows. (In fairness, he openly admits that he has been “doing that Von Daniken stuff” at the end of this book.) The writing is laughable at times, it’s written as a first person narrative about the shooting of the film, but it has a real Da Vinci Code feel to it. My favourite line in the book comes at the end of a paragraph discussing the disappearance of the Mayan people:
“Instead, they retreated deeper and deeper into undesirable places, seemingly in fear of contact with any other people. Why, damnit, why?”

So what’s being said in here that isn’t being said in the other stupid books I’ve reviewed on the same topic? Well, this one throws in the idea of cloning as an explanation as to how the aliens managed to get here. To plant the seeds of human life on Earth, the aliens would have to have travelled for hundreds of thousands of years. Cryogenics is ruled out as a means of prolonging life, and so in order for the crew to live through the journey, they would have filled up their spaceship with cannisters of human DNA, their own DNA at that. After a few years, one of the female crew members would impregnate herself with some of this DNA and give birth to a clone of herself. 25 years later, the clone would impregnate herself with yet another clone, and the process would be repeated until the ship finally reached Earth. Simple, right?

Landsburg doesn’t really go into detail on how this would work. Regardless of how large and advanced their ship was, I would imagine that the food supplies would have run out after a few thousand years even if the crew was made up of only a few people. I think the idea hinted at is that there is only one crew member alive at a time. (Quite similar to that movie Moon right?) So presumably the mother would have to sacrifice herself as soon as her clone/daughter was ready to take control of the ship. What would the clone do to the corpse? Well, considering the scarcity of meat aboard that spaceship, I reckon the only sensible thing to do would be to eat the body. Nothing should go to waste in space! Matrophageous spite; autophageous delight!

Ok, so that’s a nice bit of fantastic realism, but is there any evidence for this having happened? Of course there is! Scientists cloning axlotals [sic] found that the cloned versions of this variety of salamander end up with a slightly shorter body than the originals. They are otherwise identical. That interesting fact is noted in one of the first chapters of the book, but its relevance isn’t made apparent until somewhere near the end. After the mention of this crucial piece of information, there are a bunch of chapters on the usual ancient alien garbage, including several discussions of the Mayans and their pyramids. The Mayans are praised as being far more advanced than any other peoples of their era. Mayan skulls with holes in them are presented as proof of their advanced medical skill. They weren’t simply smashing each other’s heads open; they were removing cells from the brain to create clones! But wait a minute; how do we know that the Mayans were creating clones? Well, their skeletal remains suggest that the Mayans were fairly stocky.That is to say that they had shorter than average bodies, JUST LIKE THE CLONED OXLOTALS!!!
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Brain transplants in 2000 BC

There’s tonnes of other crap in here; lots of utter shit about pyramid power and human auras. The stuff on the Bermuda Triangle was pretty cool, but it’s written in an infuriatingly credulous way, just like everything else in this book. There’s also a discussion on Vladmir Demikhov’s experiments on dogs. I had heard of these before, but I’d not watched the footage online. Fuck, it’s absolutely horrible. I guess that’s what Roky Erickson was singing about.

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Pretty sure that’s just a monkey there mate!

I can’t say I’d recommend this book to anyone, but the movie might be enjoyable if you were high on drugs. I myself was not high on drugs when I watched it.

Morning of the Magicians – Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier

Dorset Press – 1988

This one is utterly moronic. I’m no stranger to idiotic books, and I have a fairly high threshold for reading garbage, but this one was seriously stupid. It was made particularly disappointing by the fact that I actually spent quite a while trying to track down an affordable copy. I always knew it was going to be fairly bullshitty, and so I decided that anything more than 15 dollars would be too much. It took me five separate orders over the course of two years to actually get my hands on this thing. Three times the bookseller had already sold their copy and not updated their stock online, and one copy got lost in the post. When this nice hardback edition arrived, I was delighted.

The delight was not to last.

Why was I so determined to own a copy of this book? Well, this one was actually fairly popular when it was published (this edition boasts “Over 800,000 copies sold!” on the back cover), and a lot of the silly ideas in here went on to influence other silly writers. I kept seeing its title pop up in other books and articles. It has been claimed that this is the source for the main concept in Erich Von Däniken’s work. Also, a large part of this book focuses on Nazi occultism, and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke spends a few pages of his book talking about how fucking stupid this one is. On top of that, I had read that this book was influenced directly by the writings of Lovecraft, and while it is only mentioned briefly in Colin Wilson’s The Occult, it becomes apparent after reading it that it had a pretty big influence on his thinking. I didn’t really have a choice; I had to read this one.

So, the main idea of the book is that human beings are on the brink of the next stage of our mental evolution. Pauwels and Bergier believe that the scientific method has run its course, and any major future developments will be based on something other than logical reasoning. Being sensible is holding us back from reaching our potential. Their idea is to use their imaginations to come up with absurd nonsense, and maybe that nonsense will actually be true. T.C. Lethbridge used this exact approach in his book, the topic of which fits in perfectly with the ideas of Pauwels and Bergier. The authors title this approach ‘Fantastic Realism’. I think another, more accurate, way of describing this approach would be ‘simpletonism’.

They talk about how difficult it will be for the masses to adapt to this new approach. You might find it hard to imagine a modern society radically changing its system of beliefs over a short period of time. The authors’ response to this is ingenious. They claim, ‘ If Nazi Germany did it, we can too!’ Honestly, I think they must have been planning to write two different books and ended up throwing all of their material together to reach a word-count or deadline or something. The Nazi stuff takes up about one third of the book, but its function is limited to serving as a bad example of what the authors want to achieve: a society in which people ignore common-sense and listen to the most mental dopes in all the land.

My favourite part of the book was the authors’ theory on mutants. Pauwels and Bergier believe that while nuclear radiation definitely has negative effects on some people, it probably also has positive effects on others. Sure, it melts some people’s skin off and causes cancer and sterilization, but what’s to say that it doesn’t also create super humans? Back in a few minutes guys, I’m just going to go stick my head in the microwave and become one of the X-men! They give a description of one such super human: “He is now superior to us; his thought no longer plods – it flies… Such a man would have absolutely no interest in trying to communicate with us, nor would he seek to dazzle us by trying to explain the enigmas of light, or the secrets of genes… This man would be above and beyond humanity. He could only communicate to advantage with minds of his own.” I would be surprised if Alan Moore hadn’t based Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen on that specific paragraph.

This book discusses Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, aliens, the Nazis and mutants, so you know that there’s going to be some good stuff in here. Unfortunately, all of the juicy bits are (a) not particularly enlightening and (b) surrounded by pages and pages of wank. It’s a long book, and I was only able to stomach a few pages a day. In fairness though, I probably would have enjoyed it a little more if I hadn’t come across its ideas in so many other texts. It would be a good place to start if you wanted to begin researching the ridiculous and inane. Otherwise, your life is almost definitely going to be better if you don’t read this imbecilic pile of crap. I bought two other books by Pauwels and Bergier before this one actually arrived, but I’m going to give myself a break before I torture myself with them.

I’m going to have nightmares about having to read these.

The Legend of the Sons of God – T.C. Lethbridge

Arkana – 1990

This books contains some of the choiciest bullshit I have ever come across. Did you know that the rocks of Stonehenge are from Tipperary? Were you aware that the craters on the moon are the results of an interstellar nuclear war between the Martians and Venusians? Had it ever occurred to you that Jesus was a ghost alien from the future? I can’t say I had ever wondered about these things before reading this book, but now I am convinced that they are all entirely true.

T.C. Lethbridge doesn’t even bother to present his ideas as fact. He openly admits that the bulk of this book is conjecture. He reminds his reader that there are gaping holes and inconstencies in our accounts of history. The standard scientific approach to solving these mysteries is to use proof and evidence. This method doesn’t quite satisfy Lethbridge though, and he suggests that it would be more productive to make up ridiculous stories and then look around for evidence of the events that we imagined. This book was written by a grown man playing make-believe.

“Although much of what has been written so far is not strictly orthodox, the present chapter is far worse and deals with matters which are fit really only for the television plays called ‘Doctor Who’.” Thus opens the seventh chapter of this masterpiece.

This book came out at roughly the same time as Von Däniken’s Chariot of the Gods, and it contains some similar ideas, but this one is definitely more enjoyable. It’s short, the writing is engaging and the claims herein are silly enough to be thoroughly entertaining. This is a must read.

Chariots of the Gods? and In Search of Ancient Gods by Erich Von Däniken

Chariots of the Gods? – Erich Von Däniken
Laffont / G.P. Putnam’s Sons – 1970

In Search of Ancient Gods – Erich Von Däniken
G.P. Putnam’s Sons – 1973

I believe in aliens. I would be surprised to find out that the only forms of life in the universe exist on this small planet. I even believe it likely that life on Earth originated elsewhere in the universe. I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary.

Erich Von Däniken believes that an alien civilization came to earth thousands of years ago with the aim of speeding up human development. Apparently Quetzalcoatl, Odin, Zeus, the Burning Bush, and all of the other gods of ancient mythology are members of this band of galactic Samaritans.

Some of the theories in this book are interesting, but the reasoning that Däniken uses is so incredibly bad that he discredits his own work. The first vision of Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1:4) is analyzed in both of these books. Now, Ezekiel is one of the more ‘out-there’ prophets in the old testament; early in his narrative, he has a vision of God floating down to Earth in what Däniken very reasonably refers to as a spaceship. Däniken also makes the reasonable point that if God were truly omnipotent, that he would not have to arrive from the North as he does in Ezekiel: if he were truly omnipotent, he should have been able to instantaneously appear. Even devout Christians must admit that even God can’t do what he can’t do, and I think that if you’re willing to believe in Ezekiel’s vision at all, that you must accept that the God that therein appears is in fact an alien. Now this reasoning should be convincing to believers of the Old Testament, but people with any shred of intelligence won’t really care if the Bible contains aliens. Well, in order to convince non-believers, Däniken actually dismisses the story of Ezekiel and other myths as mere exaggerations of real life UFO encounters. On one hand he is saying that we should believe in aliens because they appear in our mythologies, but on the other hand he is saying that myths are not to be trusted as they are full of exaggeration. According to Däniken, we should only trust the parts of ancient stories that suggest that aliens were once our overlords.

These are two different books that cover largely the same material. Chariots of the Gods? was Däniken’s first book. It seems that some newer versions of the book have dropped the question mark in the title. I find this unfortunate for comedic reasons; every time I see the title I imagine it being read aloud by Ron Burgundy. The other book, In Search of Ancient Gods, has no question mark in the title, but it does have the aptly descriptive subtitle; ‘My Pictorial Evidence for the Impossible’. This one was published a few years after the first one, and it’s almost the exact same content, just with more pictures. Some of the pictures in here are truly bizarre, and they’re far more unsettling than any of Däniken’s writing. This book also has a cool little alien man embossed on the front cover:

Both of these books are ridiculous. They’re not remotely convincing, but they did make me think. I really like reading writer’s predictions for a future that is now past. Däniken believed humans would have reached Mars by 1986. I don’t hold that against him though; if we focused our attention on space travel rather than on killing each other, we might well have reached Mars already. He also imagines the rather futuristic notion of a series of computers in different cities around the world being able to store information and send it to each other! Overall, I’ll give these books a 5.5/10. They were dumb, but they were interesting enough to finish. The film version of Chariots of the Gods refers to to book it was based on as a novel, and I think that reading these books as novels is a good idea. They’re good as science fiction, but shit as science.

I really want to visit Erich Von Däniken’s theme park.