The astrophysicist Carl Sagan said of Mr. von Däniken: “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.”
And The New York Times said that Mr. von Däniken’s prose, which it categorized as “Early Terrible,” was such a “mixmaster of facts, speculations, rhetorical questions” that reading it left one’s mind “the consistency of a rich Swiss fondue.”
But for a certain kind of reader — and, to scientists’ alarm, there were many of them — Mr. von Däniken’s theories registered not only intellectually but also spiritually, constituting something like the catechism of an enlightened new faith.
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