How Erich von Däniken's Fantasy Of 'Celestial Chariots' Trivialised Dharmic Civilisation

Erich von Däniken, the Swiss author who popularised the ancient astronaut fantasy through his 1968 book Chariots of the Gods?, died on 10 January 2026, at age 90. His works, selling over 70 million copies, claimed extra-terrestrial visitors engineered ancient human achievements, captivating a global audience but drawing sharp rebuke from archaeologists, historians, and scientists.

Däniken succeeded by using rhetorical tricks. These tricks took advantage of what the public did not know about archaeology. His main trick of the trade was this: if a modern person could not easily explain an ancient achievement, then aliens must have done it.

Erich von Däniken's flagship claims about ancient sites have been thoroughly refuted by archaeological evidence, confirming human ingenuity without extra-terrestrial aid.

For the Nazca Lines, he alleged alien landing strips needing aerial oversight, but scholars verify they were sacred ritual paths formed by removing dark pebbles to expose lighter soil beneath, using simple stakes and ropes. Visibility from nearby hilltops and Andes mountains, plus the region's soft soil incapable of bearing spacecraft weight, disprove flight dependency.

The Palenque sarcophagus of Mayan ruler Pakal, misinterpreted as an astronaut cockpit with controls and flames, depicts his underworld descent via the World Tree (axis mundi), where 'flames' represent stylised serpents and other elements also align with Mayan cosmology.

Delhi's Iron Pillar, claimed as a 4,000-year rust-proof alien alloy, dates to around 402 CE and consists of 99.72% pure iron whose high phosphorus content forms a rust-resistant coating, and that is a result of ancient Indian metallurgical skill, not alien intervention.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of Däniken's work is its inherent epistemic racism. His theories almost exclusively targeted the achievements of non-white civilisations in India, Africa, South America, and the Pacific as being intellectually incapable of building their own monuments, thus effectively stripping these cultures of their intellectual agency.

In the Indian context, Däniken's work found a unique and paradoxical, yet ready supportive audience from a section of the Hindu Right. Unlike the Christian creationist community, which often viewed the ancient astronaut theory as a direct threat to the biblical account of life's origins, this section of the Hindu Right saw in Däniken an external validation of their own scriptural descriptions of celestial travel and devastating weaponry.

Däniken himself dedicated significant attention to Indian epics, asserting that "only an illiterate could overlook the fact that flying cars were described in ancient Indian texts". This rhetoric, though pseudo-scientific, provided a powerful tool for this section of Hindu nationalists who fancied such a shallow, sensationalist, literal version of their ancient texts as challenging 'Eurocentric' historical models imposed during the British Raj.

Däniken's literalist interpretation of the vimanas as interplanetary spaceships and brahmastras as divine nuclear weapons in Indian epics provided a fantasy-based technological force multiplier for these nationalist agendas.

By reinterpreting spiritual allegories as records of advanced engineering and nuclear physics, Däniken offered a post-colonial shortcut to national pride. The 'Ancient Astronaut Gods' transformed into the Vedic Starfarer narrative in Hindutva circles. This sought to validate indigenous antiquity through the prestigious lexicon of modern aerospace, effectively rebranding the past as a technologically sublime era of lost nuclear war and interplanetary travel.

This alignment has spawned a generation of 'Däniken clones' within Hindutva circles — the desi versions of the Swiss author. The damage is not simple. Powerful serials on the History Channel like Ancient Aliens, predicated on Däniken's delusion, reduce Hindu civilisational achievements into the handiwork of out-of-the-world aliens or superhuman alien-like rishis.

Ultimately, this narrative represents a profound insult to age-old Indian culture and spirituality.

The harm is twofold: first, by tethering sacred symbolism to the hardware of mid-century sub-mediocre science fiction, Hindu spiritual symbolism becomes trivialised and stripped of its psycho-spiritual depth. Second, this association turns legitimate decolonising historiography into a laughing stock, delegitimising serious efforts to reclaim indigenous agency by drowning them in a sea of sensationalist absurdity.

Erich von Däniken was a master of the monetisation of the juvenile quest for the 'unexplained'. He realised that the public's thirst for mystery and post-colonial anxieties could be transformed into a lucrative, lifelong career. However, his legacy is one of slop that the scientific community and historians will be cleaning up for years.

As we look to the stars, we must do so with the rigorous tools of science like Chandrasekar and the poetic imagination of poets like Bharathi and painters like Van Gogh, rather than the easy, deceptive answers of a professional deceiver.

The true 'chariots of the gods' are not alien spacecraft, but the vehicles of human imagination and the genuine brilliance of our ancestors and the great souls amongst us, a brilliance that Däniken spent a lifetime trying to erase, and his memetic clones trying to do so today, in favour of a cosmic mirage.