Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Von Däniken was at his most creative when he discussed the alleged mysteries of ancient Egypt. The Pyramids of Egypt fascinate him, as do the mummies. More than anything else, von Däniken’s distorted and inaccurate writings on ancient Egypt were responsible for the belief in “pyramid power,” the idea that the shape of the pyramid is itself magical and possesses preservative powers.

Influenced by Erich von Däniken’s claims that Egyptian mummies had been preserved by some process unknown to science, pyramid power became quite a craze in the world of pseudoscience for a brief time in the mid-1970s. The idea was that the pyramidal shape itself was magical and filled with a mysterious energy and power. In Toth and Nielsen’s (1976) Pyramid Power, we are told that pyramid power is “the fuel of the future” (frontispiece). The back cover of King’s (1977) Pyramid Energy Handbook hints that pyramids can “deepen your ESP” and “make your plants grow.” MacRobert (1986) reports that it is not unusual to see people walking around with pyramid-shaped hats at New Age gatherings. I recall seeing an advertisement in a Sunday newspaper supplement for a pyramid-shaped doghouse guaranteed to rid dogs of fleas.

Pyramid power claims have actually been tested. Alter (1973) and Simmons (1973) showed that pyramid-shaped containers were no more effective than any other shape at preserving organic matter (flowers or meat) placed in them. Nor did putting dull razor blades in a pyramid-shaped holder restore them to sharpness, contrary to a frequent claim of pyramid power promoters. Nonetheless, it was certainly possible to obtain testimonials from people who swore that putting a razor blade under a pyramid made it sharper. How could they believe that? As anyone who has used razor blades knows, even a dull blade can be used if it is needed badly enough. The pyramid power believer puts a dull blade under a pyramid at night and then shaves with it the next morning. Expecting it to be sharper, he perceives it as sharper, but never bothers to make any real measurements of the sharpness. Thus, the belief is perpetuated.

Von Daniken (1970) tells us that the primitive Egyptians couldn’t possibly have built the pyramids by themselves. The entire culture of ancient Egypt “appears suddenly and without transition with a fantastic ready made civilization” (p. 95). Certainly the Egyptians couldn’t have evolved such an advanced culture so rapidly; it must have been due to infusions of advanced knowledge from extraterrestrial visitors. As usual, von Däniken’s facts are simply wrong, as any text on Egyptian history shows (see, for example, Mertz 1978). The evolution of Egyptian culture is well known from the time of the region’s unification, about 3100 B.C.E., through the Old Kingdom, about 2680 to 2180 B.C.E., to the New Kingdom, about 1600 to 1085 B.C.E. The New Kingdom was the period of the Great Pyramids.

Contrary to von Daniken’s claims, the Pyramids did not simply spring up out of the desert with no history of development. The history of the Pyramids can be traced from their predecessors, called mastabas , which were small brick tombs. One famous pyramid shows that the pyramid builders occasionally made errors. This pyramid, at Meidum, was originally built with its walls too steep to support its own weight. The top part of the structure collapsed into the rubble now found at the base of the pyramid. This is hardly the kind of accuracy one would expect from superadvanced space-traveling beings. The Egyptian engineers, like any intelligent humans, learned from their mistakes, and later pyramids were built with less steep sides.

Von Däniken (1970) made other claims about the Pyramids that simply aren’t true. He asked, “Is it really a coincidence that the height of the pyramid of Cheops multiplied by a thousand million—98,000,000 miles—corresponds approximately to the distance between the earth and sun?” (p. 98) The answer is clearly yes. And von Däniken even managed to get the distance between Earth and the Sun wrong: It is 93 million, not 98 million miles. An error of 6 percent is hardly the accuracy to be expected from interstellar navigators. Such a numbers game is easy to play, even if one takes the effort to get one’s numbers right. As was pointed out on an episode of National Educational Television’s Nova program titled “The Case of the Ancient Astronauts,” which was first broadcast in 1978, the height of the Washington Monument multiplied by forty gives the distance in light years to the second nearest star, Proxima Centauri. About the year 5330, will some von Däniken-like charlatan claim that ancient Americans were much too dumb to have built such a magnificent monument themselves and must, therefore, have had help from space travelers from a planet in the Proxima Centauri system?

Von Däniken (1970) also claimed that the building of the Pyramids was impossible for the Egyptians because they lacked the necessary technology. He says that the method of building the Pyramids remains unknown and that conventional methods could not have been used since the Egyptians didn’t have rope or trees to make rollers to move the stones. All this, as the reader might expect, is false. The methods of building the Pyramids are recorded in the Pyramids themselves. Rope, for example, was available in great quantity, and examples are preserved in many museums. Logs for rollers were widely used. The methods of quarrying the stone and transporting it by barge from the quarries to the site of the pyramids are also known (Story 1976).

If pyramids baffle von Däniken, mummies pose even more of a puzzle for him. Their existence suggests to him that the Egyptians were given the secret of immortality by their extraterrestrial visitors. Further, the extraterrestrials will be able to bring the mummies back to life when they return. In an interview broadcast on the Nova program mentioned above, von Däniken said the extraterrestrials might have told Pharaoh, “Listen, we come back let’s say in 5,000 years, we are able to reconstruct your body, if you only take care that we find at least a few living cells of your body, but be careful, take your brain away into a separate pot because if we want to construct also the same memory as you had, we need your brain separately.” In his 1970 book he says that mummies are “incomprehensible” (p. 101) and that the techniques of mummification remain a mystery to modern science. This is all totally false.

Like the techniques used to build the Pyramids, the techniques used in mummification developed gradually during the history of Egypt. Harris and Weeks (1973) describe this development briefly and then discuss in more detail the thirteen separate steps involved in mummification during the New Kingdom. Examination of the steps shows the ridiculous nature of von Däniken’s claims regarding the purpose of mummification. Advanced as they were, the ancient Egyptians had little knowledge of the brain’s function. They viewed the brain as an organ of little importance (the understanding that the brain is the organ of the mind is a very modern one, dating only from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western thought). Thus, when the body was mummified, the brain was pulled out bit by bit through the nose, using long tweezers, and thrown away. Unlike the other internal organs, it was not saved in a separate jar. So much for bringing back Pharaoh, complete with his memories.

Von Däniken (1970) claimed that the Egyptians mummified their leaders and important individuals so they could return from the dead and suggests they got the idea of immortality from the ancient astronauts. He says that mummification was intended to help preserve the body for later restoration. In fact, the elaborate mummification ritual was designed to aid the trip to the other world. The internal organs (except the brain) were preserved because the dead would need them in the other world, just as in this one. Pets and servants were often killed and mummified so they could accompany the deceased to the other world. The Egyptians clearly did not believe that people came back from the dead. This is shown in the lovely “Song of the Harpers,” found inscribed on the walls of several tombs from the Middle Kingdom period: