Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

In his later writings, von Däniken (1984) suggested that the famous curse on King Tutankhamen’s tomb may have been the result of some sort of extraterrestrial protection given the tomb. According to the usual legend, many of the individuals who opened Tut’s tomb when it first was found in 1922 died shortly thereafter under mysterious circumstances. The deaths are attributed to the curse allegedly placed on anyone who defiled the tomb. This curse was said to be inscribed on the door of the tomb when it was found. Randi (1978) analyzed the deaths supposedly due to the curse and found that the death rate was just what would be expected, given that many of the members of the expedition were quite elderly and that they were living in a country where modem sanitary facilities and health measures were lacking.

It has further been revealed (Frazier 1980–81) that the curse was a hoax in the first place. The security officer for the expedition, Richard Adamson, stated in 1980 that the curse story was dreamed up to keep would-be robbers away from the opened tomb. The news that the Curse of Tut had been a hoax did not stop an enterprising San Francisco policeman from suing the city for disability payments when he suffered a stroke while guarding the King Tut museum exhibit while it was in San Francisco in 1979. He claimed that Tut’s spirit “lashed out at him,” causing the stroke. The suit was dismissed (p. 12).

Another favorite von Däniken pseudomystery is the set of large designs found in the Nazca Desert of Peru. Intricate patterns of lines, pictures of giant birds, monkeys, spiders, and other animals, cover an area sixty by ten miles. Von Däniken suggested that the lines are the remains of an ancient “spaceport” and landing field. He doubted that primitive peoples could have produced the lines and figures without some extraterrestrial help through “instructions from an aircraft” (von Däniken 1970, p. 33).

In reality, the lines in the Nazca plain represent a complex astronomical calendar and observatory, testifying to the astronomical sophistication of the peoples who created them (Story 1976; Kosok and Reiche 1949; Krupp 1978; Hadingham 1987). Von Däniken’s contempt for “primitive” peoples is shown when he belittles their ability to create such large figures on their own. How, he asks, could they have created the nearly perfect circles found in some of the figures? Simple—dig a hole and place a stake in it. Tie a rope of a certain length to the top of the stake. Stretch the rope to its full length and then walk in a circular pattern. The stake, moving freely around in the unfilled hole, will turn and the rope, maintaining its length, will allow one to trace out a nearly perfect circle. Certainly the people who created the Nazca designs thought of this simple method. Nickell (1982–83) has shown that it is possible to produce a full-size duplicate of a Nazca drawing—440 feet long—using only “sticks and cord such as the Nazcas might have employed” (p. 42). It took six people about a day and a half to complete the figure.

In his other six major books, von Däniken creates hundreds of other pseudomysteries. The books are masterpieces of distortion, evasion, and deceptive writing, all in support of his half-baked ideas. Like a true proponent of pseudoscience, von Däniken does not revise his theories or claims in light of new evidence. For example, in Chariots of the Gods ? (1970) a picture appears with the legend, “This is very reminiscent of the aircraft parking bays on a modern airport.” The picture shows part of the wing, with individual feathers, of one of the giant Nazca plain bird designs. What the reader is not told and cannot judge from the photograph is that the whole photo shows an area only twenty feet across—hardly enough to contain extraterrestrial aircraft. In his Nova interview, von Däniken acknowledged this, saying, “I fully admit that this explanation of being a parking place is simply ridiculous.” But while the book has gone through numerous printings, the error was never corrected.

A somewhat more sophisticated and specific ancient astronaut claim has been proposed by Robert Temple in his 1976 book The Sirius Mystery. According to Temple, the Dogon, a tribe living in Mali 190 miles south of the famous city of Timbuktu, were visited one thousand years ago by amphibious creatures from the Sirius star system. The evidence for this is, first, that the star Sirius plays an extremely important role in Dogon belief and legend. Second, the Dogon are said to possess advanced astronomical knowledge of the Sirius system, knowledge that has been part of their legends for thousands of years and that they could only have obtained from extraterrestrial visitors. Temple says that the Dogon know there is a second star in the Sirius system, a white dwarf called Sirius B that is both the smallest and the heaviest star in the heavens. Further, according to Temple, Dogon legends tell of an “ark” that came from the sky bearing the Nomno, the founders of Dogon civilization. These are the ancient astronauts, says Temple. Since modern astronomy discovered a white dwarf star, invisible to the naked eye, in the Sirius system only in 1862 and since the Dogon legends telling of such a star date back much further, Temple argues that the only possible source of this sophisticated knowledge of the Sirius system is ancient extraterrestrial visitors.

There is apparently nothing in Dogon legend to indicate that the Nomno were amphibious in nature. Temple (1976) assumes they were because Sirius is a very hot star, so a watery environment would be needed to keep any inhabitants of a planet near the star cool. Ridpath (1978–79) has pointed out, however, that astronomical observations have shown that the environment of the Sirius system is not compatible with life-supporting planets. For example, Sirius B is a source of soft X rays. The part of the system where water would be found in liquid form is constantly changing due to unstable orbits.

Both Ridpath (1978–79) and Story (1976, chap. 12) have examined Temple’s claims in detail and found them to be unsubstantiated. At some points Temple gets his facts wrong. The Dogon were the subject of intense anthropological investigation during the 1940s, and our knowledge of their culture comes from the work of these investigators (Griaule and Dieterlen 1954). Temple says that Dogon legend tells of an “ark” that comes from the sky, presumably a spaceship. But in fact Dogon legend tells of the Nomno coming on an “arch” or bridge from the heavens (Griaule and Dieterlen 1954), which carries a different meaning, not consistent with an extraterrestrial interpretation. Nor are such legends unique to the Dogon; they are found rather frequently in Africa (Ridpath 1978–79).

Another problem with the evidence used by Temple to support his theory is that much of it comes from literal interpretations of Dogon legends. Further, only those bits of legend that seem to support the theory are described. Temple does not inform his readers that Dogon legend is rich and complex and that it includes other elements that are inconsistent with his views.

The Dogon picture the Sirius system as shown in figure 19. According to Dogon legend, there are nine objects in the system, including Sirius A, and two (not one, as Temple says) invisible companion stars. In fact, there is only one invisible star in the Sirius system, so on this vital point of astronomical knowledge the Dogon legend is wrong.