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Oct. 12, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:13:23
Edition 272 - Erich von Daniken 2016

Ahead of a visit to the UK... Erich von Daniken - author of Chariots of the Gods...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
And as a very great man once sang, Welcome to my world.
And it's a very strange one indeed.
Thank you very much for all of your support, the nice emails you keep sending.
No shout-outs on this edition for a particular reason.
A very special guest on this edition of the show.
More about that in just a moment.
If you get in touch with me by email, please let me know who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
I love to get your stories.
You can contact me through the website, theunexplained.tv, and the website designed, created, owned, and maintained by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who does sterling work.
Now, guest on this show, Eric von Daniken, the author of Chariots of the Gods and around about three dozen other books since then, a man who travels the world.
He's 82 years of age now, but his fire and enthusiasm are not dimmed, as you will hear in this conversation from my radio show last week.
I promised you when I started doing the radio show, I would bring the best of the guests from the radio show to this show online and share them with the world.
So that's what I wanted to do.
Eric von Daniken, like I say, due in London on Saturday, October the 15th.
He's giving a talk here, which you'll hear him talk about in this conversation.
And remarkable man.
He was on the show, as we said, two years ago, very nearly, and got more downloads, I think, than any other guest that I've ever had.
And, you know, he always prompts a lot of response.
I find him remarkable in so many ways.
But let's judge for ourselves, shall we, as we hear now from my show on Talk Radio and this audio courtesy of them.
We listen to Eric von Daniken, the author of Chariots of the Gods.
A very special guest for this show.
Always a very special guest for any show that he does.
His name is Eric von Daniken, the daddy of them all, you could say.
The man referenced and revered by so many, who've made a connection between mankind and visitors from space.
Now, I have with me tonight, here on the table, you can just hear me leafing through it, an original signed copy of Eric's book, Chariots of the Gods, published in 1969 this one, and given to me peculiarly and bizarrely enough, just over a week ago, as a gift by a very special person who didn't know, and neither did I, that Eric was going to be on this show.
So I find that a little bizarre and possibly unexplained itself.
Now, on the back of the book, and the pages are turning very brown with age now as I leaf through it here, there are some quotes about what is inside the book.
And it's a very well-written, very tightly packed volume that I think stands up very well today.
The Sunday Mirror is quoted on the back of this book as saying, the author's theory is that in the Earth's remote past, the planet was visited by beings from space who perhaps fathered humanity as we know it.
A challenging discussion about our past and future.
That was the Daily Mirror of the day.
Also on the back of the book is a quote from the Daily Mail.
It says, powerful stuff, and no matter how one tries, it cannot be discarded as a crackpot theory.
Now, Eric von Daniken, who we're about to connect with in Interlarken, Switzerland tonight, got more downloads for my podcast, The Unexplained, when he was a guest on it in 2015.
He was edition 190, which you can still hear after you've heard this at theunexplained.tv.
And he's here tonight from Interlarken on Talk Radio.
Eric, how are you?
I'm feeling wonderful.
I'm sitting in Switzerland.
It's beginning cold.
The weather is beginning cold, but I enjoy life.
Is there any reason why you're based there?
Because it's a place of beautiful vistas and clear air.
You know, I'm Swiss since eternity.
My family is Swiss since eternity.
I grew up here in Switzerland, so I am Swiss.
I cannot change it.
That's my home place.
But, you know, with the work that you've done and the acclaim that you've had around the world, you could have based yourself anywhere.
You could have been in San Bernardino.
You could have lived in New York City, wherever you wanted to be.
Yes, but my home place is still the best place.
You see, I traveled to Wolf.
Just 10 days ago, I came back from Indonesia.
You know, Indonesia might be wonderful.
They are ruined.
But it's whole.
It's hot.
It's wet.
So Switzerland is functioning.
The politics is functioning.
It's a safe country.
I'm happy to be home.
And it's always, as far as I've been aware of it, been a place of open minds.
So you can have your say.
You're allowed to have your say.
And if you have a theory that's different from everybody else's, which when yours appeared in the very back end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s, that's in Switzerland, that's okay.
Well, that's still today okay.
You know, at the moment we have some problems with the refugees.
We have some problems with, oh, Europe has problems with all kind of political things.
But in Switzerland, you can discuss it.
We are sitting on the bar.
We shout against.
The ones are in favor of it.
The others are against it.
It doesn't matter.
Here we have an open mind.
We can discuss whatever it is.
The same thing happens in science.
Now, in some cases, I'm attacking science.
But science is attacking back.
And it's a wonderful fight.
I love it.
I want to get into that because it seems to me, and I might be wrong, that science is attacking you perhaps less than it did.
But I might be wrong about that.
And we'll talk about that a little later.
Now, I read a couple of quotes from the back of this book.
And literally, if you heard that little intro, I did, Eric.
I was given Chariots of the Gods by a good friend a few days ago, well, about seven or ten days ago, a signed copy that you signed.
No reason why you should remember doing this because you've signed thousands.
For my friend back in the 1970s.
It goes back that far.
But I read the quotes on the back of the book from the Daily Mirror and from the Daily Mail.
Do those quotes you think stand up today?
Definitely.
Still.
You know, in the meantime, I'm 82 years old.
I have become an old fellow, but I still stand behind the quotes.
Chariots of the Gods was a mind-opener.
And what critics never understand, in Chariots of the Gods I had about 238 question marks.
Question marks means questions, means not, it has to be the way I say it.
It's a possibility.
Look at it this way.
And that's still my position today.
The books I like the most from people who appear on this show are books that start with a simple but exciting premise and then give you evidence for it.
And it seemed to me going back through this book today, as I did, that that's exactly what you did.
You start from that premise and you offer us plenty of evidence, which we'll talk about, as I say.
You know, it's for this day and age and any day and age, it's a rock-solid formula.
Well, thank you for the compliment.
As I said before, I'm an old man.
In the meantime, since Chariots of the God, I have published 38 other titles.
And I still came to the same conclusion.
This planet Earth was visited by beings from outer space some thousands and thousands of years ago.
Now, our ancestors at that time, they were Stone Age people.
They could not understand what was going on.
So they believed that these beings from outer space were some gods.
Of course, we all know there are no gods, but our ancestors believed in the gods.
And that was the starting point for so many religions.
In the meantime, we have enough of indication to support that case.
I'm still the same opinion as 50 years ago.
We're coming up on some commercials here.
That is the nature of radio.
You understand this because you've done so much of it.
Before we do that, though, and before we get into the meat of the book, and then I want to talk with you about some topics from today, from 2016.
To people discovering you today, younger people, this generation, how do you describe yourself?
Well, I am just a normal human being.
I'm working and trying to find indications to prove a case that extraterrestrials were here.
I am nothing special.
I am just like everyone.
But I'm a researcher.
I try to find out answers.
And I accept if I am wrong.
And I'm happy if I am right.
Let's go back to the 60s when you were putting the book together.
Let's set it in context.
What was it that lit the fire under your feet to do this?
Well, that's a long story.
I try to make it short.
By the way, my mother language is German, so you hear this.
My second language is French, so I might have some problems to express me in English.
But anyhow, the story goes on.
I've talked with you before.
You are brilliant.
I was educated in Switzerland as a strict Catholic.
I was in a boarding school led by Jesuits.
And of course, I was a deep believer in God.
I still never lost my belief in God.
Also, I do not know what God is.
But anyhow, for me as a young boy, as a 16-year-old boy, God had to have some minimal qualities.
For example, God makes no mistake.
Or God would not use a vehicle in which to move from point A to point B. God is all over.
Now, in this high school, we had to make translations from parts of the Bible, Greek to Latin, Latin to German.
And then I learned that the God of the Bible, he uses vehicles to move from point A to point B. He comes down to the holy mountain with smoke and fire and crumbling and loud noise and so on.
So I simply had doubts in my own Catholic education and I wanted to find out if other communities in antiquity have similar stories.
So I started to read the beginning of other religions and slowly, slowly and realized that in many of these old religions we have similar stories.
Of course with different names, but the basic is always the same.
Someone from heaven, someone from the sky descended, they came to us, they helped us, they gave us some orders and rules.
They disappeared again, but always with the promise to return in the faraway future.
So finally I asked myself, what are these beings?
Real God?
Angels?
Or is it all a misunderstanding?
Should this be extraterrestrials?
So, well, that's the base of my story.
So you won't be the first person in this world, on this planet, to kick against a religious education.
Do you think, and it sounds like that was part of it anyway, that that was a segment of your motivation for this?
It was definitely the beginning of it.
And you know, in this boarding school, I was led by Jesuits.
I had my doubts, and I talked to the professors about my doubts, and they understood it.
They said, Eric, if you want to know more about it, go to the library of the university, which was just nearby, ask for the book of Enoch.
As a young man, I never heard of Enoch.
Who the hell is Enoch?
So I learned the book of Enoch and the next step, step, step.
So finally, the result is we were visited by beings from outer space.
And then we returned.
Maybe they are back already.
We don't know.
So you sound like a very unusual young man.
I think I'm a very normal young man.
Everyone has doubts, and we all are fighting against something.
So my fight was the fight against consciousness, against my religion.
And then you have to, and like I say, once we've been through the commercials which are coming up, we'll talk about the book and its legacy.
But then you have to write the book.
That's one thing.
And then you have to find somebody who's willing to put it out there, to publish it.
That was the next catastrophe.
You know, from my family, I grew up in the hotel business.
So it was normal that after my high school, I went to the hotel school.
And finally, I was a barkeeper.
I was a waiter.
I was on the reception of a hotel desk.
And when I wrote Chariots of the Guard, I was the managing director of a first-class hotel in Switzerland.
So I wrote Chariots of the Guard.
And I was absolutely sure for myself, well, this would be a bestseller.
But I'm the only one who believed in this.
All the others said, oh, come on, forget it.
It's all rubbish and nonsense.
So I sent the manuscript to 20 different German publishers.
They all sent it back, all with nice letters.
Well, we are not used to it.
It's not scientific enough.
It's not serious, and so on.
And finally, because I was the manager of a hotel, every year one of the German leading scientists was part, or was a guest In my hotel, and we were discussing.
And one evening he said, Eric, you should write a book.
And I said, I have written a book, but I found no manuscript.
He said, Well, I know a publisher.
Maybe we should talk to him.
Next morning, I was on the phone, and he said to someone unknown to me, Listen, Irwin, I have a young Swiss here.
He has written a complete crazy book, but the man is not crazy.
You should listen to him.
And the next step happened.
I went to Dusseldorf in Germany.
I talked to the publisher and he said, okay, maybe with a little short edition of 3,000 copy, we can try to sell this manuscript.
Well, the result is now millions of copies.
How many million?
Well, in the meantime, about all the books together, we are roughly 70 million copies worldwide.
Wow.
Eric von Daniken, very special guest here on this Sunday night.
A man who's managed to sell 70 million books.
That is a book and some for every single person who inhabits the British Isles.
Think about that.
That is remarkable, Eric.
But you had an awful long way to go when you first got the book out there, a production run of 3,000.
In the original book, which I have here, I've got a very early copy that you signed.
The first sentence, you pose the question whether it is conceivable, is the word that you use, that we are alone in the cosmos in what was the 20th century.
We're in the 21st now.
How would you ask that question today?
Well, in the meantime, we know that we are not alone in the universe.
I mean, in the scientific community, we have some statistics.
We know how many stars are out there.
Now, some years ago, we all believed that the Earth has a special position in the universe.
We said the Earth is not too close to the Sun, it's not too hot.
The Earth is not too far away from the Sun, it's not too cold.
In the meantime, because of our astronomical knowledge, we know that the Earth is one of the billion of planets out there which are similar to us.
Of course, there can be complete different planets out there, like in our solar system, Jupiter, which is too hot, or far away planets like Pluto.
But Earth-like planets, they do exist out there.
This is normally accepted by the scientific community in the meantime.
So we would probably not be alone.
Now, we have indications in the old holy text, in the mythologies.
You see, some thousands of years, our forefathers were Stone Age people.
Now, they were afraid of the lightning.
They were afraid of the thundering.
They were afraid of the nature.
They were afraid of an earthquake.
Maybe they did not understand how the moon sometimes was on the sky and then the moon disappeared again.
So they could not understand natural science.
So natural religion was the beginning of all the religion on the earthlings.
But then someone came down and give information.
Where is the difference?
For example, in the old holy text, you have one text which is called the book of Enoch.
One of the extraterrestrials teaches a human in their language.
And he says to the human, human, look out at the window.
You see this little light out there?
You humans call it moon.
But the moon has no light by itself.
The moon receives his light from the sun.
And then he explains why the moon sometimes disappears and is half, etc.
Or he explains to the young man, you see this bright shiny light there?
You humans, you call it sun.
You see all the little lights out there?
You humans call it stars.
And then he explains that our planet surrounds the sun in 30, 65 days, roughly more or less, etc.
Now, natural religions, earthquake, crumblings, storms, they have, they have created natural religions.
But nature does not give scientific information.
Nature does not tell somebody the phases of the moon, the light of the moon, or the stars.
So information was given to the earthlings at that time.
And I mean scientific information.
And that's the difference between natural religion.
Do you think that the world was ready for what you had to say?
Because we were entering a phase that is continuing to this day where we are starting to realize what you said when we were speaking just two minutes ago.
That we are far smaller a part of this universe, this cosmos, than we believed we were.
We used to believe we were the center of all things, and we've been learning over these years that we're not.
In the meantime, we understand that we cannot be the center of the universe.
You know, we humans, roughly generally, there are two sorts of humans on this planet.
One sort is religious.
It doesn't matter what kind of religion.
The other sort is scientific.
Now, the religious people, they have been educated.
They say God made everything.
God made the universe, made the planets, the plants, the trees.
But as crown of creation, God created us.
The scientific community believes everything is evolution.
You know, mutation, evolution.
But we are on the top of evolution.
Now, in both cases, if you look at it religiously, crown of creation, or scientifically, top of evolution.
In both cases, we look at ourselves as the top of the universe.
We think we are the greatest.
We have to learn to become a little more humble, modest, and learn there are other forms of life out there.
We are neither the crown of creation nor the top of evolution.
And that's what's going on today.
We learn slowly, slowly, well, we are a little part like ants in this gigantic, wonderful universe.
And the tide of scientific discovery, certainly recently, and we'll talk about this a little later, but seems to back up what you've been saying for all of these years.
Does that give you a nice warm glow inside?
Well, somehow, yes.
You know, I have the chance to travel worldwide and I have many speeches worldwide.
And I'm always happy To hear when I sign some books, some people say to me, Eric, somehow your book, Chariots of the Gods, changed my mind or changed the way of thinking, or you were a mind opener.
So I'm happy to hear this.
And of course, I know the critics and I absolutely understand the critics.
And I'm not against the critics.
I love the discussions with the critics.
But finally, slowly, slowly, I think we have a change in what we call in German language the zeitgeist, the spirit of time.
Slowly, slowly, we see it differently than what we saw it 50 years ago.
And I feel, well, the acceptance of the chariots of the God is becoming more open now than it was 50 years ago.
I certainly recall, and this is just taking us off slightly into a little tangent here, but going on holiday with my parents in the 70s and even the beginning of the 80s, we would go to guesthouses and hotels, and you would always find a copy of your book, which I have to say as a boy I didn't read then.
I should have.
But it would always be in the bookshelf, in the bookcase, wherever we went.
So you had that kind of coverage.
You had open ears, open minds for your theories.
As you said, not everybody agreed with you, and some people vehemently disagreed with you, but you had more of a gateway than anybody before you, it seems.
Well, I'm happy to hear it.
You know, in the meantime, there are many international TV stations who have some TV series in which they are pro or against this Eric Fondanical idea, this visit from outer space.
And more and more I see traveling worldwide, I am accepted.
Just two weeks ago, I was in Morocco, Morocco, okay, somewhere in North Africa.
And in the elevator, when I checked out, there was an Arabic family, a man, he looked very severe with his two boys and his wife.
And they looked at me.
I went to the reception desk, I checked out, and then the man went to the reception desk too.
And I just understand, he asked who I was.
He joined me before I went to the taxi and said, are you Eric von Derniken?
I said, yes.
And I asked this Arabic man, how do you know me?
Because my books do not exist in the Arabic world.
None of them.
And he says, well, just because of the television.
I saw the ancient alien in some history channel.
So it's slowly growing and growing.
And I'm not unhappy.
I'm thankful about it.
One of the lovely things about the book is it is a series of questions that you pose.
You talk about some ancient maps found by a Turkish Navy officer that proved in an era when they couldn't have been drafted that way to be highly accurate, even including detail that we know today about North and South America and the Antarctic.
And you ask, you know, one of many questions, how could that be?
Yeah, how could that be?
We are talking about the map of the Turkish Admiral.
His name was Piri Reis.
And he made this map 400 years ago.
And he himself wrote that this map is a composition of different other maps which he made out of different maps which he found in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria.
Now anyhow, on this map, you see on the lower part, you see definitely the Antarctic island.
You see the coastlines of the Antarctic.
You see different islands and compared with today's knowledge, they are all in a correct position.
Now Antarctic, some hundreds of years ago, was always covered with ice and snow.
How could someone have mapped the Antarctic?
We have no answer.
But the result is this fact does exist.
The map of period ice does exist.
There is a scientific literature about it.
So it's an open question.
What do we do against it?
Nothing.
One of the many questions you ask is this one as well.
What can have induced the Incas to create the Nazca lines?
And what about the 800-foot-high stone signs near Lima?
Well, these are so many wonderful mysteries.
Natsuka is a place, is a desert about 500 kilometers south of Lima in Peru.
I was in Natsuka many, many times.
I flew over Natsuka already at the end of 1950, 1960 and so on.
In the meantime, Natsuka has, of course, a lot of scientific literature.
And now when you stand on the desert of Natsuka, first you see nothing.
It's just little stones.
Little stones, brown stones, rusty stones.
As soon as you scrap them away with your foot, there comes a bright shining surface on the ground.
Then you fly a little higher over Natsuka, maybe about one kilometer.
Then you see these bright shining lines form figures.
Figures of apes, birds, all kinds of animals, flowers, etc.
Then you fly higher again, maybe about one or two kilometers high over the Natsuka Ironi.
Then you see in the middle of these figures gigantic lines.
The lines start abruptly, they end abruptly, seen from the earth, seen from the high.
They look like an airport, like airstrip.
By the way, I never said it was an airstrip of the extraterrestrial.
I never said it was the landing place.
But I said it looks like.
It gives you the impression from the air.
And that's what it still is today.
Now, about NATSCA, we have wonderful scientific theories, about wonderful ideas, what it could have been.
But none of these theories has been completely proven.
We are never sure.
Either not my own idea.
I suggested some thousands of years ago there was a mother spaceship in orbit.
Now this mother spaceship was traveling maybe since hundreds of years.
They needed some kind of nourishment.
You know, raw material, energy of any kind.
Now they observed from the orbit, they observed our planet Earth.
They saw in Natsuka a desert and they measured that under the Natsuka desert there are some raw materials.
This by the way is still the case today.
Now they sent simply an automatic probe down there.
There was no airstrip, there was no airline, nobody was the Natives making an airline.
But this robot, this probe from outer space came down, maybe at the last part of the landing it used an air cushioning or whatever.
So sand and stone were blown away.
Finally this robot came to a standstill.
They made some measurements.
They found out are there raw material, is there energy, is there maybe uranium or whatever they need?
And then they start again.
But in the meantime, two or three natives may have observed this robot, this automatic probe.
And they realized something from the sky has descended.
They did not understand a word about technology.
They went to their tribe.
We have seen something from heaven.
And now the natives come to the desert.
They see a little line simply by blowing away stones and sand and so on.
Now they believe the gods from the sky wish that we make lines.
And now the natives start to make lines.
Long lines, small lines in all kind of direction.
Always hoping that the gods see these lines, that the humans are prepared that the gods return.
Maybe one day a priest may have a brilliant idea.
I mean priest always has brilliant ideas.
He says, we have to show them signs, offerings.
Now birds, fishes, monkeys, and so on.
And now in the midst of the line, they start to create these figures.
So that was my idea about Natsuka.
I do not know until today if my idea is a good one or a bad one.
But I know all the other ideas and it ends with the same question.
We have no final answer about the mystery of Natsuka.
Fact is there is a gigantic desert 500 kilometers south of Lima in Peru.
Fly over it and you have an impression of a gigantic airport thousands of years ago looking like airstrips starting abruptly, ending abruptly.
The longest of which is 3.8 kilometers long and in the midst of these lines figures.
Figures so gigantic that you can see them only from the air.
From Interlachen, Switzerland tonight, Eric von Däniken, who's coming shortly to the UK.
Tell me about your trip, Eric.
Well, next Saturday, I hear in London at the Piccadilly Circle, there is a theater called the Princess Anne Theater.
And I am happy to be there for the first time since about 25 years back in England.
And I have a speech there, a public speech.
And I show my best arguments, of course, to defend my theory.
Visitors from outer space were here.
And then there is some program going on.
They call it the Eric von der Eriken Legacy Night.
I don't really know exactly what is going on.
I will be surprised by many little things.
But first of all, I will have a speak of about 70 minutes, and I show you the most incredible, really, indications and computer animations to support the case thousands of years ago.
Extraterrestrials were here.
In a way, we're doing the Eric von Daniken Legacy Night Tonight, I think.
Now, I want to get into more specifics about the book, the seminal work, the first one, the one that was developed by others, commented on by many, caused all kinds of controversy, and turned on lights for a lot of people.
You talk about cave frescoes found in the US, in France, and other places.
We're aware of the French ones, certainly here in Europe, of course we are.
And you wonder if the people who painted them were representing precisely what they saw and not just indulging in art for the sake of art.
Exactly.
You see, some thousands of years ago, our Stone Age people had no connection together.
There were no tourist flights.
There were no ships between Africa, Australia, between South America, Europe, and so on.
Now, worldwide, in all these cased paintings, you find similarities.
You find the so-called guards with helmets around their heads, sometimes with rays coming out of their heads.
So I ask myself, why did our Stone Age people worldwide have the same imagination?
And one of the things you do in the book is you have a photograph of an Apollo astronaut from the era of Apollo, which was the 60s and 70s, and next to it you have a cave painting.
Yes.
You see, in the Sahara, Sahara Desert, today's Tunisia, Taseri, there some gigantic cave paintings were found, and they really look like today's astronaut, like someone in the astronaut should.
And I simply made a comparison with today's astronaut.
And I asked the question, what did the Stone Age man show?
Something like our astronauts?
Of course, extraterrestrials, they would not look exactly like we.
They might be similarities.
That's another question which can explain.
But they need an astronaut suit because on Earth we have different bacterias, we have different virus, we have a different air connection than extraterrestrials have.
So they must protect themselves, the extraterrestrials, in a kind of suit, in a kind of helmet.
And some of our primitive Stone Age ancestors saw it, and for him it was the guards.
So he started to paint it or to chisel it in his stone wall.
That's the basic idea.
And as you say, separate populations in separate places separated by thousands of miles.
Yes, in one place they could indulge in art and just give a kind of representation of something they imagined.
But when different people in different places start to represent what they have seen all the same, then you get a pattern.
Were you the first to say that, Eric?
I'm not so sure.
Well, at least maybe in a...
Chariots of the Grass was, on the other hand, not a novel.
It was in German we have a term which is called Sachburg, which means a book of facts.
The facts have to be there.
You have to give the exact sources, but it's not in a scientific way like the community would do it.
So whatever I presented in Chariots of the God and in the Later books, all these objects, all these findings, all these paintings, all these texts, they do exist.
You can control them.
But the resolution, you know, the concept I make out of all these mixed things are different than what the scientific community does.
But the facts exist.
So is it with all these paintings and these chiseling worldwide?
It was wonderful for me to revisit the book today, and especially to have an original copy, which I think is probably from the first or second run of paperback prints of the book.
In the meantime, it must be expensive, I hope.
Well, I think it's probably increased in value, so it was a great gift to be given.
But it's got an inscription by you in German and your signature on the front page.
We actually put a photograph on our Twitter here at Talk Radio of this.
If you want to look at that, that's where you'll find it.
But you're right.
You're saying here in the book that there are commonalities between things that are found in places as disparate and separate as the United States, in France, in Norway, Sweden, Uzbekistan.
You know, similar looking things in widely different places.
That's true.
And not only in Uzbekistan or in France or in Germany.
It's continuing in Australia.
I mean, this is a continent far away from all the other continents or in South America.
And you always have the same impression.
These Stone Age people, they saw something, they had something in common.
And they tried to represent it in their Stone Age painting later in chiseling.
So that's just a psychological moment where we have to ask, what is the reason for all this?
And I see where they saw something.
Now, in the meantime, of course, I know of many mythologies.
I know the legends of these old people.
I mean, it's not only the Old Testament, our Bible.
There are in old India texts which are thousands of years ago.
There are texts all over the world.
And in the meantime, I'm a specialist of that.
Then I find not only cave paintings, I found in the old mythologies the same story.
They all speak about the gods descending from the sky.
Descending with smoke, fire, loud noise, trembling.
They all were afraid.
They all learned from the gods.
Some of the humans were taken away, even up there to their spaceships.
Of course, the human never used the word spaceship because they had no word spaceship.
They say, I was taken up to heaven or to sky.
They learn the language, some of them.
They are teached by these extraterrestrials.
So all these texts, like the cave paintings, are worldwide in many mythologies.
That's why I say, hey, scientists, please look at it in a new way.
We have a new way of observation and of learning of all these things.
You talked about Australia.
One of the things that struck me when I was lucky enough to visit there and meet Aboriginal people there was the connection they have with their history, a connection that we've severed here because our lives have been technological and we've moved on at a pace.
But they have a narrative that goes back and back and back.
If you've been to Australia, did you find that that assisted your work?
Of course.
I mean, there are the cave paintings in the Kimberley Ranches, which again are similar to the rest of the world.
And then there are the mythologies.
I mean, the Aboriginal people, wonderful, brilliant cultures, they have mythologies.
And these mythologies were written down.
And the mythologies always speak about the gods descending from the sky, the gods who were the teachers, the gods who learned our ancestor in different belongings, including in astronomy, including telling them that we are not unique in the world, including about the calendar knowledge.
So this is mythology of the Aborigines, but not only of the Aborigines.
One like me who knows the mythology, it's a worldwide phenomenon.
Go to the Greek god of Zeus or Apollon, it doesn't matter.
Go to the mythology of the Inca or in Central America of the Maya.
It always repeats.
The gods were coming from outer space.
The gods were the teachers.
The gods were there who teached our ancestors and they promised to return.
And they will return.
That's why every society in the past, every culture had this expectation of the returning of the gods.
And still today, we have the same thing.
Just remember, when Francisco Pizzaro, Pizzaro was the Spanish conqueror of today's Peru, when he arrived for the first time in Peru, the natives fell down on her knees.
They adored him as a long-expected God.
The same thing happened in Central America.
Hernando Cortes, he was the Spanish conqueror.
He came together with Moctetsuma.
Moctetsuma was the ruler of the Aztec.
Moctetsuma fell down on his knees.
He believed that the Spanish, Hernando Cortes, was the long-awaited God.
The same thing in the South Sea.
Take James Cook, for example.
James Cook was the discoverer who discovered, for example, Hawaii.
Now, the Hawaiian people again fell down on their knee.
They believed that James Cook was the long-awaited God.
So I mean by this, the expectation of someone is not a Christian invention that happened long time before Christianity.
And now what happened today?
I am educated as a Christian, as a Catholic.
We Christians, we expect the returning of Jesus.
But the Muslim community has the same thing.
They wait for the expectation of the returning of their Mahadi.
So you're saying that all around the world?
So not only in the cultures which have died out, still in our today's religions, we have this expectation of the return of somebody.
Okay, Eric, as the minutes tick down before we have to take another break here, here's a left field question for you.
And I don't know if there is a short answer for this one, but here it goes.
You know, the expectation that something will return.
Well, look at the state of this planet now.
Look at what we've made of it.
Look at the difficulties that we're facing, and look at the potential difficulties that we now face in the future.
Why have they not returned?
Well, I think they have returned.
You see, we have today's UFO, and this is an end-never-ending story.
Some 20 years ago I was laughing about UFOs.
In the meantime, not anymore.
UFO has become a serious business and probably we are already under observation.
The man who created the book Chariots of the Gods and three dozen other books since then, selling 70 million volumes over the years and bending ears and turning on lights in people's brains and also encountering along the way, Eric, a certain amount of controversy.
Not everybody has wholeheartedly smiled and agreed, have they?
I absolutely understand this.
You know, we have a serious community which is called the scientific community and we all want to be serious.
We all want to be reasonable.
Now Eric von Deniken comes up with ideas that extraterrestrials were here.
So the reasonable people say, what a rubbish.
Does he not know that the stars are light years away from the next star?
So how could somebody reach these distances?
Or Eric von Deniken says in his book that these extraterrestrials were even looking like us, so human-like looking.
Then the critics says and they have all right, well this is rubbish.
I mean evolution on another planet will go completely different way.
How will he explain this away?
So I fully understand the critics from different side, from archaeological part.
I fully understand it.
There are other opinions than my opinions.
The question is just let's sit together.
I always learn when I sit together with some scientists who are against this idea.
It's simply a question be fair, be honest, do not lie, do not try to take somewhere over the table.
Just listen to each other and come into arguments.
And at the end of each discussion, I learned something and the other side always says to me, Eric, we didn't know about this.
We didn't know about these texts.
So we both sides learn from each other and that's what we should do.
I mean, this is amazing stuff for so many people.
And some people, as you say, not able to take it on board and you have to come back at them.
How have audiences changed since you started talking about this?
Presumably at the beginning, and I don't know this, but presumably there were people who heckled you and people who just didn't want to listen, but went to put you down.
Does that sort of thing happen now?
Are you expecting that?
I'm sure it won't happen in London, but are you expecting that kind of thing in the future?
Not anymore so hard as before.
Chariots of the Gods came on the market in 1968.
That's some 50 years ago.
In the meantime, I'm an old man.
I had had many debates and I learned, of course, a lot.
And I admitted that I have made some errors, etc.
And the other part has learned also.
In the meantime, we know about astronomy, about statistics.
We know about Earth-like planets, and so on.
So both sides have come closer together.
In the meantime, this hypothesis of a visit from outer space by extraterrestrials has become more and more acceptable.
We can talk about it seriously, not anymore just being stupid against each other.
We can talk about it in a reasonable way, and I'm happy of this development.
You talked, and I want to talk about that, definitely, but you talked just a moment ago about errors that you acknowledge that you made.
What sort of errors were they?
Oh, God.
You know, when you are young, and when I made the research for Chariots of the God, I was about the 20, 22, 23-year-old young man.
Then you believe everything, and you are not self-critical enough.
You believe what you read in a book is true.
For example, at that time, I was a 19-year-old man.
I was in Upper Egypt.
And there on the Nile in Aswan is a little island with the name of Elephantin.
And the guide there told me, Elephantin has the name Elephantin because from the air it has the shape, the island has the shape of an elephant.
So I wrote that in chariots of the guards.
Later I learned this is all garbage.
The Elephantine island does not look like an elephant.
It simply has the name because some elephants were on the island.
Or I was in India in Delhi.
In Delhi, there is an iron pillar.
I saw it, I was there, I photographed it.
And the local guy told me this iron pillar is not rusting.
So I speculated, well, is this maybe an extraterrestrial object?
Somebody left it here that we should learn about the technology and so on.
In the meantime, this damn pillar is rusting.
So what can I do?
There are many of these little things where I was wrong.
Of course, you learn.
You try to make it better.
You try not to repeat similar errors in the future books.
And I think every later book after Chariots of the God has become more and more acceptable.
What about ancient Egypt?
We know so much more as far as they will allow us to explore the pyramids.
We do know so much more about that now.
How does your original work look in the context of what we've learned more recently?
Yeah, in the meantime, rather to my favor.
You see, according to Egyptology, the Great Pyramid was constructed about 2,500 BC by a pharaoh with the name of Cheops.
I doubted this in chariots of the gods.
I had some reason why to do it.
Now, in the meantime, we know about old Egyptian historians, which we did not know 50 years ago, because these texts simply appeared now later.
And these old Egyptian historians say that the Great Pyramid was constructed before the Great Flood.
They even say by a king with the name of Saurit.
And they say Saurid is the same figure which the Hebrew community calls Enoch.
Now, Enoch again is one of these figures who was in contact with extraterrestrials.
And in the meantime, in the Great Pyramid, many new shafts and rooms have been discovered.
Just by electromagnetic meaning.
You cannot climb in there.
But in the meantime, we know about shafts inside the pyramid, which guide to rooms.
And under the pyramid, they discovered a lake, a lake with clear water, and in the water there was a sarcophagus.
Unfortunately, the sarcophagus was empty.
Or, two and a half thousand years ago, the Greek historian Herodotus was in Egypt, and he was also in Luxor.
Well, at that time it was called Taban, Taban's Luxor on the Nile.
And Herodotus tells in his second book of history that the high priest showed him 241 statues.
And the high priest made to any statue a comment.
He said, well, this was the king's X, Y, he was living from there and then, and so on.
And at the end, the high priest said, these 241 statues represent 11,340 years.
At that time, the gods from the firmament were down on the earth.
Since that time, the gods have not returned.
Now, all these statements by Herodotus were never taken seriously by Egyptology.
Herodotus was the same who said that under the pyramid there is a lake.
In the meantime, we have discovered the lake.
So slowly and slowly we learn that these ancient historians did not tell rubbish.
They were telling the knowledge at their time.
So the Egyptian priests told them it was not Cheops, 2,500 BC, who made the pyramid.
It was before the great flood, Enoch.
And in the meantime, we find more and more channels and shafts and rooms.
So it all becomes more and more fantastic.
I love it.
I love it too.
When I was a boy at school, we had the Tutankhamun exhibition in London, which of course captivated the world back then.
The great golden elements of it, which were fabulous for the world to see.
But at that time, the big question was, how were those people back then able to build the pyramids?
What technology could they have used?
It had to be assisted by somebody or something from somewhere.
Now, though, scientists are starting to say, actually, it's not as difficult as that.
And people with their level of knowledge back then may well have found ways to build the pyramids and indeed build Stonehenge.
Of course, I have no problems with building Stonehenge or building the pyramid.
Our ancestor had some ways to move, to transport gigantic stone blocks.
Whatever the way it was, my problem is another one.
My problem is the engineering knowledge.
You see, every technology has an evolution.
Slowly, some thousands of years ago, our Stone Age ancestors started to learn what is an arrow, what is a bow.
Then they started to learn what are stones.
There are different sorts of stones.
Some of them are hard, others are soft.
You can chisel it, you can cut it.
Then they learn how to transport it, about wooden rollers.
All this is called evolution in technology.
And evolution in technology finally, after some hundreds and thousands of years, make practically everything possible.
They could make the Great Pyramid.
But the problem is, in the Great Pyramid, we have a lot of shafts, rooms, etc.
This means planning.
Engineering planning.
Engineering planning means design.
And you have to do the design and the planning before you start with the construction of the building.
Because later, you cannot chisel out these rooms and shafts anymore.
You have to do it in the planning.
The planning does not fit in the evolution of technology.
So it seems to me the humans did the dirty work.
The humans transported the stones, of course.
But someone did the planning and told them how to do it and why to do it, for what reason.
By the way, the why is still an open question for the future.
Could it just be that the planning does not fit into the knowledge to kiosk?
I understand what you're saying, but could it not just be that at that time they had particularly intelligent, advanced thinking people who understood perhaps rules of geometry.
We know this.
Things that we did not comprehend or didn't come to comprehend until later.
No, what I'm trying to say really is, perhaps they knew more than we give them credit for.
Well, I exclude Nossi.
Why not?
But it does not fit to the time.
You see, Keops, Keops' father's name was Snorfu.
Snorfu simply came out of Stone Age.
Snorfu's father was a Stone Age man.
The planning does not fit into the fact of the Great Pyramid.
Something is wrong.
You see the same thing we have, for example, in French Brittany.
There we have gigantic stone blocks, thousands of it.
They are all in certain lines.
Now we always look for an answer.
Why did our Stone Age people put thousands and thousands of stones in certain lines?
We asked, was it the calendar?
Has it to do with the date?
What has it to do?
Now in the meantime, we found out all these stone blocks are not just there by coincidence.
They all make Pythagorean triangles.
Always the same distance, always the same angle.
Now Pythagoras was living about 400 BC, but these stones from French Brittany are 5,000 years before.
So why at the hell did Stone Age people transport thousands of stones and made some Pythagorean triangles with the same angel, the same line?
We don't understand it.
And that truly is Eric von Däniken unexplained.
Eric, can you stay with us just a little longer?
What I want to do is something now that we've covered the ground in the first book and your theories that have gone around the world.
I want to talk with you about things that are happening now in 2016 because it's a very exciting era.
You've been hearing Eric von Däniken, the man who wrote Chariots of the Gods and many other books.
He's due in London very soon to give a talk here and also meet up, I think, Eric, with some of your many fans.
I want to talk with you in this final segment or so about things that are happening now, about stuff that has started to appear in our news this year.
I don't know what you think about this, but it seems to me that in terms of space news and the possibility that we may Indeed, not be alone.
We've had more of that this year than at any time in my lifetime.
What do you think?
Well, between Mars and Jupiter, there is a gigantic leap, and there we have the asteroid belt.
The asteroid belt is composited of hundred thousand of stone blocks.
Some of them are small, like a football, other of them are very big.
The largest of the asteroids is called Ceres.
Ceres has a diameter of around 930 kilometers, so it's quite a big piece of stone.
We compare it to a moon.
Now, since three years, NASA has sent a probe, the probe's name is down, to Ceres.
And they have delivered pictures to the Earth.
And now in some of the pictures, you see a mountain which does not fit into the region.
And the mountain has some scraps on it, white scraps.
And then you see on the ground, you see definitely a rectangular place.
Now, rectangular, which is not made by nature.
So we have new questions.
What is going or what was going on Cirrus some thousands of years ago?
I always suggest that some thousands of years ago the extraterrestrials were here.
They came here with the generation spaceship.
That means they were hundreds of years under the way.
After hundreds of years of traveling, they need some form of energy.
Whatever the energy is, raw material.
Now the energy you do not take from the Earth because here humans are living.
You simply take the energy in the asteroid belt because there it's free.
Nobody hurts you.
The energy is just on the surface.
And now today, thousands of years later, we found on Ceres some traces of artificial stuff.
So we can ask us what was going on there thousands of years ago.
Mars, we have two moons.
They are called Phobos and Deimos.
Now Phobos and Deimos are small moons.
They look like some sort of potatoes.
And there are many craters on Phobos and Deimos.
Now the problem is both moons surround the Mars, their planet, faster than the Mars under them turns itself.
And both moons are nearly over the equator of Mars.
So it seems this is not natural.
Some astronomers, especially the Russian astronomer Shlovsky, suggested that these moons must be hollow.
Now we will find out in our time what is going on.
So today, astronomy brings material to the surface which only today we can understand.
And of a sudden we say it could have to do with an extraterrestrial visit some thousands of years ago.
When you look at the photographs that we've been lucky enough to see over the last year from Mars, from the Martian surface, there are people who say, look, we can see signs of regular geometry.
I mean, there are some crazy people who say, oh, look, is that a lizard?
Or is that a person standing on that rock?
Leave that aside.
But when you look at what you see on the surface of Mars, and sometimes if you look hard enough, it can give you a headache.
But do you see something that may be the remnants of something else that was there before when you look?
Yes, you can see some objects on Mars, which are rectangular.
Others look like a pyramid.
But finally, you are never sure.
Is it artificially or is it just natural?
I mean, on Earth, we have natural rocks who look artificially.
So the final probe is we need clearer photos or somebody has to go there.
But we have reasons to ask questions.
The same thing, by the way, on the moon.
On the moon, the moon has in the meantime been photographed perfectly.
And if you observe the photographs very closely, you see some strange things look like obelisks, look like rectangular shapes.
And you still can ask the same question on our moon as we can ask them on Mars.
But the answer must be, well, closer, sir, why go closer with better photographs and then we will find out.
What do you think about the ideas that have been in the news over the last fortnight or so about going to Mars, which we're actively talking about, and terraforming it, turning it into a landscape, turning it into an environment like ours by planting things there, by putting an artificial atmosphere in there, doing all sorts of things to make it more like here?
Well, theoretically, this is possible, but this is a question not of 10 or 20 years.
I mean, we could make terraforming, but then it takes, I don't know how many hundreds of years until we create an atmosphere, until we create another temperature of Mars.
It's not the question of just go there and the next generation has it.
It's a scientific project which takes hundreds of years.
So it's not something we're going to see in our lifetime as you write.
No, no, definitely not now.
The NASA scientists and the ESA scientists who've been so proud of all the discoveries that have been made recently, do you think that they're missing anything?
Are there any clues that they should be seeking that they haven't picked up on maybe?
No, not to my knowledge.
The scientists I know and what I read in the scientific literature, all these astrophysics and astronomers are very serious people.
They are reasonable people.
They don't want to speculate because they don't want to lose their credibility.
Now, in personal discussion, of course, we speculate about could that be and that be.
But this is not the serious discussion in public.
I don't think that they hide something before us.
They simply want to be reasonable.
And that's what science should be.
But if you were them, what would you be looking for and where would you be looking for it?
Well, I would really send a probe to the two moons on Mars, to 4% diamonds.
I would go very close to 4% diamonds.
I would try to make a landing on 4% diamonds to find out is something artificial up there?
Why are these two little moons turning around Mars on equator?
And why are they turning faster than the Mars itself?
Are they maybe hollow?
So these kind of things I would love to find out.
And if something of the kind that you're talking about was discovered there, would you see that as vindication of everything that you've been saying for these 40, 50 years?
Well, definitely yes.
But the question then still is, is our society ripe to accept these things?
You see, I used the word spirit of time in German zeitgeist.
The community has to be ready to accept something like this.
If the community is not ready to accept something, it means unreasonable.
So the society has to be prepared slowly, slowly for this excavation, for this indication, for this knowledge.
And then it will be accepted and it will change our meaning, definitely.
Well, these are very turbulent times.
Very, very turbulent times, though, on planet Earth, Eric.
Do you think that we are ready for this?
Not yet.
Well, a big part of it is.
But on the other part, you see, we have big religions on this planet.
We have our Christian religion and we have our Muslim religion and many other religions.
And the religions generally, they are not ready to accept this.
They are not ready that extraterrestrials exist.
They are not ready to believe that the human race is not the unique thing in the universe.
So this time of preparation has not arrived yet.
It all is a slow process.
Will there ever be a right time then?
Well, I hope 20 years from now.
Because slowly and slowly these extraterrestrials, what I believe and I have indications for it, they return.
And they are objects which we call UFOs.
And again, UFOs in a scientific term is not reasonable.
But UFOs more and more become reasonable because we have too many photographs, too many indications which we cannot deny anymore.
So slowly and slowly we ask ourselves, what is going on here?
Are we really not alone?
Is somebody observing it?
Is somebody maybe one day showing up in a football stadium or whatever?
What a must seal it.
And this will happen, I guess, in the next 20 years.
But the extraterrestrials know exactly how we react.
They know our brain because humans are made by them.
So talking in biblical times, God or the gods created human according to their own image.
They know how we function.
So they do not want to shock us.
They don't want to destroy us.
They want to prepare us for this connection slowly and slowly.
And this process is going on.
UFOs, though, and ufology is a very gray area, isn't it?
There is probably, you know, I'm going to stick my neck out here, but probably more fakery over the years than there's been genuine stuff.
But if you want a personal view from me, I think some of it is genuine.
The problem is, of course, always, and you may agree with this, you may not, Eric, being able to work out what is the fakery and what is not.
Yeah, I fully agree with what you said.
There are so many fakeries, which is terrible to understand and to make a frontier between it.
But some of these, I myself, I saw just recently a UFO film which was made by a pilot, a fighter pilot of the U.S. Air Force.
And now this camera in the pilot in the aircraft is fixed.
The pilot cannot move the camera.
And all around the screen, you see the data, the data which change every tenth of a second.
What kind of data?
How high is the aircraft from above?
How fast is it?
How far away is it?
What is the exact geographical longitude, latitude, etc.
So all this you see on screen and in the center you see a UFO.
And this goes on for about four minutes.
And I see this with all the data changing every tenth of a second.
And I know you cannot cultivate these things.
And the pilot who sent me this said, Eric, I want that these things come to the public.
I don't give a damn in the meantime if I have to go in jail.
I want that this comes to the public.
So something is going on and only a few people know about it.
Right.
Which brings me to this point.
If only a few people know about it.
There is a huge movement and it's supposed to be gathering great speed and momentum this year, fronted by people like Steve Bassett, who you may be aware of, but also others in the United States.
This movement is called Disclosure.
They want governments around the world, but particularly the U.S. government, to come out and disclose to the people what they know, the stuff they've been hiding for all of these years, what is at Area 51 and all of those kinds of things.
What do you make of the disclosure movement?
Well, I'm very happy that this movement exists and I hope they are successful.
And some of the scientists and some of the politics, the high politics, in the meantime admitted that UFOs do exist, in the meantime admitted that we are observed again.
But that's still not something which goes to the big press.
You know, I always use the same word, the big press, the journalists and the scientists, they want to be reasonable.
And UFOs are still in our community unreasonable.
So it's all carefully how it goes up to the public, step by step and very, very soft.
But some of the high politicians, some of the high scientists in the meantime agree, they say it in public.
Yes, these UFOs do exist.
All through we have a lot of fakes.
We have a lot of false things.
But some of them are real.
They do exist and we should be prepared for it.
Is it frustrating for you, Eric von Daniken, that you haven't seen and you haven't been visited?
Well, somehow I understand it.
I mean, as I said, I am 82 years now.
I never saw a UFO myself.
But I understand it because if I would have seen a UFO, I would probably, with my carak there, just standing up and climbing, that's true, and you have to believe it.
And then I become unbelievable myself.
So I still, I'm happy.
I have my critical distance.
You've been saying all of your career writing that the spacemen came here and they ceded what we are today and they will return.
What about the whole ethical issue or is use of us traveling in space And spreading ourselves out there.
What do you feel about that?
Is it right that we put our big footprint on places like Mars?
Definitely, yes.
We are just a little part of the universe.
We are just a little part of a gigantic forms of life forms out there.
We just are not in contact with them.
We isolated ourselves.
And it is ethically wonderful to learn that we are not alone out there.
You know, since humans exist, we have war on this planet.
We fight against because of religion, we find because of geographic things.
We always have reason to fight the humans against each other.
Now, just imagine we would accept extraterrestrials are here.
Now we realize that we must be a united mankind, not fighting it because there is something much bigger over our planet, over our earth.
We have to learn and to understand we all are earthlings.
It doesn't matter if we are black or white or Catholic or Muslim or whatever.
We are the united humans on this planet and there is something out there with which we have to communicate.
So morally, ethically, it would be wonderful if we accept the existence of extraterrestrials.
Do you think that if we get into territory that some people are saying that we are going to get into, like somebody being stupid enough to let off a nuclear bomb somewhere or a missile targeted at a city in the United States, whoever might do that, the idea of global financial crash that a lot of people are very, very seriously concerned about, do you think that the spacemen, to give them a name, would intervene at that point?
No, no, no, no, no.
We have in the past, we had some cases where God, I'm sorry, my English is not good enough to explain all that.
We had some cases where extraterrestrials stopped some nuclear weapons.
They stopped it, they shut it down.
So I cannot go into details about this.
So I hope no human is crazy enough.
I mean, all the humans who are in a high political position, that they should be reasonable.
They are under control.
Nobody is just a dictator who can do what he wants.
And no human is crazy enough to start an atomic bomb against another nation.
This time should be over.
At least, I hope we are reasonable enough for all this.
I mean, we all hope this won't happen, but if North Korea ever got the capability and did something that would be more than ill-advised, do you think that it would be time for the extraterrestrials to step in and stop them?
Do you think they would?
I'm not so sure about this.
I'm not so sure if they interfere in our problems.
But even if such a terrible case happened, I mean, the other nations, in this case, the United Nations also, or the Americans, would be strong enough.
Something, look, left field now.
Something I wanted to raise with you before from the book, From Chariots of the Gods.
On page 164, you talk about something that I didn't think fitted in the book, but I probably just didn't understand why it was there.
And it needs to be explained to me, I think.
You talked about a mass concentration experiment that was done in 1965.
It sounded fascinating, but I wondered why it was in the book.
A mass concentration?
What's this?
I've got it here.
Page 164.
Mass concentration experiment.
Hold on.
Let me just find it.
Say it in German.
Where everybody concentrated, where people around the world concentrated on something, on the same aim, the same end.
Yes, there was an experiment which took place in Germany, I remember.
But that's a long, long time ago, nearly more than 50 years ago.
And they concentrated with their brain of some point, and it worked.
But I don't remember the details anymore.
Okay, well it doesn't really matter because the point I'm coming to is that if we were created by a superior civilization, perhaps they gave us abilities that we are mostly not aware of and mostly don't use.
Why not?
I mean, the gods created humans according to their own image.
So we have a gigantic brain and we probably don't use this gigantic brain.
And there is much more in us than what we think.
Now, a brain like mine thinks to learn and to know a lot about extraterrestrials.
A brain like other is sure to learn and to know a lot about astrophysics, about astronomy, about whatever.
And so if we get these brains together, we are a mass.
This is a mass, a gigantic computer, and we will have a gigantic knowledge.
That is my basic idea behind it.
A lot of people are getting involved in private space travel now.
I have a friend, Nigel Henbest, who's an astronomer here.
He cashed in his investments 200,000 US dollars.
He's going on a Sir Richard Branson spaceflight when he's able to.
Would you like to do this?
And have you been approached to?
No, I have never been approached to.
But, you know, in the meantime, I'm an old man, 82.
Now, if someone came to me and would say, Eric, you have the chance to go up there.
I would ask, will I come back to Earth?
Because I wish to die on this planet Earth.
I wish to die here.
And if he says, yes, you will come back to planet Earth.
Then I say, yes, I can.
My curiosity is big enough.
If this approach would say, no, you would never come back to Earth.
Like, for example, going to Mars and die on Mars, I would not go.
I would say no.
Then I prefer to die here on planet Earth.
You're 82.
I am fully confident that we will be having a conversation when you are 100.
And that will be another marvelous conversation, I am sure.
But when that point, and we all have that point where we shuffle off this mortal coil, who is going to continue your work?
Well, we have a big organization, which is the Ansion Astronaut Society in Germany and worldwide.
And there are thousands of members, and at least a quarter of it are scientifics.
And there are many people, many other brilliant authors around the world, including in England.
I have good friends, authors who write about the same subject.
Brilliant people.
So when I die, it doesn't matter.
The idea continues.
And that makes me happy.
Makes me happy too.
And finally, as a great man once said, through your career and through your writing for 50 years or thereabouts, there have been people, whether they've been scientists, whether they've been academics, whatever, who have accused Eric von Däniken of pseudoscience.
In 2016, what do you have to say to them?
Oh, God, in 2016, this is history.
Look back and you will probably realize that in some part Eric von Däniken was right.
In other part, he was wrong.
Well, that's normal with our humans.
I hope you have a wonderful time when you come to the United Kingdom, Eric, and I will continue to look for your work as it appears and I will continue to follow what you say.
Thank you very much for being with us tonight.
Thank you for being part of your evening.
Goodbye.
Eric von Daniken from my national radio show in the UK.
Hope you enjoyed that.
And interesting to hear him talk about current topics and how he feels about all of this space news and potential human habitation elsewhere news that we've been getting this year, the discovery of perhaps other planets capable of supporting life and the thought that maybe Mars itself may be able to do this.
Interesting to get his thoughts in the context of what we know in this year of 2016, don't you think?
More great guests coming soon here on The Unexplained.
Thank you to Adam at Creative Hotspot for his hard work.
Please keep the emails coming.
And until next week, here on the Unexplained, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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