…all this stuff about the plains of nazca being somehow mysterious and extraterrestrial come from? It came from a guy named Erich Von Däniken, a Swiss Hotelier, who wrote a book called chariots of the gods which became a worldwide bestseller, in which he…

…in Peru, there are large drawings. Some of them look like spiders, some look like turkeys, some are straight lines. Von Däniken concluded that the straight lines were airfields and the other stuff was messages that doltish humans were instructed in carving…

…Egypt. He sees pyramids. Boy those are big. How big are the constituent blocks? A hundred tons, a hundred tons says Von Däniken. I couldn't lift a block that weighed half that. Therefore, human beings are unable to lift blocks of that mass. Therefore,…

…time a naive observer can't figure out how something could be done is silly. The one possible positive aspect of Von Däniken is that it might, in frustration, drive an occasional reader into archaeology. Thank you, happy birthday. I'll be honest with you…