Erich von Daniken:
Interview transcript

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Erich von Daniken
Interlaken, Switzerland, May 2009

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Start of interview

Bill Ryan (BR): I want to thank you on behalf of everybody who's learned such a lot from all your work all your life. You've done a fantastic job and I really wanted to tell you this.

Erich von Däniken (EvD): Yes, and, in the meantime, I am 74 years old, but the Gods still love me, okay? [laughter]

BR: The Gods are taking good care of you. [laughter]

EvD: The Gods still love me, and I continue writing books. So, in total, I have, at the moment, 32 books on the market, and I'm just writing one. In the United States, my newest one is called History is Wrong. This one will be on the market in about four months.

BR: That's great. History is Wrong is a great title.

EvD: It's a great book, too.

BR: Yes.

EvD: What is your topic?

BR: My topic is exactly the same as yours.

EvD: Great. Okay. I should have that.

BR: It is presenting the truth to the people who have not been told the truth by the politicians, by the scientists...

EvD: They lie anyhow.

BR: ...by the teachers, or even by their parents because they don't know any better.

EvD: I know.

BR: And what we're trying to put in place is an alternative education to... as you said, the title of your new book is called…?

EvD: History Is Wrong.

BR: History Is Wrong. And history is wrong.

EvD: I know it. At least quite a lot of it is wrong.

BR: Quite a lot of it is wrong.

EvD: Some scientists are lying to us. Of course, the majority are nice and integrity personalities, but some of them are lying.

BR: Yes and the guys who really know what's going on are all working for the governments.

EvD: Of course. [laughter]

BR: Could you remind me, which year did you publish Chariots of the Gods?

EvD: 1968.

BR: 1968.

EvD: That was in German language.

BR: In German.

EvD: It came in the United States in 1969.

BR: Okay. I bought it in England...

EvD: Oh, okay.

BR: ...when I was a little kid. That was the book that got me started on a journey that’s now helped me, and my friends, help a lot of other people.

EvD: In the meantime both of us have become not only older, but also wiser.

BR: Exactly! [laughter]

[Erich and female voices converse in German]

BR: Someone now has to translate for me.

EvD: Yeah, I’m sorry. [laughter] I just asked them if they saw all the shows.

BR: Oh, no, we haven’t seen them all yet.

EvD: She said that she saw Nazca. That’s important.

BR: Nazca? That’s...

EvD: You saw Megastorms?

VOICE: Yes

EvD: Okay. Vimana, here? India?

VOICE: Yes. [background chatter]

BR: I have some questions to ask you.

EvD: Yes, please.

BR: And all of this is being recorded – with your assumed permission – because we'd love to put this out on the Internet. It would be our pleasure to give you some publicity here.

EvD: Thank you. We need publicity for this project now.

BR: But is this now open just for the summer, or is it reopening permanently? What’s the plan here that you have?

EvD: No. In the past it was wrong to shut the park down. We should never have closed it, because such a project is like a big restaurant – you need time. You need at least 4 or 5 years, so the public outside of Switzerland knows that such a park exists.

BR: Yes.

[Bystanders converse in German, distract EvD and BR]

BR: Ah, maybe we could just step outside.

[EvD and BR walk to a cafe]

BR: Here’s a table. That's wonderful. This is great.

EvD: So the park is now open in summer for the moment, because in winter it was absolutely not a good business.

BR: Right.

EvD: For the moment we just do it for summer, but then in November we have to decide what to do, re-open it for the whole year or not. We need new innovation, we need new stuff, new material, which means a lot more money. It’s always a question of money.

BR: Oh yeah. Sure.

EvD: Most people love money. [laughs]

BR: Well, that’s right. Are you trying to reach the children? Or are you trying to reach the people like us, who’ve asked questions all our lives?

EvD: Okay, yes, we reach the children for the children’s part of the park. But for the shows, I rather want the adults; the people who think. You know, we have a motto here, and the motto is in German on the expression of “Das stunden viele lernen.” [Ed note: Needs German to translate]

Mystery Park is not a place where someone dictates and says: I’m having right. This is the true answer.

Mystery Park is the place which ends always with question marks.

BR: Okay.

EvD: When you be careful on the earphones, whatever you see – you see side attractions or main attractions – it always ends with question marks.

BR: So, that’s why it’s called the Mystery Park and not the park that has all the answers.

EvD: If you would give the answers, it’s no more mystery.

BR: I understand. Yes, exactly. But, for yourself, personally, do you feel after all these years that you’ve got answers; that you’ve been...

EvD: Of course. I know very, very clearly what happened.

BR: Tell us.

EvD: A thousand… [Ed note: unclear] [Bill laughs] Thousands of years ago the ETs were here, evidently, and there was an artificial mutation, changing our genes. So we are partly terrestrials because we are like evolution, and partly we are extraterrestrial.

BR: And what’s happening now, Erich? Because there is a big change in consciousness happening on the planet right now. Everyone is aware of it. You must be aware of it. What’s going on now?

EvD: Well, these ETs, when they left us, they promised to return and they will return. Now we have one possible date – that’s this Maya date, you know – 2012.

BR: How important do you feel that is?

EvD: Not very.

BR: Mm-hm.

EvD: I’m absolutely sure they will return, but you cannot fix the date, not even with the Maya calendar because the Maya calendar -- you have first to calculate into our calendar, and this calculation is wrong.

BR: Yes.

EvD: If the starting point is wrong, then the end result is wrong, too. Finally, we are not even sure if our own calendar is correct.

BR: Yes.

EvD: We count 2009. That means 2009 since the birth of Christ. But if this is wrong, the figure 2009 is wrong, too. Maybe they started 30 years later with counting. It’s all a mess.

But one thing is definitely sure: They will return. They promised it. We have written reference to that. They will definitely return to Earth, and every culture in the past had this expectation of the re-coming of someone – be it the Maya, the Inca, the Egyptians – they all were expecting somebody.

BR: Or even The Second Coming, which is a kind of metaphor.

EvD: Yes. Exactly. And today we have the same thing. I mean, the Christians, they wait for the re-coming of Jesus Christ. The Muslim community waits the return of the Mahdi. The Jewish society awaits the return of the Messiah.

So now, obviously not every religion can be right. Some of them must be wrong, and I say they’re all wrong.

BR: Now, when you say that they’re going to return, you mean they’re going to return openly.

EvD: Yes.

BR: Because, of course, they’re here now. I’m sure we agree on that.

EvD: This will be a shock. We call it The Shock of the Gods.[laughs]

BR: The shock of the Gods… that would be another great title for a book.

EvD: So many people... I have in German a book: Der Götter Schlag.which is not exactly but... [Ed note:A rough translation]

BR: Oh! Okay.

EvD: [to surrounding group] But now listen, it’s much more important you go to see every show! [laughter] Now it’s 14 hours and what?

BR: It’s about 14:30.

EvD: Well, at 3 o'clock we have Orient. At 3:15, Nazca. 15:30: Maya. Have you seen Maya?

BR: Yes, we’ve seen Maya.

EvD: [reading show schedule] Astonishing! Challenge. You have not seen Challenge. Okay.

FEMALE VOICE IN GROUP: Are you satisfied about everything that you’ve done in your life? Because it’s a wonderful park.

EvD: No, not everything. I’m satisfied about my books. We have a total edition of about 62 million copies.

BR: In many different languages, eh?

EvD: Yeah, in 30 languages, which is not bad. So, that really means you bring people to think, you are moving something. But of course, most of the people on this planet, they don’t want to know what we declare, what we say.

BR: Yes.

EvD: And some parts of the scientific community are not interested at all. They call it all: it’s all shit, it’s all garbage.

BR: Yeah. But it’s easier now than it was when you started 30, 40 years ago.

EvD: It is. Forty years ago, even 20 years ago, I was just ridiculed all over.

BR: Yes.

EvD: In the meantime, the situation has changed. Maybe it’s a respect of my work or my age, and some of the clever people -- they start to realize that I’m probably not so wrong. [laughs]

BR: Well, I think Graham Hancock has probably learned a great deal from you.

EvD: I know him very well.

BR: You know him well. Because he’s taken your work further, hasn’t he?

EvD: Ya, ya, of course. Zecharia Sitchin, too... others. Many others. We know each other. We all know each other’s work.

BR: Yes.

EvD: Ya, it takes some generations before you change the mind of the people.

BR: It’s a big team effort, I think.

EvD: Exactly. There’s another man here. Okay. Three men among all this...

[laughter; crosstalk]

BR: It’s always the women who are more aware. [laughter] You understand that.

EvD: Yes. I understand that.

BR: But things are changing, Erich, and it’s a team effort. One of the reasons why I wanted to meet you was to thank you, as I said, because you were one of the people who really got this ball rolling…

EvD: That is true.

BR: …back in the 1960s.

EvD: 1968, yes…

BR: And because you had a tough time when you started your book, it’s made it much easier for other people to follow. It’s like the guys who go into the jungle first of all, you know?

EvD: Of course. But, you know, I had the manuscript of the Chariots of the Gods... [speaks in German] The manuscript was finished in 1966 already, and I sent it to 20 German publishers and Swiss publishers. They all rejected it. They all sent the manuscript back with the usual blah, blah, blah: It’s not scientific; it’s not the way we can publish it; it’s not belonging to our program, and so on.

Finally, I was lucky. I was a manager of a hotel at that time, a first class hotel, and in my hotel I had an editor of the big German newspaper, and he said: "Hey, I know one of the publishers. We could phone him." And he phoned, so finally I was lucky to get Chariots of the Gods published in Germany.

The book was already published here... after three weeks it was number one on every bestseller list. Then came the United States, England, and so on.

BR: Yes. It was like the right thing at the right time, wasn't it, in some ways?

EvD: I was never calculating the right time. I have been accused lately that I did it just on purpose at that time to make money. That’s all garbage! The manuscript was finished two years earlier. I just could not find a publisher.

BR: Sure, sure. But it’s nice to be right because you must have sold millions of copies of that.

EvD: Yes, we have sold millions of copies, but I made not millions of money. [Bill laughs] Sometimes you have a year and you earn 600,000 Swiss francs, which is brilliant, but at the same year you just spent 600,000 Swiss francs for some expeditions and helicopters and jungle stuff and measurements. So the money comes in and the money goes out.

BR: Yes. Yes.

EvD: But we are working scientifically. In the kiosk there, you know, in the shop, there is a leaflet only in German language [says something in German]. Something is wrong in Nazca. It’s only in German language. You can’t release it. So we have given order to the Technical University in Dresden to make certain measurements in Nazca and the result is absolutely crazy.

BR: What do you mean? Can you explain that?

EvD: For example, under the lines we found very strong magnetic fields. You can measure them, you know exactly – it’s two-and-a-half meters deep in the ground, but you have no possibility to dig there. It is all under terrible control. If you just take a little stone away, you are under arrest.

We find a change of the electric fields. If I put 220 volts in here and I had a measurement instrument and I measure it here, so how is the current flowing? [says something in German] And we have made fifty points in the desert, and in the desert, of course, there is no electric flow because sand is an isolator, like ceramic, for example.

BR: Sure.

EvD: But all the lines the flow of the electric current was 8,000 times higher than just next to it in the desert. You find all this in this booklet with the pictures; with the measuring that it takes.

BR: What’s your own theory about the Nazca lines, Erich? Because it’s a real mystery. I mean, that is a real mystery.

EvD: Yes. I’m sure there were extraterrestrials, not in the sense that they needed an airstrip. They don’t need an airstrip.

BR: Sure.

EvD: There was some sort of machine coming down, like a shuttle, and they were looking for raw material. I don’t know what sort of raw material, uranium, copper, or whatever.

They were looking for raw material and they were digging away the raw material, and the natives could not understand what was going on. The natives were afraid. They were thinking these gods were coming down.

And only after the extraterrestrials left again – so to say, when their tank was full – they had some lines on the ground and they see there the gods made these lines. And other natives, they started to produce lines themselves.

BR: So they were imitating the gods.

EvD: Imitating the gods. And finally a priest had a good idea. They always have good ideas. He said: "We have to show them signs up there. We have to show them that we are here".

So in the lines they start with gigantic figures of fishes and monkeys and spiders and birds.

Anyhow, but the main thing is they will return. I’m sure about this. That’s the changing. People like you, people like me, maybe people like them, we have a sense for this. We have a feeling.

BR: Oh, yeah.

EvD: We know that something is coming.

BR: That’s true.

EvD: This is not just imagination.

BR: It’s why I’m here this lifetime.

EvD: It has to do with our genetic code, with the information which we have in us.

BR: Sure. Are you optimistic for the future of the human race? There’s a big question for you.

EvD: That’s a big question. Nobody knows. Of course we will survive. All humanity will never be destroyed, even if we have some catastrophes and so forth. Some will survive and then we continue, the next generation.

[laughter]

BR: So, the game is not over yet.

EvD: The game is never over. The game continues all the time.

BR: Exactly. Thank you so much.

EvD: Just read my book! She read it here, and go to the Nazca.

[overlapping voices] [applause]

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