It’s impossible to understand the sociological impact of Erich von Däniken’s bestselling debut Chariots of the Gods if you’re unfamiliar with the inbred awe many Germans feel when confronted with someone from an academic background. We Germans have a strong belief in academic titles, which are widely considered as de facto scientific qualifications, regardless of their exact nature. If you find yourself on the losing side of an argument concerned with, say, contemporary astrophysics, it’s always a good idea to remind your lay enemies that you are a bona fide doctor of political science. They might grumble, but they are certainly impressed enough to address you as Doctor So-and-so – which makes them look stupider than you, if only by the behavioural rules of Germanic society. For them, it doesn’t even matter if your title was only awarded honoris causa by a dubious university in Latvia after you sent them a small gift, perhaps a cheque for 25,000 Euro. Stranger still, some members of the non-academic caste might actually address your wife as ‘Frau Doktor’, implying that academic wisdom, like HIV, is somehow transferred by carnal knowledge. If, on the other hand, you are a layperson, the fact that you are bloody well right won’t help you a bit if you have, unfortunately, stumbled into an argument with a professor!

There have always been those who thought and said otherwise; and in the German-speaking community, few have done so as vehemently as Erich von Däniken. Even his severest critics, who have more or less successfully demolished his ideas, would have to acknowledge that he has consistently presented himself as a sceptic rather than a believer. Unlike most sceptics, though, he has chosen to promote the fantastic as the most logical solution. Arguably, his unique way of using common, everyday logic seemingly to debunk rather awkward scientific explanations might lack the sophistication of Charles Fort’s more philosophical approach, but, much like Fort, Däniken isolates scientific claims as distinct entities which must be judged on their inherent plausibility rather than on the qualification of their promoters.

As a German fortean of the postwar baby boom, I must confess that I was strongly influenced by Däniken’s early work. I was a kid then and faintly remember his first TV appearance, where he boldly defended his ideas against a committee of scientists. His particular mix of irony and logic made him a winner, in my opinion, and the fact that he was a lay person made it all the more impressive. Here was living proof that a lowly hotel clerk with no formal scientific education could be intelligent enough to make scientists look stupid!

Today, more than three decades after Däniken became a bestselling author almost overnight with Chariots of the Gods, he is probably the world’s best known German-language author. He might also become the first author to see the erection of his own extravagant monument in the form of Mystery Park, a multimedia museum located close to Interlaken, the main tourist centre of Switzerland’s Berner Oberland (and conveniently close to Däniken’s home in Beatenberg).

My wife Uschi and I visited Däniken in August 2002, after I had arranged an appointment with the help of a mutual friend. Over the phone, Däniken had sounded very busy. “I have no time for prattle,” he had told me. It didn’t really sound unfriendly; probably just his way of being matter-of-fact. Nevertheless, he was helpful, describing the route to the hotel where we would meet.

Arrival

We arrived in the most atypical August weather, with the Alps almost invisible behind layers of fog and rain. Scenes from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service were shot in the beautiful landscape around Interlaken, but the town itself is a typical international holiday resort, full of grand hotels, gift shops and Japanese tourists.

Beatenberg is very different, though. Consisting mostly of a single, very long, road winding uphill, just enough buildings line it to support the citizens’ claim that they live in Europe’s longest village.

The Hotel Eiger is a pleasant surprise, clean and comfortable to a degree of perfection that is almost uncanny. In a spot beside the front door, I notice the ubiquitous leaflets and brochures for tourists, including one for the “Erich von Däniken Footpath”. The hotel manager, obviously mistaking me for a mere sightseeing tourist, tells me that Däniken is an honorary citizen of Beatenberg. When I reveal that my interest in their living icon is more or less professional, he begins to speculate that Mystery Park will not boost the tourist industry as much as the project’s organisers claim.

“Most of them will come here by bus and leave on the very same day. It is not Euro Disney, you know? You have no fun rides, just things to see and listen to. There’s no reason for a family to stay for a week; most will think it is just good enough for a single day.” Mystery Park’s organisers expect half a million visitors each year, which is a large share of the 670,000 tourists who visited Interlaken in 2000. More modestly, they say that 280,000 are enough to keep the project going profitably.

After a peaceful night and a marvellous breakfast, we bide our time until 2.00pm, when we are supposed to meet Däniken in the restaurant of the Dorint hotel.

At 1.15 we arrive at the Dorint. I tell the manager that we are meeting Däniken, and he leads us to a table in the restaurant. We order capuccino while waiting for the interviewee. At 2.30, we have a second round. Repeatedly, I try to reach Däniken on his cell phone, but to no avail. I discuss this with one of the hotel clerks, who, after a while, provides me with Däniken’s private number. It might take three rings for the elven kings, but a minimum of six are needed before Däniken answers the phone. Politely, I remind him that we had an appointment at 2pm. “Oh Lord. Where are you? At the Dorint? Give me five minutes – I’m on my way.”

From our table in the restaurant, we have a complete view of the hotel parking ground. I expect to see a 4 x 4 or some other stylish vehicle, so I am surprised to spot Däniken at the wheel of a brand new, but modest, dark blue Opel. Somehow, he manages to teleport from his car to the restaurant’s entrance in zero time.

“It’s you I am supposed to meet, isn’t it?” he ask in his mild Swiss accent while approaching our table. “I’m terribly sorry – I just returned from America yesterday, and completely forgot about you.” He shakes hands, hangs his trekking vest over the chair, takes a seat and lights a cigarette, all in less than five seconds.

“You arrived here yesterday?” I tell him we did, while the waiter approaches our table. “Bring me a… no, just tea, please.” He uses the informal German address ‘Du’ instead of ‘Sie’, quite unexpected when speaking to a waiter in a fancy restaurant. But obviously, this is Däniken’s way of dealing with people, because he uses the same personal address with everybody else, including us.

“You’ve picked the worst weather we ever had. It is shit, real shitty – you know, you are in the most beautiful part of the world. Did you enjoy the footpath they’ve set up for me? No, of course you didn’t. Weather is much too shitty. Oh, what a shit. You are really unlucky. But you are not the only ones. There’s a group of young people I will meet later. Oh, there’s one of them! Hello, how are you?”

I turn around to greet a slim, bearded gothic type in his early 20s.

“Where are the others? How many are you, anyway?” Däniken asks. “Sit down, please.”

The Goth says they are eight, including his American girlfriend.

“Use all the hotel’s facilities! You are in the world’s most beautiful spot, in a splendid de luxe hotel, you know? There’s a sauna, there’s a swimming pool – you should really make the most of it. The weather is shit, much too shitty to go outside. I’ll invite you for dinner to make up. All of you.”

All of them, no doubt. Never mind, we had other plans for the night anyway. Like repairing my digital camera that refuses to function, although it did perfectly well when I checked it in the morning. Probably Däniken’s doing, adding camera destruction to teleportation. Lord, this guy is worse than Geller. Good job I brought a normal camera as backup.

In the meantime, Däniken asks my wife if they’ve met before. She says no, but he doesn’t seem too convinced. “So what do you do, anyway?” Uschi tells him she was studying social pædagogics.

“Eeek.”

Getting back on track, I ask him if Mystery Park could be seen as a memorial site.

“For me? No. It is certainly a monument – most people would only have this after they had croaked. But this is not your run-of-the-mill amusement park. No fun rides and action. It is something more introverted and meaningful.”

A meeting place for the cult of Däniken?

“No. I hope not. I never wanted to become a cult leader. Of course, there are people who claim I do, but most of them have not even bothered to read one of my books. They also say that I wrote that the Space Gods did this or that – well, I never did. I never wrote that Nazca is an ancient spaceport. I just said it looks the part. It makes me mad.” He adds that he still believes Space Gods visited Earth in the past, because there are just too many legends, too many strange artefacts that are simply incompatible with present scientific views on the development of mankind.

I ask him what started his doubt in the more traditional interpretation of history.

“The Bible. I was brought up in a Catholic family, but I was a wayward child,” he reveals, chuckling like a leprechaun. “So they had to put me in a Jesuit school. We translated parts of the Greek Bible, and I was amazed when I found that they were different from the Latin version. Also, there were so many small things that just didn’t add up. You expect an omnipotent God to go anywhere He pleases without the need for a special kind of transport. But read the Bible and you will find that he used a vehicle now and then. Also, I found it quite remarkable that God was so often involved in petty re-venge. But probably the most glaring flaw is found right at the beginning of the Bible, where it is obvious that God made the world as an experiment. But what, I ask you, would an omnipotent, omniscient God gain from an experiment, as he would, of course, know its outcome before the experiment was even begun?”

Did his findings change his religious viewpoints? After all the years of looking for proof that God was a spaceman, does he still find himself able to believe in a Christian God?

“No, not really. I think I don’t have a concept of God anymore,” he answers, lighting the next cigarette. “Personally, I don’t really believe God does not exist, but I don’t think we can hope to understand what He is. I mean, take the Big Bang: we might accept it started the Universe as it did, but then we must ask ourselves what started the Big Bang. There was a force, however small, which initiated the formation of our Universe. Scientists cannot explain what it was, so I guess we will never understand what made it all happen.”

Did he ever meet readers who told him he destroyed their religious belief?

“All the time, and some of them were young priests. They were actually quite grateful, because they felt that they had been going in the wrong direction before they heard about my ideas.”

But what about himself? Does he still believe in an afterlife?

“Oh, I would just love it,” he says with a hearty laugh. “But then again, it might all end when we draw our last breath. We just don’t know, that’s our dilemma. I might be damned for something I did. One day, I might stand before God and He’ll tell me: Erich, this is paradise, but not the place where you are supposed to spend the rest of eternity.”

Däniken’s longtime collaborator Johannes Fiebag proposed a cosmology in which God’s omniscience is the end result of the Universe rather than the reason for its existence.

“A possibility I would not rule out,” he comments vaguely. “Our viewpoints on religion are mostly based on a book that is a wild mix of fantasies and historical reports. We cannot hope to draw the truth from it so easily.”

Does the Bible still contain a mystery that he would like to explore?

“Of course it does, and there are some artefacts I would love to know better, especially in China. But my exploring days are over. I have other things to do now. Writing the text for Mystery Park’s presentations takes up most of my time. But there are other things going on, important things. I told you I was in America, didn’t I? Well, I met those TV people. You remember The X-Files? Oh, hello!”

Again, I turn around as a group of young people enters the restaurant, with Goth in the lead.

“Where did you stay for the night?”

On the camping site in Metten, a village close to Interlaken.

“That’s ridiculous! It’s a miracle you survived the night. By all rights, you should have drowned. Lord, you probably won’t believe it, but you are in the most beautiful spot in the world…”

Instantly, he switches to fluent English, addressing Goth’s blonde American girlfriend. “Sorry we are doing this in German. I told them the weather was so shitty.”

Mystery Park

This is a large part of his charm: when you are with Däniken, he lets you know that he cares for you. He manages to address any group of people as individuals. If Mystery Park is not the expected success, I’m quite sure he could successfully return to his earlier career as a hotel manager.
After they have left, he continues his musings on the upcoming TV series.

“Well, it will be much like The X-Files. They are doing a follow-up now and that’s why I met them. We have a concept worked out and three scripts have already been written. Much like the X-files, the good guys are the ones who find the mysterious artefacts, while the bad guys are those that…”

“…are behind the conspiracy?”

“Yes, those are the bad guys! One example: there is that secret tunnel in the Great Pyramid, with a door at the end. We know it is there. But no-one really knows what’s behind the door.”

I drop the name Gantenbrink1, just to make sure he knows I did my homework. This probably breaks the ice, so I continue dropping the right names. He comments on them, sometimes critically, mostly indifferently, but rarely angrily or negatively.

“Have you read my latest book? You haven’t? Well, you must. We will drive to my office now. I have two offices here – one is right at the Hotel Eiger, so it’s not out of your way. I’ll provide you with brochures and other stuff on Mystery Park. Where’s your car? Over there? Okay, just follow me.” He signals the waiter to bring him another pack of cigarettes and the bill. When the waiter returns, Erich completely empties his purse on the table. “Look, this is for you. I give you all I have.” The waiter receives a small fortune in Swiss francs, probably enough to buy a pint of milk in Interlaken’s exortionately overpriced supermarket.

We follow Erich’s car downhill. He takes the curves at Warp 5, thankfully stopping every couple of hundred meters so we can catch up. He pulls up at the post office to empty his postbox, signalling wildly that we should wait in our car. Soon after, he stops outside an archetypal Swiss house, unlocking the door of a separate entry that leads to his first-floor office.

It is a labyrinth and unexpectedly large. Computers and typewriters, filing cabinets, old furniture, nothing too fancy. “It is a bit chaotic here, with all the shareholder certificates lying around.” Buying shares in venture projects is a very popular investment scheme in Switzerland, and many Swiss are even willing to gamble by investing in wild – and mostly fruitless – projects like Free Energy machines. Still, most private shareholders are careful enough to limit their investment to less than 10,000 Swiss francs (£4,400). Erich’s right hand person, Uli Dopotka, has promised personal tours to investors willing to risk 10,000 Euro (£6,600) or more.

He leads us into his archive, revealing a link between Charles Fort and Erich von Däniken. We are surrounded by an impressive row of filing cabinets filled with newspaper clippings, articles, maps and slides. “3,000 slides of Nazca alone,” he says proudly, opening drawers at random. His system is still based on filing cards, but other pieces of information are already stored in a computer database. “I’m not involved in this. This is other people’s work.”

It takes him a while to find copies of his most recent books and videos. He shows us some of his latest photos of Nazca, including one that looks most convincingly like the spaceport landing strip he had never claimed it was.

When I ask for his autograph, he once again shows his avuncular side and signs one book for Uschi, the other for me. I know it’s just a cunning trick learned in Switzerland’s hotel schools, but Erich manages to make it feel genuine.

Just before we depart, he tells us how to reach the construction site. As it is still raining, we decide to visit it the next day on our way back to Germany. Our evening ends with an excellent dinner for two, culminating in a bill that would rent you a suite at Buckingham Palace.

Another peaceful night; another rainy morning. Mystery Park is located just a couple of miles from Interlaken, close to the motorway to Lucerne. Even if you missed the red signs, you’d spot the site, with its huge central tower.

It being Sunday, the site is deserted but still well-protected by a police car. I had heard the project wasn’t unanimously welcomed by the locals, but could they be expecting sabotage? Bern’s government filed eight complaints from groups ranging from ecological and local culture activists to model æroplane enthusiasts2 who had previously used this abandoned military airstrip as their playground. Most of these complaints were pretty academic, but you can understand how Mystery Park takes up most of Erich von Däniken’s life when you hear about the financial and managerial problems he has been confronted with. In June 2000, the board of shareholders fired managing director Frank Wenzinger because of false claims in his CV3. Later, finance director Beat Kaderli left the project when he concluded that the building scheme was “financially irresponsible”4. The management had originally planned to open the park to the public in April 2002, but this was put back to the autumn when one of their larger investors went bankrupt. In desperation, the management offered a third of the stock to Indian business magnate Srichand Hinduja, but this major deal was cancelled when it became known that Hinduja was suspected of smuggling firearms5. The project is still supported by most of the major investors, including Switzerland’s Feldschlösschen Brewery, Swatch, German TV-channel Pro7 and global players like Sony and Coca Cola, an impressive list which suggests the project will proceed smoothly after its recent bumpy ride.

It is still raining while we take our last photos. Uschi remarks that it’s a shame we came on a Sunday. The half-erected buildings and stationary machines give the site a haunted look. Having overcome the financial problems, the management will now have to fight against the bad weather, as the concrete work must be finished before the temperatures drop below zero. Then, in winter, they will install all the technical marvels that make Erich von Däniken so enthusiastic about the project: “You will be seated on this flying carpet and we will show you the Nazca platform in a mixture of real film and computer animation. But we will not tell you this is a spaceport. We will just make you think twice before you believe it is what the scientists say it is. No answers, just questions and some statements by scientists. It will be an experience, nothing more, nothing less.”

I don’t really know what to expect from Mystery Park, as the half-erected buildings don’t yet reveal the enigmas they will harbour some day soon. But it will be worth the trip to Interlaken, because Erich von Däniken has invested a huge personal effort in this project, knowing that Mystery Park will, once and forever, define his place in the history books.