Erich von Däniken

The book sold in the tens of millions while its author was separately convicted of fraud and embezzlement. Critics have argued since the 1970s that his central method — crediting non-European monuments to outside builders rather than to the people who actually lived there — follows a racist structural pattern, a criticism this entry reports rather than adjudicates.

Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods? (1968); his 1970 fraud conviction