The ‘overwheming’ evidence aliens mated with humans, the proof in the Bible and the deformed-head babies – all revealed by Chariot Of The Gods? author Erich von Daniken… and his warning they’ll come back

Was God an astronaut? Could space travellers have visited Earth thousands of years ago and kick-started human civilisation by sharing their technological secrets?

More mind-blowing still, did they mate with us? Are human beings different from all other animals because alien genes are mingled with our DNA?

The answer, according to mega-selling Swiss author Erich von Daniken, who died this month aged 90, is that we might never obtain definitive proof. But the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.

‘The past teemed with unknown gods who visited the primeval Earth in manned spaceships,’ he declared in his first global bestseller, Chariots Of The Gods?, in 1968.

Though Von Daniken’s fame had largely evaporated by the time of his death, his impact as the godfather of extraterrestrial conspiracy theories has been immense.

His publisher, Penguin Random House, calls him ‘arguably the most widely read and most copied non-fiction author in the world’. His works have sold more than 70 million copies and been translated into 32 languages, inspiring sci-fi franchises from The X-Files to Marvel characters.

He was the first to propound the notion that aliens visited Stone Age humans and supplied the mechanical knowledge that made Stonehenge and the Pyramids possible. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, described in the Bible, was an atomic explosion, he argued, and the Ark Of The Covenant an intergalactic communications device or nuclear reactor.

Most famously, he claimed that an engraving on the tomb of the 7th century Mayan monarch, King Pakal, at Palenque in Mexico, depicted an astronaut astride a rocket.

Many scientists responded with scathing scepticism. Famed American astronomer Carl Sagan complained that Chariots Of The Gods? had made it impossible to give a lecture without infuriating questions from the audience about spaceships.

One of Von Daniken’s most persistent ideas was that the aliens who visited us must have seemed like gods to early hunter-gatherers. ‘If I came down to a primitive people,’ he told Playboy magazine in 1974, ‘they would look upon me as God… because I could fly, because I could kill animals with a single shot.’

The memories of aliens passed into myth, sowing the seeds of every current religion. But he insisted his theories were not religious and that he was no guru: ‘Religions promise that if you live a certain way, you will go to Heaven. Or if you do wrong, you will go to Hell. But in my books there are no promises at all.’

Nevertheless, he frequently cited passages in the Bible, which he interpreted as clear descriptions of alien contact. In the Book Of Ezekiel the prophet told of a flying wheel that appeared out of a whirlwind, with lights all around it, ‘like the appearance of lamps: it went up and down among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning’. This, Von Daniken said, sounds like a modern description of a UFO.

One persistent theory, based on drawings of gods from around the world, was that these aliens had elongated heads. It could be in imitation of this, Von Daniken thought, that ancient Egyptian pharoahs wore tall, tubular headdresses and why, even today, Christian clergy wear mitres.

More gruesomely, the practice of deforming babies’ skulls by binding them, popular among the Incas and other prehistoric South American cultures, could be an echo of some religious rite to make children resemble their alien forefathers. This idea led to one of the most bizarre encounters of Von Daniken’s life. In 1988 he was on holiday with friends in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia’s largest city, when tragedy struck. One of the party, a Dutchman, suffered a heart attack in the hotel pool and drowned.

While they were trying to arrange for the body to be flown home, the hotel manager approached Von Daniken to announce a ‘rich man’ wished to meet him and had sent a chauffeur.

Reluctantly, and wondering whether he was being kidnapped, Von Daniken got into the car. After a long drive, he arrived at a house in the hills near the city, surrounded by armed men, where he was greeted by ‘several beautiful ladies clothed very sparingly’.

A man with a moustache and a diamond-studded watch shook his hand, addressing him as ‘Don Erich’ and introducing himself as ‘Don Pablo’, a rancher. Was there anything he needed, the man asked. Von Daniken explained about his friend’s body, which had to be repatriated, and the stranger promised this would be arranged immediately.

He seemed to know a lot about transporting bodies: ‘The blood must be extracted and replaced with formaldehyde.’ Then he ordered two servants to bring in a long box, hinged on three sides. Inside was an elongated skull 19ins from crown to jaw.

‘This,’ said Don Pablo, ‘is the head of an alien.’ He owned the archaelogical site where it was discovered, he explained.

Then he produced photos of smaller skulls, those of babies, similarly deformed. They had no ‘fontanelles’, the soft spots where the bones of the skull fuse as the brain grows. These children, it appeared, were born with their heads fully formed. ‘These are not Earthlings, Don Erich,’ he said. ‘They are aliens. But born here on Earth.’ Months later, at the Anthropological Institute of the University of Zurich, Von Daniken mentioned this encounter to the director. Flicking through newspapers to find a photo, the academic asked. ‘This Pablo?’

The stranger with the alien’s skull was Pablo Escobar, a drug kingpin with a $30billion fortune and the world’s most wanted man.

Such adventures had befallen Von Daniken since childhood. Born in Zofingen, Switzerland, in 1935, he was eight when an American bomber crash landed near his home. He watched as its crew emerged in their flight suits and walked past him in silence, apparently without seeing him.

Decades later, when journalists wondered whether the incident might have triggered his obsession with visitors from the skies, he called the idea ‘ridiculous’.

His parents were Catholic and he was educated at a Jesuit school in Fribourg, where he developed a fascination with creation myths in every religion.

Because his grandmother owned a restaurant, he started work as a waiter and studied the hotel trade, becoming a receptionist and then ‘director of a first class hotel in Davos’.

He married Elizabeth in 1960 and they had two children: Peter, who died aged two, and Cornelia, his daughter who survives him along with his wife.

At 19, he was convicted of stealing money from a camp where he was a youth leader. He received a suspended sentence but, after a dodgy jewellery deal in Eygpt, he was jailed for nine months.

These were not to his only brushes with the law. One psychiatrist later noted he had a ‘tendency to lie’. Another labelled him a ‘criminal psychopath’.

Every holiday for 12 years after he married was spent travelling, collecting information for his first book. But the lifestyle was expensive and, after he racked up debts of $130,000 (nearly £1 million today), a court found he had been fiddling the hotel books, in ‘repeated and sustained acts of embezzlement, fraud and forgery’.

He was sentenced to 15 months in prison but was able to pay off his debt because, unexpectedly, the book he had been writing for years became an overnight bestseller. Originally titled Memories Of The Future, it was initially rejected by 25 publishers. In 1967 Von Daniken approached Thomas von Randow, science editor of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, and asked what he should do.

Von Randow picked up the phone to a publisher there and then: ‘I have in front of me,’ he announced, ‘a young Swiss who wrote a totally mad book.

‘But, the guy is not mad. Maybe you should listen to him yourself.’

Retitled Chariots Of the Gods?, the ‘mad book’ went through 30 reprints in two years and inspired a film that grossed $25 million and was nominated for an Academy Award. It was said to be the first in-flight movie shown on the new Boeing 747 jumbo jets.

For the rest of his life, he reworked his theories, trying to find ways to revive their popularity. In 2003, he opened a theme park in Interlaken, Switzerland, celebrating ‘the great mysteries of the world’, though it quickly went bust.

‘I am accused of ignoring scientific facts,’ he said defiantly. ‘But scientists believe their facts are facts because other scientists told them so. Now I, with my own theory, came to the conclusion they are wrong. What is the truth? I don’t know. But today, I know definitively that Earth, our home, has been visited by extraterrestrials in the distant past.

‘They will return – so humanity had better come to grips with that thought.’