Von Daniken was a fraud, a cheat and a liar.
However he was the first and the inspiration for those alternate historians that now have revealed how so much of history was skewed by religion and politics and capitalism.
My friend Lynn Picknett admits to Von Daniken being an inspiration for her research and many books on alternate history, while at the same time deriding him as I do as a con man.

Yeah, I agree with Lloyd Pye and his book "Intervention Theory Essentials (Everything You Know Is Wrong Essentials)" which debunks abiogenesis as being too slow to account for the evolutionary leaps that took place on earth.

Also, the Sumerian texts, carved on the Babylon walls 2000 years before the Bible was written, has many stories very similar to ones told in the Old Testament Bible, except more scientific.

For example, in the Sumerian version, humans were genetically engineered by the alien Sumerians by mixing their DNA with that of human apes to make gold mine workers.

In the Noah story, the flood was a huge tsunami wave that covered a third of the earth after a planet came too close, causing a gravitation shift that broke off an Antarctic ice shelf.

The leader, Anu, was going to leave the slaves to their fate because he was angry that Sumerians had been mating with them, but two sympathetic Sumerian genetic engineers showed a favorite, Noah how to build a submarine, and he took animal DNA onboard, not adult animals.

Ohferpetessake...why does it have to be aliens Or some kinda Gawd? How about just People trying to make their lives safer, easier, less precarious?

I like to read those kinds of ancient aliens books for fun. I'm not sure I believe any of it, though, even if some of it makes a weird kind of sense.

Eric Von Daniken was popular for a brief time decades ago but quickly fell out of favor when most everything he said was debunked one way or the other. Basically, Von Daniken believed in "aliens of the gaps" rather than in the "god of the gaps." Whenever he came across something he couldn't explain, and believe me he didn't try very hard, he claimed aliens did it. He also had a very condescending view of ancient people, believing they were dumb and incompetent, and had to have help from an alien intelligence to do anything impressive.

The Bible does not contain descriptions of space ships. It contains fantastical imagery that could be explained by a primitive author struggling to describe a spaceship, but it also and more likely could be that they were just making shit up. "Making it up" is far more likely than either gods or aliens, and it's a far simpler explanation. There are other mildly more complicated explanations that are still far simpler and more likely than gods or aliens, such as people facilitating their imagination via altered states of consciousness such as religious ecstasy or intoxicants, or recording continually embellished verbal traditions that had been evolving for generations already.

Holy books always use vague prose and imagery that can act as a "fit" or "pattern match" to whatever the reader wants / needs it to. The canonical example for me personally was a Bible teacher I recall from my childhood who was teaching about a passage from The Revelation describing "hornets with long hair" plaguing people from the skies. The teacher, who was a proficient chalk artist, drew these as modern fighter jets with contrails. To her it was "obvious" that this is what the author of Revelation was attempting to describe. I'm sure that her 10th century counterpart had some other "obvious" explanation that didn't involve fighter jets. And I'm pretty sure the original author was just conjuring ominous and frightening imagery for his little campfire story.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Von Daniken is a fraud. He doesn't provide any concrete evidence for any of his claims (because there isn't any.) He starts from the assumption that the events of the bible actually happened, but were misunderstood by the witnesses. First, he doesn't present any proof that those events occurred, and he goes on to not present any evidence to support his interpretation of those events.

Sorry, Erik von Daniken fails to attain credibility at every level.

Some of his theories were pretty sketchy but some of them made sense too, especially if you set aside the accepted theories that many PHD's had the foundations on. Science is supposed to be objective but the nature of the human mind is to work within the constructs that have come before and it takes a sea change for even minor changes to happen.

Ehh. I find science more reliable and less guess work. Although science changes with proof, that is acceptable. Von Daniken is too akin to religious beliefs and believers; they make ideas to fit the facts or change the facts to fit the ideas, which ever works best for their preconceived notions.