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Erich von Daniken is not a scholar. He is an autodidact, which the dictionary defines as a man who is self-taught. Probably this helps to explain the success his first book met with all over the world. Completely free from all prejudices, he had to demonstrate personally that his theses and theories were not unfounded and hundreds of thousands of readers were able to follow him along the adventurous road he took—a road that led into regions that were surrounded and protected by taboos. Besides, his fearless questioning of all the previous explanations of the origin of the human race seems to have been long overdue. Erich von Daniken was not the first man who dared to challenge them, but his questions were more impartial, more direct and more audacious. In addition, he was able to say exactly what he wanted to say, unlike a professor, for example, who would have felt bound to take the opinions of his colleagues or the representatives of similar academic disciplines into consideration. What is more, he came up with some startling answers. Men who bluntly ask bold questions that cast doubt on time-honoured, accepted explanations have always been a nuisance and people have never been over-fussy about how they silenced them. In the past their books were banished to secret libraries or put on the Index; today people try to hush them up existence. Erich von Daniken has the spontaneity of the enthusiast. In the summer of 1968 he read articles by Vlatcheslav Saizev in the Soviet journal Sputnik with titles such as 'Space-ship in the Himalayas’ and ‘Angels in Space-ships'. Von Daniken booked a flight to Moscow on the spot. There Professor Shklovsky, Director of the Radio-Astronomic Department of the Soviet Academy of Science's Sternberg Institute, answered his questions. The author of Chariots of the Gods? was barely nineteen years old when his curiosity first drove him to Egypt where he hoped to track down the real meaning of some cuneiform inscriptions. Since his first journey in 1954, he hops on planes to clear up his theories the way we catch a bus. Thinking on the space scale as he does, distance means nothing to him so long as the goal of his journeys provides About Erich Von Daniken or make them look ridiculous. Yet none of these methods has ever succeeded in disposing of questions which concern the reason for our very arguments for the impossible. Wilhelm Roggersdorf