Although spaceflights have detected no life on the moon or Mars, they have nonetheless increased speculation both theological and secular—about whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. Some of the religious pondering has been a serious effort to prepare for that possibility (TIME, Jan. 24), but much of it—like the subject itself has been rather far out. The two most recent examples come from Europe. In Germany, a Swiss hotelman has published a bestselling book claiming that highly intelligent space travelers visited earth during man's early history and became the prototypes for the "gods" of various ancient mythologies. And in Russia a scientist has proposed that Christ was a cosmonaut.
In his book, which will be published in English under the title Chariots of the Gods?, Hotelman Erich von Daniken builds his thesis with the zeal—and sometimes the evidence—of a flying-saucer enthusiast. Thus, chapters 1 and 3 of Ezekiel (the prophet's famous fiery-wheel vision) are cited as Biblical descriptions of flying saucers, and Genesis 6, in which the "sons of God" mate with the "daughters of Men," is presumed to describe the spacemen's couplings with earthlings. Even the Ark of the Covenant becomes an intercom system through which the prophets received the word from space.
Däniken finds evidence for his extraterrestrial visitors in many ancient cultures. Only a highly advanced civilization, he says, could have taught the Sumerians how to handle mathematical calculations running up to 14 digits.
From whom else could pre-mechamcal civilizations have learned to move the stones for the pyramids or the Mayan cities or the great carved heads of Easter Island? After all, asks Däniken, are not the legends of many lands filled with stories of godlike visitors from the sky, riding in fiery chariots or on iron wings, arriving like "birds of thunder"? Indeed, the book's only illustration is drawing of an ancient stone carving found in Mexico in 1935. It looks remarkably like a figure bent over an instrument panel in a space capsule.
The publishers of Däniken's book deleted his references to the extraterrestrial origins of Christianity, but a Soviet scholar has attacked the subject head-on According to an angry Izvestia editorial, Philologist Vyacheslav Zaitsev of the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences has not only proposed the theory that Christ was a cosmonaut but also that the star of Bethlehem was his rocket A being from a higher civilization ("My Kingdom is not of this world"), Christ came to bring advanced social ideas of love, charity and democracy to a slave-society world. He was immune to the human death of crucifixion, and "ascended into heaven" after promising to come back. The idea of Christ as a cosmonaut did not bother Izvestia, but Christ as a democrat did.