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Unfortunately, people have been taking this stuff seriously since Erich Von Daniken published Chariots of the Gods in the late 60s, which is how, AFAIK, the ancient astronaut meme got started.

Yes, I agree, the article is written with a bit of humor but watch how fast it becomes fact in some people's mind.

I suspect the thesis of the Chariots of the Gods book was a throw away comment at one time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods

by: Erich von Däniken

http://www.amazon.com/Chariots-Gods-Unsolved-Mysteries-Past/...

1. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

2. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas : An awesome closeup of revenge

3. The complete Sherlock Holmes series : 'nuff said.

Non fiction:

1. Cosmos - Carl Sagan : I fell in love with science post-reading this book.

2. October Sky - Homer Hickham : A real life story of how a group of boys in a backwater town build a rocket that changes their lives.

3. Chariots of the Gods - Erich Von Daniken - A real mind bender, even if you choose not to agree with his ideas.

This is the biggest reason for teaching the basics of a broad variety of subjects: If you know what real information looks like, and how the real field basically fits together, you're less likely to be taken in by absolute nonsense. OTOH, if you get bad information to start, you're going to evaluate all subsequent information on that standard, and reject good information because it doesn't jibe with the bad stuff you've already internalized.

It's an interesting hypothesis, but seems roughly as valid as Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods?, that is, not valid at all. Were there any validity to the claim at all, we should be able to find supporting evidence in, say, the brain function of lower primates. It ain't there.

On the other hand there were dozens and dozens of news reports, over a lengthy period, about acid rain, climate and ozone in the early and mid eighties. The world bothered to do something about two. We hear far less of those two and the Millennium Bug these days. Which is taken as proof nowadays that they were never a problem in the first place. Errr...

Most people are at least somewhat intrigued by various conspiracy theories. This has long been the case.

We had these things when I was a kid, for example. Erik von Daniken's book "Chariots of the Gods" was a bestseller. Art Bell's radio long running conspiracy/paranormal national radio programs were quite popular.

I found some of it interesting. I read von Daniken's book. I regularly bought "Fate" magazine. I don't think I listened to Bell often because he was on after my bedtime.

But after I read a book like von Daniken's, or read the new issue of "Fate", or if I had stayed up late and heard Bell's show...I had months before I'd find another similar book, a month before the next "Fate", and at least a day before the next Bell broadcast.

In the time before my next dose of conspiracy/paranormal/supernatural material, I was reading the newspaper, "Scientific American", "Popular Science", watching "Nova" on PBS, and reading science books from the library including ones that touched on the real explanations for some of the things I saw in the conspiracy/paranormal literature.

In this environment, the conspiracy stuff for most of us ended up at most a hobby or as entertainment. Unless you deliberately set out to make it so, it was hard for it to become more than that.

Compare to now. Now, once you show some interest, social media figures that out and will shift your feed to contain more and more of the conspiracy stuff until your whole feed is mostly conspiracy items. Now you almost have to deliberately work to not end up seriously believing at least some conspiracy theories.

Chariots of the Gods [1]
The GMO Deception [2]
How to End the Autism Epidemic [3]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Chariots-Gods-Erich-von-Daniken-ebook...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/GMO-Deception-Corporations-Government...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/How-Autism-Epidemic-J-B-Handley/dp/16...

It's a contender in the list of 'biggest pseudo scientific bs', runner up is the scientology junk.

The reason for my comment that our ancestors were not as stupid as some contemporary people think, was in reaction on another post which stated that the Antikythera Mechanism was probably just a hundred-year old clock thrown overboard in recent times (I should have quoted that comment for clarity).

Some people cannot fathom that ancient people could realize impressive feats, just like we can. Take for example the pyramids: "the old Egyptians could never have build themselves, they must have gotten extraterrestrial help". This condescending view is also propagated by Von Daniken in his 'Chariots of the Gods' books.

Anyway...then Carl Sagan happened for me and I was rescued.

In the early 80s I picked up one of the "coming ice age" paperbacks, remaindered down to pennies, in the same category as Von Danekin's Chariots of the Gods and his Egyptian aliens. It was absolute garbage, but that's beside the point here. I probably still have it at the back of a bookshelf. Yet already by the early 80s climate heating was coming up in conjunction with acid rain and ozone depletion - they were a holy trinity that often seemed to come together, and they were starting to crop up regularly. Ultimately reporting of all increased throughout the decade, leading to action on ozone and acid rain, and formation of IPCC, at the end of the decade but also the start of the industry moves to oppose via disinformation and obfuscation - the tobacco playbook. Like the Bush administration effort to rebrand climate heating as climate crisis - as that sounds benign and normal.

So I'm old enough, and I doubt your tale - perhaps some sources were reporting it poorly, perhaps the US bought into some climate cooling cult in a way that was completely and entirely unseen here in Europe.

Citation very badly needed. 1970 was less global cooling than it was Erich von Däniken's Chariot of the Gods.

Global cooling was a niche theory that got a brief spike of publicity. It was NOT the scientific consensus, or the majority of the news reporting on the topic, or even widely known.

Chariot of the Gods was, on the other hand, quite well known at the time.