Erich Von Daniken - The Gold Of The Gods

1 - The Gold Of The Gods
illuminated everything."
These are not descriptions of the sort of snakes that intelligent human
beings saw crawling about on the ground.
But why have snakes so persistently made their home in all the
creation stories and myths?
For once, I shall obey the call of the scholars, according to whom our
primeval ancestors can only be understood in terms of their own
mental level at the time when they lived, and use simple depth
psychology.
If our ancestors saw a large unusual bird, they described what they had
actually seen, as the concept for it was included in their limited
vocabulary. But how could they have described a phenomenon in the
firmament seen for the first time for which words and concepts were
lacking? Probably the alien cosmonauts were not over-particular about
casualties during their first landing on our planet. Perhaps spectators
were hit and scorched by the red-hot trail of a jet during the landing or
destroyed by the thrust of a rocket on the return launching. There was
absolutely no technical vocabulary for an eyewitness account of this
terrifying yet grandiose event.
The unknown gleaming (metal) thing that landed or took off, snorting,
smelling and kicking up a din was obviously not a bird. So they
described what they had seen-using current ideas -as a thing 'like a
dragon" or 'like a great gleaming bird," or, because it was so far
beyond their comprehension, as "a feathered fire-breathing serpent."
Horrified by what they had experienced, fathers told their sons and
they told their grandsons for centuries and millennia about the
terrifying apparition of the dragon or snake. With the passage of time
the eye-witness account using a makeshift vocabulary gradually
became vaguer. Sometimes the fire-breathing dragon would loom
largest, sometimes the flying snake, until they assumed their