made public for whom this whole frame ofs no difficulties...John A. T. Robinson,Bishop of Woolwich,Honest to God (1963)PREFACEStan Lee, publisher of Marvel comics, once said, 'Nowhere elsebut in comic books can you still recapture the fairy tale fun offinding characters bigger than life, plots wilder than any movie,and good guys battling bad guys with the fate of entire galaxieshanging on the outcome.' Lee was almost right. He overlooked,however, the modern fad of 'adult fantasy' books, as they aresometimes called, that have taken the world by storm. Leading the hit parade is an ex-hotel manager (and ex-convict)from Switzerland - the irrepressible Erich yon D~iniken - who hasbecome, over the last ten years, one of the most successfulauthors of all time. His six bookstranslated into thirty-five differentastonishing forty-two million copies(see Bibliography) have beenlanguages and have sold an His basic 'theory' can be simply put" that superbeings fromouter space came to Earth in the distant past, created humans intheir image, and then founded civilisation on Earth as we know it. Let me say at the outset that I have no objection to honestspeculation. Nor do I find anything impossible about the basicidea that alien beings could have visited the Earth in ancienttimes. But I have found that if you take von D~iniken's 'indica-tions' or 'proofs', as he alternately calls them, and subjectthem to the normal rules of evidence - and generally acceptedcanons of logic- they fall apart. In other words, from thestandpoint of 'proof', or even from the standpoint of a reasonedargument, yon D/~niken simply does not have a case.Arizona Daily Star, 27 July 1975