Based on the famed book by Erich von Däniken, the documentary Chariots of the Gods was always from the school of thought that if a white man couldn’t do it, then it had to be aliens.
Throughout, we’re given otherworldly examples of astounding architecture in Egypt, stone wonders in Mexico and so on throughout the non-white world, learning that it was impossible for these ancient cultures — that, quite honestly, we still have barely an idea about — to build them in their wholly primitive and desperately unknowing ways.
The simple solution? Aliens, of course!
Hey, it was the ’70s, as the world was deep into the Mondo Cane-structure of many popular documentaries. Chariots of the Gods was probably on the low end of this somewhat fantastical spectrum, utilizing more of a science class film strip approach to telling its tall tales of universal visitations and, apparently, community rebranding.
The usual suspects are all here, including the famous Easter Island statues and the not-as-famous Nazca Lines, which, we learn, were used to guide incoming spacecraft to the burgeoning brown civilizations. While these ideas, though mildly racist these days, can still be fascinating to hear, they’re also extremely quite dated and filled with mostly made-up facts, like said science class film strip.
Chariots of the Gods takes us back to a time when we so desperately wanted to believe in extraterrestrials that helped to shape the then-Earth, except that it’s viewed through a whites-only telescope that really doesn’t — and really shouldn’t — hold up today. —Louis Fowler