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Crespi, a charming eccentric whose latest meal was evident on the front of his tattered cassock, was Italian by birth but had come to Ecuador to pursue his madness and incidentally to serve as a functionary at the Church of Maria Auxiliadora. His colleagues there treated him with respect but with a certain amusement as well. He was the local character, and tolerated as such. His museum, I was told, might be moved out at any moment to make room for more important matters. The split and rotted doors that guarded his treasures were held shut with rusted and very cheap padlocks. The pieces themselves were piled in uproarious abandon everywhere. It was evident that Father Carlo Crespi was just another deluded amateur theorist with unbounded gullibility.

There is another thing that the reader should bear in mind. Every country in South America wishes to be considered the cradle of civilization. When I spoke with a chain-smoking bishop in Sicuani, Peru, he assured me that many Peruvians harbored the belief that the Garden of Eden was right there in the Andes. Argentina has long favored the notion that the evolution of man took place right there, despite the fact that a pre-monkey type required for natural selection to produce the species Homo sapiens is just not found on the continent. New World monkeys split off from the prosimians very much earlier and do not enter into the evolution of humans at all, unfortunately for the many South American groups that would prefer an Andean cradle of the species. Thus, nuttiness such as Crespi's is officially encouraged.

Father Crespi had no shortage of articles to shore up his eccentric beliefs; a plethora of junk poured in at all times. Some of it doubtless came from the artifact factories that abound in Ecuador. But the nature of the entire collection was proved to me when, in looking over the piles of debris, I came upon a copper float for a toilet tank and an embossed tin can on which the words "product of Argentina" were still visible. But it was all good enough to fool von Daniken and/or his readers. I can only conclude, based on these facts, that von Daniken is a liar and an incompetent fake.

It is astonishing what this man considers to be wonderful. At one point in The Gold of the Gods he shows us a photograph of a human skeleton carved in stone and asks incredulously how the stupid "heathens" could possibly have known what a human skeleton looked like! "As we know, Roentgen did not discover X rays until 1895!" he exults, having proven his stupidity once again. Then he turns to a number of photographs of hexagonal basaltic rock columns, fifteen to twenty feet long, used to construct a building in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia. "Until now," he reveals to us, "scholars have claimed that these basalt slabs were formed by lava that had cooled." Well, I have a hot news flash for him: Scholars still claim this. In Ireland, the Giants Causeway is quite adequate evidence that lava, cooling rapidly in water, can assume these shapes—and there the columns are up to four hundred feet long. But our author would prefer that we believe some space folks carved out these columns to put up a shack out in the Pacific.

We are further treated to his presumption when we see a photograph of a 10,000-year-old giant bison skull with a neat round hole in the forehead. We are not offered any evidence at all as to the size of the hole, how old the hole is relative to the skull, or whether any authorities have been questioned about it. All we get is von Daniken's typical harebrained comment about a totally insignificant observation. "The hole in the skull could only have been made by a fire-arm," he says. "Who on earth possessed fire-arms in 8,000 b.c.?" A better question: Who on earth would believe such foolishness? Alas, 36 million people bought his silly books.

The Gold of the Gods dwells at some length on the curious Stones of lea, on which, apparently, are prehistoric carvings