{
  "apiVersion": "v1",
  "kind": "Source",
  "metadata": {
    "generated": "2026-09-12T06:52:38Z",
    "language": "en",
    "schemaUrl": "/v1/schema/source/"
  },
  "data": {
  "id": "chariots-of-the-gods",
  "title": "Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past",
  "description": {
    "en": "Erich von Däniken's 1968 (English 1969, G. P. Putnam's Sons) foundational work — the most influential single text of the contemporary ancient-astronaut tradition. Von Däniken proposes that specific ancient monuments (the Egyptian pyramids, the Nazca lines, the Easter Island moai, the Sacsayhuamán polygonal masonry, the Baalbek trilithons, the Mayan Palenque sarcophagus lid) were built with extraterrestrial assistance or by extraterrestrial visitors directly. The work substantially shaped the mid-to-late twentieth-century popular ancient-astronaut tradition. The Wheel of Heaven corpus explicitly distances itself from von Däniken's cultural-dismissive methodology — the framing that the conventionally-credited civilizations could not have built their monuments."
  },
  "authored_by": [
    "Erich von Däniken"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Ancient Astronauts",
    "Ancient Builders",
    "Pyramids",
    "Lost Civilization"
  ],
  "stance": "critical",
  "source_type": "academic_monograph",
  "publish_date": "1968",
  "source_family": "archaeoastronomy",
  "relation_to_wheel": "critical_context",
  "licensing_status": "licensed",
  "follow_url": "https://daniken.com/en/"
},
  "links": {
    "self": "/v1/sources/chariots-of-the-gods/",
    "canonical_html": "https://www.wheelofheaven.world/sources/chariots-of-the-gods/",
    "index": "/v1/sources/",
    "schema": "/v1/schema/source/",
    "traditions": "/v1/sources/traditions/"
  }
}