Well, its not always quite like that, of course, and there are some pretty nasty con-men around who prey on the poor and the old, and whose charm is quite non-existent.The sea in which the successful con-man swims is gullibility, and there is no sign that the public is becoming any less credulous.
Quite the reverse, in fact, particularly when it comes to those cosmic issues once comfortingly addressed by organised religion. This documentary took an exhaustive look at the career of the Swiss former waiter who brilliantly conned 60 million people around the world into parting with their money for his astonishing best-sellers, starting with his most successful epic, Chariots Of The Gods. While he was still a schoolboy, young Erich was blamed for the disappearance of funds from his boy scout troop. Leaving school early, he became a waiter and served a prison sentence for defrauding a hotel of money. Subsequently, he was fined for petty theft, and then, again, for fraud - this time a suspended sentence was imposed. Today, he admits that he did things that were not correct, urging his interviewer to forget them. After Chariots Of The Gods had hit the bestseller lists around the world in 1968, the man who was to bring us the theory that the Easter Island statues were built by alien astronauts who had become lost on this tiny speck of land in the Pacific and were signalling to their rescuers to come and get them, was arrested for failing to pay his taxes. The investigating magistrate then discovered that he had run up debts, in todays money, of 350,000, and charges of fraud, procuring loans under false pretences and falsifying documents, were added to the indictment. That, apparently, accounts for our fascination with the stars. All through his years as a humble waiter he needed money to travel the world - often with his friend Hans Neuner, thus giving rise to allegations of homosexuality - to obtain proof for his theories. Even after the success of Chariots Of The Gods he had to raise money while the royalties were still to arrive, even if he did exaggerate the percentage he would receive on each copy sold. And today he readily concedes that some of his critics were right, and that there are things in his books that are quite simply wrong. What, in short, he had sold as scientific fact was really science fiction - a schwindel, as it was called by the German magazine Spiegel. And in time his theories were superseded by wilder speculations, and his books went out of fashion. Now, however, he is back, and doing well on the American lecture circuit. But thats another thing about con-men: they think up a good idea, and it serves them throughout their careers. Erik Von Daniken Arrested Series Of ThrillersHalf-bind Detective Chief Inspector Ross Tanner encountered a sinister and completely blind old man last night in the final episode of the Second Sight series of thrillers. No one does sinister as well as Peter Vaughan, who played the blind man with distinct echoes of Stevensons Blind Pugh in Treasure Island, right down to his own Jim Hawkins, in the shape of his grandson. Tanner himself seems to be developing compensatory powers for his defective sight. In this story he seemed to anticipate a nail bomb blast before it went off.
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