The Flying Saucers have Left the Planet

Dave notes that Erich von Daniken's "Mystery Park" in Interlaken, Switzerland, is going pear-shaped.

The park, set up by the author of bestsellers such as "Chariots of the Gods" and "The Gods were Astronauts", has failed to attract enough visitors and needs 4 million Swiss francs (2 million pounds) in cash to stay in business.
The park's attractions -- which showcase giant drawings in the Peruvian desert that may once have been signs for visiting spacecraft, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and more -- may close forever if the group does not find the money.

The place was under construction the last time I visited the Interlaken area. At the time, the Bern Lötchberg Simplon had a locomotive carrying an advertising livery promoting the place. Kato even made an N gauge model of it.

Note that having this locomotive on the roster of the Wöminseebahn does not indicate an endorsement of Von Daniken's crackpot beliefs.

Dave adds cynically that the only problem was that it was built on the wrong continent.

I'm sure he could make it profitable again if he repurposed it to prove that angels visited the Earth in eras past, and relocated from Interlaken to, say, Kansas

Posted by TimHall at April 10, 2006 11:13 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Hey now! Not Kansas. We've already got enough taxes to bolster failing attractions here already. Heck, right now we're paying for an arena that's failing before it's even been built, not to mention the ice rink, children's museum, frontier reenactment village... I'm sure I've forgotten some.

Plus, I don't think we have four million francs in the whole state.

OTOH, we're pretty well on the road to turning into a desert, so maybe the expenses would be lower.

Posted by: Karen on April 10, 2006 11:43 PM

Two quick points:

1) When Karen mentioned an arena that is failing before it's even built I read "falling" and thought "Wembley" - which for the benefit of US readers was supposed to be the home of English football as from about now and is apprently subject to all sorts of problems including subsidence.

2) von Daniken's works would be a lot better if he stuck to identifying odd things and asking questions about their meanings rather than leaping from "these people drew stange images which look like these technological devises" to "these people drew technological devices therefore they encountered alien beings with an advanced technology".

Posted by: Michael Orton on April 11, 2006 01:03 PM

If Von Daniken had done that, he wouldn't have sold nearly as many books.

Which is what would have happened had the authors of "Holy Blood and Holy Grail" admitted it was a load of tosh they'd just made up. Or Whitley Streiber had admitted that "Communion" wasn't a true story but a work of corny hack SF.

And Kansas can't have 465.003. It won't run on the Union Pacific or BNSF's non-electrified rails.

Posted by: Tim Hall on April 11, 2006 07:46 PM

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