Mr Daniken...what do you say about the Flyswat?

I have always had an issue with the likes of Erich Von Daniken, the infamous author of the book “Chariots of God”. The fact that he proposes that it is not human intelligence that developed structures such as the “Great Pyramid” but knowledge gifted to us by aliens, whom mythology now refers to us Gods, has always seemed like a slap in the face.

To me it has always been an indicator of a couple of things

a) a prejudice, even racial against the architects, scientists, mathematicians of the ancient world with the elitist assumption that just because the scope of their achievement staggers the ‘modern’ mind, it could not have been human intelligence at work but a gift from the ‘Gods’. And with the racist assumption that since the modern Egyptian or the modern Latin Indian seem quite unlike master builders of Giza or Stepped Pyramids, their ancestors could not have possibly been so especially since at the time Europe was the home of savage uncultured barbarians.

b) A disbelief in the phenomenon of people making the leaps in technology because of the insignificance of individual man in the whole cosmic scheme and because man is only supposedly concerned with just existence with what he has got. Which is of course pure bullshit – if that were the case, there would not have been Eskimos, who are an example of the sheer resilience and magnificence of man.

You can counter hoaxes like Daniken by pointing out the fact that a person born in the mid 1800, if transported 150 years later would refuse to believe that all that he sees around him is due to human intelligence, when nothing remotely similar earth shattering transformation had been seen in the last 1000 year.

But I have a better idea, the Flyswat….

When you ask somebody what could be the greatest invention of man – the answers would usually run in the obvious – the whole range from the wheel to the atomic weapon. But one important invention almost everybody would overlook but which to me is a shining example of the simple genius of man.

I am talking about the Flyswat. A simple device that consists of nothing more than a flat thin plastic pad (the swat) which is perforated and a long thin handle. That’s it.

Think about it. We are all bugged by flies some time or the other and we are exasperated by how to get rid of them. Usually all we have is our hands and they are not as easily squished as mosquitoes – I mean, how many can squish flies between their hands and not squirm? And then flies have eyes that have an incredible range. They will see you even before you get close for a KO.

When people get angry to the extreme, we want to blow things up or shoot an AK-47 from the hip. But the greatest weapons of destruction that man has invented are helpless against the simple fly. You can drop a bomb to end a war but the Greatest Empires (even the newest ones) would beat a miserable retreat against an army of determined home flies.

This is where we get a glimpse of the mind that has built the architectural wonders. Somebody, somewhere, unsung invented a simple device which looks so easy and obvious when made and used that we don’t realize that there is a Eureka behind it as well. The invention of the wheel made would have had the same effect.

Observe the swat. When you get close to the unsuspecting fly but not too close (that’s why the long flexible handle), you aim the swat and give a mighty swish. There is only wrist movement for the most part and the handle is flexible enough to do the rest (otherwise the fly would see the hand moving). And since the swat head is perforated, the air escapes through it so that the fly is not aware of the incoming ram (if the swat head was solid, the building air pressure would warn the fly – which is why it’s not easy to swat them with a cloth) and then the fly is history, extinguished by the simple genius of man which Daniken finds so difficult to imagine.

So Mr Daniken, did an alien ‘God’ pop this idea of a Flyswat into somebody’s head?

END OF POST