von Daniken served one‐third of his sentence, during which time he wrote his second book, “Gods From Outer Space.”) He told me his lawyers were going to appeal the decision, which had difficulty in understanding when I found out later that he already had appealed it.Ī story that had appeared in The Miami News did bring an admission of error. Still, the court's findings have an awful ring of finality, like a prison door clanging shut. Well, that's only one psychiatrist -and probably a Calvinist one at that. A court psychiatrist examined von Daniken and found him a prestige‐seeker, a liar and an unstable and criminal psychopath with a hysterical character, yet fully accountable for his acts. He obtained the money by misrepresentation of his financial situation, falsifying the hotel's books to make it appear solvent. The court found that von Daniken had lived in “playboy” style (that old Swiss Calvinism won't down) as a hotel operator in Davos between 19 and went over $130,000 in debt. The canton court in the town of Chur sentenced von Daniken to three and a half years in prison and fined him about $1,000 on charges of embezzlement, fraud and forgery. Really a bookkeeping matter, and it was customary to be in arrears on the taxĬontrasted with von Daniken's charmingly‐Englished defense of himself, the facts of the case have a sterner ring. But the debts, he assured me, were the normal ones a Swiss hotelier runs up-a matter of a commune tax the hotelkeeper collects for the guests.
He had been managing a hotel and had piled up some debts then he had borrowed money without telling the lenders that he was in debt-a violation of Swiss law. To put it succinctly, he had been somewhat framed. He was not at all reluctant to speak about his troubles with the law. Von Daniken is a smooth, likable, restless, somewhat stocky Swiss, who is not quite in total command of the English language, but who does not let that sap his confidence in it. We did meet the fallowing Sunday in von Daniken's spacious suite in the Park Lane with a splendid view of Central Park. I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that the terse reference to the writer's personal life, rather than his book had been ill‐advised. Believing as I do in rehabilitation and knowing that great books are frequently written by men I would not want to marry my daughter, I was already having second thoughts.
von Daniken's background, a matter of fraud and forgery, all public knowledge. The description referred to a peccadillo in Mr.
Erich had been hurt by it, she told me perhaps I would meet him when he was in town. A few months ago I received a call from the publicity woman at Bantam Books about a one‐line descriptive phrase that had appeared with the listing of Erich von Daniken's “Chariots of the Gods?” on the Paperback Best Seller List.
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