and literal traditions of most religions contain references to visitors from stars and vehicles traveling through air and space. These, he says, should be interpreted as literal descriptions which have changed during the passage of time and become more obscure. Examples include Ezekiel's vision of the angels and the wheels, which Von Däniken interprets as a description of a spacecraft; the Ark of the Covenant, which is explained as a device intended for communication with an alien race; and the destruction of Sodom by fire and brimstone, which is interpreted as a nuclear explosion. Von Däniken attempts to draw an analogy with the "cargo cults" that formed during and after World War II, when once-isolated tribes in the South Pacific mistook the advanced American and Japanese soldiers for gods. Von Däniken also spends around one-third of the book discussing the possibility that humans could theoretically offer primitive civilizations on interstellar worlds advanced technology by the year 2100. This would, he writes, mimic the ancient extraterrestrial contact von Däniken believes to have occurred on Earth. Reception Academic dismissals Von Däniken's book, and much of his subsequent publications such as Gods from Outer Space and The Gold of the Gods, have drawn largely negative receptions from the academic mainstream despite being popular best-sellers. Many scientists and historians have rejected his ideas, claiming that the book's conclusions were based on faulty, pseudoscientific evidence, some of which was later demonstrated to be fraudulent or fabricated, and under illogical premises. An internationally bestselling book by Clifford Wilson, Crash Go the Chariots, was published in 1972. Ronald Story's 1976 book rebutting von Däniken's ideas was titled The Space Gods Revealed. Another negative criticism of von Däniken's book came from archeologist Kenneth Feder in his book Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries in 2018. Referring to von Däniken's support of the ancient astronauts hypothesis, Feder explains how his evidence is used and presented in a misleading manner in order to convince the reader that extraterrestrial life was involved in the development of ancient civilizations. Plagiarism controversies Soon after the publication of Chariots of the Gods?, von Däniken was accused of stealing the ideas of French author Robert Charroux. A 2004 article in Skeptic magazine states that von Däniken plagiarized many of the book's concepts from The Morning of the Magicians, that this book in turn was heavily influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos, and that the core of the ancient