MYSTERY OF THE ANCIENTS by Eric and Craig Umland

We're going back to our roots with today's entry, some eminently readable nonsense courtesy the Umland brothers, riding on von Daniken's coattails with a special focus on the Maya and their irrefutable outer space connection! Rare enough for this genre, the Umland boys attest that the Maya peoples are still alive and well and living on planet Earth ... which makes it even odder when they pull out the usual unknowable "mysteries," as if we couldn't just pop down to the Yucatan and ask somebody about the Mayan moon bases! 

That's right, moon bases. The Umlands bring in some timely NASA coverup action - why did NASA and the USSR both put the kibosh on their lunar photography projects with only 10% of the moon covered? What were they afraid of finding, or what had they already found? And why won't the modern Maya admit their brothers are still up there, ready to invade at a moment's notice?

There's also death rays, Nazca lines, pyramid power and levitation, and assorted other super sciences which we've seen before many a time. But at least it's fast and fun, bringing to mind Warren Smith's beautiful pseudonymous piffle piece Gods, Demons, and UFO's. Much is made of Mayan sculpture and statuary supposedly portraying global peoples, which is the kind of gloriously loose pseudoscience reasoning that would take von Daniken twice as long to strangle out in one of his bloated books, with half the verve. The Umlands simply sum up von Daniken (and others like Robert Charroux) short and sweet.

This was the Umland brothers' only book, but it must have sold well because it received multiple editions. More silly details include flash frozen mammoths, von Daniken's fraudulent ancient Ecuadorean caves, Planet X blowing up into the asteroid belt, and the ancient Mayans spurning the wheel in favor of jet power! All of this in just 151 pages, plus a bibliography! It's mix and match mystery mongering at its best, shamelessly dumb, dense and dirty. Not bad, Eric and Craig!

Some other editions

Signet Books, 1975 (original pub. 1974)