Robert Charroux

Robert Joseph Grugeau, better known by his pseudonym Robert Charroux, was a French author lunatic who is known for his amalgamation of two very different ideas, ancient astronauts and esoteric Nazism.

In his books, with such fantastical titles as Legacy of the Gods and One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History, Charroux proposes the notion of an extraterrestrial Nordic white race who lived on the (fictitious) island of Hyperborea, situated between Greenland and Iceland. These aliens purportedly came from a cold planet far away from the sun. How they could so quickly adapt to Earth's much more temperate climate is anyone's guess. Anyway, according to Charroux, these extraterrestrial Nordics, along with Celts, are the ancestors of the entire human race. Well, them and the Atlanteans, who were shoehorned into the story for seemingly no reason other than to make it even more batshit insane. In support of this "theory" he appeals to the geoglyphs of ancient American civilizations, such as the Nazca lines, and their apparent similarity to the Long Man of Wilmington in England. Charroux rejected human evolution, of course, instead adhering to human devolution (with a "d"), which states that we, as a species, are slowly descending from our lofty heights of blond-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned glory. Such a pity.

The load of bullshit stated above has evidently been adopted, at least to some degree, by some of the folks over at Metapedia, who make reference to the ideas of devolution and the "master race" in their articles on Nordicism and Hyperborea.

Erich von Däniken's claims were inspired by Charroux's in part. Charroux's publisher threatened a lawsuit for copyright violation due to Von Däniken plagiarizing him. As a result, von Däniken added citations of Charroux in later editions.