Erich von Däniken

About Erich von Däniken

Erich Anton Paul von Däniken was born on 14 April 1935 in Zofingen, Switzerland, the son of a Catholic family that raised him in the Roman Catholic faith and sent him to a Jesuit school at Saint-Michel in Fribourg. He left school at sixteen, apprenticed in the hotel trade, and spent his working life through the 1960s as an hotelier, ending that career as manager of the Hotel Rosenhügel in Davos. In 1968 the Econ-Verlag imprint in Düsseldorf published his first book, Erinnerungen an die Zukunft: Ungelöste Rätsel der Vergangenheit. The Souvenir Press English translation appeared in 1969 as Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, and the Putnam American edition followed in 1970. That book opened a publishing career that has now run for more than fifty-five years and produced more than forty titles translated into thirty-two languages, with cumulative sales reported by his publishers at over seventy-five million copies. Out of that single paperback and its sequels grew the popular discourse now called ancient astronaut theory, the reading of ancient texts, monuments, and iconography as testimony to contact between early humans and non-human intelligences from elsewhere.

What this page is. This page is the figure page for the founder of that discourse. It is the companion page to the ancient astronaut theory explainer, which sets out the wider lineage. Here the focus is narrower: the man, the books, the specific claims, the scholarly responses to those claims, the two documented controversies that are part of his biography (a 1970 fraud conviction in Switzerland and the 1973 walk-back of key claims in The Gold of the Gods), the institutions he has built (AAS RA, Mystery Park), and his on-camera role in the History Channel series Ancient Aliens from 2010 onward. The editorial stance is measured. The fraud and the Ecuador walk-back are named because they are part of the historical record. The scholarly responses from Egyptology, Andean archaeology, biblical studies, and the history of pseudoarchaeology are named specifically, with the researchers and their books. The textual-interpretation questions von Däniken raised, particularly the question of how to read the technological-sounding language in Ezekiel 1, 1 Enoch, and the Mahabharata, are real questions that serious biblical scholars and Sanskritists have also engaged. Satyori's concern is to place the tradition carefully enough that a reader can see the claims, the counter-claims, and the open questions, and draw their own conclusions.

The founding book. Chariots of the Gods? proceeds by accumulation. Each chapter picks a site or a text and asks whether the conventional archaeological or philological account fully explains what is there. The Egyptian pyramids at Giza, the Nazca Lines on the Peruvian coast, the Palenque sarcophagus lid of Pakal the Great, the Maussollos-like stonework at Tiahuanaco and Puma Punku, the moai of Easter Island, the Piri Reis map of 1513, the Dogon astronomical traditions of Mali, Ezekiel's vision in Ezekiel 1, the heavenly ascents of Enoch in 1 Enoch, and the chariot language of the Mahabharata all appear in the book or its close sequels. In each case von Däniken suggested that extraterrestrial contact offered a simpler explanation than the indigenous engineering, astronomy, or theology documented by academic scholarship. The book was a commercial phenomenon. It sold in the tens of millions in German alone within its first decade, was translated into more than thirty languages, and by the mid-1970s had been followed by Götter aus dem All (1970, English Gods from Outer Space), Aussaat und Kosmos (1972, English The Gold of the Gods, though the German title translates more literally as Sowing and Cosmos), Meine Welt in Bildern (1973), Erscheinungen (1974, English Miracles of the Gods), Beweise (1977, English According to the Evidence), and many more. The paperback wave of the late 1960s and 1970s was the vehicle through which the tradition reached mass audiences for the first time.

The fraud conviction in Switzerland, 1970. Between the writing of Chariots and its English publication, von Däniken was arrested and tried in Switzerland for offences unrelated to his books. The charges concerned his management of the Hotel Rosenhügel: embezzlement, fraud, and tax evasion, stemming from his use of hotel funds and credit lines to finance research trips and personal expenses. He was convicted in February 1970 by a court in Chur and sentenced to three and a half years in prison, of which he served approximately one year before release. Von Däniken has never hidden the conviction. He discussed it in subsequent interviews, acknowledged the financial mismanagement, and continued writing and publishing from prison. What is contested is not whether the conviction happened but what to make of it. Some readers treat it as disqualifying for any of his claims. Others, including von Däniken himself, treat it as a separate biographical chapter about a failing hotel business and not as a verdict on his research. The conviction is documented in the record. A reader is entitled to know it.

The Gold of the Gods controversy, 1972-1973. The third book, published in German as Aussaat und Kosmos in 1972 and in English as The Gold of the Gods in 1973, opened with a claim that set off the sharpest controversy of his career. Von Däniken described a vast underground metal library in Ecuador, a system of artificial tunnels stretching for hundreds of kilometres beneath the Amazonian foothills, lined with a library of engraved gold plates recording the history of a lost civilisation. He wrote that he had personally entered the tunnels with the Hungarian-Argentine explorer Juan Moricz, who had claimed to discover them in 1965, and described in detail the chambers, the metal books, and the seating arrangements of a subterranean hall. In 1973 the German news magazine Der Spiegel published an interview with von Däniken in which, pressed on specific details, he acknowledged that he had not personally entered the main system with Moricz and that some of the atmospheric detail in the book was dramatised rather than first-hand reportage. Moricz himself publicly disputed von Däniken's account. The Scottish civil engineer Stan Hall, who had known Moricz personally and organised the 1976 British-Ecuadorian expedition to investigate the Cueva de los Tayos where Moricz's claims were centred, wrote in his posthumously published book Tayos Gold that von Däniken's version of events was not what Moricz had shared with him. The practical status of The Gold of the Gods after 1973, inside the ancient astronaut tradition itself, is a book whose broader claims about an Ecuadorian subterranean library are not corroborated by the one explorer who had the primary relationship with the site, and whose specific descriptions its own author has partially retracted. Later editions of the book have continued to appear, but the book is generally not treated as load-bearing evidence even by authors sympathetic to the wider tradition. The controversy is on the public record, and it is named here as such rather than argued away.

The core claims, site by site. Across the 1968 to 1977 cycle of books, von Däniken proposed specific readings of specific sites. The Egyptian pyramids at Giza, in his argument, exceeded the engineering capacity of the Old Kingdom and implied external knowledge or assistance. Mainstream Egyptology has answered this point in detail. Workers' villages at Giza have been excavated by Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass from the 1980s onward. The Wadi al-Jarf papyri discovered in 2013 record the journal of an Old Kingdom inspector named Merer, documenting the quarrying and transport of Tura limestone for the outer casing of the Great Pyramid under the reign of Khufu. Experimental archaeology by Denys Stocks and others has demonstrated stone-cutting and drilling techniques with copper tools and abrasive sand that match the tool marks on surviving granite. The engineering case for the pyramids as an indigenous Old Kingdom achievement is now documented at a level of detail that was not available when Chariots was written, and the specialist consensus is that the pyramids are fully explicable within the Old Kingdom record.

Nazca, Puma Punku, Easter Island. The Nazca Lines in Peru, which Chariots described as an ancient runway visible only from the air, have been studied in detail by the German-Peruvian mathematician Maria Reiche from the 1940s onward and by the archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni. Their work documents the straight-line plotting methods by which the Nazca people produced the geoglyphs using rope, stakes, and sightlines, and connects the figures to Nazca ceremonial and hydrological practice over several centuries centred on the Cahuachi ceremonial site. The lines are not runways and were not visible only from the air to their makers; they were walked as ritual paths. Puma Punku and the wider Tiahuanaco complex in Bolivia, which von Däniken and later authors have treated as evidence of impossible stoneworking, have been studied by the archaeologist Alexei Vranich and many others. The andesite and red sandstone used are cut with techniques and tools documented in the Andean record; the apparent precision of some joints reflects the soft-stone methods and water-abrasion polishing used by skilled Tiahuanaco masons between roughly 500 and 1000 CE. The moai of Easter Island, treated in Chariots as figures that could not have been carved and moved by the small island population using indigenous methods, have been the subject of Jo Anne Van Tilburg's long-running Easter Island Statue Project, which has catalogued the moai, mapped the Rano Raraku quarry, and reconstructed the carving and transport methods from archaeological evidence. None of these responses close the full set of questions a reader may have about these sites, but they do close the specific question of whether indigenous builders were technically capable of what is there. They were.

Ezekiel, Enoch, and the Mahabharata. A different kind of claim runs through the textual chapters of Chariots and its sequels. Von Däniken read Ezekiel 1, with its wheels within wheels, its four living creatures, and its firmament-like expanse over their heads, as a description of a landing craft. He read the ascents of Enoch in 1 Enoch, in which the patriarch is taken up through the heavens and shown gates, storehouses, and chariots of the sun and moon, as a description of orbital or atmospheric flight. He read the vimana passages in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as descriptions of aircraft. The scholarly response to these readings has been more careful than on the archaeological claims, because the textual questions are genuinely harder. Biblical scholars, including Christopher Rowland, John J. Collins, and Margaret Barker, have worked extensively on the apocalyptic literary form within which Ezekiel 1 and 1 Enoch sit. The throne-vision genre, the heavenly-ascent narrative, and the merkabah tradition all predate and outlast the specific texts in question, and the conventional reading treats Ezekiel's wheels and Enoch's gates as visionary and symbolic rather than reportorial. A thoughtful counter-position, held by some serious scholars and many ordinary readers, is that the distinction between visionary and reportorial is itself a modern category and that the Second Temple authors did not necessarily share it. The vimana passages in Sanskrit epic literature have been studied by Sanskritists such as Alf Hiltebeitel and others; their conclusion is that the vimana is a mythic palace or chariot of the gods within the epic's cosmology, and that reading the term as a technical description of heavier-than-air craft is a mid-twentieth-century move that does not match the linguistic evidence. Naming these readings and the responses to them carefully is the work of a figure page like this one.

AAS RA and the institutional wave. In 1998, thirty years after the first book, von Däniken co-founded the Archäologisch-Astronautische Vereinigung, known in English as the Ancient Astronaut Society and later the Archaeology, Astronautics and SETI Research Association or AAS RA. Headquartered in Switzerland with branches elsewhere in Europe and North America, the society publishes the journal Legendary Times, organises the annual AAS RA World Mysteries Conference, and functions as the institutional home of the tradition. The research fellows and conference speakers associated with the society through the 2000s and 2010s include Giorgio Tsoukalos, David Hatcher Childress, William Henry, Michael Cremo, and a wider group of researchers who later became regular on-camera figures in Ancient Aliens. AAS RA is where the paperback-era tradition became an organised subculture with its own conferences, publications, and vocabulary.

Mystery Park and Jungfrau Park. In May 2003, von Däniken opened Mystery Park in Interlaken, Switzerland, a theme park organised around seven pavilions each dedicated to an ancient mystery: the pyramids, the Maya, Nazca, Stonehenge, vimanas, Orient, and Contact. The park was designed as a walk-through realisation of the argument of his books, with scale models, audiovisual presentations, and interactive displays. It opened with significant fanfare and was expected to attract more than a million visitors a year. Attendance fell short of projections and the park entered bankruptcy proceedings in 2006. It was reopened in 2009 under new ownership as Jungfrau Park, with some of the original pavilions retained and new attractions added. The park remains a working visitor attraction in Interlaken as of the mid-2020s. It is the only physical built environment that von Däniken's tradition has produced at scale, and it is a matter of the record for that reason.

Ancient Aliens and the television era. In 2009 the History Channel aired a two-hour documentary special titled Ancient Aliens, and in April 2010 the series began as a regular programme. As of 2026 it has produced more than twenty seasons and well over two hundred episodes, placing it in the top tier of History Channel series by season count. Von Däniken appears in the series as a recurring on-camera consultant and interview subject. Giorgio Tsoukalos, the former AAS RA publisher who became the face of the show, is one of his direct associates. Much of the show's interpretive material draws on von Däniken's books and on Sitchin's Anunnaki reading. The show has also been the vehicle through which most contemporary Americans now encounter the tradition, and its reception within professional archaeology has been openly critical. The Society for American Archaeology issued public statements in 2014 and 2022 asking the History Channel to stop describing the show as historical or educational, arguing that its repeated suggestion that indigenous American, African, and Pacific monumental sites exceed the capacities of their indigenous builders carries a colonialist implication. Archaeologists Sarah Bond, Donald Holly, and others have written on the same theme. The criticism is specific and has force: when the show reaches for an extraterrestrial explanation at the Giza pyramids, at Tiahuanaco, at Göbekli Tepe, or at the Olmec sites, the underlying rhetorical move is that the civilisations in question could not have built what they demonstrably built. That critique belongs on this page alongside the description of the show.

The later writing, 1978 to the present. Von Däniken has continued writing steadily into his ninetieth year. Later titles have included Signs of the Gods?, Pathways to the Gods, The Gods Were Astronauts, History is Wrong, Twilight of the Gods, The Gods Never Left Us, War of the Gods, Confessions of an Egyptologist, and the autobiographical Meine Weltreisen. The later books extend the method to further sites (Göbekli Tepe, Derinkuyu, the Longyou caves, the Baghdad battery, the Antikythera mechanism) and return repeatedly to 1 Enoch, Ezekiel, the Mahabharata, and the Sumerian king lists. The voice across the work is consistent: site-by-site, text-by-text, accumulation of cases rather than a single controlled argument. That method is part of what the scholarly critique responds to. Kenneth Feder's textbook Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries treats the method as a case study in the drift from documentary record to interpretive pattern-matching. Ronald Story's The Space-Gods Revealed works claim by claim through Chariots and its immediate sequels. Neither book convinces every reader, but both are serious, detailed, and specific, and they are the response a reader of von Däniken is entitled to see.

The influence on Sitchin, Biglino, and the disclosure-era researchers. The next figure in the lineage, Zecharia Sitchin, published The 12th Planet in 1976 and extended the ancient astronaut reading to the Sumerian material specifically: the Anunnaki of the Sumerian king lists, the Enuma Elish, and the texts in the Ashmolean and British Museum cuneiform collections. Sitchin's work stood on its own philological foundations (contested ones, as the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near East scholar Michael Heiser has documented in detail at sitchiniswrong.com), but the interpretive frame, the willingness to read ancient texts as descriptive records of non-human contact, came from the paperback wave that Chariots had opened. Mauro Biglino, the Italian translator and former Pauline Bible collaborator, began publishing in Italian from around 2010 and in English translation from 2013 a reading of the Hebrew Bible that treats the plural Elohim as flesh-and-blood beings rather than as a single transcendent God, and reads Genesis and Ezekiel in those terms. L.A. Marzulli, Timothy Alberino, Paul Wallis, Billy Carson, and other disclosure-era researchers operating through long-form podcasts and YouTube from the mid-2010s onward extend the lineage further. The intellectual debt to von Däniken is explicit in most of their work. The popular frame he opened in 1968, the grammar for reading ancient texts and monuments as testimony rather than metaphor, is the frame in which they work.

The April 2026 moment. The current spike of public interest in this material has a specific proximate trigger. On 17 April 2026, United States Representative Anna Paulina Luna posted on social media recommending that her followers read 1 Enoch, placing the Enochic material alongside her ongoing work on UAP disclosure. Luna had earlier discussed the Book of Enoch during her appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience in August 2025, and the April 2026 post reactivated that earlier conversation at a wider scale. The vocabulary now circulating in public (Watchers, Nephilim, Anunnaki, non-human intelligences) is the vocabulary that von Däniken, Sitchin, Biglino, and the disclosure-era researchers have shaped over five decades. A reader arriving at this page because the phrase ancient astronaut has surfaced again in 2026 is arriving at the founding figure of the discourse through which that vocabulary reached them.

A note on editorial stance. Satyori's position on von Däniken is not advocacy and not dismissal. The biographical facts (the Swiss hotel background, the 1970 fraud conviction, the 1973 walk-back of The Gold of the Gods claims, the founding of AAS RA and Mystery Park, the Ancient Aliens consultancy) are named as facts. The specific archaeological claims about the pyramids, Nazca, Puma Punku, and Easter Island have been answered in detail by specialists, and those responses are named specifically. The textual claims about Ezekiel, 1 Enoch, and the Mahabharata are harder, and the scholarly conversation around them is genuinely live: a reader can agree with the conventional apocalyptic reading of Ezekiel 1 and still think there are open questions about what Second Temple visionary literature was describing. That openness is part of the Satyori editorial stance. What Satyori does not do is treat the 1970 conviction or the Ecuador walk-back as disqualifying for the entire tradition, or treat the scholarly responses as mere establishment dismissal. Both the fraud and the critiques are real. Both the influence and the open textual questions are also real. Holding all four at once, and declining to collapse them into a simple verdict, is how this page tries to serve a reader who wants to see the whole record.

Significance

Why von Däniken matters as a historical figure. Whatever a reader concludes about the specific claims, von Däniken's position in twentieth-century popular culture is a matter of public record. Chariots of the Gods? sold in tens of millions of copies across more than thirty languages in its first decade of publication and remains in print worldwide more than fifty years later. The cumulative sales reported by his publishers, over seventy-five million copies across his bibliography, put him in a small category of popular non-fiction authors whose work reached tens of millions of general readers in multiple languages. For comparison, that reach is broadly in the range of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, or later Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods, all of them books that shaped how large general audiences thought about their subjects even when specialists disagreed with the arguments. Ignoring that scale of influence while writing about twentieth-century popular engagement with antiquity is not an option for a serious reference resource.

The reception history in three waves. The scholarly reception has unfolded in three distinct waves, and each deserves naming. The first wave, from roughly 1970 to 1980, was book-length and direct. Clifford Wilson's Crash Go the Chariots (Master Books, 1972) worked through the first book claim by claim. Ronald Story's The Space-Gods Revealed (Harper and Row, 1976) and Guardians of the Universe? (St. Martin's Press, 1980) extended the method across the early sequels. The German biblical scholar Siegfried Kreuzer and others published responses in Egyptological and biblical journals during the same years. The second wave, from roughly 1990 to the present, operates through general archaeology education. Kenneth Feder's Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, now in its tenth edition through Oxford University Press, has taught a generation of undergraduate archaeology students to treat von Däniken's method as a case study in how popular archaeology can drift from the documentary record. Garrett Fagan's edited volume Archaeological Fantasies (Routledge, 2006) collects multi-author responses across the wider pseudoarchaeology literature. The third wave, from roughly 2010 to the present, has responded to the cable-television and podcast phase of the tradition. The Society for American Archaeology's 2014 and 2022 statements on Ancient Aliens, the archaeologist Jason Colavito's The Cult of Alien Gods (Prometheus, 2005) and his continuing blog work, and classroom resources such as David Miano's YouTube channel and Flint Dibble's social-media archaeology outreach all operate in this wave.

The colonialist-critique thread. Part of the 2010 to 2026 response has carried a distinct argument that deserves separate naming. The Society for American Archaeology, along with individual archaeologists such as Donald Holly, Sarah Bond, and Christopher Heaney, have argued that the repeated move of attributing indigenous American, African, and Pacific monumental construction to extraterrestrial intelligences carries a colonialist implication: that the indigenous builders of those sites were incapable of what they demonstrably built. This argument does not land on every page of Chariots equally (the book also treats Egyptian, Greek, and Near Eastern material), but it lands hard on the Nazca, Puma Punku, Easter Island, and Olmec chapters, and it lands harder on the Ancient Aliens episodes drawn from those chapters. Naming that critique as part of the reception is part of an honest accounting of the tradition's effects.

Why the tradition persists despite sustained scholarly critique. Several reasons are worth naming. The first is that the tradition reads ancient texts descriptively rather than dismissing them as primitive, and many religious and spiritually serious readers welcome that. The second is that the questions behind the tradition (what Ezekiel's wheels are describing, whether the plural Elohim of Genesis reflects an older polytheistic layer, what the vimanas of Sanskrit epic are, why human civilisations across Eurasia and the Americas rose so quickly after the end of the last Ice Age) are real questions that have not been fully closed inside academic scholarship. The third is that the cable-television and podcast phases have made the vocabulary ambient in public life in a way that makes it hard for even a reader who finds the specific answers unpersuasive to set the questions aside. The fourth is the ongoing United States congressional UAP and non-human intelligence hearings (2023 through 2026), which have brought the phrase non-human intelligence from fringe discourse into the formal public record. When a sitting member of Congress like Anna Paulina Luna points readers to 1 Enoch on social media in April 2026, the vocabulary has moved from subculture into general political speech. That shift is the reason this figure page is being written now.

What a measured verdict looks like. The measured verdict that a careful reader can take from the record runs roughly as follows. Von Däniken's specific archaeological claims (that the Giza pyramids, Nazca lines, Puma Punku, and Easter Island moai exceeded indigenous engineering capacity and imply external intervention) have been addressed in detail by specialists and are not supported by the documentary record. The 1970 fraud conviction and the 1973 walk-back of The Gold of the Gods claims are part of his biography and are named here as such. The textual-interpretation questions he raised about Ezekiel, 1 Enoch, and the Sanskrit epics are harder and remain live inside serious scholarship, even when the specific ancient-astronaut reading is not the reading academic consensus accepts. The influence of the tradition he founded, through Sitchin, Biglino, and the disclosure-era researchers, through Ancient Aliens, and into the 2026 public conversation about UAP and non-human intelligences, is considerable and ongoing. A reader can acknowledge all of this at once without reaching for either evangelism or dismissal.

Connections

The texts von Däniken read as testimony. Readers following the textual thread of his work can go to the Book of Enoch, the primary text that Chariots and its sequels treat as a record of heavenly ascents rather than as apocalyptic visionary literature. Enoch himself, the antediluvian patriarch taken up through the heavens in 1 Enoch 14 and 71, is the figure whose ascents von Däniken most often cited as textual evidence for the ancient astronaut reading. Methuselah, Enoch's son, carries the Enochic story forward through the pre-flood period. The Watchers page treats the full Enochic account of the 200 angels who descended on Mount Hermon, which Sitchin, Biglino, Marzulli, Wallis, and Alberino each read as a record of extraterrestrial contact rather than a theological narrative about angelic rebellion. The Nephilim page covers the hybrid offspring of that encounter and connects the Enochic material to Genesis 6, the Book of Giants, and the parallel giant traditions across world mythology.

Named Watchers and related figures. Several named figures within the Enochic account are treated in detail elsewhere on Satyori. Azazel, the Watcher who in 1 Enoch 8 teaches humans the forging of swords, knives, shields, breastplates, and the use of antimony and cosmetics, is the figure most often read by ancient-astronaut authors as a technological instructor. Semjaza, the leader of the 200 who descended on Mount Hermon, takes the oath of mutual commitment that opens the Watcher narrative. Uriel is the archangel who guides Enoch through the heavens in 1 Enoch 19 through 36 and names the places of punishment for the fallen Watchers. Giants in World Mythology places the Nephilim in comparative context alongside the Titans of Greek myth, the Jotnar of Norse mythology, the Rephaim and Anakim of the Hebrew Bible, and the giant traditions of the Americas and Oceania.

The AAT lineage explainer. The primary companion to this figure page is the Satyori ancient astronaut theory explainer. That page sets out the wider lineage (von Däniken, Sitchin, Biglino, Hancock, the disclosure-era researchers, Ancient Aliens) and its three-wave reception history (paperback, cable-television, podcast). This page concentrates on the founding figure. Read together, the two pages give a reader the person and the movement. Additional figure pages in the lineage (Zecharia Sitchin, Mauro Biglino, Graham Hancock, Billy Carson, L. A. Marzulli, Timothy Alberino, Paul Wallis) are being written and will be linked when live. Until then the names are present without links so that a reader knows where the conversation is pointing.

Sites and concepts named in the books. Several of the specific sites von Däniken cites (the Giza pyramids, the Nazca Lines, Puma Punku and Tiahuanaco, Easter Island, Göbekli Tepe, Baalbek, the Palenque sarcophagus lid) are candidate pages on the wider Satyori content plan and will be linked when the entity pages are live. Concepts central to his extended argument (Nibiru, the Anunnaki, the Younger Dryas, non-human intelligences, UAP disclosure) are likewise pending pages. A reader who wants to go deeper on any of these can use the explainer page as a waypoint and follow the references there.

For readers who want to start somewhere else. If a reader has arrived here because of the April 2026 public conversation about the Book of Enoch and wants to begin with the primary text rather than the secondary literature, the starting point is the Book of Enoch entity page, followed by the Enoch and Watchers pages. If a reader wants the framework for how the modern tradition has read that material, the ancient astronaut theory explainer is the next step. This figure page sits between those two, naming the specific twentieth-century author whose books turned the primary texts into a mass-culture conversation about contact between early humans and non-human intelligences.

Further Reading