Robert Charroux

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Robert Charroux was the best-known pen-name of Robert Grugeau (April 7. 1909 - June 24, 1978). Grugeau/Charroux worked for the French post office until becoming a full-time writer of fiction in the early 1940s. He also wrote the scripts for a French comic strip, Atomas, about an atomic-powered superhero, appearing in the weekly magazine Mon Journal in the late 1940s. For the same magazine Charroux wrote a science fiction adventure in serial form, "Prof. Barthelemy's Flying Island." Charroux was a pioneer of the pseudoscience of ancient astronauts, publishing at least six non-fiction works in this genre in the last decade of his life, including One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963, 1970), Forgotten Worlds (1973), Masters of the World (1974), The Gods Unknown (1974) and Legacy of the Gods (1974).

The influence Charroux's first work, in its 1963 version, had on Erich Von Däniken's first books, written about 1966, as well as the influence Von Däniken's early books had on Charroux, is widely appreciated, but Von Däniken seems to have been equally familiar with an earlier French New Age ancient astronaut work, The Morning of the Magicians by Lewis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (1960), which is likely to have been a direct inspiration for both Charroux and Von Däniken.[1] Charroux's publisher contacted Von Däniken's in March of 1968 concerning evidence of plagiarism, with the result that later printings of Chariots of the Gods and Return to the Stars at least mentioned Charroux in the bibliography.

Another Space God writer appearing roughly simultaneously with Charroux and considerably pre-dating Von Däniken was prolific British author W. Raymond Drake, whose first book on the topic was published in 1964.