Was the earth an intergalactic rest-stop where alien space travellers regularly relieved themselves in ancient times? Are the ancient monoliths to be found all over northern Europe in fact crude representations of gigantic alien turds? Is Ayre’s Rock in Australia a fossilised giant jobby left by a space visitor caught short millennia ago? Are the mysterious lines in the Peruvian desert at Nazca – identified by many as runways for ancient spaceships – the result of giant antediluvian space visitors attempting to dislodge some stubborn ‘dingleberries’ by dragging their arses across the sands? Were Homo Sapiens evolved by aliens to serve as a race of toilet attendants? These are just some of the amazing questions posed by Swiss banker Erich von Scharn in his new book Skid Marks of the Gods?. “It’s obvious. All the evidence is there to show that ancient astronauts regularly visited our planet to take a dump,” proclaims von Scharn, who is convinced that most ancient legends, folklore and even monuments can be explained in defecatory terms. “Take Stonehenge, for example, all those standing stones arranged in a circle with crosspieces across their tops – obviously gigantic ‘straining bars’ of the type seen in many continental public toilets. It is clear that they were designed for some giant, multi handed, alien creature to grip firmly whilst straining to expel recalcitrant turds. Clearly, the modern French public convenience can trace a direct line of descent from this ancient monument.”

Indeed, the banker has stirred controversy in the archaeological world with his assertion that there are actually hinges two thirds of the way up every one of the Egyptian pyramids, allowing their tops to be flipped back like toilet lids, to reveal a wooden seat surrounding the consequent appeture. “Egyptologists have, for centuries, been trying to conceal the truth about these magnificent structures – they are, in fact, giant toilets, designed to lure back the spacemen that the ancient Egyptians worshipped as their Gods,” he explains. “Just look at all the pictures they left showing strange animal-headed creatures seated on what are obviously elaborate toilets, being worshipped by mortal men as they curl one off! Is it a coincidence that, to this day, the toilet is often referred to as ‘the throne’?” He angrily dismisses claims from historians that his theories directly contradict all the archaeological evidence pointing to the pyramids having been constructed as elaborate tombs for the Pharaohs, arguing that it would be perfectly natural for ancient Egypt’s leaders to want to be buried in that most holy of receptacles – a kazi. “These excremental visitations clearly had a profound effect in shaping human culture,” opines von Scharn. “How else can you explain the prevalence of toilet humour throughout history?”

Thirty-eight year old von Scharn claims that his theories first took shape when, as a child, he saw a Mayan sarcophagus in a Geneva museum. “Carved on the lid was what was clearly a representation of an ancient astronaut seated on an advanced toilet, manipulating its complex controls, no doubt to gain the required level of flush,” he says, rejecting the conventional archaeological explanation of the carving as a representation of the coffin’s occupant between the world’s of life and death. “From that moment it became obvious to me that human history had been manipulated by these strange visitors – how else can we explain the sudden advances in toilet technology from the time of the Pharaohs onwards? Could the magnificent communal crapper culture of the Romans, or the sophisticated pressurised flush toilets of the Cretans, really have been devised by a species so primitive that, only a few thousand years earlier, had thought crapping in the woods the height of sophisticated toilet etiquette? Obviously, only alien intervention could explain such extraordinary achievements!”

Von Scharn has developed an elaborate alternative history of the earth, based upon his extensive researches, postulating that alien defecation on our planet actually pre-dated man. “Clearly the aliens were using the earth as a dumping ground for waste products from their craft for millions of years – I believe this is what killed the dinosaurs, they were literally drowned in excrement,” he explains, spurning a rival theory that they were wiped out by a single huge jobby impacting the planet. “I believe the aliens then realised that better waste management would be required to avoid their rest-stop from becoming one huge, festering, pile of shit. Their solution was to evolve the primitive hominids they found here after the demise of the dinosaurs into a race capable of recycling their waste.” In his book, von Scharn argues that human agriculture originally developed as a means of treating the ancient astronauts’ huge amounts of raw sewage by utilising it as fertiliser. “Think about it, why else would a nomadic hunter of mammoths like Neolithic man suddenly decide to settle down and start cultivating plants? It just doesn’t make sense,” he opines. “It’s the same with the Egyptians’ sudden development of papyrus -man had happily existed for millennia without a proper written language, content to simply scrawl on walls. No, the papyrus was originally the arse-wipe of the Gods!”

But just why did the ancient astronauts stop using the earth as a receptacle for their bodily wastes? Von Scharn thinks it could be simply be because intergalactic trade routes have changed, leaving our planet on an interstellar back road. Of course, some cosmic turd-related phenomena are still seen – the Tunguska explosion in Russia early last century, often attributed to a comet impact, was, speculates von Scharn, the result of a stray giant steamer hitting the earth. “Such incidents are bound to happen as passing spaceships void their waste tanks. Many UFO sightings describe glowing cigar shaped objects – these are obviously ejected bum cigars burning up in the earth’s atmosphere,” he says. “There are many other historical examples – in his Book of the Damned, for instance, Charles Fort recounts the tale of how a huge scutter fell from the sky over Switzerland and crashed through the roof of Basle Cathedral, completely wrecking the building, in 1472. Whilst the locals believed that God himself had taken a shit and worshipped the stinking belly flopper for the next seven years, it is obvious that this was the stellar equivalent of ‘blue ice’, flushed from a passing space craft’s toilet.”

Von Scharn is promising even more startling revelations in his next book, Comings of the Gods, in which he will claim that the earth was literally ‘seeded’ with life as a result of space-borne alien ejaculations. “Extraterrestrial jism could be expelled at fantastic velocities for hundreds of light years by a masturbating alien,” says von Scharn. “Such material could easily have been the origin of life on earth. We might be nothing more than a wank stain on the face of creation!”