Failure of Mystery Park
In the winter of 2004, the park and its governmental support came under heavy criticism by the news channel, SRG SSR idée suisse. Owing to failed expectations that projected 500,000 guests per year when in 2005 only 200,000 visited the park, Mystery Park found itself in dire financial straits. Operation of the park was suspended on November 19, 2006.
Critics also attributed the park's failure to other reasons:
- Some cited von Däniken's biases regarding alien interactions with ancient civilizations. Although these ideas worked well for his book and documentaries, they had less appeal for theme park visitors.
- Others blamed failures of the park on von Däniken's strong personal involvement. He had an office on site, sold his books at the park, and regularly interacted with park visitors. In the pavilion with the replica of El Castillo at Chichen Itza, a film promoted his assertion that a spaceship had crash-landed in Mexico thousands of years ago, that aliens assisted by the natives took several teenage boys with them into space, and that the aliens returned the boys to Earth 52 years later after having trained them in advanced technology. He asserted it was they who founded Maya civilization. Critics said that the parallels between the attractions and his theories were serious propaganda designed to persuade people of his theories and to sell books. Instead of a fun family amusement park, the attractions were intended represent von Daniken's, not imaginary fantasy and entertainment.
Read more about this topic: Jungfrau Park
Famous quotes containing the words failure of, failure, mystery and/or park:
“The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.”
—Audre Lorde (1934–1992)
“... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing of the worst thing of all—
not the crimes of other, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?”
—Paul Celan [Paul Antschel] (1920–1970)
“Is a park any better than a coal mine? What’s a mountain got that a slag pile hasn’t? What would you rather have in your garden—an almond tree or an oil well?”
—Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944)