"The Soviet mathematician Matest M. Agrest (1915-2005) sparked the Soviet ancient astronaut craze nearly a decade before the theory gained widespread popularity in the West. In 1959, he proposed that Sodom and Gomorrah had been destroyed by an extraterrestrial nuclear device (which conveniently also killed Lot’s wife in the presence of witnesses), and that the terrace of Baalbek in Lebanon was a launch pad for alien spacecraft. Because Agrest was a scientist, unlike earlier European and American writers, his work attained a spurious credibility, especially with Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels, who saw in it not the anti-religious propaganda it was but rather confirmation that H. P. Lovecraft and Charles Fort had been on to something. His work found its way into Morning of the Magicians (1960), through which it was disseminated to Erich von Daniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and countless others."