In his book The Search for the Tassili Frescoes: The story of the prehistoric rock-paintings of the Sahara (1958), Lhote publicized the hypothesis that the humanoid drawings at Tassili represented space aliens. He baptized one particularly large and curious figure "Jabbaren" and described him as the "great Martian god." The popular press gave a lot of attention to this hypothesis of a prehistoric close encounter, and Lhote's arguments were later incorporated into the evidence assembled by Erich von Däniken for the thesis that ancient extraterrestrial astronauts visited the Earth in prehistoric times.