Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (8 page)

It was as if all the creatures, all the trees, all the vegetation of the earth had been caught up in flowing whirlpools, mixed together, and then deposited wherever the water settled. In addition to the drifts at the northwest bases of mountain chains, these jumbles of diverse life-forms were also found in drifts that filled isolated valleys and made up entire islands in the Arctic whose boneyards contained not only the remains of animals from warmer climes, but also uncountable tree trunks extirpated with their roots intact—trees that could have grown only below the Arctic treeline.

Science did not rush to proclaim the existence of a warm age!

Instead, as soon as the ice age became a scientific fact, the fossil remains of life that had been found in the drifts, including the woolly mammoth that gave rise to the myth of the ice age, disappeared from scientific discourse and the newly named moraines became a simple admixture of sand and rock. When the same admixture of bones and plant life was found stuffed deep in caves, a process that could have occurred
only
if it had been carried into the small cracks and crevices by the recession of massive floodwaters, the caves were deemed an anomaly that explained nothing, and the evidence was allowed to be mined into nonexistence.

Then came evidence that the scattered islands of the Pacific had once been home to a civilization that had stretched from the shores of Asia to the coast of South America. Plato’s accounts of a lost civilization in the
Timaeus
and
Critias
had always been the subject of debate, but the debate had not arisen because of physical evidence on the face of the earth. The pyramids, impossible structures, had always existed, but there was never a context in which to place them until the discoveries of ancient cities in the Pacific and then in Central and South America started coming to light.

Similarities among the various megalithic societies being uncovered led to the application of the word
diffusion
to describe the way culture passed from one group of people to another. With cultural diffusion again pointing clearly to an antediluvian civilization, the scientific establishment reacted with archeology’s first rule: the ironclad law that cultural transfers could not extend beyond the shores of the oceans. At the same time, a social movement was forged that was designed to preserve the dignity of indigenous populations in the face of the encroachment of modern technology.

In the United States, the late-nineteenth-century job of establishing that native populations had never been influenced by foreign contact fell to Major John Wesley Powell, who was the creator and director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian; a founder and president of the politically influential Cosmos Club; a founder and president of the Anthropological Society of Washington; one of the earliest members of the Biological Society of Washington; an organizer of the Geological Society of Washington; a founder of both the National Geographic Society and the Geological Society of America; and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

During the nineteenth century, evidence of both European presence and the existence of a prehistoric civilization was being uncovered all over North America, primarily in the mounds that dotted the countryside east of the Rockies. Powell sent out his ethnology emissaries to systematically destroy the mounds and any evidence they contained that pointed to nonnative origins, thereby successfully eradicating the history of the North American continent.

Powell’s prestige and fanaticism, together with the law against cultural diffusionism, translated into a worldwide rule of science that megalithic structures, no matter where found, were the product of whatever local inhabitants happened to live around the megaliths at the time of their discovery. Thus the world was taught that the pyramids sprang from the hands of hunter-gatherers who had discovered farming on the shores of the Nile, the massive megalithic complexes in the Americas were the product of the ancestors of the natives Cortez had quickly defeated, and the megalithic monuments dotting the islands of the Pacific were built by the natives’ ancestors who had set aside their fishing spears long enough to craft cities out of fitted slabs of fifty-ton rocks!

There was no room in the past for a megalithic society, a worldwide, antediluvian civilization that would easily explain both the physical remains of such a civilization and the flood that brought that civilization to an end. The past was dominated by an ice age created to explain the evidence for the flood that destroyed the worldwide civilization.

Today, we are stuck with the scientific fact, the myth, that ice can creep down from the North Pole and cover Europe and North America. Once the scientific community has accepted a theory as fact, any evidence is acceptable so long as it is cast to support the theory and no evidence is sufficient to disprove the theory. Without opposition, the theory becomes part of the founding principles of whole new fields of inquiry. There can, then, be no Agassiz speaking into a void created by an overwhelming desire to discredit an event described in the Bible, nor a Powell powerful enough to undo the damage done by Powell.

This is because there is no longer a steward overseeing the entire field, given that the field itself is now fractured into dozens of disciplines whose disciples can all take responsibility for claiming the theory to be wrong. If and when people in the individual fields who have adopted the scientific fact of the ice age attempt to challenge the theory, they are charged with operating out of their area of competence.

The ice age is more real than the striated rock, the moraine-buried mountains, and the erratics it was crafted to explain, a nonexistent vision that is more a visible fixture of the landscape than the landscape itself.

But the discoveries of flood evidence keep coming. The breathtaking ruins of a submerged city off Yonaguni Island in Japan have produced a storm of controversy, which has been drowned out by the cries of rage against the later discovery of the remains of a huge underwater city lying off the western tip of Cuba just east of the Yucatán. Before critics could scream themselves hoarse at this discovery, another startling find, of a sunken city in India’s Bay of Cambay, sent establishment delusionists like the Harvard archeologist Richard Meadows scrambling for an international commission to gain control of the nature of the knowledge permitted to come out of these finds.

Any researcher attempting to come to grips with the emerging facts of the past is faced with the scientifically unassailable reality of the ice age in trying to explain the facts and, by acknowledging the ice age, ends up further distorting our view of reality. Some seize on the “crustal displacement” theory suggested by Charles Hapgood and fleshed out by the Flem-Aths, the notion that parts of the earth that are now at the poles were farther toward the equator, speculating that such an event would have caused massive movements of the world’s oceans. Others favor the idea that giant comets or meteors caused the earth to tilt on its axis, thus displacing the oceans. Still others believe the encroachment of black holes caused the oceans to heave. The most effective proponent of a worldwide civilization, Graham Hancock, perceives that the melting ice sheets created massive water dams in accordance with ice age theory proposed by the late professor Cesare Emiliani. These dams, Hancock posits, broke and produced the superfloods that inundated what became the underwater cities.

Because these explanations accord reality to the scientific myth of the ice age and do not explain where the waters of the flood came from—the waters whose weight submerged the landmasses of the Pacific and the Atlantic, forcing up mountain peaks at their margins—I prefer to look elsewhere than the earth for the source of the floodwaters. The most obvious source, of course, would be the Moon, whose seabeds, outlined on its surface, have long been recognized by their names as being the remnants of seas and oceans.

Let us speculate for a moment and say that the scientific fact of gravity, rather than being the static result of mass, is the dynamic product of what the matter is doing—that is, cooling. This is a conclusion that is supported by the fact that the measurement of the product of cooling, the electromagnetic emissions such as light, is identical to the measurement of gravity, and both diminish inversely with the square of their distance. Given this, the Moon, being smaller than Earth, would have cooled off first, lessening its gravitational field and allowing the still-hot Earth, with its still-strong gravitational field, to attract the Moon’s oceans across space.

Attempting to disagree with the nature of the static gravity that causes the masses of ice to slip slowly down the sides of the planet, in our view, is a bigger sin than claiming that the billion pounds of copper mined in upper Michigan during the Mediterranean Bronze Age produced the Bronze Age. Gravity is a property rather than a dynamic process, and North American copper could not have crossed the ocean. We’re faced with a scientific process that turns ideas into facts that, once accorded consensus reality, are beyond challenge because with no evidence for their validity, there can be no evidence for their invalidity.

The ice age was crafted out of whole cloth to counter the possibility that evidence turning up all over the world could be used to support biblical interpretations of the world. No one wants to go back to the days of feudal science, when decisions about reality were filtered through belief systems designed to provide for our salvation. However, we have created a scientific system that enshrines off-the-cuff ideas of men who lived before we knew about the atom, electricity, or even that some stars were galaxies—in short, we are allowing our views of reality to be controlled by the unverifiable notions of dead men who knew relatively nothing.

Because the project of science is no longer unified, but is instead splintered among a thousand different disciplines, these embedded ideas creep into diverse disciplines unchallenged, and in doing so become unchallengeable. If we don’t consciously challenge basic assumptions at every step of the way, those of us involved in seeking explanations for the actual reality of our existence—in this case the evidence for a worldwide antediluvian civilization—will find ourselves trapped in the very paradigm we are attempting to penetrate.

7
The Martyrdom of Immanuel Velikovsky

As Catastrophists Gain Ground, an Early Hero Gets Some Long Overdue Credit

John Kettler

W
e may not realize it, but we’re going through the death throes of a fundamental geological doctrine, a doctrine called uniformitarianism, which holds that the geological processes we see today are the same ones that have always existed, and that while changes
do
occur, the process is gradual, unfolding over eons.

Right. Try selling that one to your children. They’ve been steeped in classes, through TV and movies, in an altogether more radical view of how things work, geologically speaking. That model is called catastrophism and is exemplified by the now famous “asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.” Yes, we’re talking about the Chicxylub crater in the Yucatán and an asteroid strike some sixty-five million years ago.

In 1950, this was the rankest sort of scientific heresy. The chief heretic was a man named Immanuel Velikovsky, a man who made vast contributions to a variety of disciplines, but who today is all but unknown, even to many who benefit directly from his pioneering work.

Immanuel Velikovsky was a Russian Jew, born June 10, 1895, in Vitebsk. He mastered several languages as a child and graduated from gymnasium (high school) in 1913 with a gold medal, having performed exceptionally well in Russian and mathematics. He then left Russia for a time, traveled to Europe and Palestine, and took natural sciences (premed) courses at the University of Edinburgh. He returned to what was then czarist Russia before World War I started and enrolled in the University of Moscow. Somehow he was not swept up in either the slaughter on the Eastern Front or the civil war when the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, and he emerged with a medical degree in 1921 and also a strong background in history and law.

Shortly thereafter, he moved to Vienna, where Cupid’s arrow found him, resulting in his marriage to Elisheva Kramer, a young violinist. While in Vienna, he edited the
Scripta Universitatis,
a major academic work to which Albert Einstein contributed the mathematical–physical science section. He also studied psychoanalysis under Sigmund Freud’s pupil Wilhelm Stekel and studied the working of the brain in Zurich.

By 1924, Velikovsky and his wife were living in Palestine, where he practiced psychoanalysis. He continued his academic editing work by taking on the
Scripta Academica Hierosolymitana,
a major Jewish piece of scholarship. The year 1930 saw his first original contribution in the form of a paper that argued that epileptics are characterized by pathological, distinctive encephalogram patterns. A portion of his writings appeared in Freud’s
Imago.
It was Freud’s
Moses and Monotheism,
though, that would plant the fateful seed that led Immanuel Velikovsky from the quiet pursuits of healing minds and organizing great thoughts to worldwide fame, ten years of academic ostracism, and a subsequent lifetime of vilification and scorn.

The “seed” was a nagging wondering whether Freud’s hero, the monotheist iconoclast pharaoh Akhnaton, might be the real-life model for Oedipus, the legendary individual whose strange desires and worse acts were said by the Freudians to underlie the psychology of all young men. Velikovsky later argued in
Oedipus and Akhnaton
that Akhnaton was indeed the real-life model for the tragic and legendary Oedipus
.
In 1939 Velikovsky went on sabbatical for a year, and took his family with him to the United States only weeks before World War II began. He spent the next eight months doing research in the great libraries of New York.

April 1940 brought another key question to the fore of Velikovsky’s questing mind, a mind well trained in ancient history and steeped in the Hebrew faith. Was there any evidence in Egyptian records of the great catastrophes that were depicted in the Bible as preceding the Exodus?

Velikovsky went looking and came up with what is known as the Papyrus Ipuwer, a set of lamentations by an Egyptian sage by the name of Ipuwer that describe a series of disasters that befell his beloved country, disasters that matched those described in the book of Exodus, the source of the well-known description that first appeared in the King James version of “hail and burning hail” that destroyed Egypt’s crops.

This rather amazing bombardment is the result of human interference, you see. The King James version of the Bible dates back to the 1600s, and it wasn’t until the middle to late 1700s that a scientific concept for
meteorite
even existed. Thus, when the translators encountered the Hebrew
barad
(stone) in early manuscripts, they elected to render it as “hail.” Velikovsky noticed description after description in myths and legends and historical accounts of “burning pitch” falling from the heavens, and from this he proceeded to develop deep insights into the nature and structure of Venus (more on this later).

The discovery of the Papyrus Ipuwer launched Velikovsky on nothing less than an attempt to reconcile the conflicting Hebrew and Egyptian chronologies, an effort that eventually led to academic war with Egyptologists, archeologists, and ancient historians when he published
Ages in Chaos
(revised chronology) in 1952 and
Earth in Upheaval
(wherein he presented geological and paleontological evidence for
Worlds in Collision
) in 1955
.
A titanic clash with the full force of astronomers, cosmologists, experts in celestial mechanics, and academicians ensued when Velikovsky presumed to upset their tidy model of an orderly, highly stable cosmos by publishing his bombshell,
Worlds in Collision,
in 1950.

The key idea from which the book arose came about in October 1940 when Velikovsky, reading the Book of Joshua, noticed that a shower of meteorites preceded the Sun’s “standing still.” This made him wonder whether this might be a description not of a local event but of a global one. He went looking for evidence in history and archeology and also in the myths, legends, and repressed memories of all humanity, his psychoanalytical training standing him in excellent stead here. What he found indicated to him that the planet Venus had been the major player in a series of global cataclysms recorded all over the world. It also made him wonder whether Venus could be related to the upheavals preceding the Exodus.

For ten years Velikovsky, now a permanent resident of the United States, continued to research his two manuscripts, meanwhile trying to find a publisher for
Worlds in Collision
. Two dozen rejections later, the Macmillan Company, a major publisher of academic textbooks, agreed to take on his book. The scientists who wrote Macmillan’s books and the academics who bought them applied blatant pressure tactics in an attempt to prevent Macmillan from publishing the book, but Macmillan was not dissuaded.

And yet by the time that
Worlds in Collision
had become Macmillan’s number one best seller, the pressure had become so great that Macmillan ended up transferring the book to its competitor Doubleday. At Doubleday, the book went on to enjoy worldwide success, success that was aided considerably by a public backlash against the pressure tactics.