Authors: J. Douglas Kenyon
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Gnostic Dementia, #Fringe Science, #Alternative History, #Amazon.com, #Retail, #Archaeology, #Ancient Aliens, #History
Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (9 page)
VELIKOVSKY: INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENTIFIC HERETIC
Dr. Lynn Rose, writing in
Pensée: Velikovsky Reconsidered,
in an article entitled “The Censorship of Velikovsky’s Interdisciplinary Synthesis,” noted an automatic tendency toward uniformitarianism in all the scientific disciplines. This condition was born of a profound ignorance concerning evidence of catastrophism found by other disciplines, leading to the ignoring or rejecting of such evidence within any particular discipline.
As Dr. Rose put it: “Each isolated discipline tends to remain unaware of the catastrophic data hidden away as skeletons in the closets of other disciplines. Velikovsky has removed those skeletons from various closets and has been rattling them loudly for all to hear. His suggestion is that when one looks at all the evidence without restricting oneself to the limited number of ‘facts’ usually considered by one group of specialists, it becomes possible to make a strong case for catastrophism.”
To say Velikovsky’s skeletal music was unwelcome to many would be putting it mildly. Said Dean B. McLaughlin, professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan, in his May 20, 1950, letter of protest and threat to the Macmillan Company (as quoted by Dr. Rose): “The claim of universal efficacy is the unmistakable mark of the quack . . . There is specialization within specialties . . . But no man today can hope to correct the mistakes in more than a small subfield of science. And yet Velikovsky claims to be able to dispute the basic principles of several sciences! These are indeed delusions of grandeur!”
Does this explain in part why Velikovsky was essentially crucified, then ostracized, by most of the scientific community?
Does this explain why he was harangued ad nauseum at his “day in court” twenty-four years after
Worlds in Collision
was published? This “day in court” took the form of a special meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in San Francisco on February 25, 1974. It was arranged by Carl Sagan and had been promised to be a fair forum. Instead, it turned into a snide dismissal of Velikovsky, an unprincipled, many-on-one attack on a slow-speaking, seventy-nine-year-old man deluged with objections and assertions and given near zero time to respond. Velikovsky endured two sessions of this abuse, which lasted seven hours, and while he managed to score some good points, to many who participated in this rigged event he came across poorly. Nor was a key paper by Albert Michelson (of speed of light measurement fame), which supported Velikovsky’s arguments, allowed to be read before reporters left to file their stories.
The stunning findings of planetary probes ended Velikovsky’s college exile and overloaded his schedule. Velikovsky died, still researching, in 1979, leaving us a rich published and unpublished body of work.
8
The Perils of Planetary Amnesia
As Evidence of Ancient Cataclysm Mounts, the Legacy of a Rejected Genius Is Reconsidered
Steve Parsons
A
t one time, Immanuel Velikovsky was known and respected as a world-class scholar. After studying at Edinburgh, Moscow, Zurich, Berlin, and Vienna, Velikovsky earned a reputation as an accomplished psychoanalyst and enjoyed close ties to Albert Einstein and Freud’s first pupil, Wilhelm Stekel.
But with the 1950 publication by the Macmillan Company of his bestselling book
Worlds in Collision,
Velikovsky’s reputation in the halls of science plummeted all the way to the basement. His stature as a researcher and scholar would not recover for the rest of his life. Overnight, Velikovsky became
persona non grata
on college campuses across the nation, and his work was vilified by mainstream astronomers.
How did this Russian-born Jewish scholar, educated at the world’s most respected centers of learning, bring such a firestorm of criticism upon himself? What caused powerful men of science to denounce Velikovsky as a liar and charlatan on the basis of hearsay, swearing never to read his popular book? Why have respected professionals lost their jobs for committing the crime of recommending an open investigation of Velikovsky’s conclusions?
After examining the ancient records of cultures around the world, Velikovsky made three unusual claims in
Worlds in Collision
. He postulated that (1) the planet Venus moved on a highly irregular course, passing very close to Earth within human history, (2) electromagnetic and electrostatic forces operate on a planetary scale, powerful enough to affect the motions and activity of planets, and (3) the planet Venus took the form of an immense comet in the ancient sky, inspiring great awe and fear in the hearts of our distant ancestors.
Velikovsky’s conclusions were controversial, but this alone cannot explain the intensity of the response from the halls of academe. Controversy alone cannot explain why, over many years, the popular Carl Sagan mounted a personal campaign to discredit Velikovsky. Normally, the marketplace of ideas will accommodate a broad range of thought, from the weird to the boring, but not this time.
The sheer novelty of Velikovsky’s work cannot explain why Dr. Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard Observatory, along with ranking astronomer Fred Whipple and other powerful scientists, would force Macmillan to cease publication and fire its own editor, James Putnam, even though
Worlds in Collision
had soared to the top of the best-seller lists. Some have speculated that only the power of truth touching the raw nerve of mass denial could cause grown men to go ballistic like this.
Only a deeply buried trauma in the mass consciousness could erupt with such irrational fury. In the case of the “Velikovsky affair,” the organized, frantic defense of entrenched belief produced one of the most pathological episodes in the history of science. Had Immanuel Velikovsky penetrated the veil of “planetary amnesia”?
As a psychoanalyst, Velikovsky was well qualified to recognize pathology in human behavior. In a later book,
Mankind in Amnesia,
he claims that the ancient sages exhibited a frightened state of mind, haunted by a particular fear based on terrible events their ancestors had experienced when the world was ripped apart by monstrous natural forces. He describes the means by which this deepest of collective traumas was gradually buried and forgotten over the years, but not eliminated.
Aristotle’s cosmology, which dominated scholastic thinking for two thousand years, acted with surprising precision to suppress all lingering fears of planetary disorder. Then in the 1800s, modern science agreed that the solar system, Earth, and all forms of life on Earth had
absolutely never
passed through any kind of wild or disorderly phase in the past. This idea, known as uniformitarianism, became established dogma in science. The tide of human thought has successfully driven the memory from conscious awareness, but the evidence indicates it is still alive in the collective human psyche.
Velikovsky understood our tendency to suppress trauma but also to express and repeat trauma in peculiar ways. For example, the early wars of conquest were deliberately conducted as a ritual exercise to reenact the havoc and destruction brought by the planetary gods of old.
In today’s world, we barely recognize our own violence and certainly don’t associate it with ancient roots. That’s the nature of buried trauma. One doesn’t see one’s own shadow.
Immanuel Velikovsky initially believed that the checks and balances of science would encourage others to examine his conclusions and perform their own investigations along the same lines. Unfortunately, however, by the time he passed away, in 1979, he had come to believe that his ideas would never be taken seriously by mainstream science. Though the early seventies saw a renewal of public interest in Velikovsky’s work, the doors of science have remained tightly shut on it to this day. Only the most highly motivated individuals with independent financial support have been able to continue the research where Velikovsky left off.
Interestingly, recent findings by the space program have confirmed much of what Velikovsky said. Consider the following Venusian puzzles.
Venus spins in a direction opposite that of the other planets and its temperature of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit is much hotter than expected for an object in its orbital position. The chemistry of Venus violates the established theory of planet formation. The upper atmosphere of Venus is marked by extreme, faster-than-rotation winds and the calm, lower atmosphere displays continuous lightning discharges. The body of the planet is covered with 100,000 volcanoes that have completely resurfaced the planet in recent geological time.
And finally, the traditional theory cannot account for the invisible remnant of a cometlike tail extending forty-five million kilometers into space. The Venusian tail was detected by the Earth-orbiting SOHO satellite and reported in the June 1997 issue of
New Scientist.
The Venusian puzzles make sense, it can be argued, if we believe what ancient people actually
said
about Venus. They said that Venus was a comet. They called Venus the long-haired star, the bearded star, and the witch star. They said Venus took the form of the goddess in both her beautiful aspect and her terrible aspect, that she was a fierce dragon who attacked the world. A newly arriving body that has not yet achieved thermal and electrical equilibrium with its environment could present such a display in the sky.
Apparently Velikovsky opened the door to our buried collective memories by regarding the testimony of ancient peoples as credible evidence for unusual natural events in our past.
His journey began when he studied the Egyptian and Hebrew accounts of the disasters and wonders that accompanied the Old Testament Exodus, dated at approximately 1500
B.C.E.
He discovered close parallels in the historical writings of other cultures, suggesting that the same sequence of catastrophes beset the entire globe and was experienced by all people simultaneously.
In 1950, science was not yet ready to accept the testimony of ancient peoples as credible evidence for unusual planetary events. The physical sciences would not tolerate an intrusion by an outsider who drew conclusions that crossed academic boundaries. But nearly fifty years later, science has opened the door a crack.
Two innovative theorists in the scientific establishment have recently published a book bearing a distinctive Velikovskian tone. Dr. Victor Clube, dean of the department of astrophysics at Oxford, together with his colleague, Dr. William Napier, has developed a thesis of cometary catastrophe that draws upon mythical themes as primary evidence. Though Clube and Napier’s cometary visitor was not a planet, the story is surprisingly close to that of
Worlds in Collision
.
Other innovative theorists have thrown themselves even more wholeheartedly into this line of research. The comparative mythologist David Talbott and the physicist Wallace Thornhill independently recognized the power of Velikovsky’s discoveries and have followed up with forty-five years of combined research of their own.
OPENING THE MIND TO THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE
By breaking from the pack and looking at observed facts with fresh eyes, Wallace Thornhill has become convinced that planets and stars function in an electrically dynamic environment. The Venusian tail, discovered last year, retains its ropelike or filamentary structure across forty-five million kilometers because it is a current carrying plasma. These plasma structures, Birkeland currents, are well known to plasma physicists but remain unrecognized by astronomers. The very existence of Birkeland currents in the solar system demonstrates the existence of a flow of electric current in the plasma that fills the solar system. And this opens up a whole new way of seeing things.
Thornhill says that stars do not produce all of their light and heat by thermonuclear processes. Instead, our Sun and all other stars resemble great spheres of lightning. These spheres receive energy externally rather than from nuclear fusion at their core, he says. The accepted theory that stars produce energy by nuclear fusion suits the mind-set of the atomic era but does not conform to actual observations.
Sadly, the general public has no way of knowing that the behavior of our Sun does not fit the conventional theory. We observe a lack of neutrinos; temperature reductions rather than gains as one approaches the surface; accelerated solar wind; strange rotation behavior and holes in the surface that reveal a cooler, rather than hotter, interior.
“You have to observe what nature actually does,” he says, “not what you
think
it should do.” Thornhill’s empirical approach does allow ancient human testimony to count as credible evidence. Fables, legends, and myths don’t prove Thornhill’s ideas, but they provide clues.
For instance, the mythical gods hurled great thunderbolts at each other when they battled in the heavens. The flashing thunderbolt was their weapon of choice. And the earliest written records of the ancient sages and stargazers confirm that the gods who battled in the sky were named with the same names as our most familiar planets.
If (1) the mythical gods were the planets, and if (2) the planets moved so close to each other in the sky that they exchanged colossal electrical bolts, and if (3) this took place within human memory, then where are the scars and the craters?
Actually, the scars of colossal electric strikes literally cover the Moon and most of the planets. These scars are fresh and abundant, just waiting to be studied from a new perspective. Specific patterns in these scars bear a remarkable similarity to the patterns left behind by natural lightning strikes and arcs produced in laboratories on Earth.
Planetary geologists speculate that the long, tapering “sinuous rilles” found on the moon and Mars, which travel both uphill and downhill for hundreds of kilometers, are collapsed lava tubes or dry riverbeds or cracks in the crust. But conventional experts are grasping at straws on this one. The electrical signature is unmistakable.
Such hard evidence is dangerous to science. What if Thornhill’s claims are taken seriously? What if the glass collected from the bottom of small craters of the moon and brought back by the astronauts were really heated and melted by electrical discharge rather than meteor impact? What if the Valles Marineris was actually caused by a giant thunderbolt that ripped across the face of Mars, leaving a gaping chasm that could swallow a
thousand
Grand Canyons?
If thousands of marks and scars on the planets were caused by powerful electrical discharges—the thunderbolts of the gods—then astronomy is left with more than egg on its face. We’re talking about an omelet!
Fortunately for Thornhill, he has not suffered persecution for his unusual views, at least not yet. Perhaps this is because the views of this unassuming Aussie have not received much exposure. But that will change soon.