Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

7 The Martyrdom of Immanuel Velikovsky

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

John Kettler

We 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.

INTERNATIONALLY FAMOUS; SCIENTIFICALLY DAMNED

Worlds in Collision was a bomb detonated in the china shop of astronomy, whose tidy model of the stable solar system in no way provided for planets departing their orbits and wreaking worldwide havoc even once, let alone several times. In briefest form, Velikovsky’s argument was that Venus hadn’t always been a planet. Instead, he posited, it had been ejected as a comet from the body of Jupiter and had a highly eccentric orbit that had either caused it to collide directly with Earth or had several times brought it close enough to Earth to trigger cataclysms that laid waste to entire kingdoms all around the globe before “settling down.” The arguments in the book also maintain that there were records of this having occurred within historical times.

Consider why the controversy regarding the book’s publication erupted. It was 1950, and the United States, having triumphed in World War II, was enjoying incredible prosperity and optimism. The people, perhaps reacting to all the chaos and horror of the recently ended war and the perceived rising menace of global Communism (Soviets had suddenly gotten the bomb in 1949), largely closed ranks, went back to work, and resumed their lives or started new ones. Emphasis was on patriotism, conformity, and consumption. How ironic, then, that the public (in its backlash against the book’s suppression) turned out to be more open-minded than what were presumed to be the open minds of academe and science. That’s how it was, though.

Reader’s Digest, that citadel of American conservatism, said of Velikovsky’s seminal work: “Fascinating as a tale by Jules Verne, yet documented with a scholarship worthy of Darwin.” The New York Herald-Tribune called it “A stupendous panorama of terrestrial and human histories,” and Pageant beautifully summarized the public reaction by saying: “Nothing in recent years has so excited the public imagination.” The above are all review excerpts taken from the back cover of the Dell paperback edition, in its eleventh printing by 1973, the date of the writer’s copy. The Dell paperback first went into print in 1967, some seventeen years after Worlds in Collision was first published in hardcover.

The scientific and academic reaction to the book was generally presaged by the extortion, practiced prior to and after publication, against the Macmillan Company. As the book began to garner public and—in some circles even scientific—interest and acclaim, all pretense of genteel discussion went by the boards. Out came the mailed fists, the naked threats, and oceans of mud and offal. The attacks targeted three main groups: the public, the scientific and academic community, and Immanuel Velikovsky himself. Nor were such niceties as actually reading the book before denouncing it and its author employed.

Even before the Macmillan Company published the book, the renowned astronomer Harlow Shapley arranged multiple intellectual well poisonings in a learned journal, by an astronomer, a geologist, and an archeologist, not one of whom had read the book. This was a pattern used over and over again.

Shapley and his minions also engineered the sacking of the veteran senior editor (twenty-five years at the Macmillan Company) who had accepted Worlds in Collision for publication. Shapley was also responsible for the director of the famous Hayden Planetarium being fired for the high crime of proposing to mount a display at the planetarium on Velikovsky’s unique cosmological theory. Meanwhile, Velikovsky was systematically attacked in the scientific journals via distortion, lies, misrepresentation, claims of incompetence, and ad hominem attacks, while there never seemed to be space in which he could reply in order to defend himself.

Interestingly, one of Velikovsky’s attackers was the astronomer Donald Menzel, since identified through the UFO researcher Stanton Friedman’s digging to be a highly cleared disinformation specialist during World War II. Donald Menzel was a major UFO debunker, but his name is one of those on the famous/notorious TOP SECRET (Codeword) MJ-12 document, where he is listed as composing part of the super-covert investigative team for the July 1947 Roswell crash, alleged technology from which was discussed in an Atlantis Rising magazine article entitled “The Fight for Alien Technology: Jack Shulman Remains Undaunted by Mounting Threats.”

Let’s look now at some of Velikovsky’s then shocking claims, and see whether he got anything right. (Velikovsky’s claims are in bold.)

Venus is hot.

Correct. Velikovsky argued that Venus was incandescent in historical times and would therefore still be hot. Venusian cloud temperature measurements in 1950 showed temperatures well below freezing day and night. In 1962, NASA’s Mariner II satellite showed the surface temperature to be 800 degrees Fahrenheit, more than enough to melt lead. Surface probes later determined the true value to be about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

A large comet was in collision with Earth.

Correct. Even before the famous Chicxylub story became public knowledge, researchers had found, in August 1950, rich deposits of meteoric nickel in the red clay of ocean bottoms and in March 1959 had found a layer of deep sea white ash, deposited in a “cometary collision” or “the fiery end of bodies of cosmic origin.”

Some cometary tails and also some meteorites contain hydrocarbons.

Correct. By 1951, spectral analysis disclosed hydrocarbons in comet tails. By 1959, hydrocarbons in meteorites were found to be composed of many of the same waxes and compounds found here on Earth.

Evidence of petroleum hydrocarbons will be found on the Moon.

Correct. Samples brought back by the Apollo XI mission had evidence of organic matter in the form of aromatic hydrocarbons.

Jupiter emits radio noises.

Velikovsky made this claim at Princeton in 1953. Eighteen months later, two scientists from the Carnegie Institute announced receiving strong radio signals from Jupiter, then considered a cold body enshrouded in thousands of miles of ice. By 1960, two Cal Tech scientists had found that Jupiter had a radiation belt around it that was emitting 1,014 times more radio energy than Earth’s Van Allen belt.

Quite a few “lucky guesses” and “coincidences,” wouldn’t you say?

Let’s now turn to Velikovsky’s single greatest “crime,” which not only put him in the soup but also kept him there: his interdisciplinary investigations.

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.