CLICK TO ENLARGEApproached from the right angle and with a little luck, the Past will upon occasion reveal its secrets to us. This book lays out evidence that the Earth originated in the outer solar system and argues that tidal forces during approaches of Mars caused the great mass extinctions of prehistory. The Knowable Past revises and enhances the Venus theory of Immanuel Velikovsky. It provides abundant new evidence that he was right that Venus had repeatedly neared the Earth, setting off the Bronze Age catastrophes. The Great Sphinx, Stonehenge, and newly adduced iconographic and linguistic evidence from around the world all fit this reconfigured Venus theory and its wonderful companion Theory of the Reversing Earth. While Velikovsky made some pioneer’s mistakes, he also made remarkable contributions. His scientific critics threw the baby out with the bathwater in the greatest ongoing instance of Scientific Rejectionism. The Knowable Past also investigates other cases from ancient and modern history, including the origin of the Etruscans, strategies of the world wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the John F. Kennedy assassination, the run-up to the 9/11 attacks, and the 2001 anthrax mailings case. It analyzes typical problems researchers encounter such as dealing with objections. It suggests how we might think about conspiracies and conspiracy theories. And it describes sources of insight as well as ways in which theories gain acceptance. This book is for historical and scientific detectives, but not just for them. Everyone who seeks a better understanding of the Past can find sustenance in it.
Sekhmet (“The Mighty One”), the lion-headed goddess of ancient Egypt, was dreaded for her bloody rampages. Yet she became the protector of kings and a favorite personal goddess of millions of Egyptians.
Why did Egyptians have a goddess who required such assiduous and even obsessive propitiation? Why did other Egyptian goddesses play roles similar to Sekhmet’s? What explains Sekhmet’s dual nature as destroyer and protector? Why was she called the Eye of Ra? Why was she originally depicted with an oval disk on her head?
We now have good answers to these questions. But in order to understand them, we need to see why we should think that Sekhmet was Planet Venus. And that requires us to investigate a major case of scientific rejectionism. Continue reading »
[With some updating. Scientific citations can be found in the original: Here.]
A new theory of the origin of the terrestrial planets—that Jupiter’s gravity pulled them inward from the outer solar system—solves longstanding scientific riddles and offers a rich agenda for further investigation.
The origin and distribution of water on the terrestrial planets make a good place to start investigating this theory. Radiation pressure and the solar wind pushed water molecules out beyond the “snow line” around 4.5 AU, so how did Earth come to have a relatively significant amount of water?
A top secret Canadian Security Intelligence Service report leaked on August 27, 2004 may provide the missing piece of evidence needed to identify the long elusive Anthrax Mailer of 2001.
While confirmation is still lacking, we now have enough shreds of evidence to piece together a theory of the case that resolves key anomalies. In turn, that theory can point us toward where we might find confirmatory evidence. Continue reading »
Students have long struggled, often in vain, with the rules of Latin grammar. The structure of sentences in Latin seems strange to the mind of an Indo-European native speaker. Also, Latin’s heavy use of gerundive and absolute constructions: all those verbal nouns entail a very different pattern of thinking than goes on in modern Indo-European languages. Continue reading »
There are two sides to every story. Judges rightly admonish juries to check out both sides before coming to a conclusion. Our entire system of adversarial justice is built on this principle. But under surveillance by FBI in the 2001 anthrax mailings case, U.S. Army scientist Bruce Ivins committed suicide. So only one side got to tell its version of the story.Upon closing the case on February 19, 2010, FBI issued an Amerithrax Investigative Summary that concludes that Ivins was the anthrax mailer. The Summary contains serious errors as well as minor ones. It also omits crucial information. So, to ensure a fair outcome, we need to look at it through the eyes of a defense attorney, to make sure that the American people can check out both sides of the story before coming to a conclusion. Continue reading »
New evidence and analysis suggest that the KGB bears a significant share of the responsibility for the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Official investigations have tended to discount the likelihood of a Soviet hand in the assassination, and few outside investigators have pursued this line of inquiry. However, some observers have always considered the Soviets a likely suspect. The Soviets had a palpable, powerful motive: to gain revenge for the humiliation of the USSR in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Certainly, the idiosyncratic odyssey of Lee Harvey Oswald into the Soviet Union and a Russian marriage as well as his contacts with Soviet diplomatic offices preceding the assassination afforded the KGB many opportunities to interact with him. In a sense, therefore, the KGB is the elephant in the living room of suspects in this case. Yet repeated investigations have failed to turn up specific evidence that would implicate the KGB. Continue reading »
On October 12, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer was murdered on the canal towpath in Georgetown1. A divorced artist from a prominent family, Meyer was known by insiders to have been President John F. Kennedy’s senior female consort during his White House years, though the story never leaked to the public.
Her murder and the ensuing trial of Raymond Crump, Jr., a black laborer found by the police in the vicinity of the murder, drew a good deal of attention at the time. Crump had been identified by a gas station attendant helping start a car on a road overlooking the canal. Hearing cries of “Somebody help me. Somebody help me” and two shots, the attendant ran to look. Continue reading »
There’s no shortage of candidates for the cause of the mass extinctions of prehistory. But experts have found flaws in every one.
Asteroid impact at Chicxulub, Yucatan clearly played a role in the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65,000,000 years ago, though scientists point to the serious disruptions that had begun hundreds of thousands of years before with the basalt flows of the Deccan Traps.1 Giant basalt lava flows that poisoned the atmosphere and oceans played a role in four or perhaps all five major extinctions. But other enormous basalt flows have not caused extinctions, nor did they cause the tsunamis associated with various extinctions.2 Researchers have suggested many other mechanisms, but there’s no consensus at all.
Lurking in the background, however, is a quite plausible cause, one that would have possessed the power to set off the volcanic activity, air pollution, sea level shifts, loss of oxygen in oceans, climate changes, and other phenomena associated with the extinctions.
The Martian Theory Continue reading »
The famous Snake Goddess of ancient Crete has long attracted students of history and art. Elegant, risquée, enigmatic, she embodies the mystery and allure of Minoan civilization. Continue reading »
420-meter long Great Serpent Mound in Ohio is the world’s longest effigy monument. Archaeological investigations have yielded conflicting results about its initial construction date, and various theories regarding its meaning have failed to gain traction. But a revised and enhanced version of the theory of Immanuel Velikovsky that the planet Venus was originally a comet that approached the Earth and caused great devastation neatly matches key characteristics of the Great Serpent Mound.
Recently, this Venus theory has gained additional credibility from a commonsensical explanation of how a comet-like Venus could have seemed to emerge from Jupiter as in ancient Hindu and Greek myths (it was pulled from the outer solar system), including a simple, obvious reinterpretation of the Metis myth. Much new evidence has also emerged. And the theory has found powerful substantiation from a reinterpretation of the headdress of Queen Nefertari of Egypt, consort of Pharaoh Ramses II, in this image from Abu Simbel (Ramses II’s headdress appears to contain Mars with two moons and a tail, either borrowed from Venus in an encounter or from Martian dust stirred up by an encounter). Continue reading »