Other planets have played a crucial part in the development of life on Earth - and are even responsible for the shape of the Earth as we know it. That was the controversial theory put forward in 1950 by Immanuel Velikovsky, a Russian-born doctor and psychoanalyst who settled in America, in his book entitled, Worlds in Collision.
Velikovsky claimed that cataclysmic disasters that have been recorded in the Bible and echoed in the ancient writings of the Mayas, Chinese, Mexicans and Egyptians were all due to convulsions in the universe, which sent Venus and then Mars into orbits to close to earth.
Venus, according to Velikovsky, was part of Jupiter until an explosion sent it crashing into space more than 4,000 years ago. It hurtled towards the sun, blazing brightly, and trailing a slipstream of dust and gases. Earth moved into the outer edges of this slipstream in the middle of the 15th century BC, and a fine red dust coloured our rain. 'All the water that was in the Nile turned to blood,' stated the Biblical Book of Exodus. Then came showers of meteorites, and according to the Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan, the sky rained 'not water but fire and red-hot stones'.
When gases coalesced to form petroleum, 'people were drowned in a sticky substance raining from the sky', in the words of the Mayas' sacred book, Popol-Vuh. Elsewhere, the petroleum was ignited by oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere, and a terrible deluge of fire was recorded from Siberia to South America.
Finally, said Velikovsky, Earth was subject to the full gravitational pull of the new planet and was tugged off its axis. Hurricanes and floods destroyed islands, leveled cities and altered the face of continents. 'Heaven and earth changed places, 'wrote the Cashinaua of western Brazil. The Persians watched in awe as three days of light were followed by three day's of darkness.
It was then, Velikovsky arued that Moses led the Israelite's across the Sea of Passage. Freak gravitational and electromagnetic forces, as well as the convulsions of the Earth's crust, piled up the waters on either side of the seabed. As the Egyptians pursued their former slaves, a powerful electric bolt passed between Earth and Venus, and the waters flooded back into place, drowning them.
The few survivors of the worldwide catastrophes faced starvation. But suddenly food fell from the skies - manna from heaven to the Israelite's, ambrosia to the Greeks, honey-like madhu to the Hindus. Velikovsky believed it was created either by bacterial action or by electrical discharges in the Earth's atmosphere working on hydrocarbons in the trail of Venus.
Just as Earth was getting accustomed to its new seasonal timings, Venus swung past again, in about 1400BC, with equally disastrous effects. The it settled into an orbit that left our ancestors in peace. But 8th century BC, it passed to close to Mars, dislodging the smaller planet, and pushing it into an orbit which clashed with that of Earth. Again there were geophysical upheavals, recorded in the Bible by the prophets Issiah, Hosea, Joel and Amos, and in the Lliad by Jlomer. Once more the calendar had to be revised, because a year of twelve 30-day months was no longer accurate.
Velikovsky said that Mars returned every 15 years until 687 BC, the last time it caused great disturbances, when, according to the Chinese Bamboo Books 'Stars fell like rain and the Earth shook'. In some parts of the world, the rising sun dipped back below the horizon as Earth again tilted on its axis. Then both Venus and Mars settled into orbits that no longer influenced us. The controversial theory explained many aspects of ancient myth, legend and history, not least why Mars replaced Venus as predominant god among the Greeks and Romans. But it outraged scientists in 1950 . One curator of a planetarium who backed Velikovsy was sacked.
Velikovsky had flown in the face not only of accepted scientific principles but of Darwin's theory of an ordered evolution. Yet in the next 50 years, as space travel revealed many more facts about Venus and Mars, his theories were proven right time and time again. He was ridiculed for saying that Venus had a comet-like tail, that it was much hotter than Earth, and that its proved the truth of his claims. He was described for saying that Mars had a surface of craters, and that its atmosphere contained the rare gases argon and neon. Again, space explorations found he was correct.
Neither Venus nor Mars were exactly unidentified flying objects, but the powers they unleashed terrified and puzzled our ancestors. And even today there are flying objects we can identify, but which are every bit as baffling as UFOs.
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