Athenian Cavemen

"And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the LORD, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth." -- Isaiah, 2:19

Why did people live in caves 10,000 years ago? What sort of catastrophes were they afraid of? Electric earthquakes? The expanding Earth? The stars falling on their heads? Meteor showers and meteorite impacts? Theomachy? Giants? The comet Venus? The disruption of the rotation of the Earth? The sun rising contrary to experience?

A wonderful article by Angelika Kotti at Ethnos newspaper "Οι πρώτοι... Αθηναίοι" about a pre-historic settlement of Athenians who used to hunt a species of horse which is extinct today:

They were food-gatherers, hunters and fishermen. Using hooks from bone and stone tools. They ate rabbits, deers, and even horses, cerials and legumes. These are the ancient residents of Attica. Their traces were located in the cavern that is found in Keratsini, The Cave of Schist, on the south-western edge of Mount Aigaleo, above the modern cemetery of the region.

The excavations archaeologists Fanis Mavridis and Lina Kormazopoulou and their team date the first habitation of the cavern from the eleventh up to the seventh millenium B.C., measuring roughly one millenium earlier than the first known pre-historic occupation of Attica.

An almost unique discovery for Attica and this opinion lights up the history of our countries Dark Ages period.

The dating done by method of radioactive carbon.

Geophysical Fluid Flow Cell: Electromagnetic Gravity

"The long and constant persuasion that all the forces of nature are mutually dependent, having one common origin, or rather being different manifestations of one fundamental power, has often made me think on the possibility of establishing, by experiment, a connection between gravity and electricity …no terms could exaggerate the value of the relation they would establish." — Michael Faraday, physicist, 1865

It seems that, in April/May 1985, there was an experiment performed by the United States Microgravity Laboratory aboard Spacelab 3 via the space shuttle Challenger (Mission STS 51-B) that NASA and the scientific establishment don't want you to know about: Geophysical Fluid Flow Cell.

The geophysical fluid flow cell (GFFC) experiment simulates a wide variety of thermal convection phenomena in spherical geometry. By applying an electric field across a spherical capacitor filled with a dielectric liquid, a body force analogous to gravity is generated around the fluid. The force acts as a buoyant force in that its magnitude is proportional to the local temperature of the fluid and in the radial direction perpendicular to the spherical surface. In this manner, cooler fluid sinks toward the surface of the inner sphere while warmer fluid rises toward the outer sphere. The value of this artificial gravity is proportional to the square of the voltage applied across the sphere and can thus be imposed as desired. With practical voltages, its magnitude is only a fraction of earth's and so requires a microgravity environment to be significant. The advantage of using this apparatus is that it simulates atmospheric flows around stars and planets, i.e. the "artificial gravity" is directed toward the center of the sphere much like a self-gravitating body.

The GFFC experiment flew on Spacelab 3 in April/May and operated for more than 100 hours during the mission. The experiment verified that dielectric forces can be used to properly simulate a spherical gravitational field to drive thermal convection.

By Dr. James E. Arnold.

Jupiter and Saturn Collided With Other Worlds

"The environmental anagram that is geology, is a brew of violence. Degradation by cometary wrecking balls...." -- C. Warren Hunt, geologist, 1989

Worlds in Collision: Jupiter, Saturn Plowed Through Asteroids. (Hat tip: Anaconda)

The asteroid belt has long been known to harbor gaps, called Kirkwood gaps, in distinct locations. Some of these gaps correspond to unstable zones, where the modern-day gravitational influence of Jupiter and Saturn eject asteroids. But for the first time, Minton and Malhotra have noticed that some clearings don't fit the bill.

"What we found was that many regions are depleted in asteroids relative to other regions, not just in the previously known Kirkwood gaps that are explained by the current planetary orbits," Minton wrote in an email. In an editorial accompanying the paper, author Kevin Walsh added, "Qualitatively, it looks as if a snow plough were driven through the main asteroid belt, kicking out asteroids along the way and slowing to a stop at the inner edge of the belt."

Atlantean Mountain Range Acknowledged

Science Daily: Alps-like Mountain Range Exists Under East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

"Working cooperatively in some of the harshest conditions imaginable, all the while working in temperatures that averaged -30 degrees Celsius, our seven-nation team has produced detailed images of last unexplored mountain range on Earth," said Michael Studinger, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the co-leader of the U.S. portion of the Antarctica's Gamburstev Province (AGAP) project. "As our two survey aircraft flew over the flat white ice sheet, the instrumentation revealed a remarkably rugged terrain with deeply etched valleys and very steep mountain peaks."

Mythology AKA Eye-Witness Observation

Sibir Newspaper, July 2, 1908:

On the 17th of June, around 9 in the AM, we observed an unusual natural occurrence. In the N Karelinski village (200 verst N of Kirensk) the peasants saw to the North-West, rather high above the horizon, some strangely bright (impossible to look at) bluish-white heavenly body, which for 10 minutes moved downwards. The body appeared as a "pipe", i.e. a cylinder. The sky was cloudless, only a small dark cloud was observed in the general direction of the bright body. It was hot and dry. As the body neared the ground (forest), the bright body seemed to smudge, and then turned into a giant billow of black smoke, and a loud knocking (not thunder) was heard, as if large stones were falling, or artillery was fired. All buildings shook. At the same time the cloud began emitting flames of uncertain shapes. All villagers were stricken with panic and took to the streets, women cried, thinking it was the end of the world.

Testimony of Chuchan of Shanyagir tribe, as recorded by I.M.Suslov in 1926:

We had a hut by the river with my brother Chekaren. We were sleeping. Suddenly we both woke up at the same time. Somebody shoved us. We heard whistling and felt strong wind. Chekaren said, 'Can you hear all those birds flying overhead?' We were both in the hut, couldn't see what was going on outside. Suddenly, I got shoved again, this time so hard I fell into the fire. I got scared. Chekaren got scared too. We started crying out for father, mother, brother, but no one answered. There was noise beyond the hut, we could hear trees falling down. Me and Chekaren got out of our sleeping bags and wanted to run out, but then the thunder struck. This was the first thunder. The Earth began to move and rock, wind hit our hut and knocked it over. My body was pushed down by sticks, but my head was in the clear. Then I saw a wonder: trees were falling, the branches were on fire, it became mighty bright, how can I say this, as if there was a second sun, my eyes were hurting, I even closed them. It was like what the Russians call lightning. And immediately there was a loud thunderclap. This was the second thunder. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our Sun was shining brightly as usual, and suddenly there came a second one!

Me and Chekaren had some difficulty getting under from the remains of our hut. Then we saw that above, but in a different place, there was another flash, and loud thunder came. This was the third thunder strike. Wind came again, knocked us off our feet, struck against the fallen trees.

We looked at the fallen trees, watched the tree tops get snapped off, watched the fires. Suddenly Chekaren yelled 'Look up' and pointed with his hand. I looked there and saw another flash, and it made another thunder. But the noise was less than before. This was the fourth strike, like normal thunder.

Now I remember well there was also one more thunder strike, but it was small, and somewhere far away, where the Sun goes to sleep.

Testimony of S. Semenov, as recorded by Leonid Kulik's expedition in 1930:

At breakfast time I was sitting by the house at Vanavara trading post (65 kilometres/40 miles south of the explosion), facing North. [...] I suddenly saw that directly to the North, over Onkoul's Tunguska road, the sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the forest (as Semenov showed, about 50 degrees up - expedition note). The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire Northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn't bear it, as if my shirt was on fire; from the northern side, where the fire was, came strong heat. I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few yards. I lost my senses for a moment, but then my wife ran out and led me to the house. After that such noise came, as if rocks were falling or cannons were firing, the earth shook, and when I was on the ground, I pressed my head down, fearing rocks would smash it. When the sky opened up, hot wind raced between the houses, like from cannons, which left traces in the ground like pathways, and it damaged some crops. Later we saw that many windows were shattered, and in the barn a part of the iron lock snapped.

Source: some New Ager. You can find truth anywhere.

Cometary Meteorites

When the Earth enters a meteoroid stream left by a comet it produces a meteor shower. These showers can be predicted and come every year or so.

A mini Phaeton: How A Cometary Boulder Lit Up The Spanish Sky.

Fireballs (or bolides) are the name given by astronomers to the brightest meteors (popularly referred to as ‘shooting stars’). On 11th July 2008, at 2117 GMT, a brilliant fireball was recorded. At maximum intensity, the object was more than 150 times as bright as the full Moon. It was first picked up at a height of 98.3 km and disappeared from view 21.5 km above the surface of the Earth, tracked by three stations of the Spanish Fireball Network (SPMN) above Bejar, near Salamanca in Spain. At the same time a professional photographer took a picture of the bolide from the north of Madrid.

From these images, the astronomers can deduce the trajectory and properties of the incoming boulder. The team think it was a dense object, about 1 metre across and with a mass of 1.8 tonnes, large enough that some fragments probably survived intact and fell to the ground as meteorites.

The astronomers demonstrate that before its fiery demise, the boulder travelled on an unusual orbit around the Sun, on a path which took it from beyond the orbit of Jupiter to the vicinity of the Earth. This orbit is very similar to that of a cloud of dusty particles (meteoroids) known as the Omicron Draconids, which on rare occasions produces a minor meteor shower and probably originates from the breakup of Comet C/1919 Q2 Metcalf in 1920. This strongly suggests that the boulder was once embedded in the nucleus of that comet.

Trigo-Rodriguez, J.M., et al., Observations of a Very Bright Fireball and Its Likely Link With Comet C/1919 Q2 Metcalf, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 9999, Issue 9999, Oct 2008

When scientists and historians of the future find archaeological evidence of the Spanish civilization, they are going to compare Trigo-Rodriguez to Ovid, claim that "fireballs" are myths, and call anyone who takes them seriously a pseudoscientist or Velikovskian.

Moon Mantle Is Rigid

The lunar surface has been mapped and it's crust and mantle are solid and rigid with no liquid beneath the surface.

To me this is another piece of evidence that suggests there is no water inside Europa and therefore the moons are growing: Most Detailed Lunar Map Suggests Little Water Inside Moon.

In part, the new map will serve as a guide for future lunar rovers, which will scour the surface for geological resources.

But Araki and his colleagues did something more with the map: they measured the roughness of the lunar surface, and used that information to calculate the stiffness of the crust.

If water flowed beneath the lunar surface, the crust would be somewhat flexible, but it wasn't. The surface was too rigid to allow for any liquid water, even deep within the Moon.

Earth's surface is more flexible, by contrast, with the surface rising or falling as water flows above or below ground. Even our planet's [alleged] plate tectonics is due in part to water lubricating the crust.

And Mars? On a scale of surface roughness, it falls somewhere between the Earth and the Moon, which indicates that there may have once been liquid water, but that the surface is now very dry.

No surprise there.

But Mars' roughness coupled with the complete absence of plate tectonics suggests that if there is water in the red planet's interior, it is not located near the surface, where it could lubricate the crust, Shum explained.

The LALT map is the most detailed lunar map ever created.

The Best Case Scenario

The Prescience of The Book

I've been marveling and wondering about the prescience of those primitive and superstitious ancients.

Here's another one to ponder:

"He...hangeth the earth upon nothing." -- Job 26:7

I asked an atheist friend of mine, "How could Job and Moses have known that the Earth hangs on nothing?"

He said it was just blind luck. An accident like NGC 7603 and NGC 4319 and all the other dischordant redshift associations.

Personally, I find that to be a hard leap of faith to believe.

Like David Hume, I don't believe in miracles.

Causality is a priori so there must be a reason why Job and Moses said that.

It's not like they could've flipped a coin and said, "Eureka! The Earth hangs on nothing and I'm going to write it down for all posterity."

Kaali Crater Field

"...and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit." -- Revelation 9:1-2

Kaali meteorite crater field on Saaremaa island in Estonia: Kaali.

The meteorite crater field in Kaali, Saaremaa, is the rarest natural monument in Estonia as well as the most impressive crater field of the whole Eurasia. The Kaali meteorite was the last giant meteorite that [mainstream science acknowledges] fell in a densely populated region of the world. Its fall on the inhabited island of Saaremaa evidently caused extensive damage and possibly also numerous victims, it has been compared with an explosion of a small nuclear bomb. ...

Facts

The meteoritic origin of the Kaali crater was proved in 1937 when the first fragments of iron meteorite with 8.3% nickel content were gathered. The scientists assert that the meteorite with the initial mass 400-10.000 tons, entered the atmosphere from the Northeast direction with the initial velocity 15-45 km/s, at impact its velocity was 10-20 km/s and mass 20-80 tons. At the altitude of 5-10 km the meteorite broke into pieces and fell to the Earth in fragments, the greatest of which produced a crater with a diameter of 110 m, 22 m deep, and 8 smaller ones with diameters 12 to 40 m, depths varying from 1 to 4 m. Some craters have probably not been discovered yet.

The approximate date of the falling of the Kaali meteorite – 7500-7600 years BP – is determined by the content of soil and rock particles, thrown up by the giant explosion, in the sediments in the lakes and mires of neighbourhood. In the explosion the meteorite was mostly pulverized and up to now only particles of meteoritic iron, weighing 0.5-28 g, have been found from the secondary craters.

The Holocene Impact Working Group

In 2005, the Holocene Impact Working Group was founded.

In 2007, the Geological Society published Special Publication 273, Myth and Geology, "the first professional textbook on the nascent subdiscipline of geomythology. Geomythology pairs geological evidence of catastrophic events and reports of such events encoded into the mythological lexicon of ancient societies."

Thomas King on Bruce Masse: Recent Cosmic Impacts on Earth: Do Global Myths Reflect an Ancient Disaster?

Masse, like many of today's archaeologists, isn't based in a museum or university, but works for a government agency--in his case, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. His day job involves managing the more than 2,000 archaeological sites on Laboratory lands--making sure they're not damaged by the Laboratory's operations. But his passion over the last few decades has been studying the archaeological and anthropological record of celestial phenomena and earthly catastrophes. In the Springer chapter he presents a startling picture of how such events may have been linked during the course of the Quaternary period--the last 2.6 million years.

Masse became interested in how cosmic phenomena like eclipses and comet encounters were perceived by ancient people while doing research in Hawaii in the late 1980s. The genealogical traditions of Hawaiian royalty, he found, were full of descriptions of things that happened in the sky--comet encounters, meteor showers, eclipses, supernovae. Some of the same events are described in historic European, Chinese, and Muslim records. Masse was able to plot dozens of precise matches between Hawaiian tradition and the astronomical observations of literate observers elsewhere in the world. The more he looked at mythology, the less mythical it appeared, where celestial phenomena were concerned.

When he thought objectively about how myths come to be, and who creates and sustains them, it made sense that they would encode impressive and hard-to-account-for events. "A myth," he says, "is an analogical story created by highly skilled and trained cultural knowledge specialists (such as priests or historians) using supernatural images in order to explain otherwise inexplicable natural events or processes." The priest doesn't just invent his story of the sun being eaten by a giant dog; he comes up with it as a means of explaining an eclipse that has his people scared out of their wits.

Masse began examining both the mythology and the archaeology of areas around the sites where asteroids or comets were known or suspected to have fallen to earth during the Quaternary, and especially during the last 11,000 years, known as the Holocene. Science is aware of at least twenty-seven known Quaternary impact sites, marked by craters and often the remnants of meteoritic iron and melted stone. Other impacts are known from the presence of glassy melts and tektites created by an impact or explosion in the atmosphere (an airburst). Virtually all are on land, where scientists have been able to record, study, and date them using radiocarbon age determination and other geophysical methods. Since the Earth's land masses make up only about a third of the planet's surface, it follows that in the last 2.6 million years there have been roughly 75 comet/asteroid strikes potentially big enough to leave physical signs on the ground, with even larger numbers striking the oceans. Few of these were big enough to have wiped out a civilization had one existed in the neighborhood, but each one could have killed a lot of our ancestors.

The Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth

Some people have suggested that no woolly mammoths could have survived the Younger Dryas impact events.

However, this view has been conclusively demonstrated to be erroneous: The latest woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius Blumenbach) in Europe and Asia: a review of the current evidence.

During the Last Cold Stage, woolly mammoths ranged very widely across Northern Eurasia into North America, but then disappeared as part of the global phenomenon of Late Quaternary megafaunal extinction. The timing and causes of this highly significant event have generated conflicting opinions and much debate. However, the overriding need is for more data, and recent years have seen the accumulation of significant new finds and radiocarbon dating evidence. In particular, research is currently focussing on the geographical pattern of extirpation leading to final extinction, rather than seeking a single ‘last appearance datum’. This Viewpoint article was commissioned by the Editor-in-Chief and is published following the paper by Lõugas et al. (Dating the extinction of European mammoths: new evidence from Estonia. Quat. Sci. Rev. 21 (2002) 1347) to place their finding in a wider context. We give a brief review of the youngest directly dated mammoth remains from different regions of Eurasia, based both on published sources and on our own current research. This includes a very important new record from Cherepovets, North Russian Plain, which together with the new date from Puurmani, Estonia indicates the persistence of mammoth in this region close to the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary. These and other records suggest that the previous picture of mammoths widespread before 12,000 ka BP (uncalibrated radiocarbon years ago), then restricted to limited areas of northern Siberia, although correct in outline, has important exceptions which modify our understanding of mammoth extinction.

Despite the many available radiocarbon dates for Eurasian mammoth relative to other extinct megafauna, it is apparent that much more work is needed. Only then can we adequately tackle the important question of the cause or causes of extinction

It seems some woolly mammoths did in fact survive.

Live Science: Surviving Extinction: Where Woolly Mammoths Endured.

Like an Ice Age version of Land of the Lost, a group of woolly mammoths survived mass extinctions on their own island hideaway.

The majority of mammoths died out about 11,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene era. But on St. Paul Island, one of the Pribolofs 300 miles off the Alaskan coast, a small number of the six-ton behemoths apparently lasted an extra 3,000 years.

Such resilient populations have been discovered on other continents, but this is the first evidence of mammoths outlasting the Pleistocene in North America. R. Dale Guthrie from the University of Alaska Fairbanks studied radiocarbon dating of fossil remains and showed that the mammoths were on St. Paul 7,908 years ago.

"With the present data, the idea isn't very controversial, but more data may show they lasted a little longer on the island than my one date," Guthrie told LiveScience.

And not only that, some woolly mammoths survived until the Bronze Age.

Radiocarbon: Radiocarbon Dating Evidence for Mammoths on Wrangel Island, Arctic Ocean, until 2000 BC.

Phaeton, Comets, and The Impacts

Is science myth or is myth science? I'm so confused:

PNAS (Oct 07): Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling.

A carbon-rich black layer, dating to ≈12.9 ka, has been previously identified at ≈50 Clovis-age sites across North America and appears contemporaneous with the abrupt onset of Younger Dryas (YD) cooling. The in situ bones of extinct Pleistocene megafauna, along with Clovis tool assemblages, occur below this black layer but not within or above it. Causes for the extinctions, YD cooling, and termination of Clovis culture have long been controversial. In this paper, we provide evidence for an extraterrestrial (ET) impact event at ≅12.9 ka, which we hypothesize caused abrupt environmental changes that contributed to YD cooling, major ecological reorganization, broad-scale extinctions, and rapid human behavioral shifts at the end of the Clovis Period. Clovis-age sites in North American are overlain by a thin, discrete layer with varying peak abundances of (i) magnetic grains with iridium, (ii) magnetic microspherules, (iii) charcoal, (iv) soot, (v) carbon spherules, (vi) glass-like carbon containing nanodiamonds, and (vii) fullerenes with ET helium, all of which are evidence for an ET impact and associated biomass burning at ≈12.9 ka.

New Scientist (May 07): Firestorm from space wiped out prehistoric Americans.

THE Clovis people of North America, flourishing some 13,000 years ago, had a mastery of stone weaponry that stood them in good stead against the constant threat of large carnivores, such as American lions and giant short-faced bears. It's unlikely, however, that they thought death would come from the sky.

According to results presented by a team of 25 researchers this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, that's where the Clovis people's doom came from. Citing several lines of evidence, the team suggests that a wayward comet hurtled into Earth's atmosphere around 12,900 years ago, fractured into pieces and exploded in giant fireballs. Debris seems to have settled as far afield as Europe.

Jim Kennett, an oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the team's three principal investigators, claims immense wildfires scorched North America in the aftermath, killing large populations of mammals

New Scientist (Dec 07): Ancient flood brought Gulf Stream to a halt .

It was the biggest climate event of the last 10,000 years and caused the most dramatic change in the weather since humans began farming. And it may yet hold important lessons about climate change in the 21st century.

Just over 8000 years ago, a huge glacial lake in Canada burst, and an estimated 100,000 cubic kilometres of fresh water rushed into the North Atlantic. Researchers now say they know for sure that this catastrophic event shut down the Gulf Stream and cooled parts of the northern hemisphere by several degrees for more than a hundred years.

They say the findings show modelling studies are right to suggest that something similar could happen with equal abruptness

Science (Jan 09): Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas Boundary Sediment Layer.

We report abundant nanodiamonds in sediments dating to 12.9 ± 0.1 thousand calendar years before the present at multiple locations across North America. Selected area electron diffraction patterns reveal two diamond allotropes in this boundary layer but not above or below that interval. Cubic diamonds form under high temperature-pressure regimes, and n-diamonds also require extraordinary conditions, well outside the range of Earth's typical surficial processes but common to cosmic impacts. N-diamond concentrations range from 10 to 3700 parts per billion by weight, comparable to amounts found in known impact layers. These diamonds provide strong evidence for Earth's collision with a rare swarm of carbonaceous chondrites or comets at the onset of the Younger Dryas cool interval, producing multiple airbursts and possible surface impacts, with severe repercussions for plants, animals, and humans in North America.

National Geographic (Jan 09): Diamonds Link Comets to Killer Freeze 13,000 Years Ago.

Diamond dust found in 12,900-year-old sediments at six North American sites boosts evidence of Earth's impact with a swarm of comets at that time, researchers reported today.

The discovery supports the theory that an impact with an extraterrestrial object may have contributed to the disappearance of large mammals and the Clovis culture of prehistoric humans, the scientists say.

Scientists proposed in 2007 that a cosmic impact, possibly by multiple airbursts of comets, set off a 1,300-year-long cold spell known as the Younger Dryas, fragmented the prehistoric Clovis culture and led to the extinction of a large range of animals, including mammoths, across North America.

In today's issue of the journal Science, a team led by the University of Oregon's Douglas J. Kennett, a member of the 2007 research team, reports finding billions of microscopic-size diamonds in sediments in the six locations (see map below) during digs funded by the National Science Foundation.

"The nanodiamonds that we found at all six locations exist only in sediments associated with the Younger Dryas Boundary layers, not above it or below it," said Kennett, a University of Oregon archaeologist, in a university press release.

Kennett and colleagues say the only obvious explanation for the concentration of nanodiamonds (seen in the image on the left) is that they were created in the high-energy environment of an impact by a comet or other extraterrestrial object.

"These discoveries provide strong evidence for a cosmic impact event at approximately 12,900 years ago that would have had enormous environmental consequences for plants, animals and humans across North America."

Washington Post (Jan 09): Gems Point to Comet as Answer to Ancient Riddle.

Something dramatic happened about 12,900 years ago, and the continent of North America was never the same. A thriving culture of Paleo-Americans, known as the Clovis people, vanished seemingly overnight. Gone, too, were most of the largest animals: horses, camels, lions, mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, ground sloths and giant armadillos.

Scientists have long blamed climate change for the extinctions, for it was 12,900 years ago that the planet's emergence from the Ice Age came to a halt, reverting to glacial conditions for 1,500 years, an epoch known as the Younger Dryas.

In just the last few years, there has arisen a controversial scientific hypothesis to explain this chain of events, and it involves an extraterrestrial calamity: a comet, broken into fragments, turning the sky ablaze, sending a shock wave across the landscape and scorching forests, creatures, people and anything exposed to the heavenly fire.

Now the proponents of this apocalyptic scenario say they have found a new line of evidence: nanodiamonds. They say they have found these tiny structures across North America in sediments from 12,900 years ago, and they argue that the diamonds had to have been formed by a high-temperature, high-pressure event, such as a cometary impact.

The Wisdom of Plato

"A marvellous forgetfulness of the former destruction would appear to have come over them." -- Plato, Laws: Book III, 360 B.C.

"There did really happen, and will again happen, like many other events of which ancient tradition has preserved the record, the portent which is traditionally said to have occurred in the quarrel of Atreus and Thyestes. ... how the sun and the stars once rose in the west, and set in the east, and that the god reversed their motion, and gave them that which they now have as a testimony to the right of Atreus. " -- Plato, The Statesman, 360 B.C.

But Plato was only the Scholarch of the Greek Academy so what did he know?

The Wisdom of Aristotle

"...all the comets that have been seen in our day have vanished without setting, gradually fading away above the horizon; and they have not left behind them either one or more stars." -- Aristotle, philosopher, Meteorology, 350 B.C.

"Democritus however, insists upon the truth of his view and affirms that certain stars [namely Venus] have been seen when comets dissolve." -- Aristotle, philosopher, Meteorology, 350 B.C.

"...the stars...fell from heaven at the time of Phaethon's downfall." -- Aristotle, philosopher, Meteorology, 350 B.C.

"...the time must come when this place will be flooded again." -- Aristotle, philosopher, Meteorology, 350 B.C.

The Wisdom of Sonchis of Sais

"That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise." -- David Hume, philosopher, 1772

I think I get it now.

I finally understand the wisdom of Sonchis of Sais.

And it's terrifying actually.

The Wisdom of Sonchis of Sais: Why the Greeks Have No History Prior To Homer



From Plato's Timaeus:

"There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt." -- Sonchis of Sais, priest, ~600 B.C.

What this means is that the Sun (Helios) either (1) literally gave birth to another astronomical body (Phaeton) being either a star or a planet, or (2) figuratively captured an extrasolar body, either a star, planet, or comet which yoked, captured, and disturbed the orbits of the solar system, in particular the rotation of the Earth. And that Phaeton was zapped by an electric discharge, possibly from Jupiter.

"Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us."

When remarking on the Deluge/Great Flood of All, Sonchis even says, "after the usual interval."

WTF is the usual interval? Our history only goes back a few thousand years lol.

Herodotos, The History, Book II, Chapter 142:

[1] Thus far went the record given by the Egyptians and their priests; and they showed me that the time from the first king to that priest of Hephaestus, who was the last, covered three hundred and forty-one generations, and that in this time this also had been the number of their kings, and of their high priests.
[2] Now three hundred generations are ten thousand years, three generations being equal to a hundred. And over and above the three hundred, the remaining forty-one cover thirteen hundred and forty years.
[3] Thus the whole period is eleven thousand three hundred and forty years; in all of which time (they said) they had had no king who was a god in human form, nor had there been any such either before or after those years among the rest of the kings of Egypt.
[4] Four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to experience; twice he came up where he now goes down, and twice went down where he now comes up

That's once every 2,835 years. Which means 2148 could be a rough one.

The Egyptian priests are biologically and politically uniformitarian saying no harm came to Egypt as a result but Plato is more catastrophic. He says in The Statesman, "And animals, as we know, survive with difficulty great and serious changes of many different kinds when they come upon them at once. ... Hence there necessarily occurs a great destruction of them, which extends also to-the life of man; few survivors of the race are left...."

This explains how Democritus and Hippolytus knew that worlds collide.

"consider what impetuous force
Turns stars and planets in a diff'rent course.
I steer against their motions; nor am I
Born back by all the current of the sky.
But how cou'd you resist the orbs that roul
In adverse whirls, and stem the rapid pole?" -- Ovid, Phaeton

And that is the reason why the Greeks have no science prior to Thales and no history prior to Homer.

"I spent much care upon the history of the Arcadian kings, and the genealogy as given above was told me by the Arcadians themselves. Of their memorable achievements the oldest is the Trojan war." -- Pausanias, geographer, Desciption of Greece

ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι

-- B.P.

Giants

Louis made me do it...hahah.

Wise old Nestor was a young boy at the time of the first Olympic games in 776 BC and in his 90s in 687 BC at the fall of Troy.

The Iliad, Book I, (247-269):

...and between them Nestor the fair-spoken rose up, the lucid speaker of Pylos, from whose lips the streams of words ran sweeter than honey. In his time two generations of mortal men had perished, those who had grown up with him and they who had been born to these in sacred Pylos, and he was king in the third age.

He in kind intention toward both stood forth and addressed them: 'Oh, for shame. Great sorrow comes to the land of Achaia. Now might Priam in truth be happy, and all the rest of the Trojans be visited in their hearts with gladness, were they to hear all this wherein you two are quarreling, you who surpass all Danaans in council, in fighting. Yet be persuaded. Both of you are younger than I am.

Yes, and in my time I have dealt with better men than you are, and never once did they disregard me. Never yet have I seen nor shall again see men as these were, men like Peirithoös, and Dryas, shepherd of the people, Kaineus and Exadios, godlike Polyphemos, or Theseus, Aigeus' son, in the likeness of the immortals. These were the strongest generation of earth-born mortals, the strongest, and they fought against the strongest, the beast men living within the mountains, and terribly they destroyed them. I was in the company of these men...

And also from Hebrew sources: Genesis 6

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,

6:2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

6:3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

6:4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Numbers 13:33, "And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight."

And from Velikovsky: Giants.

The traditions of peoples all over the world are quite unanimous in asserting that an an earlier time a race of giants lived on the earth, that most of the race were destroyed in great catastrophes; that they were of cruel nature and were furiously fighting among themselves; that the last of them were exterminated when after a cataclysm a migration of peoples brought the forebears of the peoples of today to their new homelands.

The Japanese narrate that when their forefathers after a great catastrophe about two and a half or three thousand years ago, came from the continent and invaded the isles, they found there long-legged, furry giants. These giants were called Ainu. The forefathers of the Japanese were defeated in the first encounter, but in the second encounter they were victorious.

Ixtlilxochitl described the wandering of peoples of the western hemisphere in the four ages of the world. The first age came to its end in the Flood. In the second age, called “the sun of the earthquake,” there lived the generation of the giants, which was destroyed in the cataclysm that terminated this age. The third period was “the sun of the wind,” called so because at the end of this period terrible hurricanes annihilated everything. The new inhabitants of the new world were Ulme and Xicalauca who came from the east to find a foothold at Potouchan: here they met a number of giants, the last survivors of the second catastrophe. The fourth age was called “the fire sun,” because of the great fire that put an end to this epoch. At that time the Toltecs arrived in the land of Anahuac, put to flight by the catastrophe: they wandered for 104 years before they settled in their new home.

Also F. L. Gomara in his Conquista de Mexico, in the chapter about “cinco soles que son edades,” wrote:

The second sun perished when the sky fell upon the earth; the collapse killed all the people and every living thing; and they say that giants lived in those days, and that to them belong the bones that our Spaniards have found while digging mines and tombs. From their measure and proportion it seems that those men were twenty hands tall—a very great stature, but quite certain.(1)

The Piri Reis Map

The Piri Reis map of 1513 seems to depict Atlantis 6000 years ago: STRANGE ARTIFACTS: PIRI REIS MAP.

In 1929, a group of historians found an amazing map drawn on a gazelle skin.

Research showed that it was a genuine document drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, a famous admiral of the Turkish fleet in the sixteenth century.

His passion was cartography. His high rank within the Turkish navy allowed him to have a privileged access to the Imperial Library of Constantinople.

The Turkish admiral admits in a series of notes on the map that he compiled and copied the data from a large number of source maps, some of which dated back to
the fourth century BC or earlier.

The Controversy

The Piri Reis map shows the western coast of Africa, the eastern coast of South America, and the northern coast of Antarctica. The northern coastline of Antarctica is perfectly detailed. The most puzzling however is not so much how Piri Reis managed to draw such an accurate map of the Antarctic region 300 years before it was discovered, but that the map shows the coastline under the ice. Geological evidence confirms that the latest date Queen Maud Land could have been charted in an ice-free state is 4000 BC.

The Truth of Myth

"Ahura Mazda warns Yima, the first king of men, of the approach of a dire winter, which is to destroy every living creature by covering the land with a thick sheet of ice, and advises Yima to build a Vara, or an enclosure, to preserve the seeds of every kind of animal and plant." -- Zend-Avesta, Fargard II

As a naive younger man, whenever I would read Plato I would almost always agree more with those around Socrates including and perhaps even especially the Sophists rather than Socrates himself, whereas on the other hand, the first time I read Aristotle, I considered him to be perhaps the most wise man whose words I'd ever read and for this reason I always considered myself an Aristotelian rather than a Platonist.

The idea of imaginary "Forms" is just not my cup of tea, whereas nature, physics, and metaphysics always appealed to me.

When Socrates said in Meno (Μένων), "there is no teaching, but only recollection," I didn't take him seriously, I didn't understand him (perhaps because I didn't take him seriously), and I thought he was a bit silly.

The first time I read the Timaeus (Τίμαιος) I was underwhelmed. I was hoping to find truth in it but didn't. The truth is I was blind to it.

It was March 23rd, 1994, strangely and exactly 2681 years after the last recorded catastrophe on March 23rd, 687 BC. Perhaps this is coincidence since there is currently a 1 in 365 chance of it.

But then I discovered the classicist Velikovsky who I consider to be the greatest genius of the 20th Century and who always reminds us of the wisdom of the ancients.

Velikovsky's claim of "mankind in amnesia" particularly struck a chord with me and the more I considered it the more I saw truth in it, all observation confims it, and the evidence mounts daily.

He pointed me back to Joshua, Homer, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Plato, Euripides, Hippolytus, Kepler, Galileo, Swift, and others who seemed to have bizarre wisdom unexplainable by mainstream logic. The words of Hippolytus and the views of Democritus perhaps being the the most prescient of all.

And it was along those lines I found this Whitehead quote from 1947, "Everything of importance has been said before, by someone who did not discover it."

But the most famous Whitehead quote is from 1929, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

And so it was I came back to Plato and the Timaeus and the wisdom of Solon.

Sometime after 600 BC, Solon travelled to Egypt and received the story of Atlantis which we all assume to be myth and Plato claims that if Solon had devoted his life to poetry he would've been the greatest of all the poets including Homer. However, his poems were lost with Critias which makes us recall the words of Pope, "they had no poet and they died."

Fortunately we have Plato.

Easily my favorite character in all of this is the Egyptian Neith priest identified by Plutarch as Sonchis of Sais. Why is he such an amazing figure? Because sometime shortly after 600 BC, he claims to have had access to 9000 years of human history.

So I went trying to find out everything I could about this Sonchis of Sais. And it turns out the Greeks after Plato did just the same thing.

According to Proclus, Crantor who was the first commentator on Plato actually travelled to Egypt looking for evidence to determine the question: myth or history?

He found it to be unadorned history.

Fastforward to the 17th century.

Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) is considered to be the founder of Egyptology as a discipline because most so-called "scholars" are ignorant of world history and human experience. However, perhaps there is a grain of truth in their ignorance insofar as his research is some of the earliest which has survived the passing of time and the catastrophes of the past.

Kircher, like Solon, also went to Egypt, where he transcribed an Egyptian map directly from Egyptian sources which he published in his 1669 treatise Mundus Subterraneous.

But Kircher's map, unlike the documents of Sonchis and poems of Solon, has survived.



Now get ready to be blown away.

Remember our friend Velikovsky and catastrophic pole shift?



Atlantis is Antarctica and the Atlantean civilization there perished suddenly in "a single day and night of misfortune," ~11,609 years ago if Sonchis was correct, with a catastrophic pole shift and Deluge.

Meet Rand Flem-Ath, the most recent discoverer of Atlantis.

The Mystery of Baalbek

Could this be what Sonchis of Sais was referring to in Plato's Timaeus?

Are these the remains of Pelasgians who defeated the Atlanteans?

Did our ancestors have advanced technology?

Did the ancients surmise these stones lifted by Giants, Gigantes, Cyclopes, Titans, Nephilim, Rephaim, Anakim?



Sacred Sites: Baalbek, Lebanon.

The great mystery of the ruins of Baalbek, and indeed one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world, concerns the massive foundation stones beneath the Roman Temple of Jupiter. The courtyard of the Jupiter temple is situated upon a platform, called the Grand Terrace, which consists of a huge outer wall and a filling of massive stones. The lower courses of the outer wall are formed of huge, finely crafted and precisely positioned blocks. They range in size from thirty to thirty three feet in length, fourteen feet in height and ten feet in depth, and weigh approximately 450 tons each. Nine of these blocks are visible on the north side of the temple, nine on the south, and six on the west (others may exist but archaeological excavations have thus far not dug beneath all the sections of the Grand Terrace). Above the six blocks on the western side are three even larger stones, called the Trilithon, whose weight exceeds 1000 tons each. These great stones vary in size between sixty-three and sixty-five feet in length, with a height of fourteen feet six inches and a depth of twelve feet.

Another even larger stone lies in a limestone quarry a quarter of a mile from the Baalbek complex. Weighing an estimated 1200 tons, it is sixty-nine feet by sixteen feet by thirteen feet ten inches, making it the single largest piece of stonework ever crafted in the world. Called the Hajar el Gouble, the Stone of the South, or the Hajar el Hibla, the Stone of the Pregnant Woman, it lays at a raised angle with the lowest part of its base still attached to the quarry rock as though it were almost ready to be cut free and transported to its presumed location next to the other stones of the Trilithon.

Why these stones are such an enigma to contemporary scientists, both engineers and archaeologists alike, is that their method of quarrying, transportation and precision placement is beyond the technological ability of any known ancient or modern builders. Various ‘scholars’, uncomfortable with the notion that ancient cultures might have developed knowledge superior to modern science, have decided that the massive Baalbek stones were laboriously dragged from the nearby quarries to the temple site. While carved images in the temples of Egypt and Mesopotamia do indeed give evidence of this method of block transportation - using ropes, wooden rollers and thousands of laborers - the dragged blocks are known to have been only 1/10th the size and weight of the Baalbek stones and to have been moved along flat surfaces with wide movement paths. The route to the site of Baalbek, however, is up hill, over rough and winding terrain, and there is no evidence whatsoever of a flat hauling surface having been created in ancient times.

Next there is the problem of how the mammoth blocks, once they were brought to the site, were lifted and precisely placed in position. It has been theorized that the stones were raised using a complex array of scaffolding, ramps and pulleys which was powered by large numbers of humans and animals working in unison. An historical example of this method has been suggested as the solution for the Baalbek enigma. The Renaissance architect Domenico Fontana, when erecting a 327-ton Egyptian obelisk in front of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, used 40 huge pulleys, which necessitated a combined force of 800 men and 140 horses. The area where this obelisk was erected, however, was a great open space that could easily accommodate all the lifting apparatus and the men and horses pulling on the ropes. No such space is available in the spatial context of how the Baalbek stones were placed. Hills slope away from where lifting apparatus would need to have been placed and no evidence has been found of a flat and structurally firm surface having been constructed (and then mysteriously removed after the lifting was done). Furthermore, not just one obelisk was erected but rather a series of giant stones were precisely put in place side-by-side. Due to the positioning of these stones, there is simply no conceivable place where a huge pulley apparatus could have been stationed.

Archaeologists, unable to resolve the mysteries of the transportation and lifting of the great blocks, rarely have the intellectual honesty to admit their ignorance of the matter and therefore focus their attention solely on redundant measurements and discussions regarding the verifiable Roman-era temples at the site. Architects and construction engineers, however, not having any preconceived ideas of ancient history to uphold, will frankly state that there are no known lifting technologies even in current times that could raise and position the Baalbek stones given the amount of working space. The massive stones of the Grand Terrace of Baalbek are simply beyond the engineering abilities of any recognized ancient or contemporary builders.

There are several other matters about the Baalbek stones that further confound archaeologists and conventional theories of prehistoric civilization. There are no legends or folk tales from Roman times that link the Romans with the mammoth stones. There are absolutely no records in any Roman or other literary sources concerning the construction methods or the dates and names of the benefactors, designers, architects, engineers and builders of the Grand Terrace. The megalithic stones of the Trilithon bear no structural or ornamental resemblance to any of the Roman-era constructions above them, such as the previously described Temples of Jupiter, Bacchus or Venus. The limestone rocks of the Trilithon show extensive evidence of wind and sand erosion that is absent from the Roman temples, indicating that the megalithic construction dates from a far earlier age.

Guess what it would require to lift one of those Trilithon stones?

The Wisdom of the Celts

A conversation between Alexander and the Celts at a drinking session was reported by Ptolemy, who faught in the Danube campaign.

Alexander asked the Celts what they feared most.

They replied that they feared no one.

"There is only one thing we fear: that the stars might fall on our heads."

According to Arrian, when they left Alexander remarked, "What braggarts Celts are."

The Wisdom of Democritus

"He said that the ordered worlds are boundless and differ in size, and that in some there is neither sun nor moon, but that in others, both are greater than with us, and yet with others more in number. And that the intervals between the ordered worlds are unequal, here more and there less, and that some increase, others flourish and others decay, and here they come into being and there they are eclipsed. But that they are destroyed by colliding with one another. And that some ordered worlds are bare of animals and plants and all water." -- Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, "On Democritus"

Democritus lived in the 5th and 4th centuries BC so how could he possibly have known all this?

When I read this quote it blew my mind. Here we get a sense of Democritus's cosmology which, with the exception of the void, is almost identical to my own, e.g. Euclidean, growing Earth, abiotic planets, and catastrophic with worlds in collision (I suspect Velikovsky takes his treatise title Worlds In Collision from this Hippolytus quote).

Democritus had gone to Egypt to study. It is no surprise then that he is lightyears ahead of modern and contemporary scientists.

The Wisdom of Egypt and Solon In Plato's Timaeus

In Plato's Timaeus (360 B.C.), Critias, an elderly relative of Plato, tells Socrates the story of his grandfather, also named Critias, and his great grandfather Dropides who was friends with Solon. The speaker is an Egyptian priest (according to Plutarch, "Sonchis the Saite, the most learned of all the priests") and the listener is Solon, one of the Seven Wise Men of antiquity.

The Jowett translation sucks but whatever (it's free...:P): Timaeus.

Critias: Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange, is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages. He was a relative and a dear friend of my great-grandfather, Dropides, as he himself says in many passages of his poems; and he told the story to Critias, my grandfather, who remembered and repeated it to us. There were of old, he said, great and marvellous actions of the Athenian city, which have passed into oblivion through lapse of time and the destruction of mankind, and one in particular, greater than all the rest. This we will now rehearse. It will be a fitting monument of our gratitude to you, and a hymn of praise true and worthy of the goddess [Athene being "grey-eyed" might be the Moon or else Venus], on this her day of festival.

Socrates: Very good. And what is this ancient famous action of the Athenians, which Critias declared, on the authority of Solon, to be not a mere legend, but an actual fact?

Critias: I will tell an old-world story which I heard from an aged man; for Critias, at the time of telling it, was as he said, nearly ninety years of age, and I was about ten. Now the day was that day of the Apaturia which is called the Registration of Youth, at which, according to custom, our parents gave prizes for recitations, and the poems of several poets were recited by us boys, and many of us sang the poems of Solon, which at that time had not gone out of fashion. One of our tribe, either because he thought so or to please Critias, said that in his judgment Solon was not only the wisest of men, but also the noblest of poets. The old man, as I very well remember, brightened up at hearing this and said, smiling: Yes, Amynander, if Solon had only, like other poets, made poetry the business of his life, and had completed the tale which he brought with him from Egypt, and had not been compelled, by reason of the factions and troubles which he found stirring in his own country when he came home, to attend to other matters, in my opinion he would have been as famous as Homer or Hesiod, or any poet.

And what was the tale about, Critias? said Amynander.

About the greatest action which the Athenians ever did, and which ought to have been the most famous, but, through the lapse of time and the destruction of the actors, it has not come down to us.

Tell us, said the other, the whole story, and how and from whom Solon heard this veritable tradition.

He replied:-In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also called Sais, and is the city from which King Amasis came. The citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the Egyptian tongue Neith [Nit is either the Moon (Tanit in Carthage) or else Venus (Ashtarte in Phoenecia).], and is asserted by them to be the same whom the Hellenes call Athene; they are great lovers of the Athenians, and say that they are in some way related to them. To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion, wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world-about Phoroneus, who is called "the first man," and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us. When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below; for which reason the traditions preserved here are the most ancient.

The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer does not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in greater, sometimes in lesser numbers. And whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or in any other region of which we are informed-if there were any actions noble or great or in any other way remarkable, they have all been written down by us of old, and are preserved in our temples. Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. As for those genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in the next place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written word. For there was a time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city which now is Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed of all cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to have had the fairest constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the face of heaven.

Solon marvelled at his words, and earnestly requested the priests to inform him exactly and in order about these former citizens.

Mainstream Scientists Discover Magnetism

"And that the shooting stars are as it were sparks which glance off from the movement of the pole. And that winds are produced by the rarefaction of the air by the sun and by their drying up as they get towards the pole and are born away from it. And that thunderstorms are produced by heat falling upon the clouds. And that earthquakes come from the upper air falling upon that under the earth; for when this last is moved, the earth upheld by it is shaken." -- Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, "About Anaxagoras"

Eureka! But still they are afraid to call it a Birkeland current. And they are forgetting Winston Bostick and Anthony Peratt. Science in amnesia: First laboratory experiment to accurately model stellar jets explains mysterious 'knots'. (Hat tip: Anaconda)

Some of the most breathtaking objects in the cosmos are the jets of matter streaming out of stars, but astrophysicists have long been at a loss to explain how these jets achieve their varied shapes. Now, laboratory research detailed in the current issue of Astrophysical Review Letters shows how magnetic forces shape these stellar jets.

"The predominant theory says that jets are essentially fire hoses that shoot out matter in a steady stream, and the stream breaks up as it collides with gas and dust in space—but that doesn't appear to be so after all," says Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, and co-author of the paper. "These experiments are part of an unusal international collaboration of plasma physicists, astronomers and computational scientists. It's a whole new way of doing astrophysics. The experiments strongly suggest that the jets are fired out more like bullets or buckshot. They don't break into pieces—they are formed in pieces."

Frank says the experiment, conducted by Professor Sergey Lebedev's team in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London (www.imperial.ac.uk), may be the best astrophysical experiment that's ever been done. Replicating the physics of a star in a laboratory is exceptionally difficult, he says, but the Imperial experiment matches the known physics of stellar jets surprisingly well. "Lebedev's group at Imperial has absolutely pioneered the use of these experiments for studying astrophysical phenomena. The collaboration between Imperial and Rochester has been going on for almost 5 years and now it is bearing some extraordinary fruit."

At Imperial, Lebedev sent a high-powered pulse of energy into an aluminum disk. In less than a few billions of a second, the aluminum began to evaporate, creating a cloud of plasma very similar to the plasma cloud surrounding a young star. Where the energy flowed into the center of the disk, the aluminum eroded completely, creating a hole through which a magnetic field from beneath the disk could penetrate."

The field initially pushes aside the plasma, forming a bubble within it, says Frank, who carried out the astrophysical analysis of the experiment. As the field penetrates further and the bubble grows, however, the magnetic fields begin to warp and twist, creating a knot in the jet. Almost immediately, a new magnetic bubble forms inside the base of the first as the first is propelled away, and the process repeats.

Frank likens the magnetic fields' affect on the jet to a rubber band tightly wrapped around a tube of toothpaste—the field holds the jet together, but it also pinches the jet into bulges as it does.

"We can see these beautiful jets in space, but we have no way to see what the magnetic fields look like," says Frank. "I can't go out and stick probes in a star, but here we can get some idea—and it looks like the field is a weird, tangled mess."

Frank says other aspects of the experiment, such as the way in which the jets radiatively cool the plasma in the same way jets radiatively cool their parent stars, make the series of experiments an important tool for studying stellar jets. With this new model, he says, astrophysicists do not have to assume that the knotted jets they see in nature mean some unknown phenomenon interrupted the jets' flow of material.

Now, says Frank, some experiments that were once far beyond astrophysicists' reach have been, literally, brought down to Earth.

The Earth Without The Moon

"And I looked down/back. And I could see there were stars. Everywhere. Except this big black hole. It was blacker than pitch. And that was the Moon. And it made the hairs stand up. On my neck." -- William A. Anders, astronaut, June 2008

"It looked like a mess. It had all kinds of meteor craters and volcanoes and it looked very very...unfriendly." -- Frank F. Borman, astronaut, June 2008

Immanuel Velikovsky: The Earth Without the Moon.

The period when the Earth was Moonless is probably the most remote recollection of mankind. Democritus and Anaxagoras taught that there was a time when the Earth was without the Moon.(1) Aristotle wrote that Arcadia in Greece, before being inhabited by the Hellenes, had a population of Pelasgians, and that these aborigines occupied the land already before there was a moon in the sky above the Earth; for this reason they were called Proselenes.(2)

Apollonius of Rhodes mentioned the time “when not all the orbs were yet in the heavens, before the Danai and Deukalion races came into existence [i.e. before the Deluge; is it possible the moon was a captured comet that caused the Flood?], and only the Arcadians lived, of whom it is said that they dwelt on mountains and fed on acorns, before there was a moon.” (3)

Plutarch wrote in The Roman Questions: “There were Arcadians of Evander’s following, the so-called pre-Lunar people.”(4) Similarly wrote Ovid: “The Arcadians are said to have possessed their land before the birth of Jove, and the folk is older than the Moon.” (5) Hippolytus refers to a legend that “Arcadia brought forth Pelasgus, of greater antiquity than the moon.”(6) Lucian in his Astrology says that “the Arcadians affirm in their folly that they are older than the moon.”(7)

Censorinus also alludes to the time in the past when there was no moon in the sky.(8)

Some allusions to the time before there was a Moon may be found also in the Scriptures. In Job 25:5 the grandeur of the Lord who “Makes peace in the heights” is praised and the time is mentioned “before [there was] a moon and it did not shine.” Also in Psalm 72:5 it is said: “Thou wast feared since [the time of] the sun and before [the time of] the moon, a generation of generations.” A “generation of generations” means a very long time. Of course, it is of no use to counter this psalm with the myth of the first chapter of Genesis, a tale brought down from exotic and later sources.

The memory of a world without a moon lives in oral tradition among the Indians. The Indians of the Bogota highlands in the eastern Cordilleras of Colombia relate some of their tribal reminiscences to the time before there was a moon. “In the earliest times, when the moon was not yet in the heavens,” say the tribesmen of Chibchas.(9)

...

[In addition to the sources cited above, cf. The Nihongi Chronicles of Japan (I.ii, in Transactions and Proceedings of the Japanese Society, vol. I [1896]) which recount how “Heaven and Earth . . . produced the Moon-god.” The Kalevala of the Finns recalls a time “when the Moon was placed in orbit.” (Rune III.35)]

On Predictions In Science

"...my liveliest interest is not so much in things, as in relations of things. I have spent much time thinking about the alleged pseudo-relations that are called coincidences. What if some of them should not be coincidence?" -- Charles H. Fort, writer, 1933

Immanuel Velikovsky: On Prediction in Science .

In order to bring into proper focus the significance of correct prediction in science, I offer at the start a short survey of the most celebrated cases, and it is not by chance that almost all of them come from the domain of astronomy. These cases are spectacular and, with one or two exceptions, are well known.

The story of scientific “clairvoyance” in modern astronomy starts with Johannes Kepler, a strange case and little known. When Galileo, using the telescope he had built after the model of an instrument invented by a Danish craftsman, discovered the satellites circling Jupiter, Kepler became very eager to see the satellites himself and begged in letters to have an instrument sent to Prague; Galileo did not even answer him. Next, Galileo made two more discoveries, but before publishing them in a book, he assured himself of priority by composing cryptograms, not an uncommon procedure in those days: statements written in Latin were deliberately reduced to the letters of which the sentences were composed, or, if the author of the cryptogram so wished, the letters were re-assembled to make a different sentence. The second way was chosen by Galileo when he thought he had discovered that Saturn is “a triple” planet, having observed appendices on both sides of Saturn, but not having discerned that they were but a ring around the planet, a discovery reserved for Christian Huygens in 1659, half a century later. Kepler tried to read the cryptogram of letters recombined into a non-revealing sentence, but did not succeed. He offered as his solution: “Salute, fiery twin, offspring of Mars” (“Salve, umbistineum geminatum Martia proles” ). Of this, Arthur Koestler in The Sleepwalkers (1959) wrote (p. 377): “He [Kepler] accordingly believed that Galileo had discovered two moons around Mars.” But Galileo did not discover them and they remained undiscovered for more than two hundred fifty years. Strangely, Koestler passes over the incident without expressing wonder at Kepler’s seeming prescience.

As I have shown in Worlds in Collision (“The Steeds of Mars”) the poets Homer and Virgil knew of the trabants of Mars, visualized as his steeds, named Deimos (Terror) and Phobos (Rout). Kepler referred to the satellites of Mars as being “burning” or “flaming” , the same way the ancients had referred to the steeds of Mars.

Ancient lore preserved traditions from the time when Mars, Ares of the Greeks, was followed and preceded by swiftly circling satellites with their blazing manes. “When Mars was very close to the earth, its two trabants were visible. They rushed in front of and around Mars; in the disturbances that took place, they probably snatched some of Mars’ atmosphere, dispersed as it was, and appeared with gleaming manes” (Worlds in Collision, p. 230).

Next, Galileo made the discovery that Venus shows phases, as the Moon does. This time he secured his secret by locking it in a cryptogram of a mere collection of letters—so many A’s, so many B’s, and so on. Kepler again tried to read the cryptogram and came up with the sentence: “Macula rufa in Jove est gyratur mathem etc.” which in translation reads: “There is a red spot in Jupiter which rotates mathematically.”

The wondrous thing is: how could Kepler have known of the red spot in Jupiter, then not yet discovered? It was discovered by J. D. Cassini in the 1660’s, after the time of Kepler and Galileo. Kepler’s assumption that Galileo had discovered a red spot in Jupiter amazes and defies every statistical chance of being a mere guess. But the possibility is not excluded that Kepler found the information in some Arab author or some other source, possibly of Babylonian or Chinese origin. Kepler did not disclose what the basis of his reference to the red spot of Jupiter was — he could not have arrived at it either by logic and deduction or by sheer guesswork. A scientific prediction must follow from a theory as a logical consequence. Kepler had no theory on that. It is asserted that the Chinese observed solar spots many centuries before Galileo did with his telescope. Observing solar spots, the ancients could have conceivably observed the Jovian red spot, too. Jesuit scholars traveled in the early 17th century to China to study Chinese achievements in astronomy.

Kepler was well versed in ancient writings, also knowledgeable in medieval Arab authors; for instance, he quoted Arzachel to support the view that in ancient times Babylon must have been situated two and a half degrees more to the north, and this on the basis of the data on the duration of the longest and shortest days in the year as registered in ancient Babylon.1

Jonathan Swift, in his Gulliver’s Travels (1726) tells of the astronomers of the imaginary land of the Laputans who asserted they had discovered that the planet Mars has “two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet exactly three of [its] diameters, and the outermost Five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one-and-a-half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the center of Mars, which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies.”

About this passage a literature of no mean number of authors grew in the years after 1877, when Asaph Hall, a New England carpenter turned astronomer, discovered the two trabants of Mars. They are between five and ten miles in diameter. They revolve on orbits close to their primary and in very short times: actually the inner one, Phobos, makes more than three revolutions in the time it takes Mars to complete one rotation on its axis; and were there intelligent beings on Mars they would need to count two different months according to the number of satellites (this is no special case — Jupiter has twelve moons and Saturn ten*), and also observe one moon ending its month three times in one Martian day. It is a singular case in the solar system among the natural satellites that a moon completes one revolution before its primary finishes one rotation.

Swift ascribed to the Laputans some amazing knowledge—actually he himself displayed, it is claimed, an unusual gift of foreknowledge. The chorus of wonderment can be heard in the evaluation of C. P. Olivier in his article “Mars” written for the Encyclopedia Americana (1943):

“When it is noted how very close Swift came to the truth, not only in merely predicting two small moons but also the salient features of their orbits, there seems little doubt that this is the most astounding ’prophecy’ of the past thousand years as to whose full authenticity there is not a shadow of doubt.”

The passage in Kepler is little known—Olivier, like other writers on the subject of Swift’s divination, was unaware of it, and the case of Swift’s prophecy appears astounding: the number of satellites, their close distances to the body of the planet, and their swift revolutions are stated in a book printed one hundred and fifty years to the year before the discovery of Asaph Hall.

The names Philolaos, Aristarchos, and Seleukos ring a bell. What was it that Copernicus discovered again?

Celestial Events In The Time of the Iliad

"There did really happen, and will again happen, like many other events of which ancient tradition has preserved the record, the portent which is traditionally said to have occurred in the quarrel of Atreus and Thyestes. ... how the sun and the stars once rose in the west, and set in the east, and that the god reversed their motion, and gave them that which they now have as a testimony to the right of Atreus. " -- Plato, The Statesman

"Then, it was then that Zeus changed the radiant paths of the stars, and the light of the sun, and the bright face of dawn; and the sun drove across the western back of the sky with hot flame from heaven's fires, while the rain-clouds went northward and Ammon's lands [Egypt] grew parched and faint, not knowing moisture, robbed of heaven's fairest showers of rain." --Euripides, Electra, 408 B.C.

Once again Velikovsky demonstrates himself to be an absolute monster intellect and polymath with his essay Celestial Events in the Iliad.

The true time of the events recounted in the Iliad was the second half of the eighth and the beginning of the seventh centuries before the present era.

In Worlds in Collision an effort was made to recognize in the description of theomachy and of the natural phenomena that accompanied the battle of the gods, the events that took place in the sky and on earth between -747 and -687.1

The Trojan War was waged to the accompaniment of blows exchanged by the planetary gods—Earth (Hera), Moon (Aphrodite), Venus (Athene), Mars (Ares) and Jupiter (Zeus).

These celestial phenomena could not have taken place in the sky over Troy alone: the entire world had to witness the events, if they were not mere creations of the bard. That they were not can be deduced from the fact that these very events, witnessed in all parts of the world, are also described in sacred epics from Finland (Kalevala), Lapland and Iceland (Edda), from Mexico, Peru, India, the South Sea Islands, China and Japan, and, of course, by the poets and dramatists, annalists and astronomers, of the Near and Far East. It would require repeating close to two hundred pages of Worlds in Collision, actually the entire part II (Mars) of that book, should we desire here to evidence and illuminate this in some detail.

Perturbations in the celestial sphere, or Theomachy, in which Mars endangered the Earth at nearly regular intervals during this century, preoccupied the minds of men and repeatedly intervened in human history. Pestilence also broke out, and many references in the cuneiform literature ascribe its cause to Nergal (Mars). Earthquakes, overflooding, change of climate, evidenced by Klimasturz, did not spare a single land. These changes moved entire nations to migrations. Calendars were repeatedly thrown out of order and reformed—and the reader will find abundant material in the second part of Worlds in Collision and also in Earth in Upheaval, where no human testimony, but only the testimony of nature was presented; and this material could be multiplied by any dedicated researcher.

It appears, however, that in the Iliad Homer telescoped into a few weeks events that took place in the space of several decades. At least some of the events may be placed in a chronological order with the help of ancient Israelite sources: namely, on the day when King Ahaz was interred the motion of the Earth was disturbed so that the Sun set before its appointed time;2

At the time of the destruction of Sennacherib’s army in the days of Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, another disturbance occurred with the contrary effect: the Sun appeared to return several degrees to the east before proceeding on its regular westward path. It is asserted in the rabbinical literature that the second disturbance rectified the effects of the first—and this is also the meaning of the sentence in Isaiah 38:8: “So the sun returned ten degrees by which degrees it was gone down.”3

In Greek legendary tradition the first event took place in the days of the two brothers, Atreus and Thyestes, contesting the throne of Mycenae—when, according to Seneca, the Sun set earlier than usual.4

Yet a certain compression or amalgamating of two events, separated in time, must have taken place, for another version of the story tells of a reversal of the sun’s motion. This version is recorded by Apollodorus and several other authors.5

The event described as the reversal of motion of the sun took place, as illuminated Worlds in Collision, on March 23rd, -687.6

The fixing of the event to the early spring of -687 is made on the strength of the information from Hebrew sources that the event took place on the night of Passover, during the second campaign of Sennacherib against Judah, the ninth campaign of his reign. The exact date for the last of this series of catastrophes7 is provided by the records of the astronomical observations of the Chinese, where we learn that in the year -687, on the 23rd of March, “during the night the fixed stars did not appear, though the sky was clear. In the middle of the night stars fell like rain.”8

This date is also confirmed by Roman sources—Romulus found his end during a celestial-terrestrial catastrophe connected with the planet Mars:

Both the poles shook, and Atlas lifted the burden of the sky . . . The sun vanished and rising clouds obscured the heaven . . . the sky was riven by shooting flames. The people fled and the king [Romulus] upon his father’s [Mars’] steeds soared to the stars.9

Romulus was a contemporary of Hezekiah;10 and the 23rd of March was the most important day in the Roman cult of Mars.11

We must not forget that the Romans and the Greeks worshipped their gods in the planets, not as gods of the planets. Invocations to the gods, such as the Homeric Hymn to Ares (Mars) are addressed directly to the planet as an astral power.12

The siege of Troy under Agamemnon followed by less than one generation the natural disturbances of the days of his father Atreus, when this king of Mycenae competed with his brother Thyestes for the crown of the realm and the Sun was disrupted in its motion.

The Myth of Gravitation

Are you familiar with Kilmer?

The real genius?

No, not Val Kilmer.

I mean C.H. Kilmer.

Historian, genealogist, metaphysician, and cosmologist (polymath?) C.H. Kilmer. He lived in Mecklenburg New York (flourished c. 1897-c. 1915), wrote a genealogy of the Kilmer family, was a reverend, and wrote a brilliant letter to the editor of The New York Times. I don't know anything about him other than that.

I'm stealing my book title from him (although I came up with it before I was aware he existed): The Myth of Gravitation.

"Magnetism is possessed by the whole mass of the earth and universe of heavenly bodies, and is an essence of known demonstration and laws. By adopting it we have the advantage over the gravity theory by the use of the polar relation to magnetism. A magnetic north pole presented to a magnetic south pole, or a south pole to a north pole, attracts, while a north pole to another north pole or a south pole to another repels. This gives to us a better reason than gravitation can for the elliptical orbit of the planets instead of the circular. It also gives us some light on the mystery of the tides, the philosophy of which the profoundest study has not solved [See Darwin, Velikovsky, and McCarthy quotes at sidebar]. Certain facts are apparent; but for the explanation of the true theory such men as Laplace and Newton, and others more recent, have labored in vain." -- C.H. Kilmer, historian, October 1915

"Since Newton announced his universal law of gravitation, scientists have accepted and educators taught it, and rarely has it been questioned. Occasionally one has the temerity to say that gravitation is a myth, an invented word to cover scientific ignorance." -- C.H. Kilmer, historian, October 1915

Paper Ranks Top Ten Telescopes

Nature: The world's top ten telescopes revealed.

It doesn't take a big mirror to have a big impact. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project conducted with a modest 2.5-metre-wide telescope in New Mexico, performed the most highly cited science in 2006, according to a new analysis of the top ten 'high impact' astronomical observatories.

"It measures how hot the science of the telescope is," says Juan Madrid of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, of the top-ten table he has released for most years since 1998. "In a way it measures how good the time-allocation committee is and how good the telescope is. I will also say it measures how good the scientists are."

Nevermind if the assumptions and conclusions are wrong. As long as you're cited frequently, that makes you good. Since Ptolemy has been cited for over 2000 years, he's obviously the greatest scientist who's ever lived.

Johannes Kepler Didn't Believe In Gravitation

"The example of the magnet I have hit upon is a very pretty one, and entirely suited to the subject; indeed, it is little short of being the very truth." -- Johannes Kepler, astronomer/mathematician, 1609

"It is therefore plausible, since the Earth moves the moon through its species and magnetic body, while the sun moves the planets similarly through an emitted species, that the sun is likewise a magnetic body." -- Johannes Kepler, astronomer/mathematician, 1609

"But come: let us follow more closely the tracks of this similarity of the planetary reciprocation [libration] to the motion of a magnet, and that by a most beautiful geometric demonstration, so that it might appear that a magnet has such a motion as that which we perceive in the planet." -- Johannes Kepler, astronomer/mathematician, 1609

Martens, R., Kepler's Philosophy and the New Astronomy, 2000