Oil Is Mastery

"What has already happened cannot be impossible." -- Me, noob, August 2009

"I'm not trying to decry Leonardo [Da Vinci]. In my view he's the greatest genius that ever lived. He didn't actually invent anything as far as I could see." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, June 2008

"Well it's certainly plagiarism. Today obviously people would be horrified if previous authors were not acknowledged but I think in those days it was accepted. Now, just take Leonardo Da Vinci for a moment. He suddenly produces, out of the blue, drawings of helicopters, submarines, parachutes, machine guns, bazookas, underwater swimmers, paddlewheel ships, God knows what, as if by magic they appear in his brilliant and wonderful drawings. Well, as I explain in the book [1434], there is nothing there original. Everything which Leonardo drew were improvements on an earlier Italian, called Francesco Di Giorgio, whose notebooks Leonardo possessed and copied and improved on. And Di Giorgio was not original either. He copied everything from another Italian an earlier Italian called [Mariano] Taccola. Now my book then shows the link between Taccola and the Chinese. So none of of them, Taccola, Di Georgio, Leonardo, not one acknowledged where he got his information from." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, June 2008

"Not only did Columbus and Vespucci and Magellan not acknowledge Chinese, but neither did Copernicus, Galileo, or Leonardo [Da Vinci]. They all were completely silent on how they got their new information and I think this is most vividly illustrated by Copernicus. He suddenly produces this new system of the universe, how everything works, but there's absolutely no credit. How on Earth did he suddenly come across this? Whose previous work did he rely on? Completely silent." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, June 2008

"The source of Taccola and di Giorgio’s inventions was, of course, the Nung Shu passed on by Zheng He’s fleets in 1434. In the book, the first drawing was of two horses pulling a mill to grind corn, just as Taccola and Di Giorgio had done. Every variation of shafts, wheels and cranks “invented” and drawn by Taccola and di Giorgio are illustrated in the drawings of the Nung Shu. This is epitomised in the horizontal water powered turbine used in the blast furnace. Every type of powered transmission described by Taccola and di Giorgio is shown in the Nung Shu. By comparing Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings with the Nung Shu, each element of a machine superbly illustrated by Leonardo had previously been illustrated by the Chinese in a much simpler manual. In summary, Leonardo’s body of work rested on a vast foundation of work previously done by others. His mechanical drawings of flour and roller mills, water and saw mills, pile drivers, weight transporting machines, all kinds of winders and cranes, mechanised cars, all manner of pumps, water lifting devices and dredgers were developments and improvements upon di Giorgio's Trattato di Architettura Civil e militare and his rules for perspective for painting and sculpture were derived from Alberti's De Pictura and De Statua. His parachute was based on di Giorgio's and his helicopter modelled on a Chinese toy imported to Italy circa 1440. Leonardo's work on canals, locks, aqueducts and fountains originated from his meeting in Pavia with di Giorgio in 1490. His military machines were copies of Taccola and di Giorgio’s – but brilliantly drawn. Leonardo's three-dimensional illustrations of the components of man and machines are a unique and brilliant contribution to civilization -- as are his sublime sculpture and paintings. He remains the greatest genius who ever lived. However, it is time to recognise the Chinese contributions to his work. Without these contributions, the history of the Renaissance would have been very different ...." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2008

"Di Giorgio was, in fact, a wholesale plagiariser. Di Giorgio’s picture of a collapsing tower is almost identical to Taccola’s." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2008

"And as far as why he [Athanasius Kircher] wanted to connect so many different kinds of knowledge, um, you know, another word to associate with Kircher is pansophism. Right? Universal wisdom. Kircher truly, I think, believed that, as he says in one of his books on magnetism, 'The world is bound by secret knots.' Right? In other words, there are these kinds of hidden connections among all the things of the world, that, with the right understanding you might eventually discover." -- Paula Findlen, historian, 2004

"Kircher's Egypt was a veritable hieroglyph of the world, an ancient civilization of knowledge that contained true wisdom, prisca sapientia...." -- Paula Findlen, historian, 2004

"The methods of navigation employed by Zhu Di's admirals are revealed by one of the few documents of the era to have survived, the Wu Pei Chi. These Chinese sailing instructions, essentially a manual of the arts of seamanship and naval warfare, somehow escaped the purges of the mandarins. There were instructions, inscribed on a long, thin strip of paper, for each regular voyage they made, giving detailed directions including star positions, latitudes, bearings and the physical description of islands, prominent headlands, bays and inlets that would be clearly visible along the route. By studying these sailing directions, it is possible to deduce not only the course the Chinese had steered but the accuracy of their navigation and their ability to set a course by the stars. It is an invaluable document." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002

"The great Chinese fleets undertook scientific expeditions the Europeans could not even begin to equal in scale or scope until Captain Cook set sail three and a half centuries later." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002

"A new observatory would be at the epicentre of Beijing. Zhu Di took a personal interest in astronomy, and in the means by which he could build on the wonderful legacy he had inherited in this field. Chinese astronomers had well over two thousand years of experience of recording events in the night sky. They had noted the appearance of a new star in 1300 BC, had charted every arrival of Halley's comet since 240 BC, and by 1054 were describing the remnants of the supernova explosion known as the Crab Nebula...." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002

"There was also a wealth of physical evidence: Chinese porcelain, silk, votive offerings, artefacts, carved stones left by the Chinese admirals as monuments to their achievements, the wrecks of Chinese junks on the coasts of Africa, America, Australia and New Zealand, and the flora and fauna transplanted far from their places of origin and thriving when the first Europeans appeared." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002

"They [China] had solved the problems of latitude and longitude and had mapped the earth and heavens with equal accuracy." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002

"I seemed to be looking at a series of the most incredible journeys in the history of mankind, but one that had been completely expunged from human memory, the majority of records destroyed, the achievements ignored and finally forgotten. These revelations were both astounding and horrifying." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002

"I decided to see if there were other charts like the 1424 map, showing continents that had been surveyed before the European voyages of discovery. The deeper I dug, the more bombshells I uncovered. I was astonished to find that Patagonia and the Andes had been mapped a century before the first Europeans sighted them, and Antarctica had been accurately drawn some four centuries before Europeans reached the continent. The east coast of Africa was shown on another chart, with longitudes that were perfectly correct -- something Europeans did not manage to achieve for another three centuries. Australia appeared on another map, three centuries before Cook, and other charts showed the Carribean, Greenland, the Arctic and the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of both North America and South America long before Europeans had arrived." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002

"Over ten years ago I stumbled upon an incredible discovery, a clue hidden in an ancient map which, though it did not lead to buried treasure, suggested that the history of the world as it has been known and handed down for centuries would have to be radically revised." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002

"The mammoth-ivory flutes would have been especially challenging to make, the team said. Using only stone tools, the flute maker would have had to split a section of curved ivory along its natural grain. The two halves would then have been hollowed out, carved, and fitted together with an airtight seal." -- James Owen, journalist, June 2009

"Well it's certainly plagiarism. Today obviously people would be horrified if previous authors were not acknowledged but I think in those days it was accepted. Now, just take Leonardo Da Vinci for a moment. He suddenly produces, out of the blue, drawings of helicopters, submarines, parachutes, machine guns, bazookas, underwater swimmers, paddlewheel ships, God knows what, as if by magic they appear in his brilliant and wonderful drawings. Well, as I explain in the book [1434], there is nothing there original. Everything which Leonardo drew were improvements on an earlier Italian, called Francesco Di Giorgio, whose notebooks Leonardo possessed and copied and improved on. And Di Giorgio was not original either. He copied everything from another Italian an earlier Italian called [Mariano] Taccola. Now my book then shows the link between Taccola and the Chinese. So none of of them, Taccola, Di Georgio, Leonardo, not one acknowledged where he got his information from." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, June 2008

"There's no question that they [Newton's papers] were considered to be borderline scandalous. Newton died in 1727. By that time you're well into the Enlightenment, and alchemy had become the domain of dunces; it was associated with all sorts of useless medieval knowledge. So the fact that Newton had been a serious student of this obsolete and idiotic field was really problematic." -- Bill Newman, historian, November 15th 2005

"...we now know that most of the great minds of the period were involved in alchemy, including Robert Boyle, John Locke, Leibniz, any number of others." -- Bill Newman, historian, November 15th 2005

"Our project now must be to see Newton the way that Newton was, rather than trying to see Newton the way we want him to be." -- James Force, professor, November 15th 2005

"On the one hand, we can recognize him [Newton] as a scientist [alchemist], but on the other hand, he's pursuing an activity which we now label as a pseudoscience [gravitational physics]." -- Pamela Smith, professor, November 15th 2005

"The modern interpretation of Newton is about as far as could possibly be from what Newton himself thought." -- Simon Schaffer, professor, November 15th 2005

"... [Kurt] Gödel exposed the 'Queen of the Sciences' as nothing more than a common harlot. The meticulous proofs of mathematics had no more to do with higher truths than the steps of popular parlor games. There were reports of mathematicians committing suicide after reading his proof." -- Dennis W. Hauck, alchemist, Jun 2004

"Sorcery and witchcraft were real, but now they are called physics and chemistry." -- Me, noob, November 2009

"Pursuing further what one would expect to be the logical meaning of the alignment distances in a chart, namely the actual distances to the stars, just for fun I looked up our current measures for the astrophysical distances to these stars. The best star distances astronomers have been able to measure are from the Hipparcos Space Astronomy satellite parallax measurements. Astonishingly, these Hipparcos astrophysical distance measurements match the megalith distance pattern quite well." -- Thomas G. Brophy, archaeoastronomer, 2002

"By even the more conservative estimate, these are by far the most certain ancient megalithic astronomical alignments known in the world." -- Thomas G. Brophy, archaeoastronomer, 2002

"Even cursory initial consideration of the locations of the six Orion stars in question (Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka, Betelguese, Bellatrix, and Meissa) suggests that the megaliths probably represented them." -- Thomas G. Brophy, archaeoastronomer, 2002

"... people living over seven thousand years ago may have possessed technical knowledge in astronomy and physics more advanced than our current understanding of the same subjects." -- Robert M. Schoch, geologist, 2002

"Athena and Aphrodite were both planet Venus deities." -- Charles Ginenthal, historian, 1995

"According to the legend, the ancient peoples [of Lake Titicaca] had been without light for many days." -- Clive L. N. Ruggles, archaeoastronomer, 2005

"It is said that in this province [Titicaca] the people of ancient times tell of being without light from the heavens for many days, and all of the local inhabitants were astonished, confused, and frightened to have total darkness for such a long time. Finally, the people of the Island of Titicaca saw the Sun come up one morning out of that crag with extraordinary radiance." -- Bernabé Cobo, historian, 1990

"The last of these catastrophic events occurred on 23 March - 686. Fortunately, men were not illiterate at the time of these catastrophes." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1979

"Physical scientists were outraged in 1950 when Immanuel Velikovsky published historical evidence from around the world suggesting that the order and even the number of planets in the solar system had changed within the memory of man. Ideas in nearly every field of scholarship were challenged, but most seriously challenged of all were certain dogmas in the field of astronomy which had only in recent centuries succeeded in convincing mankind that Spaceship Earth was a haven of safety. The emotional outburst from the community of astronomers that so blackened the name Velikovsky and so successfully - if only temporarily - discredited Worlds in Collision has been laid to many causes, from the psychological and the political to simple resentment against invasion of the field by an outsider. Whatever the nature of such intensifying factors, however, I believe it is only fair to acknowledge an underlying and totally sincere scientific disbelief in the historical record." -- Ralph E. Juergens, engineer, 1972

"Could the [American] Indians on this continent know the connection between the sun appearing over the horizon, Eastern horizon, dropping down, again appearing, dropping down, and all the continent, this continent, bursting in flame? How could they know the connection? So they could not invent the stories. Something must have happened." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1966

"...it was accepted that the solar system has no history at all. So it was created if not 6000 years ago, then 6 billion years ago. But then for 6 billion years there was no change. Whether it was created or came into being by tidal action of a passing star which would be catastrophic as the tidal theory wishes or it is growing out of a nebula, the nebular theory which goes back to Kant and Laplace, but since creation there was no change. But if what I am telling you is truth, then there were changes, and very many, and very recently too." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1966

"... the solar system may have changed so much since it was created that a study of the present state would tell us very little about it's origin." -- Hannes O.G. Alfvén, physicist, 1954

"In -747 [B.C.] a new calendar was introduced in the Middle East, and that year is known as 'the beginning of the era of Nabonassar.' It is asserted that some astronomical event gave birth to this new calendar, but the nature of the event is not known. The beginning of the age of Nabonassar, otherwise an obscure Babylonian king, was an astronomical date used as late as the second Christian century by the great mathematician and astronomer of the Alexandrian school, Ptolemy, and also by other scholars. It was employed as a point of departure of ancient astronomical tables. 'This was not a political or religious era.... Farther back there was no certainty in regard to the calculation of time. It is from that moment that the records of the eclipses begin which Ptolemy used.' [Cumont, F., 1912] What was the astronomical event that closed the previous era and gave birth to a new era?" -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1950

"In the tomb of Senmut, the architect of Queen Hatshepsut, a panel on the ceiling shows the celestial sphere with 'a reversed orientation' or the southern sky. The end of the Middle Kingdom antedated the time of Queen Hatshepsut by several centuries. The astronomical ceiling presenting a reversed orientation must have been a venerated chart, made obsolete a number of centuries earlier. 'A characteristic feature of the Senmut ceiling is the astronomically objectionable orientation of the souther panel.' The center of this panel is occupied by the Orion-Sirius group, in which Orion appears west of Sirius instead of east. 'The orientating of the southern panel is such that a person in the tomb looking at it has to lift his head and face north, not south.' 'With the reversed orientation of the south panel, Orion, the most conspicuous constellation of the southern sky, appeared to be moving eastward, i.e., in the wrong direction.' [Pogo, A., 1930]" -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1950

"The most incredible story." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1950

"Uranus has the sun rising and setting neither in the east nor in the west. So it is not a law that a planet of the solar system must rotate from west to east and that the sun must rise in the east." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1950

"If, occasionally, historical evidence does not square with formulated laws, it should be remembered that a law is but a deduction from experience and experiment, and therefore laws must conform with historical facts, not facts with laws." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1950

"The signs of the Chinese zodiac have the strange peculiarity of proceeding in a retrograde direction, that is, against the course of the sun." -- Hans S. Bellamy, author, 1936

"The Chinese say that it is only since a new order of things has come about that the stars move from east to west." -- Hans S. Bellamy, author, 1936

"The next reference to meteors is found in the Chinese annals for 687 B.C. It is given by Biot as follows: '(March 23), during the night the fixed stars did not appear, although the night was clear. In the middle of the night, stars (des étoiles) fell like rain.' The account is translated in another way by Abel-Remmat who makes the last part read: 'there fell a star in the form of rain.'" -- Charles P. Olivier, astronomer, 1925

"... when the Duke of Lu-yang [Huai-nan-tse] was at war against Han, during the battle the sun went down. The Duke, swinging his spear, beckoned to the sun, whereupon the sun, for his sake, came back and passed through three solar mansions." -- Alfred Forke, philosopher, 1925

"According to a different account, which found favour with the Latin poets, the sun reversed his course in the sky, not in order to demonstrate the right of Atreus to the crown, but on the contrary to mark his disgust and horror at the king for murdering his nephews and dishing up their mangled limbs to their father Thyestes at table." -- James G. Frazer, translator, 1920

"As told by Huaman Poma, five such ages had preceded that in which he lived. The first was an age of Viracochas, an age of gods, of holiness, of life without death, although at the same time it was devoid of inventions and refinements; the second was an age of skin-clad giants, the Huari Runa, or 'Indigenes,' worshippers of Viracocha; third came the age of Puron Runa, or 'Common Men,' living without culture; fourth, that of Auca Runa, 'Warriors,' and fifth that of the Inca rule, ended by the coming of the Spaniards." -- Hartley B. Alexander, historian, 1920

"Harakhte [The Sun] ... he rises in the west...." -- James H. Breasted, egyptologist, 1906

"The travelling toward the east [of the sun] and the disappearance in the east ... must be understood literally...." -- Eduard Seler, anthropologist, 1903

"Pour retrouver la plus ancienne histoire du globe, il fallait comparer aux antiques traditions de l’Asie et de l’Egypte celles des peuples primitifs de l’Amerique. [In order to rediscover the remotest history of the earth it is necessary to compare the ancient traditions of Asia and Egypt with those of the primitive peoples of America.]" -- Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, archaeologist, 1864

"The year 687 B.C., in the summer, in the fourth moon, in the day of sin mao (23rd of March) during the night, the fixed stars did not appear, though the night was clear [cloudless]. In the middle of the night stars fell like rain." -- Édouard Biot, astronomer, 1846

"The nations of Culhua, or Mexico, says Gomara, who wrote about the middle of the sixteenth century, believe according to their hieroglyphical paintings, that, previous to the sun which now enlightens them, four had already been successively extinguished. These four suns are as many ages, in which our species has been annihilated by inundations, by earthquakes, by a general conflagration, and by the effect of destroying tempests." -- Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, 1814

"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

"The problem set forth by the [Royal Berlin] Academy [of Sciences] is expressed in the following terms: Whether the Earth in its Rotation around its Axis, by which it brings about the alternation of day and night, has undergone any alteration since the first period of its origin. What may be the cause of this, and what can make us certain of it? The question may be investigated historically. This may be done by examining monuments of antiquity dating from remotest times...." -- Immanuel Kant, natural philosopher, 1754

"In the lifetime of [Emperor] Yao the sun did not set for ten full days and the entire land was flooded." -- Johannes Hübner, evangelist, 1729

"Lord of the two Easts, and Lord of the two Wests!" -- Quran 55:17

"[Andrew] Collins is also alive to the possibility that the 'Sound Eye' may represent some lost science and technology of sound." -- Joseph P. Farrell, author, 2007

"Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth's northern and southern lights." -- Bill Kurth, astrophysicist, July 2005

"Was it possible therefore that the world once possessed an understanding of sound that was lost and never recovered?" -- Andrew Collins, author, 1998

"Recently, granite cores dated to Egypt's pyramid age and examined by American technologist Christopher Dunn have revealed clear signs of being drilled using a form of ultrasonics -- the same technique that powers pneumatic drills today. According to his calculations, the drills employed must have penetrated the granite 500 times faster than the modern diamond-tipped drills. All this is interesting, for there is also evidence that ultrasonic devices were used to disintegrate rock in Tibetan monasteries, while in the nineteenth century a maverick American scientist named John Ernest Worrell Keely developed a sympathetic vibratory apparatus that could raise heavy objects into the air and disintegrate granite. Like the stone cores from Egypt, Keely found that ultrasonics could penetrate quartz much faster than other types of mineral because it so closely matched the ultrasonic frequency range used in this process. This knowledge of ultrasonic drilling in ancient Egypt is a startling revelation, and is yet further evidence that the Pyramid builders were in possession of an advanced technology that came out of nowhere. " -- Andrew Collins, author, 1998

"If I were to try to replicate [Edward] Leedskalnin's feat, I would begin with the premise that he was using his flywheel to generate a single-frequency tunable radio signal. The box at the top of the tripod would contain the radio receiver (there are several tuners in Leedskalnin's workshop), and the cable coming from the box would be attached to a speaker that emitted sound to vibrate the coral rock at it's resonant frequency. With the atoms in the coral vibrating (like those in an iron bar), I would then attempt to flip their magnetic poles -- which are naturally in an attraction orientation with the Earth -- using an electromagnetic field." -- Christopher Dunn, author, 1998

"Included in the program is a meeting with a Native American maker of sacred flutes from Oregon. His flutes, which are made to serenade Mother Earth, are tuned to the key of F Sharp!" -- Boris Said, egyptologist, 1996

"Subsequent experiments conducted by Tom Danley in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid and in chambers above the King's Chamber suggest that the pyramid was constructed for a sonic purpose. Danley identifies four resident frequencies, or notes, that are enhanced by the structure of the pyramid, and by the materials used in it's construction. The notes from an F Sharp chord, which according to ancient Egyptian texts were the harmonic of our planet." -- Boris Said, egyptologist, 1996

"Our debate ended on Friday, April 8, 1955, only nine days before Einstein’s death. I think I was the last person with whom he discussed a scientific problem. On that day I brought him the published news that Jupiter sends out radio noises; ten months earlier, in a letter to him, I had offered to stake our dispute on this my claim of an as yet undiscovered phenomenon...." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1976

"Babylonian tablets affirm that sound could lift stones. The Bible speaks of Jericho and what sound waves did to it's walls. Coptic writings relate the process by which blocks for the pyramids were elevated by the sound of chanting. However, at the present state of our knowledge we can establish no connection between sound and weightlessness." -- Andrew Tomas, author, 1971
"Francois Lenormont writes in his Chaldean Magic that by means of sounds the priests of ancient Babylon were able to raise into the air heavy rocks which a thousand men could not have lifted." -- Andrew Tomas, author, 1971

"... then yonder sun strings these worlds to himself on a thread. Now that thread is the same as the [solar] wind; and that wind is the same as this Vikarnî: thus when he lays down the latter, then yonder sun strings to himself these worlds on a thread." -- Yajnavalkya, gymnosophist, Satapatha Brahmana, 1st millenium B.C.

"The form of the corona and the motion of the prominences suggest that it [the sun] is a magnet." -- George E. Hale, astronomer, 1913

"[Leucippus said] All the stars are set on fire by the rapidity of their own motion; and the sun is set on fire by the stars...." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, Life of Leucippus, 3rd century

"On the other side, there is produced another enveloping membrane, which increases incessantly by the accretion of exterior bodies; and which, as it is itself animated by a circular movement, drags with it, and adds to itself, everything it meets with; some of these bodies thus enveloped re-unite again and form compounds, which are at first moist and clayey, but soon becoming dry, and being drawn on in the universal movement of the circular vortex, they catch fire, and constitute the substance of the stars." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, Life of Leucippus, 3rd century

"All physical experiments we do, at the surface of the earth, are done within the earth's electric field that has a quiet background value of about 100 Volts per vertical meter. Also these experiments are done in the earth's geomagnetic field, so this makes 2 EM fields we need to be aware of. If either of the two fields are constant during an experiment, then the experimental data have one sense of utility. If either of the fields change during the experiment, then the experiment might produce, what we call erroneous, data. If you are not aware of these EM fields, then your, to you, scientific explanations, are incomplete." -- Louis Hissink, geologist, February 2009

"Diamagnetic substances include water, protein, diamond, DNA, plastic, wood, and many other common substances usually thought to be nonmagnetic." -- Martin D. Simon, professor, May 2000

"When first observed by Voyager, the spoke movements [of Saturn's Rings] seemed to defy gravity and had the scientists very perplexed. Since the spokes rotate at the same rate as Saturn's magnetic field, it is apparent that the electromagnetic forces are also at work." -- Ron Baalke, astrophysicist, 1998

"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." -- James E. Arnold, geoscientist, March 1995

"The advantage of using this [Geophysical Fluid Flow Cell] 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." -- James E. Arnold, geoscientist, March 1995

"The experiment verified that dielectric forces can be used to properly simulate a spherical gravitational field to drive thermal convection." -- James E. Arnold, geoscientist, March 1995

"...experiments carried out by T. Townsend Brown, Paul A. Biefeld, and others, suggest that electric and gravitational fields may be strongly connected at voltages as low as 105 ev. If true, this would indicate the standard field theories are seriously flawed." -- Paul A. LaViolette, author, 1992

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

"And I looked out and could see 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, 2008

"Determination of absolute 'Earth-Moon' distances and Earth's palaeorotational parameters in the distant geological past from tidal rhythmite, however, is ambiguous because of the difficulties in determining the absolute length of the ancient lunar sidereal month." — Rajat Mazumder and Makoto Arima, geologists, July 2004

"Currently, the moon is moving away from the Earth at such a great rate, that if you extrapolate back in time — the moon would have been so close to the Earth 1.4 billion years ago that it would have been torn apart by tidal forces (Slichter, 1963)." — Dennis J. McCarthy, geoscientist, 2003

"Tides are created because the Earth and the moon are attracted to each other, just like magnets are attracted to each other. " -- Keith Cooley, astronomer, 2002

"The implications of employing the present rate of tidal energy dissipation on a geological timescale are catastrophic. Around 1500 Ma the Moon would have been close to the Earth, with the consequence that the much larger tidal forces would have disrupted the Moon or caused the total melting of Earth's mantle and of the moon." -- George E. Williams, geologist/geophysicist, 2000

"Capture of our Moon becomes the only option, it cannot have been created from the Earth." -- Wallace Thornhill, physicist, October 2000

"Why did great cataclysms occur on Earth, such as the sinking of Atlantis and the the rise of the Andes? According to some theories, the cause was a gigantic asteroid that fell onto Earth, or the appearance of the hitherto non-existent Moon in the sky over Earth. Is this so?" -- Alexander Kazantsev, natural philosopher, 1974

"Newton’s gravitational theory is regarded as proved by the action of the tides. But studying the tides, Newton came to the conclusion that the moon has a mass equal to one fortieth of the earth. Modern calculations, based on the theory of gravitation (but not on the action of the tides), ascribe to the moon a mass equal to 1/81 of the earth’s mass." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1946

"…it does not seem likely that it will ever be possible to evaluate the effective rigidity of the earth's mass by means of tidal observations." — George H. Darwin, physicist, 1907

"…in the course of our experiments, we were led away from the primary object of the Committee, namely, the measurement of the Lunar Disturbance of Gravity…." — George H. Darwin, physicist, 1882

"...the pre-Hellenic Pelasgian inhabitants of Arcadia called themselves Proselenes, because they boasted that they came into the country before the Moon accompanied the Earth. Pre-Hellenic and pre-lunarian were synonymous." -- Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, 1851

"We shall commence with a few of the principal passages from the ancients, which treat of the Proselenes. Stephanus of Byzantium (v. 'Apkas) mentions the logographs of Hippys of Rhegium, a contemporary of Darius and Xerxes, as the first who called the Arcadians proselenous. The scholiasts, ad Apollon. Rhod. IV 264 and ad Aristoph. Nub. 397, agree in saying, the remote antiquity of the Arcadians becomes most clear from the fact of their being called proselenoi. They appear to have been there before the Moon, as Eudoxus and Theodorus also say; the latter adds that it was shortly before the labours of Hercules that the Moon appeared. In the government of the Tegeates, Aristotle states that the barbarians who inhabited Arcadia were driven out by the later Arcadians before the Moon appeared, and therefore they were called proselenoi." -- Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, 1851

"The passages in Ovid as to the existence of the Arcadians before the Moon are universally known." -- Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, 1851

"In the remotest times, before the Moon accompanied the Earth, according to the mythology of the Muysca or Mozca Indians, the inhabitants of the plain of Bogota lived like barbarians, naked, without any form of laws or religious worship." --Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, Researches, 1814

"Among the great men who have philosophized about [the action of the tides], the one who surprised me most is Kepler. He was a person of independent genius, [but he] became interested in the action of the moon on the water, and in other occult phenomena, and similar childishness." — Galileo Galilei, physicist, 1632

"He [Anaxagoras] asserted ... that the moon contained houses...." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century

"...surnamed Pelasgian from Pelasgus, son of Triopas, its founder, and not far from the sanctuary is the grave of Pelasgus." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Argolis, 2nd century

"It is said that it was in the reign of Pelasgus that the land was called Pelasgia." -- Pausanius, geographer, Description of Greece: Arcadia, 2nd century

"After this king the land was called Arcadia instead of Pelasgia and its inhabitants Arcadians instead of Pelasgians." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Arcadia, 2nd century

"These were Arcadians of Evander's following, the so‑called Pre-Lunar people." -- Plutarch, historian, Moralia: The Roman Questions #76, 1st century

"The stars did not yet revolve in the heavens; the Danaides had not yet appeared, nor the race of Deucalion; the Arcadians alone existed, those of whom it is said that they lived before the Moon, eating acorns upon the mountains." -- Apollonios Rhodios, librarian, Argonautica, ~246 B.C.

"In Worlds In Collision, MacMillan, 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky popularized the idea that Venus is a new planet, a fission product of Jupiter. And from about 1450 to 550 BCE, it participated in a series of close-encounters-of-the-worst-kind with Earth. His thesis was largely (and emphatically) rejected by the astronomical community. That rejection is still generally in effect. This, in spite of the fact, that his predictions about the Earth-Venus problem have been verified." -- Robert S. Fritzius, astronomer, December 2007

"Assuming Venus was exposed to the same rain of asteroids and comets that the other planets experienced, they expected Magellan would spot about 5000 craters on the planet's surface. But they found only about 1000, suggesting that the planet's surface is actually very young ...." -- David Shiga, journalist, November 2006

"We must therefore allow that Venus and Titan may both have new surfaces if planets and moons are not formed through accretion by impacts billions of years ago. The 'befuddlement' and 'mystery' may prove to be the result of an unquestioned belief in that hypothesis. Predictions based on that story have had no success in the space age. So we may be confident that planets did not accrete from a solar nebula." -- Wallace Thornhill, physicist, November 2004

"... looking at the map of craters of Venus, all of them seem relatively pristine, and there are no older ones." -- David Grinspoon, planetary scientist, August 2004

"Of all the planets, Venus [Kukulkan/Gukumatz] is clearly the most important in Maya art, cosmology, and calendrics." -- Susan Milbrath, archaeologist, 1999

"Athena and Aphrodite were both planet Venus deities." -- Charles Ginenthal, historian, 1995

"The early people seemed obsessed that celestial visitation would bring disaster. Comets in particular were thought to augur catastrophe." -- C. Warren Hunt, geologist, 1989

"To be sure Velikovsky made some predictions that seemed to be close to what astronomers eventually discovered to be so ... For instance, Velikovsky stated that since Venus was formed from Jupiter's interior which must be very hot, Venus itself would be very hot. He said this in 1950, when astronomers believed that Venus' temperature, while warmer that Earth's might not be very much warmer." -- Isaac Asimov, writer, 1981

"Dr. Velikovsky pointed out that the collisions were not independent; in fact, if two bodies orbiting the Sun under the influence of gravity collide once, that encounter enhances the chance of another, a well known fact in celestial mechanics. Professor Sagan's calculations, in effect, ignore the law of gravity. Here, Dr. Velikovsky was the better astronomer." -- Robert Jastrow, astrophysicist, December 1979

"This Sagan assumption is so disingenuous that I do not hesitate to label it as either a deliberate fraud on the public or else a manifestation of unbelievable incompetence or hastiness combined with desperation and wretchedly poor judgement." -- Robert W. Bass, astronomer, 1976

"I who am a specialist in the field am moved to ask myself, 'Did this physician [Immanuel Velikovsky] writing in 1954 know more about physics of radio emissions than this physicist [Carl Sagan] writing 20 years later?'" -- James Warwick, astronomer, 1974

"Mars is the third star which other say is Hercules." -- Eratosthenes, polymath, 2nd century B.C.

"Tertia est stella Martis quam alii Herculis dixerunt." -- Eratosthenes, polymath, 2nd century B.C.

"... I started to think that quite possibly, though not certain, that at the age of Kronos, the planet Earth could have been a satellite of Saturn. None of them was on their present orbit." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, January 29th 1975

"The information collected there [Lake Issyk Kul] allows us to conjecture that local people had a socio-economic system hitherto unknown to historians. As a blending of nomadic and settled life, it either gradually evolved into something different or-more likely-was destroyed by one of the many local floods. Legends confirm the latter assumption." -- Nikolai Lukashov, archaeologist, January 2008

"Semyonov-Tianshansky embarked on a relentless but vain search for the shrine. To all appearances, the monastery was engulfed by water. Hydrologists have not to this day sufficiently studied the unique lake with regular shifts in its water level. Some changes are gradual, others sudden and disastrous since they are caused by earthquakes and torrents of water rush from lakes higher up in the mountains. Floods recede sooner or later, and people come back to the shores-only to become the victims of other floods 500-700 years later." -- Nikolai Lukashov, archaeologist, January 2008

"No, if these things happened, really happened, they must be not only in Biblical source but also Egyptian source in the first place. Egyptian record. I looked for it; I found it. [An] Eyewitness [Ipuwer] describe[s] the catastrophe -- the very same plagues. Strange was to me that the translator of the papyrus [The Admonitions of Ipuwer] now in Holland in [the] museum of the University of Leiden and there since more than a hundred years, [the] papyrus translated in 1909 by Gardiner, he didn't even feel that the very same verses that he translate[d] in modern English he could read in the story of the plagues in King James Version. This was observed a case of some scotoma. But scotoma was with all of us. How is it that a book that was read more than any other book, translated into scores of languages, commented upon by many commentators through so many generations, but none of them was seeing or reading stone for stone and fire for fire?" -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1966

"Well, it [Intelligent Design] could come about in the following way, it could be that at some earlier time somewhere in the universe a civilisation ... [came] to a very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Now that is a possibility, an intriguing possibility, and I suppose it's possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry and molecular biology you might find a signature of some sort of designer. And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe." -- Richard Dawkins, atheist preacher, 2008