Russian-born psychoanalyst and author of Worlds in Collision (1950), which argued that Venus was expelled from Jupiter as a comet-like body within human memory, passed close to Earth around the fifteenth century BCE, and caused the events recorded as the plagues of Exodus and in catastrophe myths worldwide. The astronomy is not defensible: the energetics of the ejection, the circularisation of Venus’s orbit and the survival of the Moon’s orbit all fail. What keeps him relevant is the treatment he received, an organised attempt by astronomers to have his publisher drop the book before it appeared, which became a standing exhibit in every later argument about scientific gatekeeping, and a small number of predictions that were later borne out for reasons unrelated to his model, most cited among them the radio emission and high surface temperature of Venus. He is the direct ancestor of the modern catastrophist line, and Zecharia Sitchin’s Nibiru is built on the same move of reading myth as a record of celestial mechanics.
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Zecharia Sitchin · Nibiru · Enuma Elish · Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis · Graham Hancock · Knowledge Filter