Prof. Arysio Nunes dos Santos Research

Pole Shift is sheer unscientific bumcombe that holds no water. It is impossible on both physicaland geological grounds, as we explain elewhere in detail. These ideas were originally ppularized by Charles Hapgood, and survive in writers such as John White and Graham Hancock. Rather than scientists, these authors are journalists, whose specialty is precisely rendering palatable to the public what are usually government lies and propaganda. White has — as indeed most such proponents of the theory, Hapgood included — publicly recanted from his former views on PoleShift, which henow recognizes as an unscienific concept. We hope Graham Hancock will soon do the same, particularly because he now dropped his proposalof an Antarctic Atlantis, in favour of our own hypothesis of a Far Eastern one.

Velikovsky is another unusual character. A Russian Jew and an emigré to the US, his books became the delight of all inquisitive persons who, in the 1950's,were discontent with the obscurities of Academic Science. Among these, I should be counted, as his books opened my eyes to the inconsistencies of theories such as Darwin's Uniformitarian Geology and his theory ofEvolution, based on precisely this false premise. The problem of Velikovsky was taking the catastrophic events he proposed as the literal truth. Moreover, as an orthodox Jew, Velikovsky also believed the dates and events of the Bible — ridiculously small by geological standards — to be actual facts which should be implicitly believed by all. Of course, most of his proposals proved to be false, excpt insofar as Catastrophism seems indeed to be one important feature not only of Evolution, but also of geology, in contrast to what Drawin and Lyell so emphatically argued. But his books — like the ones of Blavatsky and even Graham Hancock are a good read even today, as long as they are considered what they indeed are: pleasant Sci Fi, based on ill-digested pseudo-Science.