March 01, 2013 That many a thunderstone earned the sobriquet by virtue of its exposure during a thunderstorm strikes one as correct to a degree. Intellectual lassitude perfuses the attempts of those who blamed the conception of the thunderstone on sheer stupidity or, one notch up, a rebarbative belief…
Feb 28, 2013 The thunderstone is familiar from the folklore of virtually every culture, but plays no ‘roll’ in the serious sciences. In the eyes of most, the proposition that thunderbolts deposit rocks is an asinine artefact of superstitious belief – an antiquated theme that epitomises an infant stage…
Feb 25, 2013 Other credible reports of electrophonic bolides introduce severe accompaniments not normally associated with meteors in current awareness. People at the headwaters of the Murray River, presumably of Wiradjuri stock again, remembered an occasion well before 1925 when a conspicuous fireball provoked an earthquake and a rupture…
Shortly after dawn on 15 February 2013, a large meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk (Russia), generating a shockwave that injured some 1,200 people. According to the popular media, no other bolide on record is known to have caused so many casualties. Have any more violent impacts occurred within human memory?…
Feb 15, 2013 Even the lonely monuments left behind have a story to tell. Chavín de Huantar, in the Peruvian Andes, is one of many civilisations to have preceded the mighty Inca empire. The occupants of the ruins have no name; lacking a script, their cultural identity is forever…
Feb 13, 2013 Most researchers address ‘known’ questions, such as ‘what causes ice ages?’, ‘how far is the moon?’ or ‘where did the ancestors of the human species live?’. Comparative mythologists face the double challenge of seeking answers to problems which most people are unfamiliar with in the first…
Feb 08, 2013 A common theme in creation myths is that the first human being appeared in the sky, often as a metamorphosis of a divine creator. On Tahiti, people remembered the time before creation when “an expanse of water … covered the abyss, and the god Tino-ta’ata ……
From left to right: F. Gutekunst, Ignatius Loyola Donnelly (c. 1898). Courtesy Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul, Minnesota. Anonymous, William Comyns Beaumont (date unknown). Bob Kobres, Immanuel Velikovsky (1978) Jan 23, 2012 In bestsellers published in 1882 and 1883, the American politician and amateur scientist Ignatius Loyola Donnelly (1831-1901) perpetuated the enthralling hypothesis of…
From left to right: Jacob Ferdinand Voet, Thomas Burnet (1675). Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London. William Whiston (18th century), anonymous. Giovanni Rinaldo of Carli-Rubbi (date unknown). Jan 22, 2012 Ever since 1950, ‘Velikovsky’ has been a household name, associated with a set of adventurous but highly unorthodox claims that…
July 18, 2012 In June 2012, a team of 4 Japanese researchers revealed in Nature that “an extremely energetic event occurred around our space environment in AD 775.” An analysis of Japanese cedar trees showed a “rapid increase” in the concentration of radiocarbon for that year, matched by a…
