Cataclysm! by D.S. Allan & J.B. Delair

[shijing]

From bookreview.com:

Immanuel Velikovsky rocked the scientific community in the 1950 and 60's with the publication of "Worlds in Collision," "Ages in Chaos," and "Earth in Upheaval." He proposed the unexpected and hard-to-believe thesis that early civilizations saw Venus erupt out of Jupiter, travel in an erratic orbit between Mars and Earth, and finally settle into its present orbit. He believed ancient myths telling of gods fighting in the sky and causing destruction on Earth were descriptions of what people actually saw, but could not understand. To them, the unstable planets looked like gods in the sky. Intriguing though! I remember reading the books. Velikovsky also planned a book explaining how the Deluge occurred, but, unfortunately, he died before he could write it.

Almost fifty years later, Allan and Delair published "Cataclysm!" Using more powerful analytical tools, they looked at the data Velikovsky examined and proposed a fresh thesis of their own. Like Velikovsky, they believed that folklore myths were eyewitness reports of what was seen in the sky. They described many of the myths Velikovsky described and added more that were unavailable to Velikovsky. From their research, they concluded that a fragment of an exploding supernova entered our solar system around 9500 B.C. This fragment "Phaeton-Marduk" caused one of Neptune's moons to become the planet Pluto. Phaeton-Marduk then pulled one of Saturn's moons, Chiron, away from Saturn making it the smallest planet in the Solar System. Chiron was first discovered in 1976. Phaeton-Marduk then caused the fragmentation of the planet Tiamat. Tiamat's fragments are now the asteroid belts between Jupiter and Mars. Tiamat's moon, Kingu, went into orbit around Phaeton-Marduk. Phaeton-Marduk then came close to the Earth disturbing the Earth's rotation. The moon, Kingu, was pulled from Tiamat by Earth's gravitation. Kingu fell apart, the pieces plunging into the Earth. These combined disturbances caused the Deluge. Phaeton-Marduk then flipped Venus upside down, causing it to have a backward rotation. Phaeton-Marduk finally fell into the sun.

Allan and Delair also described geological data showing large deposits of broken bones and shattered trees mixed together in heaps and data describing lakes that have beds resembling craters that might have been formed by aerial bombardment of huge meteors, and many other geological abnormalities. This fascinating book presents an interesting explanation of how the Deluge might have occurred. For readers interested in this subject, especially readers who were impressed by Velikovsky's books, "Cataclysm!" is a must-read.

I just finished this book, and I thought it was quite good and also, probably, quite important. The author's collect an impressive array of evidence to support their theory of a planet-wide catastrophe appr. 11,500 years ago, and everything is meticulously footnoted. Although there are some flaws in their theory, I think that they come rather close to developing a really credible big-picture account of what really happened during the world-wide cataclysm that changed the face of the Earth with the information that they had in hand. I would definitely recommend reading this together with The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, The Cosmic Winter, and other books in a similar vein. Highlights for me included:

The authors do a survey of flora and fauna, both living and fossilized, which have a discontinuous spread between continents. Using this data, they try to piece together what the surface of the Earth looked like pre-cataclysm -- the continental patterns they suggest are pretty interesting, and have a more general horizontal (west-east) orientation than those that exist today. They also line up fairly well in at least a couple of instances with modern language-family distributions that are otherwise rather puzzling if a uniform continental pattern is assumed historically.

They reconstruct the a pre-diluvian climate based on their assumption of a different axis tilt and different atmospheric conditions/composition, and discuss in some detail what general climatic changes would have occurred post-cataclysm after the axial tilt had been altered. They also discuss the challenges faced by the first generations of post-diluvian humans, in terms of technology, food cultivation, and general economy -- this part sets the stage nicely for what James DeMeo hypothesizes about climate change in Saharasia. They also engage in a certain amount of discussion about global mythologies, using the common themes to bolster their hypothesis about a fractured mantle, conflagration, subsequent deluge, and final glaciation (which they contrast with long-term ice age) -- this is a nice complement to the mythological study that Stephen Oppenheimer does in Eden in the East.

Their main hypothesis involves a rogue planetary body (Phaeton) which enters the solar system, creating havoc with specific outer gas giants and their moons before entering the inner solar system and leading to the destruction of one planet beyond Mars, and severely disrupting the stability of the Earth-Moon system and Venus. This is where a couple points of their hypothesis are at variance with the C's account of this period -- they postulate the existence of what we call Kantek, for example (including a nice discussion of how debris from this planet would continue to interact with the inner solar system after it's destruction) and tie it's destruction to Phaeton; they do not identify it as Venus, postulating instead that it eventually hit the sun and was destroyed. The most interesting part of their hypothesis, however, is their hypothesis about Phaeton's origin -- that it originated in and was ejected from a supernova, explaining how a planet-sized object of this kind could acquire the kind of speed and momentum necessary to traverse a vast distance in space. This, in particular, caught my attention, because I have always wondered how Venus (according to the C's) might have had the opportunity to just suddenly wander into our solar system; I think this is a very suggestive hypothesis that could be borrowed to explain that.

 

[Laura]

Sounds very interesting! Going to order it now.

 

[RyanX]

Thanks for this review Shijing! :)

I'm particularly interested in this part of the hypothesis too:

The most interesting part of their hypothesis, however, is their hypothesis about Phaeton's origin -- that it originated in and was ejected from a supernova, explaining how a planet-sized object of this kind could acquire the kind of speed and momentum necessary to traverse a vast distance in space. This, in particular, caught my attention, because I have always wondered how Venus (according to the C's) might have had the opportunity to just suddenly wander into our solar system; I think this is a very suggestive hypothesis that could be borrowed to explain that.

 

[Cosmos]

very interisting ! Is this book printed in german, too?

 

[Zadius Sky]

Hmm, interesting. I'm adding it to my list of books to be obtained. :)

 

[Laura]

The supernova thing is interesting also because that is what originally attracted Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith. I think they've abandoned it and are now more in favor of Clube's giant comet hypothesis, but who knows, there could be elements of all?

 

[shijing]

The supernova thing is interesting also because that is what originally attracted Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith. I think they've abandoned it and are now more in favor of Clube's giant comet hypothesis, but who knows, there could be elements of all?

Besides the tie-in to cosmic debris, I remember that they also suggested a relationship between supernovae and genetic mutation. The frequency with which supernovae come up in the transcripts does seem to indicate that they are pretty important in some way -- if this is really how Venus was thrust into the solar system, it would sure be one reason why!

 

[anart]

I'm about half way through this book right now and I find it really curious that when they mention the vast numbers of caves and rocky crevasses on all the continents that contain a sedimentary mix filled with a dense concentration of bones of so many different animals from different regions, that they mention human bones so infrequently. So far, they've only mentioned finding human bones in this sedimentation two times, which just seems odd to me. If this is addressed later in the book, disregard the question, it just had me wondering last night why they haven't found millions of human bones in such conditions all over the planet as well. I'll keep reading!

 

[Cosmos]

I just started to read this book because it was recommended by Laura on a number of occasions including in her book Apocalypse in which she writes:

[...]

The corollary question is, of course: why should we encounter this particular combination of biological and behavioral change at this specific point in the archaeological sequence? It was, after all, a time when large parts of Europe were still in the grip of an Ice Age. (Or, so we are told, though Allan & Delair make a convincing case for a different interpretation of ice ages in their book Cataclysm.)

[...]


Of course, where the human types lived that said DNA came from is another question.. This is where the Allan & Delair book, Cataclysm, comes in. This is probably one of the most excellent compilations of scientific data – sourced and referenced – I’ve ever encountered on the topic of our earth’s cataclysmic past. As they note in their introduction: “Some readers may recoil at the abundance of references and might even regard them as irksome or intrusive. In a work of this genre precise documentation is essential …”


Allan & Delair bring serious questions to bear on the mainstream interpretation of our reality and history and do it armed to the teeth with science. The case they make for a Golden Age world prior to the Deluge is compelling and quite unique. Wielding hard data from literally every field of science, they demonstrate that hundreds of thousands of years of ice ages may be a myth created to explain many anomalous findings on earth that uniformitarian science had no other way to explain. This data strongly suggests a completely different planet prior to a worldwide cataclysm that they say occurred in 9500 BC, but the latest research puts the most recent major event back at least another thousand years. They refer to it as the ‘Phaeton Disaster’. They also bring up the issue of the ‘Fifth Planet’ that is posited to have existed where the asteroid belt now lies. They propose that the Phaeton Disaster included the destruction of this Fifth Planet and the celestial calamity – which affected the entire solar system – left debris everywhere. Here, again, they posit that this occurred at the same time as the Deluge we have related to the destruction of Atlantis, 13,000 years ago, though they suggest a different date. I think that there there may be some conflation of a number of separate events here. As noted, Spedicato proposes an event that initiated an Ice Age and another event that ended it. Other sources demonstrate compellingly the evidence of other great dyings on earth, so we don’t have to confine ourselves to just one or two episodes.


In any event, Allan & Delair suggest that Phaeton was spawned in an astronomically-near supernova explosion and that it was a portion of exploded astral matter that came careening into our solar system, instigated ‘war in heaven’, destroying the Fifth Planet, taking its resources, engaging with the earth and dumping that water and oil and so forth on our planet while changing its axial orientation, completely reorganizing the arrangement of land and water (obviously, if we acquired more water, there was more land prior to that time and their map showing how it must have looked, based on scientific finds, is fascinating), then Phaeton plunged into the sun never to bother anyone again. While I really like nearly everything they have proposed in their book (and have supported with references), I’m not too sure about this idea. It’s possible, of course, but Victor Clube and Bill Napier make a compelling case with their ‘giant comet’ that cycled around numerous times, and this ties in very well with what McCanney proposes (echoing Velikovsky): that the giant comet was Venus. The giant comet that breaks up into numerous other large comets described by Clube & Napier could then be chunks of the Fifth Planet running amok, and still there, for the most part, threatening life on earth. Of course, this again includes numerous events going back much further than 9,500 BC.

I‘m currently at the part in which they quite clearly lay down the evidence against the commonly propagated „fact“ that during the „last ice age“ and the „many other ice ages of that kind before that“ big ice shields covered the northern hemisphere. So far what they say is quite compelling in that regard.

It is also interesting to note in that regard what the C‘s have said about Atlantis which was supposedly „during the ice age“, quoted in the first post of the Atlantis thread:

Q: All I wanted was to have an idea of a land mass in the Atlantic ocean that people talk about - where did it sit?
A: Where do you think?

Q: Well, I sort of think that the Azores and the Canary Islands are sort of...
A: Yes, but many other places too. Remember, the sea level was several hundred feet lower then...

Q: Why was the sea level several hundred feet lower? Because there was ice somewhere or because there was not as much water on the earth at that time?
A: Ice.

Q: Was the ice piled up at the poles? The ice sheet of the ice age?
A: Yes.

Q: So, Atlantis existed during the ice age?
A: Largely, yes. And the world’s climate was scarcely any colder away from the ice sheets than it is today.

Q: Well, how could that be? What caused these glaciers?
A: Global warming.

Q: How does global warming cause glaciers?
A: Increases precipitation dramatically. Then moves the belt of great precipitation much farther north. This causes rapid buildup of ice sheets, followed by increasingly rapid and intense glacial rebound.

Q: (L) In that sense...
(A) Okay, this brings us to the question about the Piri Reis map. We wanted to know the origin of this map?
A: Complex, but the origin would date back to 14,000 B.C.

Q: (A) Atlantis?
A: Close.

Q: (L) Was this map drawn when Antarctica was NOT covered by ice?
A: Yes.

Q: (L) Why was it not covered by ice?
(A) Because the climate was warmer.
A: Technologically achieved.

Q: (L) Why would somebody want to technologically warm Antarctica if the whole rest of the planet was available for use? What is so special about Antarctica?
A: The whole rest of the planet was available for use? Not hardly.

Q: (L) Why was the rest of the planet not available for use?
A: Ice.

Q: (L) So, the rest of the planet WAS covered by ice?
A: No.

Q: (L) There is something I am missing here.
(A) Much of the planet was covered by ice, but not all.
A: Yes.

Q: (L) So, instead of using the areas that were NOT covered by ice, why, in particular, was Antarctica...
A: What?!?

Q: (L) What I am getting at is: why go to all the trouble to thaw out a whole big island if it might have been easier to have been somewhere else?
A: Magnetic power grid physics . EM utilization. Crystals, and the like. Seeking paths to the interior? The “Poles” know best!

A lot to discover. I think there might be a lot of factors, circumstances and possibilities that we aren’t even aware yet.

Also, what Allan & Delair describe sounds like a outrageously different World and landscape before the end of the last ice age, just in terms of geography and geology (flora and fauna not even mentioned yet). So far in my reading it almost sounds like the cataclysm that happened at that point was so humongous that pretty much all of the now present high and big mountain chains on earth were created at that point in time rather cataclysmicly along with huge landmasses being submerged/upliftet thousands of meters and hundreds if not thousands of kilometers pushed into different geographical points horizontally.

 

[40yrsofThinking]

I read Cataclysm! 10 years ago, and recently. Fascinating in its scope.
For over 40 years I have read/followed Zicharia Sitchin and his Earth Chronicles about ancient astronauts visiting earth, creating man as slaves, departing earth because of some reason, were devastated at the destruction, and returned to restore earth and become a partner with man because of our shared DNA, giving forth kingship, rules, tools, fruits and vegables, and