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'Controversial' scientist explains cataclysm theory
By DON WALKER
In ages past, men lived in fear of wrath from the skies.
Today the danger is not from cosmic space, but from man himself.
But because man has repressed the trauma he experienced in antiquity, he cannot realize the horror of nuclear war.
"WE ARE VICTIMS of racial amnesia," Immanuel Velikovsky told 400 KU faculty members and students last night in the Kansas Union Ballroom.
"Our submerged memories of ancient catastrophes have risen to cause our collective hatred, our race hatred," he said, "and we are playing with nuclear weapons."
Speaking at the last of this year's Sigma Xi lectures, the Russian-born psychiatrist and student of ancient literature said he has spent 27 years away from his profession of psychotherapy.
In that "one-half of one percent of the recorded history of man," he has pursued a theory of a cataclysmic universe and tried to state that theory to orthodox science and the public.
THE THEORY WAS as catalysic to the scientific community as the events it described, he said.
"I was in conflict with all of natural history," he said. "I worked in many disciplines to form my theory."
Velikovsky defended his approach to data, an approach which includes recognizing events in myth and ancient literature as real.
"I regard artificial the division of science into departments," he said.
Past events on earth, revealed by geology and archaeology, Velikovsky believes, can point to cosmic events.
HE CITED THE numerous discoveries of the remains of semitropical plants and animals, many species now extinct, below the ice crust of arctic regions. He believes this indicates a sudden change in climate caused by a shift in the earth's axis.
The protoplanet twice passed near the earth, once in the 15th century B.C. and again in the 8th century B.C., he said, before it settled into its present orbit around the sun.
That shift was caused when the earth entered the magnetic field of an approaching planet, he said. The comet was a protoplanet dislodged from Jupiter and became Venus.
Orthodox cosmology believes Venus to be as old as the solar system itself, Velikovsky said.
National letter of intent signings are presently being conducted throughout the country by the KU athletic department.
"Science puts the creation of
No official list of signees can be released, however, until sports publicity director Jay Simon returns from his trip covering the Big Eight sports weekend in Norman. Okla.
Upon his return, results of KU's recruiting programs in all sports will be made known. Unofficial word, however, indicates excellent freshman squads for next year.
Recruiting in process
"BUT IT holds that since then there has been no change, and with this view my view clashes."
It was simpler for science to disregard his theory than to debate it, Velikovsky said, so he spent years in compiling a wealth of evidence.
The evidence he collected in archives and travels "from longitude to longitude and latitude to latitude" pointed to the youthfulness of Venus as a planet, he said.
from its recent cosmic encounters, he said, but orthodox cosmology maintained that Venus' surface temperature was only 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
A young planet would be hot
the solar system at six billion years ago," he said, "caused maybe by some cataclysmic event.
The Mariner II probe to Venus in 1962 showed the planet to have a temperature of 800 degrees, he said, which verified his prediction of 12 years earlier in his book "Worlds in Collision."
Daily Kansam Friday, May 19, 1967
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