1. Hapgood, Velikovsky, Einstein: gli scienziati del Pole Shift
An early mention of a shifting of the Earth's axis can be found in an 1872 article entitled
“Chronologie historique des Mexicains” by Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, an eccentric
expert on Mesoamerican Codices who interpreted ancient Mexican myths as evidence for four
periods of global cataclysms that had begun around 10,500 B.C.
In 1948, Hugh Auchincloss Brown, an electrical engineer, advanced a hypothesis of catastrophic
pole shift. Brown also argued that accumulation of ice at the poles caused recurring tipping of the
axis, identifying cycles of approximately seven millennia.
In his controversial 1950 work Worlds in Collision, Immanuel Velikovsky postulated that the
planet Venus emerged from Jupiter as a comet. During two proposed near approaches in about
1,450 B.C., he suggested that the direction of the Earth's rotation was changed radically, then
reverted to its original direction on the next pass. This disruption supposedly caused earthquakes,
tsunamis, and the parting of the Red Sea. Further, he said near misses by Mars between 776 and 687
B. C. also caused the Earth's axis to change back and forth by ten degrees. Velikovsky supported his
work with historical records, although his studies were mainly ridiculed by the scientific
community.
Charles Hapgood is now perhaps the best remembered early proponent. In his books “The Earth's
Shifting Crust” (1958) (which includes a foreword by Albert Einstein that was written before the
theory of plate tectonics was developed) and Path of the Pole (1970).
Hapgood, building on Adhemar's much earlier model, speculated that the ice mass at one or both
poles over-accumulates and destabilizes the Earth's rotational balance, causing slippage of all or
much of Earth's outer crust around the Earth's core, which retains its axial orientation. In his
subsequent work “The Path of the Pole”, Hapgood conceded Einstein’s point that the weight of the
polar ice would be insufficient to bring about a polar shift.
Instead, Hapgood argued that the forces that caused the shifts in the crust must be located below the
surface. He had no satisfactory explanation for how this could occur.
Hapgood wrote to the Canadian librarian, Rand Flem-Ath, encouraging him in his pursuit of
scientific evidence to back Hapgood's claims and in his expansion of the hypothesis. Flem-Ath
published the results of this work in 1995 in “When the Sky Fell” co-written with his wife, Rose.
Charles Hutchins Hapgood (May 17, 1904 – December 21,
1982) was an American college professor and author who became
one of the best known advocates of a pseudo-historical claim of a
rapid and recent pole shift with catastrophic results.
In 1958, Hapgood published The Earth's Shifting Crust which
denied the existence of continental drift and featured a foreword
by Albert Einstein. In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966)
and The Path of the Pole (1970), Hapgood proposed the hypothesis
that the Earth's axis has shifted numerous times during geological
history.
In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings he supported the suggestion
made by Arlington Mallery that a part of the Piri Reis Map was a
depiction of the area of Antarctica known as Queen Maud Land. He used this to propose that a 15
degree pole shift occurred around 9,600 BCE (approx. 11,600 years ago) and that a part of the
Antarctic was ice-free at that time, and that an ice-age civilization could have mapped the coast. He

2. concludes that "Antarctica was mapped when these parts were free of ice", taking that view that an
Antarctic warm period coincided with the last ice age in the Northern hemisphere, and that the Piri
Reis and other maps were based on "ancient" maps derived from ice-age originals. Later research
concerning the paleoclimatology and ice sheets of Antarctica have completely discredited the
interpretations by Hapgood that an Antarctic warm period coincided with the last ice age in the
Northern hemisphere and any part of it had been ice-free at and prior to 9,600 BCE (approx. 11,600
years ago).
Hapgood also examined a 1531 map by French mathematician and cartographer Oronce
Finé (aka Oronteus Finaeus). In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, he reproduces letters received from
the chief of a U.S. Air Force cartography section stationed at Westover AFB in 1961. At Hapgood's
request, they had studied both Piri Reis and Oronce Finé maps during their off-duty hours,
concluding that both were compiled from original source maps of Antarctica at a time when it was
relatively free of ice, supporting Hapgood's findings.
Hapgood concluded that advanced cartographic knowledge appears on the Piri Reis map and the
Oronteus Finaeus map, and must be the result of some unknown and advanced ancient civilization
that developed astronomy, navigational instruments, plane geometry and trigonometry, long before
Greece or any other known civilization.
According to historians Paul Hoye and Paul Lunde, while Hapgood's work garnered some
enthusiasm and praise for its thoroughness, his revolutionary hypotheses largely met with
skepticism and were ignored by most scholars. In the book The Piri Reis Map of 1513 Gregory C.
McIntosh examines Hapgood's claims for both maps and states that "they fall short of proving or
even strongly suggesting that the Piri Reis map and the Fine map depict the actual outline of
Antarctica”.
Hapgood's unorthodox interpretations such as “Earth Crustal Displacement” were never accepted as
valid competing scientific hypotheses, yet his ideas have found popularity in alternative circles.
Librarians Rand and Rose Flem-Ath as well as journalist Graham Hancock base portions of their
works on Hapgood’s evidence for catastrophe at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. Hapgood's
ideas also figure prominently in the 2009 sci-fi/disaster movie, “2012”.
The impact of Einstein’s ideas was not restricted to
physics. Among numerous other disciplines, Einstein
also made significant and specific contributions to
Earth Sciences. His geosciences-related letters,
comments, and scientific articles are dispersed, not
easily accessible, and are poorly known. These
contributions can be classified into three basic areas:
geodynamics, geological (planetary) catastrophism,
and fluvial geomorphology.
Regarding geodynamics, Einstein essentially supported
Hapgood’s very controversial theory called Earth
Crust Displacement.
With respect to geological (planetary) catastrophism, it
is shown how the ideas of Einstein about Velikovsky’s
proposals evolved from 1946 to 1955.

3. Immanuel Velikovsky was a Russian-born American independent scholar, best known as the
author of a number of controversial books reinterpreting the events of ancient history, in particular
the US bestseller “Worlds in Collision”, published in 1950. Earlier, he played a role in the founding
of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, and was a espected psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
He summarised his core ideas in November 1942, and in two
privately published Scripta Academica pamphlets
entitled Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient
History(1945) and Cosmos without Gravitation (1946).
Velikovsky was a passionate Zionist, and this did steer the
focus of his work, although its scope was considerably more
far-reaching than this. The entire body of work could be said
to stem from an attempt to solve the following problem: that
to Velikovsky there appeared to be insufficient correlation in
the written or archaeological records between Biblical history
and what was known of the history of the area, in particular,
Egypt.
Velikovsky searched for common mention of events within
literary records, and in the Ipuwer papyrus he believed he had found a contemporary Egyptian
account of the Israelite Exodus. Moreover, he interpreted both accounts as descriptions of a great
natural catastrophe. Velikovsky attempted to investigate the physical cause of the Exodus event,
and extrapolated backwards and forwards in history from this point, cross-comparing written and
mythical records from cultures on every inhabited continent, using them to attempt synchronisms of
the historical records, yielding what he believed to be further periodic natural catastrophes that can
be global in scale.
He arrived at a body of radical inter-disciplinary ideas, which might be summarised as:
- Planet Earth has suffered natural catastrophes on a global scale, both before and during
humankind's recorded history;
- There is evidence for these catastrophes in the geological record and archeological record;
- The extinction of many species had occurred catastrophically, not by gradual Darwinian
means;
- The catastrophes that occurred within the memory of humankind are recorded in the myths,
legends and written history of all ancient cultures and civilisations.
Velikovsky pointed to alleged concordances in the accounts of many cultures, and proposed that
they referred to the same real events. For instance, the memory of a flood is recorded in the Hebrew
Bible, in the Greek legend of Deucalion, and in the Manu legend of India.
Velikovsky put forward the psychoanalytic idea of "Cultural Amnesia" as a mechanism whereby
these literal records came to be regarded as mere myths and legends.
The causes of these natural catastrophes were close encounters between the Earth and other bodies
within the solar system — not least what were now the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars,
these bodies having moved upon different orbits within human memory.
To explain the celestial mechanics necessary to permit these changes to the configuration of the
solar system, Velikovsky thought that electromagnetic forces might somehow play a greater role to
counteractgravity and orbital mechanics.

4. Some of Velikovsky's specific postulated catastrophes included:
- A tentative suggestion that Earth had once been a satellite of a "proto-Saturn" body, before
its current solar orbit;
- That the Deluge (Noah's Flood) had been caused by proto-Saturn's entering a nova state, and
ejecting much of its mass into space;
- A suggestion that the planet Mercury was involved in the Tower of Babel catastrophe;
- Jupiter had been the culprit for the catastrophe that saw the destruction of the "Cities of the
Plain" (Sodom and Gomorrah);
- Periodic close contacts with a cometary Venus (which had been ejected from Jupiter) had
caused the Exodus events (c.1500 BCE) and Joshua's subsequent "sun standing still" (Joshua
10:12 & 13) incident;
- Periodic close contacts with Mars had caused havoc in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE
Within his lifetime, he continued to research, expand and lecture upon the details of his ideas, he
released only selected portions of his work to the public in book form:
Worlds in Collision (1950) discussed the literary and mythical records of the "Venus" and "Mars"
catastrophes. Portions of his Revised Chronology were published as Ages in Chaos (1952), Peoples
of the Sea (1977) and Rameses II and His Time (1978). Earth in Upheaval (1955) dealt with
geological evidence for global natural catastrophes.
Velikovsky's ideas on his earlier Saturn/Mercury/Jupiter events were never published, and the
available archived manuscripts are much less developed.
Of all the strands of his work, Velikovsky published least on his ideas regarding the role of
electromagnetism in astronomy. Although he appears to have retreated from the propositions in his
1946 monograph Cosmos without Gravitation, no such retreat is apparent in Stargazers and
Gravediggers. Cosmos without Gravitation, which Velikovsky placed in university libraries and
sent to scientists, is a probable catalyst for the aggressively antipathetic reaction of astronomers and
physicists from its first presentation.
However, other Velikovskian enthusiasts such as Ralph Juergens, Earl Milton, Wal Thornhill, and
Donald E. Scott have embraced and developed these themes to propose a scenario where stars are
powered not by internal nuclear fusion, but by galactic-scale electrical discharge currents. Such
ideas do not find support in the conventional literature.