Immanuel Velikovsky

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Immanuel Velikovsky photographed by Fima Noveck, ca.1974

Immanuel Velikovsky (June 10, 1895 (NS) – November 17, 1979) is best known as the author of a number of controversial books on pre-history, particularly the US bestseller Worlds in Collision (1950). Earlier in his life, he played a role in the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a respected psychiatrist/psychoanalyst.

His books primarily used comparative mythology and ancient literary sources (not least the Bible) to propose that the Earth had suffered catastrophic close-contacts with other planets in the solar system (principally Venus and Mars), during and before recorded history. He argued that electromagnetic effects played an important role in celestial mechanics. He also proposed a revised chronology of Ancient Egypt, Greece, the Land of Israel and the Near East, aiming to eliminate Dark Ages and reconcile Biblical history with both archeology and Egyptian chronology.

Generally, Velikovsky's theories were vigorously rejected by the academic community, but despite this Velikovsky's books sold well, with claims of unfair treatment by the mainstream providing a rallying call for Velikovsky's lay supporters. The controversy surrounding his work and its reception is sometimes referred to as "The Velikovsky Affair".

Biography

Childhood and education

Immanuel Velikovsky was born in 1895 into a Jewish family, in Vitebsk in what is today Belarus, the son of Shimon (Simon Yehiel) Velikovsky (1859-1937) and Beila Grodensky. He learned several languages as a child, performed well in Russian and mathematics at the Medvednikov Gymnasium after moving to Moscow, and graduated with a gold medal in 1913. He then travelled to Europe, visiting Palestine, briefly studying medicine at Montpellier, France, and taking premedical courses at the University of Edinburgh. Having returned to Russia before the outbreak of World War I, Velikovsky enrolled in the University of Moscow and received a medical degree in 1921.

Berlin

Velikovsky left Russia for Berlin in 1921. There, using funding from his father Simon, Velikovsky edited and published a pair of volumes of scientific papers, some written in Hebrew, entitled Scripta Universitatis Atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum ("Writings of the Jerusalem University & Library"). He enlisted Albert Einstein to prepare the mathematical-physical volume. This project was a precursor to the formation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—the fledgling university was able to donate copies of the Scripta to the libraries of other academic institutions, who would then send complimentary copies of their own publications, thus helping the Jerusalem University to stock its library. In 1924 Velikovsky married Elisheva Kramer, a young violinist.

Career as a psychiatrist

From 1924 to 1939 Velikovsky lived in what was then Palestine, practicing medicine (both general practice and psychiatry), and also psychoanalysis (he had studied under Sigmund Freud's pupil, Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna). During this time he had a dozen or so papers published in medical and psychoanalytic journals, including, in 1930, the first paper to suggest epilepsy is characterized by abnormal encephalograms, now part of the routine diagnostic procedure, and papers in Freud's Imago, including a precocious analysis of Freud's own dreams.

Relocation to the USA and subsequent notoriety as an author

In 1939, with the prospect of war looming, Velikovsky travelled with his family to New York, intending to spend a sabbatical year researching for his book Oedipus & Akhnaton (which, inspired by Freud's Moses and Monotheism, explored the possibility that Pharaoh Akhnaton was the legendary Oedipus). Within weeks of his arrival, World War II began. Soon, taking a tangent from his original book project, Velikovsky began to develop the radical catastrophist cosmology and revised chronology theories for which he would become notorious (see below). For the remainder of the Second World War, now a permanent resident in New Jersey, he continued to research and write about his ideas, searching for a means to disseminate them to academia and the public. He privately published two small Scripta Academica pamphlets summarising his theories in 1945 (Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History and Cosmos Without Gravitation). His pressing a copy of the latter onto astronomer Harlow Shapley was to have particular repercussions.

In 1950, after eight publishing houses rejected the Worlds in Collision manuscript, it was finally published by Macmillan, who had a large presence in the academic textbook market. Even before its appearance, the book was enveloped by furious controversy, when Harper's Magazine published a highly positive feature on it, with what would today be called a creationist slant. This came to the attention of a horrified Shapley, who had thought Cosmos Without Gravitation to be pseudoscientific nonsense. Commentators have also noted that Shapley was a liberal who had suffered under the McCarthyite witch hunts against communism, whilst Velikovsky happened to be a Russian. Shapley mobilised a campaign against Worlds in Collision within academia: within two months Macmillan, intimidated by threats of a textbook boycott, transferred the book to Doubleday. It was by then a best seller in the US. In 1952, Doubleday published the first installment in Velikovsky's revised chronology, Ages in Chaos, followed by the Earth in Upheaval (a geological volume) in 1955.

For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, Velikovsky was persona non grata on college and university campuses. An early space probe sent to Venus appeared to confirm some of his predictions, most specifically that Venus would be hot. After this, he began to receive more requests to speak. He lectured, frequently to record crowds, at universities across North America. In 1972, Velikovsky's public profile was raised still higher when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a one-hour television special featuring Velikovsky and his work, and this was followed by a thirty-minute documentary on the BBC in 1973.

The remainder of the 1970s saw Velikovsky devoting a great deal of his time and energy rebutting his critics in academia, and continuing to tour North America and also Europe, delivering lectures on his theories. Several independent societies and journals sprang up to provide a forum for his work, including Pensée and Kronos in the US, and the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in the UK. By now an elderly man, Velikovsky suffered from diabetes and intermittent depression, seemingly brought on by the academic establishment's continuing rejection of his work, and many wondered if the remaining promised volumes of his work (including a prequel to Worlds in Collision and the projected sequels to Ages in Chaos) would ever see publication.

The last two years of his life finally saw publication of two volumes of the aforementioned Ages in Chaos series: Peoples of the Sea (1977) and Rameses II and his Time (1978). Velikovsky died tended by his wife at his Princeton home in November 17, 1979.

Posthumous administration of Velikovsky's literary estate

Legal wranglings appear to have dogged the release of remaining unpublished work. Velikovsky had appointed Professor Lynn E. Rose as his literary executor, with plans to issue several more volumes. However, his family managed to retain control of his literary estate. Under the supervision of Velikovsky's wife, two posthumous books appeared: the psychoanalytic work Mankind in Amnesia (1982) and also Stargazers and Gravediggers (1983), which chronicled the hostility of academia to Velikovsky's work.

For many years Velikovsky's estate was controlled by his two daughters, who generally resisted the publication of any further material. (Exceptions include the biography ABA - the Trial and the Torment, issued in the mid-1990s and greeted with rather dubious reviews; and a Hebrew translation of another Ages in Chaos volume, The Dark Age of Greece, was published in Israel.) In the late 1990s, a large portion of Velikovsky's unpublished book manuscripts, essays and correspondence became available at the Velikovsky Archive website. In 2005, Velikovsky's daughter Ruth Sharon, presented his entire archive to Princeton University Library.

Velikovsky's theories

Notwithstanding Velikovsky's dozen or so publications in medical and psychoanlytic journals in the 1920s and 1930s, the work for which he became well known was developed by him during the early 1940s, whilst living in New York. He summarised his core ideas in an affidavit 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).

In reality, these theories formed a coherent inter-disciplinary whole. However, rather than have the entire edifice dismissed because of potential flaws in any one area, and with the doors of academic journals seemingly now closed to him, Velikovsky then chose to publish them as a series of book volumes, aimed at a lay audience, dealing separately with his proposals on ancient history, and with areas more relevant to the physical sciences. 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 there appeared to be insufficient correlation in the written or archeological records between Jewish history (as recorded in Biblical and other sources) and the history of the adjoining nations (especially 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 which can be global in scale.

He arrived at a body of radical inter-disciplinary ideas which might be summarized as:

• Planet Earth has suffered natural catastrophes on a global scale, both before and during mankind's recorded history.
• There is evidence for these catastrophes in the geological record (here Velikovsky was espousing Catastrophist ideas as opposed to the prevailing Uniformitarian notions) and archeological record. The extinction of many species had occurred catastrophically, not by gradual Darwinian means.
• The catastrophes which occurred within the memory of mankind are recorded in myths, legends and written history of all ancient cultures and civilisations. Velikovsky pointed to striking concordances in the accounts of many cultures, and proposed that they referred to the same real events, all couched in the individual religious and cultural viewpoints of their authors. He 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 cause of these natural catastrophes were close encounters between the Earth and other bodies with 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 proposed that electromagnetic forces played a much greater role than acknowledged in a purely Newtonian (gravitation-only) model.
• Velikovsky argued that the conventional chronology of the Near East and classical world, based upon Egyptian Sothic dating and the king lists of Manetho, was wholly flawed. This was the reason for the apparent absence of correlation between the Biblical record and those of neighbouring cultures, and also the cause of the enigmatic "dark ages" in Greece and elsewhere. Velikovsky shifted several chronologies and dynasties from the Egyptian Old Kingdom to Ptolemaic times by centuries (a scheme he called the Revised Chronology), placing the Exodus contemporary with the fall of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt. He proposed numerous other synchronisms stretching up to the time of Alexander the Great. He argued that these eliminate phantom "dark ages", and vindicate the biblical accounts of history and those recorded by Herodotus. For further details, see the Ages in Chaos article.

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 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 which 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" incident.
• Periodic close contacts with Mars had caused havoc in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE.

As noted above, Velikovsky had conceived the broad sweep of this material by the early 1940s. However, within his lifetime, whilst he continued to research and expand 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 & His Time (1978)
• Earth in Upheaval (1956) dealt with geological evidence for global natural catastrophes

Several key portions of the Revised Chronology remained unpublished (although the manuscripts are readily available in the Velikovsky Archive and thus the details of the entire scheme are known). Numerous other authors (such as Donovan Courville, Peter James and David Rohl) have since taken a cue from Velikovsky to develop their own proposed chronological revisions.

Velikovsky's ideas on his earlier Saturn/Mercury/Jupiter events were never published, and the available archived manuscripts are much less developed. However the "Saturnist" theorists have done much subsequent work in this area, proposing that Earth was indeed a satellite of Saturn (a "brown dwarf" star) before the Holocene period.

Of all the strands of his work, Velikovsky published least on his ideas regarding the role of electromagnetism in astronomy. In fact he retreated from the propositions in his 1946 monograph Cosmos without Gravitation, a work he and his supporters preferred to ignore subsequently, and a probable catalyst for the aggressively antipathetic reaction of astronomers and physicists from its first presentation. However other Velikovskian writers such as Ralph Juergens, Earl Milton, Wal Thornhill and James Mccanney have embraced and developed these themes to propose a scenario where stars are lit not by internal nuclear fusion, but as the anode focii of galactic-scale electrical discharge currents. These radical ideas are often known as the "Electric Universe" scenario [1]. They do not find support in the conventional literature.

Criticism

"Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatan — although to state my opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least gloriously wrong."

— Stephen J. Gould, Velikovsky in Collision

Put most concisely, it can be said that Velikovsky's theories have been wholly rejected by mainstream academia, often vociferously.

Interestingly, certain aspects of some of the concepts Velikovsky originally put forward in the 1940s, which at the time were rejected in toto, are accepted within the mainstream today. These include:

• The idea that global mass extinctions were caused by Earth colliding with an extraterrestrial body (evidenced in particular by the anomalous iridium levels at the Cretaceous boundary, which largely coincided with the destruction of the dinosaurs).
• The neo-Darwinist ideas of punctuated equilibrium in evolution.
• The rôle of electromagnetism in astronomy, in the light of the subsequent discoveries such as the Van Allen belts, the sun's and planets' extensive magnetospheres, and permeation of the "vacuum of space" with charged plasma (the "solar wind").
• The idea that cometary impacts could have precipitated "dark ages" within historical times (e.g. the A.D. Dark Ages in Europe).

However, mainstream academia contends that its acceptance of such ideas has little or nothing to do with Velikovsky's work, which is generally regarded as erroneous in all its detailed conclusions by academia. Moreover, Velikovsky's unorthodox methodology (for example, using comparative mythology to derive scenarios in celestial mechanics) is viewed by most orthodox scholars as an unacceptable way to arrive at conclusions. In Gould's succint characterisation of Velikovsky's modus operandi, "Velikovsky would rebuild the science of celestial mechanics to save the literal accuracy of ancient legends" [op. cit.].

Criticism of Worlds in Collision

Velikovsky's bestselling and consequently most-criticized book is Worlds in Collision. Astronomer Harlow Shapley, along with others such as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, instigated a hostile campaign against the book before it was even published. They were highly critical of publisher Macmillan's initial notion to include it on their text book list. The fundamental criticism against this book from the astronomy community was that its celestial mechanics were irreconcilable with Newtonian celestial mechanics, requiring planetary orbits which could not be made to conform with the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of angular momentum.

Velikovsky tried to protect himself from criticism of his celestial mechanics by removing the original Appendix on the subject from Worlds in Collision, hoping that the merit of his ideas would be evaluated on the basis of his comparative mythology and use of literary sources alone. However this strategy did not protect him: the appendix was an expanded version of the Cosmos Without Gravitation monograph, which he had already distributed to Shapley and others in the late 1940s - and they had regarded the physics within it as egregious.

In the 1960s, some of Velikovsky's specific predictions appeared to be confirmed by space probe findings, for instance:

• the high surface temperature of Venus
• hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of Venus (this was later disproved)
• Jupiter's generation of radio noises

However in all such cases, the scientific community did not accept that these successful predictions could be used as proof of Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision scenario, preferring alternative explanations such as a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus.

By 1974, the controversy surrounding Velikovsky's work had permeated US society to the point where the American Association for the Advancement of Science felt obliged to address the situation, as they had previously done in relation to UFOs, and devoted a scientific meeting to Velikovsky, featuring (among others) Velikovsky himself and Carl Sagan. Sagan gave a critique of Velikovsky's ideas (the book version of Sagan's critique is much longer than that presented in the talk, see below). His criticisms are available in an essay in the book Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science. Sagan's arguments were popular in nature and he did not remain to debate Velikovsky in person, facts that were used by Velikovsky's followers to discredit his analysis (see Ginenthal in References below). Sagan rebutted these charges, and further attacked Velikovsky's ideas in his PBS television series Cosmos.

It was not until the 1980s that a very detailed critique of Worlds in Collision was made in terms of its use of mythical and literary sources, when Bob Forrest published a highly critical examination of them (see below). A short analysis of the position of arguments in the late 20th century is given by Dr Velikovsky's ex-associate, and Kronos editor, C. Leroy Ellenberger, in his A Lesson from Velikovsky.

More recently, the absence of supporting material in ice-core studies (such as the Greenland Dye-3 and Vostok cores) removes any basis for the proposition of a global catastrophe of the proposed dimension within the later Holocene period.

Criticism of the Revised Chronology

Velikovsky's "Revised chronology" has been rejected by nearly all mainstream historians and Egyptologists. It was claimed that Velikovsky's usage of material for proof is often very selective. In 1965 the leading cuneiformist Abraham Sachs, in a forum at Brown University, dismissed Velikovsky's use of Mesopotamian cuneiform sources. Velikovsky was never able to refute Sachs' attack.

In 1978, following the much-postponed publication of further volumes in Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos series, the UK's Society for Interdisciplinary Studies organised a conference in Glasgow specifically to debate the revised chronology. The ultimate conclusion of this work, by names including Peter James, Jon Bimson, Geoffrey Gammonn, and David Rohl, was that the Revised Chronology was untenable. Specifically, Michael Jones contended that it was impossible to separate the 18th, 19th and 20th Dynasties by centuries as Velikovsky proposed, presenting evidence from genealogies of construction workers which spanned the three dynasties contiguously. However, inspired by Velikovky's original premise that the Manethian chronology of Egypt was flawed, James, Rohl and several other authors have gone on to publish their more conservative chronological revisions, which have also failed to find any acceptance in the mainstream academic community.

"The Velikovsky Affair"

Such was the hostility directed against Velikovsky from some quarters (particularly the original campaign led by Harlow Shapley), that over the years numerous commentators have made an analysis of the furor in itself. The most prominent of these was a study by American Behavioral Scientist magazine, eventually published in book form as The Velikovsky Affair. This treated the events as an illuminating example of how 20th century science dealt with new paradigms, and how members of particular academic disciplines reacted to ideas from workers from outside their field, illustrating an aversion to permitting people to cross inter-disciplinary boundaries.

The scientific press generally refused to permit Velikovsky a forum to rebut his critics. On occasions where astronomers did agree to printed debate in popular periodicals (most notably Prof. John Q. Stewart of Princeton University in Harper's Magazine, June 1951, and Prof Lloyd Motz of Columbia University in Yale Scientific Magazine, April 1967), Henry H. Bauer noted that Velikovsky's legal training, skill as a debater and polymath knowledge of the humanities often gave lay audiences with the impression that he'd left the astronomers floundering. Irving Wolfe recounts that while never conceding for a minute that he was correct in his ideas, he believes that the scientific community found Velikovsky's rhetorical skill at swaying public opinion exasperating. Velikovsky played on the conduct of many academics to make claims of "suppressed genius", in which he likened himself to martyred Renaissance scientist/heretic Giordano Bruno.

The storm of controversy created by Velikovsky's publications may have helped revive the catastrophist movement in the second half of the 20th century; however it is also held by some working in the field that progress has actually been retarded by the negative aspects of the so-called Velikovsky Affair. Works with similar themes, such as those of de Santillana and von Dechend, Allan and Delair, and Clube and Napier (see References below), have met in part with an academic tolerance never experienced by Velikovsky himself, and even with acclaim by critics of the originals.

Books by Velikovsky

All published by Doubleday:

• Worlds in Collision (1950)
• Ages in Chaos (1952)
• Earth In Upheaval (1955)
• Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960)
• Peoples of the Sea (1977)
• Rameses II and His Times (1978)
• Mankind in Amnesia (1982)
• Stargazers and Gravediggers (1983)

References

• Abell, George O. (1981). Scientists and Velikovsky, in Paranormal Borderlands of Science, edited by Kendrick Frazier, Prometheus Books.

• Allan, D.S. and J.B. Delair (1995). When The Earth Nearly Died. Gateway Books, UK. published in USA as Cataclysm by Bear & Co, 1997. A précis is here.
• Bauer, Henry H. (1984). Beyond Velikovsky. The History of a Public Controversy. University of Illinois, Urbana.

• Bauer, Henry H. (1980). Passions and Purposes: A Perspective, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 5, #1, Fall 1980, 28-31. Reprinted in Paranormal Borderlands of Science, edited by Kendrick Frazier, Prometheus Books.

• Robert Todd Carroll (2003). The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-27242-6. Pages 396-401.

• Clube, V. and Bill Napier (1982). The Cosmic Serpent. Universe Books, New York.

• Clube, V. and Bill Napier (1990). The Cosmic Winter. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

• Alfred de Grazia, Ralph E. Juergens, Stecchini L.C. (Eds.) (1978). The Velikovsky Affair - Scientism versus Science. 2ed., Metron Publications, Princeton, New Jersey. Also online.

• de Santillana, Giorgio and Hertha Von Dechend (1977). Hamlet's Mill: an Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time. Godine, Boston.

• Forrest, Bob (1981). Velikovsky's Sources. In six volumes, with Notes and Index Volume. Privately published by the author, Manchester.

• Forrest, Robert (1983). Venus and Velikovsky: The Original Sources, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 8, #2, Winter 1983-84, 154-164.

• Frazier, Kendrick (1980). The Distortions Continue, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 5, #1, Fall 1980, 32-38. Reprinted in Paranormal Borderlands of Science, edited by Kendrick Frazier, Prometheus Books.

• Garder. Martin (1957). Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, chapter 3, Dover ISBN 0-486-20394-8

• Ginenthal, Charles (1995). Carl Sagan & Immanuel Velikovsky. New Falcon Publications, Tempe Arizona

• Goldsmith, Donald, (Ed.) (1977) Scientists Confront Velikovsky. Norton. Proceedings of a symposium at the 1974 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

• Miller, Alica (1977). Index to the Works of Immanuel Velikovsky. Glassboro State College, Glassboro.

• Oberg, James (1980). Ideas in Collision, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 5, #1, Fall 1980, 20-27. Reprinted in Paranormal Borderlands of Science, edited by Kendrick Frazier, Prometheus Books.

• Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia (1952). Worlds in Collision, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol 96, Oct. 15, 1952.

• Pearlman, Dale, (Ed.) (1996) Stephen J. Gould and Immanuel Velikovsky. Ivy Press Books, Forest Hills, N.Y.

• PENSÉE. 1972-1975. Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered. I - X. Student Academic Freedon Forum, Portland.

• Ransom, C.J. (1976) The Age of Velikovsky. Delta, New York.

• Philip Plait (2002). Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax", John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-40976-6. Chapter 18.

• Rohl, David (1996) A Test of Time. Arrow Books.

• Sagan, Carl, (1979) Broca's Brain. Random House. Reissued 1986 by Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-33689-5. reprinted as chapter 15 of Science and the Paranormal: Probing the Existence of the Supernatural, edited by George O. Abell and Barry Singer, Scribners, 1981. Originally appeared in Scientists confront Velikovsky.

• Talbott, Stephen L. (1977) Velikovsky Reconsidered. Warner Books, New York.

External links

Velikovsky works available online

• The Velikovsky Archive - an online collection of unpublished works, including audio recordings of lectures, and a video of the 1972 CBC documentary
• Immanuel Velikovsky Papers at Princeton University Library
• The Velikovsky Affair - Second edition of the Alfred de Grazia book (see References)

Organizations sympathetic to Velikovsky's work

• Aeon: The Journal of Myth and Science
• Kronia
• Kronos Press
• Society for Interdisciplinary Studies
• The Velikovskian, A Journal of Myth, History and Science
• Super floods and Catastrophism Hans-Joachim Zillmer

Critiques of Velikovsky

• Jerry Pournelle's commentaries on Sagan's arguments at the AAAS meeting.
• Velikovsky in Collision - Stephen J. Gould
• Ice Core Evidence - Charles Ginenthal
• Minds in Ablation Sean Mewhinney responds to Ice Core Evidence
• Worlds Still Colliding letter from C.Leroy Ellenberger
• An Antidote to Velikovskian Delusions - Leroy Ellenberger
• A lesson from Velikovsky - Leroy Ellenberger
• Top Ten Reasons why Velikovsky is wrong about Worlds in Collision - Leroy Ellenberger
• El-Arish Revisited - Sean Mewhinney
• Abraham Sachs' address at Brown Uni 1965 on cuneiform sources