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World of the Odd and the Awesome by Charles Berlitz Many of the objects and machines that today are everyday necessities were once regarded as frauds or dreams. How could it have been regarded except as wild imagination or magic to speak of flying through the air or speeding across the landscape borne by a machine? Did it not once sound absurd to suggest that one could travel under the sea without getting wet, or speak to friends in distant cities throughout the world from one’s home, or see events happening in far places at the very moment of their occurrence? And finally, was it not a simple reversion to ancient mythology to contemplate flying through space to the Moon, other planets, and even further? Not only were they not believed, but many of today’s scientific miracles were opposed and disdained during their experimental phases. In 1868, newspapers ran editorials claiming that telephones were mere trickery, designed to delude and fleece the public. For five years, after the Wright brothers’ successful airplane flight, Scientific America steadfastly refused to print a report of or comment on it. In fact, Simon Newcomb of the Smithsonian proved math- ematically that the flight of a heavier-than-air machine was impossible. The famous eighteenth-century French scientist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier stated that meteors did not exist. He said, “It is impossible for stones to fall from the sky because there are no rocks in the sky.” Physicians in Shanghai who studied the preserved corpse came up with some baffling new information about the blonde mummy of China. Whoever she was, she died with high levels of cholesterol in her muscles—and inexplicable traces of the silvery white metalloid element antimony in her lungs. (p. 6) Imagine a hole so huge it would fill the space between Chicago and Indianapolis...What could have made such an enormous hole? According to Weihaupt, the answer is a mammoth meteorite. Weighing in at around 13 billion tons and measuring 2.5 to 3.75 miles across, the meteorite is believed to have smashed into the earth between 600,000 and 700,000 years ago, at a speed of 44,000 miles per hour. (p. 38) The appearance of Greek words in American Indian and Pacific island languages is an intriguing mys- tery. The first white men who came to Delaware and Maryland found a river that the Indians called Potomac, a sound-alike for the Greek word Potomos, meaning “river.” (p. 55) 203 Appendix B: Book Abstracts Inventions Rejected Telephones Impossible Air flight Mathematically Impossible Meteors Do Not Exist Caucasian Mummies in China Giant Crater of Antarctica Greek Words Found in America Atlantis, Alien Visitation, and Genetic Manipulation