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occurring every twelve thousand years or so and with major glacial periods taking place over longer periods. These ice ages suggest a really major catastrophe - a sudden shift of the Earth's entire axis. If you lived on the planet Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun, you would be exposed to a pseudo-ice age every 21.5 (Earth) years. Our knowledge of Uranus is admittedly flimsy, and when and if we ever manage to visit it we may find that many of the currently accepted facts about the planet are erroneous, just as our moon landings disproved many of the previously accepted facts about our own satellite. In any case, the best astronomical information indicates that Uranus has a very wobbly axis and that it flips over about four times for each of its circuits around the sun. (A Uranus year is 84 Earth years.) A resident living on a fixed point on Uranus would find himself shifting drastically away from or towards the sun every 21.5 years. If the planet were closer to the sun, these shifts could produce dramatic changes of climate. longer periods. Scientists have figured out that there are minor climatic changes on Earth every 170 years due to minor axis shifts. The magnetic polarity of our planet is quite unstable. The magnetic South “ole is not a fixed point but moves steadily in a two-hundred-mile circle. As already noted, the poles reverse themselves every few million years. Studies of the rock levels of the last Ice Age have produced evidence that major shifts of the Earth's crust or the planet's entire axis occur every 12,000 years or so. Such shifts would change the climate completely; frigid areas would suddenly be in the tropic zones, water would inundate land areas, and of course, all life would be affected. Sea shells and fossils have been found in the heart of the Sahara desert, indicating that it was once covered with water. In a stimulating article in the Saturday Evening Post of January 16th, 1960, zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson documented the amazing results of one of these planetary inversions. Prehistoric mammoths found preserved in the frozen muck of Siberia had mouthfuls of un-swaltowed plants, as though they had been quick frozen while munching happily on their feeding grounds. Sanderson pointed out that the only way these animals would have been so splendidly preserved was to have been exposed to an incredible drop in temperature. TMs could have occurred in several ways, he pointed out cautiously. The earth's crust could have shifted very suddenly, carrying the animals farther north very rapidly, the entire axis could have tocked over, or some cloud of frigid gases from space could have suddenly engulfed the entire planet. Whatever the case, the discovery of these animal carcasses is solid evidence that some unexplained calamity took place with fierce suddenness thousands of years ago. Decades earlier an Austrian mining engineer named Hass Horbiger had developed a fanciful theory to explain the Earth's early history. He envisioned huge spheres of ice crashing into the planet and talked of captive moons, which predate our present moon, entering retrograde orbits, their gravity tearing up our seas and reshaping the Earth's surface. His eight-hundred page Glazial Rosmogonie, published in 1913, enraged the astronomers and scientists of Germany and Austria. The late Willy Ley, the German rocket authority and science writer summed it up when It is possible that the Earth's orbital mechanics include similar fluctuations of the axis over