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Leading scientists gave public lectures denouncing Velikovsky. The scientific journals were filled with critical anti-Velikovsky letters and articles. It was modern science's darkest hour. There was a response which for intensity and hostility was unequalled in twentieth century scientific history,' the Los Angeles Times later noted. What triggered this emotional outburst? Velikovsky's main theme was that the planet Venus was really a comet hurled out of the planet Jupiter. It had brushed part the Earth, he said, on its way into logy. mytho Immanuel Velikovsky was born June 10th, 1895, in Vitebsk, Russia. He studied medicine and law at same of Europe's best universities (he couldn't go to a Russian college because he was a Jew), received his medical degree in 1921, and settled in Palestine in 1924. He knew.Freud personally and corresponded with the great man in the last years of his life. In 1939 Velikovsky and his family moved to New York, intending to stay only eight months. But he was already toying with his theories, and he spent the next nine years in libraries conducting the exhaustive research which finally resulted in WOrids in Collision. Today he lives quietly in Princeton, New Jersey, rarely appearing in public. He has been more fortunate than Wegener and his continental drift theory in that Velikovsky has Eved to see his critics silenced and many of his seemingly far- out concepts confirmed. Ever since the invention of the printing press, publishers have been flourishing on best selling books covering the whole spectrum of pseudoscience. Volumes of profound nonsense, such as the works on pyramidology and Atlantis, have sold in amazing numbers generation after generation. Nearly every major publisher has books of astrology and flying saucers on his lists. A large part of the endless stream of theses, papers, and learned studies by establishment scien- tists has in time proven invalid and more crackpot than even the cultist literature. It was incredible that Velikovsky's contemporaries singled out his work - a book that had taken nine years of careful study and research - for their venom. In retrospect many of the anti- Velikovsky critiques read like the work of deranged lunatics who had not even bothered to read the book they were attempting to criticize. They were against the book simply because it propounded ideas that were contrary to the accepted theories of the day. They resented the fact that a psychiatrist dared to speculate on astronomy and archaeology. He was an intruder. Above all they resented the fact that his book was very well written (most scientists are miserable writers). If I had not been psychoanalytically trained, I would have had some harsh words to say to my critics,’ Dr Velikovsky said loftily in the early 1950s. Orthodox scientists have always sneered at the works of Charles Fort, an American humorist who published four books of oddities and scientific anomalies, primarily because Fort delighted in attacking the scientific establishment. Now they tried to lump Velikovsky together with Fort. Scientists and the untutored followers of sden-tism spent years denigrating Velikovsky and generating the legend that be was just another crackpot, The ageing psychiatrist orbit around the sun and had been observed by all the existing races and recorded in theL