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Turning to the ancient records for his evidence, Dr Velikovsky pointed out that early peoples had recorded Venus as an exceptionally bright object trailing smoke. The Chinese, Mayas, Toltecs, and Aztecs also recorded its motion... and the early Venus apparently followed a mtich different orbit, or trajectory, than the diminished orb now visible in our skies. The people of Mesopotamia did not even record Venus in their astronomical records. Later the Chaldeans described it as a ‘bright torch of heaven’ that ‘illuminates like the sun* and ‘fills the entire heaven*. Other far-flung cultures preserved similar comments, all of which suggest that Venus began as a comet which roared very close Another part of Dr Velikovsky's evidence consisted of the stories of the 'rain of fire’ which encompassed the earth, and he quoted from Mexican texts as well as the records of the Assyrians. If he was right then some of the oil deposits on earth were a result of that celestial shower. But geologists have always assumed that oil is created by a process which takes millions of years. Since Worlds in Collision was written, deposits of liquid hydrocarbons have been found and dated in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, giving every indication they are only a few a 1 an The ancient texts described the comet Venus as coming from the fifth planet, Jupiter. Was this possible? This was the flimsiest part of the Velikovsky theory, and the most widely attacked. Ironically, the very men who advocate the theory that tektites are the result of meteor impacts on the moon (Chapter Four) are the same ones who deny that a Jovian comet could come into being, perhaps by the same process. Velikovsky proposed a collision of planets as a possible source. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter could be made up of surviving fragments from that awesome event Our ideas about Jupiter itself have been revised considerably since 1950. We used to think of it as a gigantic planetary body composed of gases and liquids, but in recent years powerful radio waves have been detected coming from it. Apparently, there are great electrical storms on the surface, and some of these storms affect earthly radio waves as much, or more so, than sunspots, Studies of all this have led to a new theory, now quite popular among astronomers, that Jupiter may not be a planet at all. It may be a cold star! Maybe one planet could not give birth to another, but a star, even a cold star, could. Jupiter's diameter is approximately eleven times the diameter of the earth - about eighty-six thousand miles. As nearly as we can determine, it revolves very rapidly on its axis; a Jovian day is less than ten Earth hours long. Through the telescope it appears to be ringed with cloud-like bands, the most interesting feature of which is the famous red spot. This is an elliptical spot some forty thousand kilometers long and thirteen thousand kilometers wide - roughly equal in area to the entire surface of the Earth. This spot was first observed by Robert Hooke in 1664. Astronomers have been watching it ever since. It also rotates with the planet but at different speeds. And it always remains in approximately the same latitude, wandering only slightly. * See 'Radat Observations of the Planets’, Invin I. Shapiro, Scientific American. July 1968. to the earth at one point - close enough perhaps to cause tidal waves and spew burring fragments on to the earth's surface. thousand years oldl