Works dealing with the ancient riddles often reduce to little more than coffee-table picture books. They massage and embellish the old mysteries but do not even pretend to resolve them. This present study paves new ground in that it offers gratifying insights to some of the time-worn riddles, and it resolves others completely. Its unusual success stems from two independent clues that the author stumbled upon by accident while pursuing unrelated interests more than a thousand miles apart. They defied explanation at first, but as their meaning clarified they combined to yield a veritable key to understanding--a key that opens the door to long-hidden secrets in diverse fields of inquiry.
In order to understand how this might be one must be aware that all of science that pertains to earth's history is based on deductions drawn from the rocks and other residues that have survived from olden times. But the deductive process has to start someplace, and in the absence of eye-witness testimony Science bases its ratiocinations upon a seemingly obvious Principle. Namely, it assumes that the earth was shaped by processes and events which conformed to the known laws of physics--that is to say, processes that we see in operation today including, perhaps, an occasional meteoric impact.
But obvious though this Principle of Uniformity may seem superficially Petersen finds clear evidence that exceptional events have taken place in the past which transcend the normally understood laws of nature. In particular, from a critical examination of the loess he shows that this vast silty formation came into being as a Fortean-like fall--a process obviously beyond normal experience and one that implies the existence of an added dimension of space. Given this unearthly catastrophic process in the arsenal of nature it follows that some of those deductions about earth's past that we now take for granted might be grossly in error after all.
Building upon this new finding Petersen then proceeds to formulate an enlarged model for comets--a model in four dimensions which not only accommodates all of their known properties but certain "deduced properties" as well. That is, the author interprets various ancient legends dealing with great catastrophe as fanciful accounts of cometary encounter, and then he reasons backwards to define other parts of his model agreeably. Of course, it is then only to be expected that the resulting picture would "explain" those particular legends, but it resolves a great many other riddles at the same time.
As a case in point it gives an easy alternative for that unlikely suggestion about the planet Venus that Immanuel Velikovsky offered in his book, "Worlds in Collision". Drawing on ancient legends and cuneiform inscriptions that author deduced that Venus was formerly a comet that passed close to the earth on an occasion, causing great damage. Then, when its cometary properties gradually faded, and it acquired a more stable orbit, it became the planet that we know today. Petersen does not challenge the data that led to this conclusion; he only reinterprets it in the light of his enlarged model for comets, and thereby he explains other enigmas about that planet in the same context.
Furthermore, his model for comets, and the peculiar way that they react on impact, gives an easy explanation for the rings of Saturn and various legends from old pertaining to that planet. In this light one can understand how mariners in ancient times were able to determine longitude in the western hemisphere, as displayed on the well-known Piri Re'is map.
Again, the author's picture of comets gives an easy accounting for the extinction of an ancient Indian metropolis that flourished in central Arizona at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Various legends surviving from olden times on Easter Island can also be understood in this light. In fact, it appears that the same comet as destroyed that ancient civilization also brought an end to the statue building culture on Easter Island, the most likely culprit being a daughter of the great comet of 1680.
The list of successes continues on, and not surprisingly, it includes a mechanism which could easily produce a world-wide flood answering to the account in the Book of Genesis. Here both the separation of the continents and the fossiliferous layers are understood as products of a single cometary impact. Petersen concludes that the animals represented as fossils in these rocks were victims of Fortean-type events, even as the snails in the loess, and that they were probably alien to the earth. In that case they would have no bearing on the question of evolution; certainly they could not be offered in support of it. Unfortunately the time of the tragedy is left undetermined because none of the dating systems currently in use are applicable to these"non-physical" circumstances.
Petersen ends his presentation by offering a few personal impressions about the religious and philosophical implications of these findings.
About the Author
Richard Petersen was born in Arizona 70 years ago and lived as a boy in an area where residues of a prehistoric civilization could be found scattered upon the ground routinely after after every rain. Much later his attempt to understand the demise of that old nation grew by stages into this present volume.
The author attended school in Phoenix and then later the University of California at Berkeley where he majored in physics--in the hope, as he recalls, of catching a glimpse of "Ultimate Truth". He did his graduate research in solid state physics--specifically on a class of magnetic materials at very low temperatures. After receiving his doctoral diploma he abandoned academia in favor of private industry--chiefly the semiconductor industry, where he served in various research and engineering capacities.
During his leisure hours, however, he dallied with riddles from the ancient past. While yielding gladly to the laws of nature and the weight of evidence he cast aside the artifical constraints that academicians habitually impose upon themselves. Thereby did his efforts bear notable fruits .
