In recent prehistory, possibly as late as 9,500 B.C. (the date ascribed by Plato to the sinking of Atlantis), a profoundly traumatic phenomenon plagued the earth. This event, the result of a distant cosmic explosion, caused severe volcanic eruptions, massive earthquakes, catastrophic flooding, and the upheaval of the world's mountain ranges. The earth's axis may have tilted, or its crust been violently displaced. Continents rose and sank. Mass extinctions of plants and animals followed, and a period of eerie global darkness.

The catastrophe struck suddenly, researchers report. Those that survived sought refuge in caves and high mountains, the record of their plight preserved to this day in hundreds of ancient deluge/conflagration myths from virtually every cultural tradition. Scientists gathered the evidence for such a catastrophe in the last century, and more recently, but explained away parts of it through ice age theory, now known to be fundamentally flawed. The rest of the evidence, until now, science has been unable to explain.

No, this is not the synopsis of Hollywood's next disaster extravaganza, nor a rehashing of Immanual Velikovsky's catastrophe theory, but the product of serious research and the subject of two soon-to-be released books written by independent experts in the field of recent prehistory. The compelling evidence assembled by these authors reveals the existence of a prehistoric reality that casts orthodox notions about early man into the realm of mere guess work. The books are: Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9,500 BC, by D. S. Allan and J. B. Delair, and Earth Under Fire: Humanity's Survival of the Apocalypse, by Paul LaViolette.

ORTHODOX ASSUMPTIONS

With its long-standing preference for uniformitarianism (the doctrine that nothing sudden occurred in prehistory, only slow evolutionary and geological changes), modern science has discounted what was taken for granted in the last century: that hard evidence reveals a global catastrophe occurred recently on Earth. That bias, coupled with the dogma of scientific materialism, the presumption that all existence, even consciousness, evolved from matter alone, remains the unproven basis upon which conventional theories of human origins rest.

Ice age theory was born about 180 years ago, in connection with studies carried out in the Alps. Geology was then only just being born. Pioneers of the day took most fossil evidence as having resulted from the Great Flood of tradition, the benchmark in world history before the birth of modern science, promulgated by classical writings and religion, and tied to beliefs that the world is a mere 4,000-6,000 years old. Geology, however, as a systematic science, found the earth was millions of years old, and that rain-induced flooding could not account for much of the geological devastation that occurred at the time of the mass extinctions. As the scientific movement adopted its uniformitarian dogma, it sought to explain away all prehistory in purely materialistic terms, discarding anything that smacked of superstition or catastrophism. Scientists of the day, in effect, threw out the baby with the floodwater, adopting prejudices about human origins and past civilizations that dominate to this day.

Within this skewed climate, science ascribed some of the hard evidence of a great cataclysm in recent prehistory to the movement of glaciers, which undoubtedly took place in some areas. But relying on this theory alone necessitated a full blown ice age, then ice ages of greater duration and severity to account for mounting evidence that something extraordinarily severe had struck the planet, something that wiped out most of the world's mammals, uplifted mountain ranges, caused widespread volcanic explosions, carved valleys and fjords, and left massive deposits of stone and gravel strewn across the globe's land masses.

LETTING THE FACTS SPEAK

To understand more fully the story told by the scientific record, rather than what may be described as the contrived positions of orthodoxy, we spoke with J. B. Delair, a long-time researcher in the field of recent prehistory, and coauthor of Cataclysm!, published in '95 in the U.K. (to be released in the U.S. early this fall by Bear & Co. with introduction by Rand Flem-Ath).

Delair told us that in his career as a researcher he had come upon many very strange anomalies including massive fossil records in bone caves, where the remains of countless numbers of incompatible prehistoric animals, saber-toothed tigers, lions, wolves, bison, rhinoceros, mammoth, were found washed into deep subterranean recesses, animals that perished in recent prehistory all over the world. Human beings, in many instances, were found in similar conditions, radio carbon dated to times consistent with the animal deaths, and from ethnic groups as diverse as European, Eskimo and Melanesian, as in the case of a find in China. Similar finds have been recorded in India, Brazil, North America and the Balkans. Geologists have also recorded finding the remains of hundreds of humans who died from natural causes in caves, apparently seeking refuge from the catastrophe.

As a result of this, I wasn't at all happy with some of the explanations, Delair said. One of these being the ice age, another being the chronology.

The key to unlocking the problem of the anomalies proved elusive. But Delair discovered he was not alone in his quest. He received a phone call from Dr. D.S. Allan, a biologist and researcher in the field of earth severance (shifting land masses), who shared similar interests, and a partnership was born. Coupling their talents and interdisciplinary backgrounds, they labored for years and found what appears to be the missing link that unlocks the secret of recent prehistory, global cataclysm.

Allan and Delair discovered that, contrary to scientific dogma, certain events took place very rapidly in earth's prehistory, such as the shifting of land masses, as in the case of their own British Isles, detached from the European mainland just 6,000 years ago.

Allan, a Cambridge University doctor of philosophy, versed in physics, chemistry and biology, had already discovered that many of the same types of plants and animals have existed in different parts of the world when they should not, being separated by deserts or water. Delair characterized his knowledge of anomalous fossil evidence and Allan's of biological as two sides of the same coin....bits and pieces of the same puzzle.

After years of work, those pieces would fit together, buttressed by an ignored scientific record that, when fully revealed, proved stunning.

It throws a monkey wrench into almost everything, even evolution, Delair told us, when asked about the implications of his work. Evolution cannot always be a question of the survival of the fittest. You can have a sudden event that can wipe out the best and worst, the survival of the luckiest in those instances. he said.

Using carbon dating, the resources of the British Museum and the Cambridge University library, Delair and Allan established a time frame for the anomalous fossils, which in turn set a time frame for the event that caused their sudden demise.

The main thing is the dating of the fossils, Delair said. They are very, very recent in geological parlance, although quite old in human history. The changes they signify are enormous, because there are dislocations in entire faunas and floras by thousands of miles. There are also a lot of very abnormal burials. You get sea animals alongside birds and land animals, coal alongside tropical sea urchins, and all sorts of funny things.

CONTRIVED SCIENCE

It (the ice age) was an invention, Delair stated flatly, and in part a reaction to what early geologists and the scientific movement as a whole considered superstition, the Flood/Conflagra-tion legends. The original idea of an ice age going back millions of years, ebbing and flowing across the northern and southern hemispheres near the poles, just doesn't stand up to scrutiny, as you can see from our writings. We've drawn upon the literature which was, in fact, full of objections (to ice age notions), on geological and biological grounds.

Many Norwegian fjords, for example, thought to have been carved by ice sheets sliding down from mountains, are open ended. There is nowhere for the glaciers to have come down from, Delair said. The fjords were gigantic fissures, filled up with ice at some later time and smoothed by some ice action, but not caused by ice. So-called evidence for an ice age having occurred, more over, such as striation (grooved or ridged rocks) and erratically strewn boulders, supposedly the result of glacial movements, occurs in parts of the globe where an ice age is known not to have taken place.

Research funding that rewards conventional results, Delair told us, is partly responsible for perpetuating erroneous assumptions, along with trying to fit all the evidence into the same worn out theory, necessitating longer, geographically broader, and more numerous ice ages. Also, Delair notes, fitting the pieces of this grand puzzle of prehistory together requires expertise in a variety of fields. Dr. Allan, what's more, devoted his retirement to this study, a concentration of effort few, if any, conventionally employed researchers would be able to accomplish.

The picture Allan, Delair and others paint, supported by a great deal of field evidence, resembles a catastrophe of mythic proportions. Ice age theory, on the other hand, fails time and again to account for the overwhelming field evidence. The devastation proves to have been so great, in fact, that nothing of earthly origin could have been responsible. Not even a comet or asteroid, Allan and Delair say, could have wreaked such severe damage. The destructive agent, they tell us, would not have been necessarily very large, but would have been magnetically powerful, an exploding star, a supernova, that hurled one or more pieces of its fiery mass our way, upsetting the axes and orbits of various planets through magnetic influence, as it moved like a pinball through our solar system for about nine years. The event wreaked horrific trauma upon various planets, and caused Earth to convulse, they say, but amounted to a minor incident in cosmic terms.

COSMIC EXPLOSIONS

Evidence of a supernova explosion, in the form of aluminum 22 (along with other scientific and mythological evidence), found in concentration at the edge of our solar system, helped Allan and Delair conclude that a stellar blast probably caused the massive destruction. Iron ore in the earth from 11,000 years ago, its magnetic polarity violently reversed, also testifies to a powerful, extraterrestrial encounter with a magnetically powerful agent at the same time period.

Dr. Paul LaViolette, author of Earth Under Fire, discovered evidence of a different sort of cataclysm, a volley of cosmic waves resulting from an explosion in the galactic core. Entering our solar system, this galactic super wave (the most powerful energetic phenomenon in the galaxy) would have interrupted the solar wind's ability to repel most intruding cosmic dust particles, letting the interstellar wind, in effect, have its way with us.

LaViolette, a systems scientist and physicist, found high concentrations of cosmic dust in undisturbed polar ice from Greenland at ice-age depths. He determined the amount of cosmic dust in the ice samples by measuring the amount of iridium, a metal that is rare on Earth but abundant in extraterrestrial material. The old uniformitarian assumption was that the rate of cosmic dust depositing in the earth would not have change over millions of years, but LaViolette found unusually high concentrations in his samples, and other evidence of a cosmic visitor during ice age times.

In Earth Under Fire, a synthesis of astrophysics and ancient mythical and esoteric traditions, LaViolette details the case for the super wave phenomenon having recently passed through our solar system. He includes, in his body of evidence, the discovery by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft of narrow grooves, like that of a phonograph record, in the rings of Saturn, which, if millions of years old as uniformitarians maintain, would have banded together by now. LaViolette explains how the super wave would have caused the rings to appear as they do, even as Allan and Delair describe how a super nova chunk, would have disrupted the orbital paths and axial rotations of neighboring planets, indications that something of immense proportions came our way in recent prehistory. Some researchers stated, even before the Voyager visit, that Saturn's rings may be a mere 10,000-20,000 thousand years old, within the time period LaViolette, Allan, and Delair say the cataclysm took place.

Within months of the event, LaViolette says, a shroud of cosmic dust would have caused severe climatic changes on Earth, periods of darkness, severe cold, and then extreme heat, massive flooding, and incendiary temperatures as the dust interacted with the Sun, causing it to go into an active, flaring state, LaViolette said in a recent interview. If you could imagine the worst solar storm that's ever occurred and beef that up a thousand or hundred thousand times, that would be going on continuously...And then you have the possibility that a flare event could engulf the Earth.

WHAT THE ANCIENTS KNEW

LaViolette builds a scientific and mythological foundation for cataclysm as a cyclical event, a recurrence of galactic core explosions in 26,000 year cycles, a period that relates to the precession of the equinoxes. This is the duration of one Great Year recognized by the ancient Greeks, Zoroastrians, and Chinese. Hindu scriptures recognize the same cycle, a succession of declining and advancing ages that seem to relate to our solar system's orbit around the galactic core, the apparent astrological focus of the Central Sun of existence, Brahma, conscious experience of which results in transcendental ecstasy and liberation from cycles of mortal suffering, or karma, not the least of which would be recurrent cataclysms.

The Galactic core explosion cycle is another important cycle that Earth must reckon with, LaViolette urges, citing numerous ancient traditions, many of which reveal that advanced astronomical knowledge, and therefore advanced human beings, existed in precataclysmic times.

The zodiac, in fact, LaViolette says, probably came down to us as a cryptogram, a time capsule, designed to alert us to the ongoing emanations from the galactic core, and that the sphinx and pyramids of the Giza plateau stand as an astronomical memorial to the great catastrophe. The figures of the zodiac, Delair told us, appear in most catastrophe myths. And the universality of this time capsule's message, the knowledge of cosmic cycles, is hard to ignore. LaViolette and others find it encoded in numerous myths, in cultural and mystical traditions, and in the world's megalithic architecture (see The Orion Mystery, Robert Bauval, Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock, and The Message of the Sphinx, Hancock and Bauval). As these commentators point out, the ancient myths speak universally of a sea-faring people who seem to have been the guardians of advanced knowledge. Their universal message, apparently passed down from a forgotten pre-cataclysmic world, urges human progress and harmony with the source of all creation.

Almost unavoidably then, LaViolette, Allan and Delair, Hancock, and Bauval (see also Thompson and Cremo's Hidden History of the Human Race) reveal that recent prehistory was not at all what modern science, burdened by its prejudices, has erroneously assumed. A past cloaked in mystery comes to light, objectively, and the way mankind sees himself must profoundly change. A rich, diverse body of work has accumulated, interdisciplinary in nature, filled not only with ancient lore but hard evidence that supports timeless traditions. This body of work, moreover, discredits the dogma western science has promoted regarding human origins, the very nature of man.