Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization by J. Douglas Kenyon Read Free Book Online Page A

rekindle and amplify a long-standing, if dormant, curiosity in the author to examine the even larger issues of how and why civilizations have come and gone on our planet. As a result of the inquiry thus spurred, Schoch found that his own trained, unquestioning allegiance to the prevailing scientific paradigm of uniformitarianism, which governed his geological fields of interest, began metamorphosing in favor of catastrophism as the theory of choice for explaining past—and perhaps even future—planetary changes of the epochal kind.
     
    This personal intellectual journey informs Schoch’s first nontechnical book,
Voices of the Rocks: A Scientist Looks at Catastrophes and Ancient Civilizations,
coauthored with Robert Aquinas McNally, a professional science writer. In it, they survey the evidence and convincingly argue that instead of evolution and cultural change being a gradual process over many millennia (the uniformitarian viewpoint), natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods, and extraterrestrially sourced impacts (asteroids, comets, meteorites) have significantly and often abruptly altered the course of human civilization (the catastrophist perspective).
     
    Indeed, research conducted and reported by Schoch and many others strongly suggests that cataclysmic natural events have obliterated civilizations in the past and could well do so again. Schoch admits that he went “screaming and kicking” toward catastrophism, without any prior seeding by professional mentors or university teachers who were closet proponents of the alternate paradigm. But, he says, “I just followed the evidence, and in so doing, it just didn’t take me to where I was taught it would. As a scientist, I couldn’t dismiss the evidence out of hand, and so another theory was needed to account for it.”
     
    In proposing catastrophism as an alternative working model for past events, Schoch’s book also sends a clarion call about the need to address various modern environmental issues such as global warming, ozone depletion, and the threat of large terrestrial impacts from outer space, any one of which may portend a disaster of global proportions.
     
    Schoch and McNally begin their book with an overview of the scientific process and, specifically, an examination of how science progresses, including the concept of thought paradigms and how they shift as the world actually changes (or at least human perceptions thereof). By way of example, they note that the ancient worldview of the heavens as being a dangerous place populated by angry gods may not have been mythological fantasy after all, but rather a paradigm using religious language to explain the observation of actual phenomena, such as would occur if and as Earth’s orbit carried our planet through a dense meteor stream in space.
     
    After Earth’s orbit took it out of that meteor stream and, after time elapsed, this paradigm would eventually become irrelevant and would be superseded by one that reflected the subsequently calmer skies, such as the Earth-centered series of concentric planetary orbital rings later proposed by Aristotle.
     
    The authors claim that the same paradigm-shift phenomenon is at work today concerning geology, the evolution of the species, and human cultural change, with secular catastrophism gaining ascendancy over uniformitarianism. This change is based principally on the abrupt shifts in the fossil records of plant and animal communities in the earth that have been observed by various researchers, indicating relatively rapid mass extinctions of life on the surface of the planet at various points in the past (such as the disappearance of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period sixty-five million years ago).
     
    In particular, the work begun in 1980 by the father-son team of Drs. Luis and Walter Alvarez, and repeated by others, identified the presence of higher-than-normal concentrations of iridium in the so-called K-T boundary, the thin