Weird Earth: Debunking Strange Ideas about Our Planet PDF
Preview Weird Earth: Debunking Strange Ideas about Our Planet
weird earth weird earth DEBUNKING STRANGE IDEAS ABOUT OUR PLANET DONALD R. PROTHERO This book is a publication of Red Lightning Books 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA redlightningbooks.com © 2020 by Donald R. Prothero All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2020 ISBN 978-1-68435-061-2 (hdbk.) ISBN 978-1-68435-136-7 (web PDF) This book is dedicated to the great geologists who trained me and inspired me: Harry Cook Mike Woodburne Mike Murphy Lewis Cohen Peter Sadler Paul Robinson Wally Broecker Neil Opdyke Dennis Kent Bill Ryan Walter Pitman Rich Schweickert Larry DeMott Dewey Moore Bob Dott CONTENTS Foreword ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xv 1 Science and Critical Thinking 1 2 The Flat Earth 22 3 Ptolemy Revisited 41 4 The Hollow Earth 60 5 Is the Earth Expanding? 73 6 Did We Really Land on the Moon? 81 7 Magnetic Myths 96 8 Earth-Shaking Myths 102 9 Quacks and Quakes 109 10 Was There a Great Flood? 117 11 Are Dinosaurs Faked? 145 12 Is the Earth Only Six Thousand Years Old? 152 13 Mysteries of Mount Shasta 167 14 The Myth of Atlantis 178 15 The Mysterious Ley Lines 190 16 Crystal Con Artists 201 17 Water Witching 216 18 Mysterious Earth: Why People Want to Believe Weird Things 228 Notes 249 For Further Reading 265 Index 273 FOREWORD: ROMANCING THE STONE The book you hold in your hands by my friend and colleague Donald Proth- ero is one of the most captivating you will ever read. Once you start in, you won’t be able to put it down as you will be constantly amazed by what strange ideas people have about our planet. I’ve been studying weird beliefs for over a quarter century, and in reading this book I was still stunned by what some members of my species think about earth, including that it is at the center of the universe, that it is only six thousand years old, that all those dinosaur fossils are faked, that it is a giant magnet, that it is flat, that it is hollow, that it is constantly expanding, that we never visited its moon, that there are mys- terious ley lines around it directing the planet’s energies, and that there was once an ancient advanced civilization on it called Atlantis. On this last claim, on May 16, 2017, I spent nearly four hours on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast debating an alternative archaeologist named Graham Hancock, who believes that long before ancient Mesopotamia, Bab- ylonia, and Egypt there existed an even more glorious civilization that was so thoroughly wiped out by a comet strike around twelve thousand years ago that nearly all evidence of its existence vanished, leaving only the faintest of traces that he thinks include a cryptic warning that such a celestial catastro- phe could happen to us. Hancock has put forth variations on this general theme in numerous well-written and best-selling books, including Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization (1995), The Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind (1997), Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization (2002), Magicians of the Gods (2015), and most re- cently America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization (2019). I listened to the audio editions of Magicians of the Gods and America Before, both read by the author, whose British accent and breathless revelatory storytelling style is, I confess, compelling. But is it true? I’m skeptical. As I explained in my June 2017 column in Scientific American: “First, no matter how ix
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