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Having read "Was the First "Bigfoot" a Hoax?" I sensed that our friend Loren Coleman has finally gone off the deep end. So I reread the article and unfortunately my first impression is the same.
First, it should be noted that although Gerald Crew's footprint finding in 1958 ushered in the modern era of Bigfooting, there were good sightings and footprints found prior to this historic date; some of it was also published in newspapers. Why didn't Lo ren Coleman torpedo reports prior to 1958?
Then Coleman says that Wallace's recent photos of Bigfoot look like the Roger Patternson "Bigfoot" captured on film in 1967. I say nonsense. Having seen the aforementioned Wallace photo and Patterson's footage, I suggest that Coleman have his eyes examine d. What I have found over the years is that people LOOK at Patterson's film, not STUDY it--then go on to make the most idiotic statements I have ever heard.
Coleman also says that I "pointed out that a Charles W. Edson claims he too talked to Patterson on October 20, 1967, when Patterson was on his way to the famous filming of Bigfoot." I never said that to Loren Coleman. What I said was that Edson claimed t o have seen both Patterson and Bob Gimlin gallop by on horseback while Charles Edson and someone named "Red" hid in the underbrush. One is easily inclined to take Edson's claim with a sack of salt as it is only one of many dubious claims coming from his q uarters.
At one point in the article Coleman quotes Wallace: "I still have the set of wooden feet that I paid fifty dollars for." This refers to the tracks Wallace allegedly planted in northern California in 1958. To that I say: "Let's see them!"
Coleman's piece makes good copy. But his claim of "Cryptozoology's Original Sin" has a weak foundation, I feel, and it will probably be a while before anyone gets kicked out of the garden.
Danny Perez
Director of the Center for Bigfoot Studies
Norwalk, California
Loren Coleman replies:
I think it's interesting that although Perez claims to have reread my article a couple times, he nevertheless seems to have missed the thrust of the piece, which I will get to in a moment. After stating the obvious fact that "good sightings and footprints " were found before 1958, he asks why I didn't torpedo reports prior to 1958? Well, as I clearly state in the article, my examination was mainly about the cultural importance and significance of one event. Indeed, through comments about Native American ac counts and even citations of my work with Mark A. Hall on the Indian precursors to the modern era of Bigfoot accounts, the article actually supports the notion that good records existed before the incidents at Bluff Creek in 1958. I must assume that Perez failed to read the last paragraph of my article on his many readings of my piece.
Next Perez alludes to "idiotic statements" by people like me examining the 1967 Patterson Bigfoot film and comparing it to Ray Wallace's recent photo of a "Bigfoot asleep on a log." What can I say? It's all in the eyes of the beholder and Perez is allowe d his opinion. As to what Perez says he said to me about the Patterson incident versus my remembrance of it, it's possible I misheard him. But the nitpicking does not diminish the major thrust of my article's thesis--that some funny things have happened at Bluff Creek, California, especially in 1958.
Finally, Perez's comment on Wallace's set of wooden Bigfoot feet and his desire to "see them" is shared, of course, by me and should be directed at Wallace himself. But isn't this whining just as silly as all the skeptics that say, "Well, if Bigfoot exis ts, let's see 'em."?
Concluding that the "milestone" Bigfoot report of 1958 was a hoax, and then briefly considering whether subsequent sightings should therefore be dismissed, Coleman affirms that, even though the report that initiated the modern era of Bigfoot was an elabo rate hoax, the accumulated evidence for the reality of the creature is, in his view, abundant and convincing.
Fellow cryptozoologist Henry Bauer is equally unconcerned about the possibility that an epochal sighting of the Loch Ness Monster was a hoax. He accepts the likelihood that the first sightings of Nessie in 1933 were a journalistic fraud. But, fraud or not , they encouraged witnesses to testify about their sightings. "Indeed," writes Bauer, "it may have required such an artificial stimulus to generate sufficient interest that people would be prepared to spend time in the pursuit of such an elusive phenomeno n."(1)
This ambivalence about epochal hoaxes is evidently not rare among researchers, whose attitude seem to be: A hoax is in principle a bad thing, but if it initiates decades of sustained sightings, it has served the greater good.
One wonders how common this attitude is among the hoaxers themselves. While most hoaxers are motivated by cynicism and self-promotion, it is more than likely that some of them are true believers in the phenomena they are faking, and who engage in "pious fraud" so as to encourage or engender authentic experiences by others. They may see themselves as noble catalysts, whose behavior is vindicated by increases in genuine reports. But if any such hoaxer does come to regret his fabrications, perhaps he can se ek absolution from experienced anomalists who understand the value of looking at the big picture.
Brian Chapman
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
1. Henry Bauer, The Enigma of Loch Ness: Making Sense of a Mystery, University of Illinois, 1986, pp155-6.
"I am not related to Bill Green of Connecticut."
John Green
Harrison Hot Springs, B.C. Canada
Loren Coleman replies:
In the The Anomalist:3, I "replied" to Mr. John Green's critique of my Anomalist:2 article ("Was the First 'Bigfoot' a Hoax?: Cryptozoology's Original Sin") on the possible hoaxing of the 1958 Bluff Creek-Wallace events. As a sidebar, using information fr om the bigfoot email list's FAQ, I made some comments on John's continued putdown of Eastern Bigfoot investigators. Specifically, I wondered aloud about his treatment of Bill Green which this list had identified as "John Green's son" on, at least, six inc idents since April of 1995. So it is very upsetting to hear that Bill Green is not John Green's son. Obviously, John should know. So much for info on the internet! I have since contacted the list administrator who in turn has removed the incorrect stateme nt from Bill Green's entry.
David Richey presents remote viewing data and provides a statistical analysis which purports to show that his accuracy was much greater than chance would allow. But there are at least two errors. He assumes that for each individual item the probability o f getting it correct by chance is 1/2. He also assumes that all items were statistically independent. Both of these assumptions are false, and his statistical conclusions are invalid.
Procedures for valid analysis of appropriately collected remote viewing data have been used in parapsychology for over half a century. Those who undertake such analysis may wish to familiarize themselves with the scientific literature of the field.
George P. Hansen
Cranbury, New Jersey
"Baker's article struck me as thoroughly reductionistic. I don't consider even dreams to be adequately explained, much less waking hallucinations."
Roger W. Wescott
Southbury, Connecticut
The article by Robert Baker, "Alien Dreamtime," energetically and emphatically demonstrates the typical skeptical viewpoint that should fail to convince anyone well-versed and open-minded enough about alien phenomena to see beyond the two-dimensional arguments from either camp's most outspoken members.
First, "sleep paralysis," a potentially valid culprit, and one often cited for rationalizing alien abduction, is not a convincing explanation. Baker ignores some of the most persuasive evidence supporting the abduction scenario. There are numerous documented cases of abductees coming in contact for the first time with others who had somehow been present with them through their ordeal--other abductees, often from distant parts of the country. Years later they have met in some therapy group and discovered not only recognition, but shared remembered experiences.
The sleep paralysis condition almost always confines itself to the bedroom. Some floating is reported, but by and large the experience is one of terror and absolute awareness while trapped in bed. Nowhere does Baker come up with a scenario in which sleep paralysis can produce the extensive hallucinations involving flights inside a flying disc, complex medical and sexual experiments, travels over land and through space, and highly complicated dialogue and messages.
Sleep paralysis, known by many names throughout the ages, usually involves the presence of "the old hag" -- the "mare" in Old German, from which our 'nightmare' word is derived. She was Lilitu in Babylonian -- demoness of the wind; the succubus and the lamia in later centuries. This phenomena is outstanding enough on its own, in terms of its cross-cultural implications.
But if the suggestion is that now the populace has begun to supplant the hag with the extraterrestrial, then serious questions arise. Namely, why did the hallucination become so much more complex and successive in nature--where there is now a definite "plot" to a series of abductions. And how, like the appearance of the old hag, do the uninformed have the same hallucinations as those familiar with the tradition?
The most damning evidence to Baker's proposition is the experience of young children. What explanation is given for the numerous cases where young boys and girls repeat, in often terrifying detail, identical stories as those told by adults? These are four and five year-olds that have never been exposed to the abduction "media blitz." They were not allowed to watch scary movies, can't read, and even if they glimpsed a picture of an alien face, there are still so many scarier beasts out there in children's literature -- why would this one pervade their nightmares?
Another point of conflict: Baker claims that the choking and tightness of the chest during sleep paralysis leads to sexual excitement, and therefore creates the dreams of alien rape and sexual intrusion. This is in flat contradiction to the stories of the abductees. In all the literature, there are only three or four cases I can recall where the abductee had actually had an exciting sexual experience. All the others involve no pleasure, only cold stimulation for the males, and painful, often surgical intrusion for the females. If these are hallucinations, surely our minds could do better.
As one last point, I myself am a frequent victim of sleep paralysis, experiencing the terrifying condition at least three times a year. Only once have I had an hallucination. This one was incredibly vivid, and almost identical to Ronald Siegal's experience with the presence weighing on him and choking him. Mine was definitely of the "old hag" variety. Now what is important about my experience is that I had this experience at the height of an intense period of fascination and research into the subject of alien abductions. I had read just about every book on the subject, had attended several UFO conventions, and had seen every movie about UFOs--Close Encounters I have seen seven times. No one could have been more influenced by the media presentation of the alien theory than I--yet my hallucination was of the old hag. How is this possible, and what does it mean for those claiming sleep paralysis as the answer to all alien abductions? At the time of the experience I knew nothing of the history of sleep paralysis. Only months later did I come across the reference to the old hag.
It seems to me that for the skeptic to use sleep paralysis as an answer to abductions, it can only be through one possible explanation: that of Jung's collective unconscious and the development of a new cultural archetype -- that of the UFO. Yet this response should open up a wider range of questions, and should call into doubt our whole understanding of the mind, subconscious, matter and physics. For if a child who is essentially ignorant of the extensive alien abduction scenario can subconsciously produce that exact scenario in sleep-paralysis-induced hallucinations, then the mind does not work in the way we believe it to, and nothing --not even the presence of interdimensional beings who populate the realms beyond our perception--can be dismissed out of hand.
Baker also displayed a lack of familiarity with his subject matter. He repeatedly claimed that these abductees only visited quack hypnotists with no credentials, and included John Mack among them. Mack, however, is a reputable Harvard psychologist with over 18 years of extensive psychiatry experience and has even won the Pullitzer Prize. He became involved in this 'dangerous game' only after some of his regular patients began quoting similar stories under hypnosis that poured forth despite his outright disbelief and ignorance of the subject.
And it is clear that Baker did not read all of Mack's book. [Editor's Note: In fact, Baker's article was written before the publication of Mack's book.] For, like other rational thinkers in UFO research (namely Vallee and Thompson), Mack states that his research has led him to believe not in the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but in the "intra dimensional" theory -- namely that what we are witnessing is just a continuation of an ancient and continuous process of interaction between humans and something other -- fairies and demons and elves in ages past, aliens and balls of light today; this is something that bears a striking resemblance to near-eastern beliefs in a spiritual otherworld where shapeshifting beings implicitly and covertly act on the subconscious of man to bring about the evolution of consciousness, to free humanity from the mortal shells where our souls have sought refuge. This is what Mack and others have theorized, and this theory fits the big picture revealed by the abductees and the sightings.
Two percent of the population are not being abducted by space traveling, heartless aliens. No one but Hopkins truly believes this to be the case. Yet the overwhelming evidence of supporting claims--and yes, often absurd stories--from different peoples and cultures from all all over the globe, from all ages and personalities, suggest that something on a far grander, and closer, scale is underway. We're not going to have convincing evidence of scratches and sexual intrusion; we're not going to have definitive photos and alien bodies recovered from crashes. For a control system to work, the hand of the manipulator cannot be completely revealed, especially if the near-eastern mythology is correct and our evolution can only come through free will.
This phenomena is acting on us, evolving us, on a deeper, highly complex level. It's acting like a control system, bringing about an evolutionary leap. Rogers also has not updated his research: on the whole, those who have undergone regression hypnotherapy have come to terms with their situation and have gone on to lead improved lives. The majority have reported reduced, if not eliminated abduction experiences, increased spirituality and tolerance, and a sense of peace, not unlike survivors of near-death experiences.
Skeptics like Baker and Klass will always be around to point out the "obvious," ignore the contradictory and unexplainable evidence, and make broad generalizations dismissing a widespread, mysterious and important phenomenon.
Dave Sakmyster
Rochester, NY
"I enjoyed the article about alien abductions very much except I didn't like the dogmatic style; and as the article went on, I liked the style less and less. By the end of the article, I said to myself, "This guy sounds like he belongs to CSICOP." And by God, when I looked at the back of the magazine, in Notes on Contributors, I found he really does belong to CSICOP. They all write in the same style as the Hearst press or the Marxists. It's a kind of deliberate stupidity. Even when people writing in that pontifical way are right, they sound wrong to me. Nobody can be that certain of anything. But dogmatists have this 'I know what is right and nobody else does, so you'd better listen to me' attitude, which to me is like the last survival of Machismo and medievalism. They're the John Waynes of philosophy. They gallop into the town with their True Grit and they're going to straighten everything out and take no horseshit from anybody. Well, that's okay in a movie, but when people start acting that way in real life, I feel they're kind of funny in the head, and should be put on medication. In spite of the tone, though, this article is very well done. If the guy would stop beating his chest as he presents his arguments, he'd make a better impression, I think.
"Anyway, this alien abduction phenomenon has the same drawbacks as the satanic abuse phenomenon, which is that it's intrinsically incredible and when you read the details it's even more incredible. The Satanic panic looks to me like an upsurge of unconscious material, the kind of things that are most heavily repressed and which every Freudian has written about and which Joyce wrote about in Finnegan's Wake, including incest and defecation and cannibalism, and that whole level of the unconscious which is concerned with the dirty and the forbidden and the fearful. That's what Jung calls the Shadow in his beautifully poetic psychology.
"The curious thing is that these hypnotherapists believe in what they are doing, and most of them lack real training.. There is John Mack at Harvard, who has real credentials. There is another guy called Dr. David Jacobs, who has credentials as a historian, but whenever I see him on television he never makes it clear to the audience that he's a doctor of philosophy in history. He gets addressed as Dr. Jacobs and the general impression is he's a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist; after all, he should be to hypnotize people and recover memories. But he's an amateur. Just like Budd Hopkins, the leader in this field. And John Mack is a real professional, which just goes to show how these weird memes can spread throughout the community. They can even suck in a few people who should know better.
"I don't mean to sound too dogmatic. Maybe some people have been abducted by aliens. But none of the cases that have been presented so far sound either convincing or even half-way plausible, and the closer you look at them the sillier they look, especially if you read the original transcripts, or the material stuck in an appendix somewhere. The details are dream material; they have nothing to do with ordinary kinds of consciousness. But this is going on at the same time as the satanic panics, the witch hunts, right out of the Middle Ages. We are supposed to be several centuries beyond the Dark Ages and we have these two typical symptoms of the Dark Ages going on, and the sociologist Jeffrey Victor attributes it to the stress of transition that society is undergoing. Our world is changing faster than it ever has before and a lot of people are so totally disoriented that they need a conspiratorial explanation. And it's either nasty aliens, or the other variation of that, the nasty alien who have made a secret agreement with the nasty CIA, and the whole government is involved in the cover-up.
"What I find what's most fascinating about these alien abductions stories is that they depend on which hypnotist you go to. If you've got symptoms of depression, dissociation, a rich fantasy life--otherwise known as hysterical personality--and generally not well relating to consensus reality and socioeconomic reality and so on, if you go to one type of hypnotherapist, you get mainstream treatment. If you go to another type, you're going to remember being abducted by aliens, and that explains all your emotional problems. You go to another guy and you find out you're parents are satantists and they involved you in ritual sacrifice of babies from the time you are old enough to hold a knife and join in and then eat the baby and then have incest with everybody. If you go to a Feminist, it turns out that your father had sex with you from infancy onward. It just depends on which hypnotist you go to. It's the classic situation we had at the beginning of the century being repeated. Freudian patients have Freudian dreams. Jungian patients have Jungian dreams. People under hypnotic regression remember the kind of thing that the hypnotist is fascinated by. Budd Hopkins hasn't found a single case of satanic abuse among his subjects; they all remember being abducted by aliens. And the ones who specialize in satanic abuse memories, they never get a patient who comes in with emotional problems because he was abducted by aliens: Their patents were all ruined by Satanic ritual."
--Robert Anton Wilson
(Edited and excerpted with permission from comments appearing in the
Winter 95/96 audio cassette edition of RAW's Trajectories
Newsletter, PO Box 700305, San Jose, CA. 95170)
For Wilson's website click here
Ted Holden does an admirable job of listing the anomalies involved with the remains of the extinct oversized land and air creatures. His conclusion "that gravitational conditions in the distant past were not the same as they are today" is a step i n the right direction, although I will pass on how distant the past really is. His conclusion that the existence of these large creatures required some sort of lessening of the Earth's gravitational field, however, needs re-examination
Like Holden, I once felt that the only way creatures could grow large was if there had been less, not more, gravity. Holden discusses some specific anomalies involving these land and air creatures. He discusses lifting capacities, the apparent need for the land creatures to live in water to support their bulk and the inability of the air creatures to make it into the air because of their bulk, comparable efficiencies of muscle use, and the probable inability of a heart to pump blood to an elevated head let alone the ability to elevate the head itself. All of these points argue effectively against the simple existence for creatures the absolute proof of whose existence we have in their remains.
But I approach the anomaly of the dinosaur from a slightly different direction.
We all know that science cannot admit anomalies. Whatever doesn't agree with theory simply cannot be. I discuss this at some length in At the Gates of the Citadel: The Subjugation of Modern Science (Financial Book Partners, 1994). Because we have to recall something to compare with reality in order to comprehend reality, we cannot see in reality anything for which we don't have recall. If we have knitted our recall into theoretical pictures that are internally consistent, we are incapable of recognizing anything in reality that does not agree with the picture of that reality we have created in our recall.
When dinosaur bones were first discovered, out came the calipers. Why? To determine how "big" whatever it was that the bones belonged to. Because we knew that gravity was a constant in the history of the Earth, we knew that we could determine how m uch flesh the bones carried by (note the use of recall) comparing them with what we know about how much flesh bones carry today.
The calculation put more flesh on the creatures than the creatures could carry around. At one point, the picture presented was of a travelling trough, the creature being so large that it dug a ditch as it moved across the fruited plain.
Searching our recall for an analogy of a creature that had more meat on it than it could carry around led us directly to the low gravity environment provided by water, and that's where our recall placed the dinosaur. For over a hundred years, artis ts churned out imaginative pictures of swamp bound dinosaurs, cold blooded creatures floating around in a steamy world.
And then footprints were found.
It wouldn't have been so bad if the footprints were plodding elephant-like along dried up lake beds. Unfortunately, however, for the water immersed dinosaur, the footprints were on land, by stream beds, and they were not of plodding creatures, they were of lith, lopping, even light creatures.
The new picture, then, precluded dinosaurs that could not move rapidly on land. Size became an anomaly, unrecognized as a necessity if the bones were to carry the weight required by the gravitational constant. The artists made the meat disappear, and the dinosaurs became, in our recall, simply large creatures.
But large creatures which, if they were to move in a manner dictated by their footprints, must be warm blooded. While the arguments for and against warm blooded and cold blooded are many and complex, suffice it to say that the creatures weren't lyi ng around sunning themselves on rocks. They were mobile, active, probably like, well, how about any one of the other creatures we see roaming the Earth in profusion today, attuned to and capable of easily surviving within its environment.
The arguments surrounding bloodedness are eliminated, however, if the Earth was warmer in the past. As the Earth cools off at a rate that causes it to emit three percent of its surface temperature at a constant rate, then, not too far in the distan t past the Earth must have been a good deal hotter than it is today. Emissions expand uniformly over the surface of an exploding sphere, and thus diminish inversely with the square of the distance from their source. This is identical to the measurement for falling objects, gravity. If we hypothesize that there is somethin g about the expanding electromagnetic emission field that produces a force back in the direction of the source of the emissions, then gravity would not be static, but rather would vary with the rate of cooling.
If the Earth was hotter in the past, then the attractive mechanism that was produced by its emission field would have been stronger, and the temperature at the surface of the Earth uniformly warmer. This in turn, would have important consequences for lif e forms evolving on its surface, consequences which I explore in The Cooling Continuum: The Rise and Fall of Species on Earth (FBP, 1994).
With the warm environment providing the energy by not leaching it out of the dinosaurs, the creatures could easily survive with the minimal circulatory systems found in cold blooded creatures. Having evolved with circulatory systems designed for warmer t emperatures, dinosaurs were sitting ducks for the cooling Earth moving into an environment in which the evolved circulatory systems could no longer support the bulk, resulting in the known extinction.
But what about the bulk itself? Would largeness require less gravity, or would more gravity dictate larger bones? We can get the answer to this question simply by looking at the bones of the creatures that evolved in low gravity environments--fish.
Low gravity permits flimsier support systems, fish bones being small compared to the size of the fish itself. High gravity systems would require stronger support systems. To support what? The support system itself!
Dinosaur bones had to be large and strong simply to support their own weight in the stronger field of attraction of a warmer Earth. Thus, the contemporary requirement to load on flesh to justify the size and strength of the dinosaur bones is elimin ated.
The bones were large because they had to support themselves. The life systems that developed around the bones, the creatures themselves, were normal sized creatures, lean, mean fighting machines, if you will, capable of moving easily and successful ly in the environment in which they developed (which, incidentally, is considerably different than the one our artists have implanted into our recall).
When I was writing the first draft of The Cooling Continuum, I had to paste a picture of a fish skeleton over the computer with a note, "its the attractive force, stupid," to keep reminding myself that it took more attractive force to produc e more bone, not less.
But where does that leave our air creatures? After all, if the attractive force was greater, leading to dinosaur bones which were even heavier in their day than they are in our own day, what happens when the air creature wants to take off with bones that are even heavier than bird bones are today.
Again, we can go into the water environment for an analogy. While fish move easily through this viscous environment, the manta ray actually flies through it. To understand why fish bones are smaller, or how mantas fly, we have to understand how the liquid lessens the effect of the attractive force. The denser the viscosity of the medium, the more the pressure forcing the medium down causes it to force matter occupying the medium up. This is Galileo's treasured buoyancy, or in modern scientific exper iments, the rising hazel nuts in a can filled with peanuts.
With a stronger attractive force, the Earth's atmosphere would have been denser than it is today. While it would also have been constituted differently, it is the density itself that accounts for the flight of giant air creatures.
This carries the discussion into the use of muscles and tendons to manipulate bone structure, not as Holden indicates, a square-cube problem, but rather a problem of leverage. Just as increased buoyancy would provide an explanation for the overly lo ng necks of some of the creatures which, when considered in light of this discussion, might have been little more than necks and tails with legs attached, it would take only a few strategically placed tendons to manipulate the giant wings so that these gi ant air creatures could soar in the dense atmosphere like the manta in the sea.
Which is exactly the opposite of our own problem. If we are going to find out about the world we live in, if we are going to advance successfully into the future, if we are going to escape the fate of the dinosaur, then we are going to have to soar. B ut to do so we are going to have to eliminate the density that controls our thoughts, laws created by people who knew nothing mindlessly applied by a process which manufactures a reality that exists nowhere outside of our own recall, a world of fantasies floating in our minds.
If we want to survive in the world in which we find ourselves, we have to construct an accurate picture of that world. If we don't we will continue to move in a world that doesn't exist, and, as a result, cease to exist in that world, as blind to the comprehension of reality as the dinosaur itself must have been.
Peter Bros
Springfield, Virginia
Ted Holden replies:
Immanuel Velikovsky claimed that sauropods were enabled by the attenuated perceived gravity of the archaic solar system; my own miniscule contribution to this bizarre area of knowledge is the first reasonable attempt to quantify the extent to which sauro pods would be dysfunctional in our present world. What is shown is not that sauropods would be marginally disfunctional in our world, but that they were many times beyond the limit of what is possible in our world. In fact, were a brachiosaur to be so unf ortunate as to be dragged into our world by H. G. Wells' time machine, he would collapse in a heap, and suffocate and die within minutes, crushed by his own weight precisely as would be a blue whale dragged onto land.
This comment from Peter Bros is typical of a certain kind of reaction I receive that goes something like this: "There is some other explanation for the evidence indicating attenuated archaic gravity." The usual notion advanced is that the atmosphere was t hicker and that this was the primary explaination for the anomalies presented. This approach generates several new and insoluble problems while, at the same time, simply not accounting for all of the anomalies involved.
All present life forms are adapted to breathing air pretty much as it is now; it is questionable to say the least whether or not we could even breathe air which was thick enough to provide buoyancy for large animals. If any part of that thickness were due to extra oxygen, and that would be the case even if our own atmosphere were simply compressed, then the question arises as to whether we could breathe it without burning up.
Air thick enough for pterosaurs to swim through rather than flying through, as some would suggest, would also support sauropods in such a manner, i.e. whales swim as easily as sardines. A question would then arise as to why any archaic creatures had legs at all, rather than just flippers.
Part of the picture of anomalies related to attenuated gravity is the ancient supercontinent, Pangaea. As noted, the land mass of the world does not end up in one place for no reason; rather, it would have to be pulled into one place by some very great a ttractive force, and this tidal pull of the archaic system was part of the explaination for attenuated gravity. There are several other anomalies presented by Pangaea which are solved by the notion of Pangaea's having been caused by tidal pull. For instan ce, the English geologist Owen and his associates have demonstrated that Pangaea would not "fit" on our present world and, in fact, required a significantly smaller world in order to work; they propose a system involving creation of matter at the Earth's core. A far simpler explaination is that the tidal pull which caused Pangaea in the first place had also pulled the Earth into a more pronouncedly egg-shape at that time, and that Pangaea was simply sitting on the high end of the egg, and that its curvatu res thus indicate it would not fit on our present more perfectly spherical world.
Of course, a thicker atmosphere would not begin to account for anything like that. Nor would it account for the growing mountain of historical evidence supporting David Talbott's Saturn system hypothesis. In other words, the anomaly involving sauropods is a small part of a big-picture view of Earth and solar-system history which is presently emerging. It is a coherent picture, massively supported by historical and archeological reconstruction as well as by a new technique for evaluating mythical themes, a nd it bears no resemblence to the vision of Earth history which is commonly taught in schools.
All Letters Copyright ©1995 by The Anomalist