The entire body of work could be said to stem from an attempt to solve the following problem: that to Velikovsky there appeared to be insufficient correlation in the written or archaeological records between Biblical history and what was known of the history of the area, in particular, Egypt.

Velikovsky attempted to investigate the physical cause of these events, and extrapolated backwards and forwards in history from this point, cross-comparing written and mythical records from cultures on every inhabited continent, using them to attempt synchronisms of the historical records, yielding what he believed to be further periodic natural catastrophes that can be global in scale.

Another claim was made by Immanuel Velikovsky, who hypothesized an incestuous relationship with his mother, Tiye.

Abell was also passionate about debunking pseudoscientific claims such as those by Immanuel Velikovsky.

Immanuel Velikovsky () ( 17 November 1979 ) was a Russian-Jewish psychiatrist and independent scholar, best known as the author of a number of controversial books reinterpreting the events of ancient history, in particular the US bestseller Worlds in Collision, published in 1950.

Immanuel Velikovsky was born in 1895 to a prosperous Jewish family in Vitebsk, Russia ( now in Belarus ).

The son of Shimon ( Simon Yehiel ) Velikovsky ( 1859 – 1937 ) and Beila Grodensky, he learned several languages as a child and was sent away to study at the Medvednikov Gymnasium in Moscow, where he performed well in Russian and mathematics.

For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, Velikovsky was persona non grata on college and university campuses.

In 1972, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a one-hour television special featuring Velikovsky and his work, and this was followed by a thirty-minute documentary by the BBC in 1973.

For many years, Velikovsky's estate was controlled by his two daughters, Shulamit Velikovsky Kogan ( b. 1925 ), and Ruth Ruhama Velikovsky Sharon ( b. 1926 ), who generally resisted the publication of any further material.

( Exceptions include the biography ABA — the Glory and the Torment: The Life of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, issued in 1995 and greeted with rather dubious reviews ; and a Hebrew translation of another Ages in Chaos volume, The Dark Age of Greece, that was published in Israel.

Velikovsky was a passionate Zionist, and this did steer the focus of his work, although its scope was considerably more far-reaching than this.

* There is evidence for these catastrophes in the geological record ( here Velikovsky was advocating Catastrophist ideas as opposed to the prevailing Uniformitarian notions ) and archeological record.

Velikovsky argued that the conventional chronology of the Near East and classical world, based upon Egyptian Sothic dating and the king lists of Manetho, was wholly flawed.

This was followed by Oedipus and Akhnaton, Peoples of the Sea and Rameses II and His Time, and two further works that were unpublished at the time of his death but that are now available online at the Velikovsky Archive: The Assyrian Conquest and The Dark Ages of Greece.

The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies ( SIS ) was " formed in 1974 in response to the growing interest in the works of modern catastrophists, notably the highly controversial Dr Immanuel Velikovsky ".

Velikovsky was almost certainly correct in his assertion that ancient texts hold clues to catastrophic events in the relatively recent past, within the span of human civilization, which involve the effects of comets, meteorites and cometary dust.

Velikovsky was never able to refute Sachs ' attack.

Such was the hostility directed against Velikovsky from some quarters ( particularly the original campaign led by Harlow Shapley ), that some commentators have made an analysis of the conflict itself.

The most prominent of these was a study by American Behavioral Scientist magazine, eventually published in book form as The Velikovsky Affair.

Velikovsky claimed that this made him a " suppressed genius ", and he likened himself to Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake.

This was criticised by academic archaeologist William H. Stiebing Jr., who noted that such myths only developed in the 12th to the 14th centuries CE, over a millennium after Velikovsky claimed that the events had occurred, and that the Aztec society itself had not even developed by the 7th century BCE.

Although Hörbiger's theories have much in common with those of Immanuel Velikovsky ( parallels between the two were drawn by Martin Gardner in Chapter Three of his Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science ), the scientific community had a much calmer reaction to Hörbiger's theories than to Velikovsky's, and his publisher was never boycotted.

Velikovsky then traveled in Europe and visited Palestine before briefly studying medicine at Montpellier in France and taking premedical courses at the University of Edinburgh.

Rather than have his ideas dismissed wholesale because of potential flaws in any one area, Velikovsky then chose to publish them as a series of book volumes, aimed at a lay audience, dealing separately with his proposals on ancient history, and with areas more relevant to the physical sciences.

In positioning Velikovsky among catastrophists including Hans Bellamy, Ignatius Donnelly, and Johann Gottlieb Radlof, the British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier noted "... Velikovsky is not so much the first of the new catastrophists ...; he is the last in a line of traditional catastrophists going back to mediaeval times and probably earlier.

According to former Immanuel Velikovsky assistant turned prolific critic, C. Leroy Ellenberger, " states that from an equal start, the Nefilim evolved on Nibiru 45 million years ahead of comparable development on Earth with its decidedly more favorable environment.

Launching on a tangent from his original book project, Velikovsky began to develop the radical catastrophist cosmology and revised chronology theories for which he would become notorious.

In November 1952, Velikovsky moved from Manhattan to Princeton, New Jersey.

By that time, an elderly Velikovsky suffered from diabetes and intermittent depression, which his daughter said may have been exacerbated by the academic establishment's continuing rejection of his work.

Cosmos without Gravitation, which Velikovsky placed in university libraries and sent to scientists, is a probable catalyst for the aggressively antipathetic reaction of astronomers and physicists from its first presentation.

Velikovsky shifted several chronologies and dynasties from the Egyptian Old Kingdom to Ptolemaic times by centuries ( a scheme he called the Revised Chronology ), placing The Exodus contemporary with the fall of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.

Velikovsky relates in his book Stargazers & Gravediggers how he tried to protect himself from criticism of his celestial mechanics by removing the original Appendix on the subject from Worlds in Collision, hoping that the merit of his ideas would be evaluated on the basis of his comparative mythology and use of literary sources alone.

" A short analysis of the position of arguments in the late 20th century is given by Dr Velikovsky's ex-associate, and Kronos editor, C. Leroy Ellenberger, in his A Lesson from Velikovsky.

Bauer accuses Velikovsky of dogmatically asserting interpretations which are at best possible, and gives several examples from Ages in Chaos.

What Can We Usefully Learn from the Velikovsky Affair.

* A lesson from Velikovsky — Leroy Ellenberger

Bauer accused Velikovsky of dogmatically asserting his own point of view to be correct, where at best this is only one possible interpretation of the historical material in question, and gives several examples from Ages in Chaos.

Although there obviously is no sharp line separating competent from incompetent research, and there are occasions when a scientific " orthodoxy " may delay the acceptance of novel views, the fact remains that the distance between the work of competent scientists and the speculations of a Voliva or Velikovsky is so great that a qualitative difference emerges which justifies the label of " pseudo-science.

In his controversial 1950 work Worlds in Collision, Immanuel Velikovsky postulated that the planet Venus emerged from Jupiter as a comet.

In 1939, with the prospect of war looming, Velikovsky travelled with his family to New York, intending to spend a sabbatical year researching for his book Oedipus and Akhenaton.