A: Aalu to Aztlan 27
argued that a meteor impact with the Earth had been great enough for the simul-
taneous destruction of Atlantis and rise of Australia.
But in the 1920s and 30s, Donnelly’s theory was revived and supported by the
German physicist, Hanns Hoerbiger, whose controversial “Cosmic Ice” paradigm
included the Atlantean catastrophe as the result of Earth’s impact with a cometary
fragment of frozen debris. His British contemporary, the influential publisher,
Comyns Beaumont, had already come to the same conclusion independently.
During the post-World War II era, Hoerbiger was championed by another well-
known Austrian researcher, H.S. Bellamy. Meanwhile, Beaumont’s work was taken
over entirely by Immanuel Velikovsky in his famous Worlds in Collision (1950),
which elaborated on the possibility of a celestial impact as responsible for the
sudden extinction of a pre-Flood civilization.
As intriguingly or even as plausibly as these catastrophists argued, their proofs
were largely inferential. But the extraterrestrial theory began to find persuasive
material evidence in 1964, when a German rocket-engineer, Otto Muck, announced
his findings of twin, deep-sea holes in the ocean floor. They were caused by a
small asteroid that split in half and set off a chain reaction of geologic violence
along the length of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a series of subsurface volcanoes, to
which the island of Atlantis was connected.
In the late 1980s and early 90s, as-
tronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier
affirmed an asteroidal or meteoric ex-
planation for the destruction of Atlantis.
They demonstrated, however, the
greater likelihood of a virtual Earth-
bombardment, or “fire from heaven,”
as our planet passed through or near a
cloud of large debris that showered
down dozens or even hundreds of
meteoritic materials, as opposed to
Muck’s single collision.
Particularly since the publication of
Muck’s convincing evidence, leading
scholars—such as the world’s foremost
authority on Halley’ Comet, Dr. M.M.
Kamiensky (member of the Polish
Academy of Sciences); Professor N.
Bonev (Bulgarian astronomer at the
University of Sofia); and Edgerton Sykes
(the most important Atlantologist of the post-World War II era)—believed the
final destruction of Atlantis was caused by an extraterrestrial impact or series of
impacts. Preceding these scientific investigations by thousands of years are the
numerous traditions of a great deluge caused by some celestial event, recounted
in societies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.Athanasius Kircher’s 17th-century map of Atlantis.
Photograph by Wayne May.