Weird Earth: Debunking Strange Ideas about Our Planet

314 Pages·2020·6.079 MB·English

by  Donald R. Prothero, Michael Shermer

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