CHAPTER TEN
Iron-working is siderurgy, a word out of ancient Greece and Rome. It translates properly as the working of star-iron. The Greek word for anvil, on which iron was worked, was close to the word for a meteoric stone. The Eygptians called iron "the bones of Typhon" and "a gift from Seth," both names corresponding to bodies crashing into the Earth, devil-monster and devil-god. Meteoritic iron was known to the early dynasties. "The Jews called iron ore nechoshet, which literally means the 'droppings of the (cosmic) serpent, ' a nonsensical term unless our interpretation of it is allowed." [1] The Jews forbade the use of iron in chiseling stones for the construction of an altar. "A similar taboo was observed in Greek and Roman cults, it was and still is widespread." [2]
But, whereas the Egyptians held an especial taboo of iron, the Assyrians did not, and M. Sieff has described how Egyptian power waned when it lacked iron and waxed, on occasion, when foreign workers and allies such as the Greeks and the miners of Zimbabwe brought in iron and worked it. The Assyrians achieved their greatest conquests at a time of grave natural disasters (the Mars-associated events between -776 and -487) [3] . South and north of Egypt, iron in large quantities was found and used; in Egypt it was neither found nor used. Query: why was no distinction made between meteoritic sacred iron and mined iron? Possible answer; because all iron was known to be meteoritic. Much may have fallen in association with the activity of the great war god Mars-Ares-Nergal. Adequate metallurgy was known for thousands of years before the iron age; increased temperatures could have been devised if the will--and the material--were present.
In conventional works of human history, iron is placed as a late discovery. The "iron age" comes after the "bronze ages" which follow the "Stone-ages." These terms and divisions now only perpetuate confusion in anthropology, history, philosophy, and perhaps even in geology. Thus, a common reference, the Columbia Encyclopedia, thinks that meteoric iron beads existed in Egypt as early as 4000 B. C. but iron smelting not until 1900 B. C. and later [4] . Some confusion is admitted on the matter and Velikovsky's reconstruction of Egyptian chronology has added dismay to confusion [5] . Some even say that iron may have been used before bronze, since isolated iron artifacts of very early dynasties have been recovered. By the end of the second millennium, iron was in general use in Palestine and probably also to the North. A Soviet excavation has reported a metallurgical industry between 3000 and 2000 B. C. in Medzamor [6] with steel tweezers dated at about 1000 B. C. Several experts now assert that there was no clear functional superiority of iron in the first centuries of its use; bronze was adequate even for weapons.
This all would signify a concurrent use of iron, lead, tin, copper, gold and silver by 2500 B. C. in the Mediterranean and Middle East, also perhaps elsewhere in the world. The question arises why mankind did not use metals and invent metallurgy earlier. Could all the workable surface metals of the world have arrived from exoterrestrial sources within a brief period of late proto-history, and so vividly that the ancients even could assign separate periods for their arrival, as Hesiod and Ovid did when reporting a golden age, succeeded by a silver age, and ending in an iron age? I cannot attempt a full answer here, but would support the case for human-witnessed exoterrestrial falls.
Bellamy can again be quoted [7] : Gold, platinum, uranium, radium, mercury, bismuth, and other heavy metals are not detected in the surface layer of the Sun, nor of any other star. As we cannot suppose that they do not exist in those bodies they must logically be present in their cores--and hence also in the cores of the smaller cosmic bodies, planets. Therefore the presence of heavy metals on, or near, the surface of our Earth points to strewing from without. Without such cosmic strewing no ores would probably be found on, or near, the surface of our Earth at all.
In the south of the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) there is a zone, about 180 miles long by 25 to 30 miles wide, which contains great deposits of ores--chiefly copper, iron, tin, uranium, and cobalt. In Angola and Rhodesia, as well as in South Africa, there are smaller deposits.
Indeed, many geologists are of the opinion nowadays that the great rich ore deposits at least must have been brought into being through strictly localized, exceptional, and briefly operative causes.
Iron, the ancients believed, was meteoritic in origin. What would they have believed if they had seen the now exposed great iron mountains of Minnesota or Venezuela? Could such mountains have fallen from the sky? Unquestionably. Asteroids exist in the size of iron mines and contain as much iron. Would they not have exploded and dissipated into dust upon landing? Some would and some not.
A not-well-understood feature of meteoroid falls is that they can accomplish soft landings as well as hard crashes. In hard crashes, such as at Campo del Cielo (Argentina) where a number of meteoroids fell, "large masses of meteoritic iron and shale have been found in its vicinity." [8] Heide writes, "the 60-ton meteorite from the Hoba farm near Grootfontain, South West Africa, the heaviest of all known meteorites, imbedded itself in friable limestone at a depth of only 1.5 meters. The iron meteorites of Cape York in Greenland, weighing up to 30.875 tons, lay on solid gneiss rock, or were barely imbedded in moraine rubble, without any trace of an impact. Here we may guess that they fell on a thick layer of ice or snow and sank to their final location as the snow or ice melted [9] .
However, as the Mass and Velocity of the meteoroid increase, its Energy of impact increases, according to the formula E = 1/ 2 mv 2 . The atmosphere cannot brake the body in time. Therefore, no iron masses of over 100 tons have been deemed to be of exoterrestrial origin; where such have actually fallen, and few doubt this, they have been vaporized by the impact.
In the face of this formula and the visible facts of meteoritic iron, it would appear that the large iron ore masses on Earth cannot have originated exoterrestrially. The negation, if any, depends upon variable velocity. If the falling iron mass is electrically charged, or gathers a charge, so as to render it less attractive to the Earth its velocity would diminish. Theoretically, it could waft down in a soft landing in one piece. If it crashed upon landing, it would possibly assemble itself into the form of an iron ore deposit as deluges of water and dust would fill the interstices. Strange objects have been found in the midst of iron ores being mined, such as wood of recent date [10] .
Much that is meteoritic may not be discovered. On an Antarctic ice field, Japanese explorers found over 1000 meteorites, of which only one was composed of iron [11] . Were the field of stone, instead of ice, the stone meteorites would probably go undetected. Obviously we could not test all the Earth's rocks for exoterrestrial origin, especially since the tests themselves might beg the question.
Masses of iron were found lying upon a Disco Island (Greenland) shore with a great gneiss erratic boulder and associated with the talus of a basalt cliff which itself contained similar bits of iron. All the iron was termed meteoritic which led the investigators to wonder, especially since the basalt fragments were found even embedded ' inside the iron of the beach, whether the meteorite shower "occurred while the basalt was in a state of pasty eruption." [12] But, too, the range itself, though immense and tall, might have been the rim of a great impact collision and was permeated by and interacted with the exploding body.
Suppose all known meteoritic material in the world were assessed for its proportion of iron. Suppose then that one calculated the proportion of iron ore to the amount of drift, loess and homeless clay. If the two ratios were similar, the exoterrestrial thesis would be expanded to embrace the materials of both ratios. Iron in one form or another composes about 5% of the Earth's surface rocks; here is a thoroughly homogenized relationship of iron to rock. This ratio turns out to be closer to the ratio of iron to stone in meteoroids. Both ratios would be far removed, no doubt, from the ratio of iron ore to drift and loess, which would probably be one in thousands. We can imagine, as have several scientists, that the meteoroids fallen upon Earth are those of a late planet explosion in the region of the belt of asteroids and therefore we have been sampling a planet composed as the Earth is supposedly composed, with iron and nickel core, sima mantle, and sial crust. Calculations, given this simple idea, are complex but not enough. There is too much evidence of exoterrestrial dumping upon Earth by other bodies, more of the nature of Jupiter and Saturn, to carry out this algebra of ratios with confidence.
Generally, "terrestrial" iron bodies are distinguishable in composition from meteoritic iron in that they contain either smaller amounts of nickel (about 3 per cent) or larger amounts (about 35 per cent). The meteoroids also contain some cobalt. The distinction is hardly foolproof. Generally, too, the meteoroids have encrustations attributable to their experiences in space, although this is statistically discoverable and not an absolute distinction.
Perhaps somewhere in the literature, unknown to the present writer, exists a systematic examination of the boundaries of a very large metal body demonstrating a lack of exoterrestrial experience. Nor is there a great iron body embedded in precambrian rock; nor has anyone come upon intrusive pipes of iron ore that would have conveyed metal from the core or mantle, by some combination of electrical and volcanic force.
If an alternative to an electrically-assisted soft landing were sought, one might better conceive of a welding process; gigantic lightning strokes from iron bodies in space lasting for a minute would cast molten iron ore down their path to where they now rest in heaps. Again, a study of ore body boundaries is needed. Schaeffer has written of the layers of ashes and cinder scories close in to a huge pure copper mine of Cyprus [13] . One recent theory has the same copper distilling from a hot spot of a northern fork of the great African rift. To this author, the exoterrestrial notion is as convincing.
Like Bellamy, I am impressed by the fact that "there are, scattered over the Earth, a number of ore-mountains which are evidently foreign to their surroundings. At Eisenerz, in Austria, there is a huge mountain, consisting altogether of iron ore .... On the island of Elba, in Sweden, in Russia, in India, and elsewhere we find more or less considerable hills consisting of pure iron ore, mineral wonders of the world. In Orissa, India, in the jungle near the village of Sakchi, is a hill consisting of iron ore which is so rich that it yields almost 65 per cent of pure metal." Elsewhere he writes that such mountains would, upon investigation, probably prove to be 'rootless. ' He describes others.
"At Gellivara in Sweden there are enormous deposits of iron ore whose special characteristic is that they are found in floelike masses, as if they had been 'pancaked' down. At Kirunavaara and Loussavaara, in Lapland, there are similar deposits of iron ore. The 'Kursk Anomaly' in Russia consists of a mass of iron ore estimated to contain about a cubic mile of high-grade material. In the Ural area there is Gora-Blagodat, the 'Blessed Mountain, 'an iron ore mountain 520 feet high, situated in a plain. In Russia too is the Wyssokaya Gora, a deposit of rich magnetite ore, littered over a strip 40 miles long by 9 miles wide." [14]
As with iron, so with other metals: many legends have them falling from heaven. The Chinese sky dragon's "breath descends as a rain of water or of fire. Gold is the congealed breath of a White Dragon, but a Purple Dragon's spittle turns into balls of crystal; glass is regarded as solidified dragon's breath." (The tektite allusion is plain). "The dragons of mythology are often described (among the Teutons, for example) as guardians of hoards and givers of wealth." The dragons are wise in metallurgy [15] .
Donnelly says the same. He describes "Beowulf, when destroyed by the midnight monster, rejoicing to think that his people would receive a treasure, a fortune by the monster's death." [16] Further, now Humboldt writes, the Scythians had a sacred gold which fell burning from heaven. "The ancients had also some strange fictions of silver which fell from heaven, and with which it had been attempted, under the Emperor Severus, to cover bronze coins." [17] An image of a rattlesnake with a tail of gold, and descended from heaven, was worshipped by the Inca as the god of riches. In the Bible (Job 21) it is said of the horrendous dragon Leviathan, "he shall strew gold under him like mire." And Chan reports that in ancient Mesoamerica "yellow was the color of gold, the teocuilatl or excrement of the gods." [18] The dragons that are the substance of most ancient myths and of children's fairy tales today tortured and enriched both the Earth and the minds of men.
Cores drilled from Antarctic sediments of pleistocene age contained iridium and gold in anomalously high proportions. "A sizeable fraction of the noble metals is contained in vesicular, millimeter-sized poly-mineralistic grains that closely resemble ablation debris from chondritic meteorites, and there is little doubt that the noble metals resulted from the accretion of a large extra-terrestrial object."[18A]
About the same time as this expedition, the largest American gold strike in a century was occurring on the Thornton-Ash ranch in Nevada. The gold was not in nuggets, but in microscopic sizes like the Antarctic find. It is extracted by crushing and leaching its host rock. Large tracts of land are being scooped out and many millions of tons of rock processed to obtain the gold. In the absence of a comparative examination of the Nevada and Antarctic discoveries, one may suspect an exoterrestrial origin of the Nevada gold as well.
Conventionally, studies of the origins of metals and their cultural recognition do not mention any exoterrestrial contribution to their chemistry, appearance or use. Instead, they are looked upon as components of igneous intrusions. Speaking of gold, silver, copper, lead and tin, Clair Patterson in his exceptionally important study of "Native Copper, Silver, and Gold accessible to Early Metallurgists,"[18B] declares:
The primary igneous minerals of the 5 anciently used metals were generally mixed with a large number of unwanted minerals in the vein or lode. Useful igneous minerals of the 5 different metals were not generally mixed together, however. Except for close relations between lead and silver, deposits of the 5 metals were more unrelated than related in a specific region (Noble 1970). The different metals were generally successively deposited over a period of time in adjacent regions (Noble 1970). The common characteristic which bound the deposits of all 5 metals together was the fact that they were emanations derived from igneous intrusions in mountainous belts, sometimes occurring together, or nearby, or not at all.
He reports that the ratio of copper to silver to gold mined from all types of deposits in the entire world from 3800 B. C. to 1925 A. D. was 3,000 to 11 to 1, and believes the ratio not to be far removed from their natural incidence as ores. These are largely surficial, he says, even though he expects the same metals to be found in highly dispersed, fine grains throughout the crust, where their bulk would be perhaps seven million times that of the ores. "The lower the grade of ore, the more there is of it, until finally we include the entire earth's crust in our consideration."[18C]
It is likely that the greatest masses of copper, silver, gold, tin and lead ores were emplaced in the upper several kilometers of the earth's crust rather than throughout the total 35 km thickness of the continents or the thicker upper mantle. Governing agents in this vertical distribution were abrupt decreases in temperatures and pressures near crustal surfaces. It is unlikely that there are any large deposits of the kind we commonly recognize as ores at great depths in the crust, although there are very large amounts of copper, silver, gold, tin, and lead dispersed down there.
It seems that ores are found in a highly confused and diversified state that does not let one assume any neat intrusion of pure metal. Nor even is the intrusiveness manifest; the term seems to define itself, as simply something differing from its surroundings, not a clean belt or stratum, but as a conglomerate chemically, physically, and morphologically.
Ore is the valued part of minerals, including metals. The modern processes used to isolate ore are imitations of nature. Crushing is first, where the pressures and grinding of water, wind, and rock movements are emulated. Mineral separation follows. Minerals of different sizes are shaken through sieves. A hydrocyclone may be used to segregate particles by their response to varying winds. Flotation is employed to separate the crushed particles according to their density. The material may be conveyed along jigging tables under running water so that high density, then afterwards lower density material, settle. A magnetic wheel can collect from poured minerals the magnetic ores and cast off the less-magnetic ores. Minerals that accept water-proofing can float in a froth while non-proofed minerals and rock sink. Once minerals have been chemically created, by high-energy forces, the same or a varying mix of quantavolutional forces can segregate them.
Under these circumstances, a person of our persuasion is likely to see exoterrestrial intruders smashed, crushed and exhibiting metal here and there; or, secondly, rims of hardly discernible craters containing segregated elements of the Earth's rock mixed with exoterrestrial elements that have been subjected to the immense heat and pressure of a crash; or, thirdly, effects of massive electrical discharge plus fall-back of exploded earth. (Regarding this last, and considering the unusual conductivity of metals, have they been prepared for conductivity, like quartz semiconductors? Are we dealing with homeopathy or homology?)
The distribution of metals in the world is associated somewhat with folding and thrusting, but this may be a finder's help, not a random sample of ore distribution. More significant is the lack of correlation of these metals with volcanism or even with great faults. Why should metals congregate near circular features and basins, suggestive of astroblemes?
Flint is found that has undergone controlled heat treatment, with pressure retouching as revealed by spectroscopic experiments; this is at least Solutrean in age, 22000 B. P by conventional dating [19] . The skill is as complex as and less enjoyable than metalworking by heat; why then did man wait another 15,000 years to begin his work with copper, tin, lead, gold, silver, and iron? Perhaps they were not available. Or, perhaps the dating is too long and, soon after the flintworking, metalworking began, which is one logic for preserving the conventional origin of metals by casting aside the conventional chronology.
Before the ages of the metals, so-called stone age man existed. He used many different kinds of stone, bone, wood, and grasses. He designed, cut, heated, and molded them. He domesticated animals, grew cereals, performed anatomical operations with stone knives. He built cities and great monuments. He painted, danced, and sang. Coal and peat were burned. Obsidian and flint were mined; Greek myth portrays Saturn castrating his father Uranus, using a jagged-edged sickle of flint. If any amount of terrestrial iron had been present on the surface and outcroppings, why would it not have been employed? Gold, silver, copper, tin and lead were mined and used.
Mankind was ready to work and even to melt and purify iron, it seems, long before it was available. If only in order to supply the type of hypothesis that may lead usefully to historical research on the subject, I would suggest that most metals occurred around the period of the great Deluge and in the transition from Saturn to Jupiter worship, about 4200 B. C., and may be connected to a cosmic explosion that I have in Chaos and Creation assigned to a planet with the legendary traits of Apollo. It is noteworthy that the ancient metal mines of Attica had two favorite names, Artemisiakon and Hermaikon, both siblings of Apollo [20] .
John Saul drew circles corresponding to rounded features, possibly ancient exploded craters, on a topographic map of a portion of Arizona. He independently marked the location of mineral deposits on a similar map. When one overlaid the other, there appeared a significant relationship between craters and mines, with the deposits generally occurring on the rims of the circles. One circle was abundantly supplied with minerals, indicating that a certain small percentage of craters, and hence their originating body, may be heavily mineralized [21] . R. S. Diez is cited by Pauwels for arguing the origination of the immense Sudbury (Canada) nickel mines from a meteoroidal impact of pre-Cambrian times.
One can conjecture, then, about a possible ratio of large stone meteoroid impacts to large mineral meteoroid impacts corresponding to the experienced ratio of small stone to small iron-nickel meteoroid impacts. Since historical experience has been limited (explainable by the negative exponential principle), one would hardly expect historically the fall of the rarer metals such as gold, silver, and copper. Walter Sullivan has presented in the New York Times of Nov. 2, 1966 a map of the world's most productive gold field below Johannesburg, which shows a large primary "bulls-eye-formation" rimmed by gold-bearing formations and a much larger 200-mile-diameter, secondary, cratered, rim-like area, also bearing gold, and asks "Did a comet create a South African gold field?" Unless the gold was alchemized on the spot, it might have been part of the meteoroid that crashed.
Most metals, in conclusion, may originate exoterrestrially. If an alternative must be found, it may be suggested, although hardly discussed directly here, that special thermo-electric events might produce the metals. This would constitute electrolysis on a huge scale, in a dense catastrophically formed atmospheric plasma, before or after striking.
The metal, manganese, is exceptionally terrestrial in origin. Its growth out of underseas volcanos is particularly explosive and rapid. Pure manganese is found in cones near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Hot water and steam percolate through lava segregating the metal and depositing it in molten pools where it cools shortly. The French-American Mid-Ocean study, "Project Famous," found manganese geysers along the Ridge in the 1970's.
Manganese is also found in nodules on the ocean floors. These, by contrast with the geyser type, are supposed to have required much time to grow. Scott and his colleagues estimated that nodules grow at rates of 1 to 10 mm/ million years. They are supported by Ku, Burnett and Morgenstein, using both radiometric and nonradiometric techniques of dating. But Goldberg and Arrhenius reported finding a 50-year old naval shell with a ferromagnesium oxide coating 30 mm thick, indicating a rate of 60,000 mm/ m years [21A]. Heezen and Hollister point out that the rate of accumulation of manganese is a function of its concentration in water and the availability of a nucleus in the water [21B]. Conventional gradualist theory cannot explain the "mystery" so well as quantavolution.
Nodules abundantly litter the deep abyssal hills. They form around a particle, tephra, a pebble, an animal tooth, a bone, or on the surfaces of volcanic or drifted rocks. The nodules should require a very short time to form, if supplied with nucleus, warm water and a manganese rich soup emerging from fast flowing and erupting volcanos. The manganese adheres to any object and rafts to its ultimate destination far from its birth place with fast-spreading lava, which also boils out manganese accumulations as it spreads, and by swirling currents of newly forming seas around it, the same currents that hold the nuclear objects in suspension for a time. The process 'proves itself as turbulent and swift by the nuclei, which would otherwise sink in the abyssal muck if there were such and by the availability of manganese only at the hot spots of the ridge. Thus, contrary to the long-time theory of manganese formation, the very presence of the manganese nodules goes to demonstrate how rapid was the paving of the ocean basins, a topic to be treated later on.
Sodium chloride is of course a mineral compound, and not a metal. The salt domes of the world, averaging 30 cubic miles each, may carry 100,000 cubic miles of salt, about three-tenths of all the salt of the seas. Salt is not found in pre-cambrian rocks, which are said to embrace most of the time since the Earth was created. Basalt of the ocean bottoms contains no salt and salt could not have been precipitated from the melting of mantle rock [22] . Granite is also deficient in salt.
The presence of salt, like the metals, in living tissues, and therefore the need of it, does not prove its terrestrial origin. Nor should one gullibly receive the story that since salt is in our tissues, it must be part of the ancient waters that bore the first life, hence giving us proof of most ancient salt oceans. Life digests salt-free water, even ocean life. If all the water of the world were to receive all the salt deposited in domes, life as we know it might become precarious--except insofar as we constructed desalification factories to sustain it. The miracle is that salt has not killed life already, like many ancient settlements had their land sown with salt by their enemies, and thus were extinguished. Species closely resembling one another are to be found both in oceans and freshwater lakes and rivers. Salmon live in both oceans and rivers during their individual lifetimes. Paleontology may not be able to demonstrate the precedence of saltwater over freshwater life forms. Too, the medium of early marine life may have been brackish.
There is no apparent earthly source for salt. A Head Curator of Geology at the U. S. National Museum, George P. Merrill, long ago wrote that sodium chloride (at least the latter) must have come like meteorites from outer space and been caught up first in the atmosphere and then dumped in the oceans. By the atmosphere is implied a canopy sky. From the canopies, salt would descend with water deluges, which we shall be considering later as a quite recent event. The canopy or set of rings may have been a momentary affair or endured for centuries. The rings and body of Saturn may contain sodium chloride or its elements; the rings contain millions of small mineral objects. Legendary evidence exists on this account.
Once salt in solution strikes the ground it must run off into the basins that have water, making it salty, and also contribute with its host water to new seas. If it sinks into the ground in solution it will form a reservoir, either exposed or folded under or trapped in a cavity. In these cases, the water will boil out as steam: or it will percolate into underground and above-ground branches flowing to the sea. The salt residue will then form domes.
Cook argues that the salt domes were created in the same set of events as the deep burial of organic material of which petroleum is composed, for many salt domes act as oil traps, keeping oil from dissipation. Avalanching ice from collapsing ice caps, and sediments pushed by these, suddenly thrusted and folded salted waters that were swirling around the great movements, containing them under high heat and pressure. The trapped waters were squeezed out of insoluble sediments into their own cavity. There they evaporated quickly, leaving salt deposits. But it is unlikely that the waters of the Earth were so salty as to provide, via tides, the salt domes and still leave the run-off waters with the present heavy component of salt in solution. Furthermore, as later chapters here will argue, the bulk of the ocean waters and ice came exoterrestrially and the salted waters mostly arrived later.
The salt may have descended both as a solid and in acqueous solution. Salt domes exist beneath the sea floor as well as below the land. Salt domes containing oil have been discovered beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico at 12,000 feet of depth (2000 fathoms) [23] . Great salt domes have been discovered below the Mediterranean floor as well, giving rise to an idea that the Mediterranean once, 12 million years ago, became a dry basin. Why salt should not then be evaporated and laid in even layers of sediments rather than in intrusive pockets is unanswered.
In South and East Texas many cylinders of salt (with nearby anhydrite, gypsum, oil and sulfur deposits) penetrate the Earth to depths of a thousand meters and more. Kelly and Dachille ask "What could have caused these tremendous beds of practically pure rock salt?" And they write: "Our inevitable answer is the same, collision-flood. We should guess that this pan of the earth was struck by a body or bodies of sufficient size to evaporate great quantities of ocean water, both by the Kinetic energy released by the impact and by the great pool of molten lava that must have been formed in the crater. This evaporation of ocean water would have left the salt provided that it was not connected directly with the main ocean, otherwise the salt would have gone back into solution." [24]
The Gulf of Mexico does seem to have vague characteristics of a gigantic meteoroid impact. Since other salt domes have been also discovered beneath the gulf itself, one may wonder whether the meteoric body itself may not have been composed largely of salt and injected its own salt tubes into its crater basin. This would seem a more realistic scenario than the Kelly-Dachille vision of a typhoon lifting salted waters into the air, evaporating the waters, and having the salts precipitate in favored sequence and locale in a pure state. The fact, as they recall it, that salt is so free from contaminants (less than 0.4%) argues for the solid integrity of the salt from its initial appearance on Earth.
Legends imply my theory. Saturn was the first Lord of the Mill, a grindstone round like the revolving vault of the sky. It ground salt into the sea and was sunk in the ocean during the great maelstrom and deluge that brought the golden age of Saturn to an end. In Hindu myth, the gods churned the celestial ocean and the mill ground out salt into the sea. Norse myth has the heavenly mill churning out gold, then salt, then, sunk in the sea, sand and stones. The unhinging and failing of the Mill implies, too, a tilting of the axis of the globe, a likely accompaniment of the cataclysm.
A South American legend supplies significant detail. "The Arawak of Guyana call the Galaxy 'the Tapir's Way. ' This is confirmed in a tale of the Chirignano and some groups of the Tupi-Guarani of South America." According to Cuna tradition, "the Tapir chopped down the 'Saltwater Tree', at the roots of which is God's whirlpool, and when the tree fell, saltwater gushed out to form the oceans of the world." [25] The Cuna cosmology thus unites the idea of the tree-of life found in many places, including Genesis, with a Tapir-god, Saturnian-Elohim divinity, and, as the tree of life is destroyed (the old order ends), saltwaters deluge the Earth. (In Solaria Binaria, Earl R. Milton and the present author identify this tree of life with the legendary and philosophical axis of fire and this with the presence, until a nova of Saturn, of an electric arc-current flashing between a then-larger Saturn and the Sun, and visible to man.) In sum, various legends independently agree that the salt of the oceans came with an aquatic cataclysm in a time when mankind was an intelligent witness.
That salt came down upon the doomed "Cities of the Plain" at a later time as well is argued by Dwardu Cardona. Yahweh threatens his people with "sulphur and salt and burning, so that its whole land will not be sown... like the overthrow 3f Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which Yahweh overthrew in his anger and in his wrath;...." [25A]
In the same work, Milton and I propose that the Noachian Deluge occurred in cyclonic form, with the salty waters hosing or jetting down at thousands of locations. If this were correct, some of the characteristics of salt deposits would be explained, such as their common cylindrical shapes and great depth below the surface of land and seabottom. The saltwater would bore through the surface rocks under great pressure and with enough time to penetrate deeply. The water would vaporize promptly in the ambiant heat and what was left of it would leak through a multitude of fractures on the margins of the deposits.
In Manchester, England, a process of making petroleum from garbage has been announced (1982). "We can do in ten minutes what nature has taken 150 million years to do," asserts a proud engineer. The oil costs half the prevailing price of natural crude oil. This price does not consider the original devastation of the biosphere that occurred with the natural production of oil. Conventional belief interprets oil resources according to an idyll, that organic rot was deoxidized, accumulated over long periods of time, roasted slowly at a deep warm level in the rocks until it turned into oil, then seeped into rock reservoirs where it was trapped to await the oil explorer of today. There is little use in our discussing this story, inasmuch as the reader will have ready access to it in many books. Here it is argued that oil is a catastrophic product and the major questions concern the catastrophic mechanisms of its formation.
The "ten-minute oil" suggests that there may be no inherent guarantee that natural oil is old. Recently discovered hydrothermal vents in the Gulf of California are producing from sediments a petroleum that is close to commercial standards. Several C 14 dates of oil offshore California and from the Gulf of Mexico range from 5000 to 20000 years. Still petroleum generally is dated from two to six hundred million years; a common age given is fifty million years. One group of scientists suspects that solar ultraviolet polymerized the methane atmosphere of primeval Earth to form an oil slick of one to ten meters' depth all over the globe [26] . T. Gold believes that methane, composed of carbon and hydrogen, erupts from primeval reservoirs in the mantle; they sometimes explode from electrostatically induced sparks [27] However, the presently continual explosions would indicate to this writer a recent origin of the methane, probably from biomass deep-buried by catastrophe. A. T. Wilson produced hydrocarbons out of electrical discharges on methane and ammonia, and claimed in 1962 that the Venus atmosphere held hydrocarbons [28] . Oro and Hart maintain a case for current hydrocarbon production on Jupiter from methane; they manufactured hydrocarbons from methane in their laboratory [29] . Libby has theorized that oil is raining down upon Jupiter today [30] .
Max Blumer, a pre-eminent paleo-geochemist, lately of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, used the conventional age estimates given above in making a calculation of some social significance. Reminiscent of the Dow Chemical Company's claim about natural dioxins mentioned in the previous chapter, oil shipping interests have protested that only half the ocean's petroleum content comes from polluting practices and the other half comes from natural leaks and seepage. In 1970, Blumer, following this logic, estimates the amount of seepage at 5 x 10 6 tons. Quoting then high estimates of offshore oil resources at 100,000 x 10 6 metric tons, he points out that all of this would have leaked out in less than 20,000 years. But, taking the average age of oil as above, 50 million years, and the claimed seepage rate, "the average offshore oil-field would have lost to the ocean 2500 times the free flowing oil or more than 1500 times the total oil existing in situ before commercial offshore oil production started." [31]
Obviously, in Blumer's view, and the publicity attendent upon the brief article indicates a wide acceptance of it, the estimate of natural seepage is ridiculously high; the polluters are responsible for the oil in the oceans. The same is true on land. Seeps are negligible because "oil reservoirs are well sealed even on the continents where uplifiting and erosion should have bared oil-bearing strata more extensively than on the ocean floor." Oil leaks are frequently sealed by natural asphalt.
The quantavolutionist can address three comments to Blumer's line of argument. First, the age of oils in the sea may be grossly overestimated. Possibly the oil resources of the world are under 20,000 years old; in this case, the allegations of the seepage advocates would have to be disproven by other evidence, if at all. Second, Blumer does not deny seepage, but wishes it reduced. But he does not estimate seepage, or else, I guess, he would have to name a figure, such as one-tenth of the seepage claimed. In this case, the age of the "average oil" would drop by a factor Of ten; all oil resources would be exhausted by leakage in 200,000 years. Surely he would not insist upon the fifty million years age and therefore be compelled to argue that true seepage is hundreds of times less than claimed. In other words, he is walking right into the quantavolutionary door; no significant seepage is satisfactory if conventional oil ages are to be defended. This is especially so, given that strict uniformitarian rates are not likely; no matter how oil is made, early seepage must have been at a faster rate than today's seepage. Even just the transfer from factory to reservoir cannot occur without large losses. Again the age of oil must drop. And of course if a quantavolutionary theory of oil formation is adopted, the exponential principle come into play: oil is made, not in ten minutes, not currently in submarine hydrothermal factories, but in very short times nevertheless.
Two quantavolutionary theories, requiring very short times, offer themselves, one best enunciated by Melvin Cook, the other by Velikovsky. Cook hints that a great deluge may have precipitated the lateral break-out of the ice caps. The vast ice avalanche bulldozed the biosphere long distances and folded it into the Earth in a heated state. Velikovsky argues for the origin of petroleum from the tail of a great comet, which he identified as an erratic Venus. Both offer short-term explanations, Cook placing the production of oil around 10,000 years ago, Velikovsky around 3450 B. P.
Cook reconstructs the oil production process as follows: around the old ice cap of the north grew a heavy biosphere. The towering ice cap, triggered by deluges, exerted fracturing radial pressures that sent great bulldozers of ice and rock in all directions to sweep up, ignite and bury deeply the vegetation and animal life. The organic matter stewed under high thermal and pressure conditions. Some became coal; some became oil and natural gas. Here is a quick "Cook's Tour" of the world's petroleum [32] .
The most prolific oil basins of the world are those associated with the postulated major long-thrust systems described previously, namely the Mississippi valley--Gulf of Mexico system and the extensive and complicated overthrust systems comprising the great oil fields surrounding the Red, Mediterranean, Caspian and Black seas and the Persian Gulf. The southwestern USA thrust system responsible for the fragmentation in the Basin and Range province possibly contributed to the California oil basins. Another similar thrust system apparently generated the oil and coal provinces of Borneo, Sumatra, Java and New Guinea. These great oil and gas regions are most likely associated with sudden deep burial of marine and vegetal matter in (1) spoke-like radial thrusts from the ice sheets that began with the flood and eventually triggered continental drift, (2) continental drift itself, and (3) the Subsequent catastrophic effects of readjustment (ocean ridge and related systems). The greatest oil fields in the world, those in Iraq, Iran, Arabia and Kuwait, are apparently the result of all three of these mechanisms of sudden deep burial. The Gulf of Mexico system is postulated here to represent tremendous, sudden and deep burial thrusts contributed largely in the pre-continental drift stage, but with great contributions from both the north and the south such as to insure deep burial of sediments all along the coast and shelf of the Gulf of Mexico. The west coast of North and South America represent regions showing perhaps all of the deep burial effects: that due to welting and overthrusting in the pre-continental drift stage being strong in this region, the welting at the front of the thrust blocks during continental drift itself and the tremendous upheavals strongest here in the final readjustment stage. Perhaps the great (bathylithic) uplifts associated with the earth-circling ridge and rift system, particularly that part that cut into the continent in the western side of the Americas, contributed mostly to the deep basin structure in California, accounting for the youngest pools of the world.
Cook, then, must provide a force sufficient to initiate the break-out of an ice cap of enormous size; then a thrusting and folding of crustal rock over large distances, burying a whole biosphere of vegetal and marine life; then a cracking of the globe, sending the continents skittering from the great Atlantic and southern ocean cleavages in a complex pattern, with a major fracture moving through most of the world along the old Tethyan sea belt. He concludes as follows:
The physical chemistry of oil, including its formation from marine raw materials, its conditions for cracking, its observed composition and physical properties as a function of depth of the reservoirs are, apparently, better accounted for by the sudden, deep burial mechanism than by the doctrine of uniformitarianism. Oil reservoir temperatures are too low to permit appreciable cracking during all of geologic time even assuming existence of the best known catalytic cracking conditions. The observed changes of oil grade with depth may be explained instead on the basis of the physical chemistry of decomposition of green marine and vegetal raw materials in their sudden burial at various depths in the oil basins [33] .
But Velikovsky's theory of petroleum Origins introduces a frightful deluge of oil. He cites references in legends and scriptures to the fall of naphtha, sometimes blazing, and of brimstone, often rendered otherwise as a rain of hail. The Abkasian, a people famous for their long life-spans, convey a story about a fall-out of cotton, which caught fire and burned the Earth; perhaps it was "cotton-candy" mixed with hydrocarbon [34] . The ancient bible of Mesoamerica, the Popul Vuh, tells of the fate of the people of that age:
And so they were killed;
They were overwhelmed.
There came a great rain of glue
Down from the sky. [35]
The "glue" is still found in the land of the Olmecs. William Mullen comments on the work of the pioneer excavators: radio-carbon samples are contaminated by asphalt. "Much of the Early Tres Zapotes level was sealed with volcanic ash. Coe reports that lumps of asphalt were found everywhere at the San Lorenzo excavation." [36] I consulted with an expert on the area. As expected, he said that the area practically floats on oil. I visited the area. He spoke truth. But the question is: Which came first, the culture or the oil? Here, as throughout the world, the ancient voices give precedence to the people.
Velikovsky's concept can be summarized to a degree in his own words [37] :
The tails of comets are composed mainly of carbon and hydrogen gases. Lacking oxygen, they do not burn in flight, but the inflammable gases, passing through an atmosphere containing oxygen, will be set on fire. If carbon and hydrogen gases, or vapor of a composition of these two elements, enter the atmosphere in huge masses, a part of them will burn, binding all the oxygen available at the moment; the rest will escape combustion, but in swift transition will become liquid. Falling on the ground, the substance, if liquid, would sink into the pores of the sand and into clefts between the rocks; falling on water, it would remain floating if the fire in the air is extinguished before new supplies of oxygen arrive from other regions...
The descent of a sticky fluid which came earthward and blazed with heavy smoke is recalled in the oral and written traditions of the inhabitants of both hemispheres... All the countries whose traditions of fire-rain 1 have cited actually have deposits of oil: Mexico, the East Indies, Siberia, Iraq, and Egypt ....
The rain of fire-water contributed to the earth's supply of petroleum; rock oil in the ground appears to be, partly at least, "star oil" brought down at the close of world ages, notably the age that came to its end in the middle of the second millennium before the present era....
In the centuries that followed, petroleum was worshipped, burned in holy places; it was also used for domestic purposes. Then many ages passed when it was out of use. Only in the middle of the last century did man begin to exploit this oil, partly contributed by the comet of the time of the Exodus.
Definite legendary, archaeological, and geological evidence of a holospheric catastrophe in Mesopotamia was provided by J. V. K. Wilson for a period tightly connected with Inanna (identifiable as Venus) [38] . Large-scale mesolithic rock displacements are displayed, and accounts of rains of oil, the poisoning of the land, and falling sheets of fire are described in the ancient documents. Lion-headed pillars are associated symbolically with mushroom-shaped clouds (our typhonic cyclones) in the legend and architecture of the times.
The Soviet geologist Levin asserts that the hydrocarbons in cometary heads must have played a part in forming petroleum and in the origin of life." [39] Velikovsky wrote once: "Actually, if we can believe numerous testimonies bequeathed to us by ancient sources, the ancients had already what we intend some day to obtain from Venus--samples of its dust, ash, atmosphere, and rocks." He believed firmly that "Venus must be rich in petroleum gases," which, because of the planet's great surface heat, "will circulate in gaseous form."
Fred Hoyle, in Frontiers of Astronomy (1955), argued for less heat and therefore oceans of oil on Venus. The historical and geological evidence led Velikovsky to argue that Venus was hot and cooling measurably, that it was comparatively flat, with a dense atmosphere, an anomalous axial rotation, and the aforesaid hydrocarbon gases. The other predictions having been generally fulfilled, it seemed for a moment that hydrocarbon gases had also been detected; if so, the theory of the historical encounter and the dropping of Venusian oil on Earth would be strengthened.
However, the NASA scientists involved in an early statement favorable to hydrocarbons withdrew their support, and a controversy ensued, to no final end. The clouds of Venus appear definitely to be mainly of carbon dioxide. Whether this is compatible with an existing component of hydrocarbon or can have resulted from chemical transformations that resulted in the disappearance of hydrocarbons is disputable. Furthermore, organic compounds seem to be present, and also indications of iron and sulfur, possible sources of pigment for the red fall-out phenomenon mentioned earlier.
Blumer, in a path-breaking article on organic paleochemistry, pauses to reflect that "man has long been curious about the origin of these materials," coals and oil. "On occasion, early speculations approached the truth in a colorful way; thus, the Triassic Tyrolian oil shales, which are rich in vertebrate fossils as well as in chlorophyll and haemin derivatives, were thought to have resulted from an impregnation of the local rock with the blood of a slain dragon." [40]
Perhaps he should have reflected longer. The dragon, in many a myth, has poured its red blood, metals, dust., and oil upon the Earth, and the dragon is often identified with destructive sky bodies, comets, no less. That silicates and oil should descend and emplace themselves in oil shales should hardly cause surprise; we have seen that the color of red-brown to blue-black oxidized heme, blood red, is often reported in myth as falling in dust or in the gore of a slain dragon. The shale could be formed quickly, baked by a moderate heat.
How could the organic matter be injected into shales and oil from above? As related earlier, the presence therein and a fall-out of a biomass from a comet is not at all impossible. Furthermore, the distinction between living and non-living structures is not clear in the hydrocarbons of oil. "Trieb's isolation of pigments related to chlorophyll and haemin marks the origin of organic geochemistry... The fossil prophyrins of ancient sediments and of petroleum are chemical fossils; just as the more commonly known morphological fossils, they represent surviving evidence of ancient life processes that had achieved an increased structural order on the macroscopic and on the molecular level and inorganic as well as in organic structures."
It seems Blumer is claiming the unprovable, that in their beginnings these morphologically unrecognizable organic chemicals were in living organisms. Yet he declares, "in organic geochemistry, the distinction between chemical fossils and artifacts has not always been sharp." And he says, after defining geochemistry as ultimately based upon the molecular remains of ancient life, that thousands of changes occur: "chemical fossils are far more abundant than their better known morphological analogues. Contrasted with 90,000 (some say 110,000) species of fossil animals known presently, are millions of fossil chemical derivatives." Then, further:
Research on the constitution of crude oil and of oil shales has revealed severely altered biochemicals and numerous structures which occur neither in living organisms nor in recent sediments... Also crude oil and sediments contain polymers (asphaltenos, kerogen) of a type not found in living organisms.
For pages, Blumer struggles to trace the complex descent of petroleum hydrocarbons from living organisms while insisting upon the intrusion of many non-organic chemical processes, only to admit that "we are virtually ignorant of the reaction mechanisms and. reaction rates." He proceeds to establish that depth, deposition rate and temperature control the chemical chaos during the critical moments of oil formation. Still, "we remain uncertain of the extent, the rates and the mechanisms of geochemical reactions and of the composition and role of the sedimentary polymers."
We shall certainly not be contradicting him, if we conclude that the chemical transformations producing oil are as likely to occur in space as below ground, probably more likely, if we wished to argue the point. Further, we do not see how it can be asserted either that organic biomass capable of forming oil does not exist in exoterrestrial bodies or, if it does not, that its absence precludes space gases constituting or contributing to the constitution of the oils that are present on Earth.
Most metals, salt, and oil, we conclude, are more likely than not to have originated exoterrestrially or in exoterrestrially precipitated transactions at the Earth's surface.
Notes (Chapter Ten: Metals, Salt and Oil)
2. Velikovsky, Ramses II and His Time (N. Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 221-47.
8. Fritz Heide, Meteorites (Chicago: U. Of Chicago, 1969), 44.
10. Melvin A. Cook, Prehistory and Earth Models (London: Max Parrish, 1966).
11. 52 Sky and Telescope (1976) 429 citing a report by Walter Sullivan, NYT.
12. 2 Sci. Am. Supp. (1876), 510.
13. Stratigraphie Comparée... (London: Oxford, 1945). 580.
14. A Life History of Our Earth (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 196.
18A. F. T. Kyte et al., Nature (30 July 1981), 417-20.
18B. 36 Amer. Antiquity 3 (July 1971), 286-321, 288, cf. 294.
18C. Ibid., 291.
19. 276 Nature (14 Dec. 1978), 7013-4.
21. 271 Nature (26 Jan 1978), 347.
21A. P. A. Smith, 265 Nature (1977), 582-3 reporting Scott et al., I Geophys Res. Ltrs (1974) 355 and Golberg and Arrhenius, 13 Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta (1958) 153; Corliss, op. cit. ESS-005 doc.
21B. Op cit., 424, 440.
23. Oscar Wilhelm, Geol. Soc. Am. Bull (March 1972).
24. Allan Kelley and F. Dachille, Target Earth, 211; cf. 205.
25. G. den Santillana and H. von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill (Boston: Gambit, 1969), 247, cf. 146-7.
26. A. C. Lasaga and H. D. Holland, "Primordial Oil Slick," 174 Science (10 Oct. 1974), 53-5.
27. See K. S. Lewis, 78 New Sci. (1978), 277 and Walter Sullivan in NYT (24 Dec. 1977), 1.
28. A. T. Wilson, "Synthesis of Macromolecules." 188 Nature (17 Dec. 1960), 1007-8.
30. C. J. Ransom, The Age of Velikovsky (Glassboro, N. J.: Kronos, 1976), 80-2.
31. "Submarine Seeps," 176 Science (16 June 1972), 1257-8.
34. Sula Benet, Abkasian (NY: Doubleday)
35. Popul Vuh: The Sacred Book of the ancient Quick Maya (Norman; U. of Ok., 1950 trans.).