Free The Atlantis Blueprint by Colin Wilson Page A

eminent British geophysicist Sir Harold Jeffreys maintained that the earth’s crust is immovable in spite of the evidence of plate tetonics. Kuhn pointed out that the proof required to budge such entrenched opinion is enormous – facts stand no chance in the face of a lifetime of believing in the same theory.
    Now working for a group called Business International, a consulting firm specialising in providing research for corporate executives, Rand encountered an instructive – and amusing example – of this. He became a friend of one of Kuhn’s graduate students, and on many occasions the two of them discussed Hapgood’s shifting crust theory, with Rand explaining how it could account for the origins of agriculture, extinctions and glaciation patterns. After several months, Kuhn’s student was in total agreement that Hapgood’s crust displacement was a good example of Kuhn’s ‘paradigm shifts’ and the kind of hostility they encounter, until one day, when Rand admitted that his interest in the subject had been triggered by Plato’s account of Atlantis. Suddenly Kuhn’s student refused to discuss earth crust displacement any more.
    Concerned that increasing commitments to their careers might prevent them from dedicating their energies to developing their ideas about Atlantis, Rand and Rose decided to return to Victoria to work on the book. The four years in London had been of immense importance to the development of Rand’s theory. After Hapgood’s death in 1982 – which shook Rand badly – Rand felt that he had inherited the problems that Hapgood had left unsolved.
    The main one, of course, was what actually caused the crust to shift. In
The Path of the Pole
Hapgood had come to agree with Einstein that the answer was
not
the ‘washing machine’ effect, whereby an irregular polar ice cap caused the earth to ‘judder’, but he had accumulated a vast amount of other evidence that the crust does shift. Rand was inclined to believe that Milankovich’s hypothesis about ice ages was right, agreeing that they occur when three factors – tilt, perihelion and eccentricity – coincide. He concluded that the main factor was the earth’s 41,000-year tilt cycle. 11
    Rand and Rose wrote
When the Sky Fell,
and began to submit it to publishers. Perhaps he might have been better off retaining the old
title Atlantis at Last!.
If Rand had suggestedthat the ancient maps proved that the earth had been visited by extraterrestrials from another galaxy, the book would probably have been accepted by the first publisher who read it, but a sober study on earth crust displacement, with an appendix on the origins of agriculture, seemed to lack bestseller potential, even if it did argue that Atlantis was in Antarctica. Hapgood was forgotten and his works had fallen out of print; why bother to revive them? One publisher found it ‘fascinating but too academic’, and another ‘intriguing but too academic’, while a third said it left him breathless but he couldn’t figure out what audience they had in mind. Finally, the Flem-Aths accepted that the book would never be published.
    A decade passed, during which Rand and Rose moved to Vancouver Island. A publisher had not been found for the Atlantis book, but Rand continued to read the scientific literature on archaeology, mammal extinctions and anything else that had a bearing on his quest for Atlantis. Although he was unaware of it, the climate was gradually becoming more favourable for his book. The breakthrough came when John Anthony West read the manuscript and agreed to write an afterword.
    West was an Egyptologist, although he would certainly not have been recognised as such by the archaeological establishment. To begin with, he was fascinated by the work of a man who was unmentionable in Egyptological circles: René Schwaller de Lubicz. Schwaller (the ‘de Lubicz’ was bestowed later by a Lithuanian prince of his acquaintance) was the son of a well-to-do Alsatian