By KEN KORCZAK
Well!
How much fun is this book, The Cosmic War, by Dr. Joseph Farrell?
A lot!
How fatally flawed is the ultimate premise of this book?
Let me put it this way: This guy’s theory is on life support.
But wait! Let’s not pull the plug just yet!
I’ll be honest. After reading every page of the Cosmic War, I find myself almost ready to consider that some kind of intergalactic space battle involving super-advanced extraterrestrials took place in our solar system a long, long time ago.
A lot of things in this book made me sit up — such as the picture of the ancient Sumerian god Ninurta wielding a “thunderbolt” that is a dead-solid ringer for an electrical discharge produced in a modern lab that experiments with plasma physics.
Take that, Carl Sagan!
And there’s also lots of other stuff in Dr. Farrell’s book that’s uber-tough to explain away in terms of mainstream science — but any thorough review would have to be half as long as this lengthy, wordy tome to cover it all.
Thus, let me get to where Farrell stumbles so badly, it makes it impossible — beyond a reasonable doubt — for anyone to even so much as consider his overall premise to be an accurate one.
It’s the time frame, my friends!
Consider:
Farrell suggests that two cosmic wars took place, one 65 million years ago, and another 3.2 million years ago.
He then asserts that the echoes of this cosmic war are reflected in the ancient texts of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Biblical texts, Vedic tradition and also New World mythology, from the Maya and Aztecs to the myths of some native North American tribes.
But think about it: The oldest texts from the ancient Mideast are perhaps 4,000 to 5,000 years. Vedic texts may go back as far as 5,000 or 6,000 years.
And sure, purely oral traditions might possibly push it back a few thousand more years. That’s a long time, certainly– but it’s nothing compared to 3.2 million years!
It is ridiculous beyond belief to consider a connection between a 6,000-year-old ancient manuscript with events that happened 65 million years ago!
There is just no chance — none — that there could be an unbroken continuity of human story tradition over those millions of years! (Sorry for all the exclamation points!)
Think about all of the civilizations, high and low, that have come and gone in just the past few thousand years. The Egyptians, the Mongols, the various Chinese dynasties, the Roman Empire, the Inca, the Aztecs.
The Soviet Union lasted only 75 years!
Yes, traces of traditions and mythology have survived thousands of years. Other alternative historians, such as the late Stan Gooch, go further with more elaborate theories about the Neanderthal.
For example, Gooch makes a rather compelling case that much of our fundamental culture today is underpinned and actually derived from the extinct Neanderthal race, that last of which died out about 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.
Gooch said modern man is unaware of and/or has forgotten the origins of its primary, fundamental cultural attributes (such as the development of the Zodiac and various god/theological concepts) and so much more.
But again, this does not help Dr. Farrell. Even 20,000 to 30,000 years is nothing! The Neanderthals had an approximately 250,000 run as a successful species. That’s nothing!
Take note, my friends:
–> A million years is a long, long, long time.
–> 3.2 million years is even longer.
–> 65 million years only has meaning in terms of astronomical and geological reckoning.
To say that oral or written mythologies could have survived in any coherent form 3.2 million years, passed down from one human generation to another with never a break in the chain is, quite simply, impossible by any conceivable standard whatsoever. Period!
The ancient mythologies of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India or any other high civilization simply could not be a record — even metaphorical or allegorical renderings — of events 3.2 million years ago!
Accept it! It’s impossible!
We should also address a huge, glaring and egregious problem in Farrell’s thesis. It’s age of the human species itself. This from Nature:
At an archaeological site near the Atlantic coast, finds of skull, face and jaw bones identified as being from early members of our species have been dated to about 315,000 years ago. That indicates H. sapiens appeared more than 100,000 years earlier than thought: most researchers have placed the origins of our species in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. Source
So, we see, according to those nutty mainstream scientist, the origin of Homo sapien sapien is about 200,000 years (although it’s an ever-shifting number). Yet Farrell is making the case that legends were handed down by one civilization or another for 3.2 million years.
See the problem?
Admittedly, there are those who make the claim that the human species is actually billions of years old — such as alternative archaeology proponents like Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson. I’ll admit they make a compelling case, but Cremo and Thompson are certainly on the fringe.
But wait a minute …
Doesn’t Farrell’s cosmic war scenario get a tremendous shot in the arm from the work of physicist Dr. John Brandenburg? Who is he? Dr. Brandenburg is a brilliant and accomplished plasma physicist who earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis in 1981.
Since then, he has worked at the highest levels of his field, starting as a research scientist at Sandia Labs in the early 1980s. Today, he is a consultant at Morningstar Applied Physics LLC and a part-time instructor of Astronomy, Physics and Mathematics at Madison College.
Before that, Dr. Brandenburg served at Orbital Technologies in Madison as its Senior Propulsion Scientist. His field was space plasma technologies, nuclear fusion and advanced space propulsion.
Anyway, Dr. Brandenburg has published two controversial books — Death on Mars and Life and Death on Mars — in which he makes a highly scientific and rigorously technical case that Mars was destroyed by nuclear weapons millions of years ago as part of some sort of interstellar cosmic conflict.
Brandenburg said Mars was wiped out when some advanced extraterrestrial race dropped two one-million-megaton bombs that exploded in strategic locations about 20 miles above the Martian surface.
If Brandenburg is correct, that would be a tremendous shot in the arm to Dr. Farrell’s theory about an ancient cosmic war — but there is a major problem.
According to Dr. Brandenburg’s math, Mars was nuked to death 251 million years ago. That does not gibe with Farrell’s favorite timelines of 3.2 million and 65 million years ago. What’s vexing is that (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) I nevertheless believe that Farrell may be onto something in his book, The Cosmic War.
But what the author needs to do is jettison the not-well-accepted theories of the astronomer Tom Van Flandern who posits the explosion of two former planets in our solar system 65 million and 3.2 million years ago — and find some way to frame his cosmic war scenario within a time scenario of, say, 10,000 to 15,000 years.
If Farrell would only do this, so much about his overall theory would start to make a lot more sense and fall into place– as outrageous as it is.
Despite all, I am comfortable recommending this book to all of you. I gave it a top rating on Amazon, if nothing else, for the pure entertainment value delivered by Farrell’s wild and audacious ideas.
The zeal in which he lays out his thesis is engaging.
Hey, brother, you don’t have to believe to be intrigued!
At the very least, this is like reading an exciting science-fiction scenario with an added edge that it may contain the seed of real-world plausibility.
Yea, verily, there is some possibility that, by gum it, there really may have been a cosmic war fought by super-advanced aliens in our solar system a long time ago in a galaxy not so far, far away— in fact — our very own Milky Way galaxy.
NOTE: For more cosmic stories, please see: KEN-ON-MEDIUM