Pole Shift Revisited

by Len Kasten
http://www.atlantisrising.com/issue9/ar9poleshift.html

With a rumble so low as to be inaudible, growing, throbbing, then fuming into a thundering roar, the earthquake starts...only it's not like any earthquake in recorded history. In California, the mountains shake like ferns in a breeze, the mighty Pacific rears back and piles up into a mountain of water more than two miles high, then starts its race eastward.

With the force of a thousand armies the wind attacks, ripping, shredding everything in its supersonic bombardment. The unbelievable mountain of Pacific sea water follows the wind eastward, burying Los Angeles and San Francisco as if they were but grains of sand. Nothing, but nothing, stops the relentless, overwhelming onslaught of wind and ocean. Across the continent the thousand-mile-per-hour wind wreaks its unholy vengeance, everywhere, mercilessly, unceasingly.

Within three hours, the fantastic wall of water moves across the continent, burying the wind-ravaged land under two miles of seething water coast-to-coast. In a fraction of a day all vestiges of civilization are gone, and the great cities ...are nothing but legends. Barely a stone is left where millions walked just a few hours before...

...Antarctica and Greenland, with their ice caps, now rotate around the earth in the Torrid Zone; and the fury of wind and inundation marches on for six days and nights. During the sixth day, the oceans start to settle in their new homes, running off the high ground. On the seventh day, the horrendous rampage is over. The Arctic ice age is ended, and a new stone age begins.

The Bay of Bengal basin, just east of India is now at the North Pole. The Pacific Ocean, just west of Peru, is at the South Pole. Greenland and Antarctica, now rotating equatorially in the Torrid Zone find their ice caps dissolving madly in the tropical heat. ..New ice caps begin to form in the new polar areas. Greenland and Antarctica emerge with verdant, tropical foliage.

A new era! Yes, the cataclysm has done its work well.. .Once more the earth has shifted its 60-mile thick shell, with poles moving almost to the equator in a fraction of a day. Again the atmosphere and oceans, refusing to change direction with the Earth's shell, have wiped out almost all life.

Thus does Chan Thomas describe the much-heralded, greatly-feared coming catastrophe which supposedly will ring down the curtain on the greatest uninterrupted advance of human civilization in speculative history, a six-thousand-year march up from the grunting, fire-worshipping cave-man to the laptop computer girded, cellular-phone wielding corporate road-warrior. The foregoing, horrific account of the next pole shift is given by Thomas in his 55-page booklet, The Adam and Eve Story published in 1963, and updated in 1971. Thomas, a geologist-engineer with degrees from Dartmouth and Columbia, is one of the pole-shift prognosticators of interest to John White in his now classic book, Pole Shift. In the book, written in 1980 and still in print, White discusses the conclusions of the most prominent pole-shift theorists, including Hugh Auchincloss Brown, Immanuael Velikovsky, Charles Hapgood and others.

Pole Shift is a complete compendium of all of the mostly modern predictors of a pole-shift, including famous psychics and clairvoyants. It has emerged as the most thorough treatment of this subject in print, and has become the source book for students and investigators of the subject, both scientific and otherwise, all over the world. Originally published by Doubleday, and then by Berkeley Books, it is now in print by A.R.E. Press in Virginia Beach, with more than 50,000 copies of that edition alone in print.

In the original 1980 edition, White does not express certainty of belief in a coming pole-shift, but attaches enough merit to the possibility to have included a chapter in the book entitled How to Prepare for a Pole Shift. His conclusions are carefully worded, but definitely leaning towards preparing for the possibility that it will occur around the end of the century. However he does state in several places in the book that he is not yet convinced, and would not be willing to render a final judgment until certain precursor events have occurred. By 1991, White was satisfied that these selected events were not going to happen, and he therefore added an Epilogue to the 1995 A.R.E. edition in which he states his conviction that there will not be a geographic pole-shift. White concludes in this edition that most of Cayce's earth-change prognostications are in error, especially the pole-shift prediction. It is undeniable that almost all of the cataclysm dates pinpointed by Cayce have come and gone without incident.

John White has degrees from Dartmouth and Yale, and has been writing, teaching and lecturing on diverse subjects that basically come under the New Age umbrella since the 60s, with deeper involvement in the field since 1972 when he joined with Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell to found The Institute of Noetic Science in California. His main focus has been research in the area of higher consciousness. He has written many books on this and related subjects, and has edited several well-known anthologies including Frontiers of Consciousness, Future Science, and Kundalini, Evolution and Enlightenment. His most recent book, The Meeting of Science and Spirit, takes up the Herculean challenge of reconciling these two poles of the human experience, a daunting task first tackled by Madame Blavatsky in 1890 in her monumental and massive work Isis Unveiled.

White has long been involved with UFO investigation and research. He has organized and hosted an annual conference called The UFO Experience in North Haven, Connecticut since 1983, whereat have appeared such luminaries of the UFO universe as Stanton Friedman, Erich Von Daniken, Jacques Vallee, Budd Hopkins, Brad Steiger and many others. John has recently retired from his corporate public relations job, and now devotes his efforts completely to his writing, lecturing and literary agent activities.

We reached him at his home office recently in Cheshire, Connecticut, to seek clarification and his most recent thinking about the Pole Shift. We wondered particularly if he had any new thoughts about the crustal displacement theory of Charles Hapgood in the light of a recent revival of interest in Hapgood's ideas sparked by the new book, When the Sky Fell, by Rand and Rose Flem-Ath. The Flem-Aths theorize, in the book, that the watery demise of Atlantis was not really due to submergence, but; rather to crustal displacement, and they claim that the present continent of Antarctica is really Atlantis under ice, the end product of a sudden pole shift around 9,500 B.C.

White is still firm in his conviction that there will not be a geographic pole shift around the year 2000, calling it nonsense and fantasy, and furthermore that there probably has never been one, although he does not rule out the possibility that it could occur someday in the distant future. He was, however, careful to distinguish between a magnetic and geographic pole shift. He acknowledged that there have been many magnetic shifts. He says there have been at least 181 occasions recognized by science when the magnetic field of the earth has completely collapsed, and reestablished itself in the opposite polarity. So that the north magnetic pole becomes the south magnetic pole, and vice-versa. We asked if they are ever accompanied by catastrophes. His reply: No. Certainly not catastrophes of the sort predicted by the pole shift theorists and predictors. White says that, as far as he knows, such magnetic shifts do not occur on any cyclical basis, nor are they triggered by outer-space events a la Velikovsky in his famous work, Worlds in Collision.

The strength of White's conviction was surprising, and we sought to understand how he had arrived at such an inelastic position on such a controversial subject, essentially flying in the face of innumerable previsions of millennial polar catastrophe by psychics and clairvoyants such as Scallion, Cayce and Nostradamus. Primarily, it was the fact that the predicted precursor events never happened.

One of the most important discoveries that argues for pole shifts in the past was a Renaissance map found in the Library of Congress in 1959 by Charles Hapgood, that shows the continent of Antarctica in an ice-free state. This was, in addition to the famous Piri Re-is map, a map drawn by Oronteus Finaeus in 1531 from much more ancient maps. After several years of research, Hapgood was able to identify more than fifty accurately represented features of Antarctica on the map. Since Antarctica wasn't really charted until about 1920, Finaeus had no way of knowing anything about it. But obviously those ancient mariners knew it in precise cartographic terms. Hapgood estimated the source to be about 17,000 years old, and therefore speculated that the pole shift which buried the continent in ice must have occurred about 14,000 years ago. In 1961, the Cartographic Section of the U.S.A.F. Strategic Air Command, after studying the Finaeus map, entirely confirmed Hapgood's analysis. They said that the map was indeed made when Antarctica was free of ice, and that furthermore, the ancient mapmakers must have understood advanced mathematics, especially spherical trigonometry! To some, this suggests an ancient astronaut hypothesis, which Hapgood considered and dismissed as unlikely. The treatment of Hapgood was largely sympathetic in the book, but in his Epilogue to the l995 edition, White claims that Hapgood's conclusions about the Finaeus map were effectively demolished by an article in a magazine called The Skeptical Inquirer in the Fall of 1986 by one David Jolly, who publishes a rare map trade handbook. It was our naive belief that on the face of it, the Air Force opinion should weigh heavier than a single article by a non-scientist in an obscure magazine, but White told us that he continues to rely largely on the Jolly article as a refutation of the Hapgood ancient map evidence.

Hapgood's theory of crustal displacement also explains one of the great mysteries of geology. How did it happen that temperate and equatorial parts of the planet came to be covered with ice during the so-called various ice-ages? It is known, for example, that a glacier originated in southern India about 280 million years ago, and pushed northwards 1100 miles. How can this be, since India has always been where it is now? Hapgood says in The Path of the Pole, ...ice ages existed in the tropics and...great ice caps covered vast areas on and near the equator. This happened not once, but several times. Shifting poles due to slippage of the earth's crust could account for this phenomenon very neatly. In his 1991 Epilogue, White discusses this at length, and ultimately concludes that recent research in land-water distribution indicates that this factor may account for the rapid onset and recession of glaciation. When asked for his current opinion on this, White said that new information about Continental Drift may explain some of the apparent polar re-locations to tropical areas.

Then there is the problem of the Woolly Mammoths. White devotes an entire chapter in the book to this riddle. What caused them all to die so suddenly? It is one thing for a species to die out slowly over thousands of years and become extinct. It is quite another to find their bones, and in many cases, perfectly preserved bodies, in heaps in various parts of the world, mostly in northern Siberia. Most certainly, they did not die of old age. The famed Beresovka Mammoth uncovered in Siberia in 1900, had unchewed grass and buttercups in his mouth, and undigested vegetation in his stomach, indicating clearly that he had died in the summer. How then, did he become frozen, and remain perfectly preserved? A sudden pole shift plunging the Siberian plains into numbing cold and transforming them into frozen tundra would be one very acceptable explanation. Even if the Mammoths did not all die immediately, they would perish over a short period thereafter, because their food supply would be cut off. This is the hypothesis championed by the well-known naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson, who made numerous television appearances in the '60s. In the Epilogue, White relies almost completely on a critique refuting the pole shift theory, written by one William White of England. John White believes that William White is able to counter almost all of the very convincing points made by Sanderson, to his satisfaction, thus neutralizing the Woolly Mammoth evidence. However, we are never given any of White's credentials. Both sides are in agreement that the Mammoths apparently died mostly of asphyxiation before they froze, but W. White concludes that this could have been caused by drowning or suffocation, rather than a sudden icy tempest. John White claimed that the extended period over which the Mammoths died, he estimates it to be between 30,000 and 10,000 B.C., argues against a sudden catastrophic event. In the case of the Beresovska Mammoth he says all the indications are that he fell into an icy crevasse, broke his leg, and froze to death.

White's ultimate conclusion that there has never been and will not be a pole shift after such a laborious treatment of the subject, prompted us to ask, what motivated him to write the book in the first place. He told us that living in Virginia Beach and California brought the earth changes and pole shift predictions to his attention. I felt that it was a subject worthy of further investigation. If there was any truth to the pole shift concept, then the human race was facing a gigantic cataclysm in the very near future. I felt that people should be aware of it, and a great effort should be made to prepare for it.... As we pondered this reply, we considered how strange it was that, with this initial motivation and with White's consequent identification with the whole subject, that the book turned out to be a refutation! One thing was very clear, White apparently placed more reliance on scientific or pseudo-scientific evidence than on the psychic/clairvoyant prophecies. We asked him about that. I'm not a scientist. I'm only a student of science. But. . . l have enormous respect for the scientific method as a way of probing reality and ascertaining the truth of something. Science has its limits, and spiritual truths will not be proven definitively by science. On the other hand, science does have a lot to say that can help us to assess the validity of reported spiritual truths....In the world of spirituality, there's a strong tendency for people to cross over the line from having an open mind to having a hole in the head....

From his concluding statement we understood that he seeks answers from a higher source, and is possessed of a more idealistic sort of spirituality. The conversation had turned to alien abductions, which White connects with demonic forces. From his view of this situation, we understood why he is not concerned about a possible pole shift. ...it's very clear that the human race is being supported by vast metaphysical forces concerned with our health and safety and welfare and spiritual unfoldment. It's evident, especially, in the Near Death Experience where people come in contact with beings of light who wordlessly radiate a sense of compassion and forgiveness. A person's materialistic values, in that situation, are radically re-oriented in the direction of spirituality. . .the human species has strong allies who are working behind the scenes to counter those forces of darkness who seek to enslave us and capture our souls. Now, the important thing is this, to learn to love all beings unconditionally...Unconditional love is the way God loves, and we are here on earth to learn to love as God loves.