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Picking Up Where Velikovsky Left Off . . .
REBEL WITH A CAUSE: PROFESSOR JAMES MCCANNEY
by Jolene Rae Harrington
(Reprinted from UFO MAGAZINE)
“The history of this planet as it is taught is false.”
— Professor James McCanney
Once upon a time, there was a young physicist filled with the wonder of discovery and enthusiasm for spreading knowledge. He was invited to join the ranks of one of America’s most prestigious universities, where he quietly began to publish in scientific journals his novel theories of celestial mechanics. As it happens, he was present when NASA’s Voyager transmitted exciting new data to the university. His superiors were surprised that the incoming data challenged their most cherished beliefs, and they scrambled to come up with explanations for the contradictory information. Like the boy in the story of “The Emperor Who Has No Clothes,” the physicist bravely called their attention to the anomalies that demanded a serious re-working of established astrophysical tenets. He also, somewhat more timidly, ventured that the evidence proved his own unconventional theories. The Princes of Academia scoffed and raged. The young instructor was labeled an infidel, and they eventually conspired to have him banished from the kingdom.
What? You were expecting “happily ever after”? Well, life is not a fairy tale, and since being driven from the hallowed halls of Cornell University back in 1979, it’s been a rocky road for Professor Jim McCanney, teacher of physics, math and science. But despite the challenges he’s faced, his quest for scientific integrity continues. That McCanney has a chip on his shoulder against NASA and academia is obvious, and understandable—imagine his horror when he witnessed the ad hoc interpretations fashioned by his colleagues during the Voyager downloads being later disseminated to the media as if they were well-researched facts.
As you examine McCanney’s books, website and radio interviews, you find yourself becoming frustrated, too. There’s a striking dichotomy between what is taught to the public and what the facts suggest. At the heart of the problem is the university system. “They’re dedicated to being right. It’s a good old buddy system where nobody asks anyone the hard questions,” asserts McCanney. When someone with respected credentials breaks rank, they are persecuted.
In McCanney’s case, he was drummed out of Cornell by the Space Science Department, which not only included Carl Sagan but also many NASA scientists. Initially, scientific journals were quick to publish his papers, but after he left Cornell his contributions were suddenly rejected without consideration or comment. At the suggestion of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Hans Bethe, McCanney submitted to the European publications, and his work was eagerly snapped up. He consulted with top Russian scientists, such as Dr. Aleskey Dmitriev, who translated his papers and taught the conclusions in their colleges. Lauded in Europe but scorned in America, McCanney continued teaching university-level math and science at American institutions while tirelessly continuing his efforts to break the scientific elite’s stranglehold on public awareness. So what was all the fuss about? The findings of the NASA space probes suggested that the primary “axioms of astronomy” are just plain wrong. “But the professors were so dedicated to being right,” reports McCanney, “that they never took the time to say, ‘Perhaps there’s something else that caused these effects.’”
Traditional astrophysics has taught that space is electrically neutral. No way, says McCanney. Space consistently demonstrates pronounced electrical properties, with the Sun acting as a kind of “solar capacitor,” emitting solar winds carrying an excess of proton charges. The inalienable axioms also describe comets as nothing more than “dirty snowballs.” Dead wrong, says McCanney. Comets are in reality complex plasma-discharge phenomena that even at a distance interact electrically with the Sun and the planets, producing measurable effects on the Earth.
Another grave scientific miscue is the focus on the danger of incoming objects colliding with Earth. Take your blinders off! McCanney cries. There doesn’t have to be a direct hit to reap chaos on our planet. One of McCanney’s most startling theories, “Action At a Distance,” describes how comets can set off solar flaring and electrical discharge, with drastic effects on Earth and its inhabitants, including extreme weather patterns and severe natural disasters. The analysis of how this model affected our past, and how it might affect our future, makes up most of McCanney’s controversial book, Planet X, Comets, and Earth Changes, which could be subtitled “Everything You Learned From NASA Is Wrong.” He systematically refutes the cherished axioms, including such favorites as the Big Bang Theory, and supplies a new framework for evaluating what goes on in space, including how the solar system was formed, one comet/planet at a time. The companion booklet, Surviving Planet X’s Passage, reasons that just as has happened before, in our foreseeable future we will experience the catastrophic effects of the passage of a large planetary body, the widely speculated extra-solar planet whose orbit is postulated to intersect with Earth’s every few thousand years.
Depending on your point of view, McCanney is either a modern-day Cassandra or a Chicken Little. Yet keep in mind his apocalyptic predictions are based not on psychic powers or scripture, but on scientific observations and the extrapolation of the evidence apparent in pre-history, as chronicled in the work of Immanuel Velikovsky. If you’ve been following along with UFO Magazine’s feature on Velikovsky (see part two in this issue), you’ve already recognized a synchronicity between that 1950s theorist and our modern Science Avenger.
McCanney says that originally, his own theories were developed independently and later reinforced by a series of archeological expeditions he made between completing his undergraduate work and earning his Master’s Degree at Tulane University. His vision of the pre-historical world seemed at odds with what he had been taught. McCanney asked himself a crucial question: What had to have happened back then to give us the world we have today? He began to theorize that the devastation of ancient cultures was triggered by celestial events that in many cases left behind no trace of the inhabitants. “When I shared some of my ideas with a colleague, he introduced me to Velikovsky. I read the books and got very excited. There’s no question anymore that Velikovsky was right.”
Like McCanney, Velikovsky took a multidisciplinary approach, utilizing geology, astronomy and cultural history to develop a framework that takes into account all of the evidence. “That’s another problem with science. It’s so specialized and compartmentalized that no one is integrating all the data,” observes the professor. In what must seem an eerie deja vu, McCanney learned that Velikovsky had also been branded “heretical” by the scientific community. Velikovsky’s groundbreaking Worlds In Collision was on the best-seller list, and thousands of citizens were reading how the comet Venus wreaked havoc in our solar system, provoking cataclysms on Earth that destroyed ancient civilizations.
The “powers that be” believed Velikovsky had to be stopped.
“ It was Carl Sagan that led the charge against him,” claims McCanney. “Then I showed up.” With the advantage of modern technology, McCanney picked up where Velikovsky left off, demonstrating how comets, working like giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, could create the effects Velikovsky described. “When I first published my papers back then, it was definitely not what NASA or Cornell wanted to see,” he reflects. “I didn’t realize that I had provided the key to unlocking Velikovsky at a time when the academic and scientific elite had been working hard to get rid of him.”
Just as no one has convincingly refuted Velikovsky since his work was first published in 1950, McCanney is also seeing his theories validated. Not that he is getting any credit, mind you, but slowly an idea here, a factoid there lends credence to his sweeping new paradigm. Two recent NASA programs incorporate assumptions that McCanney first introduced decades ago. One example is the detection of X-rays in comets. “I talked about that back in 1979!” he declares. “Now suddenly, it’s a NASA ‘discovery.’ In light of this ‘revelation,’ how can comets still be reduced to mere dirty snowballs?” For the time being, NASA is publicly ignoring the issue, but says McCanney, “Top NASA scientists know I’m correct.”
If this is the case, then why aren’t they talking? Perhaps it’s because they have before them the examples of other rogue scientists, like Dr. Robert Harrington, the discoverer of Planet X and a NASA critic who met an untimely death in 1993. This past March, McCanney announced his desire to complete the unfinished work of Harrington. McCanney is raising money to fund a research expedition to remote outposts in the Southern Hemisphere in order to chart the new orbital parameters and true size of comets NEAT and Hale-Bopp, which he considers to be two captured objects of our solar system.
While Harrington was charting the course of Planet X, NASA astronomer/geologist Dr. Eugene Shoemaker also had his telescope trained on the sky Down Under. He realized that not only was Hale-Bopp much larger than NASA was reporting, but that at the time it was on a course that would bring it close enough to Earth to wreak total devastation. “As it turned out, Hale-Bopp lost three months in arriving due to its tail drag, but before it slowed down, Shoemaker was going to go public,” claims McCanney. “He was well known and would have carried many scientists with him.” Before he could make such a declaration, Shoemaker died in a car accident in Australia.
With the number of lives and reputations in shambles behind him, you would think McCanney would barricade himself inside his Minneapolis home. Not so. He continues lecturing all over the world, and was recently the keynote speaker at the Laughlin (Nevada) UFO Congress. When asked if he was a rebellious schoolboy, he says, “I was a thinker. I didn’t take things at face value. I developed my own theories in my geometry class that the teachers didn’t understand, but would yield the right answers. I never minded being different.”
Cosmic sleuths interested in something different are invited to attend McCanney’s virtual classroom, which meets Thursday evenings at www.realityradio.com. The lessons are posted on his website, www.jmccanneyscience.com, and come complete with visual notes, maps, photographs and diagrams that make them quite fascinating. Warning: Prof. McCanney’s classes are addicting, and you’ll find yourself logging on to learn the truth about such esoterica as secret excavations beneath Antarctica and the location of Atlantis.
Last February, his Internet students may have been among the few who were aware of a significant celestial event. No less than five large comets came very close to the Sun, producing dramatic solar-flare activity. McCanney suspects that these could be harbingers of Planet X, but there was a mysterious absence of media coverage on the noteworthy comet cluster. “NASA wants to downplay these big objects because they don’t have a theoretical place for them. But reality is knocking at their door.” And ours as well. Are we content as a society to be kept in the dark about the forecast of cataclysms that could wipe out humanity, knowing that we could be left to fend for ourselves while the privileged few scurry to well-stocked underground bunkers to ride out the destruction?
Clearly, McCanney wants to end the information blackout. The idea that there’s a “knowledge filter” at work to keep the public in line was first popularized by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, whose book Forbidden Archeology brought to light discoveries ignored by the archeological establishment. “The disinformation is pervasive,” McCanney warns. “It’s on almost every front of knowledge.” The motivation for intellectual dictatorship may be a fierce determination to protect the existing power base, or maybe something even more sinister. In a society where public information is becoming increasingly pre-packaged, each controlling agency appears to have its own agenda. For NASA and the academic community, McCanney believes that it all comes down to ego and money. “The biggest thing they fear is being wrong,” for being wrong dries up the access to funding.
McCanney might also be right when he claims that NASA is overseen by the National Security Agency (which requires every employee to sign a non-disclosure agreement). If true, what was originally intended as a civilian space program may have become just another brick in the wall. NASA, or its handlers, does not want us to know the truth about incoming space objects, probably for the same reason they don’t want us to know about UFOs: When the populace thinks their lifestyle might be threatened, then they stop shopping at WalMart, and might pause between frappacinos long enough to question the ability of our government to protect us from terrorists or aliens or incoming destroyer-objects. If we really are staring Apocalypse in the face, then the fabric of society could very well unravel, and so could the carefully-wrought control exerted by those at the apex of power, whom McCanney calls “The One World Government, a worldwide organization that is basically keeping the people in a slavery mode.”
By denying the public knowledge, these forces are denying us the power to influence our own destiny. Protecting intellectual freedom should be the foremost concern of every one of us. Supporting the alternative media is a step in the right direction. And while we’re at it, let’s spread the word about Professor McCanney, a champion for scientific truth. Maybe then we’ll get that happy ending after all.
Jolene Rae Harrington is a freelance writer and Director of Public Relations for MUFON-LA.
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