The Doctor Who Rewrote History

Immanuel Velikovsky was a psychoanalyst who claimed the solar system once rearranged itself. His bestseller argued that Venus was once a comet ejected by Jupiter that nearly destroyed the ancient Earth.

During the mid-twentieth century, Velikovsky captivated the public by suggesting that myths of natural disasters were actually eyewitness accounts of planetary encounters. While his theories were rejected by the scientific community as pseudoscience, they became legendary for challenging the boundaries of academic research. His work remains a famous case study on why humans are so drawn to dramatic, catastrophic revisions of history.