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University of Glasgow
The Hunterian Museum

February 26th 1975

Dear Dr. Velikovsky,

I expect someone has already drawn your attention to my letter in the New Scientist of last April about mammoth dates but I enclose a copy in case no-one has. For some reason I missed it myself at the time.

We are trying to for the nucleus of a society over here for those devoted to studying your ideas rationally. I would like it to be called the Whiston Society after your 17th century predecessor. It is too early yet to tell whether it will get off the ground but our campaign of advertisement has hardly started yet. I have hopes.

I do hope that all is well with you and your family and that you are allowing yourself abundant time for finishing your books. Everyone interested to whom I speak asks when we are to see some more!

With kind regards,

Dr. I. Velikovskky
78 Hartley Avenue,
Princeton,
New Jersey,
USA.

Euan MacKie


[enclosure]

New Scientist, 4 April 1974, p. 39

Velikovsky
Sir,—Regarding your Washington editor’s article “Velikovsky in chaos” (7 March, p. 624) may one hope that readers interested in this potentially revolutionary topic will follow the rational advice implied in your accompanying editorial comments and read Velikovsky’s works even though this may involve the grave risk of being likened by Mr. Chedd to a guru’s acolyte?
The article gives me an opportunity to point out that the example I selected in “A challenge to the integrity of science?” (New Scientis, vol. 57, p. 76) to show that some of Velikovsky’s claims have been disproved has turned out since to be not suitable for that purpose. The subject was the time of the final extinction of the mammoths and I noted then that radiocarbon dates for ammoth remains had all turned out to be many thousands of years earlier than the 15th century BC, one of two eras selected by Velikovsky as a possible time for their extinction (the other being the 8th century BC).
However in the journal Radiocarbon (vol. 15, p. 114, 1973) there are published three dates for the bones of a mammoth found in Bavaria which turned out to be ±70, 2080±80 and 2120±60 BC (KI 358), an average of about 1975 BC.* Even if they are corrected by the tree-ring calibration these dates still apaprently show that mammoths were alive in Gemany in late Neolithic times, towards the end of the 3rd millennium BC and not many centuries before the time Velikovsky claimed.

Euan W. Mackie

29 Banavie Road
Glasgow G11 5AW

*misprint = 1940 b.c.


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