Charles Hapgood

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Charles Hapgood
Born
Charles Hutchins Hapgood

(1904-05-17)May 17, 1904
DiedDecember 21, 1982(1982-12-21) (aged 78)
Earth Crustal Displacement theory
Spouse
Tamsin Hughes
​
​
(m. 1941; div. 1955)​

Charles Hutchins Hapgood (May 17, 1904 – December 21, 1982)

pseudo-scientific claim of a rapid and recent pole shift
with catastrophic results.

Biography

Hapgood was the son of

Franklin Roosevelt
's Crafts Commission.

During

Red Cross, and also served as a liaison officer between the White House and the Office of the Secretary of the War. After the war, Hapgood taught at Keystone College (1945–1947), Springfield College (1947–1952), Keene State College (1956–1966) and New England College
(1966–1967), lecturing in world and American history, anthropology, economics, and the history of science.

Hapgood married Tamsin Hughes in 1941 and divorced in 1955. He was struck by a motorist in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and died on December 21, 1982.[1]

Polar shift

Main article:
Polar shift

While at Springfield College, a student's question about the

Lost Continent of Mu prompted a class project to investigate the lost continent of Atlantis, leading Hapgood to investigate possible ways that massive earth changes could occur and exposing him to the literature of Hugh Auchincloss Brown
.

In 1958, Hapgood published The Earth's Shifting Crust. It denied the existence of continental drift, an idea that was not supported by mainstream science for another decade. The book included a foreword by Albert Einstein. In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966) and The Path of the Pole (1970), Hapgood proposed the hypothesis that the Earth's axis has shifted numerous times during geological history.[2] The Path of the Pole was meant as a replacement for The Earth's Shifting Crust after corrections were suggested to him. Hapgood writes in Voices of Spirit (1975): "In later discussions we discussed the theories of my book 'Earth's Shifting Crust', and he [Einstein] suggested that one of them was wrong; as a result of this I revised my book, which subsequently was republished as 'The Path of the Pole'. My own further research confirmed the truth of his observation, which involved technicalities of geophysics."

In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings he supported the suggestion made by Arlington Mallery that a part of the

ice-age civilization could have mapped the coast. He concludes that "Antarctica was mapped when these parts were free of ice" and took the view that an Antarctic warm period coincided with the last ice age in the Northern hemisphere and that the Piri Reis and other maps were based on "ancient" maps derived from ice-age originals.[3]

Later research concerning the

ice sheets of Antarctica have discredited the interpretations by Hapgood that an Antarctic warm period coincided with the last glacial period in the Northern Hemisphere and that any part of it had been ice-free at and prior to 9,600 BC (approx. 11,600 years ago).[4][5]

Hapgood also examined a 1531 map by French mathematician and cartographer

Westover AFB in 1961. These letters say that at Hapgood's request, they had studied both Piri Reis and Oronce Finé maps during their off-duty hours, concluding that both were compiled from original source maps of Antarctica at a time when it was relatively free of ice, supporting Hapgood's findings.[3] Hapgood concluded that advanced cartographic knowledge appears on the Piri Reis map and the Oronteus Finaeus map, and must be the result of some unknown ancient civilization that developed advanced scientific knowledge before other civilizations such as Greece.[6]

According to historians Paul Hoye and Paul Lunde, while Hapgood's work garnered some enthusiasm and praise for its thoroughness, his revolutionary hypotheses largely met with skepticism and were ignored by most scholars.[6] In the book The Piri Reis Map of 1513 Gregory C. McIntosh examines Hapgood's claims for both maps and states that "they fall short of proving or even strongly suggesting that the Piri Reis map and the Fine map depict the actual outline of Antarctica."[7][8]

Hapgood's ideas on catastrophe have been presented in other works by librarians Rose and Rand Flem-Ath and author and former journalist Graham Hancock, each basing portions of their works on Hapgood's evidence for catastrophe at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum.[1][9] Hapgood's ideas also figure prominently in the 2009 sci-fi/disaster movie 2012.

Acámbaro figures

Hapgood and

dinosaur extinction were wrong.[1][11]

Elwood Babbitt

Hapgood spent ten years working with New England medium Elwood Babbitt (1921-2001), attempting to make contact with notable figures from the past. Babbitt, a retired carpenter and World War II veteran, had studied trance mediumship at Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment. Hapgood audiotaped and transcribed a number of Babbitt's "trance lectures" which purported to come from Jesus, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, and the Hindu god Vishnu,[12] using the material to publish his final three books:Voices of Spirit, Through the Psychic Experience of Elwood Babbitt (1975), Talks with Christ and His Teachers Through the Psychic Gift of Elwood Babbitt (1981), and The God Within: a Testament of Vishnu, a Handbook for the Spiritual Renaissance (1982). [1] During this time Babbitt and Hapgood's cousin, Beth Hapgood worked closely with the nearby Brotherhood of the Spirit New Age commune. After Charles Hapgood's death, Beth Hapgood assembled a final volume of Babbitt's trance lectures, Dare the Vision and Endure (1997).

Bibliography

References

  1. ^
    Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library: Yale University Library. Archived from the original
    on 25 May 2013. Retrieved 5 November 2010.
  2. ^ Full text of Earths Shifting Crust, archive.org.
  3. ^
    ISBN 978-0-932813-42-8
    .
  4. ^ Anderson, J. B., S. S. Shipp, A. L. Lowe, J. S. Wellner, J. S., and A. B. Mosola (2002) "The Antarctic Ice Sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum and its subsequent retreat history: a review". Quaternary Science Reviews. v. 21, pp. 49–70.
  5. ^ Ingolfsson, O. (2004) Quaternary glacial and climate history of Antarctica. in: J. Ehlers and P. L. Gibbard, eds., pp. 3–43, Quaternary Glaciations: Extent and Chronology 3: Part III: South America, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica. Elsevier, New York.
  6. ^
    Saudi Aramco World. 31 (1): 18–31. Archived from the original
    on 29 August 2012. Retrieved 3 November 2010.
  7. ISBN 978-0-8203-2157-8
    .
  8. ^ McIntosh, Gregory C. "The Tale of Two Admirals: Columbus and the Piri Reis Map of 1513". Archived from the original on 2011-07-16.
  9. The Skeptical Inquirer. Vol. 26, no. 4. Archived from the original
    on 23 August 2014. Retrieved 4 November 2010.
  10. ISBN 978-0-691-11345-6
    .
  11. ISBN 978-0-932813-76-3
    .
  12. ^ "Elwood Babbitt Papers". Special Collections & University Archives. University of Massachusetts. Archived from the original on 20 November 2010. Retrieved 7 November 2010.

Further reading

External links
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