Immanuel Velikovsky, Einstein's Russian Friend, Argued Jupiter Barfed Out Venus

For the most part, it's a good call to live out one's days in denial. It's a safe bet that the world will not end in the next 100 years, so why should anyone worry about it, since we'll all be dead anyway? Things have been going along smoothly for millions of years as the human race has flourished and progress has kept on apace. Or has it? Immanuel Velikovsky, a friend of Albert Einstein, spent his career unearthing mysteries of the past and finding evidence to support his theory that the planet Jupiter spat out a mass of rubble around 1500 BC which went on to become the planet Venus after rocketing past Earth, nearly annihilating our planet and leaving a wake of hellfire. This near-miss extinction level event shook the foundations of great kingdoms and altered the course of history. The 1972 BBC documentary above features Velikovsky and his ideas in all of their apocalyptic, planet-smashing glory.

Of course, most credible scientists have dismissed Velikovsky's theories as pure fantasy. Nonetheless, the old psychiatrist with a penchant for conflating science and mythology achieved instant fame with his 1950 bestseller Worlds in Collisionin_Collision_. He then went on to have a meteoric career as a lecturer, mystifying impressionable young minds with his own brand of anti-science. At the very least he demands that people dare to question some of the basic assumptions about the universe.

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