''The Adam and Eve Story''

The Adam and Eve Story: The History of Cataclysms is a 1963 book by American amateur researcher Chan Thomas, describing his theory that the Earth goes through a cataclysmic upheaval every 6,000 years.

The book

The book is dedicated to Thomas's wife and to General Hal Grant, General LeMay and Admiral Taylor 'for their inspiring encouragement'.

Based on his studies of geology and various myths, Thomas suggests that approximately every 6,000 years the Earth's magnetic field changes direction, and that this leads to the crust detaching from the mantle and rotating into a new position at great speed, causing worldwide tsunamis and earthquakes. He argues that the Noah's Ark story is an account of the most recent of these, in 4500 BC, and the story of Adam and Eve is a very garbled account of the previous one, in 9500 BC. He also relates a number of other myths and rumours to this supposed cycle, including Atlantis, Mu, and the Hindu legend of manvantaras.

The book was republished in 1993 by Bengal Tiger Press.

CIA file

A copy of part of the book appears in a declassified file on the CIA's website, marked as having been released in 2013. This has resulted in a widespread idea that the book itself was classified by the CIA and made unavailable to the public and that parts of it are still unreleased, but there is no clear evidence of this. The file does not mention how the CIA came by the book.

The file contains 7 pages of the book, along with four pages from the 11 March 1966 edition of Time magazine and two pages of documents about what appear to be builders' supplies. The book pages and the magazine pages both have cryptic marginal notes on them, some of which have been censored before the file was declassified.

Academic reception

Thomas's theories are not well regarded by geologists. The idea of magnetic pole shifts is widely agreed with in itself. Magnetic minerals in rocks point in different directions in different layers of rock, indicating that the Earth's magnetic field pointed in different directions at the times when they were laid down and they were then frozen in place when the rock solidified. However, there is no evidence of it causing any kind of movement of the crust, and the evidence is usually interpreted to mean intervals of hundreds of thousands of years between shifts. Martin Mlynczak, a senior research scientist at the NASA Langley Research Center, dismissed the idea of magnetic field reversals every 6,000 years as 'totally bogus'.