Donald Patten

Donald W Patten, a geographer by training, was born in 1929 in Montana, not far from Glacier National Park. He died recently and will be buried on February 20th in Seattle. He leaves behind seven children, fifteen grandchildren, and twelve great grandchildren. He was the owner of Microfilm Service Co. and the Pacific Meridian Publishing Co. He had a lifelong history in ancient history, ancient literature, climatology, genetics, geography, geomorphology, mathematics and philosophy. He published several hypothesis relating to earth history and ancient accounts of catastrophic events such as the Biblical story of the Flood. His books include, 'The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch' and 'The Long Day of Joshua and Six other Catastrophes' and 'Catastrophism and the Old Testament'. His projections involved the planet Mars, involved an understanding or orbital mechanics, and mathematics. He chose Mars as the object that threatened the Earth, possibly inspired by Velikosky, but largely because very little was known about Near Earth Objects in those days – and the many asteroids and comets that occasionally threaten the well being of living beings on the surface of the Earth. Essentially, he was aware of a succession of unusual events, or catastrophes, that had occurred within the Holocene, and his orbital calculations were designed to bring them all together with one vector. He chose the planet Mars – not a lot was known about Near Earth Objects and the threat from space posed by asteroids on the loose and the sudden appearance of comets on the horizon of the sky. Velikovsky had of course turned the planet Mars into the god of war and mayhem – so this may have influenced his choice of vector. Not only that, planetary orbits were known and subsequently, they could be tested – and redrawn. What Patten essentally showed the rest of us is that objects in  space, even a single vector, could and probably did, cause problems in the age of human civilisations. They preserved the memory of those events in myth and legend (which is essentially what Velikovsky was all about).