[8] Nonetheless, his books often sold well and gained enthusiastic support in lay circles, often fuelled by claims of unfair treatment of Velikovsky by orthodox academia.

Velikovsky then traveled in Europe and visited Palestine before briefly studying medicine at Montpellier in France and taking premedical courses at the University of Edinburgh.

Velikovsky lived in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1924 to 1939, practising medicine in the fields of general practice, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis which he had studied under Sigmund Freud's pupil Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna.

[17] In 1939, with the prospect of war looming, Velikovsky travelled with his family to New York City, intending to spend a sabbatical year researching for his book Oedipus and Akhenaton.

Freud had argued that Akhenaton, the supposedly monotheistic Egyptian pharaoh, was the source of the religious principles that Moses taught to the people of Israel in the desert.

Launching on a tangent from his original book project, Velikovsky began to develop the radical catastrophist cosmology and revised chronology theories for which he would become notorious.

For the remainder of the Second World War, now as a permanent resident of New York City, he continued to research and write about his ideas, searching for a means to disseminate them to academia and the public.

Even before its appearance, the book was enveloped by furious controversy, when Harper's Magazine published a highly positive feature on it, as did Reader's Digest, with what would today be called a creationist slant.

During the remainder of the 1970s, Velikovsky devoted a great deal of his time and energy to rebutting his critics in academia, and he continued to tour North America and Europe to deliver lectures on his ideas.

[citation needed] (Exceptions include the biography ABA – the Glory and the Torment: The Life of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, issued in 1995 and greeted with rather dubious reviews;[21][22][unreliable source?

His main ideas in this area were summarized in an affidavit of November 1942,[27] and two privately published Scripta Academica pamphlets, Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History (1945) and Cosmos without Gravitation (1946).

[31] Velikovsky searched for common mention of events within literary records, and in the Ipuwer Papyrus he believed he had found a contemporary Egyptian account of the Plagues of Egypt.

[32] Cosmos without Gravitation, which Velikovsky placed in university libraries and sent to scientists, is a probable catalyst for the hostile response of astronomers and physicists to his later claims about astronomy.

[33] However, other Velikovskian enthusiasts such as Ralph Juergens (dec.), Earl Milton (dec.), Wal Thornhill (dec.), and Donald E. Scott have claimed that stars are powered not by internal nuclear fusion, but by galactic-scale electrical discharge currents.

[34][35][36] Velikovsky argued that the conventional chronology of the Near East and classical world, based upon Egyptian Sothic dating and the king lists of Manetho, was wholly flawed.

[37] The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS) was "formed in 1974 in response to the growing interest in the works of modern catastrophists, notably the highly controversial Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky".

The controversy surrounding Velikovsky peaked in the mid-1970s and public interest declined in the 1980s and, by 1984, erstwhile Velikovskyist C. Leroy Ellenberger had become a vocal critic of Velikovskian catastrophism.

[citation needed] Velikovsky relates in his book Stargazers & Gravediggers how he tried to protect himself from criticism of his celestial mechanics by removing the original appendix on the subject from Worlds in Collision, hoping that the merit of his ideas would be evaluated on the basis of his comparative mythology and use of literary sources alone.

[42] More recently, the absence of supporting material in ice-core studies (such as the Greenland Dye-3 and Vostok cores) has removed any basis for the proposition of a global catastrophe of the proposed dimension within the later Holocene period.

Velikovsky was almost certainly correct in his assertion that ancient texts hold clues to catastrophic events in the relatively recent past, within the span of human civilization, which involve the effects of comets, meteorites and cometary dust ...

This failure to recognize the power of comets and asteroids means that it is reasonable to go back to Velikovsky and delete all the physically impossible text about Venus and Mars passing close to the earth ...

[48] In 1978, following the much-postponed publication of further volumes in Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos series, the United Kingdom-based Society for Interdisciplinary Studies organised a conference in Glasgow specifically to debate the revised chronology.

[49] The ultimate conclusion of this work, by scholars including Peter James, John Bimson, Geoffrey Gammonn, and David Rohl, was that the Revised Chronology was untenable.

Among these was a study by American Behavioral Scientist magazine, eventually published in book form as The Velikovsky Affair — Scientism Versus Science.

More recently, James Gilbert, professor of history at the University of Maryland, challenged this traditional version with an account that focused on the intellectual rivalry between Velikovsky's ally Horace Kallen and Harlow Shapley.

[54] Earlier, Henry Bauer had challenged the view that the Velikovsky Affair illustrated the resistance of scientists to new ideas by pointing out "the nature and validity of Velikovsky's claims must be considered before one decides that the Affair can illuminate the reception of new ideas in science ..."[55] and, on the same basis, Keith Dixon contended that the treatment of the case by sociologists was an example of a broader unhealthy tendency in sociology to explain all opinions as ideologically motivated without considering their possible rational basis.