Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

180 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
In one drawing, the constellations are represented correctly, and in
the other they are reversed east-to-west, as if the Earth were spinning
the wrong way. How else to account for this but to assume
the Earth indeed was spinning east to west?
Actually, there are two ways. One is that the Earth is a big ball.
To someone standing in the southern hemisphere, the constellations
will look upside down compared to the view of someone standing
in the northern hemisphere. The curvature of the Earth does this,
making one person look like he is “standing on his head” relative to
another. That would explain the upside-down constellations pretty
well; perhaps a traveler was describing what he saw Down Under.
There is another explanation as well. Many ancients thought
stars were holes in a great crystal sphere, letting the light of heaven
shine through. The gods lived on the other side and therefore saw
the constellations backward relative to us. Many star maps show
this so-called “gods’ view” of the sky. In the main corridor of
Grand Central Terminal in New York City, the stars are painted on
the ceiling this way. Perhaps that Egyptian drawing was showing
our view of the sky versus the gods’ view.
I find either of these explanations a bit more palatable than
calling for the Earth to flip over.
And again, even if we do grant that the Earth flipped over, Velikovsky
would have us believe that another pass of Venus 24 hours
later flipped the Earth back the way it was, and spinning at the
same rate. To put it very mildly, this is pretty unlikely.
PPP
There are still two more massive, basic, truly fatal flaws to Velikovsky’s
Venus theory: one is that we still exist, and the other is
that the Moon is still around.
Velikovsky goes to great pains, over hundreds of pages in his
book, to relate the various disasters that befell mankind as Venus
loomed hugely in the sky. All of these events call for Venus to get
pretty close to the Earth. At one point, to explain such things as
manna falling from heaven and the Egyptian plague of vermin, he
states that Venus gets so close that its atmosphere flows into the
Earth’s own air.