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latitude of London while Siberia remained unfrozen, the ice sheet over India, and other irregularities.
    Hapgood was lucky to have a friend in the zoologist Ivan Sanderson, who was interested in what are now called ‘anomalies’, meaning strange and unexplained phenomena. It was Sanderson who brought to his attention the Russian scientist Immanuel Velikovsky’s investigations of the Beresovka mammoth, found frozen in Siberia around 1901 in a half-standing position with buttercups in its mouth. Obviously, for such flora to have been growing, the climate had changed very suddenly, but how could even an earth crust slippage have caused the temperature to drop so rapidly? Hapgood had himself been in Canada one Indian summer; it had been hot enough for him to bathe in a lake and then dry out in the sun, until suddenly the wind had changed to north-west and the temperature had dropped so that the lake was frozen over within hours. He imagined the Beresovka mammoth chewing buttercups in a warm meadow when a storm had blown up, with a wind of 150 miles an hour. (One of the consequences of volcanic dust in the air is an increase in the temperature difference between poles and equator and more powerful winds.)
    But why were other mammoths not affected? The answer is that they were – in their thousands. Twenty thousand mammoth tusks were exported from Siberia in the last decades of the nineteenth century and thousands more must have remained buried. Ivory is unusable unless it comes from freshly killed animals, or can be frozen very quickly. Many of the frozen mammoths were perfectly edible, indicating that they had been frozen to temperatures well below zero and kept like that for thousands of years. If meat is merely kept at or around freezing point, ice crystals form and ‘spoil’ it bydisrupting the cells. Evidently, some huge catastrophe plunged Siberia from a warm day into sub-zero temperatures that lasted 15,000 years.
    Hapgood then discussed the mastodon bones found in New York State around 1880, which at the time were assumed to prove that mastodons survived the Ice Age. Subsequent geological studies have proved that, like the Siberian mammoths, they were caught by a sudden drop in temperature, then in the ice sheet that subsequently formed, so the mastodons of North America – as well as bears, horses, giant beavers, deer, caribou, elk and bison – were also overtaken by catastrophe. The basic difference was that Siberia became freezing cold. Why? Because it had moved north.
    Einstein read Hapgood’s material and replied within five days: ‘I find your arguments very impressive and have the impression that your hypothesis is correct. One can hardly doubt that significant shifts of the earth’s crust have taken place repeatedly and within a short time.’14 His encouragement led Hapgood to send him more of the typescript. In spring 1954, Einstein supported Hapgood’s application for a grant or research appointment at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, where Einstein was based. 15 Unfortunately, Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atom bomb’, who was an influential member of the committee, opposed Hapgood, and the request was turned down. On 18 May 1954, Einstein wrote to express his sympathy, and, perhaps as a consolation prize, sent Hapgood a short introduction to the book that would become
Earth’s Shifting Crust,
probably recognising that, in the long run, this would be worth more than a grant.
    Again, in November 1954, Einstein supported Hapgood’s request for a research grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. Once again, it was turned down. The following January, Hapgood and Campbell called on Einstein at Princeton and held a long discussion which Hapgood wrote up into an account that he later sent to Einstein, who agreed thatit was accurate, although he asked not to be quoted, since his remarks had been made without preparation. Hapgood later reprinted the notes in
Earth’s Shifting