The Adam and Eve Story
The Adam and Eve Story: The History of Cataclysms is a 1965 book by American engineer and ufologist Chan Thomas (1920–1998), describing his theory that the Earth goes through a cataclysmic upheaval — driven by abrupt magnetic pole shifts and crustal displacement — approximately every 6,000 years. Thomas described himself as a polymath and claimed extrasensory perception abilities, and worked in 1967 as one of four full-time researchers on McDonnell Douglas's in-house UFO investigation team.
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, in an expanded edition of 127 pages, more than twice the length of the original edition. Among the more unusual claims in the expanded text is Thomas's assertion that Jesus survived the crucifixion, lived as a scholar among tribes in what is now Nagaland in northeastern India, and was subsequently abducted by extraterrestrials.
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.[editorializing] The file does not mention how the CIA came by the book.
The file contains the complete 1965 edition of the book except for a few pages, 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'.
Modern social-media revival
The 2013 declassification of book excerpts by the CIA was followed in subsequent years by a substantial social-media revival of Thomas's thesis, with discussions on TikTok and conspiracy-oriented podcasts presenting the book as suppressed knowledge of an imminent pole shift. Media analysts have linked the spike in attention to broader climate change denial narratives — using the alleged 6,000-year cycle as an alternative explanation for current climate trends.