The Thunderbolts Project — People and History

Theories are carried by people, and the Electric Universe has an unusually traceable human story: a banned best-seller, a student journal in Portland, a physicist in Canberra, a mythologist in Oregon, and eventually a funded laboratory. This page is the who-and-when of the movement.

The Velikovsky root

The story begins with Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision (1950) — the era's most notorious science book, arguing from worldwide myth that the planets had recently rearranged themselves catastrophically. Mainstream science's response (including pressure that forced the book from its original publisher) became a famous episode in the sociology of science. Whatever one makes of his celestial mechanics, Velikovsky put two ideas permanently on the heterodox table: that myth might be observational data, and that electromagnetism might matter in celestial dynamics. Both became EU cornerstones.

Pensée and the first electric Sun

In 1972 a young Oregonian, David Talbott, and his brother Stephen launched Pensée ("Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered") through Portland's Student Academic Freedom Forum — ten issues, 1972–74, reaching a circulation in the tens of thousands and briefly making Velikovsky reconsideration an academic conversation. Pensée mattered for a second reason: it published Ralph Juergens (1924–1979), the engineer whose 1972 papers first proposed the externally powered, electrically discharging Sun — the seed of the electric-Sun model.

Talbott's own research went into The Saturn Myth** (Doubleday, 1980)**, arguing that the convergent imagery of ancient cultures records a sky utterly unlike today's — Earth in close association with Saturn in a "polar configuration." This comparative-mythology wing remains the theory's most speculative layer (and is labeled as such throughout this section), but it supplied the movement's founding question: what did the ancients actually see? His video Remembering the End of the World (1996) and the later Symbols of an Alien Sky series present the case visually.

Wal Thornhill and the physics

Wallace "Wal" Thornhill (1942–2023) read Worlds in Collision as a schoolboy in Melbourne and took a degree in physics and electronics at the University of Melbourne. After a career spanning IBM Australia and Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, he devoted himself to the electrical reinterpretation of astronomy, presenting the synthesis he called the "Electric Universe" at a world conference in Portland in January 1997 and building the case on his site, holoscience.com. Thornhill supplied the program's physical architecture — electric stars fed by galactic Birkeland currents, discharge-machined comets and planets — drawing explicitly on the Alfvén–Peratt plasma tradition. He died in Canberra on February 7, 2023; his collaborators continue the project.

The Thunderbolts Project

Talbott (the mythology) and Thornhill (the physics) co-founded The Thunderbolts Project — the movement's institutional home at thunderbolts.info — co-authoring its two foundational books, Thunderbolts of the Gods** (2005)** and The Electric Universe** (2007)**. The project runs the long-lived Picture of the Day (TPOD) archive, the Space News video series, and periodic EU conferences, and gathered the wider cast: Donald E. Scott (electrical engineering professor; The Electric Sky, 2006), physicist Michael Clarage, geologist-engineer Andrew Hall (electrical geology), and presenter Stuart Talbott, among others. Dated prediction pages ahead of missions like Deep Impact became a house practice — the receipts the movement points to first.

SAFIRE and Aureon

The movement's most concrete artifact is the SAFIRE Project: a multi-million-dollar laboratory experiment (engineer Montgomery Childs, ~$15M over six years) placing a metal anode in a hydrogen plasma to test electric-Sun behavior. By its own 2019 close-of-mandate reports it produced stable double layers, anomalous energy densities, and reported elemental transmutation — "no disparities with the Electric Sun model," in Childs's words — and was spun into the commercial venture Aureon Energy. Independent replication has not followed yet; as a falsifiable laboratory program attached to a heterodox cosmology, it remains nearly unique.

Reading the movement honestly

The Thunderbolts school braids three strands of different evidentiary strength: published plasma physics (Birkeland, Alfvén, Peratt), physical reinterpretation (electric Sun, electric comets, planetary scarring), and mythological reconstruction (the Saturn configuration). Sympathizers and critics alike do best keeping the strands distinct — which is how the pages in this section are written.

Related pages

The Electric Universe — An Introduction

The Plasma Universe — Birkeland, Alfvén, Peratt

The Electric Sun

Electric Comets — Tempel 1, Wild 2, and 67P

Sources & Method

Sources & further reading

• The Thunderbolts Project — TPOD archive, Space News, conference talks

• Wal Thornhill 1942–2023 — the holoscience memorial and biography

• David Talbott | Velikovsky Encyclopedia — Pensée and Saturn-theory history

• David Talbott, The Saturn Myth (Doubleday, 1980)

• SAFIRE / Aureon Energy — project history

• Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (1950) — where the modern story starts