Photographer: Donna Foster Roizen. Copyright holder: Frederic Jueneman · CC BY-SA 3.0

Trained as a psychoanalyst before turning to an entirely different, far more contested project: arguing in the 1950 bestseller Worlds in Collision that ancient myths and the Old Testament preserve real memories of catastrophic near-collisions between Earth, Venus, and Mars. The book reached the top of American bestseller lists and provoked a public backlash from astronomers that became a textbook case study in how scientific communities respond to outsider claims. His revised chronology of the ancient Near East, meant to reconcile biblical history with archaeology, has been almost universally rejected by mainstream scholarship.