July 16, 1960 Dear Dr. Velikovsky: And now I must say what is in my heart. Although I believe a prolonged and strongest possible effort should be made to bring about the tests, I fear that this effort will be doomed to failure. The trouble is that everyone concerned really “knows” you are right and are actually resisting actively in a most effective way, by surrounding you with silence and nothingness. You have carefully divided up your discoveries into separate compartments, but they are not deceived for a moment. They didn’t say a word about Oedipus and Akhnaton but not for the sake of the thesis of that book. If they let you in on any front, all hell might break loose. If you break through in the chronology question, Worlds in Collision is only a step away. You are like a building inspector who has just found out that the Empire State Building must come down; it is unsafe. The careers and books of celebrated men are in danger of being reduced to meaninglessness and there is a cruelty and sadness in it. They will resist perhaps even at the risk, when all is said and done, of doing so lunatic a thing as refusing to take a piece of wood from some museum into the laboratory and finding out how old it is, falsifying results or declaring them to be invalid on one pretext or another. I am not joking when I say that I think that you, single-handed, probably severely limited the extent of radiocarbon dating in the Middle East by placing terrible psychological obstacles in the way of investigators. All this may be imaginary. I hope it is.   Very truly yours,   Theodore Lasar   Fort Lee, New Jersey