“We must learn to listen to what the ancients were telling us—not with condescension, but with respect. They were not inventing stories. They were bearing witness.”
—David Talbott
A Young Man with Questions
Born in 1942 in Portland, Oregon, David N. Talbott came of age in a time when science was triumphant. Rockets reached the moon, television broadcast the heavens, and astronomy declared the cosmos to be a vast, clockwork machine—unchanging, eternal, silent.
But even as a child, Talbott was drawn not to numbers, but to stories—especially the strange tales ancient peoples told about the sky. Dragons, serpents, thunderbolts hurled by gods, suns that were not our sun. These myths lingered in his imagination, but they seemed disconnected from the tidy models taught in classrooms.
In the late 1960s, Talbott read Worlds in Collision by Immanuel Velikovsky, a controversial book that argued ancient myth preserves memories of cosmic catastrophes—real planetary events that shaped human history. That book changed the trajectory of David’s life. It was not simply the theory that captivated him, but Velikovsky’s forensic method: comparing cultural memories across civilizations, looking for what was consistent, not what was invented.
At the time, Talbott had already completed a bachelor’s degree at Portland State University, majoring in education and political science, and had done graduate work in urban studies. But the sky had called him to something else. He would not pursue a PhD or take a tenure-track post. Instead, he would set out on his own, to discover what the ancient world was really trying to say.
The First Leap: Myth and Memory
In 1971, Talbott co-founded the student-run magazine Pensée with his brother Stephen Talbott, under the subtitle: Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered. It was no small act. At the time, Velikovsky was widely mocked by academics. To publicly defend his ideas was to risk intellectual exile. And yet, the journal became a quiet success—distributed on college campuses, read by thousands.
In 1974, Talbott made a radical decision: he cashed in his life insurance policies and flew to Canada to attend the first international Velikovsky conference. There, he met Velikovsky himself. But more significantly—though few realized it at the time—he met Wal Thornhill, an Australian physicist who, years later, would become his closest collaborator. That was the beginning of a relationship that would one day reshape alternative cosmology.
The Saturn Myth and a Career Is Born
From 1975 to 1980, Talbott poured himself into a singular project: synthesizing the comparative mythology of ancient civilizations with astronomical reinterpretation. What emerged was a theory no one had heard before: that Saturn, not the Sun, had once dominated the ancient sky. This was not metaphoric. According to Talbott, Saturn had once loomed in a fixed position directly overhead, accompanied by Venus and Mars in a stacked “Polar Configuration.”
His thesis was unprecedented—and Doubleday believed in it. They gave him the largest advance ever awarded to a first-time author in their history. When the book, The Saturn Myth, was released in 1980, it sent ripples through both Velikovskian and mythological communities. Though mainstream science ignored or dismissed it, readers found something electrifying in the pages: a sense that myth had meaning—that the ancients were not mad, but observant.
For David Talbott, that success was not just financial. It confirmed that the sky had a story, and he might be among its modern tellers.
The Hard Years and the Mythic Pattern
After The Saturn Myth, Talbott could have gone silent, satisfied with having published a cult classic. Instead, he kept digging. He founded the journal Aeon in 1987, offering a home for scholars exploring interdisciplinary links between mythology, cosmology, religion, and history.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Talbott cataloged thousands of images and artifacts, from petroglyphs to scrolls, sculptures to legends. He saw a pattern in global myth: the cosmic wheel, the column of fire, the eye in the sky, the crescent horns, and the warrior god with thunderbolts. Cultures separated by oceans told the same story—a sky once filled with awe and terror, then chaos, then forgetfulness.
He believed this was not coincidence but global memory. A mythic code. And it was waiting to be deciphered.
A Second Leap: Thunderbolts and the Electric Sky
In 1997, more than two decades after their first meeting, Talbott reconnected with Wal Thornhill. This time, the relationship would spark something revolutionary.
Thornhill saw in Talbott’s reconstructions plasma discharge phenomena—forms and behaviors seen in laboratory physics. Myth wasn’t just symbol; it was electrical memory. The cosmos, according to Thornhill and Talbott, is not ruled primarily by gravity, but by plasma and electricity—a forgotten force in modern astronomy.
Together, they founded The Thunderbolts Project—a multimedia initiative to explore and promote what they called the Electric Universe (EU). Their films, lectures, and websites reached audiences that mainstream science never touched. Videos like “Symbols of an Alien Sky” garnered hundreds of thousands of views, with Talbott’s soft-spoken, reverent narration captivating listeners.
They weren’t just selling a theory. They were offering a new lens through which to view the heavens—and the human story.
Standing Ovations and Stone Witnesses
By the mid-2000s, Talbott was speaking to standing-room-only audiences at international EU conferences. He would hold up ancient symbols—spirals, radiant eyes, stick figures with arms raised—and show how they mirrored plasma discharges captured by Tony Peratt at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The implication? That ancient people carved what they saw when the sky changed.
When Talbott presented the same configurations carved on rocks, caves, and temples from Africa to the Americas, it was hard not to feel the weight of memory pressing through time. “We are the amnesiacs,” he once said. “They were the eyewitnesses.”
For many, Talbott offered not pseudoscience but permission to wonder again. He challenged the arrogance of certainty and invited audiences to revisit the past with new eyes.
Legacy of a Watcher
Now in his eighties, David Talbott has withdrawn from public lectures, but his voice lives on—in his films, his writings, and the archives of Thunderbolts.info. He never earned institutional awards. He never published in Nature or Science. But he earned something rarer: the trust of a global audience who felt, perhaps for the first time, that myth mattered.
He will be remembered not for equations, but for asking better questions. He showed that the boundary between science and story is not a wall, but a bridge—and that some truths require both reason and reverence.
Epilogue
If you ask his followers what made him special, it wasn’t just the theory. It was the man. A patient voice. A rigorous thinker. A respectful heretic. A man who refused to forget.
And in doing so, helped the rest of us remember.
For books and merch related to the Electric universe, visit Stickman on Stone.
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