You've probably seen the TikToks. Or maybe you stumbled across a late-night Reddit thread where someone was losing their mind over "crustal displacement." It sounds like the plot of a Roland Emmerich disaster flick, but the Adam and Eve story isn't a screenplay. It’s a book. A book that was partially classified by the CIA for decades.
When Chan Thomas published The Adam and Eve Story in 1963, most people ignored it. It was a fringe theory about the Earth’s poles flipping and causing a global cataclysm every few thousand years. Then, the CIA stepped in. They sanitized a version of it.
Why?
That's the million-dollar question. If it's just some guy’s wild theory about Noah’s Ark and "The Great Flood," why hide it? It’s this specific bit of government secrecy that has turned a forgotten piece of 60s fringe science into a modern-day obsession for survivalists, conspiracy theorists, and people who are just genuinely worried about the magnetic north pole moving faster than it used to.
What is the Adam and Eve Story Actually About?
Basically, Chan Thomas argued that the Earth doesn’t just sit pretty on its axis. He claimed that every 6,000 to 7,000 years, the outer shell of the planet—the lithosphere—literally slides over the molten interior.
Imagine an orange. Now imagine the peel suddenly sliding around the fruit while the fruit stays still.
Thomas suggested that when this happens, the North Pole ends up at the Equator. This isn't a slow drift. We’re talking about a violent, screeching halt of the planet's rotation relative to its crust. According to the Adam and Eve story, this shift happens in a matter of hours. The result? Supersonic winds. Tsunami waves miles high. Total global reset.
Thomas didn't just pull this out of thin air. He looked at religious texts—the Torah, the Bible, ancient Hindu Vedas—and saw them not as myths, but as eyewitness accounts of previous "pole shifts." He believed the story of Adam and Eve was actually a metaphor for the few survivors who had to start over after the last big one.
The CIA Classification: Adding Fuel to the Fire
In 2013, the CIA released a declassified version of Thomas’s book as part of a larger dump of documents. But it wasn't the whole book. It was only about 50 pages of the original 200+ page manuscript.
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This is where things get weird.
Usually, the CIA classifies things related to national security—codes, names of spies, blueprints for tech. Why classify a book about geology and ancient history? Skeptics say it’s because Chan Thomas worked for Douglas Aircraft and had access to sensitive aerospace data, and maybe his "theory" touched too close to classified geophysical research.
Others? They think the government knows the clock is ticking.
The declassified pages are messy. They’re photocopies of photocopies, filled with notes and strange formatting. If you’re looking for a "smoking gun," you won’t find a memo saying "The world ends in 2030." What you find is a man obsessed with the idea that our "stable" Earth is anything but.
Science vs. The "Con"
Let's be real for a second. Most mainstream geologists think the Adam and Eve story is total bunk. Or at least, the "catastrophic" part of it.
We know the poles move. They're moving right now. The Magnetic North Pole is currently skittering away from the Canadian Arctic toward Siberia at about 34 miles per year. That’s fast in geological terms, but it’s not "supersonic winds" fast.
Mainstream science supports Pole Wander and Geomagnetic Reversal. It does not support Crustal Displacement.
- Geomagnetic Reversal: The magnetic field flips. This takes thousands of years. It’s happened hundreds of times in Earth's history. Birds might get lost. Your GPS might glitch. But the mountains don't fall into the sea.
- Crustal Displacement: The actual physical shell of the Earth moves. Charles Hapgood—a contemporary of Thomas—actually got Albert Einstein to write a foreword for his book on this topic. Einstein found the idea "electrifying" but wasn't fully convinced of the mechanism.
The "con" or the controversy lies in the timing. Thomas insisted these events are cyclical and imminent. Modern geology says these shifts happen over millions of years, not a single Tuesday afternoon.
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Why the Story Exploded Recently
The resurgence of the Adam and Eve story is a perfect storm of social media and genuine scientific anomalies.
First, there’s the "Magnetic Excursion" data. Scientists have noted that Earth’s magnetic field has weakened by about 10% over the last 150 years. For someone who has read Chan Thomas, that’s a terrifying statistic. It looks like a "pre-cursor."
Then there’s the distrust in institutions. When the CIA hides a book about the end of the world, people don't think "Oh, they're protecting trade secrets." They think "They’re hiding the bunker locations."
The book is also surprisingly readable. Thomas writes with a kind of frantic energy. He talks about "The Great Inundation" and describes the atmosphere literally standing still while the Earth moves beneath it, creating winds that would level every building on the planet. It’s evocative. It’s scary. It feels like a truth that’s been suppressed.
Investigating Chan Thomas
Who was this guy? He wasn't some hermit in a shack. He was a polyglot. He was an electrical engineer. He claimed to have worked on "highly classified projects."
Some researchers have tried to track down the "missing pages" of his book. There are different versions of the book floating around today—some with 240 pages, some with less. The disparity in the page counts has led to a whole cottage industry of people trying to find the "redacted" chapters.
The most common theory regarding the redaction is that Thomas had some wild ideas about Jesus and religion in the later chapters. The CIA, being a Cold War-era institution, might have just been scrubbing things that seemed "subversive" or "insane" rather than "dangerous."
But honestly? That’s almost more suspicious.
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Navigating the Rabbit Hole
If you're going to dive into the Adam and Eve story, you have to separate the physics from the fantasy.
Thomas gets a lot of things wrong. He claims the Earth’s core is solid (it’s not). He claims the "Great Flood" happened exactly 6,500 years ago, which doesn't quite line up with the archaeological record of every civilization.
However, his core premise—that Earth’s history is defined by cataclysmic resets rather than slow, gradual change—is gaining some traction in a field called Catastrophism. We now know that the younger Dryas period (about 12,000 years ago) saw insane temperature swings and mass extinctions. Was it a pole shift? Probably not. Was it a comet? Maybe.
The point is, the "stable" Earth we live on is a bit of an illusion.
Actionable Steps for the Curious
Don’t just take a TikToker’s word for it. If you want to understand why this book is such a big deal, you need to look at the source material and the context.
- Read the CIA's version first. You can find it on the official CIA.gov FOIA Reading Room. Search for "The Adam and Eve Story." It's a 57-page PDF. Notice what's missing. Notice the weird "Sanitized" stamps.
- Check the Magnetic Field Data. Look up the World Magnetic Model (WMM). This is the actual data used by navigators and the military. You can see how much the magnetic north has drifted in the last decade. It’s objectively fascinating, even without the conspiracy theories.
- Compare with Charles Hapgood. If you want the "smarter" version of this theory, read The Path of the Pole. It’s more academic and less "prophetic" than Thomas’s work, and it’s the book that actually intrigued Einstein.
- Learn about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. This is the "mainstream" version of a sudden global reset. It provides a scientific framework for why ancient civilizations might have all had stories about a world-ending flood without needing the Earth’s crust to slide around.
The Adam and Eve story serves as a grim reminder that our civilization is built on a very thin crust. Whether the CIA was hiding a literal end-of-the-world date or just some eccentric ramblings of a smart engineer, the book has forced people to look at the ground beneath their feet a little differently.
It's not about being a "doomer." It's about recognizing that "recorded history" is a tiny sliver of the Earth's life. We’re likely not the first "advanced" thing to live here, and if Thomas is even 1% right, we might not be the last to face a reset. Stay curious, but keep your feet on the ground—even if that ground is moving faster than we thought.