Mainstream astronomy holds that the Solar System has remained stable and essentially as we see it today for billions of years, cycling with regular, repeating motions that can be extrapolated backward to reliably reconstruct conditions in the remote past. The assumptions upon which this belief rests date back over three centuries to the times of Kepler, Newton, and Laplace, which see a cosmos consisting of electrically neutral bodies moving in a vacuum under the sole influence of gravity. Yet space is now known to be pervaded by electrical plasma, and there is strong evidence that the planets and other bodies carry electric charge. Charged objects immersed in plasma spontaneously form double-layer isolating sheaths around themselves that contain their fields and prevent mutual electrical interaction. For as long as planets move without their "magnetospheres" coming into contact, quiescent conditions like those that exist today will prevail, which are indeed accurately modeled by gravitation. But should some disturbance or instability occur that causes magnetospheres to intersect, the bodies involved will experience sudden complex forces immensely more powerful than gravity, accompanied by-if they are at different potentials-colossal electrical discharges between them. In Thunderbolts of the Gods, David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill present a compendium of evidence from diverse sources showing that not only have such events affected the Earth, but they have done so within the time of recorded human history! From as far apart as China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Americas, peoples of ancient times have left records in their myths, legends, religions, and art forms, of skies vastly different from those we see today, alive with spectacles of light, violence, and seeming heavenly deities in conflict that not only battled each other but brought widespread death and devastation to Earth.