John Ackerman is a physicist and author. He completed his undergraduate studies at Drexel University and graduate studies at the Johns Hopkins University, where he was exposed to some of the earliest attempts to understand the atmosphere of Venus. He has enjoyed a long career in the fields of laser applications, the processing of airborne geophysical survey data, and reconnaissance satellite collection planning. In 1992 he began the serious study of ancient myth, inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, and retired in 1998 to complete two books, Firmament and Chaos, which represent the culmination of this work.
In Firmament he presents a detailed study of the sacred myths of a number of ancient cultures from which he synthesizes a detailed scenario of cosmic chaos which dominated the Earth and mankind from 4000 to 687 BC. Chaos explains the true nature of the planets, based on hundreds of cosmic encounters in the vicinity of the Earth which were experienced and recorded by a hundred generations of our ancestors.