Catherine (Katie) Ulissey, wife and research partner of geologist Dr. Robert Schoch, found her early years shaped by dance. Conservatory trained, she turned professional at the age of 16, performing with classical ballet and contemporary dance companies, and later transitioning to musical theater, performing on Broadway in a number of productions including the original cast of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s "The Phantom of the Opera". Her early childhood in Saudi Arabia sparked a lifelong fascination with ancient mysteries. Katie and Dr. Schoch met at a conference on the topic in 2007 and married on Easter Island in 2010. Together, they have co-authored works exploring ancient civilizations and their connections to cosmic events. Katie has contributed significantly to her husband’s research, including connecting Easter Island’s previously undeciphered rongorongo script to global “plasma petroglyphs” first identified by renowned physicist Dr. Anthony Peratt of Los Alamos National Laboratory. This discovery shifted her husband’s research toward our Sun as the probable cause of the end of the last ice age. Related to this, she noticed giant Lichtenberg patterns emanating from beneath the Great and Second Pyramids on the Giza Plateau (dendritic patterns would be consistent with plasma ejected during massive solar outbursts). More recently, she has offered an hypothesis regarding the potential “Ancient and Intentional Burial of Ancient Egypt” (in similar fashion to Göbekli Tepe). She holds a B.A. from Emerson College (2002) and stays connected to her dance roots by teaching ballet at Wellesley College. She is the author of a children’s book, “Adriana and the Ancient Mysteries: The Great Sphinx”, published in German, Italian, and English (revised edition). Dr. Robert M. Schoch, a full-time faculty member at the College of General Studies at Boston University since 1984, and a recipient of its Peyton Richter Award for interdisciplinary teaching, earned his Ph.D. in Geology and Geophysics at Yale University in 1983. He also holds an M.S. and M.Phil. in Geology and Geophysics from Yale, as well as degrees in Anthropology (B.A.) and Geology (B.S.) from George Washington University. In recognition of his research into ancient civilizations, Dr. Schoch was awarded (in 2014) the title of Honorary Professor of the Nikola Vaptsarov Naval Academy in Varna, Bulgaria. In 2017, the College of General Studies at Boston University named him Director of its Institute for the Study of the Origins of Civilization (ISOC).In the early 1990s, Dr. Schoch stunned the world with his revolutionary research that recast the date of the Great Sphinx of Egypt to a period thousands of years earlier than its standard attribution. In demonstrating that the leonine monument has been heavily eroded by water despite the fact that its location on the edge of the Sahara has endured hyper-arid climactic conditions for the past 5,000 years, Dr. Schoch revealed to the world that mankind’s history is greater and older than previously believed. The subsequently excavated 12,000-year-old megalithic site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey confirmed these assertions.Dr. Schoch’s more recent research has focused on the cataclysmic events that ended Earth’s last ice age, circa 9700 BCE, simultaneously decimating the high civilizations of the time. The overwhelming evidence drawn from varying disciplines, put forth in his book Forgotten Civilization: New Discoveries on the Solar-Induced Dark Age (2021), points to enormous solar outbursts as the cause.Dr. Schoch has been quoted extensively in the media for his work on ancient cultures and monuments around the globe. His research has been instrumental in spurring renewed attention to the interrelationships between geological and astronomical phenomena, natural catastrophes, and the early history of civilization. He has appeared on numerous radio and television shows and is featured in the Emmy-winning documentary The Mystery of the Sphinx, which first aired on NBC in 1993.The author and coauthor of books both technical and popular, Dr. Schoch’s works include Phylogeny Reconstruction in Paleontology (1986), Stratigraphy: Principles and Methods (1989), Voices of the Rocks (1999), Voyages of the Pyramid Builders (2003), Pyramid Quest (2005), The Parapsychology Revolution (2008), Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Outbursts in Our Past and Future (2012), Origins of the Sphinx (2017), and the 2nd edition (revised and expanded) of Forgotten Civilization , subtitled New Discoveries on the Solar-Induced Dark Age (2021), among others. Dr. Schoch is also the coauthor of an environmental science textbook used in universities across the United States, and he has contributed to numerous magazines, journals, and reviews on geology, ancient civilizations, parapsychology, and other topics. His works have been translated into a number of languages and distributed around the world.Besides his academic and scholarly studies, Dr. Schoch is an
