Charles R. Pellegrino


Charles R. Pellegrino is an American writer, the author of several books related to science and archaeology, including Return to Sodom and Gomorrah, Ghosts of the Titanic, Unearthing Atlantis, and Ghosts of Vesuvius. Pellegrino falsely claimed to have earned a PhD, and errors in his book The Last Train from Hiroshima prompted its publisher to withdraw it within a few months of publication.

Early life

During the mid-1970s, Pellegrino earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Long Island University.

Controversies

Ghosts of the Titantic

In a scathing review of Ghosts of the Titantic in The New York Times, Michael Parfit wrote:
"If Charles Pellegrino weren't so shamelessly self-promoting, it might be O.K. to let this book drift into oblivion past the icebergs that it ought to hit. But he quotes himself in epigraphs, invents friendships with famous people and claims scientific authority for a work that flouts most principles of scientific scholarship. He shouldn't get away with it."
Parfit's final paragraph begins: "Pellegrino has an agile mind, which has carried him through books on Atlantis, Sodom and Gomorrah and the lunar module. What's sad about all this is that if he hadn't claimed authority that isn't his, had checked his facts more carefully and had more honestly labeled his reconstructions and speculations as imaginative, the book might have had promise."

Last Train from Hiroshima

In January 2010, Henry Holt published Pellegrino's Last Train from Hiroshima, a look at the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima from the vantage of survivors.
The New York Times initially praised the book as "sober and authoritative" and as a "firm and compelling synthesis of earlier memoirs and archival material". Nevertheless, a month later the New York Times questioned claims made in Pellegrino's book:
Veterans of the 509th Operations Group, the Air Force unit which dropped the atomic bombs, issued a detailed list of substantive problems with many of the book's claims about the bomb and the Air Force personnel involved.
The New York Times added, "Facing a national outcry and the Corliss family’s evidence, the author, Charles Pellegrino, now concedes that he was probably duped.... e said he would rewrite sections of the book for paperback and foreign editions." Despite Pellegrino's claim in The New York Times that he had been "duped" by Fuoco, further investigation revealed that Pellegrino had repeatedly mentioned one of the book's most disputed claims before Mr. Fuoco had allegedly confided it for him. Doubts also arose about the existence of two westerners allegedly present in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing.
On 1 March 2010, Henry Holt announced it had halted publication of Last Train from Hiroshima.
Pellegrino subsequently revised the text to remove some of the disputed content. The book was retitled "To Hell and Back" and released by a different publisher in 2015.

Doctoral degree

Pellegrino claimed to have received a PhD in 1982 from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Victoria University denied that claim. Pellegrino responded that the university had "stripped him of his Ph.D. because of a disagreement over evolutionary theory". The New Zealand Herald reported that Pellegrino claimed his credentials had been restored by 1997. The university investigated the matter, and in 2010, The New York Times reported:

Works

The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History was a companion book to the Discovery Channel documentary on the same subject created in part by film director James Cameron.

Non-fiction