An A-Z Guide To The Search For Plato's Atlantis

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  • NEWS September 2023

    NEWS September 2023

    September 2023. Hi Atlantipedes, At present I am in Sardinia for a short visit. Later we move to Sicily and Malta. The trip is purely vacational. Unfortunately, I am writing this in a dreadful apartment, sitting on a bed, with access to just one useable socket and a small Notebook. Consequently, I possibly will not […]Read More »
  • Joining The Dots

    Joining The Dots

    I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
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Asteroids

Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH) is based on the claim that around 12,800 years ago the Earth had an encounter with a very large asteroid or comet that broke up in an airburst over North America and of which some fragments possibly hit the ground directly(a).

Many effects have been linked with this event with varying levels of enthusiasm including a suggested association with the demise of Atlantis. Elsewhere, megafaunal extinctions, cataclysmic floods, the disappearance of the Clovis people and the creation of the Carolina Bays(g), have all been proposed as consequences of this episode.

In 2006, Richard Firestone, Allen West & Simon Warwick-Smith published the foundations of the YDIH in The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes [110]. A year later the hypothesis had a more public airing at the American Geophysical Union Press Conference, Acapulco, Mexico, on May 23(d). This was followed the same year by the publication of a formal paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America(f).

Since then volumes have been written on the subject, both pro and con(c).

A 2014 paper(h) entitled Nanodiamond-Rich Layer Across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800 Cal BP by Charles R. Kinzie et al., has developed further the idea of this event being associated with the Younger Dryas. In a similar vein is an article(f) from Megan Gannon.

December 2014 saw Graham Hancock raising the issue of a cometary cause for the Younger Dryas and its possible association with ancient Egypt(e).

Martin Sweatman brought further evidence to bear on this debate in an article(i) on the Graham Hancock website. This focuses on the investigations at Hall’s Cave in Texas described in a paper by Sun et al, where the team concluded that the trace elements found there could indicate a volcanic rather than an impact as the cause of the Younger Dryas cooling! Sweatman disagrees with their conclusions claiming that there seems to be an element of selectivity in choosing data, leading to a wrong conclusion.

2019 also gave us a paper that included an extensive bibliography and overview of the YDIH debate(k).

In 2020, the eminent geologist James Lawrence Powell published Deadly Voyager [1911], which offered further support to the YDIH. This book was instrumental in changing the negative stance of a number of ardent sceptics including Michael Shermer(j).

In 2022 Powell concluded a paper reviewing the YDIH debates with the following

“Finally, we can now assess Sweatman’s suggestion that the YDIH may be ready for promotion from hypothesis to the status of theory. If we combine the definitions of “theory” from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, it would read something like this:

 ‘A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence. One of the most useful properties of scientific theories is that they can be used to make predictions about natural events or phenomena that have not yet been observed.’

Those who have read this article and Sweatman’s have the information to decide whether the YDIH meets this definition. In this author’s opinion, there is a strong case that it does. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that no other single theory can explain the YD and its associated effects.”(l)

I note that Robert Schoch claims that there is no evidence to support the Younger Dryas impact theory, instead, he believes that “it was most likely due to reduced solar activity at that time, a solar shut-down.”(n) Schoch’s wide-ranging critique has been refuted by the Comet Research Group.(o)

In 2012, Jennifer Marlon et al published a paper, now made available by Marlon on the Academia website, in which they present “arguments and evidence against the hypothesis that a large impact or airburst caused a significant abrupt climate change, extinction event, and termination of the Clovis culture at 12.9 ka. It should be noted that there is not one single Younger Dryas (YD) impact hypothesis but several that conflict with one another regarding many significant details.”(m)


Scienceopen.com is a website offering “A peer-reviewed open-access journal collection covering all aspects of airbursts and impacts on Earth by comets and asteroids”. October 2023 brought the publication of five papers on the subject(p).

>In March 2024 The New York Times Magazine published an updated overview of the history and current status of the YDIH(q). The sceptical tone of the article includes an interesting look at the psychological drivers behind the popularity of the hypothesis with the general public. It concludes by noting that

In a sense, what West and his collaborators think now hardly matters. The hypothesis has already penetrated deeply, and perhaps indelibly, into the public imagination, seemingly on its way to becoming less a matter of truth than a matter of personal and group identity. Nobody I spoke with seemed to think it would go away soon, if ever. West, though, took a measured view. “All we can say is this is a hypothesis,” he said. “It’s still a debate. We may be wrong; we may be right. But only time will tell.”<

(a) https://humanoriginproject.com/evidence-younger-dryas-impact-hypothesis/

(b) YDIH: Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis | Thongchai Thailand (archive.org)

(c) https://cometresearchgroup.org/publications/

(d) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1GCgOI3B1o

(e) https://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/HancockG13.php

(f) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994902/

(g) https://cosmictusk.com/carolina-bays-in-the-midwest

(h) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268390328_Nanodiamond-Rich_Layer_Across_Three_Continents_Consistent_with_Major_Cosmic_Impact_at_12800_Cal_BP

(i) Volcanic or cosmic impact origin of the YD mini ice-age? New evidence from Hall’s Cave, Texas – Graham Hancock Official Webs*ite 

(j) In praise of intellectual honesty – The Cosmic Tusk 

(k) YDIH: Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis | Thongchai Thailand (tambonthongchai.com)

(l) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00368504211064272 

(m) (99+) Arguments and Evidence Against a Younger Dryas Impact Event | Jennifer Marlon – Academia.edu 

(n) https://www.robertschoch.com/plasma_iceage.html  

(o) https://cosmictusk.com/comet-research-group-responds-to-robert-schoch/

(p) https://blog.scienceopen.com/2023/10/introducing-comet-research-group-on-scienceopen/

(q) The Comet Strike Theory That Just Won’t Die – The New York Times (nytimes.com)*

Civilisation Collapse

Civilisation Collapse has occurred many times over the past millennia in all parts of the world. The American anthropologist, Joseph A. Tainter[1539] defines collapse as “a rapid shift to a lower level of complexity(a) .” Societal disintegration immediately brings to mind the Maya, the Indus Valley and in what are relatively more modern times, the Western Roman Empire.

The causes are usually a combination of factors, such as climate change, warfare, disease or excessive expansionism. Global catastrophes such as encounters with comets or asteroids are rare, while more local events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or tsunamis can also be thrown into the mix. These have all been encountered from time to time, but have rarely been blamed for the collapse of a society; full recovery from such limited regional events is usually possible.

The Mediterranean has seen its share of all these catastrophic events. A major tsunami on Sardinia, volcanic eruptions in Italy, and earthquakes in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. Close encounters with extraterrestrial bodies have also been proposed in that region.

Perhaps the best-documented civilisation collapse is that which occurred around 1200 BC and affected many societies, particularly in the Middle East(b) . Israel Finkelstein, a leading Israeli archaeologist, has attributed this event to climate change and is of the view that this disruption was global in extent.

Inevitably, Atlantis has been cited as an example of civilisation collapse, particularly among supporters of the Minoan Hypothesis, who link the 2nd millennium BC eruptions of Thera with the demise of the Minoans on Crete. Also popular is the idea that Atlantis had been a large island in the Atlantic Ocean destroyed by a cometary impact or the rising sea levels as the glaciers melted at the end of the last Ice Age.>However these Atlantic suggestions would appear to be ruled out by Plato’s clear statement that Atlantis was destroyed by an earthquake.<

A variety of other theories have associated Atlantis with the collapse of a civilisation. For example, Frank Joseph claims that 40,000 years ago “sudden sea-level rises triggers migration from Mu around. The Pacific motherlanders settle on a large, fertile island about 380 kilometers due west from the Straits of Gibraltar. There, the newcomers merge with the native Cro-Magnon inhabitants, resulting in a new, hybrid culture – Atlantis.”>Unsurprisingly, Joseph fails to explain why refugees from the Pacific would travel all the way from the Pacific to settle in the Atlantic when their previous homeland was surrounded by more accessible alternatives such as the Americas, Australia, Asia and Africa. He also fails to explain how the migrants had the seafaring ability to travel such a distance. Furthermore, since all the oceans are connected this sudden sea level rise would also have had a similar effect in the Atlantic generating mass migrations there also.

(a) Wayback Machine (archive.org)

(b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

Palmer, Trevor

Trevor Palmer (1944- ) is an English Professor of Biology now living in Scotland. Apart from his day job of enzymology and the study of genetic disorders, which led to an interest in evolution, which in turn brought him to research catastrophism, he has written several books on these subjects, including >Controversy Catastrophism and Evolution [1971]<Perilous Planet Earth [888],  which places today’s “concern about the threat to Earth from asteroids and comets within a historical context.” He devotes two chapters of this comprehensive work to the subject of Atlantis, in which he reviews (chap.13) some of the late 19th and early 20th century theories as well as more recent developments (chap.28) exposing many of the weaknesses in the arguments on offer.

>A lecture with the same title as the book was delivered to the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS) in September 2004 and is now available online(m).<

While Palmer does not express any personal views on the subject, it is noteworthy that he wrote an introduction to the 2005 Barnes & Noble edition of Lewis Spence’s The History of Atlantis. After a brief look at Spence’s life, Palmer gives an overview of the principal strands of Atlantology today and concluded that many of the issues debated 80 years ago are still unresolved and for that reason, Spence’s book continues to be worth studying.

Palmer wrote a short paper(a) in 1987 in which he was cautiously sceptical of the Atlantis story, particularly the possibility that it was destroyed during the Late Pleistocene era, with which I concur. He also touched on the subject of the Carolina Bays, apparently adding support to the now-discredited idea that they were created by wind action. I expect that he may have modified his views by now. However, the US Geological Survey is now (2021) identifying the bays as ‘relict thermokarst lakes’.(h)

Palmer presented a paper entitled Catastrophes: The Diluvial Evidence at the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS) Silver Jubilee Conference in September 1999.(i) He also addressed the SIS in 2004 on the background to his book published the previous year(d).

Palmer published two similar papers in 2010(b) and 2012(e) on the history of catastrophism and the ensuing debates from the time of Velikovsky until the present, when catastrophism has greater acceptance and which now offers a variety of competing ideas regarding the number, source, date and consequences of specific catastrophes.

In the second paper delivered to the Quantavolution Conference on Naxos, he offers the interesting observation that In science, unlike religion, the great revelations lie in the future; the coming generations are the authorities, and the pupil is greater than the master if he has the gift to see things anew.”

Palmer has also written a 2018 review(c) of Perilous Planet Earth in light of developments since it was first published.

In 2009, Palmer published an interesting paper on the Black Sea and its dramatic connection with the Mediterranean (9,400 years ago) and how it may have influenced the creation of flood myths in the region(l). The various groups currently investigating the area are agreed that cataclysmic flooding took place during the Late Pleistocene, but remain divided about whether similar floods also occurred during the Holocene. Eye-witness accounts of catastrophic floods in the Black Sea basin at either time could have been passed on to future generations, eventually giving rise to the later Mesopotamian legend of Uta-napishtim and, subsequently, the Biblical story of Noah. However, in the absence of any direct evidence of cultural transmission, that can presently only be regarded as plausible speculation.”

Palmer and Gunnar Heinsohn have been debating Heinsohn’s claim that our chronology of the 1st millennium AD is deeply flawed, on the Q-Mag website(f). Palmer has also written a lengthy paper supporting his views on the matter(g).

In addition, Palmer has also examined the ancient Greek and Roman historians to test whether they present a picture of the past consistent with that revealed by archaeology, particularly inscriptions indicating sequences and timescales, and also to see the extent to which they support, or otherwise, the orthodox chronology and a number of representative alternative chronologies.” He concluded that there was ‘general accuracy’(j). He subsequently expanded on this paper to include a review of the chronology of the 1st millennium AD(k).

(a) See Archive 3026

(b) https://www.academia.edu/22557009/The_Renaissance_of_Catastrophism_in_I_Tresman_ed_Quantavolution_Challenges_to_Conventional_Science_Metron_2010_pp_407_452?email_work_card=view-paper

(c) Archive 4971 | (atlantipedia.ie)

(d)Archive 4972 | (atlantipedia.ie)

(e) Archive 4973 | (atlantipedia.ie)

(f) https://www.q-mag.org/_search.html?req=Trevor+Palmer

(g) https://www.academia.edu/37544096/Writers_and_Re_Writers_of_First_Millennium_History_Second_draft_October_2018_ 

(h) https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147904/ice-age-carolinas

(i) https://www.academia.edu/35224202/Catastrophes_The_Diluvial_Evidence_Final_paper_presented_at_the_SIS_Silver_Jubilee_Conference_Easthampstead_Park_1999_Published_in_Chronology_and_Catastrophism_Review_2000_pp_108_116

(j) https://www.academia.edu/23267725/The_Writings_of_the_Ancients_and_their_Relevance_to_Chronology_up_to_332_BC_Part_I_Chronology_and_Catastrophism_Review_2013_pp_46_51_Part_II_Chronology_and_Catastrophism_Workshop_2014_1_pp_18_23_Part_III_Chronology_and_Catastrophism_Review_2014_pp_30_35 

(k) (99+) Writers and Re-Writers of First Millennium History (Second draft, October 2018 ) | Trevor Palmer – Academia.edu 

(l) https://www.academia.edu/22814109/Catastrophic_Black_Sea_Floods_and_the_Story_of_Noah_Chronology_and_Catastrophism_Review_2009_pp_45_54  

(m) (99+) Perilous Planet Earth, Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, Redhill, 2004 | Trevor Palmer – Academia.edu *

 

Warmkessel, Dr. Barry

Dr. Barry Warmkessel is the author of an extensive website(a) dealing with extraterrestrial impacts. He speculates(b) on the existence of a brown dwarf star, he calls Vulcan, in our solar system Barry Warmkesselwith an orbital period of around 5,000 years. Warmkessel claims that Vulcan has been responsible for capturing bodies from the Kuiper Belt leading to regular impacts(c) with Earth over many thousands of years. I suppose it was inevitable that the subject of the then impending disaster of 2012 was included(d) and so we are told that ‘Planet X’ or Nibiru is in fact a comet swarm that should be detectable from August 2012!

Atlantis has not been overlooked by Warmkessel who has included(c) a number of related papers (a third of the way down the page). He appears to favour circa 9600BC as the date for the destruction of Atlantis but includes links to various commentators who differ greatly on details such as cause and location.

In March 2014, Warmkessel published another wide-ranging paper(e) on Atlantis and asteroid impacts (Updated July 2015). In it he identifies a site off the west coast of Cuba as the location of Atlantis, which was destroyed by an asteroid impact. Which coincides with the views of Kelso de Montigny and others. He also predicted that next passage of a comet cluster through the inner solar system are 2016 to 2017.” 

>He subsequently advanced the date to 2020-2023!(a)

(a) VULCAN, COMETS AND THE IMPENDING CATASTROPHE (archive.org)

(b) VULCAN REVEALED (archive.org)

(c) COMET/EARTH IMPACT CHRONOLOGY RELATED SITES (archive.org)

(d) NIBIRU AND THE 2012 IMPACT THREAT (archive.org)

(e) THE ATLANTIS CATASTROPHE – Plato Was Right (archive.org)<

 

Pole Shift

Pole Shift is a term used to describe a range of theories that includes an alteration to or even the complete reversal of the magnetic poles, a change to the axis of rotation of the entire planet as well as a possible sudden movement of the outer crust of the Earth relative to its axis.

The magnetic poles are always on the move and well documented, while their complete reversal is a much slower process, previous reversals have left us with geological ‘fingerprints’. It is suggested that another reversal is imminent, while some ‘prophets of doom’ have nominated late 2013 for the event, with dire consequences for mankind(f).

The latest data shows drift of about 40 miles a year, with a recent movement of 161 miles in just six months, creating navigation problems and the re-designation of airport runways which are named after their compass orientation(i).

Jason Colavito has unearthed an early reference to some form of an axial pole shift, proposed as early 1883 in a book [1595] by the somewhat eccentric Australian, John Wood Beilby (1818-1903)(q). However, according to Colavito, there was an even earlier reference to a Pole Shift by Brasseur de Bourbourg in his Historical Chronology of the Mexicans of 1873(r). He also linked this event to the destruction of Atlantis(n).>However, it seems that Robert Hooke controversially suggested the idea of pole shift as early as the seventeenth century(z).<

David Hatcher Childress recently (2023) offered another 19th-century reference to pole shift when he wrote that “About 1885, (James)Churchward found his way to Siberia and the valley of the Lena River. He was now looking for evidence of ancient cataclysms, which, if it could be found, would lend credence to the idea that an ancient, advanced civilization such as Mu could disappear. Churchward wanted to see the piles of mammoth bones and tusks washed up in tidal waves on the Lackoff Islands (The Islands of Bones) just beyond the mouth of the Lena. He was convinced by these giant piles of ivory and bones that a ‘pole shift’ phenomenon had occurred in the past, where the earth’s crust slipped several degrees toward the equator causing massive tidal waves to wash over portions of the earth and ultimately cause the sinking of entire continents such as Mu.” (y).

The suggestion that an ancient axial pole shift was the consequence of plate tectonics has been disputed by William Sager & Anthony Koppers of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Although conceding that plate tectonics may have played a part they describe the 16-21 degree change, 84 million years ago as “an odd event.”(t)

The idea of wandering (magnetic) Poles was first proposed by the German priest Damian Kreichgauer(1859-1940)(g) in 1902[513], although at the time he found little support for the concept. The late Terrence Aym was of the opinion(l) that a magnetic pole reversal was a sign that the next Ice Age was beginning! Today, NASA provides us with a more sober view of the phenomenon of magnetic pole shifts(k).

Another theory suggests that a severe reduction in sunspot activity may herald the imminent return of another ‘little ice age’ such as was experienced in the 17th century and known as the Maunder Minimum. During that period only 50 sunspots were recorded instead of the usual 40-50 thousand(w). NASA has denied that there is any such impending cooling and that the possible effect of any reduced solar activity would be more than offset by the warming caused by human activity(x).

There are a number of variations on the basic concept of an axial change and an array of suggestions for the date of the last displacement. Generally speaking, the mechanism required to cause such a catastrophe is believed to be an impact by or close encounter with a large asteroid or comet. The continuing discovery of huge impact craters around the globe reinforces this possibility. However, recent studies have identified other processes that may have led to polar changes in the past(e).

The suggestion of an Antarctic location for Atlantis, as proposed by Rose and Rand Flem-Ath[062], is totally dependent on a pole shift. The Flem-Aths have interpreted the characteristics of our present icecaps as strong evidence for a number of previous pole shifts. This idea was inspired by the work of Charles Hapgood[369], who was convinced by such evidence as the Piri Reis Map and other ancient maps that seemed to indicate the existence of an Ice Age civilisation now partly covered by the Antarctic icecap. Hapgood has noted[1494.71] that in the 1950’s Karl A. Pauly[1496 and George W. Bain[1498 also supported a form of crustal shift, the former building on the work of A. S. Eddington[1497 of some decades earlier.

Nevertheless, a more critical look at Hapgood’s theory reveals a number of flaws(s), which should be considered in the light of the fact that Hapgood was a professor of history and not a geologist and Graham Hancock, who heavily endorsed Hapgood’s ideas is neither.

‘Project Atlantis’ is the title of an assignment(p) given to first-year geology students at Malaspina University-College in British Columbia. It was set by lecturer Professor Steven Earle with the intention of developing the critical thinking of his students. The objective of the task is to investigate the Crustal Displacement theory of the Flem-Aths, whose ‘Atlantis in the Antarctic’ hypothesis is totally dependent on the occurrence of a pole shift resulting from some form of earth crustal displacement. Kyle Bennett has written a book and a number of papers on the subject.

Pole Shift [0795] by John White, frequently associates the destruction of Atlantis with a pole shift and anticipates another one in the near future, but unfortunately, most of the ‘evidence’ he offers in support of this contention comes from psychic sources, which cannot be accepted as reliable. However, it seems that some years later White completely revised his opinions according to a 1996 report(m).

Although the majority opinion is that pole shifts occurred as a result of encounters with extraterrestrial bodies, Hapgood contended that only the outer crust of the earth shifted and that this was the result of a build-up of ice at the Poles causing instability. However, it has since been calculated that the polar ice constitutes such a small percentage of the mass of the crust that it could not possibly have caused the slippage proposed by Hapgood. This idea and others are discussed on the Pole Shift Forum(o).

Another researcher, S.F.Wells, was prompted by Flem-Ath’s work to examine the Avebury stone circle to see if there was any evidence of a pole shift there. To his surprise, he did discover at Avebury and at other ancient monuments in the locality clear evidence of a pole change of up to 30° in the past. In 2003, he wrote a paper outlining his observations(c).

Flavio Barbiero has written a paper proposing that an impact with an asteroid as small as half a kilometre in diameter could result in a rapid pole shift.

A number of facts are proposed to support the idea of a pole shift. One of the most popular is the extermination of the mammoth, which once again was central to a recent book by Charles Ginenthal, The Extinction of the Mammoth [0514]+, which dates the last pole shift to around 1500 BC. Perhaps the most impressive evidence came from Sweden in November 2009(b) when settlements dating to 9000 BC were discovered in the north of the country in a region that according to accepted theory should have been covered by ice at that time.

Wolter Smit points out that the orientation of some Mayan Temples is apparently out by around 17 degrees from what would be expected. A structural feature at the 4,000-year-old temple of Saar in Bahrain is believed to have been used to record the summer solstice is now out by 10 degrees. Similar anomalies were noted by G.F. Dodwell during his study of ancient gnomons. A further indication that our present knowledge of polar changes may be flawed is highlighted by the fact that on April 15th 136 BC we have a record of an eclipse that completely darkened Babylon that should have had its zone of totality over the Balearic Islands in the Western Mediterranean. This is a difference of nearly 50 degrees and implies that either the Earth has slowed or the polar axis has shifted.

The idea that Pole Shift(s) can be linked to the location and orientation of many ancient sites is explored by Mark Carlotto in his new book, Before Atlantis [1600].

Amy Smith also claims that the Earth ‘tilted’ around 10,000 BC(d) referring to two ancient quotations that may support the reality of this Pole Shift – one from Plato (Tim.22d) and the other from the Book of Enoch/Noah (65.1).

The Hutton Commentaries(a) contain many articles relating to an impending pole shift based on the readings of Edgar Cayce.

In October 2004, Alexander Chechelnitsky, a Russian astrophysicist claimed that Atlantis was located in the Yukon River valley in Alaska[515]. This, he believes, was the result of a pole shift although he admits that scientific evidence is lacking for this theory!

A recent overview of the Pole Shift theory was published in July 2014(h).

[0514]+ Available online: Free Electric Universe theory ebooks and related research papers (archive.org) 

(a) Hutton Commentaries – Archives 

(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20091130170746/https://www.thelocal.se/23546/20091129/

(c)  https://grahamhancock.com/wellssf1/

(d) https://www.angelfire.com/ar/josephus/Atlantis.html#Support

(e) See Archive 3029

(f) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztaWff0TtHU

(g) https://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/Arrhenius%201906,%20final.pdf

(h) Antartica, Atlantis, and the Earth crustal displacement theory | CanadaNewsLibre (archive.org)

(i) See {2268} 

(j) https://endtimesand2019.wordpress.com/my-newest-magazine-article-pole-shifts/

(k) https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012-poleReversal.html

(l) https://www.sott.net/article/223364-The-Beginning-of-Ice-Age-Magnetic-polar-shifts-causing-massive-global-superstorms

(m) NHNE: Pole Shift Torpedoed by Author (archive.org) 

(n) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/greek-sculptors-in-ancient-china-plus-a-very-early-claim-for-a-pole-shift-destroying-atlantis

(o) https://www.poleshift.org/index.html

(p) See: https://web.archive.org/web/20080705100438/https://www.nagt.org/files/nagt/jge/abstracts/Earle_v51n3p290.pdf

(q) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/the-forgotten-nineteenth-century-pole-shift-claim-and-its-connection-the-great-pyramid-of-egypt

(r) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/historical-chronology-of-the-mexicans.html

(s) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_earthchanges33.htm

(t) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/01/000125053438.htm

(u) https://www.christianhospitality.org/resources/pole-shift.pdf

(v) https://en.was-this-atlantis.info/deplacer-poles.html

(w) https://q-mag.org/a-new-little-ice-age-by-2030.html

(x) https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/2953/there-is-no-impending-mini-ice-age/ 

(y) https://www.ancientoriginsunleashed.com/p/quest-for-mu-200000-year-old-sunken?publication_id=1035345&post_id=135365655&isFreemail=true 

(z) https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?2004JRASC..98..183B&defaultprint=YES&page_ind=1&filetype=.pdf *

Exploded Planet Hypothesis

The Exploded Planet Hypothesis (EPH) has its origins in the 18th century when the regular spacing of the orbits of the then known six planets, with the glaring exception of the apparently empty theoretical position between Mars and Jupiter, led to the formulation of the Titius-Bode Law. The discovery of Neptune in 1846 in a position that did not conform to the rule of Titius-Bode, led to its gradual abandonment. However, the discovery of Pluto in the 1930’s brought the ‘Law’ back into consideration as Pluto was in the position that should have been occupied by Neptune. The exceptions to the Titius-Bode law are the lack of a planet where the Asteroid Belt is and the position of Neptune. In 2003, a further planet, Sedna, was discovered at a distance of 8 billion miles from the sun, as predicted by Doug Yurchey on the Internet in 2002. Since then, further bodies have been discovered in the outer region of our solar system, one of which was larger than Pluto.

As you will see below, a credible explanation for the Asteroid Belt is on offer and if correct, it means that now ten of the eleven planetary orbits in our Solar System correspond with the prediction of Titius-Bode. Statistically, this must have some significance. Therefore, in order to reinstate the Titius-Bode ‘law’ back on the statute book it is important to find an acceptable explanation for Neptune’s orbit.

Particular planets with satellite systems also confirm Titius-Bode, such as the principal satellites of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. Furthermore, even at this early stage in our investigation of extrasolar planetary systems, one, 55 Cancri, has at least four planets whose orbits appear to follow a similar pattern(c).

The 19th century saw the discovery of more asteroids in the orbit where a planet would have been expected. As early as 1802 the suggestion that an exploded planet had originally occupied this position was considered. As more asteroids were discovered the idea gained support. However, there remained one major problem with the theory, namely, that the total mass of the known asteroids would not constitute one thousandth of our earth. So where did all the matter go?

Donald W. Patten (1929-2014) has made a study of Martian craters and discovered a number of anomalies. One such detail is that 93% of all craters 20 miles or greater in diameter are in one hemisphere, which led Patten to conclude that “Mars received about 86% of its craters in one catastrophic day”(e)(f) and that the other 14% are spread equally on both hemispheres and over all other time. The suggestion being that these craters were possibly caused by the disintegration of large asteroid or small planet!

Tom Van Flandern (1940-2009), the leading exponent of the EPH, explained; ‘Consider what would happen if the Earth exploded today. Surface and crustal rock would shatter and fragment, but remain rocks. However, rocks from depths greater than 40 km are under so much pressure at high temperature that if suddenly released into a vacuum, such rocks would vaporise. As a consequence, over 99% of the Earth’s total mass would vaporise in an explosion, with only its low-pressure crustal and upper mantle layers surviving’. This explanation would clearly account for the low total mass of the objects in the Asteroid Belt. Van Flandern has expanded on his theory in what many consider a landmark book, Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets[293].

Van Flandern ascribes a date for this planetary explosion that is well before man existed on Earth. However, many of our ancient myths have been interpreted as describing celestial events in the vicinity of Earth that had a direct physical effect on our planet. Immanuel Velikovsky wrote extensively on these ancient tales and concluded that they referred to close encounters between Earth and Mars and separately with Venus.

The date of the Asteroid Belt collision or explosion was estimated in 2015 to be 470 million years ago after the identification of twin impact craters in Sweden(d).

If Titius-Bode is valid and Velikovsky’s planetary encounters real, we need to explain how they left their orbits in the first place and then must explain how they returned to their original positions. Ralph E. Juergens, an American engineer, supports Velikovsky with the idea that electromagnetic and electrostatic forces and not conventional celestial mechanics alone were responsible for the cosmic encounters witnessed and recorded by our ancestors(b). My personal hunch is that Van Flandern is correct about the explosion of a planet but wrong about the date of the occurrence.

The EPH may have a bearing on the demise of Atlantis in the shape of an asteroidal collision with Earth that in turn precipitated the ending of the last Ice Age and the consequential flooding of large areas of exposed land.

Alan Alford has a different view in The Atlantis Secret [009] in which he attempts to prove that Atlantis originated in an ancient myth concerning an exploding planet. However, this would require an event that occurred within the experience of speaking man for it to have been passed on in the form of myth.

(b) https://www.thunderbolts.info/pdf/Reconciling%20Celetial%20Mechanics.pdf

(c) BBC Focus magazine (No. 169, October 2006 p.58-63)

(d) https://phys.org/news/2015-09-globally-unique-crater-sweden.html

>(e) https://web.archive.org/web/20200224091448/http://www.thule.org/mars/index.html<

(f) https://web.archive.org/web/20200203185917/https://thule.org/mars/mars2.html

Also See: Asteroids, Catastrophism

Catastrophism *

Catastrophism today is the name given to a school of thought that supports the idea that the history of the Earth has been punctuated by natural events such as floods, fires and asteroid strikes that have caused widespread if not global devastation and that some of these events occurred within the memory of man and are recorded in worldwide mythologies.

“Gradualists explained geological features as the result of slowly acting processes such as erosion, while catastrophists argued that Earth had been shaped mainly by a series of violent events or catastrophes, whether over a relatively short time (6,000 to 10,000 years) or over many millions of years. In the early nineteenth century, gradualism seemed to win out completely over catastrophism, but in the late twentieth century scientists discovered that catastrophic events have also played a major role in Earth’s history.” (p)

Britannica defines catastrophism, as a “doctrine that explains the differences in fossil forms encountered in successive stratigraphic levels as being the product of repeated cataclysmic occurrences and repeated new creations. This doctrine generally is associated with the great French naturalist Baron Georges Cuvier (1769–1832). One 20th-century expansion on Cuvier’s views, in effect, a neocatastrophic school, attempts to explain geologic history as a sequence of rhythms or pulsations of mountain building, transgression and regression of the seas, and evolution and extinction of living organisms.”(q)

Worryingly, it is now more generally accepted that further catastrophes will occur as a result of future cometary/asteroidal strikes. Nigel Cawthorne has decided to cheer us up with his book, Doomsday [1800], which lists 50 possible global catastrophes on the future horizon!

One such close encounter, around 2800 BC, was considered by the Christian catastrophist, Donald W. Patten, to have generated the Deluge of Noah(j) and was the source of the flood legends found around the world! Patten nominates Mars as the intruder(l), an idea also advocated by Elsar Orkan, who, however, proposes a date of around 8000 BC for this encounter[1442].

Some readers may think that the subject has no direct connection with Plato’s Atlantis, however, his text refers to a number of catastrophic events that clearly brought devastation to Athens, Atlantis and beyond. The Flood of Deucalion and earlier inundations, Phaeton and other cosmic encounters, plus conflagrations and earthquakes all point to periods of great instability in the early prehistory of the Aegean region and quite probably much further afield.

Jürgen Spanuth devotes chapter 4 of his Atlantis of the North[0015] to an examination of “the natural catastrophes of the 13th century BC” that deals with Phaeton and the blizzard of floods, earthquakes and eruptions that beset the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the 2nd millennium BC. Some of these matters have been recently expanded upon by Nur & Cline(f)(g) and endorsed by Stavros Papamarinopoulos[0750.73].

August 2013 saw studies published(h) that pointed the finger at climate change as the cause of the widespread political instability in that region during the second millennium BC.

Claude Schaeffer, a celebrated French archaeologist, declared in 1948[0806] that on at least five occasions during the Bronze Age the Middle East had been subjected to widespread catastrophic destruction as a result of natural events rather than human activity.

Immanuel Velikovsky is arguably the best known of the 20th-century catastrophists, who published two books[0037][0038] in the 1950’s that provoked widespread controversy that continues today. There is an interesting albeit sceptical review of catastrophism in the last century by Patrick Moore & Bob Forrest in Chapter 14 of More Things in Heaven and Earth(k).

Paul Dunbavin, the author of Towers of Atlantis [1627]has published a paper(n), highly critical of Velikovsky’s work. Dunbavin has researched the evidence for a number of pole shifts that are not dependent on what he describes as the naïve astronomy” of Velikovsky.

 Rene Gallant

René Gallant

In 1964, the Belgian mathematician René Gallant (1908-1985)(image left) published Bombarded Earth[0748 which dealt in great detail with the consequences of meteorite impacts on the earth. Gallant, perhaps because of his amateur status as a geologist, never received the attention he deserved.

More recently Allan & Delair produced another book[0014] that identified 9500 BC as the date of a global catastrophe following an encounter with a comet. Their conclusions are at variance with Velikovsky’s, particularly regarding dates. Professor Mike Baillie of Queens University, Belfast is a well-known dendrochronologist who has recently entered the debate with his book, Exodus to Arthur[0111] which adds evidence from his discipline to support the theory of cometary or asteroidal impacts with the Earth. Unfortunately, his work is confined to the last 4,500 years and so casts no further light on the 9,500 BC date apart from offering support for the possibility of extraterrestrial impacts.

However, Richard Firestone and his co-authors have researched[0110] an impact ‘Event’ that occurred 13,000 years ago and caused devastation in North America including the creation of the hundreds of thousands of Carolina Bays and some of the outbursts of Lake Missoula. Like Baillie, they claim that a memory of this event has been preserved in the folktales of many North-American Indians. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the latest developments in catastrophist research.

The destruction of Atlantis has been linked to a number of possible catastrophic events including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and asteroid strikes. Plato’s account cites a flood as the immediate cause of the disappearance of Atlantis. In the 18th century, Giovanni Carli was probably the first to link a cometary encounter with the Earth as the cause of Atlantis’ demise. This idea has been supported by numerous writers ever since, with Emilio Spedicato being one of its leading exponents today.

There are numerous sites on the Internet relating to catastrophism of which one(a) can be recommended as a good starting point for further study. Andy Blackard has listed(b) events connected with global upheavals around 3200 and 2000 BC. An Australian archaeologist, Peter Jupp, is the creator of the Ancient Destructions website(e) which deals with a number of historical mysteries including, Baalbek and Antarctica.

A more recent book by Robert Argod[0065] postulates that many of these historical catastrophes were caused by an irregular series of accelerated tectonic movements, although he does not offer a credible mechanism to explain the triggering of such upheavals. Is it possible that the strikes by or near misses with extraterrestrial objects, proposed by so many, generated the tectonic shifts proposed by Argod?

Professor Trevor Palmer has written a comprehensive history of catastrophes and catastrophism from the earliest times and its relevance today. His Perilous Planet Earth[0888] includes a couple of chapters in which he reviews Atlantis theories in the context of catastrophism.

Dr Michel-Alain Combes has a PhD in astronomy from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI). He has an extensive website(i) dealing with catastrophism, which translates quite well.

2012 was been promoted as the date of the next worldwide catastrophe based on a highly questionable interpretation of the Mayan calendar. New Age gurus were promising a change in global consciousness, whatever that means. If interested. you can read more of this nonsense online(c) or consider a more balanced view(d).

A huge catastrophist bibliography (2010) is available online(m) with a 2020 update now available(o).

(a) https://www.pibburns.com/catastro.htm

(b) https://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/BlackardA1.php

(c) 2012 Doomsday Prediction and Prophecy – A closer look – with links and resources (archive.org) *

(d) https://www.skepdic.com/maya.html

(e)Ancient Destructions investigations, videos, articles on Earths catastrophes (archive.org) 

(f) https://academia.edu/355163/2001_Nur_and_Cline_Archaeology_Odyssey_Earthquake_Storms_article

(g) https://academia.edu/355162/2000_Nur_and_Cline_JAS_Poseidons_Horses_article

(h) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130814191916.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Ffossils_ruins%2Fancient_civilizations+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Fossils+%26+Ruins+News+–+Ancient+Civilizations%29

(i) http://www.astrosurf.com/macombes/index.html (French)

(j) https://www.creationism.org/patten/PattenBiblFlood/index.htm

(k) https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/ebooks/MoreThings/pages/Chapter_14.html

(l) https://www.creationism.org/patten/PattenMarsEarthWars/

(m) https://www.creationism.org/english/BibliographyCelestialCatastrophism2010_en.htm

(n) https://www.third-millennium.co.uk/home-2

(o) https://f7e94415-3a55-48d9-ba14-ed235f05a65f.filesusr.com/ugd/e5604c_4b8f67619fad4a5fa28a76e08c2a5216.pdf?index=true

(p) https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/science-magazines/earth-science-gradualism-and-catastrophism 

(q) https://www.britannica.com/science/catastrophism-geology 

Baillie, Mike

Mike Baillie is an Emeritus Professor of Palaeoecology in the School of Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University, Belfast. He is a dendrochronologist[113] of world renown, who outlined in his recent book [111] the evidence for catastrophic encounters with asteroids or comets over the past five millennia that opened a whole new chapter in the search for the truth about our past. Baillie ascribes these events to 2354-2345 BC, 1628-1623 BC, 1159-1141 BC, 208-204 BC and 536-545 AD. He touches on a number of Baillielegendary and historical events such as the Deluge, the Exodus and King Arthur, but seems to studiously avoid any direct reference to Atlantis. Nevertheless, his theory in conjunction with the suggestions of writers such as Emilio Spedicato enhances the possibility of the destruction of Atlantis being a consequence of a more widespread catastrophe.

>In a 1999 article, Baillie concluded with the following comment, “There is, I feel, a strong case for the contention that we do not inhabit a benign planet. This planet is bombarded relatively often. If this story is correct, we have been bombarded at least three times – and probably five times – since the birth of civilization some 5,000 years ago. And each time, the world was changed.”<

In 2004 it was revealed that a very large comet or asteroid, estimated to be ¾ of a mile in diameter, crashed into what is now Germany. The date is calculated at 200 BC, which coincides with one of Baillie’s dated catastrophes. A crater field stretching from the town of Altoetting to Lake Chiemsee is all that remains today.

Perhaps even more relevant to our study was a PowerPoint presentation(b) from Baillie to a Quantavolution Conference in Athens in 2011, which offered compelling evidence for a catastrophic event in 2345 BC. His data reinforces the work of George Dodwell who demonstrated with his study of ancient gnomons, decades earlier, that something dramatic happened to the rotational axis of the Earth in 2345 BC, which is possibly the same 2346 BC encounter with a comet proposed by William Whiston in 1696. At the same conference Baillie also presented evidence for dating the eruption of Thera to 1628 BC.

Baillie is also co-author with Patrick McCafferty of a fascinating work[112] that reinterprets some of the heroes and gods of Celtic mythology as a coded account of our ancestors’ observation of a close encounter or impact of comets with the Earth. However, Baillie’s books should be read in conjunction with an equally compelling volume[148](a) by David Talbot and Wallace Thornhill who offer a complementary but rather than conflicting interpretation of early man’s perception of highly visible cosmic events. Talbot and Thornhill have linked ancient myths and thousands of petroglyphs with their view of an electric universe, where large-scale plasma phenomena were witnessed and recorded by preliterate man. Their book has drawn extensively on the work of Dr. Anthony Peratt, who has gathered and classified an enormous database of petroglyphs from all over the world(d) that are apparently a record of celestial demonstration(s) of plasma physics.

Nevertheless, Baillie also has his critics, particularly in relation to his attitude towards proponents of the ‘New Chronology’ such as Peter James and David Rohl(c).

(a) www.thunderbolts.info

(b) https://www.qconference-athens-2011.grazian-archive.com/the2345topicmbai/index.html

(c) https://www.cokenais-soas.com/CAIS/Religions/non-iranian/Judaism/Persian_Judaism/book6/pt1.htm (half way down page) (link broken)

(d) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1265340

(e) http://www.zetatalk.com/theword/tword04n.htm *

(f) https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/714636/posts *

Asteroids *

Asteroids, Comets and Meteoroids are all relatively small objects that inhabit our Solar System. When any of them have orbits that intersect with that of the Earth they are known as Near Earth Objects or NEOs. Asteroids (a word coined by William Herschel [1738-1822]) used to be known as minor planets, while meteoroids is the name applied to asteroids that are less than 50 metres in diameter, although some use 10 metres as the classification threshold.

The largest known meteorite is the Hoba Meteorite near Groodfontein, Namibia, which weighs over 60 tons and is calculated to have landed less than 80,000 years ago(ax) and is composed of about 84% iron and 16% nickel, with traces of cobalt(ay).  Before man learned how to smelt iron the only source of the metal was from meteorites that were used to craft ornaments or weapons, such as the beautifully crafted knife buried with Tutankhamun. It is also reported that meteoric iron was used to fashion an arrowhead from a meteor that landed 3,500 years ago(az).

Meteorites have had a history of being considered divine in origin, leading to different levels of veneration in various cultures(v). In the 2nd century, Clement of Alexandria is said to have concluded that “the worship of such stones to have been the first, and earliest idolatry, in the world.”

What is probably the first recorded death from a meteorite strike took place in India in February 2016(z).

Comets, until recently, were generally thought to be composed of just dust and ice, ‘dirty snowballs’, which have orbits that periodically bring them close to the sun at which stage the interaction of the comet’s dust trail with the solar wind produces a highly visible coma or tail. The nucleus can have a diameter of a couple of kilometres.

The chemical composition of comets is now known to be varied and much more complex than previously believed. In 2015, Comet Lovejoy was ejecting the equivalent of “500 bottles of wine every second” when it was closest to the sun, in the form of ethyl alcohol(w). A close encounter with the Earth would have been interesting!

In 1883 a large comet is estimated to have come within a few hundred miles of Earth. It was photographed and some years later the image was hailed as the first image of a UFO!

In recent years comets have come to be seen as potentially more dangerous than asteroids in the event of a collision. This view was graphically demonstrated when the Levy-Shoemaker comet crashed spectacularly into Jupiter in 1994, after breaking up into as many as 21 large pieces before impacting. This comet was originally about 20 km in diameter. However, the distinction between comets and asteroids has been blurred by asteroids sometimes displaying the features of comets, such as asteroid P2013/P5, which in 2013 produced six cometary-like tails.

In 2022, a report offered evidence that major cometary or asteroidal impacts or airbursts have been more frequent than previously thought. University of Cincinnati’s Professor Kenneth Tankersley and his colleagues have listed many such events that are known to have occurred since one apparently wiped out the dinosaurs. The most disturbing fact is the number of encounters experienced within historical times, for example –  “Archaeologists have found meteorites, microspherules, iridium and platinum anomalies, and burned charcoal-rich habitation surfaces at 11 archaeological sites of the Hopewell culture in three states stretching across the Ohio River Valley. While Hopewell people survived the catastrophic event, which occurred between 252 and 383 CE, it likely contributed to their cultural decline.” (as) Jason Colavito is critical of this claim because the Hopewell did not enter a terminal decline after their proposed impact date of c. 255-300 CE but flourished for another 200 years.”(at)

In 1752, the French astronomer, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, expressed the view that “However dangerous might be the shock of a comet, it might be so slight, that it would only do damage at the part of the Earth where it actually struck” and with coincidental foresight added Perhaps we should be very surprised to find that the debris of these masses that we despised were formed of gold and diamonds” considering how Richard Firestone and his associates more recently used the existence of nanodiamonds to confirm the cometary impact of 11,000 BC over North America.

Asteroids and comets have been blamed by a number of researchers for the demise of Atlantis since the end of the 18th century. It was the Italian polymath, Giovanni Rinaldo Carli, who in 1788 declared [087] that part of a passing comet hit the Earth and was responsible for the destruction of Atlantis. A century later in his second book [022] on Atlantis, Ignatius Donnelly similarly claimed that a comet’s collision with Earth was the cause of Atlantis’ destruction(af).  Comets rather than asteroids were initially blamed because of their high visibility. However, as our technology advanced and we gradually became aware of the number of large asteroids that intersect with the Earth’s orbit they replaced comets as the more likely cause of historical impacts.

For some decades, Bob Kobres has been studying the evidence for cometary encounters contained in ancient mythologies and their possible association with known events(ah) such as the creation of the Carolina Bays or the Bronze Age Collapse(ag).

The early part of the 20th century saw the eccentric William Comyns Beaumont[088][089][090]and the mysterious Hans Schindler Bellamy[091] both supporting the idea of Atlantis being destroyed by an encounter with an extraterrestrial object. The theory has been adopted by a growing number of popular modern writers such as Otto Muck[098], Egerton Sykes, Andrew Collins[072], Paul Dunbavin[099], Karl Jürgen Hepke(a), Frank Joseph explains [102.108] how a number of scholars encouraged by Muck, came forward to publicly state their belief that Atlantis had been destroyed by an extraterrestrial impact or impacts: “They included the world’s foremost authority on Halley’s Comet, Dr M.M. Kamienski, a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences; Professor N. Bonev, one of the 20th century’s leading astronomers at the University of Sofia, in Bulgaria; and Jack Hills, of the prestigious Los Alamos National Laboratory”.

In 1971, Sykes’ Atlantis magazine devoted an entire issue to the matter of impact craters around the globe(ak), a subject that he also wrote about a few years earlier(av). More up-to-date is a paper by Andrew Glikson published in August 2023. In it he notes that Geophysical evidence suggests there is a massive, magnetized structure deep beneath Australia. Experts think it could be the remnants of the largest meteor crater on Earth.”  This feature in New South Wales known as the Deniliquin structure may date to half a billion years and is “yet to be further tested by drilling, spans up to 520 kilometres in diameter. This exceeds the size of the near-300km-wide Vredefort impact structure in South Africa, which to date has been considered the world’s largest(ba).”

Emilio Spedicato of the University of Bergamo has written(b) and lectured widely on his hypothesis that the last Ice Age was started by an extraterrestrial impact over a continent and ended with a similar event over an ocean. This second impact was the cause of Atlantis’ destruction and Spedicato specifies Hispaniola as containing the location of its capital.

Spedicato is not alone in believing that impacts by large objects have been responsible for the triggering of past Ice Ages. As we have seen a large number of writers have suggested an impact with the Earth as the primary or at least the secondary cause of the destruction of Atlantis(d). These cosmic collisions have occurred throughout the history of our planet, continuing to this day. Most of the impact material is small and burns up in the atmosphere. Some low-density objects have penetrated the atmosphere but disintegrated before actually impacting, generating powerful shock waves commensurate with their size. Such an event was the well-known Tunguska(i) explosion over that area of Siberia in 1908.

Commenting on the Tunguska event Stephen E. Franklin added that “Less than five hours after the Tunguska object exploded at 7:14 AM local time in Siberia, another fireball was seen over Kagarlyk near Kyiv in what is now Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) at around 7:00 AM local time followed by the impact of a 1.912 kg stony meteorite.”(ad)

In 2001, Dr Luigi Forschini one of the leaders of an Italian expedition to the Tunguska region studied some of the 60,000 fallen trees and for the first time, they also had access to previously untranslated eye-witness accounts. They concluded that the object had arrived from the southeast at about 11 km per second and that an investigation of its likely orbit concluded that it was more likely that the intruder had been an asteroid rather than a comet. They speculated that it was probably not much more than ‘a pile of rubble’ that broke up completely, leaving no crater(aq).

>In 2013, Gernot Spielvogel co-authored Sonnenbomben [1582] in which it is suggested that the Tunguska event was caused by a solar plasma ‘bomb’. Elsewhere, a YouTube video reviews the Tunguska event and concludes that many of the remaining mysteries associated with can be explained if it is treated as a major electrical discharge event(bb) between the Earth and an approaching asteroid or comet.<

The most recent (April 2020) Tunguska theory is that it could have been caused by an iron asteroid partially entering and then leaving the atmosphere!(aj) The most bizarre Tunguska suggestion is that it was the result of experiments carried out by Nikola Tesla(al). Another claim is that a massive explosion of escaping underground gas was the culprit(am). July 1st, 2021 another update on Tunguska theories revealed very little that was new(ao).

Two similar explosions occurred over South America in the 1930s(ar). However, some are large enough to survive the journey to the surface.  Depending on the size, density, speed and angle of approach, the consequences of a large impact are difficult for the average person to appreciate. As Austen Atkinson wrote[109] “A single impact by a rock the size of (London’s) Millennium Dome could devastate the surface of the globe with an explosive release of energy five times more powerful than the entire world’s nuclear arsenal. On 19 May 1996, just such an object came within 280,000 miles of Earth: six hours from a collision. Humankind could have been eradicated.”

The most famous impact is probably that which is known as the Chicxulub Event in the Yucatan took place 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs. A 2017 update on Chicxulub studies was presented(ap) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans.

A more recent (2019) paper(ae) reports that “excavations in North Dakota reveal fossils of fish and trees that were blasted with rocky, glassy fragments that fell from the sky. The deposits show evidence also of having been swamped with water – the consequence of the colossal sea surge that was generated by the impact.”

The Chicxulub event may have been more complicated than generally thought, as a 2022 report revealed that “researchers have now uncovered another crater off the coast of Guinea that might well be Chicxulub’s cousin. The newly discovered feature, albeit much smaller, is also about 66 million years old. That’s a curious coincidence, and scientists are now wondering whether the two impact structures might be linked. Perhaps Chicxulub and the newly discovered feature—dubbed Nadir crater—formed from the breakup of a parent asteroid or as part of an impact cluster, the team suggested.”(aw)

The Yucatan impact has a rival claimant in the Indian Ocean as the dinosaur killer, known as the Shiva crater. This is claimed as the largest multi-ringed impact crater in the world(an).

11 million years later another impact in the Atlantic is credited with the expansion of the mammals according to a new study by co-author, Dennis Kent from Rutgers University.

An online calculator of impact effects was developed by scientists at Purdue University and Imperial College, London was first published in 2004 and recently updated(g).

By 2009 175 large impact craters have been discovered all over our planet and many more are undiscovered having been destroyed over time by wind and water erosion or hidden by vegetation. In 2006, a crater with a diameter of 30 km was discovered in the Southern Egyptian desert. This discovery may solve a mystery in the same region that has baffled science for over seventy years, namely, the Libyan desert glass that covers an area of 60 x 100 km. However, the largest known impact crater is the Vredefort crater in South Africa with a diameter of 300 km (186 miles). But this may have to take second place to the 300-mile-wide crater identified in Hudson Bay in North America.

The spectacular collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter in July 1994 and how it disintegrated into a number of huge pieces before impacting over seven days, may offer one possible explanation for the mechanism that could produce the apparent clustering of 3rd millennium BC impacts on Earth.

The current estimate is that there are more than 2,000 asteroids exceeding a kilometre in size together with 10,000 over half a kilometre plus millions of smaller items in Earth-crossing orbits; collectively known as ‘Apollo objects‘. The meteor that exploded over central Russia in February 2013 belonged to this Apollo group. Add to this the risk from comets, normally larger than asteroids, and it is obvious that large-scale impacts are inevitable, however infrequent. The good news is that in 2011 it was reported that a NASA space telescope recorded a 40% reduction in their earlier calculation(j) which should be compared with the assessment referred to(f) at the end of the last paragraph of this entry. May 2012 saw further estimates being published(l).

Terminology, definitions and number estimates are constantly changing. Asteroids that are more than 100m across with orbits that come within 7.5 million km of Earth are now referred to as PHAs (Potentially Hazardous Asteroids). As of June 2014, the IAU has listed 1,466 PHAs, while NASA estimates put the actual total in excess of 4,700(q).

As recently as 1953 an asteroid impact with the Moon was photographed as a flash and only in 2002 was the resulting 2Km- wide crater identified. The estimated energy released by this 300-metre-wide object on impact would have been half a Megaton of TNT (35 times the Hiroshima bomb). A hit of this magnitude on Earth could have wiped out a large city.

It must be kept in mind that the immediate damage caused by the impact itself is only the beginning of the story; tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes together with worldwide long-term dust veils could trigger climate change leading to ongoing adverse effects on vegetation and animal life. For humans, this meant death, destruction, floods, repeated crop failures and probably a breakdown in any existing civil order.

It was as recent as the 1930s that geologists were being told that Meteor Crater in the Arizona desert was the only known evidence that an impact, with worldwide consequences, had ever taken place. The site is also known as Barringer Crater after the family who owns it. Until recently, it held the record for the largest impact crater less than 100,000 years old; it’s about 49,000 to 50,000 years old and measures 0.75 miles (1.2 km) in diameter. That is, until 2019, when the Yilan crater was discovered in China, which measures about 1.15 miles (1.85 km) across and likely formed about 46,000 to 53,000 years ago, based on radiocarbon dating of charcoal and organic lake sediments from the site, the NASA statement says(au).

It was also in the 1930s that the first of the Apollo objects were identified. Since then, the number of large identifiable impact craters grew to hundreds and the number of Apollo objects, whose impact would have global implications, became thousands. It then became obvious that the Earth as we know it is at serious risk. World authorities are slowly realising that the probability of similar impacts in the future is simply inevitable.

Until recently, statistical analysis indicates a major impact every 10,000 years; with the last such event occurring 12,000 years ago possibly destroying Atlantis, directly or indirectly. However, in 2006, this estimate was revised downward to a major collision every 1,000 years with the last impact having taken place around 2800 BC, in the Indian Ocean, where an 18-mile diameter crater has been discovered at a depth of 12,500 feet.

However, a paper(x) published in October 2015 has suggested that a study of mass extinctions over the past 260 million years appears to have taken place every 26 million years coinciding with major asteroid/comet impacts.

So far 175 large impact craters(e) have been discovered all over our planet and many more are undiscovered having been destroyed over time by wind and water erosion or hidden by vegetation. In 2006, a crater with a diameter of 30km was discovered in the southern Egyptian desert. This discovery may solve a mystery in the same region that has baffled science for over seventy years, namely, the Libyan desert glass that covers an area of 60 x 100 km. However, the largest known impact crater is the Vredefort crater n South Africa with a diameter of 300km (186 miles). But this may have to take second place to the 300-mile-wide crater identified in Hudson Bay in North America. A 2015 report tells of two impact zones that total more than 400 kilometres across, which were identified in the Warburton Basin in Central Australia(t).

Although it appears that similar suggestions have been made since the 1950s, the debate has now reached a new level. The Hudson Bay feature has generated even greater interest since Richard Firestone, a nuclear physicist together with Allen West and Simon Warwick-Smith published[110] their claim that it was created around 11,000 BC and had human witnesses who preserved their memory of it in their local folklore and that may have been responsible for the extermination of the Clovis people(ai). Firestone’s tentative 11,000 BC date for this event is earlier than Plato’s even more questionable 9600 BC date for the destruction of Atlantis might be connected since the event described by Firestone & Co. would have had global consequences and could have affected any suggested Atlantis location. In 2007, at a news conference during the Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union, in Acapulco, Mexico, two archaeologists from the University of Oregon, Douglas J. Kennett and Jon M. Erlandson added geological evidence to support Firestone’s thesis. In 2008 evidence of an exploding comet/asteroid over Canada during the same period was presented(c) by other academics from the University of Cincinnati. However, it must be noted that the Firestone hypothesis has encountered some criticism since the start of 2009 and must therefore be treated with due caution. This criticism appears to be gaining support according to a May 2011 report(h). In June 2012, James Kennett, son of Douglas Kennet mentioned above, was part of a team that announced further evidence of a major impact event 13,000 years ago extending from Pennsylvania and South Carolina as far as Syria(m).

Dr Reinoud de Jonge has written several articles(d) that drew on petroglyphs in Brittany to support his contention that the Earth had an encounter with a cometary body in 2345 BC. This would appear to complement the work of Mike Baillie and George Dodwell, who echoed William Whistons proposed date of 2346 BC, for an encounter with a comet that caused the biblical Deluge.

Since only 30% of our globe’s surface is exposed land, it is reasonable to conclude that 70% of impacts will have landed in water, leaving little lasting evidence. However, at least ten of these identified impact craters occurred after the last Ice Age and at least seven of them date from around the third millennium BC, a period when there were widespread cultural collapses.

In a recent book[111] the renowned dendrochronologist, Mike Baillie, has outlined compelling evidence from his discipline combined with ancient mythologies to support the idea of extraterrestrial impacts in early historical times. May I suggest that the mythologies that possibly relate to multiple impacts are in fact recollections of a comet that had been visible for some time before breaking up under the gravitational influence of our planet before impact? This idea was developed by Baillie in a subsequent book[112] written with Patrick McCafferty that focused on Celtic mythological figures. Comets rather than asteroids are more likely to have contributed to the development of myths since an asteroid would not have been visible long enough for it to develop an identity that would be remembered in legend. Graham Phillips has gone further and proposed[036] that a close encounter with a comet in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC triggered the development of monotheism at that time. Furthermore, he contends that as the Earth passed through this comet’s tail, it introduced large quantities of the amino acid, vasopressin that heightened aggression in humans leading to large-scale conflicts worldwide. This comet, 12P/Pons-Brooks is due for another close encounter with Earth in 2024.

A 2012 paper(o) by Fernando Coimbra investigates the influence of unusual astronomical events, in particular comets, on the subject matter of rock art. An earlier paper(p) by Coimbra looks at the swastika as a specific example of a reflection of such an event.

Mythologies, worldwide, offer evidence of these impacts and have been subsequently reinforced by classical writers who describe in non-scientific terms the effects of these extraterrestrial assaults. Pliny wrote in his Natural History (Book II, sec 91) of ‘A terrible comet was seen by the people of Ethiopia and Egypt, to which Typhon, the king of that period, gave his name; it had a fiery appearance and was twisted like a coil, and it was very grim to behold: it was not really a star so much as what might be called a ball of fire.’

Similarly, the Greek myth of Phaëton has been interpreted as a record of an encounter with a comet. Edith and Alexander Tollmann also identified an 11,000 BC impact with the Köfels region of the Austrian Tyrol as one of the impact zones. The interpretation of ancient legends and myths is a matter of subjective response, but the volume of such evidence is so great that the probability of a number of major impacts being within the memory of man, who relayed the experience down to us through the medium of tradition, is quite high.

The fact that our Earth is continually at risk of a cosmic collision, the physical evidence of recent and past collisions, the recording of impacts on the Moon and Jupiter compounded with stories in ancient mythologies offer strong grounds for accepting the possibility of Atlantis being destroyed as a result of a collision with an extraterrestrial object as a credible working hypothesis.

While an asteroid impact destroying Atlantis is relatively easy to accept, some authors have proposed even more dramatic scenarios where the impact was so great that it caused the Poles to change position and/or the Earth’s outer mantle to move relative to the inner core. There is little doubt that cosmic collisions of all the possible natural catastrophes pose the greatest possible threat to life on Earth. There is an interesting website(c) that discusses both catastrophes and Atlantis. Another site(e) has a small collection of images of impact craters as seen from space. 2010 produced a frightening upward reassessment of the asteroid threat(f).

In 2001, NASA(k) identified 1,000 asteroids and comets orbiting close to Earth that are capable of causing catastrophic damage to our planet in the event of a collision. An interesting map was published(n) in February 2013 showing the locations of 34,513 impacts dating back to 2300 BC.

Recent deliberate encounters with comets and asteroids have produced images and data that have raised questions about the traditional description of comets being composed of ice and rock. The lines between asteroids and comets are becoming increasingly blurred and new definitions are required(r). The trend now is to see asteroids and comets as part of a continuum. Evidence is emerging that the H20 previously associated with comets may have been OH radicals(s).

The 2014 landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko would appear to have destroyed the ‘dirty snowball’ description of comets, coined in 1950 by the noted astronomer, Fred Whipple, and should now be abandoned.

Although large asteroids or comets have caused and will again cause global catastrophes on a scale that we can only imagine, they are not the greatest potential threat to our existence. It is estimated that our galaxy, like others, is also home to free-floating giant gas planets untethered to any star, which, if they wandered our way, could not only obliterate our planet but de-stabilise our solar system.(u)

Terry Westerman offers a fascinating overview of possible global impact sites on his fully illustrated website(y).

Fortunately, the death and destruction caused by comets are balanced by the probability that they are also the source of life on our planet. This idea is gaining greater acceptance with a further paper(aa) offering additional supportive evidence published in April 2016.

Nevertheless, improved vigilance is required if we are to believe Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario, whose research in 2014 concluded(ab) that hazardous asteroids are 10 times more likely to hit Earth than previously thought!

Further Reading: Hoyle[602] , Maguire[604], Verschuur[579], Clube & Napier[290], Allan & Delair[014].

(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20200225130714/http://www.tolos.de/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20190805194450/http://atlis.de/

(b) Wayback Machine (archive.org) 

(c) https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-05/uoo-ori052107.php

(d) https://web.archive.org/web/20200128100421/http://barry.warmkessel.com/dejonge.html

(f)  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1306555/Our-terrifyingly-crowded-solar-How-asteroids-closing-in.html
(g) https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth

(h) https://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/comet-claim-comes-crashing-to-earth-31180

(i) https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/30jun_tunguska/ (link broken) 
(j) https://www.space.com/13130-dangerous-asteroids-earth-nasa-telescope-results.html

(k) The Probability of Collisions with Earth (archive.org)  *

(l) https://www.seeker.com/4700-potentially-hazardous-asteroids-lurking-1765777967.html#news.discovery.com

(m)  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120611193657.htm

(n) Every meteorite fall on earth mapped | News | theguardian.com

(o)  https://www.academia.edu/5354586/Rock_art_and_the_memory_of_unusual_astronomical_events

(p)  https://www.academia.edu/2951519/The_astronomical_origins_of_the_swastika_motif

(q)  BBC Focus Magazine, July 2014, page 67.

(r) Are comets asteroids or asteroids comets? – Thunderbolts Forum (v2.0) (archive.org) 

(s) Are they saying water when they mean OH radical? Please help – Thunderbolts Forum (v2.0) (archive.org) 

(t) https://web.archive.org/web/20190528024004/http://www.sci-news.com/geology/science-warburton-giant-asteroid-impact-basin-australia-02627.html

(u) https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-make-our-home-on-a-rogue-planet-without-a-sun

(v) https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/falling-stars-and-black-stone-humanity-s-worship-meteorites-001901

(w) https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/26/9615392/comet-lovejoy-ethyl-alcohol-organic-molecules-life

(x) https://phys.org/news/2015-10-scientists-link-comet-asteroid-showers.html

(y) Seismic Circles (archive.org) 

(z) https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Meteorite-explosion-killed-Vellore-college-bus-driver-Tamil-Nadu-government-says/articleshow/50889270.cms

(aa) Archive 2998 | (atlantipedia.ie)

(ab) https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/telescopes/a10236/the-asteroid-threat-visualized-16490560/

(ac) https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37647049

(ad) https://neros.lordbalto.com/ChapterNine.htm

(ae) https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47755275

(af) Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel | MalagaBay (archive.org)

(ag) https://web.archive.org/web/20200916132547/http://defendgaia.org/bobk/bronze.html

(ah) https://web.archive.org/web/20200203201811/http://defendgaia.org/bobk/bobk.html

(ai) https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/656015?journalCode=ca

(aj) https://www.q-mag.org/the-new-final-tunguska-theory.html

(ak) Atlantis, Volume 24, Nos 3/4, April-July, 1971.

(al)  https://theunredacted.com/the-tunguska-blast-teslas-death-ray/

(am) The Tunguska Event: the most powerful explosion in documented history that still remains a mystery | protothemanews.com

(an) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091015102246.htm

(ao) Remembering Tunguska: A Mystery Explosion that Baffles The CIA Over a Century Later – The Debrief

(ap) <chicxulub killer meteorite> (q-mag.org)

(aq) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1628806.stm 

(ar) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/esp_ciencia_tunguska23.htm

(as) Near-Earth Comet Exploded over North America about 1,500 Years Ago | Sci-News.com 

(at) Researchers Behind Ice Age Comet Claim Say a Comet Destroyed the Hopewell, Too – JASON COLAVITO

(au) Scientists uncover the largest crater on Earth under 100,000 years old | Live Science

(av) Atlantis – Die Theorie vom Meteoriten-Impakt – Atlantisforschung.de 

(aw) https://eos.org/articles/impact-crater-off-the-african-coast-may-be-linked-to-chicxulub

(ax) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoba_meteorite 

(ay) National Geographic, June 2023 p.102

(az) Meteorite that crashed to Earth 3,500 years ago carved into arrowhead by Bronze Age hunters | Live Science 

(ba) https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/the-largest-asteroid-impact-crater-on-earth-is-lurking-beneath-australia-new-evidence-suggests#:~:text=Geophysical%20evidence%20suggests%20there%20is,largest%20meteor%20crater%20on%20Earth. 

(bb) (1) Matt Finn: Tunguska Mystery of 1908 | Thunderbolts – YouTube