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If not by impact, then what?

Dennis Cox
A Catastrophe of Comets
Mon, 16 May 2011 20:24 UTC

One of the large regions that tweaks my curiosity about impact events in a very big way is an area that extends from eastern New Mexico to just the other side of Odessa, and Midland, Texas.

In the image below we see a small part of that area near Vaughn, New Mexico. Using Google Earth's historical image feature, we can view the same place from about 15,000 feet, in images taken at different times of the year.

As you can see, there are numerous craters. You get a different set of colors in the late summer.

The early black & white images are sometimes even more telling.

These next few are little closer to Vaughn.

Here it is in the late summer.

And in black & white.

Crater fields of comparable fragment sizes can be found in scattered, locally dense, clusters all the way to central Texas.

Anyone can Google up some images of the Odessa crater, in west Texas. But the big mystery I'm struggling with is, what about all the others? In the world according to Google Earth, the Odessa crater is only one of thousands liberally scattered among the oil fields of west Texas. In the image you see below, the white lines are dirt roads about 7, or 8, meters wide. And each of the clearings that show up as little rectangles of a half an acre, or so, are the location of an oil well pump.

Let's zoom in close to one of them. It's almost 190 meters wide.

The early black & white view is interesting too.

On any other planetary surface in the solar system no one would hesitate to trust their eyes, and call these these what they look like: impact craters.

I asked NASA's David Morrison what he thought of these things. He expressed his doubts that so many craters could be all the same age. He said he thought that a cluster impact event would be "Highly unlikely". Under the prevailing uniformitarian/gradualist geophysical paradigm, his views are typical of most mainstream planetary scientists.

But in March, 2010, W. M. Napier published a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and titled, "Paleolithic extinctions and the Taurid Complex". In it professor Napier points out that:

"The fragmentation of comets is now recognized as a major route of their disintegration, and this is consistent with the numerous sub-streams and co-moving observed in the Taurid complex."

And in an earlier 2009 paper by professor Napier, and titled "Comets, Catastrophes, and Earth's History" we read,

"The evidence that an exceptionally large (50-100 km) comet entered a short-period, Earth-crossing orbit during the upper Paleolithic, and underwent a series of disintegrations, now seems compelling. The idea is not new, but it has been strengthened by an accumulation of evidence from radar studies of the interplanetary environment, from the LDEF experiment, from numerical simulations of the Taurid complex meteoroids and 'asteroids', and from the latter's highly significant orbital clustering around Comet Encke.

The disintegration of this massive Taurid Complex progenitor over some tens of thousands of years would yield meteoroid swarms which could easily lead to brief, catastrophic episodes of multiple bombardment by sub-kilometer bolides, and it is tempting to see the event at ∼ 12,900 BP as an instance of this. Whether it actually happened is a matter for Earth scientists, but from the astronomical point of view a meteoroid swarm is a much more probable event than a 4 km comet collision."

Most of the academic community assume that large clusters of cometary debris don't hit the Earth. At least, not in the geologically recent past. And they will entertain almost any fantastical theory for the formation of these depressions; as long as that theoretical geologic process does not involve a sudden catastrophic impact event. When looking for answers, the typical party line is that they are all probably karst sinkholes, because they are all in limestone.

But there's just too darn many of them. And in too large a variety of terrains. Any given karst sinkhole is representative of a partial collapse of a much larger cave system beneath. And if we work from the uniformitarian postulate that these holes in the ground appeared, over a great span of time, our thinking is still stuck in a box. They are all in exactly the same almost pristine condition. So it's completely non sequitur to say they represent a long series of repeated events.

There are many thousands of them, in many different terrains. They can be found in a large variety of sizes in a vast region that includes almost all of eastern New Mexico, and West Texas. And they average about 100 meters in diameter.

Take your pick. Which is more plausible? A giant series of inter-connecting cave systems covering tens of thousands of square miles, with too many large sinkholes as big as a large sports stadium, all breaking the surface, and collapsing, at nearly the same time to count? Or the giant crater fields caused by the almost simultaneous, late Pleistocene - early Holocene impacts of a very large cluster of cometary fragments?

I've been asking around, and digging for evidence that someone has actually done some real science on these things. And all I've been able to get are wimpy answers that begin with; "Well, most geologists agree that______", or words to that effect. Heck, I don't care what they've all decided to agree about. I want to know what they've proven.

As for me, and until proven otherwise, I prefer to trust my own eyes. Those surfaces we see those things in all date to the late Pleistocene. And I'm working from the postulate that they are related to the impact storms of the Younger Dryas Impacts.

There's a few more to be seen in this gallery called Craterfield.

Reader Comments

parallax · 2011-05-17T00:48:39Z

Plausible indeed.

Very compelling photos. It is amazing how the establishment sometimes (most-times) seems to have great difficulty with objective reality both right and left.

Keep up the good work.

Appollynon · 2011-05-17T03:04:05Z

Another impact site & possible meteor remains

As I was doing my daily nes rounds this morning I came across the following curious item on a blog, with the title, "Somewhere in the Bald Hills is a meteor waiting to be found".

"In 1876 a giant meteor fell in the Bald Hills at the head of Roaring River in Duncan Basin. It fell with a thud so loud it was heard all the way to Shasta, Bass, Stillwater, and Woodman's.

Not only did people hear it, many people also claimed to have seen it. Ruth Jordan was one. She lived in the Bald Hills and said she saw it after it hit the ground. She called it just an old gray rock and said it was 4 ft. wide and that about two-thirds of it was buried in the ground.

No records have been found to indicate someone removed it. So chances are it's still out there."
[Link]I thought this was curious timing in synch with this article, it seems there are many impact sites we are unaware of and the mainstream scientific community seem to be ignoring.

arcticcircle · 2011-05-17T06:25:00Z

craters in Nevada also

nice read.

I used to fly out of SFO eastwards on biz, usually over the Nevada desert. there are MANY such craters, some dozens of miles from any road. At first i thought they might be bomb craters, but then a line of seven impacts in a row, almost overlapping caught my eye.

Holding my head against the window in a constant spot, with the vertical edge of the window my guide, and approximating that the jet traveled one mile in seven seconds, some of the craters were DAMM big. - much bigger than the Texas ones - taking seconds to cover

look just south of I-80. . cheers

Seeker · 2011-05-17T06:28:09Z

Possible other causes as well…

If one digests the available research, there seems to me to be absolutely no question that cometary impacts/atmospheric explosions, etc have played a major – if not the major – catastrophic role in defining and marking our planet, and indeed human history. That being said, we all need to be careful not to see direct hits by comets in every piece of catastrophic evidence. The true picture of cosmic interaction is almost certainly far more complicated. In particular plasma/electrical discharge and interchange by large cosmic bodies in near proximity must also be acknowledged as a likely (if not more likely) source for certain of the features seen. Extra large comets (such as that we now call the planet Venus) are capable of passing by our earth and in the discharge that takes place, raking the world with mind boggling amounts of electrical ‘thunderbolts’ which produce precisely the kind of complex scaring seen in some of these pictures (but which are very hard to attribute to direct hits by a body).

Many impact areas, such as the Carolina Bays, whether created by air bursts or shrapnel effects from an exploding comet, do violently attest to the evident dangers of direct assault by comets. But it does appear that in our not too distant past such activity may well have been accompanied by awe inspiring movements of the larger planetary bodies. The myths tell us about the heavenly wars of the gods in the ancient past, an aspect of which likely denotes the global turmoil caused by the close pass by of earth of the planet Mars and the comet Venus, interlocking all concerned in a periodic, titanic embrace. Anyone interested in this subject should explore the research undertaken in laboratories precisely replicating the kind of scarring highly visible on Mars, which may also be connected to the destruction of the Martian atmosphere and the ‘disappearance’ of Mars’ water.

It is also of great interest that the scarring referred to in this article is widespread across the oil fields of west Texas. This raises again the possible likely extraterrestrial origins of petroleum oil (which is not a fossil based fuel as has been so ridiculously promoted); there may also be a connection between the scale of the cosmic activity over this area and a rain of oil from above.

Food for thought.

EFer · 2011-05-17T10:06:48Z

No Chance

Of US Bombing practice?

Dragon · 2011-05-17T11:12:37Z

Electric craters = Balderdash

As an Ironworker, certified welding inspector, and often lead fabricator, on an R&D team. I’ve seen an example of almost every kind of electric discharge event. In steel fabrication we use controlled streams of plasma for both cutting, and welding. R&D people with very high energy energy plasma equipment at their disposal, and a little time on their hands, like to play with that equipment, just to see what it will do. Sometimes an experiment gets a little out of hand. And I’ve seen too many very high energy plasma discharges to count. Some were powerful enough to blow large holes in steel armor plate. Not one of them produced a crater.

Show me one single experiment conducted under scalable, Earth normal, conditions where an electric discharge produced a crater of any size whatsoever. And an electric discharge into a dust covered CRT screen is not a valid example of Earth normal conditions at any scale.

Or better yet, show me a paper that describes the process of electric excavation of a crater in detail. And can account for all energies required. Including the orbital mechanics of the source point for the discharge, You’ll have to account for the charge separation that produces the current. As well as the movements, and thermal properties, during formation, and emplacement, of all of the blast effected materials.

I can provide good peer reviewed experimental data by numerous scientists working at the NASA Ames Hypervolicty impact facility that describes the evolution of an impact crater in millisecond by millisecond detail. And using a match-grade 50 caliber rifle, I can produce some pretty good classic textbook impact craters myself that verify the impact experiments of researchers before me.

Using the high pressure plasma streams from steel cutting equipment, I can also duplicate the heat, and pressure, of a geo-ablative air burst event, and study the fluid motions of the resulting ablated materials. So the formation, and emplacement, of an ablative airburst melt formation can be described in very fine detail as well.

If you want me to take EU’s electric crater hypothesis seriously you’re going to have to provide equally detailed, and scalable, experimental data for the evolution of an electric crater. You should be able to tell us exactly how the motive forces provided by an electric arc can produce exactly the same fluid motions, and geomorphology, during the explosive emplacement of blast effected materials as a kinetic impact. So far, even when challenged to do so, the founding fathers of Electric Universe theory have failed to do that.

And the idea that Venus and Mars nearly hit the Earth a few thousand years ago came from Velikovski. And it is disproved by the complete lack of physical evidence on Earth that those near misses ever happened.

If Venus, and Mars, nearly collided with the Earth 3,500, and 2,700 years ago as Velikovski claims, and the debris from Venus that was deposited in Earth’s atmosphere was so thick it caused the 40 years of darkness after the Exodus, then what happened to the debris? There should be corresponding layers in the world’s ice caps, and sedimentary deposits in ancient lake, and ocean floors.

It’s been a long time since Velikovski. In the decades since his time they’ve filled warehouses with core data from both ice sheets, and sedimentary deposits world-wide. And that debris just isn’t there.

The Saturnists cleaned up V’s more blatant archeological, and mythological, mistakes. And they brought in a physicist, or two, to produce “Saturn Theory”. But that does not change the fact that no supportive evidence for the suppose exists in the core data. And all they’ve accomplished is to put lipstick on a pig.

All the physical evidence I’ve identified, and all of the blast effected materials in central Mexico, and the American southwest, can be explained without errant planets. And in terms of climate change, and ensuing habitat degradation, every last pebble can be explained as a consequence of the massive air-burst impact storms, associated with Clube & Napier's astronomical model of the Taurid Complex.

Dragon · 2011-05-17T11:23:05Z

Bombing practice?

It was a possibility I had to rule out. Please see: [Link]

Dragon · 2011-05-17T11:32:40Z

Craters in Nevada?

Hi arcticcircle,

Check out a post titled Oblique Craters In Nevada. [Link]

Seeker · 2011-05-17T12:14:18Z

re balderdash

I hear your expertise Dragon and I'm not going to fight you line for line because it's clear you have set your mind straight on how things are. Such statements as ‘it is disproved by the complete lack of physical evidence on Earth that those near misses ever happened’ is I would suggest highly suspect; it’s the kind of blinkered junk that uniformists come out with when they try and sweep threatening ideas under the carpet (we get the same rubbish from NASA about comets being dirty balls of ice which is one of the greatest corruptions of truth in modern science).

Of course there is evidence, but evidence of what; the issue if one of interpretation. This planet is covered in massive scars and signs of enormous upheaval, all of which have been put down to uniformist processes when they clearly so often defy such narrow explanation. Do the research, it is out there.

For now, (and the simplest way to answer your challenge), is to suggest you watch the following detailed video presentation with an open mind and then explore some of the work undertaken by plasma physicist Wallace Thornhill – some papers and his website linked below.

The Lightning-Scarred Planet Mars - Part One
[Link]
The Lightning-Scarred Planet Mars - Part Two
[Link]

Ransom, C.J.; Thornhill, W., "Plasma-Generated Craters and Spherules", IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Volume 35, Issue 4, Aug. 2007 Page(s):828 – 831

Thornhill, W.W., "The Electrical Nature of Comets", IEEE 34th International Conference on Plasma Science, 2007. ICOPS 2007., Publication Date: 17-22 June 2007, On page(s): 1000-1000

[Link]

Dragon · 2011-05-17T15:15:54Z

A note on "Blinkered Junk"

I've noticed that most Saturnists, and Velikovskian delusionists are especially keen, sometimes almost to the point of troll-like behavior, on propping up the assumption, unquestioned among them, that electromagnetic forces can somehow provide a way to overcome, or over-ride the forces of gravity, and orbital momentum, on a planetary scale.

Not one of them can describe the physics of how it might work

They are desperate to somehow give weight to the otherwise preposterous, and physically impossible, idea of the so called “Polar Configuration”.

Where they have Saturn as the Earth’s primary. And held in a fixed position relative to the Earth buy a giant plasma column extending between the two. And they love to point at every crater in the solar system, especially those on Mars, as evidence of the massive electric discharges they assume must have happened when the PC broke up. And when Mars almost collided with the Earth. Saying, “See there? Those holes in the ground look like electric discharge scars.” And that from people who have no clue what typical electric discharge scarring of a planetary surface should be expected to look like. No one does. Because no one has ever made such a thing happen under realistic planetary conditions at any scale.

Show me the data. Where is the terrestrial debris from those supposed near-collision catastrophes? The evidence in the stratigraphic record, and ice cores, does not exist for the planetary near collisions they assume must have happened. Nor can an even remotely plausible astronomical model be constructed of the so called Polar Configuration. Much less an Earth transition from the Saturnian system to the present heliocentric orbit.

Who ever made an electric crater happen in ordinary, normal, terrestrial materials, and electrical conditions, of the ground? And which crater nevertheless presents the same full suite of shock effects, and explosive fluid mechanics, and geomorphology, in the emplacement of the resulting blast effected materials as a kinetic impact?

I’ve collected enough flash burns, and blind spots, over the years to have a pretty good grasp on what electric discharge scarring of a surface looks like. If such things as plasma discharge phenomena, and the resulting scarring are infinitely scalable as they say, then if there is such a thing as an inter-planetary scale electric discharge event, the resulting planetary scarring will have no visual resemblance whatsoever to the planetary scarring, or geomorphology of a kinetic impact structure.

The Thunderbolts group are barking up the wrong tree.

canyonjammer · 2011-05-17T17:20:18Z

location, location, location...

I found it interesting that Mr. Cox' impact field coincindes with the west Texas oil fields and James McCanneys statement that petroleum did not issue from decomposed dinosaurs....

Seeker · 2011-05-17T17:54:49Z

So depressing…

Dragon you are a sad example of the monotheistic mindset that has left our planet bereft of sanity and objectivity. Your post is arrogant, ignorant and essentially without merit. You ignore the considerable evidence which contradicts your complacent and mechanistic view of the cosmos (much of which is daily posted to this site) whilst dishing out the usual balderdash that frauds such as Carl Sagan used to bury the reputation and visionary courage of thinkers such as Velikovsy (warts and all still worth 100 of his kind). You keep banging on about Saturn; no one has mentioned Saturn but you – what is that tick about!. You asked for evidence. I gave you evidence. You come back with insults, ignoring the detailed research that offers a complete and scientifically rigorous hypothesis as to the state of the scarring on Mars. You are a joke. Where do you get off to have the audacity to think (the self appointed Iron worker of the last age before destruction) that your little mind is capable of dealing with this issue. Post your ego off somewhere else. This is a website that respects the thinking that you so deride. Find somewhere else to troll on.

Could someone else please post comment here; I am bored with the both of us.

Dragon · 2011-05-17T20:01:32Z

What evidence?

I believe the insults began with your descriptive of my “Blinkered thinking.” Nice touch of ad hominem insult to finish up your argument though. Did you learn that debating tactic in the fifth grade? Where do you get off trying stuff your Velikovskian delusional programming, reasoning, and bullshit, down my throat? All I see in the "evidence" you've presented is a pile of mutual-inter-assumptive confabulation born of Velikovskian Delusionist assumptive reasoning.

I have no wish to feed the trolls here. So I’ll not dignify your small minded ad hominem insults with a response in the future. But for those interested, there is a very good antidote for Velikovskian delusions like yours. Just click the [Link]

Dragon · 2011-05-17T20:45:35Z

My thinking

Seeker said: "Post your ego off somewhere else. This is a website that respects the thinking that you so deride. Find somewhere else to troll on"

Uhmm.... News Flash..I am the author of the article that's at the top of this thread, and which is supposed to be the topic of it.

There is nothing in the article regarding Velikovsky, the Thunderbolts group, or their controversial views on the planetary scarring of electric discharge phenomena. I don't happen to agree with their assumptions at all. I am not required to. Nor should I be required to debate the merits of their thinking in a thread following an article that never mentions them. Especially since I'm the "small minded" bloke that wrote the article in the first place.

Who's trolling on who?

Raccoon · 2011-05-17T21:45:03Z

Thank you both,

For an engaging, entertaining and enlightening read--I was engrossed up to the end, and am still chuckling at my good fortune to have ever found this site.

Dragon · 2011-05-19T08:56:45Z

Non-biogenic oil

canyonjammer said:

"I found it interesting that Mr. Cox' impact field coincindes with the west Texas oil fields and James McCanneys statement that petroleum did not issue from decomposed dinosaurs...."

Indeed, a very large percentage of the large crater fields in both New Mexico, and west Texas do coincide with an oil field.

Got a link to what Mr McCanney has to say about non-biogenic oil?

Seeker · 2011-05-23T04:14:06Z

Stiring the dust as it settles...

So I get it Dragon; your being the author of this article gives you the right to not be susceptible to the kind of blinkered thinking and deliberate obscuration known as ‘trolling’. I’m sorry, I don’t get the logic. Nor do I get the insinuation that being the author you have some given right to control the direction or mode of comment attached. All I did was suggest the Texan scars may – let me repeat ‘may’ – be a sign of other activity beyond straightforward impact. After all the very title of your article invited such debate (or was it actually a rhetorical statement regarding a pre-ordained conclusion?). I merely suggested electrical forces were worth considering. On came your rant about Velikovsky, Saturn, Thunderbolts, etc, issues I never mentioned until you did. I hugely respect the fact you have brought this extremely interesting subject/images to our attention, but that does not give you authority to dictate to everyone what to think or see in it. Your tone is to say the least authoritarian. That’s your business. But don’t expect everyone to fall into line with your way of thinking. This site is about dialogue, making unexpected connections, branching out and exploring – connected the DOTS no matter how far apart they may sometimes seem. If you need to be ‘right’ all the time you might find that a great deal of what appears on here threatens that position (as it has mine on many occasions).

You make it abundantly clear you are an avowed ‘opponent’ of what you term the thunderbolts group. Why you would do that is not clear, other than a blanket dismissal of something that threatens your fixed view of the cosmos. I am not part of, or in any way connected to this line of research. Indeed, I have my own issues with some of their material, particularly the solely mechanistic conclusions they make when it comes to analysing global mythology and their failure to grasp other density realities as being a likely source for certain recurring motifs. Having said that, the electric universe material they produce is highly impressive and consistent and their hypothesis (please note that word) regularly proven to be accurate when it comes to observational/practical experiment, which cannot be said about the standard model. As more and more contradictory data comes in, we see daily contortions, delusions and downright lies from NASA and its off shoots in desperate attempts to maintain their flawed status quo and to hide from the public the truth about the cosmos we live in, and most importantly what that may mean with regards to what is taking place, right now, in our solar system. That is why debate concerning such ‘impact’ scars is important. Your blanket denial of this research material does not stand up to evaluation and your unwillingness to explore and debate (rather than deride and condemn) is a sign of stress and some form of personal issue. The weight of evidence that we live in a highly electrically charged environment is all around us and is increasingly being explored on this site (see the SOTT article below and attached SOTT links). [Link]If you simply start with the standard model of the sun, as basically a large nuclear bomb continually ‘exploding’, the facts simply do not support this e.g. the amount of mass required to be continually expelled by such a process would lead the sun to run out of fuel in a fraction of the time NASA demands that the sun has/will exist. It is simply not possible. Listen to McCanney explain this in the last half of his latest broadcast.
[Link]
And if the sun is electrical and if we are seeing increasing evidence of electrical interaction between large cosmic bodies, and comets are electrical, and the earth is bathed in an EM environment, how do you reach the informed conclusion which enables you to dismiss all this?

And by the way, I first brought up the issue of the non-biogenic origins of oil and the possible connection to the impact fields of Texas. Interesting that you ignored this and referred to a later post by canonjammer; this wouldn’t be personal would it?

So let's all get off our high horses and explore and exchange. There is so much division and opposition in this world that it really does become a matter of deep despair when on even this site, a rare oasis against the prevailing drought, a courageous and far seeing source of much wisdom and nurture, that we end up at each others throats rather than pooling our abilities for the deepening of knowledge for the greater good.

I am completely open to the fact these may well be impact craters from asteroid or cometary activity. Laura Knight-Jadczyk has shown this reality to be a key element in human history beyond the point of valuable debate. But some of the patterns displayed in your pictures are suspect and should be debated and explored with more vigour and openness. That’s simply my suggestion.

Dragon · 2011-05-23T10:09:26Z

NASA is not the enemy

There you go preaching, and proselytizing s’more.

You bought into the whole Thunderbolts anti-NASA programming didn't you? How 'bout leave off the mindless, and empty, ad hominem crap. And speak of specific problems with specific science, or research.

If you want to discuss some of the geology I've pointed out, I'm ok with that. But since our reference is Google Earth, please give specific GPSs.

I’ve known Dave Talbot, and Wall Thornhill for a couple of years now. And there are too many emails between us to count on my hard drive. I happen to like them a lot. I just don’t agree with them. I don’t have a problem with Electric Universe theory at all. The simple, empirical fact that electricity is a powerful, and fundamental, driving force, in the universe, is obvious.

I have a problem with Saturn Theory. And the church of the Grand Velikovskian Delusion. And don’t say Saturn Theory’s not part of it. They’ve turned it into a religion. There is rarely a thread on the Thunderbolts site where Velikovsky isn’t mentioned in worshipful tones. Like he was a prophet, or something. But the simple fact is that he was not a scientist at all. Just a mythologist who had no clue of the physics, or orbital mechanics required for the events he thought he was reading of in the ancient myths. And he was wrong.

The Velikovskian delusion is central to all of their thinking. That’s why they’re so desperate to say that the craters on Mars were caused by interplanetary lightening bolts when , as they assume from their interpretation of ancient myth, and legend, not actual planetary science, that Mars, and the Earth, nearly collided a few thousand years ago.

I have a problem with their baseless confabulation that craters can’t be convincingly explained by impact. And that they are better explained as the work of giant, inter-planetary lightening bolts.

The actual science, and impact research, they so blithely dismiss out of hand was conducted by some of the same scientists that put men on the moon. But they never mention any the more than 50 years of work by numerous scientists at the NASA Ames Hypervelocity Impact research center.

They would have us believe that those scientists were clueless idiots at best. Or a bunch of vile conspirators bent on confabulating government sponsored lies. But folks should note that like you, their attacks on NASA impact science are always stupid, empty, and generalized, ad hominem attacks that attack the institution, and it’s scientists. They never mention any specific impact research paper, or data. They don’t have to. They can get away without doing any real science of their own at all. As long as they can convince you with their ad hominen bullshit that you shouldn’t bother to check the actual, data driven, experiment based, NASA planetary science that might disagree with their untested assumptions, and confabulations, they can say anything they want, and you’ll buy it on faith.

Any competent impact physicist can describe the evolution of an impact crater in millisecond, by millisecond detail. And he can account for all energies, and motive forces, as well as the motions, and emplacement, of all blast effected materials at that same level of detail. The accuracy of the physics used in the impact models, and simulations, were confirmed in startling detail when we saw the fragments of SL-9 hit Jupiter, and the results were predicted before the impacts. The whole world was watching. Those results did not include a giant electric discharge that zapped the comet as it approached.

Not one of the wizards of Electric Universe theory is prepared to explain the process of how an electric discharge event can produce exactly the same explosive geomorphology, and mass movement of blast-effected materials as a kinetic impact. For all their scientism, and mutual-inter-assumptive confabulation, not one of them can make a crater happen under terrestrial conditions, and into terrestrial materials, at any scale. And they can’t even begin to explain the physics of how.

Scott · 2011-05-24T04:45:02Z

Em...

I'm not sure why the EU theory is necessary to explain crater impacts. It's pretty clear that Earth has been subjected to "regular" bombardments by astral bodies. And it's pretty clear that it's happening again now. Read the Comets and Catastrophes series in the left column. Quite simply, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's most likely a duck.

That isn't to say that the EU theory is total bunk, because personally I don't believe it is. I also think that McCanney is on to something. But I also don't believe that either of the two has got it 100% correct. We are in the realm of theory, and the evidence that exists may point in a certain direction, but we don't know for sure. So, I like to keep an open mind.

Having said that, there was a time when this one guy said the Earth moved round the sun, and everyone else believed the planet was the center of everything. Obviously, the dude was right, and everyone else was wrong. The exact same thing still happens today under the cover of "official science" in all fields of study despite the fact that everyone seems to think that "science" is the end all and be all. Science as it exists today is itself essentially a religion. That's pretty sad, actually. But that doesn't mean that ALL scientists are necessarily priests... The whole thing is not as simple as "black or white".

In the end, I still don't see how or why electrical discharges would be required to explain what seem to me to be impact craters. People have seen quite a few fireballs, meteorites, etc. lately. To say, "It's all electrical!" seems to be ignoring what is staring us in the face - and it doesn't do the EU theory any favors either.

Joe · 2011-05-24T07:39:10Z

Erm

It's always unfortunate to see people missing a chance to co-operate by getting too 'personal'. Both Seeker and Dragon have given in to the temptation to take each others comments in a personal way and to engage in a mud slinging contest that makes any points they make rather null and void.

Gentlemen, please remember that you are discussing a topic that is by definition beyond our ability (at present) to fully understand. For sure we have hard science to rely on, and it is important to do so, but that only takes us so far, and when we get into theorizing about the possible effects of a close passage of a large heavenly body, it is pointless to make any hard and fast statements of what can or cannot happen.

Those craters look like meteorite (or meteorite fragment) scars to me, but then I haven't gone out there, taken samples, and attempted to ascertain whether the rock, sand, soil etc is most likely of purely earthly origin or if it contains elements associated with 'space rocks'. If the material was shown to be of earthly origin, then we would have to look for some reason other than meteorite impact. Electrical discharge is one to explore, but in doing so we would be forced to rely on hard science in determining the likelihood of this scenario. Otherwise, if we enter into the field of 'exotic science' then all bets are off and we can theorize til the cows come home about what may or may not be possible.

On the other hand:

Seeker, Dragon is simply coming at the situation from a hard science point of view. It is unreasonable to criticize him for doing so because it is an important first step towards a tentative conclusion. Dragon, Seeker is attempting to open up the range of possibilities as to the cause of these craters, he is theorizing and by definition his theorizing goes beyond the bounds of hard science as it is known today. It is unreasonable therefore to dismiss his theorizing by comparing it to hard science. We all know that his suggestions are not and cannot right now be proven true or false.

Dragon · 2011-05-24T11:36:23Z

The search for proofs

Thanks Joe,

In point of fact it is possible to prove how the craters in the Southwest, Nevada, and Montana formed. All that’s required is good geologic field work at those locations. Field work that hasn’t been done there yet. The same can be said for the craters on Mars. In both cases the state of the science remains the same.

One of the early tests of Velikovsky was to look for the debris of those supposed near collisions with Mars, and Venus, in the ice sheets, and sedimentary deposits. It was pretty dang embarrassing when field work didn’t turn up that debris layer anywhere on Earth. So they’re desperate now to show planetary scarring they can say is evidence of those near-collisions.

If they were really serious about studying craters, and showing that interplanetary electric discharges caused them, the high priests of the church of the Grand Velikovskian Delusion could have focused some attention on the unstudied craters in the southwest. There are thousands of them. For any serious researcher, they represent a clear blue, unstudied sky where no one has ever gone before. And they’ve known about them almost as long as I have. But if field work, and detailed analysis of specimens didn’t turn out to be supportive of their mutual inter-assumptive reasoning, they’d be stuck having to explain again why they were mistaken.

They need to show physical evidence, somewhere in the solar system, that the events they assume the ancient Myths describe really happened. And like Velikovsky before them, they ignore the simple, empirical, fact that astronomically speaking, the orbital mechanics for the “Polar Configuration” are physically impossible. They assume without question that future research into electric plasma phenomena will eventually validate their claim that electro-magnetic forces can completely over-ride the normal laws of mass, momentum, and orbital mechanics, on a planetary scale.

And never mind that if you are going to use a magnetic field powerful enough to yank a planet like the Earth around, that field is going to have a much stronger pull on the iron core than on the silicates of the mantel, or lithosphere.

Hmmm… lemme digress a little.

Imagine a large, hand painted globe, 1 meter in diameter. And beside it, a perfect scale model of the Earth of the same size.

On our hand painted model, the difference in altitude represented by the troughs, and ridges of the brush strokes is ten times the difference from the lowest ocean trench, and the highest mountain on our perfect scale model.

On our perfect scale model those differences in altitude do not deviate from a perfect sphere enough to be measurable, except by a very powerful microscope. The deepest ocean is a thin film of moisture that barely wets your finger. Most of the thing is soft, and gooey, molten, and semi-molten, silicates. And the entire lithosphere is a fragile crust, so thin that if you do try to touch it, your finger will probably just go right on in.

And if you yank the Earth around magnetically by it’s iron core with enough force to take it away from Saturn, and throw it into a completely different, heliocentric, orbit, that iron core has a good chance of coming right on out.

In spite of what the high Priests of the church of the Velikovskian Delusion would have us believe, Earth was never a moon of Saturn. She was not tossed, moon and all, from the Saturnian system into her present heliocentric orbit just a few thousand years ago. Venus didn’t get spat out of Saturn during that time. Mars didn’t dang near collide with the Earth. And the Earth, Moon, and Mars, didn’t get all cratered up by giant interplanetary electric discharges during that complete re-arrangement of the inner solar system either.

They chose to focus on Mars for the simple reasons that no one’s gonna be doing field work at any of the locations they’re pointing fingers at in this lifetime. So they are safe from being taken to task anytime before it’s time to drop the body, and move on with their lives. To give weight to the Velikovskian delusional assumption of the breakup of the so called ‘Polar Configuration,’ they need planetary scarring they can claim as their own. They chose to focus their attention on Mars because as long as no one can do the field work to check their assumptions, they can interpret the Satellite data anyway they see fit.

But that’s ok. Some of that field work in the southwest is already underway. There is also work being done in New Mexico regarding the planetary scarring of very large airburst phenomena.

The fields of impact physics, and planetary science are on the cusp of a major, once in a century, paradigm shift. And there’s a couple of research papers out there in the pre-publication pipeline that will blow y’all away. Stay tuned.

Appollynon · 2011-05-25T04:04:02Z

I hope you don't mind me asking the following question Dragon. I was wondering if you had any information or links to such, that would help to expain the threshold of mass that would be needed for a geo ablative impact to take place as opposed to the higher mass threshold, past which a meteor/comet would make a more regular surface to surface impact crater? I ask this due to the recent meteor sited by the NASA Sky Cam network which broke up and dissipated whilst still airborne, so it got me to thinking of the degree of mass that would be needed in a meteor/comet for the two differing types of impact structures.

Dragon · 2011-05-25T09:00:23Z

Good Question

There isn’t a clearly defined answer to that one. As far as Tunguska class events, Mark Boslough’s simulations indicated that threshold should be somewhere around 120 meters for a stony asteroid. At Tunguska, for all the blast effects we see there, the fallen trees, etc., the fireball did not reach the ground. Only it’s shock wave did. And the object has been estimated at anything from 50 to 100 meters. Here’s a little better explanation [Link]or [Link]

For a while there, they were getting confident that anything smaller than that would have a very slim chance of making it to the ground. But an impact of a much smaller object in 2007, in Peru [Link]gave them a wakeup call. According to what they thought they knew, that thing should not have made it to the ground. And until someone went down there who knows what they were doing, the crater it made was called a hoax by many prominent scientists.

But Peter Schultz, a scientist from brown university, is someone who has done hundreds of impact experiments at the Hypervelocity Vertical Gun Range, at the Ames research center. He’s also one of the original 26 authors of the 2007 paper by Firestone et al, titled “Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling” [Link]And in the field of impact research, his work represents cutting edge. So we can say he’s one of the big kids.

Pete went down to Peru to investigate that little crater as a total skeptic, and thinking he was going to debunk a hoax. Instead, he wound up confirming it was indeed an impact crater. And he suggested that similar pond sized craters should be investigated a little closer.

Folks might note that that brand-spankin’ new crater Peru is a perfect copy of the thousands of small craters in West Texas, and Eastern New Mexico.

Appollynon · 2011-05-25T13:21:16Z

Thank you for the reply and links Dragon, you’ve helped me to get my head around the question and possibilities a little better. For some unknown reason your first link regarding the “Aerial Bursts and the impact threat,” pdf had a comma after the pdf part of the link, and so didn’t work first time, but removing the comma in the web address allowed me to find the relevant page. Both of the first links are very interesting, particularly with a view to the calculations of the energy and type of aerial airbursts that potentially caused the Tunguska and LDG event. The pillar of fire an airburst of this sort would create over Tunguska certainly seems to fit with some of the (at a distance) eye witness accounts of the phenomena, and also explains the lack of a traditional crater formation as well as many other anomalies.

I had been following news about the Peruvian meteor impact when it happened and it was very, very interesting. What I found the most interesting at the time was the reports of several ( I think it was around 200 or so) locals in the area becoming ill after the meteor had touched down and mixed with the local soil and water to create a grey cloud. At first I thought this illness may be due to toxic or radioactive chemicals in the cloud, but after reading of Dr Gabriela’s recent article in the Dot Connector Magazine “New Light on the Black Death”, I think that the late Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe may be right about viruses and bacteria being distributed throughout the cosmos by comets, comet dust and their debris streams.

Thank you also for the link to the paper by Peter Shultz and Firestone et al. I have a copy of the Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophe book, so I was somewhat familiar with this work already, however the paper makes it easier to compare some of the data and results from the myriad sites tested when they are presented in a more condensed way side by side. I look forward to reading some of those paradigm shifting papers that are on their way.

Dragon · 2011-06-03T14:36:15Z

Re-stating the question

In my earlier posts , 'If not by impact, then what?', [Link] 'A few craters more', [Link]and 'The Meteorite Men, and The Odessa Crater', [Link]I wrote of the numerous small craters in New Mexico, and west Texas. And the question remains essentially unanswered.

Since none of them have been officially confirmed as impact structures, we’ll just call them ‘enigmatic depressions’ for now. I’ve received quite a few emails from folks about what they thought happened to form them. And they've proposed every thing from crashed space craft, to inter-planetary electric discharges, and oil field blowouts.

But missing from the responses so far is an answer from a trained Geologist. And in spite of the fact that they are dramatically obvious in satellite image data, I haven’t been able to turn up anything online, or in the literature, that indicates anyone has done any real science at any of them.

I am looking for any solid data I can get. So far, I haven’t found them mentioned on any geologic map. Or in any piece of scientific literature. Maybe I’m just not looking in the right places.

But since our uniformitarian based Earth sciences don’t believe in the possibility of a cluster impact event of small fragments, I’d like to reiterate the question. But this time I’m hopping to hear a plausible theory, from a trained Geologist, that describes a uniformitarian-compatible, non-catastrophic, process for their formation.

To the geologists, and impact scientists of the world: They are all in the very same geologic condition. Indicating that they are all close to the same age. So, again, if those things weren’t formed by impact, then by what?

wytebear · 2011-06-03T14:42:29Z

I'm no Geologist, Dragon, but if I was, I'd probably be on a Geologist website forum, mostly. Have you posed these questions and pictures to one or more of those? If so, what kind of responses did you get?

Dragon · 2011-06-03T20:29:18Z

Resonses

The responses I’ve gotten from geologists are varied, depending on location. For many of the crater fields in New Mexico, anywhere the bedrock is limestone, they tell me we’re probably looking at sinkholes. But that doesn’t hold up. There are just too darn many of them as big as a football stadium that are too close together. The cave system would have to cover tens of thousands of square miles. Besides, sinkholes don’t over-lap with raised rims. Do they?

There were quite a few bombing practice ranges in NM during WWII. And the giant geo-glyphs they used for targets are all over the place. So one geologist told me he thought they were bomb craters.

Again we come back to the numbers. The average size of those things is more than 100 meters wide. And there are thousands of them in New Mexico alone.

First of all, if the US had ordinance in WWII that could excavate a football stadium sized crater, they had better things to do with them than blasting New Mexico into oblivion. And if they are bomb craters from bombing practice, then more live ordinance was dropped in WWII practice raids in New Mexico, than on Hitler’s Germany. Not!

In fact, a practice bomb doesn’t need to explode. It only needs to have the same weight, and aerodynamic properties as the real thing. The only time they used live ordinance was when they were testing the effectiveness of the weapon itself. Not in bombing practice. And they didn’t do that at all the bombing ranges.

The ones that are in the oil fields get blamed on some vaguely defined blow out phenomena that no one’s ever seen happen before.

So far, they seem to be willing to consider any fantastical theory for the formation of all those craters. As long as it does not involve an impact event.

And so far no one has been able to tell me, ‘Oh yeah, a geologist studied those things years ago. He published a paper with his findings in a peer reviewed journal. And you can read what he wrote at this link….’

I do top maintenance on my older vehicle for as long as I can. Fk'em.

Demore

...do the Amish take in refugees of tech tyranny ? ;)

Shangri

:O What is it that is affecting people's brains these days?

ReRan

''...containing fake images of myself superimposed on other people,...'' Where ? Some of them have to be funny.

Demore

Nothing new in that article.

Demore

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