justinian plague painting
For nearly half-a-century, the chief principals of The Thunderbolts Project have been presenting a scientific case for relatively recent celestial catastrophes in the inner solar system, within human memory. These events were recorded in the myths and storytelling of ancient man in pre-history, the dramas reverberating through generations and shaping the earliest civilizations.

The catastrophes were electromagnetic in nature -- planets seen in the Earthly sky discharging electrically, the thunderbolts of the gods. But what about more recent disasters, in the A.D. time periods, disasters that also may have been triggered by fundamentally electromagnetic phenomena in the solar system?

In this episode, Thunderbolts colleague Peter Mungo Jupp offers the provocative conjecture that an encounter between our own planet and a cometary intruder may have caused an AD catastrophe, leading to the deaths of tens millions of human beings - the so-called Plague of Justinian.