Today I'm going to write a letter; a letter to all our readers. I'm also going to include a transcript of a very interesting letter sott.net has received from Prof. Victor Clube. I hope that these letters will change your life, your future, and mine as well.

Here at sott.net, we have been pretty busy working on our legal defense, as if you couldn't guess! I'm sure that everyone notices that we are nowhere near our goal for having enough funds to cover this expense. All of you just remember, if 1,000 people can donate $100.00 each, we are in the clear. If 2,000 people donate $50. each, we are in the clear. And certainly, with over 10,000 of you reading this site every day, we ought to be able to do that!

Just keep in mind what you would be missing if we were gone! Who else would spend days, weeks, months and even years digging down to the deepest levels of our reality to bring you reports and analyses of what is really going on? After all, it is not just a matter of the political chaos out there; there are cosmic reasons for that chaos and historical cycles demonstrate clearly that times such as these generally manifest other symptoms that we all need to be aware of. For example...

Did you catch this one? Antartica: Mysterious Meteorites Stymie Scientists Followed by this one: Meteorites may be remnants of destroyed dwarf planet ? They are both about the same meteorites and the suggestion that there was once another planet in the solar system that was destroyed at some point is something that we here at sott.net have speculated about for years now.

Speaking of missing planets, did you read this one: Mission to the Forgotten Planets? Amazing how long it takes science to catch up with "inspired utterances" isn't it?

Speaking of science "catching up," have a look at this: Utah Crater Mystery Cracked where we read:

"The very controversial debate about Upheaval Dome's origin has lasted nearly a century, over the course of which extremely different hypotheses (gradualism versus catastrophism) have been proposed," report Buchner and Kenkmann.

The debate has, in fact, reflected a historical divide of ideas in geology over those decades.

On one hand there were the "gradualists" who adhered to the idea that just about everything we see on the planet today is the result of gradual processes still at work -- glaciers moving, rains falling, rivers flowing, etc. Gradualism was considered heretical when it was proposed by James Hutton in the late 18th century because it implies the Earth was tremendously older than some Biblical scholars had claimed.

These Biblical scholars cited such catastrophes as Noah's flood to explain such geological oddities as marine fossils atop mountains. These early "catastrophists" tended to ignore evidence that went against their Biblical interpretation of the geological record. In other words, they weren't very scientific.

As a result, geologists are trained to tread very carefully wherever extraordinary events are being called on to explain geological features. The trouble is, of course, there are some things like Upheaval Dome, which are, as we now know, genuine creations of extraordinary -- albeit non-Biblical -- catastrophic events.

Wow! Who'da thunk it? Catastrophes?

Speaking of catastrophes then and since and future, take a look at this one: "Giant Fireball" Impact in Peru Upends Meteorite Theory and this one: How The Peruvian Meteorite Made It To Earth. The latter article informs us:

Scientists have determined the Carancas fireball was a stony meteorite - a fragile type long thought to be ripped into pieces as it enters the Earth's atmosphere and then leaves little more than a whisper of its journey.

Yet the stony meteorite that struck Peru survived its passage mostly intact before impact. "This just isn't what we expected," Schultz said. "It was to the point that many thought this was fake. It was completely inconsistent with our understanding how stony meteorites act."

They thought it was a fake! And in the case of Upheaval Dome, they've spent a century debating it. It all sounds like nobody really knows what they are doing, doesn't it? But then, why are they doing this: No, it's not a joke! Plans for 'doomsday ark' on the moon

I've been saying for years now that "Something Wicked This Way Comes." I find it curious that this lawsuit comes at exactly the time when I am getting deeper and deeper into the research for the series of Comet articles:

New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection

The Hazard to Civilization from Fireballs and Comets

Cosmic Turkey Shoot

Wars, Pestilence and Witches

Thirty Years of Cults and Comets

Comet Biela and Mrs. O'Leary's Cow

Tunguska, the Horns of the Moon and Evolution

In this series, we have learned that there is a lot of evidence that our planet undergoes cataclysmic bombardment a lot more often than most scientists and scholars and the general public thinks or believes.

Awareness of the possibility of large impact events on Earth, although long present among a handful of the most imaginative thinkers, has come of age in this century as a result of studies of Arizona's Meteor Crater and the Tunguska fireball of June 30, 1908, in Siberia, spacecraft observations of cratering on Earth and other rocky bodies, and astronomical surveys of the near-Earth asteroid and comet populations. Appreciation of the effects of large impacts has developed in response to these studies and to the unclassified literature on the effects of large nuclear weapons. [...]

[T]he most intensively studied impact phenomenon, impact cratering, is of limited importance, due to the rarity and large mean time between events for crater-forming impacts. Almost all events causing property damage and lethality are due to bodies less than 100 meters in diameter, almost all of which, except for the very largest and strongest, are fated to explode in the atmosphere. ... Since explosions greater than 1 gigaton TNT are rare on this short of a time scale, we are forced to conclude that the complex behavior of smaller bodies is closely relevant to the threat actually experienced by contemporary civilization. [...]

[T]he large majority of lethal events (not of the number of fatalities) are caused by bodies that are so small, so faint, and so numerous that the cost of the effort required to find, track, predict, and intercept them exceeds the cost of the damage incurred by ignoring them.

(John S. Lewis, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Co-director of the NASA/University of Arizona Space Engineering Research Center, and Commissioner of the Arizona State Space Commission in: Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth, 2000; Academic Press)

The above statement by John Lewis pretty much sums up the conclusions of all the research into Comet and Asteroid Hazards that has been going on in a frenzied way for the past 14 years or so. The ones we really have to worry about, the ones that will kill people on the planet in random, unforeseen disasters, probably can't be seen and are too numerous for it to be cost effective to try to find and deal with them. In other words, the public is abandoned to their fate. Not only abandoned, but a deliberate policy of concealment of the facts is clearly in place.

As I have mentioned before, considering the nature of the topic and the obvious efforts to marginalize it, to cover it up and transfer it to the realm of "crazy conspiracy theories" or worse, we had some concern about Professor Victor Clube, author of The Cosmic Winter and the paper addressed to the European Office of Aerospace Research and development, dated June 4, 1996, entitled: The Hazard to Civilization from Fireballs and Comets who seemed to have sort of "disappeared." I wrote in Part Four of this series:

As I have continued to dig into this subject triggered by reading Victor Clube's paper: The Hazard to Civilization from Fireballs and Comets, it sure appears that I have opened a can of worms. I can report two things at this point: 1) there is a lot of covert research going on about this subject; 2) Victor Clube, himself, seems to have disappeared. We've got some researchers digging on that right now and I'll report back later. It could be the guy just retired, but for the moment, it does seem a bit mysterious considering the things he has written on the topic to hand.

It turns out that Victor Clube HAS retired. One of the SOTT editors who is a climate researcher at a major U.S. research facility undertook to try to find Clube and eventually received a FAXed letter from the good professor which I am quoting here in part:

2008 Feb 15

[...]
I note that my health is questioned and I hasten to admit its comparative rudeness! ... In fact I still like to think my apparent inactivity is not quite as total as a google search might be indicating!

First, I should say your references to the (cosmically complacent) paleoclimate community and to my otherwise unread narrative report to the USAF european office strike a very considerable chord with me. After all neither Ms Victoria Cox nor your good self can be aware how very much Bill and I had reason to appreciate the timely injection of USAF funds at a time when the line of research we championed appeared to be successfully closed down by the UK scientific establishment. Thus we were both in turn obliged to relinquish our career posts at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh on account of this line of research - which gave rise to our reincarnation at a more tolerant haven namely my alma mater (Oxford).

Also, whilst I broadly accept your commentary regarding the role of "national elites" in the face of near-Earth threats, I am quite certain the elites in practice currently know VERY "much LESS than they let on" and that the situation for humanity is dire. Any comfort you may draw from the opposite opinion seems to me to be entirely misplaced. Thus although the globally modest efforts to assess the NEO threat with telescopes by a few semi-enlightened national administrations (eg USA) or by a few private enterprises (eg Gates) are certainly to be commended, I look upon this aspect of the NEO threat as basically intermittent and therefore more or less symbolic so far as generally more urgent and still largely undetected low mass NEO flux (which is demonstrably climatological in its effect) is concerned. This particular threat (evidently responsible for our planet's evolving glacial/interglacial condition during the past 3 million years) is of course _fundamentally_ ignored by the current Body Scientific and hence by most of humanity as well.

Why is the Body Scientific so misguided? Basically, in my view, because many these days are unaware _two_ secular versions of natural philosophy have arisen since the West's renaissance when Plato's works were reintroduced, essentially substantiating a zodiacal circulation of gods apparently ancestral to the european elite.

Following the invention of telescopes and the undigested revelation that zodiacal gods appeared non-existent (Galileo), the elite began to invoke transcendental divinity whilst rejecting any material circulation or "unmoved mover" occupying interplanetary space. Newton however delved behind Plato to reach Pythagoras etc. and revived the claims for a material circulation in the zodiac (diminished in luminosity) whose encounters with our planet remained a source of recurring providence.

With advancing technology and the improvement of telescopes, the zodiac then revealed the first near-Earth comet (P/Encke) and the first not-so-near asteroid (Ceres) thus re-opening the question whether the ancient zodiacal circulation comprised near-Earth comets.

An ensuing but very severe crisis then emerged within the Western elite which was resolved ca 1830 in favour of the preferred secular version of natural philosophy (Galileo's) as opposed to the other (Newton's).

I now believe this turn of events was clearly initiated by the Royal Astronomical Society's official charter in Britain (top nation!) as soon as it agreed _not_ to publish observations of P/Encke even though its namesake had already received the Society's highest commendation.

Arising from the political interference, Newton's unpublished papers were to remain concealed for at least another century whilst climatology (like many other branches of knowledge) was never properly integrated with Newtonian astrophysics and geophysics.

Once this thread of advancing knowledge is fully appreciated this integration may be reckoned to have only recently been attempted with the publication of an excellent interdisciplinary monograph "Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes" (Springer 2000) by Muller and McDonald (deceased). This seminal climatological work once again connects climate with a material circulation in the zodiac and can indeed hardly be faulted until it reaches its chapter 7 (Accretion climate models). Here, unfortunately, it becomes heavily dependent on a completely mistaken understanding of previously unknown dust bands in the zodiac revealed by IRAS as recently as 1983-4*.

The IRAS team was a typical post-WWII scientific enterprise lasting only a decade or so and lacking a secure institutional base but inspired and funded by the top nation (USA) for the benefit of humanity. Its claims under these conditions, like those for resurrection, were endorsed far too rapidly by the Body Scientific and it was absolutely wrong to suppose _only_ low eccentricity (orbital) material could be invoked in creating these previously undetected dust bands. The IRAS team thus completely failed to associate these bands with their most obvious source namely the long term progenitor of Comet P/Encke.

The upshot of all this is a succession of UK and US astronomical/ cosmological elites skillfully distracting the Body Scientific and humanity for the past 200 years from the most prominent material dominating near-Earth space and controlling Earth's climate for the past 3 million years (and a no doubt comparable period in future). The social/political outcome of all this (including the current global warming scare) could be laughable if it were not also so deep and profound. [...]

* P.S. The authors of these publications both fail to realise the conclusion between our planet's climate and it's spin-orbit differential nodal precession must arise on account of its long term orbital resonance with the accretion source (or the ancient music of the spheres). As you know, our research builds upon Comet P/Encke's proximity to such a resonance.

As I have mentioned already, everyone needs to read Clube's books - The Cosmic Winter and The Cosmic Serpent - if you can possibly get copies. You may have to go to a library to do so. The reason this book is important is because it gives you a good idea in very realistic terms, of what you may have to deal with at some point in the not-too distant future... AND, that it is eminently survivable IF you know what to look for and how to prepare! We aren't talking about a giant asteroid here that is going to create a global wave of firestorm destruction like the movies depict! It's not Planet X or Nibiru! It's NOT the End of the World (at least not for everybody, but certainly for those who aren't prepared and happen to be in the line of fire!) But yeah, it might be somewhat like the Black Death with the loss of half the population of one or more continents, or the great Chicago Fire or Tunguska or even all of these rolled into one; but all of those events were survivable had the victims been informed and prepared. Yes, there are those who, even had they been informed and prepared would not have survived in any case, but we choose the optimistic path: Knowledge Protects. And we are trying our hardest to give you that knowledge.

The very fact that Bill Gates and others have invested in a seed bank, in an observatory, and all the other things we have discussed in the past and above suggest to us strongly that they (the rich and powerful), too, have this sort of future in mind. The very fact that the weather has gone berserk, that fireball sightings have increased so dramatically, and even frequent impacts are recorded around the globe, are clues that we are definitely moving into a cosmic dust stream as Clube describes, and that such a stream very likely includes some bigger objects - swarms of them - and those "in the know" have taken note and are making preparations to survive. Shouldn't that knowledge be available to everyone? We think so.

We don't even have to worry about anything having to do with a companion star and a comet swarm from the Oort cloud which may or may not be in our future; we only have to deal with the science in front of us. The science says "Something Wicked This Way Comes."

I'm thinking about turning this series into a book, (and there is so much more to write about!) but of course, if Eric Pepin prevails in his suit against me - remember, I'm named personally as a defendant - things don't look too good for that book or future books. One might even speculate that the real intent of the suit is to try to seize all my copyrights, put me so deeply into debt that anything I write ever again will be owed to someone else who will then, we suspect, bury it forever.

That IS a possibility, you know. A real one.

In short, this lawsuit isn't just about some weird guy who got ticked off because a small, obscure forum in a backwater corner of the internet, generally suppressed by google (that's a whole other story), published some criticisms of his work and way of life - criticisms based on widely known and publicized events in that life, by the way. Nope. Eric Pepin has got to know that sott.net operates on a shoestring, that there is no gold to be gotten from this source. And, considering my age and lifespan prospects, ole Eric has got to know that even if I flipped burgers until I died, he'd never get anything. Never.

So, yeah, this is more than just an attempt to suppress Free Speech. Connect the dots, figure it out.

And if you really want to know what is going on here on the BBM, you really need to kick yourself into action and either help us out with funds or with spreading the word about this situation because, peeps, Eric Pepin, whoever is behind him, along with the U.S. legal system, could very well snuff the lighthouse.

You gotta tell me if you want to know, and you gotta do it now. Tell me with actions, not words because, at this point, only actions will save the words I have yet to write for you, for your children, for all of us.