The flash of bright light surprised everyone who saw it. Hundreds of Portlanders reported spotting "a vast burst of smoke and spurting flame."

The explosion that followed was even more startling. The shock wave reverberated across the sky for miles, shattering windows and cracking walls.

A recreational mountain climber might have had the best view.

"I was standing still for a moment, looking toward Portland," recalled Thurston Skei, who was working his way up Mount Adams just before 8 a.m. on July 2, 1939. "I saw a trail of smoke coming down through the sky. There was a bright flash at the head of the smoke column as if a huge rocket had exploded."

A few people called police to ask if Martians had attacked. (This was nine months after Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast had confused and worried listeners.) Many more residents thought there had been an earthquake. (The Oregonian reported that the University of Washington's seismograph had remained quiet.)

The US and its far-right allies in Brazil and Colombia are currently leading a coup attempt against Venezuela's elected government. It's the issue that's filling media outlets around the world at the moment. But what doesn't appear in the news is the backing of a country some 10,000km away: Israel.

Israel's links with Latin America are perhaps more extensive than one might expect. And the attempted coup in Venezuela is a reminder of longstanding Israeli ties with the Latin American far right.

Israel backs the Venezuelan coup attempt

Israel has a longhistory of supporting far-right groups and regimes in Latin America. This seems to be reoccurring today in Venezuela.

Almost two years have passed since the "deep state" became a part of the American lexicon. It was in early February 2017, just weeks after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, that news reports first mentioned the term's increased use within the president's inner circle. Over the following months the president and supporters of his administration publicly embellished upon the deep state's meaning and significance, making it into a catchphrase for perceived internal adversaries within Washington. News analysis of the phenomenon has done much to shed light on how the worldview of right-wing activists such as Steve Bannon and Alex Jones helped introduce administration allies to the concept of the "deep state." Though the term has been cause for much circumspection within political media, it is now clear that the notion of the deep state has assumed some importance for the American public. According to a Monmouth poll from the spring of 2018, a total of 37 percent of respondents had heard of a thing called the deep state. When asked if they believed there was "a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy," almost three-quarters of respondents agreed such a "deep state" existed.

The concept of the deep state has been a subject of interest for me for some time now. As a historian of the Republic of Turkey, I was first exposed to the term almost 20 years ago as a graduate student. When I began to first visit Turkey in the early 2000s, anyone who spoke of the deep state did not do so facetiously or critically. Serious people not only accepted the existence of a Turkish deep state, but they tended to believe it comprised an important element that defined Turkey's past. For more than a decade much of my research has been dedicated to understanding many of the individuals, institutions and events associated with the Turkish deep state. Among the works that inspired me to look more closely at Turkey's deep state phenomenon were books and articles written by a Canadian diplomat-turned-professor named Peter Dale Scott. His 1993 book published by University of California Press, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, caught my attention as one of the few academic studies to frame American history in a light similar to Turkish discussions of the deep state. In 2007, I had a chance to interview Scott on a (thankfully) short-lived podcast I had published while a professor at Long Island University. Our discussion occurred within weeks of the publication his newest work, The Road to 9/11, in which he used the term the "deep state" for the first time. It was as a result of this book, and the exposure he received thereafter from Alex Jones and others, that many Americans first entertained the notion that a deep state lorded over the United States.

An international team of researchers has combined archaeological, historical and linguistic data with genetic information from over 700 newly analyzed individuals to construct a more detailed picture of the history of inner Eurasia than ever before available. In a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, they found that the indigenous populations of inner Eurasia are very diverse in their genes, culture and languages, but divide into three groups that stretch across the area in east-west geographic bands.

Inner Eurasia, including areas of modern-day Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Mongolia, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, was once the cross-roads connecting Asia and Europe, and a major intersection for the exchange of culture, trade goods and genes in prehistory and historical periods, including the era of the famous Silk Road.

This vast area can also be divided into several distinct ecological regions that stretch in largely east-west bands across Inner Eurasia, consisting of the deserts at the southern edge of the region, the steppe in the central part, taiga forests further north, and tundra towards the Arctic region. The subsistence strategies used by indigenous groups in these regions largely correlate with the ecological zones, for example reindeer herding and hunting in the tundra region and nomadic pastoralism on the steppe.

Researchers have translated famous ancient symbols in a temple in Turkey, and they tell the story of a devastating comet impact more than 13,000 years ago.

Cross-checking the event with computer simulations of the Solar System around that time, researchers in 2017 suggested that the carvings could describe a comet impact that occurred around 10,950 BCE - about the same time a mini ice age started that changed civilisation forever.

This mini ice age, known as the Younger Dryas, lasted around 1,000 years, and it's considered a crucial period for humanity because it was around that time agriculture and the first Neolithic civilisations arose - potentially in response to the new colder climates. The period has also been linked to the extinction of the woolly mammoth.

But although the Younger Dryas has been thoroughly studied, it's not clear exactly what triggered the period. A comet strike is one of the leading hypotheses, but scientists haven't been able to find physical proof of comets from around that time.

The team from the University of Edinburgh in the UK say these carvings, found in what's believed to be the world's oldest known temple, Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey, show further evidence that a comet triggered the Younger Dryas.

"I think this research, along with the recent finding of a widespread platinum anomaly across the North American continent virtually seal the case in favour of [a Younger Dryas comet impact]," lead researcher Martin Sweatman told Sarah Knapton from The Telegraph at the time.

Humans settled in southwestern Amazonia and even experimented with agriculture much earlier than previously thought, according to an international team of researchers.

"We have long been aware that complex societies emerged in Llanos de Moxos in southwestern Amazonia, Bolivia, around 2,500 years ago, but our new evidence suggests that humans first settled in the region up to 10,000 years ago during the early Holocene period," said Jose Capriles, assistant professor of anthropology. "These groups of people were hunter gatherers; however, our data show that they were beginning to deplete their local resources and establish territorial behaviors, perhaps driving them to begin domesticating plants such as sweet potatoes, cassava, peanuts and chili peppers as a way to acquire food."

The archaeological team conducted its study on three forest islands -- Isla del Tesoro, La Chacra and San Pablo -- within the seasonally flooded savanna of the Llanos de Moxos in northern Bolivia.

The golden eagle has been hunted and revered by human cultures for thousands of years. Yet this may not have been a uniquely human devotion-Neanderthals, too, may have targeted these impressive birds of prey some 130,000 years ago, according to new research. What's more, modern humans may have learned their eagle-catching techniques from their hominin cousins.

With its luminous auburn feathers and massive 2.2-meter wingspan, the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) is associated with solar deities in religions around the world, from Native American traditional belief systems to Roman and Greek mythologies.

A family team of anthropologists wanted to find out whether Neanderthals were part of that heritage. Eagle bones and talons have been found across dozens of sites in central and western Europe occupied by both Neanderthals and modern humans. So the researchers combed through the literature on 154 Neanderthal-associated sites to see whether golden eagle remains stood out in any way.

Archaeologists working at the site of Scotland's largest Pictish fort have made an "incredible" discovery after unearthing part of the power centre's defensive wall.

The discovery has been made at Burghead in Moray, the largest known fort of its kind in northern Britain which is believed to have been occupied by the elite of Pictish society more than 1,000 years ago.

Around 10 feet of rampart wall has been unearthed with preserved pieces of timber lacing, which strengthens the structure, also found.

It is now known that the wall dates to the 8th Century - putting it right at the heart of the Pictish period.

A 15,600-year old footprint discovered in southern Chile is believed to be the oldest ever found in the Americas, according to researchers.

The footprint was first discovered in 2010 by a student at the Universidad Austral of Chile. Scientists then worked for years to rule out the possibility that the print may have belonged to some other species of animal, and to determine the fossil's estimated age.

Karen Moreno, a paleontologist with the Universidad Austral who has overseen the studies, said researchers had also found bones of animals near the site, including those of primitive elephants, but determined that the footprint was evidence of human presence.

Moreno said this was the first evidence of humans in the Americas older than 12,000 years.

"Little by little in South America we're starting to find sites with evidence of human presence, but this is this oldest in the Americas," she said.

Any follower of Catastrophism the last few years has seen extraordinary confirmations of ancient cataclysm and novel contributions to our way of thinking. To the Tusk, three revelations have characterized the period: The discovery of an extraordinarily youthful late Pleistocene crater in Greenland; a series of popular, comprehensive and unrefuted major journal articles which exquisitely defined hard evidence for the Younger Dryas impact catastrophe; and the singular contribution of Dr. Martin Sweatman, as made in his fabulous book, Prehistory Decoded.

Dr. Sweatman has done our planet and history a tremendous favor by writing Prehistory Decoded. By employing the hard science of probability, he has managed to demystify the world's very earliest and most mysterious art.

Prehistory Decoded begins by documenting Sweatman's initial discovery, reported worldwide in 2015, of an empirical method for decoding the world's first art using pattern matching and statistics. Guess what? The code is a memorial and date stamp for our favorite subject here: the Younger Dryas Catastrophe, and its associated Taurid meteor traumas.

Sweatman has managed to produce a synthesis explanation for the previously indecipherable succession of artistic animal figures at Gobekeli Tepe in Turkey, Chauvet Cave in France, Lascaux Cave in France, and Çatalhöyük in Turkey, among others. Unsurprisingly to the open minded, the ancient artists are communicating using a universally handy and persistent reference set: Stars. Or, more precisely, the appearance of constellations as adjusted over time according earth's precession.

(Don't you love the internet? One hyperlink and no need to explain all that!)

It seems reasonable then to the Tusk that, if there were a code, someone, somewhere, would break the code soon given the global availability and intense interest in the information. In fact, if I waited much longer without someone cracking it, the Tusk may have become convinced the oldest art is simply stunning cave paintings, and heavy carved rocks, with no relevant common narrative (other than horses are pretty, and moving rocks is cool).