One hundred years ago today, on the night of 30 June and 1 July, one of the most extraordinary events in modern history occurred.

The first reports of a strange glow in the sky came from across Europe. Shortly after midnight on 1 July 1908, Londoners were intrigued to see a pink phosphorescent night sky over the capital. People who had retired awoke confused as the strange pink glow shone into their bedrooms. The same ruddy luminescence was reported over Belgium. The skies over Germany were curiously said to be bright green, while the heavens over Scotland were of an incredible intense whiteness which tricked the wildlife into believing it was dawn. Birdsong started and cocks crowed - at two o’clock in the morning. The skies over Moscow were so bright, photographs were taken of the streets without using a magnesium flash. A captain on a ship on the River Volga said he could see vessels on the river two miles away by the uncanny astral light. One golf game in England almost went on until four in the morning under the nocturnal glow, and in the following week The Times of London was inundated with letters from readers from all over the United Kingdom to report the curious ‘false dawn’. A woman in Huntingdon wrote that she had been able to read a book in her bedroom solely by the peculiar rosy light. There were hundreds of letters from people reporting identical lighting conditions that went on for weeks… (Tom Slemen)

None of the people witnessing this strange phenomenon had any idea that, in the central Siberian plateau, just after 7:15 a.m. local time, the planet had been hit by a cometary impactor that exploded - as most such impactors do - in the atmosphere just above the Earth’s surface.

There was, of course, a great deal of comment about the strange, glowing sky in newspapers and scientific journals at the time. A theory was proposed that icy particles had somehow formed high in the atmosphere and were reflecting sunlight. Another theory suggested that a strange auroral disturbance was involved. The Danish astronomer Kohl pointed out that several very large meteors had recently been observed over Denmark and he suggested that comet dust in the high atmosphere might account for the phenomenon. He was getting close, but in general, there was no agreement as to what had happened.

An Irkutsk newspaper dated 2 July reported that, in a village more than 200 miles from the Tunguska river, peasants had seen a fireball brighter than the sun approach the ground, followed by a huge cloud of black smoke, a forked tongue of flame and a loud crash as if from gunfire.

All the villagers ran into the street in panic. The old women wept and everyone thought the end of the world was approaching.

Nearly 400 miles south-west of the explosion, at 7:17 a.m. on 30 June, a train driver on the Trans-Siberian express had to stop his train for fear of derailment due to the tremors and commotion. In towns 300 to 400 miles away, hurricane-like gusts rattled doors, windows and crockery. This was followed within minutes by shock waves which knocked down horses and hurled people working on boats into the river.

Over 550 miles to the south of the explosion, a seismograph in the city of Irkutsk near Lake Baikal, close to the Mongolian border, registered strong earth tremors.

Local Siberian newspapers carried stories of a fireball in the sky, and a fearful explosion, but by the autumn of 1908 these stories had died out, and they went unnoticed in St. Petersburg, Moscow and the West. The region was arguably one of the most inaccessible places on Earth, in the center of Siberia.

The closest observers of the explosion were reindeer herders asleep in their tents in several camps about 30 km from the site. They were blown into the air and knocked unconscious; one man blown into a tree later died of his injuries.

Early in the morning when everyone was asleep in the tent, it was blown up in the air along with its occupants. Some lost consciousness. When they regained consciousness, they heard a great deal of noise and saw the forest burning around them, much of it devastated.

The ground shook and incredibly prolonged roaring was heard. Everything round about was shrouded in smoke and fog from burning, falling trees. Eventually the noise died away and the wind dropped, but the forest went on burning. Many reindeer rushed away and were lost. [earthsci.org]

Thousands of reindeer, in the general area around ground zero, were killed. Many campsites and storage huts belonging to the herders that dotted the area were destroyed.

Rumors of an extraordinary event persisted, transmitted back by geologists and other researchers working in the area. These stories attracted the attention of a meteorite researcher, Leonard Kulik. But, it was not until 1927 that he could finally lead an expedition to the site of the 1908 explosion.

Kulik got off the Trans-Siberian railway at the Taishet station and on horse-drawn sledges they set off on an arduous three-day odyssey through 350 miles of ice and snow until he and his men reached the village of Kezhma, situated on the River Angara. At the village Kulik and his party of researchers replenished their supplies of food, then struggled on for a three-day journey across wild and unchartered areas of Siberia until they reached the log-cabin village of Vanavara on 25 March.

Kulik then tried to make headway through the untamed Siberian forests, or taiga as the Russians call it, but was forced to turn back after heavy snowdrifts almost froze the horses to death. For three days Kulik was forced to remain in the snow-bound village of Vanavara, but during this period he interviewed many of the Evenki hunters who had witnessed the Siberian fireball’s arrival on this planet.

The tales of the sky being ripped open by a falling sun and of a great thunder shaking the ground made Kulik even more eager to penetrate the taiga to find his holy grail.

When the weather gradually improved, Kulik set out for the Tunguska Valley. When he finally reached the site of the mysterious explosion, he was almost speechless. From a ridge overlooking the scene, Kulik took out his notebook and scribbled down his first impressions of the damage wreaked by the cosmic vandal. Kulik wrote:

From our observation point no sign of forest can be seen, for everything has been devastated and burned, and around the edge of the dead area, the young, twenty-year-old forest growth has moved forward furiously, seeking sunshine and life. One has an uncanny feeling when one sees twenty to thirty-inch [thick] giant trees snapped across like twigs, and their tops hurled many yards away.

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Aftermath of the Tunguska explosion

There were three further expeditions to the site of the Tunguska explosion, all of them headed by Kulik. In 1941, Hitler attacked Russia. The 58-year-old Leonid Kulik volunteered to defend Moscow, but was wounded by the Nazis. He was captured by German troops and thrown in a prison camp where he died from his wounds. [Tom Slemen]

The energy of the explosion has been calculated from the extent of the flattened forest and from the small pressure waves which arrived at the speed of sound and were recorded on barographs around the world including stations between Cambridge, 50 miles north of London, and Petersfield, 55 miles south. Interestingly, it took the meteorologists in England twenty years to make the connection between their records and the devastation in Tunguska. The wave trains were unlike any others which had been recorded up until that time but nowadays we know that they do resemble those obtained from a hydrogen bomb explosion. It seems that the impact had an energy of 30 to 40 megatons, the combined force of a few dozen ordinary hydrogen bombs.

According to John Baxter and Thomas Atkins, in their book The Fire Came By, the explosion resulted in an enormous "pillar of fire" and the blinding column was visible for hundreds of miles. The series of thunderous claps that followed could be heard for 500 miles or more.

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What the Tunguska explosion may have looked like.

The noise of the explosion deafened those close to the blast. Following that, a searingly hot thermal current from the fire in the sky raced across the forests. Tall conifers were scorched and ignited and the fires burned for days. Residents of Vanavara, a small trading post about forty miles distant, felt the fierce draft of heat. Some individuals there were flung into the air as the shock wave arrived; pieces of sod were gouged up, ceilings collapsed, and windows were shattered.

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Aftermath of the Tunguska explosion

As it happens, the date of fall, 30 June, corresponds to the passage of the Earth through the maximum of the Beta Taurid stream. From this and its trajectory, it appears that the Tunguska object was part of the Taurid complex. Probably the Earth passed through a swarm within the stream.

The scientific investigation undertaken by Kullik in 1927 revealed that near the center of the blast many of the trees were still standing upright, even though denuded of limbs and leaves. Further from ground zero the trees were blown down and seared, forming concentric circles with the bases of the trees all pointing in the direction of the center of the blast. All of this evidence pointed to the fact that the blast almost certainly occurred in mid air.

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This image shows the directions of the blast

The occurrence, this century, of an impact with the energy of a really big hydrogen bomb does give one pause. Had the incident occurred today, it would probably trigger World War Three. Just a few hours earlier or later and the impact could have been over a major city or urban area. But that didn’t happen. As noted, it was twenty years before anyone really had an inkling of what DID happen. That was partly due to the fact that the Russians in 1908 were somewhat occupied with politics. The previous year, 1907, Czar Nicholas had found himself faced with revolutionaries being elected in large numbers to the newly created parliament - the Duma. The eventual revolution began in 1918. One might even say that the Tunguska event was a harbinger of things to come. And maybe in more ways than anybody thinks.

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This diagram shows the area of damage in Tunguska as compared to the size of Washington D.C.

Eighty-six years later, in July of 1994, there was another harbinger: the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy struck Jupiter.

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If they were able to brush Tunguska off as a fluke, scientists were not so easily able to put aside the spectacle of a whole string of comets hitting another planet in our solar system, one after the other, as the planet spun in space. In the same year, a book entitled Hazards due to Comets and Asteroids was published in reaction to this, then impending, event. The book is a collection of papers which I have referenced before in this series. One of the papers in that book says:

Our understanding of the history of Earth and its inhabitants is undergoing a radical change. The gradual processes of geologic change and evolution, it is now clear, are punctuated by natural catastrophes on a colossal scale - catastrophes resulting from collisions of large asteroids and comets with Earth. It is, to use the popular term, a "paradigm shift."

This "new catastrophism," is not unlike the revolutions brought about by the heliocentric solar system of Copernicus, or Darwinian evolution, or the big bang. In retrospect, such revolutionary ideas always seem obvious. On reading the Origin of Species, Thomas Huxley remarked simply: "Why didn’t I think of that." Now, looking at the Moon, we find ourselves wondering why it took so long to ask whether the process that cratered its surface is still going on. (Robert L. Park of The American Physical Society, Lori B. Garver of the National Space Society and Terry Dawson, a staffer for the House Committee on Science, Technology, and Space working for the Committee’s then Chairman, Rep. George Brown )

Let me repeat that most important remark:

Our understanding of the history of Earth and its inhabitants is undergoing a radical change. The gradual processes of geologic change and evolution, it is now clear, are punctuated by natural catastrophes on a colossal scale …

That may be the understatement of the millennium.

It has been suggested by a number of researchers that the current "climate change" issues are actually due to the earth moving through cosmic dust clouds and that all the hoopla about global warming is simply a cover-up of this fact. Astrophysicist Victor Clube suggests that it is a cometary cosmic dust cloud, left over from the break-up of a giant comet that, for a long period of the Earth’s history, threatened and bombarded our planet with unspeakably horrible, civilization destroying fragments, i.e. the progenitor of the Taurid stream, including the Tunguska comet. Clube also argues that these events were the basis for the formulation of humanity’s ideas about the cosmos, god and religion and even astrology. Over time, as the giant comet spent most of its mass in its Titanic fury, dying away to occasional less than civilization destroying bombardments, our conceptions of gods changed; the reality was tossed out the window in favor of fairy tales for both science and religion, not to mention astrology. He writes:

Three thousand years ago, in accordance with age-old practice, the kings of Babylon were still employing astronomer-priests to give warnings of cosmic visitations. A thousand years ago, the emperors of China were still relying on similar skills, while in Europe the Pope saw messages in the sky and urged Holy War. But this latter was an aberration; for the last two and a half thousand years have seen the decline and fall of the sky gods, and the growing presumption that the cosmos is stable and regular. The shift of paradigm has been unconscious, convenient, insidious and thorough. Probably, the rediscovery of a lost tradition of celestial catastrophe could not have been made through analysis of ancient texts alone; a key had to be provided, and it has been, by the paraphernalia of modern science. It is a salutary lesson both on the capacity of human reasoning to get it wrong for long periods of time, and on the essential unity of knowledge.

It would be naïve to think, however, that one merely has to point to deep-seated cracks in the structure of modern knowledge to have scholars setting to and constructing a better framework within which mankind might plan his future. There is considerable intellectual capital invested in the status quo, enough to ensure that those with an interest in preserving it, the ‘enlightened’ and the ‘established’, will continue to present the cosmos to us in a suitably non-violent form. The history of ideas reveals that some will even go further and act as a kind of thought police, whipping potential deviants into line. For them, temporal power takes precedence over the fate of the species. (Clube, The Cosmic Winter)

This problem of the "status quo" and "thought police" is not a minor issue. In this series of articles that were kicked off by Mike Baillie’s book New Light on the Black Death, we have repeatedly come face to face with the obvious fact that those in positions of power and authority lie to the masses of humanity as a rule rather than an exception.

Again and again in this series, we have discussed historical cometary bombardments, the consequences for humanity being dire enough to begin with, but which were then exacerbated and capitalized upon by pathological deviants, following which the facts were covered up by lies. Worse, again and again we have seen that the masses of humanity that suffer the most from these assaults and manipulations appear to be quite willing to be deceived even to their own death and destruction (if only someone will give them something warm and fuzzy to believe in and a scapegoat to blame). At present, we are observing this phenomenon playing out on the global stage in real time and again and again we shake our heads and ask "why?!" What is it about our world, our present day culture, the human beings that occupy our planet, that gives rise to this bizarre condition that lies are preferred over truth, death over life?

As I have pulled on the many threads that lead to and away from these matters, what I see repeatedly is a small group of people on the planet who rule over the masses of people, who do not have humanity’s best interests at heart - another staggering understatement, but I’m on a roll so why stop now? What I see is the constant - and mostly successful - efforts of this small group driving to enforce totalitarianism in one guise or another - from politics to religion to all fields of science - on the entire world. And again and again they utilize disasters as a means to consolidate their power. Read Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine to get a good grip on exactly how this works now, and how it has always worked. There is nothing new under the sun!

Parallel to the growing awareness of pathology in power is the expanding research among a few maverick scientists and researchers showing plainly that cometary disasters are cyclic and it is altogether possible that there are still a few big bangs left in the Taurid meteor stream. It is also possible that there are new swarms of comets heading our way as recent "global warming" and "moon capture" events on the other planets seem to indicate. Something is definitely going on in our solar system and we need to know what it is. What seems certain is that if disasters are in our future, it will be seen by the elite as just another opportunity to use their Shock tactics to consolidate their power over the entire globe, never mind that there might be so few people left that it will only amount to being a big frog in a small pond - and possibly a frozen one at that.

In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrestles mightily with the problem, never quite reaching a complete explanation nor solution. After all she saw, all she experienced, all her research, in the introduction she wrote:

Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena - homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.

On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight. The central events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who have given themselves up to reckless optimism. […]

This book […] was written out of the conviction that it should be possible to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved into a conglomeration where everything seems to have lost specific value, and has become unrecognizable for human comprehension, unusable for human purpose. To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of "historical necessity," but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless, and unreal.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us - neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated attentive facing up to…reality.

In this sense, it must be possible to face and understand the outrageous fact that so small (and, in world politics, so unimportant) a phenomenon as the Jewish question and anti-Semitism could become the catalytic agent for first, the Nazi movement, then a world war, and finally the establishment of death factories. […] or the curious contradiction between the totalitarian movements avowed cynical "realism" and their conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality. […]

The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. (Hannah Arendt, Summer, 1950)

Hannah’s comments and observations of our world, wrung from her own pain and experiences, have never been more poignant than today when we face exactly what she was describing: Global Totalitarianism rising like a mighty juggernaut with the end of humanity in sight. And never have we seen more clearly that characteristic of the authoritarian type Hannah also saw: "avowed cynical "realism" and … conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality." If you want to see a stunning portrayal of this type of individual, get a copy of Lions for Lambs and watch Tom Cruise deliver a drop-dead performance.

Here at SOTT we regularly discuss the problem of pathological deviance and how pathology can drive an individual to seek power over others. We have brought forward the work of Andrzej Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology, and this goes a long way toward providing a framework in which the history of evil - particularly political evil - can be understood.

As far as I can tell, Hannah Arendt did not consider the problems of pathology and how it operates in society as a corrupting element, nor did she consider the factor that Judaism and its offspring, Christianity and Islam, could be the carriers of the disease of totalitarianism. In this sense, it is really important to come to the knowledge of how religions are created and by whom - generally pathological deviants - and how they are used, in combination with politics, to control masses of people. This, of course, takes us back to the problem of comets in our skies and impacting our planet.

As it happens, after pulling on so many threads relating to the topic, it occurs to me that comets may, indeed, have a great deal to do with the major social problem on our planet today: psychopaths.

One might reasonably ask: Is some evolutionary process at work here? Clearly, staggeringly large numbers of people die repeatedly when they place their trust in lies and liars. And nearly as often do the liars in power find themselves in difficult situations as a result of their over-reaching and ignoring facts. Obviously, if evolution is at work here, those individuals - and their offspring who believe lies are ultimately eliminated from the gene pool. What happens to those who, as Arendt suggests, try to comprehend, understand, and face the facts of our reality, remains to be seen. As she also states, this comprehension must not deny the outrageous, nor attempt to deduce the unprecedented from precedent.

You see, evolutionarily speaking, psychopaths should not exist. Throughout history it can be seen that human beings have needed to co-operate and care about one another in order to survive and produce a new generation that will carry on the processes of society. Most human dynamics are based on people trying to work out their problems and come to resolutions agreeable to the greatest number or, at the very least, in the interactions between two people. The issue of trust is paramount. Someone who betrays your trust is someone you cannot live or work with. Therefore, psychopaths, who are untrustworthy should have long ago become extinct. But that isn’t the way things are. It appears, in fact, as if psychopathy has increased!

As we can observe throughout history right down to the present day, being the only psychopath in a group of trusting people can be a very good thing for the psychopath. As groups get larger, they can accommodate more psychopaths. It seems that when the number of people carrying the psychopathy gene is small enough, those few who carry it can achieve phenomenal breeding success. As Glenn Whitman explains it:

What’s nice about this explanation is that it not only explains why psychopaths exist, but also why we’re not all psychopaths. If there are few enough psychopaths in the population, then being a psychopath makes sense because you’ll mostly have winning confrontations with nice people. But if there are too many psychopaths, then the gains from taking advantage of nice people will be swamped by the losses from confronting other psychopaths. In equilibrium, you’ll get both psychos and nice folks, with each strategy generating approximately equal returns, and with the precise balance determined by the relative payoffs of different interactions.

The problem is, as noted, we are living in a time when psychopathy seems to have increased almost exponentially. Moreover, as Hannah Arendt notes - and this was never more true than today - the broad sweep of history indicates that the psychopaths are winning and that means destruction for all, including the psychopaths.

Which leads us to the problem: psychopathy being what it is and doing what it does, should certainly have brought the human race to total destruction a long time ago IF, as a taxon, it had existed throughout the development of humankind. And that suggests that it did not. In fact, the studies of Marija Gimbutas indicate that there was a time when psychopathy was not "at the top".

As far back as we can go with archaeological records; i.e. "hard science," we find that the worship of the Great Celestial Goddess was the act of veneration of the Universe and all within it as the living body of the Goddess-Mother-Creatrix. This goddess was symbolized by the double wavy lines of water - both the cosmic sea of potential/activation, as well as the life giving moisture that emanated from the body of the Goddess and all women as her representatives on earth; the oceans and seas, rivers and springs and wells.

She was the sky Goddess and the Earth was her womb and all upon it were her children. The "Son/Sun-King" died every year and was reborn in the passing of the seasons. Rites and rituals were enacted to insure the rebirth of the "Son-Sun" through the "womb of the Earth," the generative organ of the Cosmic Mother. There was a purity and innocence… a pastoral, Arcadian simplicity and symmetry to life. Men and women were equals in importance as the "Twin offspring" of the Goddess.

Women were honored and cherished in their three manifestations: the virgin-future-mother; the mother-nourisher; and the crone-mother of wisdom. Men were partners and protectors of women, thereby protectors of their own being since all were born and nursed by women. The male energy served the female because the female served the male; there was cycling energy, synergy, symmetry and balance.

The wavy lines of water, the Cosmic Sea of the Mother, were, at some point, corrupted into the symbol of the serpent; the woman became associated with the serpent instead of the Stars; and everything went downhill from there. This event is described in Genesis 3:19 where Adam is told by Yahweh: "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

Here, the "dust" or the Earth, is denigrated and reviled as worthless in the same passage as woman, herself, is denigrated and reviled as the temptress. But, in the pre-existing Goddess religions, the earth out of which all life has been born is NOT dust, but alive - as the womb of the Goddess herself! And, judging by the massive evidence collected by Marija Gimbutas, this was the most ancient and worldwide order of thought, antecedent to and underlying all other myths, predating the male-dominated pantheons by many thousands of years!

The main theme of the Goddess symbolism is the mystery of birth and death and the renewal of life, not only human, but all life on earth and indeed, in the whole cosmos. Symbols and images cluster around the parthenogenetic Goddess and her basic functions as Giver of Life, Wielder of Death, and, not less importantly, as Regeneratrix, and around the Earth Mother, the Fertility Goddess young and old, rising and dying with plant life. She was the single source of all life and who took her energy from the springs and wells, from the sun, moon, and moist earth. This symbolic system represents cyclical, not linear time. In art this is manifested by the signs of dynamic motion: whirling and twisting spirals…" [Gimbutas, 1989]

At some point the goddess, or source of moisture and all life, was identified with the serpent-as-tempter and became the wicked Temptress herself. There is some difficulty in untangling the threads of the currently known symbolic systems of which there are now two: one reflecting a matriarchal-serpent culture, and the other an androcratic-militaristic-serpent culture. The man and woman, who were formerly united as the original "Twins of Creation," and who, in their union could "control" the serpent, became opposed to each other; unbalanced; antagonists, not partners. The benevolent "Son-King," the leader of the flock, was no longer sustained and supported by the female energy, channeled from the Goddess through the "Tree," in the body of the Goddess’ representative on Earth, Woman, but instead became the male "killer" of the serpent AND controller/ oppressor of the Goddess, who became the exemplification of temptation and occasional consort of the serpent!

At some point, the ancients say that Eve betrayed Adam, Cain killed his brother, Abel, and psychopathy was let loose on our planet.

Who was this serpent? What are the clues that point to his appearance on the scene? Where? When?

Tunguska was the first key to this problem.

If it had not been for the cometary impact at Tunguska one hundred years ago today, and then the Shoemaker-Levy impacts on Jupiter eighty-six years later, our attention would not be drawn to certain aspects of our history that have been thoroughly covered up, nor the effects of those lies and distortions on our world today. Somehow, psychopaths and comets are inextricably bound together; it is even possible that the same cosmic forces that sent comets our way also "created" psychopaths. This is what I want to explore in the final installments to this series of articles.

Stay tuned, our next stop is the end of the Last Ice Age when the Cosmic Serpent appeared on the scene and the processes that have led to our involvement in the Sixth Extinction got underway.

I had a pretty good flow going, Moses was coming to life on the computer screen, and then… well, then I started to have doubts. I knew that I knew a lot about Moses from the theological point of view and from the point of view of a lot of alternative research. I even knew a lot of what the scholars knew - the people who spend their lives studying and analyzing the Biblical texts. But I still felt uneasy. So, I went searching for more source materials and discovered that there was a whole lot more I needed to read before I could complete this project. That’s pretty much what I have been doing for the past year or two: reading stuff that nobody except specialists ever reads, and collecting piles of data.

What has been shocking to discover is exactly how much IS known among the scholars that is not known by the general public. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised since I have discovered this to be true in other fields, but when the subject is the foundation of religion - stuff people believe in and stake their lives on and use to determine their actions in life - well, it’s pretty bad.

In the process, I’ve learned a lot about the creation of Judaism which is pretty much the "foundation" of Western Society. Gee, don’t you find that odd? A religion created by an obscure Middle Eastern tribe - basically a tribal god - somehow got elevated to be the "God of the Cosmos" and became the model for the Western view of "Godly being"? And this was done at the expense of the perceptions of spirit that were common to Western Europe before the imposition of the Middle Eastern gods. We are taught that Europe was a savage, uncivilized place; but is that true? How could it be true when there is so much evidence around us in the form of hundreds of thousands of megaliths, that the ancient Europeans did things that the Middle Eastern civilizations never did?

Well, anyway, as I branched out in my reading to include other references, I found that the creation of Christianity is closely associated - even in time, which could be a shocker for some - in some very interesting ways with the creation of Judaism; there is a direct link between the texts of the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls and a link between the Dead Sea Scrolls and certain ideas that became "Christian property"; and bit by bit, with horrifying sureness, I have come to realize that there is nothing more evil on this planet than the monotheistic religions born in the Middle East.

At some point, of course, I want to explore the role that cometary bombardment may have played in the creation of religion and then to examine the role religion has played in the fostering of lies and deceptions in our world. After all, today we consider - can’t say I’m celebrating - the "birthday of Israel," an event that has brought more misery and suffering into our modern world than any other event since the Global Holocaust of World War II. In fact, the two events are so intimately connected that you could say that the Holocaust has continued as a consequence of the "Birth of the State of Israel." But there have most assuredly been other Judaism created holocausts throughout the two thousand year history of Western Civilization; the crusades and witch persecutions come immediately to mind.

Judaism supposedly created Israel, and Judaism also is the parent of Christianity and Islam, so the issue of Judaism and Ancient Israel, from which it supposedly emerged, are not trifling topics. The fact is, as a growing body of scholarship demonstrates, there was no "ancient Israel." The Hebrew Bible is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a historical document, and trying to understand the history of Palestine by reading the Bible is like trying to understand Medieval history by reading Ivanhoe. Niels Peter Lemche, a biblical scholar at the University of Copenhagen, writes:

For some years, a discussion has raged within biblical - particularly Old Testament - studies between a position called "maximalist" and a second position, usually dubbed "minimalist." This controversy is over the amount of historical information that can be found in the pages of the Old Testament: not much, the minimalist would say; a lot more, the maximalist would argue. […]

And, of course, the "maximalists" are true believers… those who have controlled the study of the Bible for a very long time; those who created archaeology for the sole purpose of proving the history in the Bible is true; but archaeology is, little by little, becoming more scientific, and as it has done so, as it has freed itself from the control of True Believers, it has revealed that the Bible is not a historical source.

I approached the subject by first analyzing the biblical accounts of the patriarchs, the exodus from Egypt, and the sojourn in the desert - in short, the narratives in the books of Genesis through Numbers. After that, I compare the image of the past created by the biblical writers with ancient sources of information from the civilizations of Syria and Palestine in the Bronze Age, which is usually considered as the historical setting of the pentateuchal stories. It will be shown beyond question that there is very little correlation between the biblical portrait of the past and the nonbiblical evidence from actual Bronze Age cultures. We must conclude, however, not that the biblical authors were unsuccessful historians but that they were not at all interested in providing anything like a historical report of the past. They wrote for other reasons, and they used history as the vehicle for their message. When approaching the literature of the Old Testament, people of modern times must realize that the ancient authors did not write primarily for posterity, that is, for us, but for the benefit of their contemporary audience. They followed the moral and aesthetic expectations of their time; they would have had no idea of the rules that govern modern historical studies and interests. […]

Is the Exodus narrative historical reflection or literary fiction?

If we insist that the Exodus narrative is not referring to a historical event, then we must be prepared to withstand opposition of a far more serious kind than was the case when we deconstructed the historicity of the patriarchal narratives.

Solid reasoning underlies this critical opposition. The social setting of the Exodus story is vastly different from that of the patriarchal narratives and the Joseph saga, which deal with the fate of a particular family. […]

Unlike the patriarchal narratives and the Joseph saga, Exodus does not describe the fate of a single family. Now the narratives turn to a larger question: the liberation of a nation. The string of narratives that began with Joseph’s family migrating to Egypt ends with several hundred thousand people leaving it. The patriarchs are now no more than the distant ancestors of this nation. … Later Israelites must accept the acts of that liberated generation [of the Exodus] as their own for the sake of national solidarity and continuity. They are part of the national heritage. A saying from the exile underscores the relationship between past and present: "The fathers ate sour grapes, and their children’s teeth feel blunt!" (Jer 31:29) It reflects the idea that the liberation of their ancestors ("fathers") from Egypt provided freedom for generations yet unborn, that is, the "children." These children and those ancestors are one people. The Israelites perceive themselves as heirs, identifying with their deceased ancestors, their people. This also means that the ancestors have determined the fate of their descendants because every successive generation relives for itself the experience of its ancestors.

It is interesting to compare this concept - that the Exodus as the liberation of the Jews provided freedom for generations to come - with the concept of the vicarious remission of sins by the crucifixion of Jesus whereby future generations are "set free" by this act. They are, essentially, the same; peculiar Eastern ideas that have no place in a civilization that originally took personal responsibility quite seriously.

The liberation from Egypt is a critical moment in the history of Israel. A nation and its religion depend upon it. Without it, Israel’s nationhood would have been a historical footnote, and its faith in Yahweh as the God of Israel would have remained insignificant. The Exodus represents more than a national liberation: it marks the birth of a nation and justifies that nation’s very existence.

Two other events become important "foundation legends" for the Israelites: the revelation at Sinai, and the occupation of Canaan. The Exodus marks the beginning of the people and the source of its identity, but the people also need a religion and a land. Without both, the people cannot survive but will face annihilation. A national identity requires a concrete, physical space within which to develop. Without its religion, the people would wander aimlessly through the wilderness like ghostly figures.

At Sinai, Yahweh presents himself as the God who liberated Israel from Egyptian bondage - the very same God who at the beginning of history entered into an exclusive relationship with the patriarchs and promised them a beautiful land.

Keep in mind that the stories of the patriarchs were re-written by those who were seeking to create a new nation after the Babylonian exile and the promises of land were put into the mouth of God to show that the manufactured Exodus story was just a step in the fulfillment of God’s plan.

Finally, at Sinai, Yahweh becomes Israel’s God in concreto. A contract or "covenant" seals this bond between a people and its God. Thus, the law of Yahweh becomes the legal basis for the nation and for the Israelites’ everlasting obligation to their God. Two principles of this covenant inexorably solidify their religious identity. First, the collective religious consciousness of the Israelites confirms that Yahweh is and always will be their God. Second, all Israelites must now and forever conform to the lay of Yahweh, in effect, Israel’s "constitution." Thus, the law simplifies what it means to be an Israelite, under God’s protection. And anyone who fails to obey is no longer a member of that people.

As for the land, the fulfillment of that promise lies in the future. Yet God makes a pledge at Sinai: if they adhere to the stipulations of the law, the people will inhabit the land and own it. This is not merely a story about a divine revelation; rather, it represents a program for the future of the Israelite nation. Until the people finally live in the "land," one cannot truly call the people "Israel."

In this way, the denial of the historicity of these bedrock elements of the Israelite historical narratives comes close to a denial of the very existence of the Israelite people. Thus, dismissing the Exodus narrative as a historical source is far more serious than taking a critical view of the historical content of the patriarchal tradition. […]

Predictably, many conservative Christians and Jews become troubled by skeptical voices that question the historicity of the Exodus narratives. Both Christians and Jews consider themselves Israel’s true descendants; therefore, to them, these criticisms represent "negative" or even heretical opinions. They do not view these theories as objective analyses of the Exodus or the revelation at Sinai; they see them as attacks on their own religious identities.

If, however, we disregard such concerns - it is after all not the purpose of a critical investigation to protect the presumed identity between the living and the dead members of a certain religious community - it is quite obvious that the Exodus narrative is largely made up of literary elements that closely resemble the ones already found in the book of Genesis. … The book of Exodus represents a literary quilt, pieced together from the fragments of universal and timeless adventure stories and legends. These are examples of narrative art rather than specifically Israelite folk literature. Appreciating the utility of their plots and characters, the biblical authors appropriated these universal tales and reconstituted them with their own Israelite template. […]

[W]e can see in the biblical stories images of a familiar narrative style, and perhaps that type of mimicry contributed some measure of credibility to an ancient historian’s message. […]

Exodus 1-19 represents a coherent narrative unit that describes the Israelite wanderings from Egypt to Mount Sinai. Yet many literary substrata appear within those chapters - individual vignettes strung together to create "scenes" within the larger Egypt-Sinai complex. The unit begins with Moses’ birth and miraculous rescue and ends with his escape to Midian, where God outlines his future mission. The next contains the long section about the plagues that lead ultimately to Israel’s liberation. Finally, a third pericope describes how the Israelites left Egypt and headed toward Sinai.

I would, of course, suggest that the story of the plagues of Egypt is a memory of cometary bombardment, but biblical scholars do not include such speculations in their analyses and so, are somewhat handicapped in interpreting what may or may not be historical.

Initially, this Exodus-Sinai complex seems like a coherent narrative unit. Yet upon further examination, the events and legislation at Mount Sinai represent the narrative’s literal and figurative high points. The importance of the Sinai event is so profound that it disturbs the narrative balance of the Exodus-Sinai complex. Sinai simply disrupts the narrative that takes the reader from Egypt to Canaan. Without regard for the narrative consistency, Mount Sinai bursts into the Israelites otherwise uninterrupted march from the Sea of Reeds to the Jordan River.

For years, Old Testament scholars have recognized the narrative discontinuity between the Sinai complex and the Pentateuch’s overall narrative scheme. They have based this observation not on the narrative itself but on such texts as the brief credo in Deut 26: 5-9

5 And you shall say before the Lord your God, A wandering and lost Aramean ready to perish was my father [Jacob], and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and he became there a nation, great, mighty, and numerous.

6 And the Egyptians treated us very badly and afflicted us and laid upon us hard bondage.

7 And when we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, the Lord heard our voice and looked on our affliction and our labor and our oppression;

8 And the Lord brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm, and with great (awesome) power and with signs and with wonders;

9 And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (Amplified Translation, Zondervan)

These brief recollections of Israel’s early history, its liberation from Egypt, and its conquest of the promised land completely ignore the Sinai events. While Israel’s life in and migration from Egypt remain pivotal topics, Sinai is never mentioned. Thus, almost sixty years ago, Gerhard von Rad suggested that the Sinai complex is not one of the original narrative components of the Pentateuch. For him, these are two originally independent narrative units, on the one side the Exodus and wilderness stories, and on the other the Sinai revelation. They were written independently and only later joined together. (See von Rad, "The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch," in "The problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (trans. E.W. Trueman Dicken; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).

For von Rad, the borderline between the Exodus narrative and the Sinai revelation is in Exodus 14 (Exod 15, the renowned "Song of the Sea," is an independent unit and not part of either complex). … clearly, the Exodus narrative is related to the Passover, and Sinai to the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost). The two traditions merge much later. The inclusion of the Sinai revelation into the narrative string of the Exodus and wilderness stories must perforce be later than the composition of a credo text such as Deut 26: 5-9.

Of course, the late combination of two originally independent narrative units does not exclude further elaborations and additions, especially those which create smooth literary transitions between the Exodus and Sinai material. Each narrative complex carries its own religious meaning and background. They arose independently and came together at a later date. Consequently, we must consider their historicity separately. If we confirm the historicity of one complex, we cannot assume the historicity of the other.

Moses, the towering figure of the narrative, guarantees the fundamental unity of the Exodus-Sinai wilderness complex. Moses himself functions as the glue that holds together the Exodus-Numbers tradition, each episode of which is inexorably linked to and defined by its hero. There is, however, reason to doubt that Moses is also the historical link between the Sinai revelation and its surrounding narrative complex. From a historian’s vantage point, it might be questionable to see one and the same person as the center of two originally separate narrative units. This observation is important because it is almost impossible to separate Moses from either unit and consider him primary to one of them while secondary to the other. What is the Exodus narrative without Moses? Could Israel accept the tablets of the law from anyone other than Moses himself? Everything points to the narrative units’ having been composed from the beginning with Moses in mind.

When they wrote their stories about Israel’s past, the authors and the collectors of tradition saw Moses as more important than any of the narrative elements that they combined into the Exodus-Sinai wilderness complex. Thus, from the moment of its composition, Moses dominates the Exodus - Numbers complex. As a consequence of Moses’ being an integral part of the narrative units in Exodus-Numbers, it must be concluded that he did not participate in any of the events recorded, which is a paradox since the narratives would not live without his presence. […]

This uncertainty about Moses’ identity surfaces again when we consider his many different roles. In some narratives he is portrayed with a multitude of characteristics, while other narratives characterize him more uniformly. The infant Moses’ rescue from the river foreshadows his role as Israel’s liberator, the figure of a prototypical ancient Near Eastern adventurer-hero. Egyptians, Babylonians, and Assyrians all knew of tales about such child prodigies, a noteworthy example being the Akkadian hero-king Sargon. […]

The legendary tales of Moses and Sargon foretell the future greatness of two marvelous heroes. Their authors used the rescue theme to distance their heroes from ordinary people. In this way, the hero is allowed to transgress the social conventions that normal people must follow. Without this freedom, no hero would ever succeed in radically changing the fortunes of his nation. […]

When we consider the several components of the image of Moses in the Pentateuch, his role as the creator and legislator of the Israelite religion is clearly central. At Sinai, Moses mediates the covenant between Yahweh and Israel and conveys the content of God’s law to the Israelites. That Moses should also function as Israel’s supreme judge and ruler with the same power as the later Israelite kings will, in light of his other functions, hardly come as a surprise.

Moses is simply the unifying literary component in the Egypt-Sinai wilderness complex. Thorough him the authors spin a red thread that connects all the different episodes belonging to this complex of narratives. Yet one question persists: does any of this relate to a historical person called Moses? As we already noted, the Exodus-wilderness complex on the one hand and the Sinai periscope on the other were originally two independent literary units. Unity between them was only reached by introducing the figure of Moses to both narrative complexes. Before that happened, these narratives developed independently; without Moses, their authors would hardly have succeeded in bringing them together.

It is frequently said that the history of Israel’s origin and religion presupposes one central and historical individual and is totally unfathomable without that person. Thus, it is quipped that if there had been no Moses, somebody would have to invent one! They say that Israel’s early history is inconceivable without a genuine architect The answer is easy: yes, they did in fact invent Him! […]

Sinai presents another dilemma. Where exactly did God appear to the Israelites? The ecclesiastical tradition that connects the present-day Jebel Musa (the Arab name means "mountain of Moses") with the biblical Mount Sinai only partially conforms to the biblical tradition. In the late narrative that begins in Exodus 19, a mountain appears. However, the description of the journey as well as other hints preserved by the narrative - does not point in the direction of Jebel Musa… [but] rather leads toward the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula and, more precisely, to the oasis Kadesh-barnea.

[A]nother problem persists. The divine revelation at Sinai described in the Old Testament cannot be reduced to a part of the history of early Israel. Such a revelation simply goes beyond what is from a historian’s point of view acceptable, because God cannot be the subject of historical reflection … they must rely on empirical facts. By nature, the Sinai revelation is not a historical subject. […]

[This] applies as well to the desert wanderings. They must also conform to the criteria and scrutiny of scientific research. …

Already, problems arise. The census in Numbers describes a massive migration composed of several hundred thousand people, who wandered the desert for forty years. And yet the general description in the Old Testament of the Israelite’s desert sojourn has little in common with living conditions in such a place; it rather looks like a snapshot of a religious procession within a settled culture. The number of participants is astonishing. How could so many people survive in the desert? Already the biblical authors were met with such questions and they knew very well how to answer them clearly and absolutely: God provides for his people! Literature can handle miracles, history cannot. The biblical authors interject an intriguing answer to Israel’s desert dilemmas, namely, God. Repeatedly, God solves the wanderers’ problems with a series of mighty deeds… […]

So the depiction of the desert wanderings found in Exodus through Numbers is a tradition that does not relate historical circumstances of immigration or life in the desert. This narrative is no more and no less than a literary fiction that has only one goal, namely, to move the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan. Only the most dedicated believer clings desperately to the notion that hundreds of thousand of humans survived forty years in the desert: clearly a barren and inhospitable environment.

To justify the historicity of the desert wanderings, we must modify the number of refugees leaving Egypt and tone down God’s miraculous deeds so that we can analyze the historicity of the events they describe. Ultimately, the results will do violence to the biblical descriptions. Why? Because they run counter to the biblical version that not a few persons but a whole nation took part in those events. […]

If we reduce these stories in the usual, but unlikely, way - taking them to be the memory of only a very small and unimportant group of Asians who escaped from Egypt sometime in the late second millennium BCE - then we must conclude that the Old Testament narratives are unhistorical. The Israelite people never lived in ancient Egypt. The authors of the Biblical narrative may have borrowed from the remembrance of a small group of persons who once had been in Egypt. This group eventually might have become part of the Israelite nation and their tradition a part of the national heritage.

When scholars accept a "small group" hypothesis, they do so to bypass the many historical problems raised by this narrative. Consequently, it is impossible to prove that such a group of emigrants from Egypt ever existed. By drastically reducing the number of people involved in the escape from Egypt, Scholars have made them invisible to the historian. […]
Ultimately, the authors of the book of Exodus created the narratives as we know them. These writers - just like the authors of the patriarchal narratives in Genesis - created their own narrative universe. They wrote about places and events that never existed… they describe a literary world, not historical facts. […]

[T]he Exodus and Sinai narratives were combined in a religious environment where the Law - the Torah - was already dominant, in other words, in an Israelite, or preferably Jewish, context. […]

In other words, the stories were combined, glossed, adjusted, re-written, at a time when they were needed to underpin certain religious and political objectives, a time when the Law was already in place, undoubtedly after the Babylonian exile, or even later. Some experts suggest that these stories were created under Hellenic influences because quite a few of the Bible stories indicate borrowings from Hellenic sources and concepts.

In spite of the preceding observations, we cannot dispute every last historical connection for the Sinai narratives. Both the Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern sources provide circumstantial evidence of Yahwistic practice at Sinai, although the god Yahweh only later came into possession of a major temple in Palestine. The book of Exodus tells us how Yahweh reveals himself initially to Moses and then later to all of Israel. The revelations take place south of the border of ancient Palestine, where we should probably look for Yahweh’s original home. Most of the Old Testament evidence appears in material dating from a relatively late literary period; however, other Old Testament passages refer to the mountain of God. As we noted previously, in 1 Kings 19 Elijah ventures into the desert and encounters God at Mount Horeb, evidently a second name for Mount Sinai. In Judg 5: 5 Yahweh is "the one from Sinai." In such texts, Yahweh is also seen as an immigrant from the south, ultimately from Edom or Seir.

Furthermore, Yahweh is mentioned outside the Old Testament narratives. Egyptian sources relate stories about an area known as "Shasu Yahweh", inhabited by Shasu peoples. According to the Egyptian sources from the second millennium BCE, the nomadic Shasu lived in Syria-Palestine, east of the Jordan, and on the Sinai Peninsula. In this context, Shasu Yahweh is located in the Sinai Desert. …

Long before scholars began to interpret the Egyptian clues about Yahweh, many tried to find the historical background for Moses’ visit to Midian, the first place Yahweh confronted Moses. Apart from the question of the historicity of Exodus 3, one unique feature stands out in this Moses-in-Midian story: if Yahweh appeared in Midian, then Israel’s God lived in a foreign land and mingled with foreigners (the Midianites). Evidently this was the case.

Second Kings 5 provides an example of the important connection between Yahweh and a land: the Aramaean Naaman, who had converted to Yahwism, had to bring a "piece" of the land of Israel back to Damascus. On this piece of land he could continue to worship Yahweh. Thus it is only possible to worship Yahweh "in" (i.e. "on") his own land.

This is a curious fact. It reminds me of the legends of vampires that could only sleep in a box of earth from their native land. Connection?

Clearly, the Old Testament consciously connects Yahweh with the southern Palestine, indicating the originality of the information contained in these narratives. These historical kernels in the Exodus narratives suggest that either the Israelites lived in southern Palestine or Midianites (according to other biblical information, the Kenites) brought the worship of Yahweh to Palestine. Consequently, Yahwism spread throughout the region until finally Yahweh became Israel’s national God. In support of such a theory scholars refer to the evidence that Moses’ father-in-law was either a Midianite of a Kenite. […]

Here I must interject a bit about the Kenites:

In the ancient Levant, the Kenites were a nomadic clan sent under Jethro to priest Midian. According to the Hebrew Bible, they played an important role in the history of ancient Israel. The Kenites were coppersmiths and metalworkers. Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, was a shepherd and a priest of the Kenites. The Kenites apparently assimilated into the Israelite population, though the Kenites descended from Rechab maintained a distinct, nomadic lifestyle for some time.

The Kenites were the descendants of Kenan, but have been understood as the descendents of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve who murdered his brother, Abel.

Moses apparently identified Jethro’s god, El Shaddai, with Yahweh, the Israelites’ god.[1] According to the Kenite hypothesis, Yahweh was originally the tribal god of the Kenites, borrowed and adapted by the Hebrews. (Wikipedia See also: Jewish Encyclopedia entry)

In other words, according to their own stories, the Jewish god is the God of Cain - the marked murderer - who slew his brother Abel. That leads to a whole other area of thought and we won’t go there now, but it certainly gives us pause to think, to consider the "Mark of Cain" as being integral to Judaism. We certainly can take note of the fact that, in Christianity and Judaism, the curse of Cain and the mark of Cain refer to the Biblical passages in the Book of Genesis chapter 4, where God declared that Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, was cursed, and placed a mark upon him to warn others that killing Cain would provoke the vengeance of God.

What kind of god would protect a murderer that way? And does this suggest that the Jews writing the bible were fully conscious of this connection and wrote that part into the Genesis story to intimidate others? A sort of pre-emptive accusation of "anti-Semitism"? One even wonders if circumcision is the fabled "Mark of Cain"?

[T]he Old Testament authors knew that Yahweh once "came out of Sinai" and was a Midianite or Kenite deity. In the re-emerging biblical narratives, Yahweh remains the same, although he chooses another people as his own. […]

Or the Kenites ARE the Jews.

This study demonstrates that the biblical portrayals of Israel’s earliest history - set in the larger contexts of Mesopotamia, Syrian Palestine, and Egypt - are literary compositions rather than historical sources. The biblical authors consulted various ancient tales and legends, but did not approach them with a critical eye. …

A literary analysis of the Pentateuch proves incontrovertibly that its narratives are not reliable sources for the study of antiquity; rather, they are works of art. Without regard for exact historical data regarding the development of their people, those writers used every weapon in their literary arsenal to create powerful and dramatic narratives. … One cannot reconstruct Near Eastern history from these narratives; rather, we must be content with what they are: adventure stories and legends, crafted and written by late author-compilers to discuss "the old days" with their audience. Clearly, that audience did not measure the historic by historical standards. (Niels Peter Lemche: Prelude to Israel’s Past, excerpts through page 63)

Well, that is damning enough when one considers the claims of the modern state of Israel - the lies they told and the myths they created - that justified their stealing the land of the Palestinians. What is even worse is that, by trying to impose the false image of an ‘ancient Israel’ that never existed on the land of Palestine, the true history of the land and the people has been not only covered up, it has been categorically denied. As Keith W. Whitelam writes:

The history of ancient Palestine has been ignored and silenced by biblical studies because its object of interest has been an ancient Israel conceived and presented as the taproot of Western civilization. […]

The search for ancient Israel, in which I include for shorthand purposes second Temple Judaism, has consumed phenomenal intellectual and material resources in our universities, faculties of theology, divinity schools, theological colleges, seminaries, and departments of archaeology, particularly in the USA, Europe, and Israel. A quick glance through the prospectuses and catalogues of these institutions will reveal numerous courses on the history and archaeology of ancient Israel conducted in the context of the study of the Hebrew Bible from Jewish and Christian perspectives. This is just as true in ’secular’ universities with departments of Religious Studies rather than faculties of theology. Interestingly, and revealingly, I have been able to discover very few courses on the history of ancient Israel in departments of History or Ancient History. It seems that ancient Israelite history is the domain of Religion or Theology and not of History. […]

Biblical studies has been dominated from its inception by a concern for the history of ancient Israel as the key to understanding the Hebrew Bible. It has been of fundamental concern for Christian theology since Christianity is conceived of as a religion based upon revelation within history. Philip Davies has demonstrated, however, that the ‘ancient Israel’ of biblical studies is a scholarly construct based upon a misreading of the biblical traditions and divorced from historical reality. […]

[T]here are so many facets of history that our political and theological histories do not address. … Much of the data that pertain to these areas of study are still in unpublished form, hampering the realization of the project [of producing a factual history of ancient Palestine]. However, it is the network of connections in which these scholarly investigations are set which is the greatest hindrance. …

The cultural and political factors that have dominated biblical studies discourse on ancient Israel have denied the development of a strategy for investigating such issues. Ironically, much of the archaeological work, the regional surveys and site excavations, which have contributed to the paradigm shift are coloured by the overwhelming search for ancient Israel, the material reality which, it is presumed, will help to illuminate the Hebrew Bible. … It has been difficult to uncover or document sufficiently the subtle political and ideological influences which have shaped historical research in biblical studies. (Keith W. Whitelam: The Invention of Ancient Israel - The Silencing of Palestinian History.

But that is not to say that there aren’t historical elements in the Hebrew Bible as we have already seen! In fact, if the historians and historians of religion would read their texts with an awareness of both Ponerology and Cometary bombardment of the planet at periodic intervals, what they are seeing that has been, until now, so puzzling, would suddenly begin to make perfect sense.

Considering Ponerology, yesterday I wrote an editorial that included a long quote from psychopathy expert, Martha Stout, in an effort to explain why so many people are susceptible to the machinations of psychopaths. In that article I mentioned Nachman Ben-Yehuda’s exposure of the fraud of Masada, the myth created in the early part of the 20th century, that was utilized to unify (by terror and mind control) Jewish immigrants to Israel, and turn them into efficient killing machines so that they would not feel any pangs of conscience over dispossessing the Palestinians of their land and their lives.

If the reader will take a few moments (heck, it’ll take an hour, but it’s worth it!) to read The Masada Myth and The Masada Fraud - The Making of Israel Based on Lies , you will have an exact picture of how the Bible itself was written. It is composed of various texts that were written at various times with various political and social agendas similar to those behind the creation of the Masada myth. Some facts are retained, others are suppressed, and there are complete inventions superimposed on the whole. Voila! You have the Myth of Masada and in the same way, you have the Old Testament and the New Testament!

On the subject of mythmaking and religion, Burton Mack writes about this topic extensively in his analyses of the New Testament. Many of the scholars of the Old Testament also point to myth-making as the reason for its existence but Mack makes it pretty easy to understand. He writes:

That early Christians engaged in mythmaking may be difficult for modern Christians to accept. The usual connotations of the term myth are almost entirely negative. And when it is used to describe the content of the New Testament gospels there is invariably a hue and cry. That is because, in distinction from most mythologies that begin with a "once upon a time," the Christian myth is set in historical time and place. It seems therefore to demand the belief that the events of the gospel story really happened. And that means that the story cannot be "myth." It may help some to note (1) that mythmaking is a normal and necessary social activity, (2) that early Christian mythmaking was due more to borrowing and rearranging myths taken for granted in the cultures of context than to firsthand speculation, and (3) that the myths they came up with made eminent sense, not only for their times and circumstance, but also for the social experiments in which they were invested. […]

Every culture has a set of stories that account for the world in which a people find themselves. These stories usually tell of the creation of the world, the appearance of the first people, ancestral heroes and their achievements, and the glorious beginnings of society as a people experience it. Terrain, village patterns, shrines, temples, cities, and kingdoms are often set in place or planned at the beginning of time. Scholars understand these myths as the distillation of human-interest stories first told in the course of routine patterns of living together, then rehearsed for many generations. Telling stories about one another is what we do. It belongs to the life and work of maintaining human relations and constructing societies. […]

Epic is a rehearsal of the past that puts the present in its light. Setting the present in the light of an illustrious past makes it honorable, legitimate, right, and reasonable. The present institution is then worth celebrating.

And we saw exactly this process in the discussions of the making of the Myth of Masada.

Naturally, both the past and the present may be highly romanticized or idealized, for epic is myth in the genre of history. The stories of Gilgamesh in ancient Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations were epic. For the Greeks, Homer was epic. Pindar’s poetry of illustrious family lines was epic on a small scale. The local histories of shrines, temples, and peoples in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic period were epic on a medium-sized scale. And the history of Israel, which, from the very beginning of the world aimed at the establishment of a temple-state in Jerusalem, was epic for the Jews.

When the [alleged] second temple was destroyed in 70 C.E., the Jews had a problem on their hands. Not only their ancient history, contained in the five books of Moses, but an immense body of literature from the Hellenistic period documented their intellectual investment in the temple-state as the proper goal of human history from the foundation of the world. Christians also had a problem. They had no right to claim the history of Israel as their own. But early Jewish Christians had wanted to think of themselves as the people of God, heirs of the promises to Israel, or even the new Israel for a new day. … All of the early myths about Jess were attempts to paint him and his followers in acceptable colors from the Israel epic. But these attempts were fanciful, ad hoc, and incapable of competing with the obvious logic of the Jewish epic. The Jewish epic was a history that aimed at the establishment of a temple-state in Jerusalem, not a Christian congregation. When the temple’s end came, however, and the epic’s logic was in total disarray, Christians had their chance to revise it in their favor. It was then that revising the Israel epic became a major focus for early Christian myth-making. […]

And then, from the middle of the second century on, the fur really started to fly. Both Jews and Christians wanted to read the history of Israel in their favor, and each needed the Jewish scriptures as documentation for social formations that did not match the temple-state at the end of Israel’s story. Two myths were devised then, and they are still playing havoc with what otherwise might be a reasonable conversation between Christians and Jews about the texts we sometimes call the Hebrew Bible, sometimes the Old Testament. […]

Just as with each separate writing, so the Bible itself came together at a certain juncture of social and cultural history. The reasons for the selection and arrangement of writings in the Bible cannot be found in any of the individual books read separately. The reasons have to be taken from the Christian authors of the second to the fourth centuries. Only at the end of this period, when we finally catch sight of the Bible as we know it, will we see that it demands a particular way of reading the history of Israel, puts a special spin on the appearance of the Christ, and grants uncommon authority to the apostles and their missions. By then it will be clear to us that the book was important because it gave the church the credentials it needed for its role in Constantine’s empire. We may then call it the myth of origin for the Christian religion. It will be the Christian myth in the form of the biblical epic that granted the Christian church its charter. It will be that epic that determines the Bible’s hold upon our American mind. The Bible’s mystique is oddly mis-named by calling it the "Word of God." We must come to see that, or we shall never be able to talk about the Bible in public forum when discussing our cultural history and its present state of affairs. (Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament)

We have to keep in mind that the event that triggered the creation of the Christian Bible which, ultimately, led us into the trap of the Judaic god of Cain, the murderer, was the conversion of Constantine which, very likely, was at a time of cometary bombardment and extreme social stress. (Do have a look at the list of Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls to get an idea of how these events have influenced our history, creating social chaos which is the ideal breeding ground for psychopaths and their ascent to power.)

Constantine became the sole emperor of the Roman Empire and called the first council of Christian bishops to meet in Nicaea in 325 CE. Constantine knew a unique opportunity when he saw one the same way that Shmaria Guttman saw that Masada was the ideal story to transform into a myth of Jewish ruthlessness.

When, finally, the Jewish scriptures and the "apostolic" writings were combined in a single book, the church was off and running; it had its story straight. The Hebrew bible could be used to claim extreme antiquity for the Christian religion, and served as the "Christian Epic." Having claimed all these texts, traditions, and ancient history, the Christian church achieved honor in the eyes of the Greco-Roman world. (Which is why they did it!) Without the Old and New Testaments together, the Christian church would not have had an appropriate pedigree in the eyes of 4th century people. And, of course, that history was amazing! Never mind that it was created by schizoidal psychopaths who wanted to create a Jewish Temple State in Israel with the help of the Persians, or that parts of it were used to justify the kingship of the Hasmoneans. It had been revised and adjusted so many times, that whatever history had ever been incorporated was now lost in layers of manipulative gloss.

Christianity was driven by two schizoidal urges: to continue the expansion of Christendom by whatever means necessary, and to "return" to the Holy Land where all the significant events of the founding of the religion were supposed to have taken place. The thrust of Christianity is thus, backward in time, inward toward a psychological repeating of the founding events, and toward a specific location: Israel.

There is a certain irony to this because the original claim that Christianity made on the epic that belonged to Israel was based on the fact that Jerusalem was desolated and destroyed, so of course, God had abandoned it and chosen a new people - Christians - on whom he would bestow his favoritism. It was the destruction of Jerusalem that made it possible for Christians to steal the Jew’s epic "history" and interpret that destruction as God’s desire to expand his territory to include the whole world. So why, one might ask, would Christians want to go back to Jerusalem? That’s not logical.

But, not to worry: an explanation was soon forthcoming! It was declared that God logically wanted Christians to redeem Israel.

And so, finally, the Global Temple State had a chance to come into being under Christianity - the Catholic Church was positioned at the apex of power; even princes bowed to the pope. The power of God was in its hands and the intent was to shape the minds of all humanity from kings down to the lowliest serf.

The Christian church claims to represents the kingdom of God on earth and its whole rant is that people must prepare for a future life in heaven under threat of an apocalyptic alternative. How’s that for mind control? The church can call society to task for not living up to God’s standards, all the while pointing to some other time and place (never now, of course), when that kingdom of God will finally manifest.

But, the church itself is exempt from critique! The church has the Bible as its charter and the Bible has the universal plan, and the Bible is exempt from analysis. The fact is, without the Bible, and the belief in the bible by the masses of humanity as, at the very least, divinely inspired, the church would look pretty stupid. The Bible is the only object in the Christian religions that all forms of Christianity have in common. For almost 2 thousand years, the church has forced people after people into alignment with the Biblical epic and "history" and the history of Western Civilization that is the result of that ancient epic. The traditions and customs of culture after culture have been subsumed, eradicated, erased from collective memory, and those people have been forced to adopt the Epic of Israel as their own - as if it were their own history. To become a Christian means that one must accept this epic as the only one that matters. Saying "yes" to the Epic of Israel is the price one pays to become part of Western Civilization.

Additionally, the Bible functions as America’s Epic, the dream of creating "One Nation, Under God, indivisible…" One doesn’t even have to be a Christian to think that way. One only needs to think of America as the "flowering of Western Civilization" - but don’t forget that the roots of that civilization are supposed to be firmly planted in Israel.

Are you getting the impression that Christianity was created to serve Judaism?

Well, that’s not exactly the case. Israel was literally created by Christianity in order to fulfill the Christian apocalyptic agenda. As Keith Whitelam writes:

The production of a "master story" of ancient Israel has formed part of a theological enterprise conducted mainly in faculties of theology and divinity in the West.

The biblical epic of Israel seen through the lens of Christianity, is based on a worldview that is universalist in scope, monolinear in history, hierarchical in power, dualistic in anthropology, and it requires miracles, breakthroughs and other cosmic dramas at regular intervals to rectify social situations that have run amok.

The fact is, the adoption of the Epic of Israel by Western Civilization has created more problems throughout history than it has ever solved.

We cannot go on destroying other peoples and cultures in order to "save them." We cannot go on exploiting our planet because "God gave it to us to do with as we wish". And unless we, as a culture and civilization, really come to grips with the fact that we have believed a pack of lies for over 2000 years, we aren’t going to get out of the mess we are in.

Criticism of the Bible has always been considered subversive. But, the fact is, the Bible is a masterpiece of invention, the product of energetic mythmaking very much like the making of the Masada myth, the sacrificing of Truth. And this sacrificing of Truth is what has shaped the soul of Western Civilization. As Burton Mack writes:

My own fantasy is to enter a hall and find high ceilings, lovely chandeliers, walls lined with bookshelves, wines in the alcove, hors d’oeuvres by the windows, and a wide table down the middle of the room with the Bible sitting on it. And there we are, all of us, walking around, sitting at the table, and talking about what we should do with that book. Some rules are in order. Everyone has been invited. Christians have not been excluded, but they are not the ones in charge. All of us are there, and all of our knowledge and expertise is also on the table. There are historians of religion, cultural anthropologists, and political scientists, but also politicians, CEOs and those who work in foreign affairs. The ethnic communities of Los Angels County are all well represented, as are women, the disenfranchised, the disabled, and all the voiceless who have recently come to speech. Merchants are there, and workers and the airline pilots. Everyone is present, and everyone gets to talk and ask questions. No one has a corner on what the Bible says. We blow our whistles if anyone starts to pout or preach. What we are trying to figure out is why we thought the Bible so important, whether it is so important, how it has influenced our culture, what we think of the story, whether we should laugh or cry at the "ending," how it fits or does not fit our current situation, and whether the story should be revised in keeping with our vision of a just, sustainable, festive, and multicultural world.

Wouldn’t that be something?

Why can’t we learn to talk about religion and culture in public as we look for ways to imagine and create the sane societies we desperately need in our multicultural world? If we want to do that, and I think we must, the taboo on the Bible that is now in place will have to be broken. […] The taboo is the sign that we all are complicit in the unacknowledged agreement to let that story stand. It is time to find out whether we think that wise. (Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament?)

It’s pretty easy to cast most of the blame on Israel for all the horrors of our world today; it’s obvious. But we have to remember that it would all grind to a halt in an instant if Christianity would withdraw its support for the re-creation of Israel which they see as necessary to "initiate the Eschaton." One ought not to forget that it was the Bible Thumping British who started all this with the Balfour Declaration. Of course, one can think that there was blackmail - unusual and excessive pressure - exercised by the Zionists to get what they wanted. But that doesn’t excuse the choices made by Western leaders under the influence of their own pathological, apocalyptic agenda.

And so, what we see, in the end, is a psychopathic minority at the top of all the governments of the world using the faith of Christians and Jews alike (and Muslims) to pursue their rapacious goals of seeking ever more power and plunder. They do not even realize that they, themselves, or their offspring, will soon find themselves with nothing. As Lobaczewski writes in Political Ponerology:

The following question thus suggests [itself]: what happens if [psychopaths seek] power in leadership positions with international exposure? … Goaded by their character, such people thirst for just that even though it would conflict with their own life interest, …They do not understand that a catastrophe [will] ensue. Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing.

It may be the birthday of the State of Israel, but there is no cause for celebration. Today Israel celebrates not the birth of nationhood but a 60-year-long campaign of ethnic cleansing of an innocent and defenseless people, justified by a 2000-year-old lie. Rather than celebrate, let us recognise and mourn the fact that the whole world has been made slaves to this Judeo-Christian doctrine of demons and subjects of the synagogue of the vengeful and wrathful god of Cain, the murderer, that seeks to rob us of our humanity, and let us resolve to no longer tolerate the public spectacle of wanton cruelty that is the US, UK-backed Zionist entity and its systematic brutalization and murder of the Palestinian people.

Astronomy books and papers far too numerous to cite offer the assurance that "no one has ever been killed by a meteorite." (John S. Lewis, University of Arizona)

©Julian Baum

Over the past few years, while sott.net has been tracking the increasing flux of fireballs and meteorites entering the earth’s atmosphere, we have been, by turns, amused and horrified at the ignorant reactions and declarations that issue from academia and the media regarding these incursions. A few years ago, we read that "this is a ‘once in a hundred years’ event!" Not long after it was a "once in a lifetime" event. Still later, after a lot more incidents it became a "once in a decade" event. More recently, it has been admitted in some quarters that meteorites hit the ground (as opposed to safely burning up in the atmosphere) several times a year! And of course, we have discovered the fact that the governments of our planet are well aware that there are atmospheric explosions from such bodies numerous times a year. We have also learned in this series that the frequent reports of unusual booms and shaking of the ground is often due to such overhead explosions. Yet the media steadfastly refuses to honestly address this issue, though we have noted a plethora of recent articles presenting opposing academic arguments designed to put the populace back to sleep, to reassure them that there is nothing to worry about, that such things only happen every 100,000 years or so, and certainly, the Space Watch Program is going to find all the possible impactors and take care of things.

Recent articles we have covered on SOTT.net include:

Top Scientists Want Research Free From Politics

Leading U.S. scientists called on Congress Thursday to make sure the next president does not do what they say the George W. Bush Administration has done: censor, suppress and falsify important environmental and health research. […]

Among the more than 15,000 government scientists signing onto the statement are Harold Varmus, preesident of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre and former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and Anthony Robbins, professor of medicine at Tufts University and former director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

"Although surely the worst, the Bush Administration is not the first, nor will it be the last administration to mistreat and misuse science and scientists," Robbins said. The White House itself has been directly involved in the suppression and falsification of science, Robbins stressed.

But interference from the White House is just part of the problem, said Francesca Grifo, a former government researcher and now a director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Industry lobbyists are all over government agencies, trying to influence research that will impact their corporations, she said. "These special interest groups are being given access at the highest level."

"Government scientists have had their findings subjected to censorship and misrepresentation," said Kurt Gottfried, professor of physics at Cornell University and a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "The public and Congress have often been deprived of accurate and candid scientific information."

"The pursuit of science in an open society has had a long and fruitful tradition in America," Gottfried said. "Unfortunately, this tradition has been violated in recent years by the government itself."

Another: Government’s funding framework breeds scientific conformity

Here is a list of beliefs in the biomedical and climate sciences that must not be questioned if you’re applying for a government grant:

- That global warming is caused by humans;

- That AIDS is caused by a virus;

- That radiation, cigarette smoke and other toxins are dangerous in proportion to their strength, no matter how small the dose;

- That heart disease is caused by saturated fats;

- That cancer is caused by mutations.

This is part of a list offered by a University of Washington professor of surgery, Donald W. Miller, who is a heart surgeon at the VA Medical Center in Seattle. Miller believes that all the above ideas may be false, and ought to be tested. […]

But much of science runs on government money. Some people find the stink of bias only in private money, and see government as free of it, but they are mistaken. Government likes certain beliefs. To get its money, you have to get the approval of the scientists it selects, and you are less likely to get it if they think your idea wrong.

What that means, Miller says, is that "If you say low doses of radiation aren’t bad for you, or that global warming is due to variations in the sun, you can’t get funded."

He says this happened to University of California scientist Peter Dues-berg, who challenged the viral theory of AIDS, and to Harvard’s Willie Soon, who challenged the pollution theory of global warming, and to others. In a paper published in 2007 in the Journal of Information Ethics, Miller argued that conformity is built into the system of government grants. […]

In 2005, in the scientific journal Cellular and Molecular Biology, Pollack made an argument similar to Miller’s. American science, he wrote, has become "a culture of believers" whose rule is, "just keep it safe and get your funding."

For science, the result has not been good. […]

Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, argued famously that science progresses in revolutionary bursts, in which the "dominant paradigm" is overturned. But what if the supporters of the dominant paradigm are the people vetting your application?

We most certainly can see that the issue of meteorite, cometary and asteroid impacts on our planet, and their true potential danger to each and every one of us, must be added to this list of unfunded research.

This is a very bad and dangerous state of affairs. As Victor Clube wrote in his letter to SOTT.net:

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.

And so, it seems, we here at SOTT.net, and some brave souls with the good of humanity at heart, are on their own, opposed by the governments that are supposed to be in place to look after the interests of their people.

Of course, the question arises: what led to this general and overall blindness on the part of the people we look to for interpretation and explanation of our reality? How can the people who write textbooks, teach in schools, even at the highest level, be so ignorant? The consequences of this ignorance are, after all, detrimental to everyone for many reasons, not the least of which is simple survival in a rather hostile environment.

The events that have been covered so far in this series have led us to understand that there have been many times when it is highly probable that the earth - or parts thereof - was bombarded with meteorites or exploding aerial cometary fragments. These events occurred, and were probably related to, periods of great stress on the environment and humanity as a whole. Climate changes brought floods, droughts, extreme temperatures, crop failures and famine. These pressures may have caused lowered disease resistance for given populations, and it is also conjectured that extra-terrestrial bombardments may have carried disease pathogens. Impacts or crustal disturbances could have placed stresses on the geological structures so that outgassings from fissures, the ocean, or lakes may have poisoned large numbers of people, not to mention the record of tsunamis that is now called into question. Do we know, for example, that the Christmas tsunami-causing earthquake near Malaysia was not impact induced? No, we don’t. And we can’t trust either our governments or the news media - or even most of academia who owe their livelihoods to the government - to tell us the truth.

Why do they lie to us?

Well, the main reason is rather simple: it’s all about control. All of these things, taken together, place intolerable stresses on the human social organism and, as is typical for human beings, this brings on a crisis of faith, demands for answers, demands for protection that governments simply find it too expensive to provide.

When the world shows itself to be a hostile environment, when the environment suggests that there is no god and humanity is cast adrift in an uncaring cosmos, most people cannot tolerate this; they desperately need to restore their belief in something "out there" that is going to save them, and if there is no one to save the, that means that someone has to be blamed for the disasters: a scapegoat. The corrupt governments do not want to be blamed, so they seek to blame someone else and convince the masses that this object of derision is the chief cause of all terrors. And the masses invariably buy into these maneuvers because, of course, if you can find someone or something to blame for calamity, you can continue in your illusion that "God is in his heaven and - but for the evil acts of the chosen scapegoat - all would be right with the world." Otherwise, the tension and anxiety of having no control (even vicarious, via prayer or ritual) over the hostile environment, would be unbearable. I’m sure that you notice that this also relieves the individual of any responsibility as well, so this approach works in all kinds of situations.

We are going to examine this problem in some depth further on, but for now, I would like the reader to become acquainted with the facts. What I have prepared for today is The List, by no means exhaustive, of all the incidents I have been able to uncover of meteorite, asteroid, or cometary impacts that have caused death and destruction, property damage, or were near misses. Major parts of The List are extracted from the work of John S. Lewis, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Codirector of the NASA/University of Arizona Space Engineering Research Center, and Commissioner of the Arizona State Space Commission, in specific, his books entitled Rain of Iron and Ice and Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth. In this latter volume, he writes:

The 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. … [W]e are forced to conclude that the complex behavior of smaller bodies is closely relevant to the threat actually experienced by contemporary civilization.

Based on the data he collected, Lewis noted that:

[O]n the century time scale, firestorm ignition and direct blast damage by rare, strong, deeply penetrating bodies are the most common threats to human life, with average fatality rates of about 250 people per year. … On a 1000-year scale, the most severe single event, which is usually a 10 to 100 megaton Tunguska-type airburst, accounts for most of the total fatalities. On longer time scales, regional impact-triggered tsunamis become the most dangerous events. …The exact impactor threshold size for global effects remains poorly determined. […]

Perhaps most interesting is the implication that the 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. [Lewis, 1999]

Unfortunately, Prof. Lewis did not have to hand the information presented by Mike Baillie in his book New Light on the Black Death, nor did he consider the global events of 12000 years ago revealed by the work of maverick scientists, Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith. If he had added the estimated numbers of fatalities from those events into his calculations, it might not have decided that the small, faint, and numerous bodies were so easily ignored. I think that if ALL the data were plugged in, the average deaths per year would be a lot higher than 250. Regarding impacts from history, Lewis writes in Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth:

Many ancient sources from many cultures treat comets as literal, physical harbingers of doom. Such phenomena as the burning of cities and the overthrow of buildings and walls by aerial events are mentioned many times in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chinese records, but there is no evidence of physical understanding of the nature of the bombarding objects or their effects until quite recently. […]

There is indeed a language problem in understanding the ancient reports, but it is largely a matter of the lack of an appropriate technical vocabulary in the older writings. […] In certain locations and periods, especially in medieval Europe, all unusual heavenly events were interpreted as signs sent by God. Therefore, the surviving accounts are strongly biased toward explaining the moral purpose of these events, not their physical nature. Such fundamental information as exact date and time, exact location, place of appearance of the phenomenon in the sky, its duration and physical extent, luminosity, precise nature of the damage done, and the like were generally regarded as unimportant, and therefore rarely recorded for posterity. […] Even in 20th century newspapers, bolide explosions may be described (and indexed) as "mysterious explosions," aerial blasts, aerolites, aeroliths, bolides, earthquakes, fireballs, meteorites, meteors, shocks, thunder, and so on. […]

Reports of meteorite falls, often with consequent damage, extend back to the fall of a "thunderstone" in Crete in 1478 BC, described by Malchus in the Chronicle of Paros. The earliest Biblical source is the account of a lethal fall of stones in … Joshua 10:11. […]

Other ancient reports in the West are found in the writings of Pausanius, Plutarch, Livy, Pindar, Valerius Maximus, Caesar, and many others. The report of a great fall of black dust at Constantinople in 472 BC, perhaps the result of a high-altitude airburst, is documented by Procopius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Theophanes, and others.

Colonel S. P. Worden has called to my attention the following passage in The History of the Franks, written by Bishop Gregory of Tours:

"580 AD in Louraine, one morning before the dawning of the day, a great light was seen crossing the heavens, falling toward the east. A sound like that of a tree crashing down was heard over all the countryside, but it could surely not have been any tree, since it was heard more than fifty miles away… the city of Bordeaux was badly shaken by an earthquake … a supernatural fire burned down villages about Bordeaux. It took hold so rapidly that houses and even threshing-floors with all their grain were burned to ashes. Since there was absolutely no other visible cause of the fire, it must have happened by divine will. The city of Orleans also burned with so great a fire that even the rich lost almost everything."

Astronomers who have sought documentary evidence of ancient astronomical phenomena (eclipses, comets, fireballs, etc.) have found that East Asian records are far superior to European records for many centuries. Kevin Yau has searched Chinese records and found many reports of deaths and injuries (Yau et al., 1994). The Chinese records of lethal impact events include the death of 10 victims from a meteorite fall in 616 AD, an "iron rain" in the O-chia district in the 14th century that killed people and animals, several soldiers injured by the fall of a "large star" in Ho-t’ao in 1369, and many others. The most startling is a report of an event in early 1490 in Ch’ing-yang, Shansi, in which many people were killed when stones "fell like rain." Of the three known surviving reports of this event, one says that "over 10,000 people" were killed, and one says that "several tens of thousands" were killed.

On 14 September 1511, a meteorite fall in Cremona, Lombardy, Italy, reportedly killed a monk, several birds, and a sheep. In the 17th century we find reports of a monk in Milano, Italy, who was struck by a meteorite that severed his femoral artery, causing him to bleed to death, and of two sailors killed on shipboard by a meteorite fall in the Indian Ocean.

In addition to these shipboard fatalities, there have been several striking accounts of near disasters involving impacts very close to ships. Near midnight of 24 February 1885, at a latitude of 37 degrees N and a longitude of 170 degrees 15 minutes E in the North Pacific, the crew of the barque Innerwich, en route from Japan to Vancouver, saw the sky turn fiery red: "A large mass of fire appeared over the vessel, completely blinding the spectators; and, as it fell into the sea some 50 yards to leeward, it caused a hissing sound, which was heard above the blast, and made the vessel quiver from stem to stem. Hardly had this disappeared, when a lowering mass of white foam was seen rapidly approaching the vessel. The noise from the advancing volume of water is described as deafening. The barque was struck flat aback; but, before there was time to touch a brace, the sails had filled again, and the roaring white sea had passed ahead."

A strikingly similar event occurred only 2 years later on the opposite side of the world. Captain C.D. Swart of the Dutch barque J.P.A. reported in the American Journal of Meteorology 4 (1887) that, when sailing at 37 degrees 39 minutes N and 57degrees W, at about 5 pm on 19 March 1887, during a severe storm in which it was "as dark as night above," two brilliant fireballs appeared as in a sea of fire. One bolide "fell into the water very close alongside the vessel with a roar, and caused the sea to make tremendous breakers which swept over the vessel. A suffocating atmosphere and perspiration ran down every person’s face on board and caused everyone to gasp for fresh air. Immediately after this, solid lumps of ice fell on deck, and everything on deck and in the rigging became iced, notwithstanding that the thermometer registered 19 degrees C."

On 20 August 1907, the steamship Cambrian arrived in Boston from England with an equally extraordinary tale to tell. When the ship was several hundred miles south of Cape Race, Newfoundland, steaming along under a clear sky, a brilliant fireball appeared near the northeastern horizon and "rushed across the sky like a rocket. The next moment it passed over the topmast of the liner with a tremendous roar and plowed up the sea about fifty yards from the boat. The upheaval of the water was terrific, but the ship was not damaged." The report of this event was carried in the New York Times.

Next, according to the Times, on 13 September 1930, a fireball plunged into the sea near Eureka, California, barely missing the tug Humboldt, which was towing the Norwegian motorship Childar out to sea. It requires little imagination to appreciate that such an event, if it were to strike a ship, should easily cause fatalities, or even the loss of the vessel with all hands. [Lewis, 1999]

Now, that just gives you a taste of what is to come. (I would like you to notice the highlighted mention of the fall of chunks of ice.) So, without further ado, here is:

THE LIST: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls

10,000 - 11,000 B.C. - The earliest disaster we know of from our historical or mythic records is, of course, the legendary Deluge of Atlantis. The description of the end of Atlantis given by Plato in the "Timaeus" and "Critias" dialogues bears striking resemblance to what many scientists are now agreed would be the inevitable result of an oceanic impact by a disintegrating comet or large asteroid. The resultant ‘tsunami’, or tidal waves, would easily reach 2000 ft. high as they approached land, wiping out any and all coastal settlements. The deluge traditions, of which there are literally hundreds worldwide, appear in this light to be variations on Plato’s account, and could even be actual observation-based tales, eye-witness accounts of the same, or similar, events. This is very likely the event discussed by Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith in The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture. As I have discussed in my book, The Secret History of the World, the North and South American continents in the Western Hemisphere fit all the descriptions of "Atlantis," and it is very likely that the event that led to the extinction of about 30 species of large mammals about 12,000 years ago was the source of the legends of Atlantis and probably the legends of a global deluge: Noah’s Flood. Let’s look at some descriptions of what such an event can do.

Back in the 1940s Dr. Frank C. Hibben, Prof. of Archeology at the University of New Mexico led an expedition to Alaska to look for human remains. He didn’t find human remains; he found miles and miles of icy muck just packed with mammoths, mastodons, and several kinds of bison, horses, wolves, bears and lions. Just north of Fairbanks, Alaska, the members of the expedition watched in horror as bulldozers pushed the half-melted muck into sluice boxes for the extraction of gold. Animal tusks and bones rolled up in front of the blades "like shavings before a giant plane". The carcasses were found in all attitudes of death, most of them "pulled apart by some unexplainable prehistoric catastrophic disturbance."[Hibben, Frank, The Lost Americans (New York: Thomas & Crowell Co. 1946)]

The killing fields stretched for literally hundreds of miles in every direction.[ibid.] There were trees and animals, layers of peat and moss, twisted and tangled and mangled together as though some Cosmic mixmaster sucked them all in circa 12000 years ago, and then froze them instantly into a solid mass. [Sanderson, Ivan T., "Riddle of the Frozen Giants", Saturday Evening Post, No. 39, January 16, 1960.]

Just north of Siberia entire islands are formed of the bones of Pleistocene animals swept northward from the continent into the freezing Arctic Ocean. One estimate suggests that some ten million animals may be buried along the rivers of northern Siberia. Tho