Last year on the 4th of July we drove down to the local mall to watch the fireworks display. We bought boxed dinners from Colonel Sanders, and listened to Vivaldi as the evening sky was transformed into a Cosmic Fairyland of Magic and Mystery. Little did we know, it would be the last Fourth of July we would celebrate. Seven months later, we were on a plane, leaving the U.S. - probably forever - and as I took my last look at the country of my birth, my heart was heavy with the awareness of what is very likely in the future for the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

What do I mean?

On May 13, I wrote a bit on the Planet X Hoax: Will the world end on Thursday? As I noted at the end of this commentary: "The dogs are barking, but they are barking up the wrong tree."

For so many years we have heard about "End of the World" hoaxes and panics that it is becoming rather tiresome and tedious. When was the last time you heard about the Photon Belt nonsense? That one was pretty popular for awhile. Kept everybody going like crazy while dozens of folks made lots of bux off books and "ascension" courses to help people survive the "enlightening" of the planet.

Well, the "photon belt" apparently fizzled... and then the Hale Bopp Frenzy cranked up leading to some mass suicides and a general air of paranoia all over. What a lot of people didn't notice was that there were some extremely strange things going on here on the Big Blue Marble while Hale Bopp was decorating our skies - the weather was changing dramatically and Europe experienced what was called "The Flood of the Millennium." One has to wonder if the Hale Bopp affair was not just another form of distraction away from what was really going on - sort of a Cosmic O.J. Simpson trial?

After Hale Bopp Flopped, the Planet X Panic got its motor warmed up and Nancy Leider - deluded or a con artist, who can say? - may be facing some lawsuits for leading people astray with that one. Most certainly, our researches into secret government mind control projects suggest that Nancy and others are really not to blame for their lunacy: it is planned and deliberate.

Of course, all the while that was going on, the political world was going crazy and we are now sitting on a planet that is like a powder keg just waiting for somebody to casually light a cigarette...

The thing that has exercised us the most in the Signs Newsroom is the apparent apathy of those who might be able to actually DO something to halt the juggernaut of Global Destruction that is stalking our planet. In this context, we have discussed, at some length, the observations of Richard Dolan in his book UFOs and the National Security State. In my review of this book I wrote:

Those of you who have read the Adventures Series are already familiar with the research we have done tracking "who's on first" on the planet. Some of the most disturbing material we found was the fact that American Tax dollars - or maybe Black Ops dollars - are being used to research how to kill the largest number of people with the least amount of energy output. There is also something that is called "maximum sustainable human population" and one wonders what connection the two ideas have to one another.

Getting back to the problem of apathy. In addition to the controls that must be exerted on government officials around the planet so that there is no real high level opposition to the current madness, there is the fact that the different masses of humanity seem to operate at varying levels of sleep. This may be a function of mind control project implementation. The group that seems to be most deeply asleep are Americans as a whole, though there are exceptions. Those Americans who ARE awake seem to have a better handle on what is going on in the U.S. than Europeans who generally just see George Bush as the village idiot trying to dominate the world. At least, the awake Americans see the REAL problem as the emergence of dangerous Fascism that seeks not merely to dominate, but literally to take over and RULE the world.

Or so it seems...

Neverthless, this apathy problem is troubling. We can, of course, suggest that many Americans are awake and seeing through the propaganda and lies - and that the only reason we don't know about them is due to the fact that the mass media consistently and deliberately filters out any reports of activism as a means of depriving other activists of psychological support and a feeling of solidarity. But I still can't get over the sensation that somehow, ignoring it and hoping it will go away is the reaction of choice.

The other morning, I woke up with the thought circling around in my head: The present global craziness is like a Trojan Horse - a vehicle that carries the instruments of destruction. So many people are like a deer paralyzed in the hunter's headlights - fascinated by the display and completely unaware of the destruction that is imminent.

This thought did not appear out of nowhere and for no reason. It was the result of many days of deep thinking and discussions here at Signs Central. What initiated those discussions is what I want to talk about here: the possibility of global destruction in the wings and that the political machinations on the planet are designed to divert our attention from the clues and signs that this is imminent.

As we have noted in the Signs of the Times commentary numerous times: it seems that the absolutely outrageous behavior of the Bush Criminals who have effected a coup d'etat in America, as well as the staged reactions from the leaders of other countries around the planet, is grounded in a firm conviction that they will never have to pay for their crimes. Their behavior is disquietingly similar to the actions of a conscienceless individual who has been told that he is in the final stages of a terminal disease.

If that is the case, what could it be that gives them the confidence to simply not care that their raping, pillaging and plundering of the planet is becoming obvious to even the dimmest lightbulbs in the carton?

Regular readers of this Website are aware of our researches into the problem of cyclic extinctions. Most generally, this is attributed to a "Pole Shift."

The Pole Shift idea was described as the "ultimate disaster" by John White in his book appropriately entitled Pole Shift. White listed numerous psychic prophecies that are clearly describing a Pole Shift and attempted to relate them to scientific ideas. One source claims that the Hawaiian Islands will rise and become peaks of a great mountain chain on a new continent that will rise in the Pacific. Another source predicts that the Hawaiian Islands will sink beneath the sea. Such contradictions among psychics are often handily explained with the "branching universe" theory with a twist: both are true, they just refer to different periods of future history.

As it turned out, most of the psychic predictions analyzed by John White concerned the period right around the year 2,000. Well, it has come and gone, the pole didn't flip, and we are still here.

The fact that the Earth's magnetic poles have changed many times in "history" is now a well accepted scientific fact. But this actually says nothing at all about the planet itself "flipping." It just signifies a reversal of the magnetic field. As we now know, the Sun reverses its magnetic field regularly and cyclically with no apparent cataclysmic effects. So, a simple reversal of the magnetic field cannot be used in support of a physical and literal "Pole Shift."

In the end, the chief problem of all the "End of the World" theories is that of the "trigger mechanism." What is driving the machine?

In order to form any ideas about a "trigger," it is important to try to sort out the data that we can get and decide if a Pole Shift is even possible and if so, is it a gradual, Uniformitarian event, or if it is sudden and cataclysmic.

It is commonly accepted among scientists nowadays that there is a "cycle of extinction." However, until recently, they continued to attempt to put it off so far into the past and future that it could not possibly concern our present civilization. It is only fairly recently that hints and clues have begun to emerge into public awareness - a sort of "testing the waters" - though, as usual, there is much back and forth debate. Generally, those who say that cyclic extinctions DO happen - and rather frequently - generally approach the subject from the point of view of collecting and presenting data. The naysayers generally approach the subject from the point of view of "explaining away" the data as being "faulty" or "misunderstood." They also tend to get emotional and attack the personalities of those who present data. Still, more and more facts, data, confirmable information, keep coming to light. In particular, consider the following extracted from my book The Secret History of The World:

Something catastrophic happened to the large mammals roaming the world during the Pleistocene Epoch. Woolly mammoths, mastodons, toxodons, sabre-toothed tigers, woolly rhinos, giant ground sloths, and many other large Pleistocene animals are simply no longer with us. The fact is, more than 200 species of animals completely disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene approximately 12,000 years ago in what is known to Paleontologists as the "Pleistocene Extinction."

At the same time that the paleontologists are dealing with the unsettling notion of such a recent mass death, geologists are confronted with the evidence of terrifying geological changes which took place: extensive volcanism and earthquakes, tidal waves, glacial melting, rising sea levels, and so on. The Pleistocene Epoch didn't end with a whimper, for sure. It went out roaring and thundering.

Geologists and Paleontologists don't like catastrophism - it keeps them up at night. They fought long and hard against the Catastrophists. But in the present day, scientists in both fields are having to face the fact that the Catastrophists were mostly right from the beginning - even if they might have gone overboard and explained everything in terms of catastrophe. It is evident that there are "gradual" changes, but that most of what happens on the Big Blue Marble in terms of significant changes, is catastrophic.

One of the major facts that both paleontologists and geologists and archaeologists have had to face is the stupendous number of frozen carcasses in Canada and Alaska in the western areas, and in Northern Russian and Siberia in the eastern areas - all dated to about 12000 years ago. This suggests, of course, that something dreadful happened on the planet, and its effect on the Northern hemisphere was more severe than on the Southern hemisphere.

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, 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."

The evident violence of the deaths of these masses of animals, combined with the stench of rotting flesh was almost unendurable both in seeing it, and in considering what might have caused it. The killing fields stretched for literally hundreds of miles in every direction. 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 12000 years ago, and then froze them instantly into a solid mass.

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. Thousands upon thousands of tusks created a massive ivory trade for the master carvers of China; all from the frozen mammoths and mastodons of Siberia. The famous Beresovka mammoth first drew attention to the preserving properties of being quick-frozen when buttercups were found in its mouth.

What kind of terrible event overtook these millions of creatures in a single day? Well, the evidence suggests an enormous tsunami raging across the land, tumbling animals and vegetation together, to be finally quick-frozen for the next 12000 years. But the extinction was not limited to the Arctic, even if the freezing preserved the evidence of Natures rage.

Paleontologist George G. Simpson considers the extinction of the Pleistocene horse in North America to be one of the most mysterious episodes in zoological history, confessing that "no one knows the answer." He is also honest enough to admit that there is the larger problem of the extinction of many other species in America at the same time . The horse, giant tortoises living in the Caribbean, the giant sloth, the sabre-toothed tiger, the glyptodont and toxodon. These were all tropical animals. These creatures didn't die because of the "gradual onset" of an ice age, "unless one is willing to postulate freezing temperatures across the equator, such an explanation clearly begs the question."

Massive piles of mastodon and sabre-toothed tiger bones were discovered in Florida. Mastodons, toxodons, giant sloths and other animals were found in Venezuela quick-frozen in mountain glaciers. Woolly rhinoceros, giant armadillos, giant beavers, giant jaguars, ground sloths, antelopes and scores of other entire species were all totally wiped out at the same time, at the end of the Pleistocene, approximately 12000 years ago.

This event was global. The mammoths of Siberia became extinct at the same time as the giant rhinoceros of Europe; the mastodons of Alaska, the bison of Siberia, the Asian elephants and the American camels. It is obvious that the cause of these extinctions must be common to both hemispheres, and that it was not gradual. A "Uniformitarian glaciation" would not have cause extinctions, because the various animals would have simply migrated to better pasture.

What is seen is a surprising event of uncontrolled violence. In other words, 12000 years ago, a time we have stumbled across again and again in our researches, something terrible happened - so terrible that life on earth was nearly wiped out in a single day.

Harold P. Lippman admits that the magnitude of fossils and tusks encased in the Siberian permafrost present an "insuperable difficulty" to the theory of uniformitarianism, since no gradual process can result in the preservation of tens of thousands of tusks and whole individuals, "even if they died in winter." Especially when many of these individuals have undigested grasses and leaves in their belly. Pleistocene geologist William R. Farrand of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, who is opposed to catastrophism in any form, states: "Sudden death is indicated by the robust condition of the animals and their full stomachs … the animals were robust and healthy when they died." Unfortunately, in spite of this admission, this poor guy seems to have been incapable of facing the reality of worldwide catastrophe represented by the millions of bones deposited all over this planet right at the end of the Pleistocene. Hibben sums up the situation in a single statement: "The Pleistocene period ended in death. This was no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period which fizzled to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all inclusive."

The conclusion is, that the end of the Ice Age, the Pleistocene extinction, the end of the Upper Paleolithic, Magdalenian, Perigordian, and so on, all came to a global, catastrophic conclusion about 12000 years ago. And, as it happens, even before this evidence was brought to light, this is the same approximate date that Plato gave for the sinking of Atlantis. Coincidence?

On the outskirts of Brno, Moravia, there is a quarry where workers uncovered the bones of a woolly mammoth. There, in the quarry, was discovered a 160 foot deep sequence of multiple soil cycles. Each climate cycle from warm to cold was expressed as a sequence of gradational soil types reflecting the change from a moist, deciduous forest to an arid, frozen tundra, cracked by deeply penetrating permafrost. Midway through each cycle, there are numerous bands of fine windblown dust delivered in what must have been monstrous storms of continental scale. Expert speculations suggest that this dust must have shrouded the earth for weeks or months at a time and must have produced a refrigerating effect on Europe's climate. In the colder part of each cycle, the environment had become so dry that even large rivers dried up.

It seems that the ice sheets that repeatedly advanced southward were accompanied by the development of vast, but temporary deserts throughout Russia and Ukraine, even extending into southeast Europe and to the shores of the Black Sea. Every passage back from freezing cold to warm was abrupt in every cycle.

Oceanographers from Turkey, Russia, Bulgaria and the United States teamed up to explore the Black Sea. Using sound waves and coring devices, they discovered that the Black Sea was once a vast freshwater lake. Glenn Jones of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution dated the samples from the bottom of the Black Sea and confirmed that around 7,500 years ago, the seas had burst through the Bosporus valley and the salt water of the Mediterranean poured into the lake with unimaginable force. What was evident was that it had happened suddenly and almost instantaneously. What was also noted was that the massive amounts of salt water pouring into the Black Sea had been deficient in Oxygen.

This rather dramatic description from the back of Otto Muck's book - The Secret of Atlantis - is based on his ideas about the causal relationship between isotherms and favorable climate in northwestern Europe, and the unobstructed flow of the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic. Muck tries to use this flow to make a case for the prior existence of a large body of land in the Atlantic whose subsidence changed the ocean currents and warmed the British Isles about 10,500 years ago, give or take a day or two. Based on a varied and interesting collection of hard data, Muck suggests that the submarine massif of the Azores was once above water and could have blocked and deflected the Gulf Stream, preventing the circulation of the warmer waters, and thus contributing to the freezing temperatures of the British Isles.

There are other solutions to the problem of the isotherms including current day research showing that this can result from global warming. While we don't deny that it's possible for such severe lithosphere disruption as Muck suggests to occur, and we aren't playing soft with the idea of mass destruction of species, it just seems that an event that would produce the sinking of so vast a body of land so completely would be an event from which absolutely nothing on the earth would survive.

Nevertheless, Otto Muck draws our attention to the meteor craters in the Carolinas. The Carolina bays are mysterious land features often filled with bay trees and other wetland vegetation. Because of their oval shape and consistent orientation, they are considered by some authorities to be the result of a vast meteor shower that occurred approximately 12,000 years ago. What is most astonishing is the number of them. There are over 500,000 of these shallow basins dotting the coastal plain from Georgia to Delaware. That is a frightening figure.

Let me repeat: there are over 500,000 of these shallow basins.

Unlike virtually any other bodies of water or changes in elevation, these topographical features follow a reliable and unmistakable pattern. Carolina Bays are circular, typically stretched, elliptical depressions in the ground, oriented along their long axis from the Northwest to the Southeast. [T]hey are further characterized by an elevated rim of fine sand surrounding the perimeter. […]

Robert Kobres, an independent researcher in Athens, Georgia, has studied Carolina Bays for nearly 20 years in conjunction with his larger interest in impact threats from space. His recent, self-published, investigations have profound consequences for Carolina Bay study and demand research by academia as serious, relevant and previously unexamined new information. The essence of Kobres' theory is that the search for "debris," and the comparison of Bays with "traditional" impact craters, falsely and naively assumes that circular craters with extraterrestrial material in them are the only terrestrial evidence of past encounters with objects entering earth's atmosphere.

Kobres goes a logical step further by assuming that forces associated with incoming bodies, principally intense heat, should also leave visible signatures on the earth. And, finally, that physics does not demand that a "collision" of the bodies need necessarily occur to produce enormous change on earth. To verify that such encounters are possible outside of the physics lab, we need look no further than the so-called "Tunguska event."

On June 30, 1908, in the vicinity of the Tunguska River deep in Siberia, a tremendous explosion instantly leveled 2000 sq. km. of tundra, felling trees by the millions, all left pointing outward from a central area. News accounts of the day told of Londoners being able to read newspapers from the glow of the night sky for days afterward. Seismographs worldwide recorded an apparent cataclysm in Siberia. Unfortunately (or fortunately as the case may be) the explosion had occurred in an area so remote, and during a time of such political turmoil, that no researcher pinpointed or even managed to travel to the suspected impact site for more than two decades. Not until pioneer Russian meteoritic researcher Leonard Kulik managed to gain entry to the inhospitable area in 1927, did anyone but local tribesmen view the devastation and its peculiar nature.

At the epicenter of the explosion lay not a large crater with a "rock" in it, as might be expected, but nothing more than a number of "neat oval bogs." The Tunguska literature generally mentions the bogs only in passing, since Kulik failed in digs there to locate any evidence of a meteorite and went on to examine other aspects of the explosion.

Now, let's look at another item: Radiocarbon dates for Pleistocene remains in northeastern North America are as much as 10,000 years younger in the western part of the country.[…] Materials from the Gainey Paleoindian site in Michigan, radiocarbon dated at 2880 yr BC, are given an age by TL dating of 12,400 BC. It seems that there are so many anomalies reported in the upper US and in Canada of this type, that they cannot be explained by ancient aberrations in the atmosphere or other radiocarbon reservoirs, nor by contamination of data samples. […]

Our research indicates that the entire Great Lakes region (and beyond) was subjected to particle bombardment and a catastrophic nuclear irradiation that produced secondary thermal neutrons from cosmic ray interactions. The neutrons produced unusually large quantities of Pu239 and substantially altered the natural uranium abundance ratios […] Sharp increases in C14 are apparent in the marine data at 4,000, 32,000-34,000, and 12,500 BC. These increases are coincident with geomagnetic excursions. […] The enormous energy released by the catastrophe at 12,500 BC could have heated the atmosphere to over 1000 C over Michigan, and the neutron flux at more northern locations would have melted considerable glacial ice. Radiation effects on plants and animals exposed to the cosmic rays would have been lethal, comparable to being irradiated in a 5 megawatt reactor more than 100 seconds.

The overall pattern of the catastrophe matches the pattern of mass extinction before Holocene times. The Western Hemisphere was more affected than the Eastern, North America more than South America, and eastern North America more than western North America. Extinction in the Great lakes area was more rapid and pronounced than elsewhere. Larger animals were more affected than smaller ones, a pattern that conforms to the expectation that radiation exposure affects large bodies more than smaller ones. [Firestone, Richard B., Topping, William, Terrestrial Evidence of a Nuclear Catastrophe in Paleoindian Times, dissertation research, 1990 - 2001.]

The evidence of a Nuclear Catastrophe of course, begs the question as to what caused it? Firestone and Topping try to assign it to the effects of a Supernova. However, it stragely evokes Plato's story of Atlantis which says that there was a war between superpowers just prior to a global cataclysm.

Timaeus and Critias, written by Plato some time around 360 BC are the only existing written records which specifically refer to Atlantis. The dialogues are conversations between Socrates, Hermocrates, Timaeus, and Critias. Apparently in response to a prior talk by Socrates about ideal societies, Timaeus and Critias agree to entertain Socrates with a tale that is "not a fiction but a true story."

The story is about the conflict between the ancient Athenians and the Atlanteans 9000 years before Plato's time. Knowledge of the ancient times was apparently forgotten by the Athenians of Plato's day, and the form the story of Atlantis took in Plato's account was that it was conveyed to Solon by Egyptian priests. Solon passed the tale to Dropides, the great-grandfather of Critias. Critias learned of it from his grandfather also named Critias, son of Dropides.

Plato described Atlantis as an "island empire" that "in a single day… disappeared in the depths of the sea." But he also tells us that this "island" was bigger than Libya and Asia Minor combined. Right away we perceive that his terms are a bit different from what we would use. We might think that his term "island," meant simply that this body of land was not connected to Eurasia or Africa - that it was a distinct body of land surrounded by water - except for something else he added: Plato also told us that Atlantis was "the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent." This suggests to us an unusual land formation - an isthmus.

His expression that it "disappeared into the depths of the sea" was probably meant to suggest that it was swept by vast tsunamis as the result of some cataclysmic event. So, considering these clues - its vast size, the definition of the term "navigable," and the idea that "disappearing into the depths of the sea" very likely meant swept by terrifying walls of water, let take a peek through the Pillars of Hercules. What do we see? Well, we see the Americas. We see North and South America connected by an isthmus. We also see a lot of little islands in the Caribbean.

Another clue that Plato gives us is that Atlantis had a lot of elephants. What was it Professor Hibben found in Alaska? Miles of Elephant carcases.

Over and over again we find these odd clues that point to an ancient civilization that existed something over ten thousand years ago. There has been a raging controversy for generations between pro-Atlanteans and anti-Atlanteans about this. There seem to be sufficient archaeological remains to justify a serious scientific study based on such a hypothesis. Archaeology and ethnology, being observational sciences, and not experimental sciences, have built their entire framework upon the study of those remains. And when we look closely at the array of discoveries in those fields, we discover bits and pieces of cultures of almost unspeakable age. The fact that Uniformitarian science barely allows the idea of cataclysmic destruction to be part of the hypothesis cripples archaeologists and, in the end, may make fools of them all.

Without the algorithm of cyclic cataclysm, archaeologists cannot fully understand what they observe, nor can they explain the anomalies here and there, and the lack of other evidence that ought to be here and there (if one assumes great antiquity of civilization with no cataclysms). The fact seems to be that, what does continue to exist in terms of archaeological remains from times before 7,000 or more years ago, have been subjected to geological and cosmic cataclysms of almost incomprehensible violence and few major relics remain for perusal. Those few, however, are cast aside as the anomalies of archaeology and ethnology, and their very existence is buried or denied in efforts to avoid toppling the house of cards so laboriously established by those sciences.

Nevertheless, we find that all over the globe, with few exceptions, these studies break down almost completely right around 7,000 to 10,000 BC, at which point they meet with what mathematician call a "discontinuity." Immediately after this discontinuity, all of the hot-spots of ancient civilization that archaeologists accept as valid suddenly appear with no indication of gradual, Uniformitarian development. What is more, there seems to be considerable indication that these developments were degenerate remnants of something already lost in the mists of antiquity.

Entire libraries of books have been written demonstrating this antiquity of man and his civilizations, but it has not yet been accepted, even in principle, by any branch of science. The scientific thought police oppose any type of cataclysmic change in the structure of the earth and will go to any extremes to avoid coming to grips with its evidence.

Or perhaps the REAL problem is that someone HAS come to grips with the evidence - they just aren't letting it out to the public - even at the higher levels of government.

In addition to what might be termed more "ancient" cometary events, every day more and more data comes forward to demonstrate that they occur with frightening frequency that should give us pause. The following news item caught my eye recently:

Robert Matthews Science Correspondent, The Telegraph - London 11-4-1

Scientists have found the first evidence that a devastating meteor impact in the Middle East might have triggered the mysterious collapse of civilisations more than 4,000 years ago.

Studies of satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed a two-mile- wide circular depression which scientists say bears all the hallmarks of an impact crater. If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs.

Today's crater lies on what would have been shallow sea 4,000 years ago, and any impact would have caused devastating fires and flooding.

The catastrophic effect of these could explain the mystery of why so many early cultures went into sudden decline around 2300 BC.

They include the demise of the Akkad culture of central Iraq, with its mysterious semi-mythological emperor Sargon; the end of the fifth dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom, following the building of the Great Pyramids and the sudden disappearance of hundreds of early settlements in the Holy Land.

Until now, archaeologists have put forward a host of separate explanations for these events, from local wars to environmental changes. Recently, some astronomers have suggested that meteor impacts could explain such historical mysteries.

The crater's faint outline was found by Dr Sharad Master, a geologist at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, on satellite images of the Al 'Amarah region, about 10 miles northwest of the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates and home of the Marsh Arabs.

"It was a purely accidental discovery," Dr Master told The Telegraph last week. "I was reading a magazine article about the canal-building projects of Saddam Hussein, and there was a photograph showing lots of formations - one of which was very, very circular."

Detailed analysis of other satellite images taken since the mid-1980s showed that for many years the crater contained a small lake.

The draining of the region, as part of Saddam's campaign against the Marsh Arabs, has since caused the lake to recede, revealing a ring- like ridge inside the larger bowl-like depression - a classic feature of meteor impact craters.

The crater also appears to be, in geological terms, very recent. Dr Master said: "The sediments in this region are very young, so whatever caused the crater-like structure, it must have happened within the past 6,000 years."

[...]

The discovery of the crater has sparked great interest among scientists.

Dr Benny Peiser, who lectures on the effects of meteor impacts at John Moores University, Liverpool, said it was one of the most significant discoveries in recent years and would corroborate research he and others have done.

He said that craters recently found in Argentina date from around the same period - suggesting that the Earth may have been hit by a shower of large meteors at about the same time.

EARTH BATTERED THROUGH HISTORY BY COMETS

Published Tuesday, August 17, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury News

BY ROBERT S. BOYD Mercury News Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Recent scientific discoveries are shedding new light on why great empires such as Egypt, Babylon and Rome fell apart, giving way to the periodic "dark ages" that punctuate human history.

At least five times during the last 6,000 years, major environmental calamities undermined civilizations around the world. Some researchers say these disasters appear to be linked to collisions with comets or fragments of comets like the one that broke apart and smashed spectacularly into Jupiter five years ago this summer.

The impacts, yielding many megatons of explosive energy, produced vast clouds of smoke and dust that circled the globe for years, dimming the sun, driving down temperatures and sowing hunger, disease and death. [...]

The last such global crisis occurred between AD 530 and 540 -- at the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe -- when Earth was pummeled by a swarm of cosmic debris. [...]

Researchers say similar environmental calamities occurred around 3200 B.C., 2300 B.C., 1628 B.C. and 1159 B.C. Each led to the collapse of urban societies in widely scattered portions of the globe. [...]

Although the evidence is debated, a growing number of researchers contend that most, if not all, of these ecological disasters are connected to bombardments from space. [...]

"After an impact, the dense dust cloud that is created by the impact spreads through the atmosphere, cuts out sunlight," Rampino said. "This stops photosynthesis and causes the climate to get cold and dark, leading to the mass extinction of large numbers of organisms." [...]

NASA and the Air Force are searching for comets and asteroids that might be on a collision course with our planet. Fortunately, nothing of a dangerous size -- arbitrarily defined as more than a kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter -- has been spotted heading our way for at least a century. But astronomers say a major impact is inevitable.

"Earth is currently enjoying a quiescent period," said Robert Shoch, a Boston University geologist. "But around 2200 AD, it is likely (sic!) that a new flow of comet fragments will enter Earth-crossing orbits and pose a real threat to our planet.

For thousands of years, comets have been associated with disaster and misfortune. They are harbingers of plagues, earthquakes, floods, natural disasters and wars. In fact, the passing of a comet followed by war has been so frequent as to earn for comets the sobriquet "The Swords of Heaven." Tradition has assigned responsibility to comets for death and destructions, disease and decay, defeat and dissolution, the deaths of kings, and the fall of empires. It could be said that no celestial phenomenon is so widely and generally feared.

We come back now to seeking the source of the trigger mechanism. As I noted in my discussion of the related theories of Zecharia Sitchin:

The relative importance of an idea and the implications of the conclusions that can be drawn from that idea, ought to determine the level of attention given to the idea.  The fact is, the idea that something may be whacking through our solar system at periodic intervals is a concept of such importance that it simply cannot be overstated.  [...]

The fact that such events are cyclic - regular pulsings of extinction - suggests a single initiating factor. This issue of the cycle of this purported "return" is of the utmost importance. If we consider the remote possibility that this is going to happen, and if we are interested in human destiny, it behooves us to investigate whether or not there is a correlation between cyclical geologic changes in the earth's past and the future, and what that cycle might be. 

If we, for one second, think that there is even a one-percent possibility that such events are cyclic, and that we may be approaching such an event, we ought to be putting the whole force of all our science and all the great minds of our civilization into researching the matter. But we are NOT doing that. At least it is not being acknowledged as a real, possibly imminent threat by our world leaders, even while they behave as though the "End of the World" was coming and they are going to party hearty and fiddle while Rome burns.

Most of the theories of the "cause" of regular cyclic cometary showers have to do with something that "perturbs" the Oort cloud - a shell of comets that surrounds our solar system. Some of the ideas leading to this began as a result of observations of orbital anomalies in some of the outer planets.

Aberrations in the orbital motion of Neptune and Uranus have convinced many scientists that there is a strong likelihood that some kind of large body exists in solar space beyond Pluto and exerts strong gravitational attraction on the outermost planets and that it returns according to a regular cycle. 

In August of 1996, the Cassiopaeans brought to our attention the idea of our Sun having a "dark star companion" that is the "trigger" mechanism for cyclic cometary showers, including cataclysmic cometary bombardment of our planet by thousands or hundreds of thousands of cosmic missiles.

What the C's proposed was, as we later discovered, quite in line with scientific studies about the possibilities of our Sun having a companion. According to these theories, periodic comets were "bumped" into the solar system by a dark star, a "little brother" or "little sister" of our own Sun, which has a long, elliptical orbit measured, most likely, in millions of years.