Randall Carlson's Work: Striking similarities (Comets, Geology, Catastrophism etc.) through Decades of meticulous research?!

[Cosmos]

For anyone interested in catastrophism, geology, comets, ice ages, history, mythology, alchemy, Gurdjieff, huge floods and many other branches (to numerous to put into this post) of science and research, there is a person that was mentioned already in a couple of other threads in the forum named Randall Carlson , that might be of interest. See below for a short selection of the topics he is into for decades, and in most of those apparently pretty deeply and from where I stand so far, pretty much right on the money.

What will follow is rather long, so if you want to skip right to the concrete research, instead of a summary, you might want to skip to the posts I intend to do after this one. At the end of this post you will also find his websites and YouTube channels.

A warning at the beginning, it might be easy to dismiss the guy and what he presents „by throwing the baby out with the bathwater“, especially if one is inclined to be conspiracy minded about Freemasonry, especially high ranking Freemasons, such as he is (32 gegree since the late 70ies). You can have a look at what the C‘s said about Freemasonry and Freemasons, which doesn‘t quite fit with the run of the mill „if he is a Freemason he is evil and/or probably a Illuminati kind of person that runs the world, especially if he has a high rank“ nonsense. The C‘s even stated at one point that they are in contact with some Freemasons and that it is one of the oldest mystic traditions (over 5000 years old, if I remember correctly) that still exist to this day and has transmitted knowledge down relatively intact since then. The second thing that makes it easy to dismiss Carlson, is his „Sacred Geometry“ stuff.

We have also an already existing thread (which is in the Cointelpro Section, in which the writer also is amazed by the similarities to what we have found and is asking similar questions I did) from a person that stumbled on Randall's research years back and gave 4 possible reasons for why his research might so closely match ours. I would propose, from all I‘ve seen so far, that two other possible reason might be considered too, which I think could be more likely:

- Carlson has independently figured all of this out, and might indeed be unaware of Laura's work. Due to his seemingly outstanding ability to just follow the bare facts wherever they might lead, tossing out nonsense, combined with a huge amount of knowledge and interest in many field as a background, coupled with a pretty open non-dogmatic mind, he seems to have come to similar conclusions we have in a different way, which again might proof, that we are indeed on the right track. His Freemason background as well as his connection in the science world, to Gurdjieffs work, might have given him some crucial clues on what to look for as well. He has some friends that helped him with the research as well, at least over the last couple of years, although most of it seems to come from Randall personally, who pretty much seems to have synthesized a huge body of information in the science/book world out there, into something that closely matches our findings.

- Another possibility that might be connected with the above could be that he is channeling in some way, weather he realizes it or not

Let me just tell you, from having watched and studied what he says for quite a while now, it doesn‘t appear to me that he is a nutty person, quite the contrary in fact. His main principle that shows up in everything he does is the scientific method and he is very strict about that. He keeps his Geometry stuff pretty much separate from his other research, at least at the face of it. And what I‘ve looked at is manly all the other stuff he present that has nothing or little to do with his geometry stuff. So I can‘t really judge on the geometry stuff, to be honest. See more on that down in the list.

It also has to be said that the sheer amount of knowledge, insight and dot connecting he seems to have accumulated over more then 5 decades of his studies in so many fields, makes it hard to even know where to begin with this post. Sometimes I think he is some kind of knowledge vacuum cleaner since there is hardly any topic he doesn‘t seems to be quite knowledgeable about and I get the conrete sence that he really knows what he is talking about. He seems to have absorbed enormous amounts of informationin in many fields and connected the dots between them pretty well.

His conclusions and thinking very closely resemble what we have found out here through the help of the Network, Laura and the C's. Which is another point that makes it easy to be conspiracy minded about him.

The sad thing is, that most of his research so far hasn't been put into written form or books for that matter. He mentioned somewhere (one or two years ago) that he is working on a book, which hasn't materialized yet. He has a couple really good articles up on his websites though. Most of his stuff has only recently been available to the public, when he started to put out videos from some of his talks he held starting in 2006 or so towards his students, in front of a camera, and most recently by the appearance on the Joe Rogan podcasts. He was there a number of times since. In fact, those podcasts are a great starting point IMO to understand what he has researched. His first appearance on Rogan was a conscious decision from him, as he explained in there or elsewhere, to go that public route now through Joe's Podcast, to finally get it out to the public (2014 in the first Podcast with Rogan), since the "public as well as the scientists should critically asses his ideas in the spirit of scientific discovery" or something like that.

So those Podcasts will be in the first post below, to give a first overview.

By the way, by now I even get the slight impression, that at least some recent groundbreaking scientific discoveries/research (in the last couple of decades), that stirred up the science world, might have been inspired by Randall personally and his workings in the background for decades.

See below for more on that below and in the third post I intent to post (after this one) about a documentary called "Fire from the Sky" that was inspired by Randall's research and first aired on TV in 1997 and features a bunch of famous scientists and also a short section with Randall. Astounding that so few know about this documentary, or have watched it. I think that is essentially because of the content, which flies directly in the face of the commonly believed dogmas about Comets. I guess it was only aired once, because it was essentially too dangerous.

Since he seems to be so well versed and connected with the scientific community for decades (again see below) I think there are good grounds to the assumption that he might have played a crucial role in directing scientist to look certain ways to find answers and that this might have resulted at least in part in a number of new discoveries about comets, geology, catastrophism etc.

I intend to post one video presentation of him at a time after this post, in separate posts over the coming weeks and months. It is simply too much content and ideas otherwise. Those videos almost all date back to 2006 - 2009, so you should keep that in mind, since he probably has learned a thing or two since then. Since it is impossible to write this all down, I'm going to attempt to discuss specific articles and videos from Randall in detail as well, in those coming posts, so that you get a better picture of what the guy has gathered, which is in all cases (I've looked at) is very interesting and thought-provoking, to say the least.

Almost "anything" knowledge wise seems to be condensed into this one guy named Randall, so much so, that one really would like to have a brain share of that information from him. I wonder sometimes if he is some kind of polymath sometimes.

What follows is a pretty short summary-list of the stuff he has researched over the years, what his background is, what he has studied, what he is studying, where some faults may lie in his ideas and so on, that I gathered from what I've seen from his presentations and heard from his interviews. Most of it, is from notes I took while watching and listening to his lectures and interviews:

- He is a 32 degree Freemason since the end of the 70ies and has a lodge ever since

- He has a very pragmatic and scientific approach to everything. In fact, I've seldom seen it applied that well and carefully outhere

- He is an architect/builder of some sorts. He also earns his money with that, together with his brother-/s. They have a business running in that building area for many decades, which is also his primary source of income I think.

- He is into "sacred geometry" which might be a red flag. On the other hand, he is a strong opponent of new age nonsense and advocates for the scientific method in everything he does and gets into. And from what I have seen, that is very true. Having seen so many of his presentations about other topics (not about "Sacred Geometry", mind you!) it is hard for me to believe that he would approach that subject not with the same scientific integrity/thinking. Which confuses me quite a bit! In one interview he explained that "Sacred Geometry" isn't any kind of "woo woo nonsense" but actually similar to fractal stuff and that the name "Sacred" probably was inspired by the first great church builders (gothic cathedrals) in Europe, who incorporated universal geometric principles into their structures, in the way they build them. The "sacred" in "sacred geometry" therefore refers to those sacred buildings (namely churches) that employed said geometry principles, like the golden ratio, into their buildings etc. He is also a architect/builder of sorts, which might explain his fascination with geometry.

- He speaks from the Great work (although I think he means something a bit different than we do here)

- He seems to have studied Gurdjieff quite extensively

- He has very good articles up on in websites, for example about the CO2 Nonsense and topics like "mother goddess" culture, Clovis, comets, etc.

- He has read about 2-3 scientific papers over the last 4-5 decades everyday and studied them deeply and cross referenced everything. In topics such as geology, archeology, astronomy etc. Not just reading them, studying them and taking notes etc.

- He has a very well thought through and IMO the most logical explanation I've heard yet for the Atlantis that Plato mentioned (most of which is based on earlier research, which was, curiously enough, burried as soon as Uniformitarism entered Geology full blown) based on hard scientific findings and close examination of Plato's (and other) writings

- He has as a very fascinating series about the Carolina Bays, with a lot of stuff I heard for the first time

- He talked about possible mutations/evolutions through Comet-Bombardments

- He studied ice ages, mini ice ages and the maunder minimum quite extensively, with pretty interesting results

- He is an expert in the megafauna that roamed the earth during the ice age and also about their demise

- He knows a lot about Paleonology, since that was among his first passions in live (dinosaurs and such, for example)

- Among many of the things he is saying, that I was unaware of, was the Brazilian Tunguska type event in the 1930ies, if I remember correctly

- He has a fascinating Series on Tunguska, with stuff in there I've never seen anywhere else

- He thinks it is possible that great fires in cities an regions in the past (even pretty recently) were probably caused by smaller comet intrusions into the atmosphere and he tracks down how exactly and through which mechanisms that might have happened, both through eyewitniss accounts as well scientifically proven things

- He studies huge global tsunamis in recent past through geology and has made the striking argument (backed up almost irrefutably now) that the end of the last ice age was an act "in three stages" in which every stage was enormously catastrophic, if I remember correctly. At least one of those stages was probably triggered by one or several comets slamming into the ice sheets and creating humongous flood waves that flooded over america and possibly also other parts of the world. While another on of those events might have mainly involved ocean impacts. He is pretty sure all the evidence points to huge floods at the end of the last ice age, that changed everything in a matter of hours/days/weeks pretty much globally. Very interesting stuff.

- In 2006 - 2009 or so, he pointed out the accumalating evidence for a big comet/asteroid strike (burckle crater) that hit in the middle of the Indian Ocean (around 5000 years ago] and most likely caused at least 600 feet high waves all around the continents (see the following posts for more information on that)

- He hates the russia bashing and defamation of Putin

- He is very disappointed by the left today, of which he formally was part of, when he protested against the Vietnam war. He thinks what has become of the left is a disgrace, to put it mildly

- He said at some point (around 2006) that the most logical theory of all he has studied so far, on how ice ages might be triggered, is that of the idea that atmospheric dust loading, from comet debris, is causing it

- He is a good historian who likes to read originals and what words actually meant at the time when they were written and likes to get to the sources of those writings

- He also appears to be able to read ancient Latin, Greek etc, probably due to his intense interest in history

- He would like to see good relations with Russia and finds the Putin demonization silly. They should work together instead.

- He has very interesting book recommendations and appears to have read everything he could get a hand on for decades, not matter when it was published (he also talks a lot about very early science books and papers) and in what field of science and "fringe speculations" it is in

- He says he would be more than happy to share his sources and books with anyone that wants to research and get into contact with him

- He is keen to engage and talk to as many scientists as possible to learn more and get some good feedback on his ideas and research

- He has read many of the books we have read, including a lot more that we probably have not yet read. Very interesting stuff in there! Would be really interesting to ask him for a list of those!

- He doesn't seem to be aware of the plasma/electric role of things in the sky, or hasn't discussed it yet, maybe because he likes to stay on firm mainstream scientific ground most of the time. For example, he still thinks of comets as icy bodies while the main difference between them and Asteroids might reality be their electrical properties (see Pierres and Lauras book for that)

- He is in almost all cases a bit more into the mainstream "nuts and bolts" kind of science than into really out there stuff

- He is interested in metaphysics and UFOs and stuff in that direction, but rather likes to study more concrete things. He says for example something like, that the UFO field is just so full of nonsense that he hasn't yet had the inclination to look all to deeply into it and just sticking to the nuts and bolts stuff is already taking up his whole time anyway

- At one point (in some interview) it seemed like he thinks it is possible that past earthlings might be some of the "Aliens" out there today. That at least was the impression I got.

- He thinks that the notion of the Great year and many similar things, might be based on comet cycles. He makes really interesting arguments for this an similar things.

- He talks about Gnosis as well, in the original sense of the word from old Greek. His podcast, which only has two episodes, is also called by that name

- He is open to everything including the UFO phenomena and quantum stuff, metaphysics and so on, though he usually doesn't go there with his research, since as he says, he has already way to much on his plate by simply sticking to the "nuts and bolts" stuff.

- He is also aware of Edgar Cace's predictions and seems to think some of it might be at least useful inspiration for research. That at least was the impression I got.

- He mentioned the "Heinrich Event" and the "Ice age anomaly" among numerous other things, which I all have never heard before. All those things are scientifically proven phenomena, many of which still are a mystery.

- You learn A LOT about Geology, Archeology and many other fields when you watch his presentations. He has a fantastic way of presenting those things to laypersons, so that you can easily get and understand it

- He apparently has the idea that some if not many ancient traditions wanted to transmit crucial information to future generations about comet cycles, (through earthworks, ancient megalithic structures and so on) and moreover, to get "us in the future" to explore outer space and pack our stuff to go "off planet" to avoid or sit out the next major cataclysm, in order to later (when the worst is over) maybe "replenish" the earth. If I understood that correctly. Here we might also see his a bit too materialistic thinking at work, even though it isn't such a unlikely idea IMO that exactly this might have happened already during or before other catclysms in the past. Which also raises the question if some 3D Aliens out there might in fact be us (as in humans) from the past, who escaped earth for one reason or the other?!

- Many if not all ancient and/or long-standing tranditions have a substantial amount of comet/catastrophic imagery in them. He presents fascinating stuff there as well.

- He has interesting things to say about Clovis (and the older culture they discovered recently) where he went to the excavations of the lead archeologist (if I remember correctly) to discuss and learn things

- He also talks about meteorology, biology and similar stuff, although not so extensively, as far as I could see

- He had a very similar line of thinking as Pierre with his mammoth article already back in 2006 or thereabouts (when the presentation was filmed)

- He had to revise many ideas over the years when he was presented by new information

- He is familiar with Firestone, West, Mike Baillie and Co. and an apparently an enormous amount of other works

- Randall has discovered the 3 Stage Event (as he proposed in one video), at the end of the last ice age, independently of Firestone and co and Hancock who brought it to the public attention. It matched his research basically.

- He has studied the field of geology for so many decades in great detail, that he can be probably considered a far better geologist than most professionals out there. In fact, at times he finds himself in the situations, that he has to explain to geologist what geology is

- If you want a good crash curse in a wide variety of topics, you should watch his lectures

- He goes into the Ark story, maybe with a somewhat misguided materialistic conclusion

- He has apparently studied the bible quite extensively

- He has a series about Alchemy among which is the work of Fulcanelli

- He talks about his interpretation of the Holy Grail quest/mystery, in which again he might be coming to a somewhat misguided materialistic conclusion

- He thinks that Freemasonry is probably very old since very similar rites and practices were performed throughout history by people like the Zoroastrians etc. Would with what the C's said as well.

- He has yet to encounter a Freemason, even high ranking ones, who seem to know or understand much more than the average joe

- At one point he told a story that a famous astronaut came to his masonic lodge at one point (I think it was Edgar Mitchell, if I remember correctly), so it seems he has build quite some connections throughout the years, maybe partly because of his Freemason rank.

- Who knows who else he was in contact with over the years as well, besides all kinds of scientists?

- He thinks that a lot of the conspiracy theories that have evolved around the Freemasons are pure BS, to put it mildly

- He came to Freemasonry as most people do, because his father was a Freemason too

- He knows Zechariah Sitchin work and many other like him and knows that most of them went overboard into crazy land when attempting to form theories around what they saw

- He is familiar with Velikovsky and many other "fringe" stuff. Velikovsky was one of his main insperation to dig deeper early on.

- He talks often how exactly uniformitarism got started, with what exact geological writings, in what year, in what sentence, in what way certain "Scientist" very subtly twisted and defamed certain ideas and people, which all also seems to have been informed by Darwins strange/faulty ideas in many areas

- He loves references in books. When he read a book about pole shifts for example, he researched almost all the 300 or so references, by finding, reading and studying them, to get to a better understanding of this phenomena

- Randall sources everything and gives regularly credit to those researchers and scientist that discovered this or that part in his talks

- He has done many geological field trips himself, sometimes with and sometimes without geologist and other scientists

- He invites not only professional geological scientist to field trips and excavations, to a) know more about those topics and b) see and discuss things with them and c) more often than not, as it happens, explaining to them, what they obviously have missed here or there

- He is in contact with and went out with quite a number of big names in the archeology and geology business, to field trips and excavations for example, to understand more

- He can debate any geologist out there and "win" the well reasoned argument to his favor, since he frankly knows more than most if not all of them

- He has done an intensive study on the american earthwork builders, of which most is destroyed nowadays. Here also, I heard a lot of things that are fascinating and I never heard before

- He thinks that earth is bombarded by many different comet swarms in recurring cycles, often catastrophically, and this has shaped human history profoundly/catastrophically, right to the present day

- He is aware of the twin star hypothesis and that this might explain the comet inflow, although at the time (around 2006) he hadn't yet fully made his mind up what might actually be the case there, since there are also other competing ideas

- He apparently thinks we are in another comet bombardment cycle and that it is crucial now to "see the signs in the sky" rather than wallow in ignorance

- He apparently thinks that humanities focus on silly, ignorant and plain stupid stuff at this point in time, away from the bigger picture, will sooner or later turn out to be fatal for the human race, if we don't start to get to business and learn from the past

So, the above was the short version, I'm sure I've missed a lot. Now on to the concrete research, most often, as mentioned above, packed into video lectures, one by one, in the following posts.

Before we go on though, here are his two websites. The last one is the one I focused on:

https://sacredgeometryinternational.com

http://geocosmicrex.com

And here are his two YouTube channels, from which the second one, the geocosmic rex channel, will be our main source for the following discussions in the coming posts.

_Sacred Geometry International

_GeoCosmic REX

Edit: Corrected a lot of spelling mistakes and made it more readable

 

[Cosmos]

The sad thing is, that most of his research so far hasn't been put into written form or books for that matter. He mentioned somewhere (one or two years ago) that he is working on a book, which hasn't materialized yet. He has a couple really good articles up on his websites though. Most of his stuff has only recently been available to the public, when he started to put out videos from some of his talks he held starting in 2006 or so towards his students, in front of a camera, and most recently by the appearance on the Joe Rogan podcasts. He was there a number of times since. In fact, those podcasts are a great starting point IMO to understand what he has researched. His first appearance on Rogan was a conscious decision from him, as he explained in there or elsewhere, to go that public route now through Joe's Podcast, to finally get it out to the public (2014 in the first Podcast with Rogan), since the "public as well as the scientists should critically asses his ideas in the spirit of scientific discovery" or something like that.

So those Podcasts will be in the first post below, to give a first overview.

Here all the appearances of Randall on the Rogan Podcast chronologically. The last one is a debate which was mentioned and discussed here as well as here. In the following posts in both threads that I just hyperlinked in the previous sentence, other stuff from Randall was brought up too.

Edit: Corrected spelling mistakes and made it more readable

 

[Cosmos]

By the way, by now I even get the slight impression, that at least some recent groundbreaking scientific discoveries/research (in the last couple of decades), that stirred up the science world, might have been inspired by Randall personally and his workings in the background for decades.

See below for more on that below and in the third post I intent to post (after this one) about a documentary called "Fire from the Sky" that was inspired by Randall's research and first aired on TV in 1997 and features a bunch of famous scientists and also a short section with Randall. Astounding that so few know about this documentary, or have watched it. I think that is essentially because of the content, which flies directly in the face of the commonly believed dogmas about Comets. I guess it was only aired once, because it was essentially too dangerous.

What follows is the above mentioned documentary "Fire from the Sky" that was first aired on TBS on March 23, 1997.

The description of the video reads:

"Fire from the Sky" (TBS-1997) based on Randall Carlson's research

[c 1997: Turner Original Productions / American Artists / Channel 5 / Warner Home Video] Early documentary based on the original research of Randall Carlson, premiered as comet Hale-Bopp was closest to the sun in the spring of '97. Features Gene Shoemaker and David Levy, plus Randall Carlson discussing the upper mid-western fires of October 1871. Includes brief reviews of the Tunguska event of 1908, comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter, the great Chicago fire and simultaneous fires across Wisconsin, potential destruction from the next eminent impact, regularity of atmospheric detonations, and more... (Fake newscast was removed due to critical implausibilities included in the dramatization)

There are actually more scientists featured in the documentary. The 9 scientist featured in the Documentary (besides the short segment with Randall) are as follows:

- Co-discoverer of Shoemaker-Levy 9 (the comet that slammed into Jupiter 1994) geologist Gene Shoemaker, "one of the founders of the field of planetary science" and the "founder of Astrogeology, who died on "July 18, 1997 during one such expedition in a head-on car collision", just two months after the documentary aired

- Co-discoverer of Shoemaker-Levy 9 astronomer David H. Levy, science writer and discoverer of comets and minor planets

- Carl W. Hergenrother who was a graduate student at the time and is now "an American astronomer and discoverer of minor planets and comets."

- Physicist Edward Tagliaferri

- Irish Astronomer and Director of the Armagh Observatory, Professor Mark E. Bailey

- Dr. Jasper Wall, former Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory (at the time of the documantary) and now Adjunct Professor at The University of British Columbia for Astronomy & Astrophysics.

- Peshtigo Historian Robert Couvillion from the Menominee County Historical Society

- B.S. and M.S. in astronomy Ray L. Newburn, Jr. from NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory "Co-I and Head of the imaging team on the STARDUST mission [and] Chief Environmental Modeller for STARDUST"

- Dr. William F. "Bill" Bottke formally at Caltech (at the time of the Documentary) is "a planetary scientist specializing in asteroids" and is now "Director of the Department for Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado" and:

• Director of the Institute for the Science of Exploration Targets (ISET) of NASA's Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute.
• Group Leader, Dynamical Evolution Working Group, NASA's New Frontier's class OSIRIS-REx mission
• Science team member, NASA's Discovery Class Lucy and Psychemissions.

I'll try to summarize in the next post the content of the documentary. And finally, here is the Documentary itself:

Edit: Corrected spelling mistakes and made it more readable

 

[Cosmos]

I'll try to summarize in the next post the content of the documentary. And finally, here is the Documentary itself:

It took me quite a while now, but here we go. I created a text version out of the whole documentary above, for those who want to read it. The whole thing is really interesting, but take a special note of the things I bolted and highlighted towards the middle and the end of the documentary. You wont regret it! I think that it needs to be preserved in written form, since there are quite a number of pretty interesting things covered in there, that make you just wonder, especially considering the date it was created and first aired.

It becomes ever more obvious that quite a number of scientist and secret US military satellites, knew of and have recorded, early on, at least since 1975, many incoming objects that hit the earth in great detail. And no small ones at that. Much more than the public knew at the time and even now. And remember, that was from way back then, and is probably just a little fraction of what they knew then and know about today.

Especially interesting are the sections on the Brazilian Tunguska event in 1930; the great Chicago fire of 1871, in which a much bigger and deadlier story in other places in the US was taking place at the same time (which involved 1200 dead in one small village alone), which was pretty much wiped out of history as well; a declassified study from US spy satellites about atmospheric explosions within a ten year period (more on that in the next post, pretty interesting stuff!). And the many pretty interesting statements from those scientist, about the real number (already astoundingly high, even than) of newly discovered asteroids and huge things passing between earth and moon every day; house sized objects every day and football field sized objects every week. Already back than! It is way to much to summarize, so I urge you to watch the docu above or read the transcript below. Some things can not be transitted in written form, such as the documents, videos and pictures that are being shown. The documentary makes it very clear, that even small objects that just explode in the atmosphere have caused great damage in the past and will do so again.

It becomes also rather clear that most if not all of the content is indeed coming from Randalls research. I've watched enough of his lectures by now, to be pretty certain of that.

So here we go:

The documentary „Fire from the Sky“ is structured into 5 different sections throughout, which are as follows: "SPACE: a violent Place", "It will happen AGAIN", "The Power of IMPACTS", "Welcome to Ground ZERO", "EARTH has been hit before" and "A Matter of TIME".

As you can see below, most of the documentary is centered on what the scientists say; they speak most of the time. So I've done my best to separate each statement (who is saying what) so that it is understandable. There are also short sections of narrating, which are separated as well from the other parts. The few words in [brackets] are from me, either to make it clearer what is meant, or if something was said that wasn't understandable in the way the person said it.

Here it is:

Fire from the Sky

SPACE: a violent Place

Geologist Gene Shoemaker:

Well, theres this old notion that all the planets are going around in these nice uniform orbits and it's all running like clockwork and it is a very peaceful tranquil place out there; That's a myth!

Astronomer David H. Levy:

Someday the earth will get hit by a comet and an asteroid, it will happen, there's no way out of it, it has happened in the past...

It will happan AGAIN

Astronomer Carl W. Hergenrother:

Well, theres thousands of asteroids out there that could potentially hit the earth and as of now, we only know of about three or four hundred of them...

Physicist Edward Tagliaferri:

If you have two thousand objects with diameters of a kilometer or more, with orbits that cross the Earth's orbit, a significant fraction of those are gonna hit the earth. It is not if, it is when…

The power of IMPACTS

Geologist Gene Shoemaker:

If nature hit a large metropolitan area like Los Angeles, it would simply obliterate all of Los Angeles and the surrounding region...

Astronomer David H. Levy:

There would have been a cloud covering the entire planet within two hours and it would last for a year...

Astronomer Carl W. Hergenrother:

It easily would have cause mass extinctions, you have years of kind of a nuclear winter effect where you just wouldn't get any sunlight...

Dr. Jasper Wall:

Ten million people would have been killed, virtually intsantly...

Astronomer David H. Levy:

Imagine one Hiroshima-strengt bomb being exploded every second for several years...

Welcome to Ground ZERO

Narrator:

What follows are facts from scientists and astronomers that explain why fire from the sky could become tomorrow's news.

SPACE: a violent Place

Narrator:

As new technology has brought the universe closer to us we have begun torealize that cataclysmic destruction is business as usual in the cosmos. Recent images from the Hubble telescope reveal whole galaxies cartwheeling into eachother. Some scientists believe that Mars was once a green planet with oceans much like Earth until a series of tremendous impacts blew away the Martian atmosphere and left it a dead planet. Venus is littered with tremendous impact craters, many the size of a small country. But it was a massive impact into Jupiter in 1994 that revealed the magnitude of the threat to earth. Tracking the objects that sometimes cause these collisions has been the lifelong pursuit of astronomer David Levy...

Astronomer David H. Levy:

I'm a bit of a klutz, I fell off my bicycle, broke my arm and my cousin gave me a get-well present, wich was a book about the planets and I read that book and I thought, gee that's what I'd like to do for the rest of my life! So at age 12 I decided to become an astronomer.

Narrator:

Meteor crater near Flagstaff Arizona is the most perfectly preserved impactcrater on earth. Gene Shoemaker is the geologist in residence...

Geologist Gene Shoemaker:

Almost nobody was working on it in the mid-1950s when I first came here to meteor crater and started to study this crater in very great detail. So once you studied this kind of a thing your next question is, well, you know, what are the bullets out there that make these things and how often do they hit?

Narrator:

David Levy along with Gene Shoemaker and his wife Carolyn have teamed to become the most prolific comet hunters ever. Together they have found 13 comets but in 1993 they found a comet that would give earth a first-hand education as to what happens when comets meet planets.

Astronomer David H. Levy:

I think that the seminal event that really alerted everyone to - „yes Virginia, comets do hit planets!“ - was the collision of Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter. In all the years I've observed, I've never seen a comet like this, I‘ve never seen anything like this! There were at least five separate comets, all together, with this dust wings on either side and then the tails going of to the north...

Geologist Gene Shoemaker:

...which later became to be called a string of pearls. There were many little comets all lined up, each one going on its on orbit, but very closely related orbits, and it was clear that this had once been one comet that had gotten too close to Jupiter and had been torn apart in the gravity field of Jupiter.

Narrator:

Not long after discovering Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, they learned the comet was on a course that would lead to its own violent end...

Astronomer David H. Levy:

and I said „oh my gosh!“ and Carolyn stuttered and said „what, what?!“ and I said „our comet gonna collide with Jupiter in 16 months from now“. I think for the next half hour the tree of us just stared at the announcement and read it and Gene was saying „ I don‘t believe it, we're going to see a collision in my lifetime!“. On July the 16th, the first fragment of Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter, traveling at a speed of 140,000 miles per hour, and would be able to cross the United States in a couple of seconds at that speed. It torrents Jupiter, and really, Jupiter didn't know what hit it. The explosion from the first fragment of Shoemaker-Levy 9 grows over 2,000 miles above Jupiters cloud tops and a few hours later another one hit and the next day another one hit...

Geologist Gene Shoemaker:

Jupiter got hit „Bam Bam Bam!„, at least 16 times over the course of 6 days...

Narrator:

but the most powerful impact was yet to come… Frangment G exploded into Jupiter raising a fireball visible from earth...

Astronomer David H. Levy:

it left a cloud larger than the earth and a cloud that lasted on Jupiter for almost a year.

One of the questions that we all had when we were watching this enormous damage done to Jupiter was, but what if it had been us? Imagine one Hiroshima strength bomb being exploded every second for several years, that is the energy released by Shoemaker-Levy 9 in this collision with Jupiter.

Narrator:

The magnitude of the impacts into Jupiter surprised and alarmed the scientific community...

Astronomer David H. Levy:

And one of the big discussions was how do we get rid of the giggle factor? We go to Congress and say a comet could hit the earth some day and everyone laughs… after Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, nobody was laughing...

EARTH has been hit before

Narrator:

Only in the last 50 years have we begun to accept the fact that earth is apotential target even though the evidence was hanging right in front of us. Our moon bears the scars of over 30,000 impacts but for centuries we believed earth was somehow spared these bombardments. In the last 20 years we have identified 180 impact craters on earth. If you could strip away Earth's jungles and oceans scientists believe we would find another 2,000 craters. At the northern tip of the Yucatán Peninsula, Chicxulub is the largest crater ever found on earth, at just under 300 miles. Many believe this X marks the spot where the asteroid struck that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But even in this century Earth has been a target. The biggest impact in recorded history mystified turn-of-the-century London and drew the attention of Irish astronomer Mark Bailey...

Astronomer, Professor Mark E. Bailey:

1908 there was a very bright, very very bright light was seen in the sky emanating from the southeast. The Twilight, even though it was June the 30th, was very very light, to the extent that people were able to play cricket at night, [there were reports of people] reading newspapers after midnight, which we not normally ever be able to do that. The scientific journals and the newspapers were full of this unusual phenomenon at the time and there was speculation as to what caused it, but no answer.

Narrator:

Seismographs in belgium recorded a tremendous shock wave emanating from a remote region in siberia. Russian meteorologist Leonid Kulik believed the event was caused by the impact of a meteor. It took him almost 20 years to mount an expedition to recover what he thought would be valuable minerals from the meteor.

As he approached the recorded epicenter Kulik passed mile after mile of forests, laid over like matchsticks. Kulik searched for years mounting two later expeditions but he never found an impact crater or the meteor. The cause of the massive destruction became the subject of speculation, everything from an earthquake to an exploding spaceship were offered as a possible explanation.

Dr. Jasper wall of the Royal Greenwich Observatory believes a meteor caused the massive destruction, one that did not impact the earth, but detonated miles above the forest floor...

Dr. Jasper Wall:

Now, it didn't actually strike the Earth's surface but what it did do, is a burnup in a fearful fireball above the Earth's surface, perhaps a mile above the Earth's surface, sending a shockwave down which struck the earth and devastated [and] flattened the trees.

Astronomer, Professor Mark E. Bailey:

It had a energy yield, roughly that of one of the largest nuclear weapons that have been produced; about 30 Megatons. And first thing that happened was that the forest was set on fire by the heat and the radiation and then, as the blast waves swept over the burning forest, the blastwave puffed out the fire and you're left with a flattened region of devastation of some one or two thousand squarekilometers in extent; so the size of a large city was wiped out by that particular object.

Dr. Jasper Wall:

Had it been three hours later - had the earth moved by the equivalent of another three hours- and that event [would have] occurred over Moscow, ten million people would have been killed, virtually instantly.

Narrator:

Scientists assured us that such an explosive event only occurres once every 100,000 years but 22 years later, earth was it again...

Dr. Jasper Wall:

The second biggest impact that we know about, the second biggest impact in recorded history, took place in the Brazilian jungle in the mid 1930ies. It must have seemed to the the Indians, the Aborigines, that the end of the world had come and indeed for hundreds it probably had...

Astronomer, Professor Mark E. Bailey:

There's was the dawn of a new day, the fisherman were casting their nets, the people were just having a normal good time in the rainforest and suddenly there is a tremendous darkening of the Sun, so the Sun goes blood red and there was these explosions in the sky and an apparent fire in the forest. Now the natives at the time believed that this was essentially the end of the world. We know of all of this because there happened to be a Catholic missionary in the area at the time, father Fedele who was embarking on his annual apostolic mission and he arrived just at a time a few days after the impact.

The reports that followed from father Fedele‘s Diaries indicated that he had arrived just in the nick of time as the local priest or witch doctor was preparing to administer this poison called tempo to the villages in the community, who had been scared out of the wits by the event in the sky and were really believing that the sky God had come to ground and it was necessary in some way to placate him by making a mass suicide attempt...

Narrator:

But the fear grew beyond the Amazon rainforest as word of the destruction spread. It wasn't until years later that the truth was known; three small asteroids exploded in tremendous Fireballs a mile above the jungle floor. Igniting a ground fire that destroyed over 800 square miles of rainforest.

Astronomer, Professor Mark E. Bailey:

My hunch is that the Brazilian event is a much smaller example than the Tunguska, maybe only 50 or 100 kilotons equivalent. And such an event probably runs into the earth on the average about every 20 years.

Narrator:

Both the Siberian and Brazilian impacts occurred over sparsely populated areas of the world, is it possible that we have not always been so lucky?

In 1871 headlines around the world reported the fire that burned Chicago to the ground. The cause was reported to be a cow owned by a Mrs. O'Leary. But what history has forgotten is the fact that on the same evening, at the same hour, a dozen separate fires swept through a surrounding four-state area causing even greater devastation[Music]

Randall Carlson has devoted his lifetime to researching unexplained phenomena, he believes the inferno was another case of fire falling from the sky...

Randall Carlson:

The reason no one can explain these great fires is that no one knew to look to the heavens. But recent studies have shown that a comet nucleus only a hundred yards in diameter, exploding 20 miles up in the atmosphere can set a large pine forest on fire. This is the only explanation that can account for the simultaneous outbreak of massive forest fires all over the Midwest on October 8 1871.

Narrator:

In fact, astronomers at that time we're tracking the dying comet Biela, whose orbit was dangerously close to Earth. Some scientists have suggested that fragments falling from the comet may have ignited not only the Chicago fire but the fires in neighboring states as well. The most deadly fire that night was not in Chicago but in a small town of Peshtigo. 1200 people died there in the worst fire in American history. A mass grave commemorates the remains of 350 of the victims burned beyond recognition.

Robert Couvillion is the president at the Peshtigo Historical Society, the stories he has preserved are of a fire unlike any other...

Peshtigo Historian Robert Couvillion:

Fire was not unusual in this territory but on this particular night this was a fire like nobody else had ever seen. It was seven or eight o'clock at night when it became dark and they could see this [not understandable in the audio] glow in the western sky. It was like a thunder, a muttered thunder that never ceased, it just kept growing louder and louder.

Narrator:

Before they could run a firestorm blasted them off their feet...

Peshtigo Historian Robert Couvillion:

There were trees beeing uprooted, roofs were coming off of their homes, chimneys were crashing to the ground, everything was moving horizontally, it was like the heaviest snow storm you've ever seen only it contained the burning embers and the ashes and the red-hot sand and the dirt that was picked up and when they decided it was time to go to the river, already it was too late...

Narrator:

The people who managed to reach the river were not yet out of danger; clothing and hair combusted spontaneously, the air itself seemed to be on fire...

:Randall Carlson:

Eyewitnesses described that the very sky itself was on fire as far as the eye could see into space, survivors felt like it was the end of the world...

Narrator:

Peshtigo was literally devoured by this fire from the sky. At sunrise the next day survivors struggled from the river banks to tell stories of a night in hell...

:Randall Carlson:

Eyewitnesses described fireball and meteorite like phenomena falling from the sky just prior to the outbreak of the fire. In the aftermath they described whole forests of great maple trees uprooted and laid flat like new-mown hay. This is strikingly suggestive of the forests knocked flat at Tunguska. While no one was killed at Tunguska 1,200 people lost their lives at Peshtigo.

Narrator:

Is it possible that there have been other tragedies other disasters we attributed to earthquakes or fires or tidal waves only because we didn't realize how often the earth gets hit?

It will happan AGAIN

Narrator:

For centuries we portrayed comets as fire-breathing dragons terrorizing the earth or as tremendous Thunderbolts flung by the gods to punish us. In fact, comets are the leftover debris from the formation of the planets; giant balls of dust and ice. Impacts from comets are thought to have provided the water for Earth's oceans.

NASA's JetPropulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California is home to some of the world's leading experts on comet studies.

Astronomer Ray L. Newburn, Jr:

Comets are rather unusual objects, the small body in the middle may be a few kilometers in diameter or even only a few hundred meters in diameter, but the atmosphere can grow to a hundredthousand or several hundredthousand kilometers across. And they create long tails, a dust tail and a gas tail, or ion tail typically, so that they can have tails perhaps 100 million kilometres in length, the distance of the Earth from the Sun [is] say, a 150 million kilometres.

They can in fact appear very suddenly and surprisingly [so that] we don't know that they're coming. Typically they're found in fact by amateurs simply looking with small telescopes, amateurs who are well-trainedand know how to recognize a comet when they see it.

Narrator:

While comets are more visible and do pose a certain threat to the earth, the greater danger is an impact by an asteroid. Asteroids are thought to be pieces of a planet that never formed. These leftover rocky fragments make up the asteroid belt that orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Groundbreaking research on near-earth asteroids is being done by Caltech's Bill Bottke...

Dr. William F. "Bill" Bottke:

An earth crossing asteroid is an asteroid that has an orbit that crosses the orbit of the earth, so these are the asteroids that could potentially impact the earth.

Right now we estimate that there are possibly as many as 1,500 to 2,000 asteroids that are about a kilometer in size or larger that are on earth crossing orbits. An asteroid about the size of a house comes between the orbit of Earth and Moon about ones each day. An Asteroid of the size on a football field comes between the Earth and Moon about once each month.

Narrator:

In 1996 a graduate student in astronomy, Carl Hergenrother, witnessed a record close approached by a huge asteroid.

Astronomer Carl W. Hergenrother:

Well, the object we found, 1996 j1, is actually a piece of an asteroid from the asteroid belt. There must have been a collision out there and the objects hit the piece and it went flying off and eventually ended up crossing the Earths orbit. It was real exciting and even a little scary at first because when you first see it you know, okay this is heading at the earth and then you go, hmm... I wonder if it's gonna hit?

Narrator:

The asteroid passed within 400,000 miles of Earth, had it been seven hours later, it would have been a direct hit.

Astronomer Carl W. Hergenrother:

You wanna find something you don't wanna find something that interesting!

Narrator:

The magnitude of the asteroid threat to earth was not a secret to everyone. For years the US military had been monitoring near space. Physicist Ed Tagliaferri succeeded in declassifying this top-secret information...

Physicist Edward Tagliaferri:

What we saw was that the rate of impact of the objects that hit us on a daily basis was really much higher than had been suspected before…

Narrator:

The 10-year long study revealed 250 high-altitude detonations as detected by military satellites designed to find nuclear missile launches. These detonations were caused by small asteroids exploding on contacts with the Earth's atmosphere...

Physicist Edward Tagliaferri:

I think most people would be shocked by the number of times we have been hit. The other thing that people would be shocked by is the amount of energy that these things bring in. Typically even a small thing, something the size of a basketball, will light up the sky such that you actually read newspapers by it...

Narrator:

In 1994 one such asteroid hit over the Pacific Ocean near Micronesia...

Physicist Edward Tagliaferri:

It detonated about 60,000 feet in the air and it detonated with an energy of about 50 to 70 kilotons of TNT, that's four to five times the size of the bombs that were used in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It was picked up the DoD satellites and in fact it was picked up by the entire nuclear detection system of the US, and I don't know for a fact, but I'm told that even the acting president had a bid on this one...

Narrator:

250 detonations over 10 years; 25 detonations a year, or one nuclear type explosion every two weeks...

Physicist Edward Tagliaferri:

But there are still people in the government who are skittish about publishing it because it seems alarmist. When I tell you that something could happen that could wipe out the entire human race, that's alarming!

Welcome to Ground ZERO

Narrator:

You don't always need a telescope to see an asteroid or meteor, sometimes they come too close forcomfort; this meteor was captured by an amateur cameraman before it finally impacted in New York State[Music]

This [daytime] fireball was photographed [and filmed] passing 10 miles above the earth and was large enough to have leveled a city had it hit. It streaked across three states, and only a few seconds, before skipping back into space...

Physicist Edward Tagliaferri:

They're moving at speeds which are 5, 10, 15 times the speed of what the space shuttle moves, they're moving at speeds of 15 to 50 kilometers per second. Those are just unbelievable speeds! Because of that, they carry so much energy that even the object the size of a basketball can be as energetic as a small atomic bomb...

Narrator:

But there are massive asteroids orbiting near-earth, asteroids that would dwarf a modern city, asteroids that no matter where they it, would cause global destruction…

Geologist Gene Shoemaker:

If you hit a large metropolitan area with an iron asteroid a mile across, that would be an unimaginable catastrophe for the local area, as well as for the world; it would simply obliterate...

Narrator:

It would explode with 30,000 megatons of force, more power than the entire nuclear arsenals of all the armies of the world. People at Ground Zero would never know what hit them. Millions would die in a first instant. The air, superheated to 9,000 degrees, would ripple outward hundreds of miles and millions more would perish. An entire metropolitan city would be wiped from the face of the earth. But you would be no better off if the impact occurred over the ocean...

Astronomer Ray L. Newburn, Jr:

People sometimes think that if an object were to hit in the ocean, that this would not create a problem, that it would be much better if it hit in the ocean than on land[Music]. But the problem is that if you got a one mile in diameter body hitting the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it would create a tidal wave that would probably wipe out all of the coastal cities bordering on the Pacific Ocean...

Narrator:

The waves rushing onto the land would tower miles into the air. Coastal cities would be inundated. Flood waters would rush hundreds of miles inland, sweeping millions of people to watery graves. But what's even more horrific is, that the same thing happens on land, just as an impact on water creates a tidal wave, a large impact on land would create a tidal wave of Earth, hundreds of feet tall, that would circle the planet at 500 miles per hour, wiping out everything in its path.[Music]

The impacts would trigger an Armageddon of worldwide disasters. The initial impact would literally cause the whole planet to shake, every major faultline could fail...

Astronomer David H. Levy:

First is a is an earthquake, that depending on the size and speed of the impact could be pretty severe and will be felt all over the world.

Narrator:

Billions of tons of Earth, heated white-hot, would be hurled into the atmosphere and then fallback to earth, igniting fires over the entire planet.

Astronomer David H. Levy:

These secondary impacts - there would be billions of them - they would be all over the world and they would serve to raise the temperature of the whole atmosphere. If you're outside you'd be facing temperatures as high as an oven set to broiler. There'd be ground fires, forest fires, all over the planet; anything that could burn, would burn...

Narrator:

The intense seismic activity causes volcanoes worldwide to erupt, blasting ash and smoke into a sky already blackened by raging fires. A black cloud forms around the entire planet...

Astronomer David H. Levy:

This is not a cloud that causes a day to be dull and gray, this would be a cloud that would cut off all sunlight, the day would be black, the night would be black, and it would probably last for a year...

Narrator:

As sunlight is cut off, the temperature drops and a nuclear winter scenario begins...

Geologist Gene Shoemaker:

If it wasn't already winter time, if it were summer time [in] the Northern Hemisphere, you would convert summer to winter[Music]

Astronomer David H. Levy:

It will be raining, the rain will be so much laced with nitric acid, it would be like the mother of all acid rains. Photosynthesis would shut down, plants wouldn't be able to survive, people and animals that eat plants would not be able to survive and creatures that eat planteating creatures wouldn't be able to survive. Death will just go right up the food chain. Finally as the sky finally starts to clear you get a greenhouse effect which slowly builds up the temperature and could last for hundreds of years. So it's just about every environmental disaster that you can think of all happening at once.

A Matter of Time

Narrator:

It has been easy to dismiss the threat of an asteroid or comet impact, but earthbound research and space missions within our solar system are teaching us that the probability may be higher than previously thought. One space program using improved imaging cameras, is discovering four to 500 new asteroid a night...

Astronomer David H. Levy:

The chances that we will die in a comet collision are about the same as the chances that we'll die in an airplane crash. And just think of how much money the U.S. spends on improving aircraft safety and the chances are about the same...

Astronomer Ray L. Newburn, Jr:

So how important is it to you, to find an object which has maybe only a chance in a hundred thousand of killing you during your lifetime, but if did happen might wipe out not only you but everybody else in the United States or even the world?

Dr. Jasper Wall:

The events are very rare, but when they occur, they are globally catastrophic and the earths population of a billion people is totally at threat.

Narrator:

Despite our growing awareness of this potential threat, funding is being cut worldwide for spacewatch programs...

Dr. William F. "Bill" Bottke:

We're talking about tens of millions of dollars - and not much more than how much you would pay for a few star athletes in football - to look for more asteroids, as sort of a lifeinsurance policy against a large - against some random very large asteroid impacting the earth - over the next few hundred years.

Physicist Edward Tagliaferri:

Now, why should we care? Well, first of all, it's our life, it's our civilization that's at stake here. The second thing is, we have a technology that allows us to find these things, track them and determine when and if they're going to hit the earth.

Narrator:

If we did find an asteroid headed for Earth, could we do anything about it?

Astronomer David H. Levy:

The whole answer to this is predicated on another question, that is, when is it going to hit the earth? If the comet that somebody discovers is going to hit the earth within two months, there's nothing we could do. If it is coming in too fast and with two months warning we would not be able to do anything. If it were small enough, when you would be aware that the earth is going to be hit, we could work to evacuate that part of the planet. Could you imagine what a problem that would be, to evacuate a whole part of the planet?!

Narrator:

But if we had years instead of months, there are things we could do...

Geologist Gene Shoemaker:

It turns out, if you have a long lead time, like 10 or 20 years, it doesn't take very much of a push on an asteroid to change its orbit, so that you could deviate it from a deadcentered hit to a clean miss[Music]

Narrator:

The perfect technology to divert an incoming object may have been developed by the controversial Star Wars program...

Physicist Edward Tagliaferri:

The ballistic missile defense organization, originally called the Strategic Defense Initiative, actually developed the technologies which allow us to deal with these threats. All of the things that you need to do, to intercept a ballistic missile are the same sorts of things you need to do, to intercept and deflect an asteroid...

Astronomer Ray L. Newburn, Jr:

Then the hope is, that if we know in time, that we [then] can send up a spacecraft and push them aside. This could be done with a nuclear bomb, a hydrogen bomb of some kind.

Dr. William F. "Bill" Bottke:

Because these objects are somewhat fragile you may end up blowing them into a sort of a shotgun blast and when that shotgun blast comes toward the earth, it has the potential to do just as much damage as a solid chunk, coming towards the Earth. Atomic weapons may not be the best idea. Other means are the idea of going to an asteroid, landing on it and setting up what they call a mass driver, this would be a device which would shoot pieces of the asteroid off at high velocity. And if you again set that up over many years and shoot small fragments of the asteroids, off in a consistent direction, you get a thrust; for every action there's a reaction and that asteroid could slowly be pushed out of the way...

Astronomer David H. Levy:

But it's time that we look out into the heavens and look at our neighbors, we are no longer children in Planet Earth, we're adults now, and we can look at into the sky and see what other worlds are out there...

Geologist Gene Shoemaker:

If we fail to respond to the technical challenge of preventing these catastrophesm sooner or later there will be an object, an asteroid or a comet, that will hit the earth and cause devastation...

Narrator:

99% of all living species to have ever walked the earth are extinct. Many killed off by comet or asteroid impacts. They never knew what hit them and therein lies the difference, we are the first species to recognize this threat from space and only by dealing with it can we ensure our future on planet Earth[Applause][Music][Music][Music]

Edit: Spelling

 

[Cosmos]

a declassified study from US spy satellites about atmospheric explosions within a ten year period (more on that in the next post, pretty interesting stuff!).

I've searched for hours to find it yesterday, or rather the article about it, as it turns out. It was pretty hard to track it down. In the documentary you can see a picture of an article, that I assumed must be the one the Physicist and Narrator is talking about. It turns out on the whole internet, there didn't seem to exist any reprint of the content of that article nor any article about it. I couldn't find it anyway. What I found was a few references in books about what was written in that said picture/article. On the picture you could see a snipped of the content, where you can read the author, who's name is J. Kelly Beatty and the title of the content is called "Secret Impacts Revealed".

With those data at hand and a few paragraphs that can be read in the picture, I was able to find the following two references in books about it. With that, I was able to track down that this article appeared in an obscure Magazine called "Sky & Telescope" in the year 1994 an apparently only there. With that data at hand I searched further, without luck at first. After a while I was able to track down the magazines website, and luckily enough, they have all their magazines since they started (1966 I think) in digital form for sale on their shop website. It was buried even further though then, since I needed a while to find the right magazine for the month of february, which isn't apparent anywhere on the first glance on their website. Also, searching for the article itself was fruitless on the website, since it wasn't listed in the descriptions. In the end I found it though here and bought it.

Finally, after quite some difficulties, I can present it now here, probably for the first time on the internet in full. First two screenshots of it and in the appendix below you will find a PDF version where you can zoom in better.






Notice that in the documentary the narrator talks about a ten year study in which 250 high altitude detonations were recorded by US-Satellites. Notice also that Physicist Edward Tagliaferri was apparently the one who was able to declassify the content according to the documentary, which it is in accordance with the article above. Notice that in the above article they talk about 136 detonations though, while under the picture it reads paraphrasing "that roughly 10 times more airbursts probably occurred in the time frame since 1975 (exceeding 1.000 tons of TNT) than are plotted here" and they talk about a timeframe of 17 years.

So I think in what Tagliaferri declassified and read (and probably also Beatty) were probably several studies, that's why this one seems a bit different from what is said in the documentary. As I understand it, in the declassified world, if you can declassify something, only certain people can see the content and make articles and reports of the content. So Tagliaferri was probably one of the few who could read all of that material, even though it is "declassified". Further, in "declassified" things, most often sections are still marked black that are to "sensitive" or don't even get declassified in the first place. So it is reasonable to suggest that the above and the stuff in the video from Tagliaferri is probably just the tip of the iceberg. Notice also the curios remark by Shoemaker (presumably Eugene M. Shoemaker) that "I've been aware of this data for a long time" that he had "been waiting for the time this could be released". Also notice that the content of this declassified stuff "will appear as a chapter in the book Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids to be published next year".

While searching for the said article above yesterday, I happened to come across this declassified extensive paper called "Preparing for Planetary Defense: Detection and Interception of Asteroids on Collosion Course with Earth" in which the above article is cited as footnote number 4.

 

[Cosmos]

Now, before we go on to watch and discuss some of the video presentations of Randall, on this page on his website, we can read the (likely pretty small fraction) of articles Randall has studied and cataloged, probably since the computer age started. Not even accounted here are probably the articles he read, studies and preserved for many decades before the digital age. All the books he seems to have read aren't even accounted for in all of this. The text above it reads:

REFERENCE PAPERS

Before brushing off Randall’s ideas and opinions, asking: “What do the real scientists say?” Check the emerging evidence first, and make sure you’ve perused this small sampling of published scientific papers, to be collated coherently into your well-informed paradigm of modern and pre-historic Earth Change…. (bump up the zoom level on your browser to read the titles for now – we will be reformatting this partial list of references)

 

[Cosmos]

I think it would be worthwhile to cite some of the backround and biography material available about Randall in text and video form, before delving into the video-lectures and articles themselves. First, a short video presentation of his life, about his bio and how he got into what he is doing called "The Making of a Catastrophist" Intro Bio on Randall Calson". The family pictures and such are from his youth and early times and such.

On the about us page on his website we can read:

Randall W. Carlson
Independent scholar & cosmological researcher,
Founder, Cosmographic Research Institute

[...]

Purpose:
Randall generates a compelling argument that cosmic forces have influenced the cyclic advancement and destruction of human civilizations and proposes the actions that must be implemented now to avoid the next catastrophe.

[...]

Randall W. Carlson

…is a professional builder and co-owner of Archetype Design/Build Inc. A native of rural Minnesota, he developed a curiosity and love for the natural world early in life. While attending Georgia’s Dekalb College, he was awarded ‘outstanding geology student of the year’ in 1993. He has continued his studies as an avocation with a primary interest in discontinuities and catastrophes in the geological record. During the past two-and-a-half decades he has logged over 40,000 road miles of travel across North America to hundreds of sites, studying the effects of the Late Wisconsin Ice Age and its rapid termination 11 to 14 thousand years before present, along with other phenomena associated with extreme events such as impact craters, volcanic eruptions, and Late Pleistocene megafaunal death assemblages. His focus has been directed primarily at the wealth of evidence for catastrophic megafloods associated with the recession of the vast Laurentide/ Cordilleran ice complex.

As an independent scholar and researcher, Randall blends multiple scientific disciplines together with a keen knowledge of ancient mythology and symbolism, to create a unique perspective on the events that have shaped our historical and pre-historical timelines. He has traveled extensively both nationally and internationally, investigating the impacts that astronomical events have had on human culture. Recent discoveries have bolstered his theories that many ancient myths may hold truths about the repeated rise and fall of mankind. From ubiquitous flood legends, the mysterious extinctions at the end of the Great Ice Age, the collapse of the Bronze Age, through the Dark Ages, the Medieval period, the Little Ice Age and now global change, Randall generates a compelling argument that cosmic forces have influenced the cyclic advancement and destruction of human civilizations and proposes the actions that must be implemented now to avoid the next catastrophe.

And on his other website we find another shorter bio:

Author: Randall Carlson

Randall Carlson is a master builder and architectural designer, teacher, geometrician, geomythologist, geological explorer and renegade scholar. He has 4 decades of study, research and exploration Into the interface between ancient mysteries and modern science, has been an active Freemason for 30 years and is Past Master of one of the oldest and largest Masonic lodges in Georgia. He has been recognized by The National Science Teachers Association for his commitment to Science education for young people. His work incorporates Ancient Mythology, Astronomy, Earth Science, Paleontology, Symbolism, Sacred Geometry and Architecture, Geomancy, and other arcane and scientific traditions. For over 25 years he has presented classes, lectures, and multimedia programs synthesizing this information for students of the Mysteries. It is his aspiration to affect a revival of lost knowledge towards the goal of creating the new world based upon universal principles of harmony, freedom, and spiritual evolution.

And an in depth Bio written by him on the same page above:

Randall Carlson: The Making of a Catastrophist – Part 1

by Randall Carlson

Randall Carlson amidst the Swan Falls Boulder Bar
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I spent most of my youth in rural Minnesota. The area where we lived, about 10 miles northwest of Minneapolis, was a rolling mosaic of hills, pasture, forest, meadow, agricultural fields, and countless lakes. The landscape was the product of the great ice age which came to an end only about 10 thousand years ago. The many hills were piles of earth and glacial till heaped up by the fluctuating glacier margin that advanced and retreated multiple times across the region. The many lakes were puddles of meltwater left over from the final retreat and melting away of the vast ice sheets that reached from more or less my back yard northward for some 2 thousand miles to beyond the Arctic Circle and all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. At times the area where I lived was buried under more than a thousand feet of ice. 1000 miles to the north, over central Canada and around the region of Hudson Bay, the ice grew to be some two miles in thickness.

We lived on the shores of one of those tens of thousands of meltwater lakes spread across Minnesota and Wisconsin. The lake was about three quarters of mile in length and a half mile across and was named Schmidt Lake after two Schmidt families that owned neighboring farms. The two lane gravel road that passed by the lake and in front of our house was called Schmidt’s Crossroad. At first, there was only our house and the two farms bordering the lake. As a youth I would fish for bass, sunfish and bullheads (Minnesota’s catfish) from my backyard. Not more than a hundred feet or so from our property a large boulder, perhaps six feet in diameter, sat right at waters’ edge. Sometimes I would fish from this rock, other times I would leap on top of it to fight off imaginary monsters with my sword, which was usually just a stick I had picked up in the woods. Not infrequently I would wonder why that single boulder was sitting there in imposing isolation. I have no idea if it is still there and I don’t know from whence it ultimately came, but wherever that may have been I know now the means by which it was conveyed from its place of origin to its final resting place. It is, or was, what geologists call a glacial erratic, a boulder quarried from bedrock and carried by the advancing glacier perhaps many hundreds of miles from its source, to be deposited in a location far removed from its origin. Erratics are typically composed of a different type of rock than the local bedrock, which is a clear indication that their present location is a consequence of transport over some considerable distance.

I spent many hours of my growing up years swimming and canoeing in those Minnesota meltwater lakes, traversing her countryside by foot, by bicycle and on horseback, hiking and camping in her forests and meadows, but with only a vague conception of the mighty forces of which they were the product. There were days, usually summer days, where I might wander off for hours at a time in solitude, just enjoying the peace and beauty of the pastoral countryside in which I found myself immersed.

Frequently I would make my way to the top a broadly sloping hill near to where I lived, from which I could gaze down and around upon the expansive countryside. If it was early summer the fields of wheat and alfalfa swayed in the wind giving the impression of waves on an ocean of green speckled with countless numbers of lavender flowers. From this vantage point I could observe, nestled within the rolling hills, the brilliant blue of Schmidt Lake below, embellished with dancing sparkles of reflected sunlight. Overhead vast armadas of cumulous clouds would march in stately, majestic procession, always it seemed, from the west, traveling toward the east. They would regularly transit across the face of the Sun casting shadows upon the Earth below that raced over the land in synchronized movement with the clouds above, adding to the impression that the entire landscape was dynamically alive and in motion. The Sun would frequently break through the clouds in glorious, golden rays that would pour down in shimmering columns of light over the land. Sometimes I would get the sense that the whole vista spread out before my eyes was a vast, living work of art, that it was both concealing and revealing some hidden meaning, some deep mystery that awaited discovery and explanation. It was during these times that I would succumb to a state that I could only describe as rapturous. It seemed at times as if my mind would expand to fill the whole of the world within my purview, and for a few moments during these episodes I had the sense that time itself stood still.

Now, long after I have grown and moved to other parts, the Midwestern landscapes of my youth have left an indelible imprint on my psyche. From these early experiences I entered into a sort of dialogue with the Earth which continues unabated to this day. This dialogue has involved thousands of hours spent in the field, traversing and studying a wide variety of landscapes along with thousands of hours in the study of various sciences related in one way or another to the goal of understanding this extraordinary planet upon which we are engaged in this ongoing human experience.

The more I have learned over the years the more I realized that we can take nothing for granted. The leisurely pace that has characterized planetary change during recent history has frequently been interrupted by events that have profoundly altered the trajectory of both natural and human events. In the series of articles I have contributed over the last year or so one of the prevailing themes has pertained to global change. I made a preliminary case that a fundamental idea of the Grail Mythos deals directly with the utilization of natural forces of cosmic origin towards the rejuvenation of Nature in the aftermath of environmental catastrophe.

I believe that one of the most critically important insights into the modern human condition on planet Earth involves recognition that sometimes profoundly disruptive events can radically alter the balance of nature with severe consequences for the stability of civilization, totally independent of the actions of humankind. The evidence for ancient catastrophes is everywhere about us, but goes largely unrecognized simply because the scale of this phenomenon is so vast.

One of the founding fathers of the modern science of climatology, Hermann Flohn, after a lifetime of study of the climate, wrote in 1984:

“Climate –even under its natural development alone- varies continually. Each year, each decade, each century, each millennium, since long before any question of impact of human activity…It is important to gauge the magnitudes and time-scales of these variations, since planning should not be based on expectations of return to some non-existent norm. And the magnitude and extent of any changes attributable to Man’s activities –or even whether any such effects are occurring on more than a local scale- cannot be determined without knowing the range, and the likely timing, of changes due to natural causes.” The Climate of Europe: Past, Present and Future, p. 25

These words need to pondered deeply by anyone who presumes to have an opinion on the subject of climate change, especially by those committed to promoting the scenario of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

My studies in planetary change began in earnest during the mid to late 1970s. When I learned in the early 1990s that the United Nations was going to promote an unprecedented scientific investigation into the causes of climate and environmental change I was encouraged that the vital question as to the cause of these great climatic upheavals in the history of the Earth would be tackled. Needless to say I was dismayed when I began to realize that the new government sanctioned and funded climate bureaucracy had no intention of addressing the kind of extreme natural climate and environmental upheavals that had occurred throughout history and prehistory independent of human involvement, but was, instead, directed to focus exclusively upon the human contribution, and then to focus solely on carbon dioxide as the driver of climate change. Since the advent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its excessive influence on the science of climate change it has become typical to denigrate anyone who questions the “consensus” that carbon dioxide is the sole or even the dominant driver of climate change. I think it is critically important that we examine the assumptions and claims made by those who clearly stand to gain by the implementation of carbon remediation measures as well as some of the dissenting voices who are trying to remind us that climate has always changed, without help from humans, and sometimes those entirely natural changes have been extreme and catastrophic, and, I would suggest, we ignore such natural change at our peril.

I have remarked on the countless thousands of glacial meltwater lakes that cover the upper Midwest, where I spent most of the first 23 years of my life. The geomorphic evidence of extreme climate change lay everywhere about me. It was only after I reached my adult years that I developed an abiding interest in geology, the science by which one can decipher the extraordinary history of the Earth that I learned to “read” the landscape and to understand the story it had to tell.

Initially, in my first youthful exposure to the subject matter of geology I came away with the impression that the whole thing seemed rather boring. After all, the study of processes that occur so slowly and gradually, one drop of water or one grain of sand at a time, that they are largely invisible to the human perspective, are not the kind of thing to provoke the excitement and curiosity of a typical, rambunctious teenage boy. In all the media, whether books, television, or the classroom, everything that occurred in the geological realm was described as taking millions of years, the words “gradually” and “slowly” were invoked over and over again to describe the formation of mountains, the building up of a seashore, the erosion of canyons and so on.

As a kid I could get lost for hours at a time gazing into a wonderful 3-dimensional world inside my small plastic View-Master.​

However, the seeds of a different perspective had been planted in my brain early on. For my fifth birthday I was given a “View-Master,” a very popular toy in the 1950s and 60s. I would bet that most baby boomers had one growing up. The View-Master was a stereoscope that utilized circular reels with paired images on color film that allowed the viewer to view scenes in 3D. As a kid I could get lost for hours at a time gazing into a wonderful 3-dimensional world inside my small plastic View-Master. Among my collection of reels were a number of nature topics and travelogues, National Parks and so on as well as a series of stories that included things like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, Tales of the Arabian Nights and a certain Tom Corbett Space Cadet. (for an interesting aside on this see www.enterprisemission.com/corbett.htm)

Space Cadet Tom Corbett discovering a Tetrahedron on the Moon​

My favorite set of View-Master reels was a series of 21 dinosaur scenes animated by the great Ray Harryhausen for the 1956 film The Animal World. I suspect that the climax of this story was my first exposure to the imagery and idea of Catastrophism. After depicting an encounter and impending battle between a Triceratops and a Tyrannosaurus Rex the narrative story accompanying the reels suddenly shifts gears and introduces the imagery of Catastrophism:

“The sky reddened suddenly then a quivering of the earth threw the king lizard off balance for just a second . . . The king of the earth had been betrayed by the shaking of the very earth itself . . . Just then a booming roar shook the air and the very sky caught fire! Even the battling monsters froze in the middle of their fight to the death. An unknown fear gripping their primitive emotions they looked around at their once familiar world. The earth under their feet rose and fell like the waves of the sea. The blue of the sky had vanished in a blood red deluge of light, and the silence was broken by the booming of vast explosions in the distance . . . Mountains blew their tops. Flowing lava engulfed many dinosaurs and ashes killed the plants . . . The doom of the dinosaurs was at hand. . . Winter came back to the world. ”

“The sky reddened suddenly then a quivering of the earth threw the king lizard off balance for just a second . . . The king of the earth had been betrayed by the shaking of the very earth itself . . . Just then a booming roar shook the air and the very sky caught fire!​

This imagery was depicted in the final several frames of the View-Master reels in full 3-dimensional color. I have no idea how many times I visited and revisited this tale of the Mesozoic Era and its calamitous end, but it was certainly in the dozens. It made such an acute impression on me that these reels and my original viewer are the only things I have managed to preserve from that time long ago. Remember, in the year 1956 a strict gradualism dominated geological and paleontological thinking. In retrospect it would appear that Irwin Allen, the mastermind behind the production of The Animal World, was a Catastrophist. Almost a quarter century later, in the year 1980, hard scientific evidence would be discovered that led to the formulation of a scenario almost identical to Allen’s and a realization that the demise of the dinosaurs was indeed a catastrophic event of global proportions. All Irwin’s story was lacking was an explicit reference to an asteroid or comet impact. All the other elements were there, including the last stage of the violent Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe—cosmic winter.

The written narrative of the story concluded with these compelling and enticing words:

“The total disappearance of the dinosaur is one of the great mysteries of all time . . . Their complete extinction cannot be explained. This whole race of reptiles which dominated the face of the earth, its waters and its atmosphere for a hundred times as long as the short span of man on earth – this whole race died out leaving not one single descendant!”

With these words the seeds of curiosity were planted in my mind, eventually to bear fruit decades later. Looking back it almost seems that my whole life was largely being programmed by an abiding interest in various subjects stimulated by the subject matter of these View-Master reels. By the time I reached middle school I had read most everything by Jules Verne; I had read everything I could get my hands on related to mythology, Greek, Norse and Arabic; I consumed lots of science fiction; I developed a lifelong interest in Astronomy, and an obsessive interest in dinosaurs and their extinction that persisted into my young adult years. My fascination with dinosaurs receded towards the end of the 1960s as my interest shifted into explorations of consciousness and the study of various metaphysical and spiritual traditions. However, my interest in mythology persisted and I became familiar with authors such as Robert Graves, Edith Hamilton, James Frazier, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Frank Waters, and others.

As anyone who has spent any time in the study of Mythology knows, one of the recurrent themes from all over the world is the inclusion of catastrophism of one kind or another. In reading the stories of Thor and Loki, Odin and Freya I encountered the tale of Ragnarok, or “The Twilight of the Gods” that describes the great, final battle of the gods and the destruction of the world by fire and water through the action of the mighty Midgaard serpent and the vicious Fenrir wolf. In reading Greek Mythology I became familiar with the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha who survived a massive flood by building an ark, and Phaeton, son of Phoebus the Sun god, who, in attempting to drive his father’s chariot, fell from the ecliptic pathway and set the world on fire. And of course I attended enough Sunday School to have heard the story of Noah and the deluge that drowned the world.

In reading the stories of the Arabian Nights as a youth I had no idea then that they were cleverly disguised Alchemical allegories nor that Jules Verne had encoded the symbolism of the Mysteries and certain esoteric traditions in his tales of visionary science.

However, as important as the things I was learning through reading were to my emerging interest in Catastrophism, exposure to various geological features in the region where I spent my formative years was equally important. I have already described the influence of living on a glacial meltwater lake and the evolving sense that that there was meaning and significance in the landscapes surrounding me.

Myself and two friends along the St. Croix River, Spring of 1969. I am the fellow in the middle. The turbulent waters of the late glacial floods sweeping through this gorge severely plucked and quarried the basalt bedrock. The outcrop on which we are perched is a remnant of this catastrophic quarrying. The great potholes described below are on the rocky outcrops on the opposite side of the river.​

One of the places I regularly visited was near Taylor’s Falls on the St. Croix River which forms a section of the state boundary line between Minnesota and Wisconsin. This segment of river is now part of Interstate Park, a park encompassing both states, the first interstate parkland collaboration in America. It is also part of the Saint Croix National Scenic Riverway and is one of the sites designated as part of the Ice Age National Scientific Reserve.

At this location the river flows through a prominent gash in the basalt bedrock that is now exposed on both sides of the river. On the Minnesota side, bored into the bedrock some 50 or 60 feet above the present river level, are a series of massive potholes. Some of the potholes are up to twenty feet wide and eighty feet deep, they are, in fact, some of the largest known potholes on Earth. Potholes on any significant scale, drilled into solid rock, are not being formed on Earth today. They are the product of extreme turbulence in a gigantic flood that swept through this region at the close of the last Ice Age. It must be appreciated that these extraordinary features were not produced by any flood such as has been experienced in historical times. As a small child they were just big holes in the rock that my mother or grandmother would tell me not to stand too close to. As I got older I actually started to wonder about their origin. Eventually, years later, I did come to understand the process that could drill gigantic holes into hard basalt bedrock .

Looking out from inside one of the great potholes at Taylor’s Falls, Minnesota​

Another place visited several times in my youth, and indelibly stamped into my memory, was the Wisconsin Dells. This is a unique locale in which floods of enormous scale carved an unusual and striking series of sandstone cliffs along the banks of the Wisconsin River. Again, it was not until I was in my adult years and became more knowledgeable of geology that I understood that here was a local manifestation of the same extraordinary series of fluvial events that had created the giant potholes at Taylor’s Falls more than 180 miles to the northwest. I also came to realize that the powerful agency responsible for these formations was not something that acted millions of years ago, as was the case with the dinosaur extinction events, rather here were phenomenon that occurred a mere instant ago in the geological timescale, in an epoch immediately preceding the emergence of human civilization.

Deeply scoured and etched sandstone bluffs along the Wisconsin River, eroded by catastrophic meltwater floods. Note undercutting of the caprock.​

I now understand that these two places that were so special to my youth were, in fact, the product of tremendous world events that terminated the previous planetary age and signaled the catastrophic birth of the present world age. I now understand that Taylors Falls and the Wisconsin Dells are but two members of a suite of thousands of features encompassing the globe that yield mute testimony to profound climate and environmental changes happening in the very recent geological past, changes that utterly dwarf anything experienced in historical times and are completely and conspicuously absent from the contemporary models and discussions of climate change that seek to lay the blame for all change at the feet of human beings.

In this essay I have been writing about my gradually awakening awareness of the Earth’s catastrophic history. Throughout my youth there were a number of places, which, looking back, I can clearly see stimulated my interest in the events that shaped the landscapes of the world around me. I have described the influence of the glacially sculpted environment where I spent my growing up years and two locations I visited on multiple occasions that, unbeknownst to me at the time, were the product of massive, catastrophic floods at the close of the last great Ice Age, a time geologists would call the Pleistocene – Holocene transition.

Another noteworthy experience that set in motion the thought processes that eventually led to my awareness of Catastrophism occurred early in the summer of 1969. I was fresh out of high school and one of my favorite things to do was to go to rock concerts. (And there were some good ones back in 1969). Just south of Minneapolis was a small county airport called Flying Cloud Airport, outside of a town named Eden Prairie. During that summer there were a series of outdoor, daytime rock concerts and general tribal gatherings either on or immediately adjacent to airport property, I don’t remember which. What is important though is the fact that the airport sits on the level surface of a series of bluffs overlooking the Minnesota River Valley, not too far from its junction with the Mississippi River. On one particular day, I remember it was a gorgeous day at that, during a break in the music, I strolled away from the crowd and wandered over to the edge of the bluffs, which here were some 150 feet in height, in order to look out over the river and its valley. As I stood there taking in the scene, without realizing it, I came to my first awareness of Scale Invariance, a concept that has continued to grow in importance as my understanding of natural phenomenon has grown. What I saw was this: down below me on the floor of the valley was the winding Minnesota River. The river has an average discharge of about 4,400 cubic feet per second and in the vicinity of my point of observation it is about 250 feet wide. As I gazed down I noticed that the river flowed within a distinct channel that was somewhat larger than the river itself. However, looking out across the valley, which here was more than 6,000 feet wide, I saw a set of bluffs on the other side that matched the bluffs upon which I stood. The insight which at that moment impressed itself upon my consciousness was that this imposing valley of the Minnesota River spread out in front of me was a vastly larger version of the channel in which the river itself now flowed. The implication that I then intuited, but only came to understand rationally years later, was that the modern river was but a diminutive relic of a gigantic ancient river that had carved the valley in its totality.

Allow me to digress for a moment. In the early 1980s I was teaching one of my first classes on Sacred Geometry. One of the important bedrock principles of this ancient tradition concerns the harmonic relations amongst the parts of a composition and the whole of the composition. This idea can be recognized by a consistency of form and proportion linking the part with the whole, so that the geometry of the whole is reflected in the parts and vice versa. An ancient Greek term for this principle was Eurhythmy. A modern term is fractal self-similarity. Another term that applies is Scale Invariance, meaning that the pattern of the whole can be discerned in the parts, that the pattern is invariant regardless of the scale. This is the basic geometric concept manifest in sacred art and architecture. It is also a principle that continually appears in the realm of geology. Many of the forms and features of the natural world, most especially in geology, are scale invariant. This is why in virtually all photographs of geological subjects some object, typically a rock hammer or a person, is placed in the photograph to provide a sense of scale.

Anyways, in this particular class I was discussing the importance of Scale Invariance in geometry and made reference to its occurrence in geology. As an example I told how I first became aware of the concept through my observation of the Minnesota River valley and its relation to the much smaller channel enclosing the modern river, how they appeared to be larger and smaller versions of each other, with the implication that a giant river once flowed over the land. A member of the class who had a background in geology interrupted me to explain that the larger valley was the product of slow erosion over “millions of years” by a river not necessarily any bigger than the modern river. I disagreed but had not made the studies, nor had sufficient command of the facts to make a convincing argument in support of my belief that the valley had been carved by a river of enormous proportions. This student was satisfied that he had educated me as to the error of my ways regarding this issue, but I remained convinced that my intuition was correct.

In the years since then I have made exhaustive studies of various aspects of geology, majored in geology in college and have spent 1000s of hours in the field studying all kinds of geological features, most especially those produced fluvially, that is, by flowing water. I can state without the slightest equivocation that I was completely correct in my assumption that the valley of the Minnesota River was indeed the erosional product of a truly massive water flow. Even mainstream geologists now recognize the fact and have given to this mighty ancient river the name River Warren. Calculations based upon the size and slope of the channel indicate that at maximum discharge River Warren flowed with a volume of about 12 million cubic feet per second, or about two thousand seven hundred times the volume of the modern Minnesota River.

1/24,000 scale topographic map of the Minnesota River Valley near Flying Cloud Airport. The great disparity in size between the modern Minnesota River and the enormous valley of ancient River Warren in which it flows is clearly discernable. The arrow points to the spot upon which I stood when I first became aware of the concept of Scale Invariance in the summer of 1969.
​

That day in the early summer of 1969 marks a major milestone in my intellectual life. Standing on that bluff, looking out into the grand, imposing valley spread before me, a seed of awareness was planted – the first glimmer of an awakening to an invisible geological “matrix” if you will – a realization that superimposed upon the modern world we inhabit, the planetary stage upon which all the petty dramas of modern life are playing out, is the imprint of an immense cosmic event preserved in the landscapes of the Earth, an event that marks the great dividing line of human history, and that the key to perceiving this matrix lies in the principle of Scale Invariance.

The Minnesota River is an example of what geologists call an underfit stream, or river. This is a river that is diminutive in relation to the channel in which it is conveyed. There are literally thousands of underfit streams and rivers across North America and around the world. These oversize channels are not the product of slow erosion over many millions of years but are instead the result of enormous, short-lived, catastrophic floods.

From whence came these colossal floods?

At the close of the last great Ice Age, between about 13 thousand and 10 thousand years ago the massive ice sheets that mantled more than half of North America began to undergo an inexplicably rapid retreat. As the ice receded towards its nucleus over Hudson Bay extreme meltwater floods discharged from multiple points along the ice margin and vast temporary lakes formed adjacent to the melting ice mass. The greatest of these lakes was called Glacial Lake Agassiz, named after Louis Agassiz, a preeminent 19th century geologist who was largely responsible for convincing the scientific community that ice ages were a real part of Earth history. The lake at its maximum extent covered some 170 thousand square miles and was larger than all of the Great Lakes put together; in fact, it held more water than the total volume of every lake on the Earth today. It was the rapid draining of this lake that supplied the water of River Warren. The same draining also supplied a substantial portion of the flood water that created the giant potholes along the St. Croix River described above.

So, at least three different places that I enjoyed visiting as a youth were the product of tremendous planetary environmental changes. In my adult years I have pursued my interest in Earth change with a consuming passion. What I have learned has convinced me that we inhabit an extraordinarily dynamic planet, one that has undergone profound changes on a scale far exceeding anything within recent times. In fact, I now realize that what we think of as history is merely the record of human events that have transpired since that last great planetary catastrophe. I also understand that the imprint of these catastrophes is to be found all around us, in virtually every environment, and we are just beginning to be able to perceive and to decipher the evidence.

What tremendous forces of nature are responsible for driving the planet into and out of a succession of several dozen ice ages over the last couple of million years? What could have provoked several well documented global warming episodes at the end of the last ice age that were of a magnitude 10 to 15 times greater than the warming that has occurred since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and that transpired in less than five years? These questions regarding catastrophic, entirely natural climate change have not yet been answered. It is for this reason that the claim that the science of climate change is settled, that the debate is over, or that there exists an unchallenged consensus of opinion, must be recognized for what it is – a self-serving propaganda ploy in the service of a political agenda. It seems that amongst many of the factions promoting fear of anthropogenic climate change, their actual knowledge is in inverse proportion to their hysteria. If you doubt the truth of this statement do this – next time a well-meaning but uninformed person claims that the debate about climate change is settled, that there is an unequivocal consensus amongst scientists, ask him or her what causes the planet to succumb to the thoroughly well documented, extreme oscillations of climate that characterize the onset or termination of an ice age. Ask them what process instigated the Bolling Allerod-Younger Dryas climate catastrophe, or the Younger Dryas-Preboreal climate catastrophe 1300 years later. Don’t expect to receive any kind of an informed response.

The truth of the matter is that our understanding of climate change is in its infancy and to claim otherwise is a dangerous delusion.

Here’s one final matter to consider. The record of climate change that has now been accurately reconstructed from a wide variety of proxies reveals that warm interglacials, such as the one we now enjoy, are relatively short lived affairs. In fact it appears that the Holocene epoch, the present period of interglacial warmth during which civilization has emerged, now going on 10 thousand years in length, may be the longest span of interglacial warmth of the last quarter million years.

"The truth of the matter is that our understanding of climate change is in its infancy and to claim otherwise is a dangerous delusion."

The historical record is clear on one thing – global cooling is much worse than global warming to human society. I will be addressing this matter in more detail in another essay. But for now I will say this: The ever improving reconstruction of past climate reveals that it is constantly changing, it is either undergoing warming or cooling in a range of magnitude exceeding the changes of climate documented during the past century and a half. At no time, in fact, on any time scale, is climate found to be stable. There is no ideal baseline of stability to which we can return.

The evidence proving the reality of mighty catastrophes is scattered all about the face of the Earth, it is everywhere about us. To one who can read the geological record the story revealed is one of repeated world destructions, catastrophe layered upon catastrophe, one world built upon and out of the wreckage of former worlds. The sobering thing to ponder is that the wreckage of the previous world, the one whose destruction and disappearance from the planetary stage cleared the way for the commencement of the present age, is only 10,000 years old. The transition out of the last great ice age, the transition from the Pleistocene Epoch to the Holocene, involved a series of planetary convulsions of almost inconceivable violence and power. With only a few exceptions, the fact that an event of this magnitude stands at the threshold of recorded history and the rise of modern civilization, along with the implications that it portends, remains unrecognized and unacknowledged by virtually the whole of the human race.

Catastrophism alters our world view. It is real. Great sweeping upheavals of nature have been a regular and consistent part of the geological process. I cannot emphasize enough that this reality is being ignored by those engaged in advancing a “climate change” political agenda that recognizes only the climatic influence of humans and a 100 parts per million increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.

Recognition of the reality Catastrophism in the natural history of planet Earth is the signal to the human species that it is time to wake up and grow up. On June 8 of this year Asteroid 2014 HQ124, or “The Beast” as it has been nicknamed, made its rendezvous with Earth, zooming past at just over 700 thousand miles distant. The Beast is about 1300 feet in diameter, making it around 20 times larger in diameter than the meteorite that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Siberia in Feb. 2013, injuring more than 1200 people. However, since volume scales by the third power of the radius in a roughly spherical object, and assuming a similar density between the two objects, it means that by volume, The Beast would be about 7 to 8000 times more massive than the Chelyabinsk meteor. The Beast was about 10 times the diameter of the great Tunguska bolide of 1908, meaning it was some 600 or 700 times as massive. An object of this mass striking the Earth at a closing velocity of 31,000 miles per hour would be a serious planetary wake up call. The crater blasted out of the Earth’s crust would be between two and four miles in diameter. As much as 50 cubic miles of material could be ejected into the atmosphere causing a global cooling that would seriously disrupt global agriculture. The area obliterated by blast and fire would be close to the size of Texas. If it occurred in a populated zone millions of people would perish. The environmental and economic consequences of such an encounter would be severe in the extreme. And most people remain oblivious to the fact that over the past several decades there have been several dozen “close encounters” with celestial objects that could seriously disrupt life as we know it and provoke enormous ecological and environmental consequences if they impacted Earth. (see my article ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf.’)

How many more close encounters with cosmic “beasts” will it take before we humans finally get our priorities right? Will it take a significantly larger event than Chelyabinsk to finally shake the human race out of its hypnotic stupor and fixation upon the grossly superficial?

Was the author of the New Testament Book of Matthew pointing to the necessity of recognizing the big picture when he quoted Jesus in the 24th chapter: “For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and knew not until the flood came and swept them away, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.”? The author of these words is not implying that the routine affairs of daily human life are intrinsically bad, rather he is trying to make the point that it is only when the attention of humankind never rises above the level of the mundane that we render ourselves vulnerable to disaster. The Hopi Elders believe that previous worlds were destroyed when mankind “neglected the plan of the Creator.” The great sage Lao Tsu said “When men lack a sense of awe, there will be disaster.” And the esteemed historian Will Durant, after a lifetime of study into the rise and fall of civilizations wrote: “Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” It would behoove us to ponder deeply the meaning of these words as we press forward into an unknown and indeterminate future.

"Catastrophism alters our world view. It is real. Great sweeping upheavals of nature have been a regular and consistent part of the geological process. I cannot emphasize enough that this reality is being ignored by those engaged in advancing a “climate change” political agenda that recognizes only the climatic influence of humans and a 100 parts per million increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide."

In reference to the quote from the Book of Matthew above I pose this question: Was the actual meaning of the “coming of the Son,” hiding symbolically behind the mythical, moral and prophetic narrative of the Synoptic Gospels, really about the cyclical nature of the changing cosmic environment and the return of the Son of the Sun, the agent of cosmic redemption that forcibly rouses the human species to a higher existence, the same image of cyclical return that lies at the core of all the world’s prophetic traditions? Fundamentalists will resist reading verses such as this in the light of symbolism and those of scientific training ignore matters generally deemed theological, but sooner or later it will be recognized that the corpus of ancient and sacred writings of many traditions conceal a hidden teaching, preserved in the form of symbolical narratives and geometric allegories, encoded thousands of years ago by persons unknown for the edification, and possible salvation, of future generations. We can only hope that this recognition comes sooner, rather than later.

For those with ears to hear, let them hear.

Randall

And finally I noticed that he his described as "author" in some places and it raised the question for me, if he has published books, pretty much no one knows about?

I found these two books about economic and Business stuff from a person with the same name. I couldn't find out though if the Randall discusssed here is really the same person. It could very well be that he published under a psydonym some books, but that is pure speculation on my part...

By the way, Randall should be 67 years old now, according to wikipedia.

 

[Cosmos]

Finally, here is the first video-lecture from Randall that we will discuss, called "Increased Impact Threat: “500 in the Last 10,000 years? Nobody Gets It!” w/ Urgent Randall Carlson" recorded in February 2009.

The description of the lecture reads:

Broader context for previously posted video: "Impact Threat more Dangerous than Climate Change" with review of 2008 article announcing that there may have been more than 500 impact events during the Holocene (last 10-12,000 years), and what our response to that impending threat should be, and the dire consequences if we don't redirect our resources.

 

[Tuatha de Danaan]

In the above video Randall, amongst the numerous things he mentioned, likened humanity to the knight who kills the dragon-(meteor from outer space)- and saves the beautiful lady-earth. What a concept and what a subject for discussion. What would the C's make of that.? This idea, whilst very nice, would make people think they had avoided disaster and go back to sleep. The wave would still come or so I think.

 

[Tuatha de Danaan]

I pressed post too soon on above entry. What I meant was that the idea seemed nice in principle but people would be glad of a narrow escape.......that their government had taken care of them...... and they could go back to sleep.
The grand destiny cannot be changed and the Wave will come.

 

[Voyageur]

That's a lot of work to put this together, Pashalis. I like the way he explored the environs when as a youth he had asked questions which remained - as he was not getting much from school textbooks either as noted in this snip (Carlson):

Initially, in my first youthful exposure to the subject matter of geology I came away with the impression that the whole thing seemed rather boring. After all, the study of processes that occur so slowly and gradually, one drop of water or one grain of sand at a time, that they are largely invisible to the human perspective, are not the kind of thing to provoke the excitement and curiosity of a typical, rambunctious teenage boy. In all the media, whether books, television, or the classroom, everything that occurred in the geological realm was described as taking millions of years, the words “gradually” and “slowly” were invoked over and over again to describe the formation of mountains, the building up of a seashore, the erosion of canyons and so on

A Darwinist discourse was firmly in place; this is how it was remembered in youth, too, and yet you would look around being amazed at what was seen and wonder - which later would become more revealed.

Regarding the Chicago fire of 1871, Ignatius Donnelly's (Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel) wrote well on this; all together a fascinating story. The Amazon event you brought up was highly interesting too.

As Tuatha de Danaan infers above, though, Carlson seems highly optimistic that we could somehow control the wings of the cosmos in a preventative way. Unless he explains this further in a practical way. As a quote by Durrant on his video suggests:



We don't get much notice and we would have not much time to react regardless. Our current State(s) seem to not have a will to even try, let alone inform society; except for the few. However, perhaps the 'knights' who slay the dragon is a supreme conscious effort by humanity's choosing, and it is not carbon reduction. ;)

I'll keep checking Carlson out as he indeed brings up a lot of interesting aspects that the surface has just been scratched.

 

[Laura]

Thanks big much for the Sky and Telescope article! That was some good work tracking that one down.

 

[Cosmos]

In the above video Randall, amongst the numerous things he mentioned, likened humanity to the knight who kills the dragon-(meteor from outer space)- and saves the beautiful lady-earth. What a concept and what a subject for discussion. What would the C's make of that.? This idea, whilst very nice, would make people think they had avoided disaster and go back to sleep. The wave would still come or so I think.

I pressed post too soon on above entry. What I meant was that the idea seemed nice in principle but people would be glad of a narrow escape.......that their government had taken care of them...... and they could go back to sleep.
The grand destiny cannot be changed and the Wave will come.

As Tuatha de Danaan infers above, though, Carlson seems highly optimistic that we could somehow control the wings of the cosmos in a preventative way. Unless he explains this further in a practical way. As a quote by Durrant on his video suggests:

We don't get much notice and we would have not much time to react regardless. Our current State(s) seem to not have a will to even try, let alone inform society; except for the few. However, perhaps the 'knights' who slay the dragon is a supreme conscious effort by humanity's choosing, and it is not carbon reduction. ;)

It seems to me so far, that Randall was thinking (at least till 2006-2009, or so) that if humanity had gotten their act together and work together instead of fighting each other, science could have achieved much more today, in regard to our understanding of the past and our potential catastrophic future and then might have been in a position to do more than is the case today. I essentially agree with that. In one lecture, he mentioned the assassination of Kennedy as a crucial turning point into the wrong direction and found its timing peculiar. I think he is aware that there was a much bigger conspiracy at work and not a "lone" shooter. Kennedy pushed for exploring the solar system, which resulted for example in the first landings on the moon and Randall thinks investment of money in those kind of things is good. I do agree that we could have achieved much more if sciences wouldn't have been corrupted so badly.

Having said that, I think what Randall suggest is, that it would be wise for us to focus our attention more on history and those cosmic intruders and than might be able to more about it. I think he is fully aware that there is pretty much nothing we can do about any of that at this point. We can't do a darn thing about it, as he would probably agree. He seems to have an idea though, which was already mentioned above, how we (as in humanity) can escape the worst, of those cataclysms, which seems to be based on a rather materialistic view on things.

- He apparently has the idea that some if not many ancient traditions wanted to transmit crucial information to future generations about comet cycles, (through earthworks, ancient megalithic structures and so on) and moreover, to get "us in the future" to explore outer space and pack our stuff to go "off planet" to avoid or sit out the next major cataclysm, in order to later (when the worst is over) maybe "replenish" the earth. If I understood that correctly. Here we might also see his a bit too materialistic thinking at work, even though it isn't such a unlikely idea IMO that exactly this might have happened already during or before other catclysms in the past. Which also raises the question if some 3D Aliens out there might in fact be us (as in humans) from the past, who escaped earth for one reason or the other?!

- He speaks from the Great work (although I think he means something a bit different than we do here)

- He goes into the Ark story, maybe with a somewhat misguided materialistic conclusion

- He talks about his interpretation of the Holy Grail quest/mystery, in which again he might be coming to a somewhat misguided materialistic conclusion

The C's said something to the effect of "it doesn't matter where you are but who you are" which doesn't seem to be a part of Randall's thinking there. I can't say for sure, since he seems to be versed in all kinds of mystic traditions and might view things also spiritually, but there seems to be a slight twist toward viewing the ark story and similar things, through a somewhat materialistic lens, instead of spiritual one. Who knows, maybe it is in reality a combination of both, since the physical universe is a part of the spiritual universe and vice versa?

Added: a quote from the first post

 

[Harmony99]

I was thinking earlier today on some distortion of Freemasonry,so it good to meet up on this thread. I appreciate your overview of Mr.Carlson work. You have done well my friend,i will download a few of his YT videos for my long road trip tomorrow.

 

[Cosmos]

Finally, here is the first video-lecture from Randall that we will discuss, called "Increased Impact Threat: “500 in the Last 10,000 years? Nobody Gets It!” w/ Urgent Randall Carlson" recorded in February 2009.

The description of the lecture reads:

What follows is the transcript of the video. In the beginning Randall quotes some very interesting excerpts from an article about new discoveries of the Holocene working group. At some point I gave up bolding and highlighting stuff since it would be way to much in the end.

Pay a special attention to the many details Randall throws in there every now and than in passing. Like the Burckle crater event (that we will see in much greater detail in other videos soon. Very interesting!) or the event 800 years ago that basically completely devesated all of New Zealand and the questions he raises about the cycical nature of those events and if we might be able to determine where, how and when they happen.

In the next post I'll post a link to the article Randall is quoting. Again, this article was hard to find on the Internet and seems to be incomplete. In fact I could find only one place on the net that has republished it, and probably not all of it.

Increased Impact Threat: “500 in the Last 10,000 years? Nobody Gets It!”

Cosmic Encounters: A heretofore unrecognized force of human history

Now, what I'm interested in ultimately, is looking at how this celestial architecture relates to the delivery of cosmic stuff to the earth; that's where I'm ultimately interested in going with it. Is it possible? And that's why I started by showing you that connection between a probable encounter between Earth and a stream of cosmic debris, that perhaps was being focused, somehow being focused along this alignment of the solar system, that was the vernal equinox.

Because see, when we're looking at the vernal equinox up there, bear in mind we're looking at one end of this axis and the other end of that axis is the autumn equinox, and then in right angles to that is the Solstice line… And could we possibly go through now and set up the known timing of the various cosmic events?

Like - - if we assume, if we can take say, the timing of the Burckle crater event and get that down to within a few years; the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations, which has been refined to within about, you know, a decade or two of 4,300 years ago; if we could go to the collapse of the great ice sheets and the extinction event, the termination of the Pleistocene at 12,900 years ago -- are we going to find similar things occurring?

Will there be a consistent set of geometric patterns that might be associated with each of these events? And that's what I'm trying to explore, and so far what I'm finding suggests that there is! That there is some kind of a mechanism that seems to focus streams of cosmic material along certain pathways during certain epochs... And if we could know that information, that would be extremely extremely valuable for future humans on this planet!

Because without any question at all [!], and I brought something here tonight, which is about a year old, but it still needs to be addressed – because we've been talking in here about the holocene working group and the whole idea of global transformations, global changes, the emergence of the new catastrophism ---, this is basically from the work of the Holocene working group, which has been studying climate change and events for catastrophes since the Pleistocene ended 12,000 years ago, right.

So we're now talking about events that are within the last 10,000 years and this is what it says:

In a presentation to the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Dr Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University, presented new evidence suggesting that more than 500 impact events of extraterrestrial orgin have punctuated Earth during the last 10,000 years.

Assuming it is more, we will be conservative and say 500... So that means on average every 20 years. Every 20 years!... Now, when was the last time that we had a major impact?

Somebody from the audience:

„A 100 years ago“

A hundret years ago, 1908, although we now know that in the 1930s there might have been an equivalent impact event in Brazil, that involved three objects, causing massive blowdown of forests... We've seen evidence that eight hundred years ago there was a massive explosion over New Zealand, that essentially decimated the the animal life on New Zealand and flattened all of New Zealand's forests...

[Randall Continuius to quote:]

The great majority (70%) of these events have been of the Tunguska-type class of atmospheric impacts with an average energy yield of between 20 and 100 Mt TNT.

Now remember for perspective, what was the largest hydrogen bomb ever tested by any human beings during the arms race?

[Someone in the audience is saying something not understandable]

How much?

Sixty megatons... Now if you drop to sixty Megaton bomb on downtown Atlanta, Sam's house would be knocked over by the energy of that. In fact, a sixty Megaton bomb would completely wipe out, the complete, the whole metro area of Atlanta and all of its suburbs... One sixty Megaton bomb... The estimated size of the Tunguska event was about 15 to 20 megatons. Which is still one hell of an explosion! Because remember, it flattened 800 square miles of forest and that would be the same as flattening 800 square miles of building. Think about an explosion that could flatten a single square mile, every building within it, right! Now think of an explosion that could flatten 800 square miles, that was the Tunguska event of 1908... 800 square miles of taiga forest just laid over flat like it was matchsticks. Okay…

[Randall Continuius to quote:]

However, more than 100 surface impacts, including more than a dozen oceanic impacts, are believed to have repeatedly devasted whole regions, small countries and early civilisations around the globe.

In a worst case estimate, Dr Peiser said that up to eight climatic downturns detectable in the geological and climatological records of the Holocene may be directly associated with multiple impact events.

Quoting him:

"Episodes of increased cometary or meteoric activity punctuating societal evolution should be looked upon as potential agencies determining the rise and fall of ancient civilisations.

Both the emergence and the collapse of human cultures, the Pleistocene-Holocene transition and the Neolithic Revolution, the onset and collapse of the Bronze Age civilisations, and even the collapse of the Roman Empire may be associated with episodes of increased cosmic activity and multiple impacts that may well have included incidents of cosmic dust loading."

While most of these impacts occurred over unpopulated areas of the globe, there are historical accounts about devastating cosmic catastrophes. According to a number of Chinese records, about 10,000 people were killed in the city of Chi'ing-yang in 1490 AD due to the break-up of a small asteroid.

About a dozen hypervelocity impact craters that date from the Holocene period (i.e. since the end of the ice age) have been discovered to date. The majority of impacts, however, that occurred during this crucial period of societal evolution have not been detected yet.“

Now I could go on here, but the implications of this are clear… Again, every piece of evidence, like since we started having these meetings three years ago, every piece of evidence since I started following this in the early 1980s with the discovery of the Iridium layer, has pointed to the same conclusion.

That what was once considered a totally wacko oddball idea – that earth was in any way affected by incursions of things from space -- has now become essentially the bedrock idea of geology, even though the mainstream geologists have still not fully accepted the implications, or are even aware of the implications yet!

The reason being, [that] geology like so many scientific disciplines, is focused on some narrow avenue of research and hence tends to neglect the big picture... What I try to do is make up that deficiency by looking at the big picture, and the big picture has said – and all of the evidence is accumulating – that we have been in a period of cosmic quiescence or cosmic inactivity for the last couple of centuries that has been unprecedented through the whole of the Holocene, or the last 10,000 years!... And that we should in fact be expecting that anytime now a Tunguska class event should happen!... In fact, I argue that we're overdue for it...

Now, what happened in 1908 in Siberia didn't make much of an impact on societal evolution, but a hundred years later an impact of that event has a much greater probability of impacting a major population center… Now, if a Tunguska object happened over Europe over America, over a densely populated area of India or China or anywhere like that, we're talking about an event that would produce probably casualties in the multiple millions, right.

And again the Tunguska event is a peashooter event! It's a small cosmic event... And another thing is, is that, as I've tried to show you, is that that object was not just an isolated thing in space, it was part of a coherent system of stuff called the Taurid system, that includes at least two known comets, three known asteroids, several different meteor showers; the Taurids, the beta Taurids, the Aquariids and several other objects out there, and possibly [Camera Clitch!] also the zodiacal light, which is basically a stream of dust.

It's very possible that the climate of Earth could be drastically affected, in fact, of all the theories that could bring on an ice age, the one that seems to be the most consistent and accordable with the evidence, is that a cosmic dusting is the agency by which an ice age is originally initially triggered…

No, we don't like that, we don't like that! And here's the reason we don't like it; because we've probably, to use the words of the climate scientist John White, who first studied those Greenland ice cores I introduced you to a couple of years ago, made the statement, verbatim „we don't know why we have been so blessed by this period of unprecedentedly stable climate“ that we haven't seen anywhere in the record! But we have had it and it allowed us to advance our culture and our civilization to this unprecedented level that we've achieved!

And now we're becoming a globally integrated culture, but we're overdue for a cosmic catastrophe! In all of the religious and spiritual traditions of the planet, that have this basis of catastrophism (and virtually all of them do!), not only the the myths and the legends of events that have happened in the past, but the prophecies of events that could happen in the future, [point to something similar]. Because we're talking about a cyclical phenomena here… So if we're talking about something that happened once in the past, then absolutely, we're talking about something that will happen again in the future! Just like if we're talking about spring equinox is coming and it's going to be followed by a change in the weather --- and then that's going to be followed by the fall and summer solstice and then fall equinox and another change in the weather -- what we're talking about is changes in the cosmic whether that is cyclical… But in the cosmic cyclicity of things what we find is that there are cycles of the energy and material composition of the cosmos, which is fluctuating. It is not a steady state, it's fluctuating...

So Earth in its journey, in its cosmic journey from wherever it started in the universe to where it is ultimately leading, passes through these discontinuities within the cosmic architecture, and when it does, it becomes much more vulnerable to having these transitions, transformations and catastrophes imposed from the outside...

Now, I argue that this has been ongoing for millions of years and the biosphere finally is getting sick of it and so it said we've got to come up with a new species that can deal with this! Hence human beings emerged onto the scene. And human beings came in and started immediately making all kinds of changes and upsetting the balance of things, but the balance of things that they were upsetting, as it turns out, is only an illusion because there is no balance!

The hardcore environmentalists wanna take us back to some unknown ideal where everything was a certain way... Just prior to what [exactly]? The Industrial Revolution? What do we wanna go back to when we say we want to limit carbon to the amount of carbon that was in the atmosphere in 1980?! [Back to] 1990, to 1850 or a thousand years ago?! We wanna return the earth to the sea level of a century ago, the acreage of forests of a century ago, the amount of deserts?! Do we [really] think that we can somehow impose some kind of stasis on the planet and then that's going to be it, and we've returned the planet to some kind of pristine ideal!?

No, that is a complete delusion because the planet has been changing severely and constantly since geological time began and we've come on to the stage at the very end of it and we have built our society within a two or three century interval of unprecedented climate and an environmental stability!!! And there is absolutely no reason why we should assume that this is going to continue indefinitely!!!

And what we've done now is, we've essentially perverted the whole equation by taking all of the emphasis and attention away from the natural cycles, that have been ongoing for millennia and for millions of years, and focused exclusively on the effects of human beings, the anthropogenic effects!? And so what is happening now?! Last week in the paper, New York Times [is putting out the headline] ; „big science is now going to be getting on board with climate change“! And that's one of the agendas of the new administration; to pump billions of dollars into climate change research…

But I can tell you right now, the focus of that climate change research is going to be exclusively on anthropogenic climate change! And what's going to be neglected is the real issue, the stuff that's been ongoing since long before we stepped on to the stage and will continue long after we're gone! And the problem with it is, if we're focused on our own imprint; now, I can tell you this, yeah we have a carbon imprint; that we have an imprint on on the environment, absolutely no doubt, there's no question about that, but the imprint that human beings have had, basically disappears into complete insignificance when you look at the event that may have created Burckle crater 5,000 years ago...

There was an event that whose energy would have been equivalent to unleashing every nuclear weapon in the Arsenal's of the superpowers at the peak of the Cold War! Now there is nothing, nobody can say – and I don't care who you are and what your beliefs are or what your attitude towards the environmental movement is ---anything we have done yet approaches the effects of what we would have done to the environment had we had an all-out nuclear war…

At one point there was 10,000 [or] 12,000 warheads in the Arsenal, about five to six thousand on each side… If we [would explode] everything we had [nuclear bomb wise], what effects would that have had on the environment? The fires, the consequent, the dust injected into the atmosphere, the the physical devastation caused by the blast waves and so on, it would have been devastating to the environment...

But a full scale all blown 10,000 megaton nuclear war would be nothing compared to even a small asteroid impact!!! Which has happened repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly throughout the history of the earth, and it has probably almost terminated the human species more than once!!!

So what am I getting at here? I'm getting at the fact that all of this knowledge about our true position on this planet and within the cosmos is now available to us... but almost nobody gets it!!! Certainly nobody in Washington gets it, as they're planning to downsize NASA and shift the focus of NASA on to global warming! That signals to me loud and clear, nobody up there gets it!

[break in the video followed cheering of the spectators]

Alright, so I don't wanna end on a negative note, because my point in all of this is, we human beings are the one species on earth that can figure all this out and understand what the real the stakes of the game really are…

And as as David Levy, co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 said 10 years ago. He said, „you know there [have been] many kinds of disasters that have befallen the planet and human beings since culture began“: Earthquakes, volcanoes, typhoons, hurricanes, massive forest fires, things like… [You know] an earthquake [for example]; we have no hope of (at this point anyway) technologically doing anything about an earthquake other than predicting it... Likewise we have no way of controlling a volcanic eruption... I would like to be able to think that perhaps a century or two from now we could harness the energy of a volcanic eruption... but at this point, if a volcano decides to go off, its going to go off and there's not a damn thing we can do about it!

As David Levy went through the litany of different potential disasters that could befall the planet and as a consequence the human race, he said of all of those, the worst disaster of all, and the one disaster that can cause all of the other disasters, is an impact!!! An impact can trigger gigantic earthquakes, it can trigger massive global volcanism, it can cause unbelievable climate changes and storms and hurricanes, it could create tsunamis of monstrous proportions, right?!?

But ironically, and this is the irony of it, of all of those disasters, that we can't do anything about, the worst disaster of all is within our control, we can do something about it!!! And we're as close now as a planetary civilization of doing something about the next planetary disaster, as we were to putting a man on the moon in 1960, we might even be closer... But nobody is looking, nobody is heeding the message of the past, from our predecessors on this planet!!! Who tried to put this insight into every conceivable format, to transmit it down through the ages, so that when the cycle came around again and the planet becomes vulnerable [again], whoever is alive at that time would be able to read the message of the past and heed the warning and say, „okay this is what's happened before, it's going to happen again!“

And the reason they've sent us this message is, not because they believed that action was futile, but because they believed, that we would be in a position to do something about it and protect the entire biosphere, from the kinds of depredations that have completely and repeatedly assaulted us throughout geological time!!! Of the 50 billion or so species that have ever lived on this planet, 99.999%, estimate [!], have gone extinct!... And they have gone extinct because they have been annihilated in cosmic catastrophes...

Now, we humans are in a very privileged position, but we're in a position of awesome responsibility[as well], because we are the caretakers of the planet… And it's not ourselves that we need to protect the planet from, because unless we had upset the balance, you know, probed the defenses of the opposition a little bit, we would be in no position whatsoever to even plan a counter-attack... [asking someone in the audience] Am I right? You've got to probe the defenses of your opposition, of the enemy...

Now the enemy though is not each other, the enemy is an implacable Cosmos that will throw this cosmic material at the earth, profoundly upsetting the balance of nature, unless we intervene...

And this is the ultimate vindication of our technology, of our industry; we can use our science that we have conjured up to protect this planet… Think of the image of the knight slaying the dragon, protecting the beautiful maiden... That image that has been handed down to us from the Dark Ages, the chivalrous image, that's the image of man protecting the guardian of this planet... And that's our role that's our responsibility, that's what nature wants from us...

And if we do that, all the bad stuff we've done, essentially that will be like the ultimate karma balancer, if we do that. And all the bad stuff we've done to the planet, the raping and the pillaging of the planet as the environmentalists like to talk about [explaing in body language that this isn‘t such a abig deal after all], all of that, the slate will be clean, our karmic slate...

But what's missing is the vision and the will!... We have got to have the vision first and then the will to do something... In 1960 we had, there was a man [Kennedy], whatever his other faults and political beliefs were, that I don't necessarily agree with, he did have a vision… And he said we're going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade... and he was killed!?! Which was interesting because had he not been assassinated, it's very possible that the space program wouldn't have carried that momentum through... But in the aftermath of his assassination, nobody wanted to stand up and say; „hey this is a boondoggle and spending 60 billion dollars putting a man on the moon is going to be a waste of money“... But as it'll turn out, once we start talking in more depth about the moon and the mysteries of the moon, you'll understand why that Apollo program was so important…

And that's one of the few government programs that I, in retrospect, could be supportive of: the program that put us on the moon. And even though, maybe the the motive for it was not the most noble, [aka] we wanted to beat the Russians there, nonetheless we got there [and] we brought back 800 and some pounds of lunar rocks, and those lunar rocks spoke to us, but what was their message? Well, that's going to be one of the things we're going to be talking about in the future, because that message of those lunar rocks pertained directly to the destiny of the human species, in the next century or two…

So there we'll leave it for tonight…