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The Comet Strike Theory That Just Won’t Die [soylentnews.org]

Science, or New Age Apocalyptics? You decide.

In 2007, a group of researchers, led by a nuclear physicist named Richard Firestone, announced an astonishing discovery. They had uncovered evidence, they said, that 12,900 years ago, a comet — or possibly a whole fleet of comets — struck Earth and changed the course of history. For the preceding two and a half million years, through the Pleistocene Epoch, the planet’s climate fluctuated between frozen stretches, called glacials, and warm interglacials. At that time, Earth was warming again, and the ice sheets that covered much of North America, Europe and Asia were in retreat. Mammoths, steppe bison, wild horses and other enormous mammals still wandered the Americas, pursued by bands of humans wielding spears with fluted stone blades. Suddenly, somewhere over the Upper Midwest — an explosion.

But, the Plot thickens.

This cometary origin story, with its mix of ancient humans, vanished megafauna and global cataclysm, quickly spread beyond the confines of scientific journals. Media outlets around the world covered the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. It has been the subject of two more books and multiple documentaries, including one produced by PBS NOVA. Joe Rogan has discussed the hypothesis a dozen times on his podcast, and it provided the scientific underpinnings for Netflix’s 2022 hit series “Ancient Apocalypse.” But even as the hypothesis wormed its way into the public imagination, an important question persisted: Was any of it true?

A tale of cancellation, full of sound and furries, signifying, a conspiracy?

As they tried to replicate the Firestone team’s findings, the skeptics noticed numerous odd details that seemed to hover around the hypothesis. There was, for example, “The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes,” which came out just before the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study. The book’s publisher was a division of Inner Traditions, which, according to its website, is “devoted exclusively to the subjects of spirituality, the occult, ancient mysteries, new science, holistic health and natural medicine.” The book, written by West and Firestone, intersperses a breathless account of their work with the “astonishingly similar stories” of floods and celestial conflagrations from dozens of ancient cultures, including the tale of the “Long-Tailed-Heavenly-Climbing-Star,” attributed to the Ojibwa. “It clearly wasn’t a science book,” says Jennifer Marlon, a paleoecologist at Yale who read the book soon after seeing the PNAS study. “I just thought, Well, this is kind of silly.”

Kind of, in a theoretical way.

The widespread interest in the impact hypothesis outside academia can appear difficult to understand, says Tristan Sturm, a geographer at Queen’s University Belfast, who studies apocalyptic narratives and conspiracy theories. “Archaeology is not a superpopular topic,” he points out. Nor does grasping the truth about the impact hypothesis have obvious importance for the average person.

More broadly, the hypothesis’ fringe status appeals to those who are experiencing what Sturm calls “conspiracism,” the reflexive distrust of authority figures, including politicians, journalists and, increasingly, scientists. A tendency toward conspiracism does not necessarily mean someone subscribes to actual conspiracy theories, Sturm says; rather, it is a gap in the epistemological immune system through which conspiracy theories enter.

In the course of publishing this work, though, members of the Comet Research Group say they have encountered signs that their opponents have moved from simply voicing skepticism to actively trying to suppress their research. Despite receiving several favorable peer reviews on a paper submitted to a scientific journal, group leaders told me, the journal’s editor summarily rejected it. In response, they started their own scientific journal, called Airbursts and Cratering Impacts, whose editors include West and two other Comet Research Group members. All three assured me that submissions to the journal are peer-reviewed according to the usual best practices; so far, the journal has published six papers from the group.

There was some talk of "alternative facts."

I began to wonder if, in trying to draw connections between the various oddities that swirled around the Comet Research Group, Boslough was himself falling into a kind of conspiratorial thinking. “I have indeed asked myself that question,” he told me. But after careful consideration, he had concluded that he was not.

Comet Research Group members predicted to me that skeptics like Boslough could never be persuaded, only waited out. “You know that old saying,” West told me. “ ‘Science advances one funeral at a time.’” During one of my conversations with him, I asked — as I did of nearly everyone I spoke with, on both sides of the issue — whether he ever harbored any doubts. Was there any kind of evidence that might convince him that he was wrong?

In a sense, what West and his collaborators think now hardly matters. The hypothesis has already penetrated deeply, and perhaps indelibly, into the public imagination, seemingly on its way to becoming less a matter of truth than a matter of personal and group identity.

This is the kind of journalism that SoylentNews needs to censor.

Original Submission