CHAPTER EIGHT


FALLING DUST AND STONE

When Alexander the Great asked some Celtic leaders in 325 B. C. what they most feared, expecting them to reply Alexander himself, they said it was that the skies might fall. Somewhere along the line of history, this story lost Alexander but became attached to the Celtic Gauls; the schoolbooks universally read by French children until lately began by telling them that their earliest ancestors were the Gauls whose eyes were blue, who feared nothing but that the heavens would fall on their heads, and whose huts had holes in their roofs to let out the smoke. Were the Gauls known for nothing else? The naive, simplistic image lets the children be amused. But the insistence with which this particular canard is purveyed says something about the fear of falling skies, which absurdly seems to grip even the savants in their obsession with foisting it upon their perceived ancestors and their descendents.

In the most ancient legends it is common to find references to more than comets and deluges of water. Deluges from the sky consist also of dust, loess, stones, glass, tar, oil, salt, gold, iron, ashes, carbohydrates -all of them sometimes hot and sometimes aflame. They are invariably tied to catastrophes.

Donnelly collected some of the stories:

We read in the Ute legends... that when the magical arrow of Ta-wats struck the sungod full in the face, the sun was shivered into a thousand fragments, which fell to the earth, causing a general conflagration." [1]

[One is cautioned to read "sun" with reservations; foreigners who pass along legends are likely to make the word "sun" out of any brilliant great body in the sky. That the Sun is only one of such historically manifested bodies is the thesis of a number of studies.]

Further :

It is a belief in many races that the stone axes and celts (chisala) fell from the heavens. In Japan, the stone arrow-heads are rained from heaven by the flying spirits, who shoot them. Similar beliefs are found in Brittany, in Madagascar, Ireland, Brazil, China, the Shetlands, Scotland, Portugal etc. [2] (And the Greek Apollo is famed for discharging clouds of arrows and plagues from afar).

Also from the Aztec prayer to Tezcatlipoca :

Hast thou verily determined... that the peopled place become a wooded hill and a wilderness of stones?.. Is there to be no mercy nor pity for us until the arrows of thy fury are spent? Thine arrows and stones have sorely hurt this poor people [3] .

And, of course, the Bible (Deuteronomy xxviii)

The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust; from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed..."

Thus, in Deuteronomy; but more too in Joshua x:

And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Beth-horon, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: There were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.

This, it may be recalled, was the day when the Sun "stood still", a swing-back of cometary Venus, according to Velikovsky, 52 years after Exodus, and at the least he shows that this hail was not ice but of stone [4] . The student of geology today is realizing that what falls from the sky is not only nickel, iron or stone fragments. There is a continuity of materials. P. M. Millman writes:

... physical theory, applied to the observed heights, velocities, deceleration, and luminosities, indicates that in most cases the mean densities of the meteoroids may be below that of water and that they have a fragile structure with a tendency to crumble and fragment. A small fraction, probably 1 or 2 percent, consists of denser, compact particles corresponding more closely to meteorites. These latter are either nickel-iron, with densities about eight times that of water, or heavy stone, with densities between three and four times that of water [5] .

Where does all the dust and stone rest today? It may be, as Donnelly said it, the main constituent of the so-called glacial till and in heaps called mistakenly glacial moraines. It may be in much of the clay of the Earth, in red loams of many countries, in abyssal clay of varied red and blue hue. The geologist Johan Kloosterman tells a story from Brazil :

Early this year, Professor Doeko Goosen in Enschede, Holland, told me that there was something odd about the iron content of the early-Holocene coversands of the Netherlands. These sands are thought to have been formed through a combined fluvial and aeolian activity. But in many of their soils, the amount of iron is much too high for such an origin. Moreover, the present loss of iron by seepage water, observable along many ditches, demonstrates that the original iron content must have been higher still. Weathering of minerals (loss of Silica and relative accumulation of iron) does not satisfactorily explain this anomaly. Could the iron have come from above, as a sort of ferruginous loess?

A few months later in Mato Grosso, Goosen's remark led me to look more closely at laterites profiles. I noticed an inch-thick layer of hard laterite between two layers of unconsolidated gravel; its undersurface was smooth: it had obviously been formed prior to the deposition of the top gravel. I traced the layer for several kilometers, and later found it in places tens and even hundreds of kilometers away, on different deomorphological levels. The only possible explanation for these observations seemed aeolic precipitation on a barren, moist surface [6] .

Doeko Goosen has gone well beyond the ordinary unsatisfying explanations of soil formations commonly employed." Not so long ago soils were considered to form in materials derived by weathering of the underlying rock. Over several decades there has been a growing recognition that much of the mantle of soil is allochtonous." [7] But where does it come from? Few are the regions where soil can be shown to have aggregated as humus from the vegetation above. The large areas of Europe and Asia covered with loess are now considered all or in part by Russian scientists as non-aeolian. This is conveyed forcefully to their minds by the presence in the loess of numbers of angular stones. Promptly we are recalled to the pages of Donnelly's old book where he insists on the exoterrestrial origin of the angular stone typical of "glacial till" and of loess.

Now Goosen advances the argument with respect to the soils that sit atop the loess. He claims that humus does not form except in waterlogged area, presently and historically unlike the Kazakhstan (U. S. S. R.) area he discusses. Furthermore, the "Chernozems," the aforesaid soil, is rich in hydrocarbons. Presumably, some of it was combusted, too. The incident of its formation was most likely a cometary encounter.

Goosen goes farther, in what approaches in fact a general theory of soils formation. Slickensides (common in cracked vertisols and related to mass movements of ash and clay), and latosols, along with much other soil with a high iron content are assigned catastrophic origins, with tides and floods in the first case, and heavy hematite exoterrestrial fall-out in the second as the mechanism.

"Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return." From dust to dust, goes the pathetic saying about man's fate. "To dust" we know from experience. "From dust" -what does geology say? Nothing, of course. Does mythology have something to say? Yes. One of the most popular creation legends has man being made from clay, Hebrew Genesis, for example. The Greek Promethean creation, for another. Moreover, the "Cree Indians believe that the flesh of those who perished in the waters of the Deluge were changed into red pipe-clay. Similar myths or echoes of myths are found in the tales of almost every nation. "So reports Bellamy [8] "We are all made from common clay," say egalitarians.

Why clay? Because, according to ordinary surmise, clay is malleable; early people would made images of clay and, projecting their desire for omnipotence onto the gods, would imagine that the gods could fashion real people from clay. Is this adequate reason? Is there additional reason to believe so?

Bellamy also asserts that the enormous and unfamiliar loess deposits, which must have formed such a striking feature of the new Earth, were regarded by the survivors as the dissolved bodies of their unfortunate brothers and sisters [9] . It is noteworthy that loam deposits do surround the remains of Peking man at Choukoutien and human tools of the Lower Paleolithic in Europe and Tadzhik (U. S. S. R.) The loess is a fine undifferentiated loam of brownish or reddish color that makes eerie standing images by its vertical pipe structure when eroded. The logical divine action, in magical theory, is to create people from the same material, especially if its origin is celestial.

To conclude our reasoning, the myth and the magical reasoning press a hypothesis upon the geologist. The origin of loess may be in an immense fall-out of dust from a comet or an explosion of Earth material into the highest atmosphere whence most of it fell back to form loess and clay covering many hills and valleys to this day. Since humans seem to recall such an event, the time might not be far off.

Donald Cyr, a California amateur and devotee of the Canopy Theory of Isaac Vail, has studied loess. He has a story to tell too.

"Loess is mixture of silica and clay, with particle size ranging from 0.1 mm down to 0.005mm . Where loess in unoxidized, it has a greyish color, but may also be yellow, orange, or brown because of presence of ferric oxides. Deposits of loess occur in North America, Europe, Russia, Siberia, China, and also in Argentina and New Zealand...." [10]

The State of Kansas is estimated to be overlain by more than 50,000 cubic miles of loess. There is little glacial outwash in Kansas, Cyr writes, and he does not see how glaciers had the power to grind down sufficient rock within the Pleistocene age, wherein it is placed, to supply the loess. He estimates the worldwide deposits at 7,000 cubic miles per degree of longtitude per hemisphere. And he suggests that the ocean "blue" mud may be part of it.

A few more words are owing on the origins of the drift or till, before letting the abused author Donnelly stand in his solitary majesty. Many accounts of stone falls are acceptable; Corliss has compiled and introduced some of them. Velikovsky has analyzed several cases, while rejecting Donnelly as to the cometary origins of the drift. For instance, he points to 28 fields of blackened, sharp-edged and broken stones (harras) in Arabia in strewn fields of many thousands of square miles; they are not igneous; they are referred to in ancient Arabic and Hebrew literature; they originate from the sky in early historical times [11] .

Till is a stiff clay full of stones varying in size up to boulders; conventional science says it was produced by abrasion and carried along by the ice sheet as it moved over the land. So Geikie said in 1863, and the definition is still useful. Donnelly pointed out that this till, which he called drift, is not in all places where the ice was said to be and exists in other areas where no ice was supposed to have been. Till is common "over much of the most important mineral producing terrain of the northern hemisphere. Till occurs ubiquitously in Canada and Scandinavia and is present as well over significant areas of the United States, U. S. S. R. and United Kingdom." [12]

But why, argued Donnelly, was there a "driftless region" is Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota [13] . And why is very little found in Siberia; there exist " the great river-deposits, with their mammalian remains, which tell of a milder climate than now obtains in those high latitudes, still lying undisturbed at the surface." So wrote James Geikie [14] . And why are "glacial" pebbles and a "terminal moraine" found on hills and in valleys of the Southern Appalachians, and where the ice was not supposed to have reached in Eastern Kentucky [15] . Why do glaciers today not produce true ancient-type till, that is, striated stones, drift clay, mountain-top till, and how could glaciers form sheets over 30% of the Earth's surface a million years ago, not to mention pushing boulders up thousands of feet in elevation [16] .

Crossed trains of drift occur, and are rationalized into successive advances and retreats of ice under different climate and morphological conditions. The till is not fossiliferous. Where drift and till have been found in Australia, India, and deep beds of older rock in Scotland, they were attributed to more ancient ice ages, thus scholars might conveniently dispose of all material appearing to be till. It is not difficult in historical geology to use time freely to make place for anomalies and to create events, even the greatest types of events, such as ice ages.

Using the ordinary theories of glacial geology, even though he is an exoterrestrial catastrophist, the Soviet geologist Salop has pointed out "that the Precambrian glaciations occurred under very unfavorable physical-geographical conditions. The glacial deposits are interbedded between strata indicating a hot climate, such as red-beds, dolomites, phytolite-bearing limestones (at present only found in warm, usually mineralized waters along the seashore or in tropical lagoons and hot springs), evaporites, kaolinitic sandstones and bauxite." This association of tillites with formation of warm and hot climates is typical of the Paleozoic Ice Ages too [17] .

But Salop also demonstrates that nine ice-age pre-cambrian "intervals vary from 40 to 125 (or 180) MY and no evident periodicity can be observed." He then associates "biologic revolutions with the epochs of excessive climatic cooling usually resulting in glaciation." Tillites are taken as the signal of an ice age; whatever the climate above and below the till, whether cold or hot, the till is supposed to designate cold. Some association may be found among tillite beds and a) low sea-water temperatures as measured in the differing gas and mineral concentrations of stratified sea-shells, and b) "coeval strata" that "attest to the influence of a cold, almost glacial climate." All correlations are subject to variations and even to possible basic flaws in radiometric dating. The association is loose enough to permit the argument that tillites may not be associated with cold climates, hence the tillites are not deposits of ice sheets and glacier, and, further, that tillites may be exoterrestrial deposits occurring in both hot and cold climatic period, wreaking quick destruction upon the biosphere.

Cyr and Sun point out that tektites are chemically similar to loess. This would suggest a possible exoterrestrial origin for loess and a coincidence of the two substances. Tektites are jets of fused silica. They range from microscopic size to large chunks. They are strewn around the world in enormous fields. They are found in the waters and soils of Central Europe, West Africa, Australia, Indochina, Thailand, the East Indies, the Philippines, Japan, China, and the Caribbean [18] . Heezen and Hollister estimated an Indian Ocean deposit of a billion tons that they think occurred upon a reversal of the Earth's magnetic field 700,000 years ago.

Billy Glass and R. N. Baker of the University of Delaware, with D. Storzer and G. A. Wagner of the Max Planck Institute of Heidelberg, studied intensively the Caribbean-North American strewnfield [19] . They estimated the total tektite field at 10 17 grams of material, dated stratigraphically at Middle Upper Eocene. Some 6000 such glass microspherules were found in the sediment of one thin core at a depth of some 250 centimeters below the Caribbean Sea Bottom. The falls apparently came either at different times, or from different phases or portions of a gigantic single incident, because there are chemical differences among the tektites coming from different strewnfields of the world.

The writers claim different times, for they hold few reservations about their dating techniques. If from different times, a Moon origin is suggested, for there could have been large meteoroid explosions upon the Moon that would have splashed debris onto the Earth. Or, since the tektites are of a material akin to the Earth's crust, they might have been a fall-back from large explosive impact encounters with Earth.

Glass and Heezen differentiated three forms of tektites found in the Far East. One was melted twice, one melted once, and a third little melted. They deduce a massive cosmic body breaking up upon atmosphere entry into two or several pieces. Of these, one would explode in the upper atmosphere, another closer to the ground and a third close to the ground [20] .

Faul says "it is an established fact that tektites fell from the sky," but show too little cosmic-ray interaction to have spent much time in the sky [21] . Although he allows a possible lunar origin for some tektites, he shows that some tektite fields are too concentrated spatially to have been flung from the Moon and that, in Germany and the lvory Coast, a similar composition can be ventured for large astroblemes and nearby tektite fields.

No writer has considered the possibility of an origin from the fission of the Moon and Earth. If the present author's theory of lunar fission were postulated, then the composition, distribution and occurrence of the specified forms of tektites would be consonant with the event.

I think that legendary streams of cosmic arrows shot by the gods upon hapless but offensive mankind might refer to the glassier kinds of fall-out. Tektites resemble somewhat obsidian, a popular igneous stone for fabricating arrowheads. Tektites may fall like showers of needles, or arrows, or as arrowheads in size, weight and hardness.

The same tektites are called "Dragon Pearls" in China. Carter Sutherland in 1973 traced dragon art in China back to its apparent origins around 1500 B. C [22] . That reinforcements of the horrendous (but sometimes beneficent "Lucky Dragon") image have been supplied by various comets through the ages was documented by Dwardu Cardona (1975) [23] .

Invariably the Chinese dragon is chasing a "chuh," or globe, or sphere, and "chuh" also means "pearl". "Huoh chuh" is "fiery sphere" and "fire pearl." Moreover the Chinese also call the tektite "huoh chuh". Indians, Javanese, and Tibetans also call the tektite "fire pearl". Long before modern science became interested in tektites, the ancient Chinese (the T'ang Annals) knew that these 'fire pearls' originated in space." They were esteemed by priests and emperors.

The tektites fell from the sky [24] . Aerodynamic ablation experiments with tektite glass have simulated their shaping upon entry and passage through the atmosphere. They are found in recent sediments and on the surface. The tektites were not long in space, they display no cosmic-ray interaction. They are easily eroded [25] but still exist in abundance and cannot be found in fossilized beds, another sign of youth. But other tektites have received old ages, 20 to 45 M/ Y, as reported by Barnes [26] . Many are around the million-year mark (Heezen Glass, Chaprian) [27] . and ages of 5000 years were found by George Baker and Edmund Gill [28] . Gentner's dating by fission-track suggests a million years or less for certain groups, much longer times were assigned to others.

The tektite falls have been associated by Billy Glass and others with magnetic reversals and faunal changes [29] . A syllogism emerges: a heavy-body impact explodes tektites high into the sky; it causes reversal of the Earth's magnetic field; as the EMF hits zero point, cosmic particles, ordinarily deflected, pour down and cause mutations and extinction. Contrasting with this theory are opinions such as Lyttletons's that tektites fell from a passing comet train. However, Urey and Spencer argue that they reflect a splash from a cometary or meteoroid impact on the Earth. Moreover E. A. King: "the answer is now clear: tektites are produced from extraterrestrial rocks melted by hypervelocity impacts of large, extraterrestrial objects." [30]

Erratic bits of an exploded planet from the Mars-Jupiter interregion often fall to Earth. Some of them may also be surviving, uncaptured, terrestrial material. The tektite fields on Earth could also be fall-back from the lunar eruption. Rittmann writes : "The chondrites (of meteoric falls) correspond genetically to the terrestrial sima, and the tektites to the protosialic upper crust of the primeval earth." [31] James Sun proposes that half a million years ago, a snowball comet laden with flammable gases approached Earth from the Northwest [32] . It shattered by gravitational force, and part crashed while part continued on. Loess was thus laid down, and in some place melted by impact into glass. Loess has a chemical composition very much like the tektites, as I have mentioned above. Aerial explosions created innumerable small glass blobs that fell to Earth.

The investigators generally agree that tektites are earth-like and moon-like in composition. Probably, the loess and tektites arrived within the same time span after passing into the upper atmosphere following their explosion from the Earth. Either a passing large body exploded the Earth's crust to make them or a meteoroid impact did the job.

John O'Keefe links the North American strewn field of tektite and microtektite falls with the terminal Eocene (Tertiary) event, when radical climatic change can be perceived in floral abundances and radiolaria were devastated [33] . His theory calls for the tektites to assume, before final descent, a ring-like structure around the Earth. The ring might have lasted a million years and cast a blighting shadow over the biosphere.

It is apparent here, once more, that earth scientists are becoming ever more daring in their suggestions of mechanisms to satisfy the resultant state of geological facts. Just under a century ago, Issac Vail received short shrift from academicians for proposing a Saturnian ring canopy system for the globe and arguing that it was known to early civilized man and fell apart before his very eyes [34] .

Reporting systems on natural phenomena have gradually become more complete, regular, and valid. Nevertheless, the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1819 issued an enchanting list of "meteoric stones, masses of iron, and showers of dust, red snow, and other substances, which have fallen from the heavens, from the earliest period down to 1819." [35] Among the exotic items were: a great fall of black dust at Constantinople on November 5-6, 472 B. C. accompanied by burning heavens; a kind of red matter like coagulated blood in the middle of the 9th century; a burning body that fell into Lake Van, Armenia, turning the waters red and cleaving the Earth in several places (1110 A. D.); gelatinous matter in India with a globe of fire; and a mixture of red rain and snow whose dust contained silica, aluminum, lime, iron, carbon and loess and was coincidental with a shower of meteoritic stone over central and southern Italy in 1813. Red rains, often associated with meteors, were common. William Corliss, in his compilations, has educed much additional literature on peculiar fall-outs. Peter James [36] , Donnelly, Velikovsky and others have demonstrated the frequent occurrence of red falls in proto-history.

Much meteoritic dust falling upon the Earth is invisible and immeasurable. Meteoritic falls have been estimated at 4000 tons per year by Saukov [37] . Hughes (1976) arrives at a figure of 16,000 tons per year. Schmidt gives an average for all of geological time at 8x10 11 tons per year, very much larger and based upon an exponentially leveling off of initially vast drops of material [38] . At the last rate, with a geological age of 5x10 9 years, one would have a total of 40x10 20 tons dust dropped on Earth from space. This is not far from the total mass of the Earth, 6x10 21 tons. But if Pettersson is correct, the rate of accretion of cosmic dust may be about 10,000 tons per day [39] .

Micrometeorite dust has been estimated by Fred Singer [40] to fall at a median rate of 1250 tons per day or 456,250 tons per year (the rate may actually be 10 times more or less, he estimates). The calculation is from the detection of aluminum 26 abundance ratio in Pacific Ocean bottom cores. This is 4.5x10 11 grams per year today, but Schmidt's estimate is only 400 tons per year today.

If any exponentialism is part of Singer's scheme and it should be, a fairly considerable portion of the Earth's crust should be composed of gathered-in planetary dust, achieved in a fairly short time. If, for example, we had a measure showing this figure to have been 10 20 grams per year in 500 B. C. and 10 25 in 2500 B. C., the subsequently plotted curve would give us the mass of all of the continental crust except for the basic granite within a few thousand years. We do not have such figures, but if we consider the obsession of ancient voices with days and years of darkness and ascribe half of this to fall-out of dust, the required substantial deposits would be quickly forthcoming.

Between 1956 and 1964, W. D. Crozier collected exoterrestrial black magnetic spherules from atmospheric fall-out at two New Mexico stations, of a type noted around the world and in sedimentary rocks of great ages. These were accreting at an average annual rate of 1.04x10 11 grams for spherules in the diameter range of 5 to 6. David Hughes considers the interplanetary dust to originate with comets and arrives at a figure of 16,000 tons per year of all sizes.

Hans Petterson, reporting upon the oceanographic expedition of the Albatross, disclosed a high nickel content in the Pacific Clays. Since basalt, the bottom material contains little nickel and meteoritic dust, meteoritic showers hundreds of times greater than presently observed were required to explain the abundance. The nickel abundance is also 5.5 times that in continental igneous rock; hence an exoterrestrial source is invoked [41] . Assuming the average of nickel in meteoritic dust to be 2%, he arrives at the aforesaid figure of 10,000 tons of dust per day, 3,650,000 tons per year (3.6x 10 6 ), hence, especially if any kind of exponentialism is introduced as we go back in time, we should have the sediments of the ocean receive their quota of nickel laid down in a few thousand years.

McSween and Stolper, in their study of basaltic meteorites, which were definitely not of earthly or lunar origin, abstracted a type of shergottite meteorite. This material they assign originally, not to comets, or asteroids, but to the planet Mars, which has many extinct structures and surface rocks with a known resemblance to the shergottite [42] .

The electrician, Eric Crew, has analyzed confirmed reports of ice and stone falls associated with lightning; many such were collected by Charles Fort (1874-1832) who wrote once, "we shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded... a procession of the damned." [43] . Crew ascribes both pick-up and fall-out phenomena sometimes to high-speed jet occurring in and about air-to-ground fast electrical discharges [44] . Dust storms and volcanism greatly augment the fusion of particles. There may be posited that in large meteoroidal and cometary encounters, the Earth will be subject to considerable material exchanges by the electrical discharge channels occurring between Earth and the intruder.

The "White Cliffs of Dover" and other immense chalk beds elsewhere are a mixture of tiny spheres, a formless chemical mass, and organic debris, which contains some marvelously unattrited marine skeletons. How were they formed? Conventional science pleads continuing longtime deposits, but the stratification and water-current markings attesting to such are missing, nor can the preserved shapes admit to this mechanism [45] . A great updraft and precipitation is suggested, or else a dust-laden electric discharge penetrating the waters, followed by an upheaval or expansion of the bottom terrain.

A study by L. and W. Alvarez, Asaro and Michel describes a fall-out of dust 1000 times that of Krakatoa from a meteoroid crash, which, they claim, darkened the Earth for years [46] . The crash was deduced from the presence in Italian, Danish, and New Zealand limestones of the fossil break between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods of iridium, 30,160 and 20 times its normal background level in terrestrial rocks but characteristic of meteoroids. Spain and Holland were added by Ganapathy to the locations bearing the tell-tale chemical signals. Fish-clay analyses by Kyle and others in Denmark agreed with the limestone findings. A number of additional rare elements were also in long supply, 5 to 100 times their normal abundances.

The correlation of a fossil index set with a distinctive chemical element marks an important advance in geological investigation. A sure layer is now presumed to exist worldwide; even were it not to signal an age boundary, it would permit a tightening of identifications of relative and absolute dates of strata and species. We know that we are dealing with a uniform world-wide event, something that is only hoped for when correlating fossils and rocks. We know that the event is limited in time.

We know further that if the event is not denoted in the strata, the reason is not that the event did not occur. That is, some stratum capable of containing the iridium (or other element) must at the stipulated time have existed everywhere. Where not found, conditions for its prompt removal must have existed, or later removal must have occurred. Alternatively, the fall-out was erratic and initially directed only to certain spots by the presumably catastrophic winds and tides of the moment. Despite all this, with a dozen such exoterrestrial chemical markers, historical geology and paleontology would undergo a quantavolution.

What conclusions can be drawn from the material of this Chapter? At the least, a considerable part of the Earth's crust is exoterrestrial and has fallen as dust and stone not long ago. There is reason to accept in general terms the multitude of legends speaking of heavy falls. Even the most bizarre material has descended during historical times and every indication points to an exponential increase in the quantity and perhaps the variety of matter with the regression of time from the present. All the seas and continents contains heavy deposit of suspected exoterrestrial origin.

Yet there is also some indication that the time of heavy falls may have been concentrated in a catastrophe or set of catastrophic climates. The "ice ages," for instance, may have been a period of combined ice and stone deluges from outer space, explaining thereby a number of inconsistencies in the terrestrial pure theory of a central focus and outspreading therefrom. The absence of fall-out stratigraphic formations in older rock formations bespeaks a primeval peace.

A question arises as to what constitutes outer space or exoterrestrialism for dust and stone falls. Under certain conditions of large meteoroid or cometary impact, and heavy multiple volcanism, exploded material can achieve extreme heights and even be lost into space. Such would be the case, for instance, were the Moon to have been exploded from the Pacific Basin. In such a case, a prolonged fall-out period of a great many years, perhaps centuries, might result. Pebbles, dust, loess, tektites and other types of matter might separately collect in orbit and shower down homogeneously, while simultaneously, volcanism would pave large stretches of the globe.

Once more, we find the gradual fall rates of the present and the more credible exponentially higher fall rates of the recent past so productive of mass and volume for the Earth's crust that a young age for the Earth or a very young age for the catastrophized Earth suggests itself. Whatever the properties of fully exoterrestrial falls to explosion and fall-back, the fall-out even will wreak havoc: darkness, lightning, winds, possible interruption of Earth motions, and biosphere destruction, plus excitation of seismism and volcanism; holospheric transactionism, that is.

Back to Contents

Notes (Chapter Eight: Falling Dust and Stone)

1. Op. cit., 258.

2. Ibid., 258-9.

3. Ibid., 186-90.

4. Worlds in Collision, 42-3, 51-3.

5. "Meteor," 12 Ency. Brit. (1974), 36.

6. I Catas. Geol. (1976).

7. Unpubl. mss., 1980, Soil Dept., ICT, Entschede, Netherlands.

8. H. Bellamy, Moon, Myths and Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 241, 243.

9. Ibid.

10. D. A. Cyr, Annular Space Dust (Thousand Oaks, Calif. Annular Publs., 1968).

11. Earth in Upheaval, 96.

12. W. W. Shilts, "Glacial Till and Mineral Exploration," in R. F. Legget, ed., Glacial Till (Ottawa, Royal Soc. Can., 1976), 205; Also Dreimanis, Ibid., II, 14-5, 42.

13. Op cit., 28-31.

14. ibid., 121-2.

15. John Bryson, 4 Am. Geol. (1889), 125-6; W. R. Jillson, 60 Science (1 Aug. 1924), 101-2.

16. Chester A. Davis, 19 New World Antiquity (Mar-Apr. 1972), 27-43; Donnelly, op. cit., passim.

17. L. J. Salop, "Glaciations, Biologic Crises, and Supernovae," 2 Catas. Geol. 2 (Dec. 1977), 24-5.

18. John A. O'Keefe, "The Terminal Eocene Event..." 285 Nature (1980), 309-11; Heezen and Hollister, op. cit., 254; O'Keefe, ed., Tektites, (U. of C. Press, 1963) and Tektites and Their Origin (N. Y., 1976).

19. B. P. Glass et al., "North American Microtektites from the Caribbean Sea" 19 Earth and Plan Sci. Ltrs (1973), 184-92 (N. Holland).

20. 217 Sci. Amer. (1967), 35-6.

21. 152 Science (3 June 1966), 1341-5.

22. C. Sutherland, "China's Dragon," 4 Pensée 1 (Winter 1973- 4), 47-50.

23. "Tektites and China's Dragon," I Kronos 2 (Summer 1945), 35-42.

24. 152 Science , loc. cit.

25. G. Baker, "Origin of Tektites," 185 Nature (30 Jan. 1960), 291-4.

26. Gill, 75 J. Geophys. Res. (1970), 966-1002 finds ages of only 4830 to 14600 years. B. glass et al. find end of Eocene deposits, 10 Lun. Plan. S. (1979) 434-6.

27. B. Heezen, B. Glass, op. cit., and 112 Science News (1977) 408 on Ivory Coast tektites.

28. Op. cit.

29. John Lear, Sat. Rev. (6 May 1967), 57.

30. E. A. King, 65 Amer. Sci. (1977), 212-18.

31. Rittmann, Volcanoes and Their Activity (New York: Wiley, 1962), 284-5.

32. James M. S. Sun, 56 Trans. Am. Geophys. U. (1975), 389.

33. 285 Nature (1980), 309-11.

34. Selected Works (Santa Barbara, Ca: Annular Pubns, 1972).

35. Edinburgh Philos. J. (1819), 221-35.

36. I. Catas. Geol. (Dec. 1976), 5.

37. In D. I. Shcherbakov, ed., The Interaction of the Science s in the Study of the Earth (Moscow: Progress Publ., 1968).

38. R. A. Schmidt, "Extraterrestrial Dust as a Source of Atmospheric Argon," 151 Science (14 Jan. 1966), 223.

39. "Cosmic Spherules and Meteoric Dust," 202 Sci. Amer. (Feb. 1960), 123-32.

40. S. Fred Singer, "Zodiacal Dust and Deep Sea Sediments," 156 Science (26 May 1967), 1080-3.

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42. Sci. Amer. (June 1980), 44-53.

43. Book of the Damned, repr. (London: Abacus, 1974). See also the compilations of W. Corliss (Glen Arm, Md., 21057, Sourcebook Project).

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46. Luis Alvarez et al., "Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction," 208 Science (6 June 1980), 1095-1108.