CHAPTER ELEVEN


ENCOUNTERS AND COLLISIONS

"Even heaven, despite the orderliness of its movements, is not inalterable." So wrote Laplace [1] , who has been freely used to attest to the security of the celestial order. Nothing in his unparalleled mathematical and physical achievements kept him from soberly portraying the effects of collisions of the Earth with comets, and expressing the view that these had occurred and would probably again occur. He warned of movements that he could not take into account in his calculations, and mentioned the forces of electricity and magnetism whose effects were then unnoticeable. The gravitational balance of the solar system, he proved, however, was near perfect, an empirical demonstration that became a shibboleth to astronomy and thence to progressive mankind.

The present trend to accommodate ancient cometary and meteoroid encounters in the earth sciences and biology cannot but bring about a revolution in thought. A large body impacting on Earth is the most versatile mechanism of quantavolution: so everyone will admit. Its effects begin upon approach, increase upon passage through the atmosphere, reach a climax in its explosion, and continue to spread from the point of impact until the whole world and all its spheres are affected. Too, the effects may continue for many years in an active form and then go on in the 'genetics' of the holosphere.

During a period, which Nininger has well described, when scientific dogma forbade the serious discussion of exoterrestrial interference in the affairs of Earth, when even light meteoritic falls were ignored, students were denied the use of this marvelous theoretical construct in explaining what lay before their eyes. Finally a scientific commission was dispatched from Paris in 1802 to the countryside to investigate a reported fall. It returned with evidence of several thousand meteorites. So "America was discovered." Still in 1933, a Smithsonian Institution report by L. J. Spencer could declare, "the problem of meteorite craters is quite a new one." Only several were listed, and of these only the Barringer crater of Arizona and the Wabar Craters in Arabia had been well described, both lately.

Yet, to continue the litany of this book, it appears now that enough meteoroids and comets have struck the Earth to deface it throughout. Moon, Mercury and Mars evidence telescopically tens of thousands of large astroblemes. Dachille (1962), projecting the Moon's apparent experience onto Earth, estimated a round million of heavy impacts here [2] . He assumes five billion years of uniform falls and applies weathering rates for the continental masses from wind, tide and vegetative erosion, ending up with somewhat over a thousand craters that are potentially identifiable.

Of this thousand, 750 are below water and ice; of the remaining 250, "in the last few years a staccato tally of meteorite scar finds or recognitions has raised the total to 42-50 at this writing." He offered an independent survival rate calculated by Krynine that would be in the neighborhood of 10,000.

He pointed also to new diagnostic methods, such as the discovery of coesite, a silica mineral that forms under high pressures in the laboratory and has been found in craters suspected of exoterrestrial origin. Meanwhile the space shuttle Columbia has photographed beneath the sands covering the eastern Sahara to reveal fractures, dried-up rivers, and probable paleolithic settlements. The U. S. Geological Survey confirmed the radar penetrations. Craters can be discerned as well, and they will probably be promptly mapped over the globe. Many bodily and electric encounters of Earth with exoterrestrial bodies will one day be counted, measured, plotted for concentrations, and assigned to temporal episodes.

The difference between a meteoroid and a comet may be an artifact of biased experience. Lately no comet has fallen to Earth. Perhaps, too, most or all comets come from a special source today; Jupiter has been suggested. Perhaps the meteoroids come from the asteroid belt; such is generally believed. The major distinction may come from their manner of flight; with highly elliptical and often eccentric orbits, comets must forever change their appearance in transacting with their electrical and material environment; the asteroids are generally in regular orbit. Too, we know the size of many asteroids, but not of comets.

Once, to ridicule Velikovsky, a renowned astronomer claimed that comets were filmy and insubstantial bodies. A more acceptable theory of Whipple of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory (he was by no means a supporter of Velikovsky) sees comets typically as bodies of ice and other frozen gases cementing together rock and dust. It may be of significance to note the presence of water in recently examined meteorites, from studies by Hughes, Ashworth and Hutchison [3] ; if water, then a watery planet once upon a time: so the reasoning goes.

Gravitational anomalies on the Moon and Mars have been interpreted to signify dense mass concentrations, hence "mascons." They are associated with large circular basins, therefore probably with meteoroid impacts [4] . The Earth has not yet registered mascons. Because of its heavier atmosphere, more intense magnetosphere, and greater electrical charge, it may be that the Earth has means of ablating and retarding the velocity of meteoroid falls. On the other hand, gravitational anomalies have begun to be detected in circular areas of the Earth and shortly we may expect mascons in the Earth's morphology as well.

With the aforesaid "soft frills," one can expect the Earth to exhibit hills and mountains, as of iron ore and erratic isolated hills, which are then surficial mascons. Concerning the "abrupt" extinction of Cretaceous life forms, Smit and Hertogen, like Alvarez and his associates, see in a general distribution of two trace elements, iridium and osmium, at this stratum of the phanerozoic record a proof of meteoroid impact [5] . Soil and rock everywhere, it would seem, are in need of chemical tests in search of exoterrestrial influences during their deposition.

A decade after his estimates were published, Dachille would report that the number of identified craters had risen to "60 well-documented craters, 25 very likely candidates, and another 20 hopefuls." [6] The greatest of these are the Ishim, Kazakhstan, USSR, (7000 km diam.), the Nastapoka Island arc of Hudson Bay (440 km diam.) and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence opening onto the Atlantic Ocean [7] . The Ishim crater is estimated as initially of 350 kilometers in diameter, 12 kilometers in depth. "The subsequent rebound of the central region and the collapse of the surrounding area enlarged the crater to 700 kilometers in diameter, making it larger than the average lunar mare. The area of this impact structure is a little greater than the combined areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and Maryland. The kinetic energy of the collision can be shown to have been at least one billion times as great as the energy in any one of the largest earthquakes of recent history." [8] And these quakes, of course, much exceed the greatest hydrogen bomb blasts in energy output.

In a work of 1953, Dachille, together with Alan Kelly, offered the circular Bermuda Deep as an astrobleme. By all odds the largest candidate for craterdom so far, this feature might be held responsible for Bermuda Island, as its typical central peak. The hundreds of Carolina Bays were conjectured as the splash-down sites of successive meteors in the same train or later on. The Appalachian mountains would become the westward-thrusted, outer rim displacement from the crater. Significantly, in 1982, claims were voiced that a Northeast to Southwest belt of the Appalachians was once an offshore island chain rammed into America in the course of continental drift and, after the growth of the Eastern plain, the two continents split once more to create the Atlantic. More persuasive to this writer is the Kelly-Dachille view that would let the mountains be the Bermuda crater rim, let the plain be the crater debris and sediments and let the Atlantic cleavage be abetted by the Bermuda impact.

The authors of the Bermuda theory proceed to discuss the dozen high-energy expressions that must necessarily accompany so stunning an impact--global hurricanes, eruption of hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometers of lava, darkening of the globe for years, deluges of water and debris, destruction of most of the Earth's biosphere--terrestrial and marine--poisoning of the atmosphere and fall-outs of many kinds of material, a giant set of electrical typhoons centered at and around the impact and moving radially outwards, earthquakes and volcanism in many places including the antipodes, and vast tidal waves sweeping across America, the Caribbean, and the oceans to the north, east, and south. Large tracts of land would be sunk and others elevated. Minerals would be formed, elements transmuted, species extincted and new forms created in the radiation storms. They assigned an axis tilt of 30 ° to the blow, shifting the north pole from near Akpatok Island, in the Hudson Strait, to its present location.

The diameter of the Bermuda crater appears to vary between 2200 and 2500 kilometers as its limits are drawn, the western being more marked than the eastern, which disappear into the oceanic abyssal bottom. The western arc extends from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland down around the East Coast of America to Puerto Rico. The diameter of the original comet or meteoroid is estimated at 400 to 700 kilometers, greater than the possible Hudson Bay crater (440 km). The relative speed before impact of the meteoroid with Earth is given at about 100 km/ second, with an approach from the northeast. The collision would involve an energy approximately equal to that of the Earth's rotation (1.2 x 10 37 ergs) and would readily provoke an interruption of the rotation, an axial tilt, a slippage of the crust above the mantle, and an immediate orogeny around the ruin of the blast crater.

The scenario includes many details that need not be repeated here. For instance, the hypothetical Bermuda intruder would theoretically account for all the coal, gas and oil of Appalachia and the North American continental shelves by instant burning in passage, deep burial and dampening upon impact folding, and tidal land thrusts and water flooding. Even cutting back its diameter to 280 km, the intruder upon impact

would raise a column of vapor and debris that easily could measure one thousand miles in diameter at the base, and possibly larger at the top after the fashion of the atom bomb explosions. This column might tower something like five thousand miles above the earth, the higher particles doomed to float out beyond the reach of gravity for all time... the energy of the collision we have pictured is so great, that but 2 to 3 per cent of the total would be required to evaporate completely the meteorite and its equal in weight of the earth's crust. Therefore the column above the collision area may take on the function of a fractionating column for these mineral vapors, refining minerals to varying extent [9] .

Streams of speciated minerals, metals, rocks and salts would pour down to form deposits. Large areas would be melted and magnetized by electromagnetic fields arriving from intense brief currents of electricity formed of the electron and ion plasma. In all of this, it should be noted that the colliding intruder partly or largely provides for its own concealment, by cross-winds, cross-tides, rain, volcanism, debris fall-out, and differential diastrophic effects, some of them called forward from remote areas.

Moving about the global map, Kelly and Dachille could suggest numerous candidates for their meteoroid inventory. Wherever an arc appears on a coastline--they noted five large ones off the west coast of North America, two off of West Africa, two off of Brazil and Argentina, plus the great island arcs of the north and east Pacific Ocean--a crater is implied. Norman elsewhere suggests "that any large-scale crustal feature which exhibits an arcuate outline is deserving of special scrutiny--for example, the curve of the Coast of China, the curved mountainous coast of eastern Australia, and the magnificent sweep of the Himalayas bordering northern India. Smaller-scale versions exist bordering the southern parts of the Caspian and Black Seas, and eastern Korea. We must also think of examining concave arcuate coasts such as the Gulf of Mexico or the Great Australian Bight." [10] In 1981, Fred Whipple suggested Iceland as the site of the giant meteor impact which, striking the volcanically active ocean ridge, initiated the finale of the Cretaceous period, its dinosaurs, and its marine life [11] . A year later, Sky and Telescope [12] reported the discovery of a double ring of magnetic anomalies of 60 and 180 kilometer diameters, in Yucatan. The anomalous magnetized rocks are about 1100 feet deep and assigned to Late Cretaceous which makes it, too, a candidate for extincting dinosaurs and decimating the biosphere. But other candidates can be named, for instance an astrobleme feature beneath the disturbed ice of Wilkes Land, Antarctica, to which Weihaupt ascribes hypothetically the origin of the tektite strewn fields of Australia, calling the collision of "Recent geologic time." [13]

I might, too, suggest the Pacific Basin as a possible impact site, though here the size of the feature is so great as to imply the total destruction of the globe, and I have, for this reason and many others, elsewhere defined this area as the escape basin of the Moon, following G. Darwin, Osmond, and other writers. Notable in this case is the set of great transform fractures, pictured by Norman [14] which point from south, east and north like arrows to an "impact" or "escape" point in the central Pacific Basin. The current theory of scientists concerning the asteroid belt orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter is that here is the debris of a great body exploded by collision with another body some millions of years ago. One may reason that if this could happen in asteroidal space, it could also happen to Earth's space. There has obviously been a limit to the size and mass of all that has struck Earth.

Satellite photography has in the past few years introduced a new instrument for crater detection, whether volcanic or meteoric, as in the Bichat structure of Mauritania. Some photographic reconstructions delineate what appear to be many crater outlines. Soon, it appears, the number of defined crater outlines will soar into the hundreds, and perhaps thousands.

Given the new interest in meteoritics, the identification of meteoritic fields may also proceed apace. As long ago as 1889, a list of 14 small fields was published, all of the nineteenth century and ranging from 3 to 16 miles long. The Arabian barrad fields, Donnelly's drift stones, and the tektite fields, already discussed, are much larger and older phenomena. The Atacama Desert also evidences a large meteoritic field, still unmapped, with many siderites and rich silver mines at its center. Meteoritic material on Earth is evidenced therefore by dust, stones, and craters, with all ranges of size from visually undetectable clay elements to basins so large as to be hitherto visually unimagined.

The answers to our persistent questions about the extent and recency of quantavolutionary phenomena at the Earth's surface are now beginning to take shape. The Earth must have suffered as much meteoritic bombardment as its planetary neighbors and satellite. On several occasions--at Hudson's Bay, the circular bulge of the West Africa Coast, Ishim, Bermuda, St. Lawrence Bay, Argentina, Australia, Antarctica, and others, all inadequately discerned until now--global catastrophes could have occurred with large-body impact encounters. On other occasions, as we. discussed earlier, meteoritic showers and bombardments also may have been globally catastrophic. Harold Urey writing in 1973, conjectures a comet of 10 18 grams and an impact velocity of 45 km/ sec to end the Cretaceous and begin the radically different geological period of the Tertiary [15] ; his scenario of effects upon Earth is substantially that provided here and in the much more detailed analysis of Kelly and Dachille for so large a body. (The reader is asked to recall that scientists have only lately granted comets this possibility of large masses and Earth collisions. The recent work by S. V. M. Clube and W. M. Napier, entitled The Cosmic Serpent (1982), essaying a connection between solar-system galactic spiral encounters and recurrent paleontological catastrophes, via cometary and meteoritic crashes, is perhaps the first treatise to be published by professional astronomers. The independently pursued work of the astronomer Earl R. Milton, much of it in press as Solaria Binaria, with the present author, is comparable. Clube and Napier wrote unaware of the astronomical theory of Chaos and Creation and similarly, I did not obtain a copy of their book until the present work was at the printers.)

But would any or many of the larger impacts be recent, within the past score of millennia? This is probable. The methods by which heavy meteoritic and cometary impacts on Earth are timed begin with averaging on uniformitarian assumptions. Thus Dachille arrived at his 1967 numbers by averaging the expected number of major impacts over a five billion year age for the Earth and Moon; then, again using uniformitarian premises, he reached for some broad guidelines. 'Weathering rates estimated for continental masses and great mountains are about 80 meters per million years, and for land masses in tropical regions 225 meters per million years. Circular ridges of less than 750 meters relief could be broken down in 5 million years, to be unrecognizable..." [16] Thus he arrives finally at his low figure for discoverable craters.

But when, with Kelly, he came earlier to describe the Bermuda event, he could contemplate this global catastrophe of maximum intensity as having occurred at the time of the Chaldeans and Hebrews, about 3500 years ago. In the Bermuda case the two scientists follow quantavolutionary logic and can explain the new face of the globe in terms of seconds, minutes, weeks, years. They do not need or use much time. Not only that, but they indeed destroy time by the few-second incoming passage of the body through the atmosphere and the gigantic explosion that transforms a considerable portion of the atmosphere and rocks of the world. How many radioactive clocks, depending upon stable rocks and atmosphere, were disrupted?

Here the uniformitarian suffers the same embarrassment as the catastrophist. Just as he jests at the catastrophist, "You say that evidences of catastrophe are unavailable because they are destroyed," now the catastroptfist jeers at him, "you say that you cannot find meteoroid craters because they were eroded." Perhaps there never were a million craters or more. If undeniably showers of ice, water, dust, stones and heavy bodies have struck the Earth, cannot a deluge of dust, stones and heavy bodies have done the same? It is prima facie reasonable that the changes wrought, upon Earth have been the work of a few thousand years. And it is an open question whether the changes are recent or ancient. Perhaps the bombardment of Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Earth is all recent history.

C. Simon (1982) reports on the topography of giant circular ripples moving out from a point west of Hudson Bay as indicated by gravity anomaly data [17] . Scientists involved conjecture that a 60-90 km meteoroid impacted, digging a great crater and wrinkling the surface for thousands of kilometers around. All is covered over but the density variations remain, below the surface, to provide the circular patterning.

That such an event would be electromagnetic as well is certain. Lacking surveys, we are left to surmise. Electromagnetic effects must' be especially important in meteoroid impacts. Dachille has described electromagnetic fields produced by impacts of high-velocity explosives in military tests, and has projected the Em fields to meteoroid masses of 10 12 , l0 16 , 10 20 grams at 40 km/ sec. "Magnetic fields more intense than those of the most powerful electromagnets extant would be imposed upon matter many hundreds of kilometers from the point of impact." [18]

Once again, we must pose the dilemma that is to be a theme of our book: either the Earth must be so thoroughly tortured electromagnetically that the search for magnetic maps to represent the Earth's magnetic fields is futile; or the Earth's surface was so lately magnetized, whether for the first or last time, that collisions and encounters and all other remagnetizing influences have not had time to deface it.

A generation ago, in the Physical Review for Aug. 15, 1948, Carl Bauer theorized that the asteroid belt contains remnants of the explosion of a planet less than 60 million years ago. He calculated the age from the quantity of helium in examined meteorites, assuming its origin from radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. Ovenden also later on retrojected an exploding planet as the ancestor of asteroids. Von Flandern added comets to meteoroids: "Comets originated in a breakup event in the inner solar system about 5 x 10 6 years ago. In all probability it was the event which gave rise to the asteroid belt and which produced most of the meteors visible today." [19]

In the course of his study, he alludes to "the lack of any definite finds of 'fossil' meteorites or meteorite craters," citing Cassidy; moreover, he reports that "Stair mentions that neither tektites nor other meteorites have been found in any of the ancient geologic formations, which also suggests that most surviving meteorites are relatively quite young, in contradiction to their estimates by the usual dating methods... The need for a revision of the standard dating methods is certainly suggested by these new results."

An astrobleme, large or small, disappears quickly under conditions of rain, tides, current, wind, fall-out, seismism, volcanism, biosphere invasion, and recurrent disasters governing its location. Still, what, if not astroblemes, are the multitudinous faint circles that John Saul has located on published maps, publicly available?

The Earth's surface exhibits faint circular patterns which have not been described before. These circles are characterized by near perfection of outline. by the presence of topographic highs (rims) along parts of their circumferences, by their generally large scale (diameters of from under 7 km up to approximately 700 km in the areas examined), and by their definition in various geological environments, in many rock types, and in rocks of all ages. Many of the circles are intermittent in places along their rims but about 55% of the approximately 1,170 definite circles observed to date can be visually traced around an entire 360 ° of arc. The circles are further characterized by the presence of fracturing and brecciation along parts of their rims and by the extraordinary control they place on regional geology in general and on ore mineralization in particular [20] .

Saul has only begun such surveying, and has found circles in the Western United States, northernmost Mexico, the Appalachians, Alaska, the Yukon, Madagascar, and Corsica. The circles occur more frequently in mountains rather than plains, indicating that mountains may often have been formed by such upheavals and that the scars are too deeply buried by overdrift to be observable straightaway on the plains.

Perhaps, he says, these circles are more shadows of astroblemes than the original craters themselves; they would be like old scars on human skin, which often are distorted and shift away from the original wound. Kellaway and Durrance, it turns out, had some time earlier discovered such circles too, and called them cycloliths [21] . They called attention to cycloliths in Great Britain and Mauritania (the Richat structure), and stress that they can be responsible for river development and drainage patterns. Rivers would channel along the rims, giving them a negative enhancement, and would make gulleys in the fractures associated with the cratering.

The cycloliths are granted great ages mainly because of their faintness. Yet their existence contradicts the interpretation of the rocks below them; if two intersecting or adjoining circles of similar states of preservation overlay rock exposures, say, a hundred million years apart, then, either the rocks or the circles are of the same age, and the rocks give no indication of the age of the cycloliths; worse yet would be the finding that the circles straddle rocks "older" than themselves. This is all matter for investigation.

Yet if time were short, could the Earth have suffered so many blows? In any event, large cycloliths must number in the scores of thousands, unless the Earth, like the Moon, has a preferred side for suffering bombardment. Small cycloliths must then approach the millions. Nor are we speaking of fossil craters, contained in stratified sediments, none of which appear to have yet been discerned. It is one thing to say, as do the writers above, that the bombardment occurred upon a newly formed Earth crust, as on the Moon, four billion years ago, for then all the time given is free to give. But could they have been made by impacts in a recent period of, say, six thousand years? Then if two million landings ensued, they would average several hundred a year, like one clean hydrogen bomb per million square kilometers. Deluges of water might settle much of the dust. Still the prospect is awesome. Soft landings, ice falls, cosmic lightning blast--these might cause the Earth less agony. It is too soon to say.

Velikovsky, in Worlds in Collision, did not treat of collisions, strictly speaking, between Earth and its principal antagonists in space, Venus and Mars. The bodies approached one another at times between about 1450 and 687 B. C.; they exchanged electrical charges; dusts, stones, and gases fell upon Earth. Earth passed through the tail of Venus, which was behaving as a comet. The earth paused in its rotation on encounter. Here Carl Sagan in criticizing Velikovsky had to agree; the biosphere would not go swirling off the globe into space by centrifugal force, as others had argued. Actually the danger of explosions into space would rather come from electro-gravitational interactions [22] .

A portion of such a cometary Venus or of its tail probably did, however, crash into the terrestrial globe. This was called Typhon by many writers and in legends. Typhon was both the name of a conquering king of Egypt, following the disasters that brought the Middle Kingdom to an end, and the name of a monster who threatened the world at the same time. We can let Donnelly tell the story [23] ; he does it well:

Born of Night a monster appears, a serpent, huge, terrible, speckled, flesh-devouring. With her is another comet, Typhon; they beget the Chimaera, that breathes resistless fire, fierce, huge, swift. And Typhon, associated with both these, is the most dreadful monster of all, born of Hell and sensual sin, a serpent, a fierce dragon, many-headed, with dusky tongues and fire gleaming; sending forth dreadful and appalling noises, while mountains and fields rock with earthquakes; chaos has come; the earth, the sea boils; there is unceasing tumult and contention, and in the midst the monster, wounded and broken up, falls upon the earth; the earth groans under his weight, and there he blazes and burns for a time in the mountain fastnesses and desert places, melting the earth with boundless vapor and glaring fire.

We will find legend after legend about this Typhon; he runs through the mythologies of different nations. And as to his size and his terrible power, they all agree. He was no earth-creature. He moved in the air; he reached the skies...

According to Pindar the head of Typhon reached to the stars, his eyes darted fire, his hands extended from the East to the West, terrible serpents were twined about the middle of his body, and one hundred snakes took the place of fingers on his hands. Between him and the gods there was a dreadful war. Jupiter finally killed him with a flash of lightning, and buried him under Mount Etna.

And there, smoking and burning, his great throes and writhings, we are told, still shake the earth, and threaten mankind:

"And with pale lips men say, To-morrow, perchance to-day Encelidas may arise!"

Typhon, also spelled Typhaeon, is evidently another version of Phaeton (and probably of Python who was a monster killed by Apollo). The Phaeton myth, most famous 'of all, is treated by Plato self-consciously as a myth in form but standing for true natural history. Phaeton is reluctantly lent the chariot of his father the Sun for a day. He cannot control its powerful steeds and burns sky and Earth in his wild plungings. Finally he is felled by a Jovian thunderbolt, cast dead into the river Eridanus, and the nearly destroyed Earth recovers. The sad and angry Sun emerges once more.

Parallel legends are found in other cultures; the best resume occurs again in Donnelly's Ragnarok. The paramount student of ancient astronomy of his day, F. X. Kugler, dissected the myth of Phaeton to assess its validity and concluded that a comet struck the Earth in the north Aegean region in the second millennium B. C. The event is probable. If it is tied into all the other evidence, in legend, history, and geology, of the same time, the event becomes more probable--and of more dire consequences. It is best if we avoid repetitious listing of disastrous effects; suffice to say that every criterion of a major exoterrestrial impact is satisfied, except the location of the point of impact.

Still the story is not to be ended neatly. At one and the same time, so it appears, a great body passed close by the earth (call it proto-Venus) and a large body collided with Earth. The disasters afflicting the world in those days were effects of both events. Until the crater or aerial explosion point of flaming yellow-haired Phaeton can be found and its size and traits used to evaluate the occurrence, the effects of the principal body's pass-by cannot be calculated. Inasmuch as the effects have been extensive and continuing, not only geophysically but socially, the research seems worthwhile.

Because it is our favored theory that the Moon erupted from the Earth, we give less attention to the idea that we discarded some years ago, namely that the Pacific Basin originated in a meteoroidal impact. We do ascribe many impacts prior to the episode, based upon legendary indications (see Chaos and Creation) and contributing to the loosening of the crust. It is noteworthy that E. R. Harrison "proposed that the Pacific Basin was the seat of an immense explosion in the primitive Earth" and suggested a planetesimal of about 100 km radius [24] . The rim of the Pacific has a number of characteristics of an astrobleme rim, on a gigantic scale.

Our preference for the lunar fission is based upon evidence elsewhere in this work, and in the Quantavolution Series; it has to do mainly with the nature and behavior of the Moon, with legendary evidence, with the recency of the event as attested to by today's oceanography, and by the electrical effects of a two-body pass-by that would execute more efficiently, even while dampening, the effects evidenced in the Pacific Basin and throughout the global cleavage and rifting system.

By now the reader may be wondering how the Moon and more could have been erupted in one set of events, how so much of what we see on the surface could have dropped from above, and how thousands of craters, many quite large, could be dug into the Earth, all within a period of time which, it is increasingly apparent. I believe to have occupied only ten to twelve thousand years, in the Holocene period, no less. Are there not too many disasters to let the biosphere survive? Further, how do these relate in time? Finally, does the author accept all of the suspected astroblemes of the world without question?

To the last question, the author has to apologize for a general ignorance. The Bermuda astrobleme may be an illusion, for example. The thousands of faint circles or cycloliths may be how the Earth swells and expands. As to how the growing inventory of astroblemes may be placed in time, the author refers to a hypothetical calendar, carried here below and in Chaos and Creation. The ladder of associations between time and events will be better and better constructed as the calendar is investigated. To the first question, on the inconceivably large scope of the disastrous falls and their bisopheric effects, the author again pleads the general ignorance. On one issue, he feels confident, namely, that a small meteoroid such as the Alvarez team has sought and believed sufficient to destroy the dinosaurs and much else around the world--a meteoroid of a few kilometers diameter--would barely interrupt the reproduction cycle of the species; but it did not occur alone.

Certainly I did not begin my studies with so prodigious an armory of missiles in mind. It happened that more and more effects called for causes. It happened, too, that more and more literature has been becoming available that indicates exoterrestrial intervention in earthly processes. Meanwhile, I increasingly strapped myself into a short-time harness, which is explained astrophysically in Solaria Binaria, anthropologically in Chaos and Creation and Homo Schizo I, and to some extent in the chapters gone by here and in those to come. My model demands a short-time for many exoterrestrial transactions to occur. If either the amount of time or the number of encounters is to be substantially changed, my model will crack up, and the value of my work must then rest on its assembly and description of exoterrestrial effects in the different areas of geology, astrophysics and anthropology. An exception would occur if it will be shown, as we have said in Solaria Binaria, that the formative period of the Earth, under a million years ago, brought down showers of material whose marks are faintly observable everywhere still. However, I am in no sense foreseeing a crack-up and ask the indulgent reader to continue to ride along with the model.

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Notes (Chapter Eleven: Encounters and Collisions)

1. (1749-1827) Oeuvres Complétes (Paris: 1884) VII 121; and see VI 234-5, 478; VII cxx ff.

2. Frank Dachille, "Interactions of Earth with Very Large Meteorities," 24 Bull. S. Ca. Acad. Sci (1962), 1-19; see also "Axis Changes in the Earth from Large Meteorite Collisions," 198 Nature (13 Apr. 1963), 176.

3. "Meteorites-Little and Big..." 46 Earth and Mineral Sci. 7( 1977), 49-52.

4. C. S. Beals, Ian Halliday, and J. Tuzo Wilson, Theories of the Origin of Hudson Bay (Ottawa: Dept. of Energy, Mines, ResoHad trouble resolving dest near word action type is Launch urces, 1968).

5. Dachille (1977) 51; 5 Astronomy (Feb. 1977), 60.

6. D. W. Hughes, 256 Nature (28 Aug. 1975), 679, referring to studies of Ashworth and Hutchinson on hydrous meteoritic minerals.

7. O'Leary, Campbell and Sagan, "Lunar and Planetary Mass Concentrations," 165 Science (15 Aug. 1969), 651-7.

8. J. Smit and J. Hertogen, "An Extraterrestrial Event at the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary," 285 Nature (1980) 198- 200.

9. Op. cit., 203-4.

10. John Normain et al. "Astrons--The Earth's Oldest Scars?" New Sci. (24 Mar. 1977), 689-92.

11. New Sci. (19 Mar. 1981), 740.

12. 63: 249 (1982).

13. 81 J. Geophy. Res. (1976), 5651-63.

14. ( 1977) 692, fig. 5.

15. " Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods," 242 Nature (2 Mar. 1973), 32-3; cf. R. A. Lyttleton, 245 Nature (21 Sep. 1973), 144-5 for comment.

16. Op. cit., 2.

17. " Deep Crust Hints at Meteoritic Impact," 121 Sci. New (1982), 96.

18. " Electromagnetic Effects of Collisions at Meteoritical Velocities," 13 Meteoritics (Dec. 1978), 430-3.

19. " A Former Asteroidal Planet as The Origin of Comets," 36 Icarus (1978), 51-74, 71.

20. John M. Saul, "Circular Structures of Large Scale and Great Age on the Earth's Surface," 271 Nature 26 Jan. 1978), 345 ff.

21. Supra, 75, ltr Geoffrey A. Kellaway and Eric M. Durrance with Saul reply 273 Nature (4 May 1978), 75.

22. Asimov et al., loc cit. and S. Kogan, op. cit.

23. Op. cit., 140.

24. 188 Nature (24 Dec. 1960), 1064-7.