Graham Hancock and Allen West on the Younger Dryas Impact

So um I'm going to give another presentation. This this one is about the younger dryass impact hypothesis. If you talk about a lost civilization, there got to be some reason why it got lost. Something major. And that's why the younger drius impact hypothesis is of great importance to me. After my presentation, uh Dr. Alan West uh from the comet research group will join me uh and we will have uh a discussion about the work of the comet research group and the challenges that they that they face. So I shall begin. Um, as I mentioned earlier in my work going right back to the early 1990s, I began to see the period of around 12,500 to 13,000 years ago as being incredibly important to the ancient civilizations that I was dealing with. and it seemed to be associated with some kind of cataclysm, but I didn't know what it was. And and uh I looked at a number of possibilities and one of the possibilities was was indeed the earth crust displacement theory by Charles Hapgood, which gets a very solid uh mention in fingerprints of the gods. Um but there are a number of problems with that theory. If the if that theory were correct, and I'm not totally ruling it out, if it were correct, it would be an utterly devastating glo global cataclysm if the earth's crust were to shift. But then in the 2000s, particularly since 2007, I came across the younger dry impact hypothesis, which was then a new hypothesis. Um, and and I realized that the the cataclysmic incident that I was convinced had taken place between around 12,500 and 13,000 years ago was exactly being described by the comet research group that uh that this was what they were this is what they were focusing on a a global cataclysm precisely of the kind that could have wiped a civilization from our memory. So I want to talk a bit about the YDIH the younger drius impact hypothesis. Uh it is not uh a fringe hypothesis. Everybody behind the younger drius impact hypothesis is a solid massively credentialed scientist. We're dealing with people who are absolutely mainstream scientists but they are taking a a position involving catastrophes. And something about science, particularly geological sciences, they don't like cataclysms. They don't like catastrophes. And and and the younger drius impact hypothesis has faced a huge amount of of very bizarre attacks upon it over the years from other scientists who seem to want to get rid of it for some reason. So look, uh this is our home, the Milky Way. Um, we uh we're in the Orion arm and uh we're orbiting the center of the galaxy at about 515,000 miles an hour. Just consider that we are we don't have that sense. I mean, we know the Earth turns, but we are actually in orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at 515,000 miles an hour. And uh we Look at these these figures. There's the 514,000. The Earth is spinning on its own axis at a thousand miles an hour if you're at the equator. Thousand miles an hour. We're sitting on something that's running at 1,000 miles an hour and it's going round the Milky Way galaxy. Uh so it takes 225 million years despite that vast speed for our solar system to make a complete circuit of the center of the Milky Way. So, we've had about 20 galactic years since the sun and the earth first formed. Now, here's the funny thing. The Earth's orbit around the center of the Milky Way is not on a flat plane. The Earth does this. The whole solar system does this kind of sinocidal motion as it orbits around the center of the galaxy. Uh and and it has been suggested that this motion as we pass through the central plane of the galaxy every 27 or 30 30 million years puts us into a dense and dangerous area of the galaxy where we're much more likely to receive comet impacts than we would at other times. And uh there is a theory that that uh these 27.5 millionyear cycles are a result of that interaction with the dense central plane of the galaxy. Uh and there's been a lot of good science published on this. I think it's I think it's very interesting. It suggests that mass extinctions events on Earth may occur roughly every 27 to 30 million years potentially linked to the solar systems passage through the cl crowded midplane of the Milky Way galaxy. uh and and uh the scientific work was done by Rampino and co-authors. They note that the solar system passes through the midplane of the galaxy approximately every 26 to 30 million years. They speculate this could cause increased encounters with dark matter, disturbing cometry orbits and so on and so forth. So where do comets come from? There are two main sources. uh one is the kiper belt uh and the other is the ort cloud. Um and and uh what this cycle seems to show is that we have these periodic showers of comets that come in from the solar systems ought cloud come in from deep space. Um and and uh it's a kind of junkyard of icy bodies. Uh both are thought both the Ort cloud and the Kyper Copa belt are thought to be sources of comets. Um and and uh it's very likely very likely that the comet that was responsible for the younger Dryus impacts was a comet that came in from deep space was attracted by the Earth's gravity and by by the sun's gravity and went into orbit around the sun. Unfortunately, an orbit that crosses the orbit of the Earth. Uh, and comets are not they're not just dirty snowballs. Comets are full of masses of rock as well. Um, let's take comet 67P photographed by the Rosetta Pro probe. Uh, there's its nucleus. The nucleus of a giant comet can exceed 200 kilometers in diameter. And the scientists working on the Younger Dryus impact think we're looking at a comet that was originally at least 100 kilometers in diameter that came into the inner solar system and started to disintegrate. Um to give you an idea that's 67P uh overlaid on San Francisco. Needless to say, an impact with such an object would be utterly devastating. Um, and we've been observing comets in the solar system for quite a while. And one the one that teaches us very important lessons is comet Shoemaker Levy 9, which hit Jupiter uh in 1994. The massive gravity of Jupiter caused this comet to break up into multiple fragments. In fact, it broke up into 21 fragments. You can see some of them here. these glowing deadly trails of light. And when they smashed into Jupiter, Jupiter drew them in with its gravity. Total explosive power of the Schubc 9 impacts 300 gigatons. A gigaton is equivalent to 1 billion tons of DN of TNT. I nearly said DMT. A million tons of DMT. I mean, can you imagine? Bring it on. The stockpiled nuclear arsenal of the entire Earth, were it to explode at once, would be equivalent to just 6.4 gigatons. So, we're talking just enormous explosive events. Um, and and uh this is the moment I' I've talked about this before and I'll say it again here. Thank you Jupiter. We owe everything to Jupiter. Jupiter is the giant guardian of our planet. With its huge gravity, it is drawing in comets that would otherwise have made life on Earth completely impossible. So Jupiter is our protector. And Jupiter is so big, Jupiter can take it. Not a problem. If one of those things hit the Earth, we'd be done for. Yeah. So, of course, the biggest impact event that we all we all know about that's in still still in current discussion is the the so-called KT or the or the Cretaceous Paleogene event as it's now called that that made the dinosaurs uh extinct at the Cretaceous tertiary boundary. Um and and um you can see that boundary. It's a boundary layer and there's a huge extinction follows it. Uh these days there's quite a lot of thought that the object that made the dinosaurs extinct wasn't an asteroid. It was a comet. Um and and uh that is still an argument. It's still a theory. Whether whether it was a comet or an astron asteroid, we know what it did. And what it did was massive. Um, the world changed utterly. The former order of things was swept away and a new order began to emerge. So, the dinosaurs aren't quite extinct. That fell down there, that's a dinosaur. The birds survived. These guys vanished, but the birds survived. They are dinosaurs. And then, why am I showing you this little shrew here? Purgatorious. Well, that is because that's our 65 million year old mother. The mammals were going nowhere during the age of the dinosaurs. They were dead in the water. But when the dinosaurs were gone, the mammals suddenly began evolving and and stepping into niches that previously had been unavailable to them. And that was the beginning of mamalian evolution that fundamentally led to us. So yes, it made the dinosaurs extinct, but we're here. It changed the world completely. Now that's called the Cretaceous Tertiary Boundary or the Cretaceous Paleogene boundary as they've renamed it. You can see that it's a very distinct boundary layer in the rock. Uh and and it's full of of what are called impact proxies. They're full of the evidence that there was a cosmic impact even though there may not be a crater immediately visible in the area. Uh the these include iridium carbon microspherials, nano diamonds, shocked quartz, melt glass, suicides, and other minerals melted at extremely high temperatures. The more than 2,200 degrees centigrade, the boiling point of quartz across a wide area of the Earth's surface. And here's Lewis Alvarez and his son Walter Alvarez at the KT boundary. They faced exactly the same kind of that the comet research group is facing today. They couldn't produce a a crater initially and the scientific community turned on them, savaged them, sought to destroy their reputations, said they were making it all up. It was false. It was wrong. It was fraud. It was a hoax. But it wasn't. It was real. And they did eventually find the crater. And that crater is the chicks globe crater in Mexico. is deeply buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico, shown up in remote scanning. Since then, it's not been an argument anymore. Uh we we know why the dinosaurs went extinct. Um NASA tells us that these extinction level events occur only once every hundred million years. I wonder what magical frequency NASA are dialing into to to to to say that 100 millionyear intervals. Obviously, if there's 100 million-year intervals, we we don't need to worry, you know. I mean, the last one was 60 million years ago. We got 40 million years. Why should we care? Um but but uh a number of eminent astronomers say we should care very much indeed and that our cosmic environment is much more active than NASA teaches us and they're particularly concerned with with comets. I'm showing Fred Hy, Chandra Wickham Singh, Victor Kubin, and Bill Napia here. Um this is a NASA fact sheet. What is a meteor shower? Well, every single meteor shower, whether it's the Torids, whether it's the Orionids, whether it's the Leonids, every single meteor shower is what's left of a disintegrated comet. It's the dust trail of a disintegrated comet. And as the dust enters the Earth's atmosphere, it burns up uh and we see shooting stars. And they say not to worry. Meteorites are usually small. Uh they almost always burn up quickly in the atmosphere. Little chance they're going to strike the Earth's surface. just see a beautiful shooting star show. The message is don't worry. But uh the prominent astronomers who disagree uh say we should worry very much indeed. Uh that the earth is orbiting in the trail of a giant destroyed comet and several times in the past 13,000 years has suffered cataclysmic bombardment from bits of cometary debris and that's had profound implications for history. There's always been a fear of comets. Going right back into human history, there's this terror of comets. That omen in the sky seems to precage danger. And you have to ask yourself why. Why should that be? Though the torid meteor stream as was explained earlier, we call it the torid meteor stream because at the moment as a result of procession, if you look at the sky, the radiant the point out of which the torid meteor stream appears to emerge is in the constellation of Taurus. It isn't coming from the constellation of Taurus. That is just a visual illusion. That's the bit of the sky that it appears to be coming from. And that's why it's called the torid meteor stream. The torid meteor stream is 30 million kilometers wide of cometary debris. Some some bits of it are just dust and some bits of it are very large. Uh including comet Enki. If you read the mainstream coverage of this they'll they'll tell you that comet Enki what's left of it was the source of the torid meteor stream. I disagree and so do most of the scientists working on this. Comet Enki is one of the fragments of the original very large comet that was broken up in the gravitationa --- ld. Um that this was a a cataclysm of of radical climate change. There's no doubt about that. Nobody disputes that. But the question is what caused it? What what what caused the cataclysm? Why did the climate change so suddenly? What happened? And the explanation that's given by the mainstream on this really begs further questions. What they what is said is that there's a thing called the global meridianal overturning circulation of which the Gulf Stream is a part. It's a flow of warm and cold water currents that travel around the whole of the world ocean. And the Gulf Stream in particular plays a very important role in keeping the northern latitudes warm. And the suggestion is that the mainstream view is that there was flooding out of glacial lakes on the American mainland and that this flooding uh of cold water interrupted the overturning circulation, the kind of central heating system of our planet and caused our planet to get much colder. Now there's no doubt that is the mechanism. But the question is why? Why was there so much meltwater released into the world ocean that it could actually stop the Gulf Stream dead in its tracks? And that's a question that the mainstream has never satisfactorily addressed in my view. Um, but what is clear uh is that at the beginning of the younger dryers, at the very moment when the world is suddenly getting cold, something really weird happens. Sea levels rise suddenly. There's a dramatic pulse of sea level rise. It's not an enormous rise. It's two to four meters within a few decades or less of y onset. Why is this puzzling? Because we are entering a period of deep freeze. In a period of deep freeze, you'd expect expect the ice mass to grow and sea levels to fall. You wouldn't expect the ice mass to carve off huge amounts of water, dump it into the world ocean, and cause sea levels to rise, but that's what happened. Um, and and uh that's fundament what triggered those meltwater discharges. And I think the answer is very clear. Those meltwater discharges were triggered by fragments of that disintegrating comet hitting the North American ice cap. and and Randall is is is absolutely right. Hitting a two-mile deep ice cap, they're not going to leave craters that are visible, but they are going to produce an enormous amount of water that's going to rush into the world ocean. Uh and you can see from the diagram on on the right the spread of the evidence that we now have for what's called the younger dry boundary where these proxies of impacts are found in the soil uh all around the world heading all the way from the far west of North America as far east as Syria. Um and and uh basically the younger dryest boundary contains exactly the same impact proxies that were identified in the case of the KT boundary. uh and we can look at it here. There's Murray Springs on the left. You can see the younger dus boundary. It's about a hands width uh in in uh size and again all over the world. Gay Mitch Michigan ll Belgium iridium nano diamonds sedimentary layers in in Murray Springs. It's just all over the world. I'm with Alan West here uh at Murray Springs and he's showing me the black mat. This is referred to as the black mat. This is the this is where the primary evidence for the youngeras impact hypothesis is found because that black mat is full of the proxies that could only be caused by air bursts or impacts from an extraterrestrial object. Uh and actually at Murray Springs, this this is the excavation of Murray Springs. They're excavating a mammoth there. They gave her a name, Eloise. And that black mat was found draped over her body. that mammoth was that mammoth died in the younger dry impact. Um and and and I'm not going to try and read these papers to you. I just want to show you that the comet research group is an extremely serious group of people who have who have faced unwarranted opposition from other scientists and who are bringing very important information to the field and are doing so in the right way. They're publishing that information in peer-reviewed journals and uh it just goes on and on and on. the evidence that they have brought forward and at the same time the sneering dismissal of other scientists towards that evidence that is also part of our fight for the past. I'm just going to show these these these images from different scientific papers that's been published by the comet research group to make it clear to you that this is scientifically wellestablished data. This is not fringe data by any means. Journal of Geology 2014. Uh July 2015. Large platinum anomaly in the Greenland ice core points to a cataclysm at the Younger Dryus. That's the proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences. Uh it's there in Nature's Scientific Reports. uh we have biomass burning younger driest cosmic impact 12,800 years a possibility of of ev evidence of impact proxies even as far south as the Antarctic and in fact the 2014 YDB strewn field of impact proxies has been traced across 50 million square kilometers but the studies from May 2018 reporting impact proxies in Antarctica's Taylor Valley also linked to the evidence of an impact airbear 12,800 100 years ago. We're gradually seeing how global this event was, how what huge parts of the world that it affected and the the fascination with finding a crater is completely ignoring the nature of the event that this was largely air bursts of the Tunguska type that took place all around the world. Um, Patagonia in Chile, uh, Abuhera in Syria. This is a really fascinating site. It's so close to Gobeclete and the evidence for a massive air burst there around 12,800 years ago is absolutely compelling. Uh indeed um there's a map you can see Abuhurera and Gobeclet just a couple of hundred miles further away from Abuhurera. I think the event at Abuhurera played a very important role in the Gobecé story. This is an artist's impression of the of the air burst that took place over Abberuhera. And interestingly, I I have of course a lot of opposition from skeptics, but this was this was Michael Shermer who edits the Skeptic magazine who I've also debated and and after looking at the Abuhera evidence, even Michael Shermer had to admit that he needed to adjust his priors. In other words, his condemnation of the comet research group and my work just as priz in the light of more research like this and modify. It was nice to hear that from Michael. At least he at least he had the capacity to admit that he could change his mind which some of the other scientists I've had the misfortune to deal with. Their minds cannot be changed at all. They're like Mount Everest. Just stands there. Cannot be changed or altered in any way. There we are. Sorry, I have a bit of a rant every now and then. Uh so again Atakama desert we're seeing vast patches of glassy rock in Chilean desert exploding comet. The evidence just goes on and on and on and it keeps on going on. Now, one of the things that's happened, and I I hope that Alan will will talk about this a little bit, is that the the scientific opposition to the comet research group has been so huge there's again there's been an attempt to cancel them, to cut them out of mainstream journals to the point where they they're getting tired of arguing with the editors of mainstream journals and they they've they've created a journal of their own, air bursts and cratering impacts. it is peer- reviewviewed uh and most of the very recent science on the younger dus impact has been published in that in that paper. So I just want to show you that this keeps on going that there is more and more evidence for it and this is a little sinister. This is a this is just a screenshot from a YouTube channel. Notice the way that YouTube gives us these warnings. We're not grown-ups, you know, we have to be told what to think by YouTube. So aware that the that the comet issue raises issues of climate change, YouTube feels compelled to tell us that the United Nations reports that climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Human activities have been the been the main driver of climate change. In other words, one of the reasons that the younger dry impact hypothesis is being snubbed and attempts are being made to snuff it out is because it contradicts the pres the present narrative that human beings are responsible for all climate change on this planet. Uh and and uh I have no doubt that human beings are responsible for some climate change. But if we look back into the past record, we can see that much more radical climate changes have occurred at a time when there was supposedly no industry on Earth at all. Uh so I think that that that's part of the problem that this cataclysmic event which caused radical climate change was not caused by human beings and and that has led that has led the establishment to try to marginalize this theory because it goes against a current prevailing narrative. Um so I'm just looking at I I don't want to read all of this out, but it it it it it's a fair summary of the the evidence and counterarguments against the younger drius impact hypothesis. And then of course the the gang of scientists who hate the younger drius impact hypothesis particularly including individuals like Nicholas Pinter, Andrew Scott, Vance Holiday, Mark Boslo. So it's interesting in 2011 they published a reququiam for the younger dus impact hypothesis. They washing their hands that we've completely destroyed the younger dus impact hypothesis. It will never raise its head again. Here's its reququum. So, weirdly, the same group of authors in 2023 are publishing another reququiam for the younger drius impact hypothesis. Like their first one wasn't good enough. They publish they call it a comprehensive reputation of the younger drius impact hypothesis. It's a rubbish paper from beginning to end. It's full of hatred and jealousy and envy. Uh that the guys writing these papers didn't make that discovery themselves. But the papers have been well responded to. Uh Martin Swedman from the University of Edinburgh has done excellent work rebutting the uh so-called comprehensive deduction of the younger dus impact hypothesis. Lawrence Powell very important work premature rejection in science the case of the younger dus impact hypothesis. This is a problem we have. I see it very much in archaeology because that's my my primary focus at the moment, but I suspect it's right across the scientific world. The tendency to prematurely reject new ideas. The tendency to say, "Oh, here's a new idea. Let's look for everything we can find in it that's bad and let's exaggerate that and let's try and get rid of it." Wouldn't it be better when a new idea comes up if people said, "Let's look for what's good in it. Let's look for what we can see in this that might be useful that might be helpful to understand our predicament of human beings. This this destructive criticism within science. It has its place but it allows very negative human emotions particularly jealousy and envy to come across and prematurely reject important scientific developments. So Laur Lawrence Powell's paper is is very important on this and he's carried carried on subsequently. So despite the hostility they're facing, the comet research group are constantly coming up with new evidence which supports and reinforces their theory. It's like with all paradigm shifts. A paradigm never changes overnight. It has to be overwhelmed by new evidence and not just a little new evidence but lots and lots and lots of new evidence and that is what is happening right now with the work of the comet research group. So, uh, I don't think that, uh, the I don't think there's a big problem in understanding why those ocean currents were interrupted 12,800 years ago. Uh, it was the Younger Dryus impact. What happened at the end of the Younger Dryus is much less wellstied. Way back years ago, Sir Fred Hy in the 1980s proposed that the sudden end and the global warming that followed it, the sudden end of the Younger Dryus 11,600 years ago might have been caused by a another cometry impact. Uh, another bit of that fragmenting giant comet hitting a world ocean, sending a huge amount of water vapor into the upper atmosphere and creating a a greenhouse effect. And then of course Robert Shock has got done excellent work on the possibility that that solar activity was involved. I think it's hard to make the case for solar activity at the beginning of the younger drius but there's a very good case to be made for solar activity causing that sudden warming at the end of the younger drius. Uh I don't see why the younger drius impact hypothesis and solar fluctuat --- dow last night." And I say, "Ah, why worry? Wasn't my window." So So it's actually a near miss. If if it could take out satellites, it could just as easily hit us. And when it does, here's the kind of things that can happen. This one was in 1908. in Tungusa, Siberia. It's an animation of what happened. This was a very small object, maybe 40, 50 feet across, knocked down 80 million trees. This an actual photo. They're all spread out all across the Siberian uh tundra. This is what would happen if it happened over New York City. It's bigger than New York City. And this is an animation of what it would happen if you were on the ground in New York City. So they say why worry? Well, this is the reason that you should worry. >> Yeah. >> So this is uh Shoemaker Levy 1994 whacked into Jupiter. Now you think that looks awfully small, right? Small dots in there. But let's put Earth by one of the the blemishes that it put on Jupiter. That blemish is several times larger than the Earth. Then Shoemaker, the scientist who discovered it, said if that thing had hit the earth, we'd have had three months, three to four months of total darkness, just like the darkest night. No sunlight, no photosynthesis, plants not growing, bitterly cold. That happened in our lifetime. So we know that they hit planets. So the skeptics say, why worry? There's the reason to worry. >> Yeah, absolutely. This is even more of a worry. This is the two 2013 air burst over events in Russia. These are actual videos of what happened. Blew the door off the garage. Blew in the window, knocked the people over, blew in another window, knocked the people over. So, so that was a small one. That was maybe 30, 40 feet across. So, not much to speak of, but dangerous, you know, not going to cause the extinction of the human race, but certainly would be bad news over Sedona or any other city around here. So, now here's another one that's been extremely controversial. This is 3,600 years ago, there's destruction of the biblical city, Sodom. Now, obviously, our critics jumped on that right away. Well, how do you know it was Sodom? Well, you know, in all honesty, we don't. We did look for uh we thought, okay, let's quiet the critics here. We'll look for street signs. So, we tried to see if there was something like Sodom Way and, you know, Gamora Boulevard, that kind of thing. Couldn't find anything. But, uh, but that that was two times hotter than the sun. And and this this was a small one. We think it was maybe 55 ft across. So let's take a look at uh next thing. This is a a computer animation that we did. It's called hydrocode modeling. So in the computer extremely sophisticated bit of software took me two months to learn how to use the software to do it. Is that difficult? So and you can see here the asteroid that we model is 55 m wide. So about 180 ft. the energy was more than most atomic bombs. And those are uh models of the city buildings. So watch what happens to them. The thing blows up and there go the buildings. And so this is what the model said happens. So then when we looked on the ground, we found evidence to support that. So this is a an artist rendition of what the roof might have looked like. had uh clay roofs, many layers of clay built around uh logs to hold them up. So, look what we found here. This was a piece of that roofing material. So, it's just seriously contorted. It was harder than concrete because it had been baked by the impact itself. It also flattened a four-story palace. This was the foundation of the palace and it used to be fourstory tall. Instead, all of this material was blown into the valley next door. The shock wave was so intense, it actually stripped every building off the top of that uh hill that you just saw. So, now this is uh top view of the city. About 20,000 people live there. Well, guess what our critics did with this? We published a paper was in the world's largest journal. You can see there 600,000 people in 200 countries downloaded this paper which just shows you that if you write papers that talk about giant rocks from space blowing up cities, people pay attention, got their attention. So our critics, however, took them four years to do it. But it was a relentless campaign of of trashing our work, calling it fraud, claiming that we manufactured the evidence, that it wasn't real. And so the editors finally got sick of hearing from them and they pulled the they retracted the paper. So what did we do? We, as Graham said, we published our own journal, put it in it. And the last year, the last year, we've had 300,000 people in 200 countries read our papers. So, >> bravo. And so it just shows you that that you don't necessarily have to fight the critics. They tried to stop us and we simply went around them. >> And so, you know, you can fight with them and and you know, that's the old you've heard the old story about don't wrestle with pigs. You know, the pigs enjoy it. Well, this is a little bit of the same thing. We decided not to argue with the critics. We just went around them. And I think your policy has been to constantly publish new information. >> That's a good point. >> Add to the evidence ra rather than getting into these fist fights with extremely negative people. Just keep presenting them with evidence they can't refute. >> That's exactly it. You know, they they're the critics are very active on Facebook and Twitter, you know, trashing what we're doing. We've decided to take the high road. you know, we basically ignore them, which is the worst thing you can do to somebody who wants to cause you trouble. Yeah. But it's it's actually worked. So now, interesting. What else we can do is outlast them. So that part of what we're doing now, interesting story about this guy. This is Max Plank. The turn of the century, he came up with quantum theory, which is, you probably all heard of that. That's a big thing nowadays, you know, quantum computers and all that. A lot of that came from his research. So, Max Planck had an interesting idea because he was just met with intense criticism, too. I mean, people trashed his work and he was just trying to get the hypothesis out there. So, what did he do? He came up with this idea, science advances one funeral at a time. >> Yeah. Okay. And now just to be clear, these are two of the late scientists who opposed Max. Professor Obstruction, Dr. Ino It all. So, so now just to be clear about Max, he was not advocating shooting his critics, although I'm sure it occurred to him more than a few times. But nevertheless, the idea is that your critics die out, the opposition goes away, and people say, "Well, that idea made a lot of sense. Why were they against it in the first place?" So, so we're we're intending to try and outlast our critics, and may not be in my lifetime or Grahams, but we figure that truth is going to come out eventually. >> Truth will come out. So um your papers report again and again finding very unusual materials in the youngeras boundary layer. Give us some examples. What are the most unusual ones? >> Okay. Well, this is the thing the the the um critic attack us saying that what we're finding is not real. I had actually one critic accuse me of making these iron spirals in my basement and go and salting them at these sites. So now those things you can see they were sometimes smaller than an ant. So what does that mean? It got so hot that every car in the parking lot would have been turned into a pool of molten iron and plastic within less than a few minutes. So incredibly destructive. So we found lots of those at sites. We also found something called shock quartz. And you can see here it's these small lines that are in there are called lamelli. They're actually fractures in the quartz. The quartz is the size of a sesame seed. And just to give you an idea of how much pressure is involved, this is the Washington Monument. So imagine this stacking 75 elephants elephants on top of the Washington monument. So 750,000 pounds per square inch. So just this massive amount of of pressure on these tiny little quartz grains and and nothing on this planet except people and impact events can cause that. So now the we also found nano diamonds. You can see this is an animation of a virus. They're about the third of a sight of of a virus. If we took all the diamonds that we found in 60 some odd sites across the planet and put them into a single ball, it'd be pretty much bigger than downtown uh uh Manhattan. And these are actually images with a 10,000 $10 million m electron microscope of some of the diamonds we found stuck in the Greenland ice sheet. We actually had a crew go to Greenland. We took the ice back, melted it, and this was what was in it. So those are some of the things we're seeing. They're very unusual. And the critics basically say, "Oh, we're making it all up. What about the high levels of radioactivity that you found at some sites? Um, which I know your critics have disputed. What's what's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, let's take a look at some of the evidence here. So, so you saw this in Graham's uh presentation. That's the famous black mat at Murray Springs, you know, just not very far from Fort Wuka. This was one of the first sites that I visited and uh most of our evidence is not only here but in 50 to 60 sites across the country. Well, interestingly enough that it was radioactive. I mean not radioactive in the sense that it would kill you but it was much higher than it should have been. So we published a paper very early on about this and along with this this is a mammoth leg bone from u from New Mexico. The same thing the yellow staining is a uranium oracle carnetite. So this went viral on the internet. People were saying, "Oh my gosh, nuclear war 12,800 years ago." So, so we tried to talk them out of it. I mean, there was no evidence in nuclear war, but we're not sure what they had in mind, but we figured this might be might be something. [Laughter] So I suppose they thought the closest Native Americans had nukes. Now if they did, that would give a whole new twist to the mammoth extinction. You simply nuked them. Okay. So some scientists are they they question your evidence. They say it's just regular terrestrial material that you've misidentified it or it's just a coincidence that you find it in the youngeras boundary layer. What's your answer to that? >> Okay, so let's look at Murray Springs again with this coincidence idea. So, so let's imagine that we could strip back the land and show what it looked like 12,800 years ago. You know, look something like this. probably not a whole lot different than today. So, but here's the difference. So, there was a rain of those melted iron sphererals of diamonds and other things at a million times the normal background. So, now they're falling to be fair, they're falling out of the atmosphere all the time because we have meteorites, small ones coming in all the time. So, there's a small rain of this material, but this was a million times greater. So, let's put it back together again. So, it all there. So, is could it be really a coincidence? No. 10 million tons of seralss across the sites we've looked at. Those are just the ones we know about. 400 million tons of nano diamonds. So, is that a coincidence? You know, just simply impossible that it could be. The critics don't ever give up, you know, but that's still what they think. So, so obviously we think the YD impact did it and that's the best explanation anybody's come up with so far. >> So, you you also claim that human populations at around that time 12,800 years ago when when went through a a massive decline this is a very dramatic figure as as as much as 2thirds of the people on the planet. I know your critics don't like that idea at all. Uh again, what how do you respond to the criticisms? >> Yeah. So, here's some evidence for it. This is CH or Flint, and you might know it. The uh for the Native Americans, this was like Home Depot and Ace Hardware all rolled into one because they made tools out of it. So, these are some of the incredibly beautiful spear points that they made uh out of CH. And curious thing is there were third we found 11 church quaries in the eastern United States. They were everywhere but these are just the east. So they were in Virginia and Kentucky, Tennessee and South Carolina. Then not long after right around 12,800 years ago they disappeared. I mean they they were abandoned. The church was there but the people weren't there for nearly 700 years. Nobody used any of those. Now, imagine if you're building a house and you decide, well, I'm going to do it, but I'm not going to go to Ace Hardware or Home Depot. --- o blame. Yeah, >> the man in black, right? You've heard of him? Actually, it started with the government and u one of our uh key scientists was high up in NASA for 20 years. He was a NASA section chief and he told me that back in the in the 80s when they first discovered the big impact into Yucatan, the government knew that they couldn't do anything about it. And they were starting to get worried calls from their constituents that what can we do about these things? You got to do something about it. You got to stop it. And they couldn't. So what they decided to do was to just pretend that it wasn't real. They had the public fears about the impacts. They decided to just deny, deny, deny. Just say, "Don't worry. There's no problem. We've got it under control." When they didn't. And and he said the problem was that there were some small group of people, mostly in the government, that knew they were lying about it, but then it became the doctrine. It got out there. People began to believe it. the people down the line said and and most of be honest with you, most of our critics either work for NASA or they work for government organizations that depend on NASA for their funding or for their research facilities. And so his thought was that it would became this institutional position that there was no danger from these things and just tell people don't worry because they didn't they they couldn't stand the truth so don't tell them. So so I think that's how so now to be honest it's gotten better but let's just see how much. So comets and asteroids every year the budget is 150 million to look for them and they put up a few satellites to try and see when they're coming. But compare that to this one submarine nuclear submarine 300 3,000 million or three billion dollar 150 million versus three billion. >> There's something wrong with this picture. So, >> no, I think if if NASA suddenly saw that there was a comet coming in that was going to hit one of their nuclear submarines and they'd probably be more interested in spending money. But at the moment, they aren't. So >> but but the question is if if um just hypothetically if something like the youngas impact event were to happen today what not a massive big impact that would threaten all life on Earth but but a a series of air bursts as you're proposing 12,800 years ago. What would be the consequences for our civilization today? Let's let's exactly you know you've you've shown what happened during the younger dry and we've seen some animations too of a lot of these small objects hitting now that was a big event but let's say that we had a smaller one what would happen and it doesn't look good for our technological society they could take out our communication satellites no cell service if they came in multiple air bursts like that would would fry a Transformers, overload the grid, burn out the transmission lines, cities go dark, no TV, no internet. Oops. So, our entire civilization would go dark. Well, that's not good. >> Yeah. >> And uh and that would be for a relatively small one. Now, to be fair, that's not likely to happen tomorrow, but the odds are above zero. In fact, they think that Tonguska-like events might happen every few hundred years. So, but then they're more likely to happen over the world's oceans, but they could happen over a city. And so, we really need to do something about them. And uh and it doesn't look like our government is very motivated to do that. They more likely build nuclear submarines than to do what they need to do with to fix these things that are coming out of space. And the bad news is they know where the big ones are, but they don't know where the ones are that are as wide as this auditorium. They only know a small percentage of them. And the trouble is, they often don't see them coming until they're gone. In other words, they pass between us and the moon and they say, "Oops, there it went." Well, you know, that's not very good. So, so it's something to worry about. But the thing is, we can do something about it. They can put up satellites that can look at the entire sky. They could see these coming. There's some remediation policies that they already know about they could do, but are they going to do it? I'm afraid that's not likely. Yeah. So, we've got this um background of virilent, extremely hostile, very personalized criticism of the younger drius impact hypothesis and yet you continue to present new evidence and and and build your case stronger and stronger. How long do you think it'll be before the YDI actually is widely accepted? Yeah, I wish I knew but uh you know might not be in my lifetime, might be the next generation. Generally paradigm shifting ideas can take 30, 40, 50 years to finally make it into the mainstream. The old idea of science advances one funeral at a time. So our critics have to die off before it does. But but you know, we're really making progress. And in in the last 5 years, our papers have been read by 1.5 million people in 204 countries. >> Our critics, they've been read by a few thousand people, mostly in the United States, mostly their friends. So, so when you look at that, we're making progress, but it's slow. But I I will say that one of the major reasons we've been able to do that is because of donations from people. Thousands of people have donated to help us do this and um and that's been essential. And one of those people is Graham. He's donated from his personal to do that. Another is guy sitting the front row here named Eugene. He came to he heard Graham talk sometime. And these two are part of our angel donors we call them because we can't get money from the government. So, we've really depended on on on donations. We have a lot of people who donate $1 month after month, $5, $10. They're just as valuable to us as the big donors because they all add up when you get thousands of them. So, alto together and so yeah, let's give a hand for Graham and for Eugene here. And quite likely some of you might be donors, too. You know, we've been doing this for a few years and we take good care of your your money if you do donate. We don't take any salaries ourselves. Every single bit goes to pay for these expensive microscopes. The electron microscope, some of the images that you saw were taken with equipment that cost us nearly $300 an hour to rent. So, we have to pay for that out of donations. So, so we're getting it done. And it's it's slow, but it's steady. But as as Graham will attest, when he started with this, almost nobody knew about the younger dus hypothesis. That's changed now because of his books, because of his talks, just like this one. Thousands and thousands of people across the planet know about it who did not know about it before. now and and we've always thought that this would have to be a kind of a groundswell uh movement that that people pressure governments to do things. Government generally don't do them unless they're pressured to do it. Uh unless they want to pay their billion dollar donors and for their, you know, pay them back. But but anyway, so we're making progress. So >> definitely. So there's just a couple of of short questions left. Um, absurdly your critics claim that everything about the youngeras impact hypothesis is wrong. Do you think any of it actually might be wrong? >> You know, if the if the critics ask us or even reviewers or just like Graham ask us that, we'll be the first of the to admit that we don't know everything about this. You know, um, you probably heard the old story, they ask three blind men to describe an elephant. So, the first one grabs the trunk, says, "Well, it's like a fire hose." The next one grabs the the leg and says, "Nope, it's like a tree." And the third one grabs the tail and says, "It's like a rope." Well, we're at that stage. We really don't know how to describe this elephant of an impact. And there are a lot of things that we don't know about it. And as Graham talked about too, it's it's entirely possible that that this huge comet that came in went on and smacked into the sun. If it does that there just a massive solar eruption that comes out. If that was aimed towards Earth, we could have we we could have uh gotten hit with what's called a CME, you know, coronal mass ejection. So also there could have been uh uh just other things at the same time. from a supernova went off at the same time. Well, they tend to bathe nearby stars in deadly radiation. So, and what they do is even though they don't put out a lot of pressure, they put out a a wave that goes through space. And even though it's subtle, it's enough to very gently kick comets out of their orbit. So, what happens when there's supernova, they're often extinctions tied into them. And so we think that maybe a supernova went off, pushed the comet in that hit the earth. So there's more than one thing that it could be. And and actually because of the funding that we've been getting, we're actually looking in ocean cores for evidence of supernovi, evidence for chronal mass ejections, for evidence of other things that could have happened at the same time. We're pretty certain there was an impact. That part we're clear about, but even then we don't necessarily know what it was or where it came from. There are certain objects that'll come in from deep space. I don't know if you saw this that there was this object called Omua Mua that came through was this spindle-like object that shot through the solar system. It came from deep space, shot through our solar system, and kept right on going. Well, who knows? It could have been an object like that. So that's one of the things we're looking for on these ocean cores, too. Is there evidence that whatever this comet was maybe was from deep space? It wasn't from our system at all. So, so we'll be the first to admit we don't have all of the answers, but we're looking for them and in spite of the critics, we plan to keep publishing what we find. So, >> so your critics are, this is the last question really, your critics are very noisy. uh they do seem to have mastered social media quite effectively to make this a multi-pronged attack on you. Uh listening to their noise, you would get the impression that there's a lot of them. Are there actually a lot of them? How many people are we dealing with who really want to stick the knife into the younger dus impact hypothesis? >> Well, well, there there are what we call the loudmouth critics and the quiet critics. So the loudmouth ones like to do it on social media. But but then once again, I'm sure all of you know about social media. One of the things if you want to know whether how important something is, you look at how often it's shared, how often it gets likes. Well, we look at the criticism we get of the younger dus. And generally there are maybe 10 or 20 likes or shares. So when we put things out, it's considerably more than that. The same with Graham. when he puts something on his Facebook page, he gets a lot of likes and shares. Well, that tells you how popular it is. So, so I think our critics are very vocal and unfortunately they do have a fair amount of sway. You know, they they're keeping a lot of our papers from getting accepted. We get things like a reviewer says, uh, this journal should not publish this paper in a million years. It's just pseudocience. There's nothing to it. It's all made up and bogus. Well, then the editors look at that and they reject the paper. So that's why several years ago we set up our own journal. So we just okay, you going to close this door. We're going to go around and and just do it anyway. So So they're not having much effect. You know, they had more effect. At one point we had one paper that was rejected by six different journals one after the other. And we finally said, "That's enough." We set up our own journal. We published it in our own journal. And we followed all of the same rigor that journals follow. We had it peer-reviewed by experts. We listened to what they said. We changed it and we published it and lots of people are reading them. >> Well, congratulations on the work that the Comet Research Group is doing. I think I think it's incredibly important work and uh I would urge I would urge everybody keep your eyes and your ears open for future developments with the with the comet research group and and uh there are many projects in the world today that deserve support but the comet research group is definitely one of them because what they're looking at has implications for the whole of life on Earth for all of our futures and the children in the future as well. So, thank you. >> Thanks. Well done. That's really good.