Asteroid Theory

G.R. Corli, a French astronomer in 1785, was the first researcher to conclude
that the fragment of a passing comet collided with the Earth to destroy Atlantis.
The earliest thorough investigation of the Atlantis Problem was begun nearly 100
years later by the father of Atlantology, Ignatius Donnelly. His second book on
the subject, Ragnarok: Age of Fire and Gravel (1884), proposed that the island
civilization had been annihilated by a comet’s collision with the Earth. At a time
when established scientists did not even recognize the existence of meteorites, his
speculation was roundly dismissed as untenable fantasy. He was supported by only
a few contemporary thinkers, such as the Russian physicist Sergi Basinsky, who
argued that a meteor impact with the Earth had been great enough for the simultaneous
destruction of Atlantis and rise of Australia.
But in the 1920s and 30s, Donnelly’s theory was revived and supported by the
German physicist, Hanns Hoerbiger, whose controversial “Cosmic Ice” paradigm
included the Atlantean catastrophe as the result of Earth’s impact with a cometary
fragment of frozen debris. His British contemporary, the influential publisher,
Comyns Beaumont, had already come to the same conclusion independently.
During the post-World War II era, Hoerbiger was championed by another wellknown
Austrian researcher, H.S. Bellamy. Meanwhile, Beaumont’s work was taken
over entirely by Immanuel Velikovsky in his famous Worlds in Collision (1950),
which elaborated on the possibility of a celestial impact as responsible for the
sudden extinction of a pre-Flood civilization.
As intriguingly or even as plausibly as these catastrophists argued, their proofs
were largely inferential. But the extraterrestrial theory began to find persuasive
material evidence in 1964, when a German rocket-engineer, Otto Muck, announced
his findings of twin, deep-sea holes in the ocean floor. They were caused by a
small asteroid that split in half and set off a chain reaction of geologic violence
along the length of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a series of subsurface volcanoes, to
which the island of Atlantis was connected.
In the late 1980s and early 90s, astronomers
Victor Clube and Bill Napier
affirmed an asteroidal or meteoric explanation
for the destruction of Atlantis.
They demonstrated, however, the
greater likelihood of a virtual Earthbombardment,
or “fire from heaven,”
as our planet passed through or near a
cloud of large debris that showered
down dozens or even hundreds of
meteoritic materials, as opposed to
Muck’s single collision.
Particularly since the publication of
Muck’s convincing evidence, leading
scholars—such as the world’s foremost
authority on Halley’ Comet, Dr. M.M.
Kamiensky (member of the Polish
Academy of Sciences); Professor N.
Bonev (Bulgarian astronomer at the
University of Sofia); and Edgerton Sykes
(the most important Atlantologist of the post-World War II era)—believed the
final destruction of Atlantis was caused by an extraterrestrial impact or series of
impacts. Preceding these scientific investigations by thousands of years are the
numerous traditions of a great deluge caused by some celestial event, recounted
in societies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Many, if not most, of these worldwide folk memories invariably link a heavensent
cataclysm with the Flood. Beginning with the first complete account of
Atlantis, Plato’s Timaeus, the fall of an extraterrestrial object foreshadows the
island’s destruction when Psonchis, the Egyptian narrator of the story, tells
Solon, the visiting Greek statesman, about “a declination of the bodies moving
around the Earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the
Earth recurring at long intervals of time.”
Inscriptions on the walls of Medinet Habu (Upper Nile Valley), the “Victory
Temple” of Pharaoh Ramses III, tell how the Atlantean invaders of Egypt were
destroyed: “The shooting-star was terrible in pursuit of them,” before their island
went under the sea. Ibrahim ben Ebn Wauff Shah, Abu Zeyd el Balkhy, and other
Arab historians used the story of Surid, the ruler of an antediluvian kingdom, to
explain that the Great Flood was caused when a “planet” collided with the Earth.
In North America, the Cherokee Indians remembered Unadatsug, a “group”
of stars—the Pleiades—one of whom, “creating a fiery tail, fell to Earth. Where it
landed, a palm tree grew up, and the fallen star itself transformed into an old
man, who warned of coming floods.” As the modern commentator, Jobes, has
written of Unadatsug, “The fall of one star may be connected with a Deluge story;
possibly the fall of a Taurid meteor is echoed here.”
A complimentary version occurs in the Jewish Talmud: “When the Holy One,
blessed be He, wished to bring the Deluge upon the world, He took two stars out
of the Pleiades.” Similar accounts may be found among the Quiche Maya of the
Lowland Yucatan, the Muysica of Colombia, the Arawak Indians of Venezuela,
the Aztecs at Cholula, the classical Greeks, and so on.