Did a Comet Cause the Great Flood?

In January I flew back to the United States to interview a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (where they designed the nuclear bomb) who says that he has found evidence that 5000 years ago most of humanity was almost wiped out when a comet smashed into earth and caused a global cataclysm. Years of painstaking research have led Bruce Masse has compiled a list of creation myths around the world that mention floods and fire that he says actually record a historic event. According to Masse the Biblical tale of a great flood that nearly wiped out humanity is actually the same event as a South America myth that mentions fire falling from the sky and nearly ending life on that continent. He has tracked similar myths in India, China, Africa, Europe and Austrilia. But what sets Masse apart from just some another guy with an interesting tale to tell is that he has involved the broader scientific community to corroborate his claims. Now members of a team on three continents have gone through geologic data and core samples from the bottom of the ocean to locate a crater off the coast of Madigasgar that just might be ground zero for the beginning of this age of civilization. Everything before that, argues Masse, is just ash.

My story appears in this month's issue of Discover Magazine. Excerpt below:

The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly. A horn juts sharply from its head. The creature looks as if it might be swimming through a sea of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt cliff? For Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient petroglyph, scratched into a rock by a Native American shaman. “You can’t tell me that isn’t a comet,” he says.

In Masse’s interpretation, the petroglyph commemorates a comet that streaked across the sky just a few years before Europeans came to this area of New Mexico. But that event is a minor blip compared to what he is really after. Masse believes that he has uncovered evidence that a gigantic comet crashed into the Indian Ocean several thousand years ago and nearly wiped out all life on the planet. What’s more, he thinks that clues about the catastrophe are hiding in plain sight, embedded in the creation stories of cultural groups around the world. His hypothesis depends on a major reinterpretation of many different mythologies and raises questions about how frequently major asteroid impacts occur. What scientists know about such collisions is based mainly on a limited survey of craters around the world and on the moon. Only 185 craters on Earth have been identified, and almost all are on dry land, leaving largely unexamined the 70 percent of the planet covered by water. Even among those on dry land, many of the craters have been recognized only recently. It is possible that Earth has been a target of more meteors and comets than scientists have suspected. . .

Continue reading on Discover's website here.