The Perkins Lake Site

The Perkins site (on farmland near Perkins, Louisiana,USA) is claimed by some as North America's first identified airburst crater, dating to the onset of the Younger Dryas period. The site is an unassuming, shallow depression some 300 metres across. Enthusiasts investigating the feature argue that it contains evidence for a low-altitude cosmic airburst, and that deposits found in and around the depression may preserve the physical traces of such an event.

The lake is located east of Perkins, LA, in the state’s southwest corner (inset, arrow) and is called the Perkins site. Base image: USGS. Inset image: Google Maps, 2024, INEGI.

The story of the site begins in 1938, when Walter Leo Fitzenreiter Jr., father of Robert Fitzenreiter, who would later lead the research team publishing the discovery (Fitzenreiter 2025), first speculated that a seasonal lake on his property might be an "impact crater". His interpretation was based largely on the shape of the feature and the presence of a crater-like rim, raised approximately a metre above the surrounding terrain. At the time, there was little more than the morphology of the depression to support the idea.

Depression with locations of glass-and-spherule-rich material outlined with the white dotted line. Image: Google Earth, Maxar Technologies; imagery date: 12/13/2003.

More than six decades later, in 2006, Robert Fitzenreiter began digging at the site. During this work he identified several locations around the lake where large, semi-consolidated masses of spherules occurred together with multi-centimetre-sized fragments of black, vesicular glass. Fitzenreiter reasoned that these unusual materials might have been produced by a cosmic airburst or impact event. In 2011, he contacted members of the Comet Research Group, who subsequently undertook analyses of the materials in an attempt to establish their characteristics and origin.

The resulting investigation has produced a collection of observations that the researchers regard as particularly significant. Large numbers of fused spherules and substantial fragments of high-temperature meltglass have been recovered, which they interpret as indicators of an extreme cosmic event. There are also reported to be abundant shocked quartz grains and microbreccia. These are geological features that can be associated with impact processes and, according to the researchers, are especially characteristic of confirmed impact sites.

The exceptionally high concentrations of meltglass and spherules reported at Perkins are presented as another important feature of the site. According to the research team, their abundance ranks among the greatest found at any known impact or airburst site. Chemical and structural analyses have further suggested similarities between the Perkins spherules and meltglass and materials recovered from other proposed Younger Dryas impact sites in the United States and elsewhere.

A range of analytical techniques has been applied to the material, including optical microscopy, universal-stage analysis, electron microscopy (SEM, TEM and STEM), cathodoluminescence, laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), neutron activation analysis (INAA), and radiometric dating. The researchers report that these investigations reveal morphological and compositional similarities between the Perkins deposits and impact-related proxies identified at other sites.

Dating is particularly important to the interpretation. Radiocarbon dating and ^40Ar/^39Ar analyses are reported to constrain the possible age of deposition to between approximately 30,000 and 10,000 calibrated years BP, with a concentration of dates around 12,800 years BP, specifically 12,835–12,735 cal BP, i.e., falling within the generally proposed age range of the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB), approximately 12,800 years ago.

On this interpretation, a low-altitude, or "touch-down", airburst could plausibly have produced the shallow depression as well as the unusual concentrations of meltglass and spherules found around it. The Perkins site would therefore represent, in the researchers' view, North America's first identified airburst crater associated with the Younger Dryas Boundary. 

The research team consequently concludes that the results of the investigation highlight the scientific significance of the Perkins discovery for both geology and “our understanding of cosmic hazards”.
Yeah, right. But first lets see the facts. For a site report, these 25 authors are very coy about saying EXACTLY where it is (30°23'53.55"N  93°21'13.66"W ) or showing its actual situation in the cultural landscape. In favct it is very much more complex than a simple depression, there are banks and water courses in it. That 'rim around' the site is difficult to discern on the satellite photos, but there are artificial banks crossing it, and there is a supicion (not helped by the fact that there is not a single sectoion of the stratigraphy published) that this depression was dug out as a sandpit and the banks around the edges are of stripped topsoil. The banks crossing the site may be an attempt to channel a stream that crosses the site. In my opinion, before jumping to conclusions on what this site was, the investigators needed to pay more attention to the geomrophology of the site and the nature of the deposits in and around it as well as the landscape history of the surroundings of the site. There is still much more to be investigated and documented before drawing conmclusions about some extraterrestrial influences.  

I also note that there is no archaeological context given for those C14 dates (or the "arrowheads" that seem to play some part in the dating process) this would be because they don't really seem to have gone for working out the stratigraphy, and Hole 1 is off the edge of the depression, not through the layers of its silting. WHY? I really do not understand the fascination wiyth "Baysian age-depth" models in a set of scattered dates obtained from a stratigraphical sequence that is not a sequence because they've not defined it. Just bonkers and meythodologically inept. Can we get some real archaeologists looking at this site? 

References

Martin Sweatman 2025,  'The first Younger Dryas impact surface feature identified?' Martin Sweatman Blog June 07, 2025.

Robert Fitzenreiter, Kord Ernstson, Gunther Kletetschka, Malcolm A. LeCompte, Christopher R. Moore, James P. Kennett, Michael Bizimis, Florian Hofmann, Marian Takac, A. Victor Adedeji, Timothy Witwer, Julie E. Chouinard, Jesus Paulo Perez, Marc D. Young, Teresa M. Eaton, Matthew J. Valente, David B. Lanning Jr., Yoav Rapoport, Kailey Ellison, Argyro Reyes, Ravi Holladay, Michelle Madrigal, Julian Albanil, Charlie Sanchez and Allen West 2025, 'Evidence of a 12,800-year-old Shallow Airburst Depression in Louisiana with Large Deposits of Shocked Quartz and Melted Materials', Airbursts and Cratering Impacts Vol. 3(1). DOI: 10.14293/ACI.2025.0004 [Research Gate]. 

Biondi's "Harmonic SAR" examined and found wanting

While we were all waiting for a more digestible form of the Malaga/Biondi presentation on the Khafre Project, I came across a very interesting text here: "I tried to reproduce the viral satellite radar paper about the pyramids [https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.00811]. Here's what I found" (Simone @theotherpomp Apr 21). I do not know who the author is, but their method and conclsions seem worthy of discussion.

The critique begins by outlining Filippo Biondi's extraordinary claim that satellite radar analysis has revealed vast underground structures beneath the Giza pyramids, including shafts extending hundreds of metres underground and structures more than a kilometre deep. These claims were presented as credible because the method was also said to have successfully detected the known chambers within the Great Pyramid and the underground Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy.

The author first examines whether the published single-pass SAR method is physically capable of detecting the known chambers inside the Great Pyramid. By reconstructing the imaging geometry using real satellite parameters, they conclude that the method's vertical resolution is approximately 285 metres, far too coarse to distinguish structures such as the King's Chamber and Queen's Chamber, which lie only a few tens of metres apart. This suggests that the claimed detections are not physically plausible using the published technique.

To test this conclusion empirically, the author compares the radar response of the Great Pyramid with nearby empty desert using the same processing approach described in the paper. Across 240 experiments varying multiple parameters, the method fails to distinguish the pyramid from the surrounding landscape; indeed, the empty desert often produces stronger responses than the pyramid itself. Expanding the analysis to twenty different locations (including other monuments, urban areas, farmland, and the Nile River), produces remarkably similar results in every case.

The author then investigates why the method appears to generate underground structures everywhere. Through simulation, they show that sparse tomographic reconstructions can create convincing but entirely artificial deep structures, even when only shallow features are present in the original model. As the amount of genuine observational data increases, these apparent deep structures disappear, suggesting that they are reconstruction artefacts rather than real objects.

This explanation is then applied to the Gran Sasso laboratory, which the author argues may represent a case of identifying an expected feature within a reconstruction method that naturally generates structured responses at many depths. The critique also identifies a possible inconsistency in the original study: although the published method is described as a single-pass technique, the paper references multiple acquisitions and processing tools typically associated with multi-pass interferometric SAR analysis.

The author ultimately concludes that the published single-pass method cannot support the extraordinary claims being made for it. They suggest that any genuine detections of known structures may have resulted from a different, multi-pass workflow than the one described in the paper, while the dramatic deep structures beneath Giza are more plausibly explained as artefacts generated by an under-constrained reconstruction process.

The veil is falling: Ἢ Ἀπ’ Ὄνου Πίπτειν

Nicole Cicciolo's "ancient mysteries" fanboys are trying to build up the tension.

Filippo Biondi @Filippobiondi_1 · 4h

History is about to be rewritten forever.
In world premiere at Castel San Pietro Terme, Filippo Biondi and Corrado Malanga unveil the groundbreaking results on the Second Sphinx of Giza. What was hidden for millennia beneath the sands is emerging — a perfect symmetrical twin of the Great Sphinx, rewriting ancient history. As the ancient Greeks whispered: «Σφίγξ δὲ δίμορφος, φύλαξ τῶν μυστηρίων» — a bimorphic Sphinx, guardian of the mysteries. And «Ἐν τῷ σκότει κεῖται ἡ ἀλήθεια» — in the darkness lies the truth. Just as the Latin masters taught: «Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem» — from shadows and images into truth.
The HarmonicSAR technology has spoken. Sacred geometry does not lie. This is the millennium of space. For discreet support to the Sphinx excavations and HarmonicSAR research, contact: biopippoo@gnail.com
The veil is falling.
Watch the world premiere preview now → https://youtu.be/wH792ihvbhk

Biondi Bollocks on The/A Flood at Giza

Italian boffin Filippo Biondi says that the Great Flood, the so-called "Zep Tepi", and the Giza pyramids are all connected. He told US podcaster Joe Rogan that "seawater salt" still stuck to the walls inside the Great Pyramid proves the entire area was flooded thousands of years ago. That same salt is the evidence that ties everything together with the mythological "first times" (Zep Tepi). "Two months ago, I went for the first time to visit the pyramids, and I found salt on the wall" and he said that this is proof that the entire area was flooded, which he suggests is supported by the fact that the shafts were flooded and filled with debris. This would mean that:

the pyramids were built sometime between Zep Tepi and the Great Flood, which could push their age back dramatically. The salt on the walls is ocean salt from when the sea rushed in over 11,000 years ago and filled the shafts with debris [...]. This changes everything we thought we knew about ancient history

. It further convinces me that this guy has some kind of mental condition that requires him to come out with firm "statements of fact" for purposes of self grndisation and attracting attention.
Salt is present in limestone and desert conditions for other reasons than an otherwise undocumented marine transgression.

Neal Sendlak ( @Gnosisinformant, May 21) and I are of the same opinion:

It's hard to tell if this guy is completely out of his mind or just a complete fraud who knows there are really stupid people in the world who will buy into his crap.

Myth as History

                                             .                                             

Michael Button thinks (@MichaelButtonX )

At the end of the last Ice Age, sea levels rose by more than 120 metres. That's a drastic shift. An area of land *larger* than the United States disappeared beneath the ocean. But for the people living there, it must have felt like the world was slowly ending. Today, around 40% of humanity lives within 100 km of a coastline. Imagine London underwater. New York underwater. Shanghai underwater. If your homeland vanished beneath the ocean, what story would you tell your children? And what story would they tell theirs? Would it become a legend? A flood myth? A warning? One of the strangest possibilities in history is that some ancient myths may not be inventions at all. They may be memories.

If that is what this ancient-history-educated YouTuber believes, then it would advance discussion of his idea if he would write a proper book setting out a METHODOLOGY of using "the Greek Myths"(first he should define that term) recorded by say Apollodorus and Hesiod as a historiographical source. Not a video, a book with references.

                            .                        

No doubt Button would start off with his favourite example of how Schliemann used Homer to find the real city of Troy(though in fact it was never lost). He might mention the examples of indigenous Australian myths that purportedly accurately describe coastlines from 10,000 years ago, or perhaps break down how Hesiod's Ages of Man compare to actual archaeological ages.

It is difficult to see how one could go much further with this. As I said a methodologist must strictly define what "The Greek Myths" means. Myth is not a single holy book. It is a messy, shifting web of oral tales. Myths mix real memories (though potentially selecdtive or biased retellings of them) with symbolic storytelling, religious lessons, and creative imagination. To use stories like those referring to the hackneyed topic of a Golden Age or global divinely-ordained catatrophes as history. Scholars cannot just take them at face value, especially by picking-and-mixing the bits of what must be treated as an internally coherent whole just because certain fragments seem to relate to extra-source evidence. First the discarded fragments need to be taken into account - by what methodology?

Using mythology as a straight historical record creates several major issues. Myths lack precise dates, there may be timeline distortion, various symbolic numbers may be assigned to events, how can a methodology separate these from actual dates derived from some kind of record if that record itself is neither explicit or extant? There may be exaggeration introduced for narrative or symbolic resons. Natural events get grander over time; a large local river flood becomes a global ocean flood that "covers the highest mountains". The story may have been symbolic, a parable, with characters and events often standing for ideas. A "Golden Age" might not be a real time period, but a literary tool to contrast a difficult present with a perfect, imagined past. Myths also may involve political rewriting. Rulers and priests often changed myths. They rewrote stories to prove they had a divine right to rule or to make their enemies look bad.

What kind of toolkit would be involved in trying to use myth as a historical source? In some cases they are the same that are in use for any written source first of all, establish the authentic text then apply the usual analystical tools (e.g., comparative mythology, textual criticism and source stratigraphy) followed by some form of cross-verification.

So how far would that get you? Let Mr Button show us. In the course of trhat, he may well discover why two centuries of study of these texts has pretty definitively already decided that they are not actually usable in the way he proposes. I wonder just how much of that debate (for example on the compilation of the first five books of the Old Testament and their relation to other Near Eastern - for exmple mesopotamian or Egyptian - documents) he is aware of? If he writes the book, we will find out.