The US Durupinar Expedition's "Rock Scanner" Finds "Petrified Wood" Rock

"Died Suddenly" (@DiedSuddenly_ 15/9/2016) writes

" Died Suddenly is proud to be an official partner of this world-shaking scientific study".

 But, ah, ... "This one came back as haematite", uh-oh. Guess they don't learn much about rocks in US schools... 

Died Suddenly @DiedSuddenly_
Possible Petrified Wood identified at the Durupinar Noah’s Ark Site. ..

Possible Petrified Wood identified at the Durupinar Noah’s Ark Site.

They are taking the sample in for further testing, and begin core drilling into the boat site in September. pic.twitter.com/bT0WR5EWGH

— Died Suddenly (@DiedSuddenly_) September 1, 2026

.. They are taking the sample in for further testing, and begin core drilling into the boat site in September. 5:38 PM · Sep 1, 2026 · 32.1K Views

So the US expedition's off to a good start, with full MAGA-professionalism. 

US Biblical Literalists Go to Turkey to Sit on a Rock and Fantasise.

                

   US Biblical literalist Lauren Witzke  

This stridently racist, xenophobic MAGA-christin lady seems to've bought new blue jeans and a new Meryka-meryka top to join an archaeological project in Turkey: (@LaurenWitzkeDE 15 Sept 2026)

Earlier this year in a landmark decision, Turkish officials voted unanimously to give a group of American Christians permits to study the remains of Noah’s Ark.

It’s been the greatest pleasure of my life to be a part of one of the most important scientific expeditions in world history (sic). American exploration in the Mountains of Ararat where creation (sic) began anew.

It’s been so surreal. The evidence is overwhelming. It’s all real. The Bible is real, the global catastrophic flood happened… and the researchers and scientists at Noah’s Ark Scans are going to prove it to the world.

The Durupınar investigation is a joint project between Noah’s Ark Scans and Prof. Dr. Cenker Atila, Professor of Archaeology at Sivas Cumhuriyet University in Turkey, who serves as President of the project./

GPR and ERT scans are finding organized corridors and patterns, and what appears to be a massive vessel beneath the surface with 3 tiers or layers.

Soil samples consistent with decomposing wood.

This is NOT a rock formation. Keep in mind it’s over 4000 years old and buried in mudflow.

Please consider chipping in to help us make the evidence irrefutable, and bring down the demonic teachings of evolution and Darwinism.

"GPR and ERT scans are finding organized corridors and patterns..." No, they are not. They are more likely finding fissures in a rock slab. Drawing outlines on a printout with a sharpie does not change the evidence - just the extent of your self-delusion. Duh.

"....and what appears to be a massive vessel beneath the surface with 3 tiers or layers", er, n-o-o-o.... It shows a slab of rock.

"Soil samples consistent with decomposing wood". Or donkey shit, bat shit, decomposing dead grass, actually anything with organic carbon in it [actually READ the report with the understanding high school sciences gave you]. 

"This is NOT a rock formation"  It sure as hell is not wood.

"Keep in mind it’s over 4000 years old and buried in mudflow". That all-American 'dating' comes from what?

Her illustration of this bowl-shaped round-bottomed vessel with no keel is from 2017 not a 2026 expedition:

Note the research agenda "to make the evidence irrefutable, and bring down the demonic teachings of evolution and Darwinism". The Noah's Ark story is related to neither of those things. What do they teach them in US schools? Critical thinking apparently not a lot.

It's the Fault of the Illuminati and their Bicycles?

Guess which site this is about?
I_Am_CyberSmith ( @I_Am_CyberSmith 6:13 PM Sep 9, 2026)

The Turkish government has closed part of the site off.

The Illuminati don't want us to learn about the Previous Cycles.

If we knew how they did It before, we might stop them from doing It again.

Archaeologists used to be independently wealthy aristocrats, answerable to nobody. But now, they are people like @internet_hottie with modest means, dependent on grant money, in a field that doesn't directly produce any revenue. This makes them vulnerable to institutional capture.

They know they will lose funding if they tell us the truth about Atlantis, Nephilim, and the Mudfloods that buried Tartaria.

Where could one even begin to address this?

Another Pseudoarchaeology get-together

Quest for Ancient Civilizations Austin 2026 "The Quest for the Future — The Future is Ancient".

Quest for Ancient Civilizations brings together researchers, authors, and explorers in a 3-day conference on lost civilizations, forbidden archaeology, and the questions mainstream research won't touch — in one room, with an audience that actually wants the answers (Austin, Texas USA, October 16–18, 2026). "Featuring the voices rewriting history: David Hatcher Childress; Randall Carlson; Billy Carson; Dan Richards (DeDunker); Hugh Newman; JJ Ainsworth; Drew Brophy; Duncan Trussell; Kurt Metzger; Tyler Engle; Dr. Heather Lynn; Brent Pella; Enrique Chaug; James Vieria + More TBA".

The Great Flood

 

When you listen to the hancockian and other pseudoarchaeologists, what strikes me is the number of folk who talk about "the Great Flood" as though it was a real, geologically-tested, historical global event that really happened. What's more, they never qualify that phrase, they seemingly do not even conceive that there might be a reason why many of their potential listeners do not share that conclusion. For them, the event is seen as a foundational, universally accepted baseline. For example US YouTuber Jimmy Corsetti  writes several times of the site at Gobekli Trepe (admittedly in the same country as Mt Ararat!) as potentially the site of THE altar that Noah built when the Ark came to rest (Genesis 8:5-21). Because their algorithms, podcasts, and books cross-reference each other as objective fact, they genuinely lose the cognitive perspective required to realize that mainstream science views the global deluge myth as entirely unsupported by any evidence.  

Google n-gram of Google-Book content also gives food for thought, the mentions of this myth-as-event increases dramatically after 1987. It is odd that there was rather a low incidence of use of the term when it was more 'mainstream' in the nineteenth century (possibly other terms such as "Noah's Flood" supplemented that). 

This is pretty shocking. What could be causing it? There are a number of (unrelated?) reasons. A lot of it is due to influence from the USA. The Anglophone "alternative history" market is structurally, financially, and rhetorically dominated by American cultural exports. 

In Europe, the ground was prepared by related processes. In particular chanbges in the book market (away from more serious literature to ephemeral train-station paperbacks) and the blossoming of the New Agey approach to the world that grew from beginnings in the late 1970s and 1980s, developing the "Earth Mysteries" movement. By 1987–1988, this movement crossed over from radical counter-culture into mainstream British publishing.

Unlike in the US, where climate anxieties were largely academic or simply dismissed, Europeans were led to change their views in the mid-eighties. Although climate change and related threats had been discused in Europe since the late 1960s (Silent Spring) the threat was seen as rather an abstract situation that "someone" would have to deal with eventually. But when the explosion of the Soviet-built Chornobil in April 1986 suddenly blanketed Europe in radioactive fallout, a whole continent experienced an overnight, invisible environmental cataclysm. Arguably this led to an abrupt shift in thinking about humanity's vulnerability to sudden, invisible, global ecological ruin. This seems to be one of the roots of a vein of neo-cataclystic (apocalytic) fears - into which the pseudoarchaeologists like Hancock tapped. One corollory of this was the increasing prevalence to see ancient myths not as religious dogma, but as historical warnings. "The Great Flood" stopped being viewed as an ancient Sunday-school story and was re-interpreted through a secular, ecological lens: it became the ultimate archetype of a highly advanced society destroyed by planetary upheaval. 

In the US, there had long been attempts to get the Biblical account of the human past accepted as absolutely literal events, though until the late eighties this was largely confined to fundamentalist Christian circles (for example under the banner of "Creation Science). In June 1987, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that teaching "creation science" (sic) in public schools was unconstitutional because it advanced a specific religion. This legal loss seems to have forced a massive, highly funded intellectual migration. Creationist organizations could no longer use standard educational channels, so they heavily shifted resources toward pop-science literature, alternative documentaries, and alternative geology books too promote their pseudoscientific views. This included encouraging seeing the Biblical deluge myth instead as a real "historic, global cataclysmic event".

As in Europe, in the late eighties there was greater interest in New Age and related ideas and this period marks the birth of modern mass-market alternative history to cater for the massive, commercially viable demographic of consumers hungry for books that validated ancient wisdom over traditional, mainstream history and geology. In this period too, the conceptual framework for pseudoarchaeology transitioned from ancient astronauts (the fading 1970s Chariots of the Gods era) to Earth-based cataclysms.Writers and researchers in the late 1980s realized that audiences were weary of UFO explanations but deeply responsive to ideas of lost human greatness. By treating the Great Flood as a purely physical, geological event caused by crustal displacement, comets, or ice age melting rather than the wrath of God they made the myth palatable to a secular, scientifically literate but conspiratorially minded public. This laid the exact structural groundwork that writers like Graham Hancock stepped into in the early 1990s.

Othala and neo-Nazi Migration Fantasies

Internet user  ThoughtfulWitz (@ThoughtfulWitz Sep 4, 2026) with reference to undiscovered archaeology in northern Africa, says:

"Especially when you look at some of the cultures and ethnicities who have inhabited NW Africa since pre-history.. like the ancestors of the Berbers (The Amazigh, etc).. who you’d look at and think were from Europe… similar to the Guanches (the primitive, ancient people who inhabited the Canary Islands and the Azores.. who the Portuguese came in contact with centuries ago, went to war with and eventually enslaved/killed… they mummified their dead, and built pyramids… and they were Tall, Blonde/Red haired people, who also in some cases had tattoos….

They were believed to be survivors of Atlantis.. and the Amazigh as well as the Berbers seem to be the genetic descendants of these people.. it’s fascinating.

I’m wondering if, considering the climate changes, etc.. if these Guanches, are the surviving remnants of a vastly ancient civilization that was wiped out by a cataclysm so brutal, that it separated them from the mainland of Africa.. and the island which they inhabited, were simply the peaks of the mountains of the Atlantic landmass that they lived on for Millenia.

Look into the Guanches and the Amazigh. They’ve been in Africa and the Azores (sic) since before written history.. yet they look almost Germanic or even Celtic."

Good grief. What does "being Germanic" or "being Celtic" look like? There is a fair bit of Ahnenerbe in that. So they "wore tattoos" did they (source?)? Why does his picture show tattoos like the Elder Futhark Ōþala-rune (apparently corresponding to the notion "inheritance, home, native land" in Old English) and much used by the Nazi SS and currently by far-right groups? Instead of going on what they "look like" the typical pseudo-science standby, why not use the actual genetic evidence (conveniently summarised here)?

There is no accepted evidence that the island groups Cape Verde Islands, Madeira and the Azores off the coast of north-western Africa had an indigenous population in the deeper past. Specifically, the Azores, mentioned above, were uninhabited when Portuguese explorers arrived in the 15th century. As any history book would have told Mr Witz before he set out to lecture us all, the bloody conquest and decimation of the Guanche population of the Canary Islands however was not by the Portuguese but was a Spanish/Castilian initiative. 

As for the idea that the Guanche "mummified their dead and built pyramids", Mr Witz has got confused. The Guanches did practice mummification of some of the deceased, preserving bodies with leather and herbs in burial caves. The "pyramids" claim refers to structures like the Pyramids of Güímar in Tenerife. However, mainstream archaeology dates these specific step-stone structures to the 19th century agricultural era, not to the ancient Guanches, though romantic and pseudohistorical theories (promoted by explorers like Thor Heyerdahl) often tied them to the indigenous population and external influences. The mention of tall, blonde / red-haired people with tattoos selectively quotes from earlier accounts but is mixed with fantasy from 19th-century racial mythmaking. Nineteenth and and early twentieth century racial anthropologists had exaggerated these traits to claim the Guanches were a "lost white tribe," attributing Nordic, Cro-Magnon, or Atlantean origins to them. Mr Witz just follows along.

Last Glacial Maximum

Mr Witz also ignores the huge depth of the ocean between the island groups that he idly speculates (but does not fact-check) might have been joined as a larger landmass when the sea level was lower. Reality is more modest. Why do people write such crap without thinking it through first?

The so-called Pyramids of Güímar

The so-called Pyramids of Güímar are a tourist attraction in the southeast of Tenerife (Güímar, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain). The site is a 64,000 m² series of stone-built terraces (now partly destroyed). They seem to be 19th-century agricultural terraces and field walls. They seem to have been formed during the 1800s when local landowners cleared rocks from arable fields to prepare the land for cultivation by piling the stones systematically into structured terraces, a common regional practice known as majanos (but of course terraces appear whenever areas of stony land on hillslopes are cleared for fields). Excavations conducted by the University of La Laguna in the 1990s uncovered 19th-century pottery shards and domestic items buried directly in the soil layers underneath the terraces (Gómez and Mederos 1996).

Some of the terraces have been claimed to have astronomical alignments (Belemonte, Aparicio and Estaban 1993 etc.), but why modern terraces should be aligned this way is not clear. The site was opened to the public in 1998, sponsored by a Norwegian investor, Fred Olsen, who owns the largest ship and ferry company in the Canary Islands.

The famous Norwegian explorer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl became fascinated by the site in 1991, when he moved to Tenerife with his third wife (Jacqueline Beer) with whom he became very actively involved with several archaeological projects until his death in 2002 [this was well after his Kon-Tiki stunt (1947), the 1955–1956 expedition to Easter Island and the Ra sailings of the 1970s]. Heyerdahl argued that the structures were meticulously designed step pyramids that shared uncanny structural similarities with ancient temples in Peru, Mexico, and Mesopotamia. He proposed that the Canary Islands served as a crucial geographic stopping point for ancient Mediterranean or African mariners who sailed to the Americas thousands of years before Christopher Columbus. He believed the indigenous Guanches of Tenerife originally constructed the pyramids based on these seafaring connections.

REFERENCES
J. A. Belmonte, A. Aparicio and C. Esteban 1993, 'A solsticial marker in Tenerife: the Majanos de Chacona', in: Archaeoastronomy (supplement of Journal for the History of Astronomy), No. 18.

Antonio Aparicio Juan/César Esteban López 2005, 'Las Pirámides de Güímar: mito y realidad'. Centro de la Cultura Popular Canaria, La Laguna 2005, ISBN 978-84-7926-510-6.

Aparicio, A., Esteban, C. 2015, 'A Modern Myth - The “Pyramids” of Güímar' In: Ruggles, C. (eds) Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6141-8_107

Maria Cruz Jiménez Gómez/Juan Francisco Navarro Mederos 1996, 'El complejo de las morras de Chacona (Güímar, Tenerife): resultados del proyecto de investigación', XII Coloquio de Historia Canario-Americana (1996), Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria 1998, vol. 1.

Italian Self-Delusion, now Nicole Ciccolo Wants to dig up the Giza Plateau.

Official press release of the Khefren project (translation).

.

./

"On August 22, 2026, the Khefren project team officially filed with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt the technical documentation relating to the research to be carried out in the Giza Plain area. The filing includes the collection of non-invasive field measurements as well as an official request for excavation permits.

The non-invasive surveys conducted over the last 18 months have revealed density anomalies compatible with structures, including hypogeums of significant archaeological interest. The results were acquired in compliance with the international protocols applicable to UNESCO cultural heritage [meaning unclear - PMB] and will be the subject of scientific publication in the form and timeframe established by the project. Further updates on the Khefren Research Project will be published starting October 1st on Professor Corrado Malanga's official YouTube channel [Corrado Malanga Experience]. The Khefren project does not shy away from any scientific debate; on the contrary, it demands it. Any institution, researcher, or journal wishing to question our data, our methodologies, or our conclusions is invited to do so in the appropriate scientific forums before independent third-party international bodies such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the International Science Council, or bodies of equivalent authority and impartiality. We will be present at every forum for serious, well-documented debate based on the scientific method.

The Khefren Project has acted and will continue to act firmly in every forum and context to assert its rights and guarantee full transparency on the facts. Together with all the aware people of this planet, we will transform objective measures into certainties for humanity. Thank you."

Bonkers. No mention here of any involvement of archaeological bodies. The Chinese Academy has agreed to get involved, what about the Italian one? Instead of submitting a "collection of raw non-invasive field measurements", how about first publishing them as is the usual way of things and subjecting them and the group's analysis (using AI no less) to proper peer review which would help refine the research aims?

"At Ease folks"

 

Twitter soothes, there's no anthropocene at all in the shaping of the global climate, "David" [whose Twitter account reveals to be a rabid hater of Islam] instructs us:  

Do the Younger Dryas Impact Theorists know about this? So where are the effects of their cometary-winter and consequent civilational collapse and great extinctions on this chart? If it happened, its not in this schematic picture of long cycles in ANTARTICA.

This map, that David uses originates from material disseminated by "The CO2 Coalition" (registered address an office suite in Prosperity Ave Fairfax, VA 22031-4968, USA). This is an advocacy organization and non-profit think tank based in Trump's USA that promotes the view that carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuels are beneficial to the Earth and the economy. It was established in 2015 as a successor organization to the now-defunct George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank known for casting doubt on mainstream climate science. Its stated mission is use selectively-presented material "to educate policymakers and the public about the positive contributions of carbon dioxide to life and agriculture, arguing against mandated emission reductions and questioning climate models". The organization has received funding from energy industry interests, fossil fuel executives, and conservative foundations that oppose environmental regulations.

The group's membership is listed here (with mugshots)., the ultimate appeal-to-authority. The group's roster includes roughly 200 members, they are overwhelmingly drawn from the engineering field, but also hard sciences (physicists, atmospheric physicists, engineers, meteorologists, and mathematicians together with various researchers who challenge mainstream consensus on human-caused climate change) and the energy sector (including geologists and geophysicists, many of whom have career backgrounds in petroleum, coal, or mineral exploration). Tellingly, there are no professional archaeologists or prehistorians listed among the members or experts of the CO2 Coalition.

Even though they lack specialists in human prehistory or archaeology, the CO2 Coalition frequently publishes material regarding the "prehistoric record". They do this by selecting paleoclimatological data in isolation from the archaeological record of human societies. They often cite periods from millions of years ago (such as the Cambrian or Mesozoic epochs) to argue that something or other thrived on Earth when carbon dioxide levels were thousands of parts per million higher than they are today. I wonder if they'd have liked to have lived a decent civilised life on such a planet.

For example in the landscape of the Jurassic, not a lot of crops can be farmed in these conditions. If we today have problems with urban foxes (and in Warsaw, boars and elk) just imagine a large sauropod rummaging through the rubbish bins. 

The vast majority of climate scientists and major scientific organizations dispute the group's assertions, categorizing its messaging as climate disinformation or denial.

Reuters Fact Check: 'Chart of historical CO2 levels misleading, overlooks human-driven increase' January 2, 2024

Argüelles and Mayanism

 

José Argüelles (January 24, 1939 – March 23, 2011) was an American New Age writer and artist. His 1987 book, The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology, became a foundational text for the New Age movement by popularizing the "2012" phenomenon and reshaping how western subcultures viewed ancient Mesoamerican culture. Argüelles combined Maya mathematics, astrology, and mysticism to argue that humanity was reaching the end of a 26,000-year galactic cycle. For some reason, he claimed that at the time of writing, our solar system was passing through a 5,125-year-wide "galactic synchronization beam" that began in 3113 BCE and would conclude in 2012, and that the Maya understood this cosmic frequency. Arguelles revealed that a great moment of human transformation awaited us as we approached 2012: that there are galactic "seasons" and that the Maya accurately recorded them; and that each person had the capability to connect directly with the energy of this beam emanating from the galactic centre that contains the power to awaken the higher mind.

In his book, he criticized modern industrial civilization and argued that humanity had lost touch with the natural cycles of time by relying on artificial clocks and technology, and that ancient civilizations had possessed "lost knowledge" needed to heal the planet. He tied to persuade people to transition from the Gregorian calendar to a 13-moon, 28-day cycle to harmonize with the universe (and made up a modified version of the Maya calendar system that he called the "Dreamspell Calendar" as a step towards this).

He also initiated "The Harmonic Convergence" of 1987 to prepare humanity for the cosmic shift that the book announced. On August 16–17, 1987, hundreds of thousands of people gathered for what was probably the world's first group meditation at sacred sites around the world, such as Mount Shasta, Stonehenge, and the Egyptian pyramids, to channel positive energy, prevent a predicted global catastrophe, and usher in a new era of peace.

While the book succeeded in popularizing the concept of the 2012 winter solstice as a moment of global transformation, it faced heavy criticism. Anthropologists, historians, and scholars of Maya culture heavily disputed Argüelles' interpretations, pointing out that his theories were a blend of Western astrology and New Age philosophy rather than authentic Maya cosmology. Despite the academic backlash, the book fundamentally changed pop culture, laying the groundwork for the widespread fascination with the year 2012 that persisted for the next two decades.

Coherent Catastrophism of the 1980s

                             .                        

In the mid-to-late 1980s, British astronomer Victor Clube (together with Scottish astronomer and author Bill Napier) published (1982) a foundational work on so-called "Coherent Catastrophism". This theory posits that Earth has, throughout human history, been subject to episodic, heavy bombardments from space that are tied directly to the evolution and fragmentation of giant comets. Rather than viewing comet impacts as entirely random, isolated events, Clube argued that massive "giant comets" enter the inner solar system and continuously break apart, creating streams of debris that periodically intersect with Earth's orbit. According to Clube, a massive bombardment event occurred just a few thousand years ago. He argued that the widespread fear of comets, the cross-cultural association of gods with planets, and the belief in angels in ancient history are literal cultural memories of these terrifying cosmic events.

He further postulates that these events were accompanied by climate change due to dust deposition, proposing that a comet doesn't need to make a direct, single catastrophic impact to alter human history. Instead, the "exceptional deposition of cosmic dust" into Earth's atmosphere from these debris streams induces severe climate changes. These cosmic-dust-induced climate shifts directly to major historical crises and societal collapses, including the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, and even the English Civil War.

References

1982a 'The Cosmic Serpent', Victor Clube with Bill Napier

1982b 'Close encounters with a million comets' (15 July 1982). New Scientist 95, (1314), 148–151, with Bill Napier

Pseudo Blast-Glass from the US

The Geological Society of America will be having a session in Denver Colorado on 'Myths and Misrepresentations surrounding Cosmic Impact claims in Paleoclimatology, Paleontology, Paleoecology, Geoarchaeology, and Quaternary Research' that will look at the evidence for the Younger Dryas Impact Theory (11-14 October 2026). One of the papers is this one presented by Robert Harris (Department of Geology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA; Georgia Space and Rocks (GASPAR), LLC, Loganville, GA, USA): 'A Critical Assessment of Anthropogenic Slags and Petroleum Pyrogenetic Glasses in the Southeastern United States: Petrology and Misidentification as Natural Melts'...

Abstract:
Many of the controversial claims that have been published over the last two decades regarding evidence of impacts or airbursts at the Younger Dryas Boundary have cited and relied upon comparisons to melt breccias collected around Blackville, South Carolina, described by Bunch et al. (PNAS, 2012). As someone acknowledged by those authors as providing “critical” samples (and as a co-author of the Firestone et al. (2007) YDB article), I am uniquely qualified to give testimony that those glasses are slags from an abandoned railroad. The lead authors were aware of the clear evidence of that before publication.

I could argue that to the extent subsequent claims of YDB glasses, and other more recent Holocene samples, convincingly demonstrate similarities to the Blackville slags, those claims of impacts or airbursts that rely on the comparison, properly should be retracted.

Remarkably, many of the Bunch at al. (2012) authors joined with Bindi et al. (2026) seemingly to endorse the conclusion, after fifteen years of saying otherwise, that they are uncertain whether the glasses were, “…produced by natural processes or anthropogenesis.” But how can there can be any doubt when the coordinates of the sample studied by Bindi (2026) map to the center of a railroad berm composed largely of construction aggregate.

No amount of circumspection prevented many of the authors from drawing on Bunch at al. (2012) to make definitive assertions of a YDB impact near Perkins, Louisiana (Fitzenreiter et al., 2025). I was asked by one author to examine samples from the site in advance of publication. My preliminary petrography suggested quench rates slower than those typically observed for small-scale impacts or short-duration airbursts. I reported that they either were anthropogenic or, less likely but plausibly, might be ejecta eroded from older impact strata that do occur up-gradient. However, a subsequent tour of the site and additional samples graciously provided by the lead author, revealed evidence that these glasses are most like those produced by petroleum fires. The Perkins site, in fact, sets in the middle of an area with abundant pimple mounds, which have been linked to gas extrusions.

The Blackville slag finds are at site 7 on this 2019 map of the YDI-sites then known.*

The other material mentioned in this take-down text refers to the study by Fitzenreiter et al. (2025), published in the journal Airbursts and Cratering Impacts, asserts that a shallow seasonal lake/depression near Perkins, Louisiana, is North America’s first identified cosmic airburst crater dating to the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB). The authors argue that the site preserves physical evidence of a low-altitude "touch-down" cosmic airburst that occurred approximately 12,800 years ago.

 * (Map showing 24 sites containing Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) nanodiamonds. The solid line defines the current known limits of the YDB field of cosmic-impact proxies, spanning 50 million km 2 , including Venezuela (open circle). Numbered sites are from this study: 1) Lake Cuitzeo, Mexico; 2) Daisy Cave, California; 3) Arlington Canyon, California; 4) Murray Springs, Arizona; 5) Lindenmeier, Colorado; 6) Bull Creek, Oklahoma; 7) Blackville, South Carolina; 8) Topper, South Carolina; 9) Kimbel Bay, North Carolina; 10) Newtonville, New Jersey; 11) Melrose, Pennsylvania; 12) Sheriden Cave, Ohio; 13) Gainey, Michigan; 14) Chobot site, Alberta, Canada; 15) Lake Hind, Manitoba, Canada; 16) Kangerlussuaq, Greenland; 17) Watcombe Bottom, Isle of Wight, United Kingdom; 18) Lommel, Belgium; 19) Ommen, Belgium; 20) Lingen, Germany; 21) Santa Maira, Spain; 22) Abu Hureyra, Syria. In addition, independent researchers have reported NDs at six sites, indicated by letters, four of which are in common: a) Indian Creek, Montana; b) Bull Creek, Oklahoma; c) Sheriden Cave, Ohio; d) Newtonville, New Jersey; e) Lommel, Belgium; f) Aalsterhut, Netherlands. Credit to Wittke et al. (2013); Kinzie et al. (2014). [Volker Dietrich])            

Not Before Time: Pyramid Scan Pseudoarchaeology Retraction From Journal of Remote Sensing

Filippo Biondi and Corrado Malanga's bonkers paper "Synthetic Aperture Radar Doppler Tomography Reveals Details of Undiscovered High-Resolution Internal Structure of the Great Pyramid of Giza" has just been retracted from the journal Remote Sensing (Remote Sens. 2022, 14, 5231. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14205231  Published: 19 October 2022). This has been ascribed to an "investigation that confirmed serious methodological flaws and statistical errors that were deemed to undermine the scientific conclusions of the article". In other words, they are going to submit the text to the external editors that will now do what should have been done four years ago, read the work carefully. 

For the record, I am one of several archaeologists who have called out the so-called Khufu Project's methods and questionable formulations repeatedly (on the retracted paper, see here: 'Filippo Biondi, and Corrado Malanga: 'Khufu's Pyramid is Full of Holes and May Have Been a Giant Vibro-Massager' Monday, 27 April 2026), but I never found the time to actually contact the journal and am not the whistleblower [the dozy editors and their peer-reviwers should not have needed one in this case, rather they should resign].*

Nicole Ciccolo walks away from her Khufu Project

* Academic Editors: Rosa Lasaponara, Ilaria Catapano, Luca Piroddi, Sebastiano D’Amico, Marilena Cozzolino, Nasser Abu Zeid, Patrizia Capizzi and Sergio Vincenzo Calcina. Note, ms was received on 30 August 2022, it was already accepted on 12 October 2022, and published a week later, 19 October 2022.

Atlantis Theories Meet Ancient DNA

There is a quite detailed article Atlantis Theories and DNA: What Paleogenetics Excludes (May 27, 2026) on the website of a company 'Explore Your DNA' that seems worthy of attention. This service is provided by Teemu Nätkinniemi, trading as G25Requests, a registered Finnish sole proprietorship business based in Vaasa, SW Finland. The article contains too many details to summarise here, but the conclusion is as follows:

"Conclusion: what paleogenetics excludes
Paleogenetics now allows several precise versions of the Atlantis hypotheses to be excluded. First, it excludes the existence of a pre-Neolithic advanced maritime Atlantic civilization that left demographically traceable descendants: no European or Mediterranean population carries an unexplained ancestral component corresponding to a pre-7000 BCE Atlantic source. Second, it excludes the identification of Tartessos as a genetically distinct civilization: the studied Tartessian individual is a normal local descendant. Third, it excludes the identification of the Minoans as an exotic population: their profile derives cleanly from documented Aegean sources. Fourth, it excludes the identification of Doggerland as a lost civilization: its inhabitants were ordinary Western hunter-gatherers. What paleogenetics cannot exclude is the allegorical interpretation of Plato (which most classical scholars have favored since Antiquity), nor the idea that the Atlantis account reflects, in distorted form, the memory of real natural events (Santorini eruption, Doggerland submersion, Storegga tsunami, decline of Tartessos) that impressed the oral sources transmitted to Plato. Paleogenetics eliminates versions of the hypothesis that assume a distinct demography; it leaves intact the purely cultural, allegorical, or symbolic versions."

Unfortunately this whole exercise has failed to identify at its outset a useful research aim. It asks, in all seriousness, the question whether the population of EUROPE came "from Atlantis". The only bodies of genetic material examined are European. So basically what they are addressing are the very anachronistic views of writers such as Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901) and Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) - questions long ago already answered by science. 

Very few later writers are claiming that Europe was colonised by Atlantis. Those that do situate that mythical fantasy-island in Europe, so there were German nationalists such as Albert Hermann (1886–1945) and Dutch-German pseudohistorian Herman Wirth (1885-1981) who linked the process of civilization of Europe with Aryan ("German) colonisers. In more modern times we only have a few devotees of hyperdiffusionism such as Paul Dunbavin ('Atlantis of the West: The Case For Britain's Drowned Megalithic Civilization' 2003), argueing that Atlantis was a large island that once existed in the Irish Sea and that a comet impact caused a pole shift that changed the Earth's axis around 3100 BC and this somehow led to the Neolithic civilization on ythe island being drowned out by rising sea levels and this led to its inhabitants colonising Europe (a sort of a reversed Hancockism). Swedish geographer Dr. Ulf Erlingsson ('Atlantis from a Geographer's Perspective: Mapping the Fairy Land' 2004) proposes that Atlantis had been located in Ireland. None of these ideas are mainstream, even in pseudo-archaeology or pseudo-history circles. So it is not cler what, or who is being "debunked" in this out-of-touch article.

The article does not address Graham Hancock’s influential "Lost Allerød antecedent Civilization" hypothesis, because it merely focuses on Bronze/Iron Age, region-specific theories rather than pre-Younger Dryas (before 10,800 BCE) narratives. To directly address Graham Hancock’s specific hypothesis, a scientific critique or article would have to pivot away from Bronze Age Mediterranean archeology and instead target his specific timelines, mechanisms, and geographic models. To address Hancock’s claims, the article would need to analyze early Palaeolithic genomes on a far wider scale than we see here.

Hancock does not usually argue that an advanced civilization mass-migrated into Europe or the Americas. Instead, he claims a few highly advanced survivors from the collapse of his postlated "Lost Allerød antecedent Civilization"  at the beginning of the Younger Dryas travelled the world to teach local hunter-gatherers agriculture, astronomy, and architecture. What is needed to examine this theory by genetic means is to show the degree of unexplained trace ancestry of 10,000–9,000 BCE populations (like those at Göbekli Tepe or early South American sites)to determine the degree that these populations are descended from known, local Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, or whether there are traces at the time of a social or cultural change of an "introgression" or "founder event" from a mysterious, technologically advanced third party. 

This needs testing for all the global hotspots Hancock highlights (such as Indonesia/Sundaland, the Amazon basin, and southeastern Anatolia). Genetic testing would need to show the degree to which, right before and during the postulated “Younger Dryas cataclysm”, there was sudden, widespread population mixing or genetic bottleneck that would indicate a global maritime network collapsing and dispersing.

Since Hancock implies that (“the idea of”) agriculture was gifted to humanity by this lost civilization after the postulated cataclysm, another approach would be through tracking the genetics of domesticated crops and animals. The paleogenomics of early domesticates (like einkorn wheat in Anatolia or maize ancestors in the Americas) needs to show to what degree the genetic wild-to-domestic transition in these plants happened gradually over thousands of years via local gathering, as opposed to the degree to which it shows a sudden, genetically engineered, or fully "pre-developed" introduction from an unknown botanical source.

Hancock has argued that his postulated “lost civilization” is today lost to sight because it flourished on landmasses that are now underwater due to post-glacial sea-level rise (like the drowned continent of Sundaland in Southeast Asia) or shifted by crustal displacement (Antarctica). A critique would need to look at the genetics of pre- and post- Younger Dryas populations living on the edges of these regions (e.g., modern and ancient genomic data from maritime Southeast Asia, Australia, and southernmost South America). This would show the degree to which these populations lack any shared, highly distinct "ghost" DNA component that would link them to a singular, central, highly developed maritime empire that sunk beneath the waves.

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.

"Crackpot" versus "Conspiracy"

The problem with the priminence of anti-academic conspiracy theory in the public domain is not restricted to archaeology. Karl Feagans draws attention to a similar discussion in other sciences, for example Angela Collier at UCI, makes a fascinating point about "crackpot physics" vs "conspiracy physics".

"Crackpot versus conspiracy physicist."

The slide distinguishes between two types of fringe science figures:

Crackpots

• Crackpots are convinced they have solved a specific physics problem.
• Crackpots seek "help" from physicists to get their ideas accepted by the physics community.
• Crackpots work alone and recognizes other  crackpots  are crackpots

          Conspiracy Physicists  

• Conspiracy Physicists think physicists are liars.

• Conspiracy Physicists look for physics adjacent, expelled or "underdogs".
• Conspiracy Physicists form groups, create celebrities, and formulate conspiracy theories about physicists. They do not make physics 'theories.

• He comments:

"There are definitely some points in this that I recognize in crackpot/conspiracy archaeology. I know crackpot archaeologists that look at others in pseudoarchaeology as crackpots. But I think pseudoarchaeologists tend to both make theories and consider real archaeologists as liars" ( Carl Feagans cfeagans.bsky.social [@cfeagans] Apr 28, 2026 10:56 PM).

See Dr Collier's video here for some more perspicaceous and applicable observations:

.

Posted on YouTube by Angela Collier Aug 5, 2022

.

So much of this relates to pseudoarchaeology.