An Interview with Allen West, Ph.D.

The Evidence for Cosmic Impacts and how to collect your own Stardust!

by Brent Raynes

Allen West, Ph.D, is an author and retired geophysical consultant to oil-and-gas and mining companies in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the Middle East, and South America. Allen has been involved in many projects searching for petroleum, silver, and gold, including Spanish treasure. He retired after nearly three decades to become an author, and that led to the discovery of new evidence for an impact event 12,900 years ago. Allen provided some of the funding for the research and helped organize a 26-member international research team from 18 universities. Details of the research are found in the book, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, as well as in a scientific paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

(See that PNAS paper at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0706977104v1)

Editor: Please give us somewhat of an overview of The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, a book that you co-authored with Richard Firestone and Simon Warwick-Smith.

Allen West: The book has three parts to it. The first part is the story of the discovery of the clues and the search for answers. Of course, it has been a long-standing mystery about what happened to the mammoths and the mastodons and the saber-toothed tigers. I remember as a child hearing stories that described how the mammoths just suddenly disappeared from the planet and of thinking to myself, ‘Well that seems awfully odd. What happened to them?’

So that was the mystery, and the first bit of evidence that we found, which is described in the first part of the book, came from Bill Topping, one of the co-authors of our PNAS scientific paper, who had been working in Michigan at a site called Gainey, a Paleo-American campsite. He had wondered about what had killed all of the animals, and he also knew that the Clovis culture vanished at the same time, although humans survived, unlike the mammoths. Their culture disappeared and after that time there were no more Clovis points around, which were a very distinct type of spear points.

In the sediment at Gainey, he found what we call magnetic spherules, or micro-spherules, that look like little ball bearings, highly polished and intensely magnetic. He found hundreds of thousands of them in this layer where these Indians had camped in Michigan. He knew that typically these magnetic spherules come from space, so he began to think that since this happened at the same time that all of these animals disappeared, maybe there was a connection.

That was the initial impetus for the story. So the first part of the book takes the reader through all that we went through of getting that initial clue and finding other sites in North America and extending the search into Europe and finding the same things, these micro-spherules. It’s the story of how we found one marker after another until now where we have fourteen different lines of evidence that all point to a massive cosmic impact having taken place.

So that’s the first part of the book, the story of how we put all the clues together. The second and third parts deal more with how the theory evolved to explain what it was that we were finding.

Editor: Yes, it’s a fascinating scientific detective story really.

Allen West: It is, and just like a detective, we had a big murder mystery on our hands. Millions of animals got killed and we had a few of the bullets, as tiny as they were. The question was: Who did it and what happened?

Editor: I had always imagined that something like that if you were at ground zero then you were fried and that with these events hundreds and thousands of miles at a distance then it was a gradual thing, but that wasn’t really the case though.

Allen West: The interesting thing is that these were like thousands of nuclear bombs going off. That’s what we found was the best explanation. With the atom bombs that went off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people survived and in fact, people survived fairly close to it. Lots of people didn’t, but some just through serendipity did, and that, in a sense, is what happened to a lot of these animals. Some of the species were killed off and some miraculously made it through, including us.

Editor: Even though the sites were such widespread distances apart, like from New Mexico to South Carolina, and there must have been who knows how many life forms at that time, Indian, the saber-toothed tiger and the mammoth and so on that died from those fragments that were flying through the air.

Allen West: Exactly. Then, of course, there was more than just the explosion itself and the flying fragments. One of the curious things of it is that it appears to be that the biggest explosions happened in or over the big ice sheet that was covering Canada. Then we think that one of the most troublesome parts of it was that suddenly, and I mean it may have been within a matter of hours or days, the temperature plunged. All of a sudden, animals that were used to living in Arizona had to suddenly get used to living in the climate normal to Alaska, and many of them weren’t adapted to it, so we think that a lot of animals probably survived the actual initial blasts only to die from starvation. One of the big implications of this is that with that kind of climate change, the animals might have made it through for some length of time but chances are high that almost none of the plants did. You can imagine the same scenario when you think about what happens in most places when it turns into winter. All the plants die and they go into hibernation until spring.

Well, that’s okay; animals today make it through such things. But, what if nearly all the vegetation burned up and there were months and months of an “impact winter.” Then there never would have been anything to eat for many of the animals. So we really think starvation probably killed many more animals than did those things that were flying through the air, like the tiny ball bearings.

Editor: Right, which were flying at an incredible amount of speed.

Allen West: Absolutely. Equal to probably rocket speed -- faster than most jets can fly by two or three times. Even though they were small, you can imagine that if something were going that fast and hit you in the arm or the eye, it would definitely damage you.

Editor: So how did you become involved in co-authoring the book?

Allen West: This whole story has been one of unusual coincidences, which C.G. Jung called synchronicity, and I think that’s a pretty good term for it. Things that, on the surface, have no apparent cause-and-effect relationship, and yet they were crucial to making this story happen.

Bill Topping made the original discovery in Michigan, and Richard helped analyze the evidence, but the theory that they developed turned out to be incorrect, or rather, incomplete. They thought that a supernova had done it, and so they published a short paper that was not received very well. In fact, very quickly, people disagreed strongly with parts of the theory. So even though Richard and Bill had made an important discovery and thought that there was something to it, they dropped the story for a couple of years.

Due to health reasons, Bill dropped out and did not continue with the story. Even though he’s a co-author of our scientific paper, he really hasn’t participated in the more recent research, but he was the one who set it in motion. Richard is with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and he has been with the story almost from the beginning. He was the second to come in.

By that time, I had retired from a career as a geophysicist. Since I had long been interested in extinctions, my agent had gotten me a book deal to write about them, including the dinosaur extinction. So during the research, I came across the paper published by Richard and Bill and thought, “Oh my gosh, this sounds altogether like an impact.” They thought that it was a supernova, but it sounded to me like an impact. Not long after that, I contacted Richard, one thing led to another, and I became the third to join the story. Right away, I went to a Clovis site that’s here in Arizona, very close, and found the same things there that they had found in Michigan. That led us to realize that this was a massive event to have gone across most of the continent. It had to have been very, very big.

I had some time on my hands and I had some money that I could pay for the research, so I visited many more sites and found the same evidence everywhere. Over time, Richard and I began to work out more aspects of the theory. Eventually, I asked Richard to join me in co-authoring the book, and he agreed. I pretty much went out and collected the evidence, analyzed some of it, and Richard analyzed a lot of it, too, and together we evolved the theory and put it into the book.

After that, because of all my years in business, I realized that we needed a team with lots of people from different areas of expertise to analyze all of this, so I began contacting people and asking if they were interested. Gradually, we assembled a team who saw the evidence and realized that it was something unusual, too. And that was an important part of it because as you know from reading the book that it’s an immense subject that crosses a lot of scientific disciplines, so it’s impossible for just one, two or three people to have enough expertise to answer all of these questions. That’s why we ended up with 26 co-authors on the scientific paper we published.

Editor: Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve read a book in my whole life that has explored something that was this important and used all of these different disciplines and was involved in it themselves.

Allen West: Yeah, isn’t that amazing. The impact event had an effect on just about every aspect of life 13,000 years ago, and the chilling part of this is that it’s the only impact that we know of that happened while anatomically modern humans were around. This has happened within our history, even though it’s technically prehistoric. Our evidence suggests that it is quite likely that these things happen more commonly than scientists believe because they’re the type of impact that leaves very little trace. So it could have happened thousands and thousands and thousands of times, and yet for the most part, there would be virtually no remaining evidence of it back beyond a few hundred thousand years.

Editor: Wow. Of course, with the age of the earth, 13,000 years ago was just not that long ago.

Allen West: That’s right. A geologic eye blink.

Editor: It’s incredible that all of this happened and we’re just now kind of putting it together, so to speak.

How about Plato’s story of Atlantis? Based on this, could there have something to that story?

Allen West: Yeah, absolutely. I will say though that as a scientist you have to make distinctions between theories that you have good evidence and theories that you don’t, and of course, there is no widely accepted concrete evidence for a civilization as sophisticated as what Plato described, though one may have existed. But what I will agree to is that there were almost certainly very well developed groups of people living back then. The Clovis people were very organized, and they were clearly just as bright as we are. They were completely modern humans. I’m sure that they were extraordinarily successful in their environment whereas we couldn’t be equally successful in their world. In fact, they’d probably do better in ours than we’d do in theirs.

There is one thing that makes me think there’s some truth to Plato’s story. It’s because what you see is that the story that Plato told, in its general details, is extremely similar to the stories told by fifty different groups of native peoples living around the world, and that just can’t be coincidental.

Editor: Right. You detail a lot of these stories and legends in the book that just seem to give testimony to what you’re finding about a fire from the heavens and great floodwaters.

Allen West: Absolutely. That’s one of the most interesting things. However, there are a number of scientists who collect cultural stories and they say, “Well they’re allegorical,” or that they just aren’t true. When they hear these ancient stories, many of the cultural scientists say, “Well they’re just describing a local flood that might have happened once in 500 years.” However, when they come across Native peoples today who have gone through some kind of severe flood like that, they don’t typically tell their children around the campfire that all the animals died and that everybody on the planet, except a few, were killed. So you have to think that whatever they were referring to was something absolutely extraordinary and well beyond the kind of thing that any human culture goes through very often.

Even those the old stories seem to fit, we can’t say for sure that those stories apply to this impact event, because we actually think that there have been impacts in between 13,000 years and today. Not as serious as that one, but they still would have caused local devastation. For example, the impact in Tunguska, in Siberia, destroyed thousands of square kilometers of forest, and anything living in it would have been pretty much toasted. So if that kind of thing happened today, then obviously the natives would tell some horrendous stories about it. So we can’t be sure than these 50 stories apply to this event, but I would say that the chances are quite high that a substantial number of them do. As you saw in the book, they all have similarities. All of them have several parts to the stories, and while the details might vary considerably, there are certain things that are common to all of them. They almost always say that something fell from the sky. It was either a star that fell or rocks that fell, huge clouds that fell, or rain, but something fell from the sky. Most people were warned in advance, but they didn’t listen and so they got killed. Most of the animals got killed, too, and only a few people survived and they went on to repopulate the world.

It seems extraordinary to me that there would be such a similarity in those stories without there being, most likely, some single event behind them all.

Editor: So based on what you know at this point, you and your co-authors propose that a supernova and, say, asteroids and comets that are perhaps pushed off course, some maybe hitting the sun causing solar flare activity, and of course things crashing directly into the earth itself would have been all interrelated in this?

Allen West: Absolutely. Yeah. However, the one thing that we’re certain about, about which we have the most evidence, is that there was an impact. Exactly what caused it and exactly what went along with it is less clear, but when you have impacts on earth and other planets, you would expect that some part of that is going to hit the sun. In fact, comets that come in and break up frequently do that. They might run into a planet like Jupiter, and some of the fragments are going to be orbiting the sun and could hit the sun too, so we expect that there would be flares. But we don’t have any real evidence for that. It’s just consistent that those things one would expect to happen during a major impact.

We think we were hit by a fragmented comet or comets, but we don’t know exactly what kicked those comets out of orbit. We theorize that it was the supernova, but we don’t have any evidence to tie the two together, except that we do find potassium 40 in a thin layer or sediment across North America, but there are other explanations for that other than a supernova. So as one part of the story, we have solid evidence for an impact, although we don’t know exactly what the object or objects were or where they came from. We just have solid evidence that something hit us. What’s more speculative is what was the chain of events that led it to hit us.

Editor: Looking at some of the aerial photographs taken say around Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, they are just amazing when you look at them and you say something definitely tremendous happened.

Allen West: Exactly, and I think that most people who have never seen the Carolina Bays look at that and it definitely has a “wow” factor to it. You think, “Oh my gosh, that doesn’t look normal.”

Editor: Of course, when you’re looking at it at ground level you don’t get the same perspective.

Allen West: That’s it. You can’t see them from the ground. In some cases, you can see that there’s a lake, but you don’t see the rim and the elliptical shape until you’re in an airplane.

Editor: And I might just throw this in that I recently read on the Internet that it was believed that a lake was found up around that Siberian blast in 1908 that they think was perhaps an impact crater.

Allen West: Right, I saw that too. I think that they’ve got a ways to go to convince a lot of scientists. I know I heard some people saying that there are lakes like that that are just in the permafrost anyway, and most people say that they’re going to need evidence. How do they know that lake was formed by the blast? So, that’s part of science. You can come up with a theory all right, but then you really need to come up with evidence before people will accept the theory widely. They may say it makes sense, but always you have to come up with the proof.

Editor: In the appendix of your book, you have a section entitled “Find Your Own Stardust,” where you write about taking a supermagnet and searching for particles.

Allen West: That’s right.

Editor: So how deep do you dig?

Allen West: You know, interestingly enough, you can find it right on the surface in many places on the coastal plain in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. You can find not just the magnetic grains, but the carbon spherules too, which are shown in the book. They’re easier to see than the magnetic grains and they float on water. If you take a big bucket of water, put the sediment in it, then these things will float to the top along with charcoal and sticks and everything like that. So once you dry what comes up, then these spherules will roll down a plate. So they are direct evidence of this impact, and in many places in South and North Carolina, we can go out and take a shovel full, go down 6 or 8 inches, and throw a shovel full in the bucket and these things will float right out.

Editor: Wow, I didn’t think that it would be that close to the surface.

Allen West: It varies, of course. If you’re up in the mountains, the top of the ground in places was exposed to the surface 13,000 years ago, and so anything that would have fallen back then would still be right on the surface. At most of the sites that we went to, they’re typically buried three to six feet down, but in many cases they’re close to the surface, and rarely are they deeper than 3 or 4 feet.

Editor: So if a person was to dig down, there’s what they call the black mat which is a layer that’s darker than the normal sediment and if you have that supermagnet then you can pick up things, and if you have a Geiger counter, get readings.

Allen West: Absolutely. However, with the Geiger counter, there has to be a lot of uranium for it to be very sensitive. It’s quite subtle to detect uranium, so the supermagnet is the easiest way to do it. The other easy way is to throw some dirt in a bucket and look at the carbon spherules with a little microscope or a magnifying glass, and it really takes those for both types of evidence, the magnetic grains or the carbon spherules. When you do that, you can take a look at something that was part of a massive event that killed off 30 or 40 million animals 13,000 years ago.

And there’s more. The interesting thing too is that, and it’s touched on just briefly in the book, we now have considerably more evidence for microscopic diamonds. We just got done testing at Murray Springs, Arizona, for the carbon spherules, plus the layer that’s under the black mat. The sediment right under the black mat at Murray Springs is just absolutely loaded with these tiny diamonds. Unfortunately, they’re too small to see without a laboratory electron microscope -- they’re smaller than a piece of dust floating in the air, but nevertheless there’re just millions and millions and millions of them. Actually, if you’re in North Carolina and walking across the surface, in many places they’re in the surface sediment, and you can step on more than a million diamonds with every footstep that you take. There’re that many of them.

By the way, I should say one more thing. The black mat is not everywhere. It has been at maybe a third of the sites that we’ve been to. So sometimes you can dig down and not find a black mat. Yet, in the impact layer, you’ll find the magnetic grains and the carbon spherules, and there’re not many of each one of them. You can’t visually see them looking at the sediment ­ you’ll need a microscope. So, there may not be any evidence of a black mat, yet there will be all of these other markers.

Editor: That’s incredible.

I don’t know if you had a chance to look at the article by Andrew Collins, a British author who had written a book called The Cygnus Mystery, and he wrote about how from Cygnus X-3 there’s a cosmic plasma blast, which he has compared to a cosmic gun barrel and we’re kind of like in its path.

Allen West: Yeah, aimed right at us.

Editor: Apparently it’s not always the same levels of intensity, and he believes that there were genetic mutations in DNA, and that there were events like what you have described too.

Allen West: Absolutely. I’ve followed his work over the years. He’s written several books, one of them about the Carolina Bays; it has those in them, and other things too. I don’t find anything that he suggests that’s implausible, though I can’t say whether it’s right or not. Frankly we don’t have much evidence for that side of the story, as to what actually caused these things, but I think that his theory is legitimate. Scientists certainly, without a doubt, have found Beryllium-10 and other cosmogenic isotopes that are formed by cosmic radiation. They found them in the ice core, they found them in the ocean cores, and they all date to about 35,000 years ago. In fact, just recently we had a poster that we presented at AGU (see http://ie.lbl.gov/Mammoth/Impact.html) on the mammoth tusks that have the meteorites in it, as described in the book. Do you remember the part of the book where it describes the mammoth tusk containing what look like pellets from shotgun blasts?

Editor: Sure do.

Allen West: Okay. We have analyzed some of those little bits of metal and they have a geochemistry that is extraterrestrial; they have high levels of nickel relative to the iron, low levels of titanium. That perfectly matches a number of classes of meteorites, and does not match any typical terrestrial geochemistry. And there appear to be burn marks. Curiously enough, we thought that this was from the 13,000 year event, but when we carbon dated those things, it turns out that the bulk of the tusks are 34,000 to 35,000 years old. That supports what Andrew Collins had been saying, that there was a cosmic catastrophe about 35,000 years ago. That’s a perfect match with this evidence. The ocean cores and the ice cores all show evidence of a cosmic evemt just the way he said, and now here we have radio carbon dated tusks with meteorites stuck in them that date to exactly the same time.

Editor: Fascinating. And these tusks also that had these effects were not just from like Alaska and the Canadian area, but also in Siberia.

Allen West: Exactly. That’s the bison skull that is mentioned in the book. It came from Siberia. The tusks mostly came from Alaska, and yet they both date to roughly the same time.

While we don’t have any smoking guns, we’ve definitely got some bullets from it!

Editor: You’ve come up with an impressive body of evidence.

Allen West: It’s certainly exciting. This is what makes science fun, when you find some of these things. When we got into it, there was no way that we could have predicted it. You can’t go looking for something like this. You kind of stumble on it, and so much of science is done that way. You come across things by accident. Because of that, I tell people I can’t take any credit for it. The only thing that I did was pay attention when I stumbled across these things. It’s been extraordinary.

Editor: It’s been a lot of hard work, I’m sure. You have to read the book to really appreciate the journey.

Allen West: Yeah. The journey included quite a few dead-ends, too, but like somebody said, “A dead-end is just a place to turn around.”