Fall of a Thousand Suns

In 2007, a team of twenty-four scientists presented evidence that massive comet fragments exploded over North America 12,850 years ago, killing millions of creatures and people. If this event happened in the not so distant past, why didn't our ancestors' share this horrifying experience with their children and stress the importance of telling the story to future generations? Fall of a Thousand Suns: How Near Misses and Comet Impacts affected the Religious Beliefs of our Ancestors proves that they did. There are descriptions of the cataclysmic event in dozens of religious texts and myths around the world. Lacking science, each culture described the comet impact as best they could: As a lion sent by the Sun that "roared" and scorched the earth, a giant fiery snake that flew through the air and killed people, a sun that fell on distant lands, or an angel that fell from the heavens to Earth. With the help of religious scholars, anthropologists, and astrophysicists from JPL and NASA, the author of Fall of a Thousands Suns spent years investigating what our ancestors' knew about comets and their godlike destructive power. Frighteningly, as the author dug deeper, he discovered that some religious texts, myths, and sciences pointed to a more recent near-miss by a comet, a snake-like comet that spanned the entire night sky, small asteroid impacts that leveled cities, and yet another massive comet that hit our planet and killed millions. This more recent impact appears to have created megatsunamis hundreds of feet high that decimated coastal civilizations. That story too was passed down orally, until it was eventually recorded in popular religious texts known to every Jew, Christian and Muslim alive today. Don't we owe it to our ancestors, who struggled to survive in the wake of these celestial cataclysms, a progressive world where we use science and comparative religion to search for past truth? Fall of a Thousand Suns attempts to do just that. After reading it, you won't look at comets, meteor showers or religion in the same way.