Thunderbolts. What were they?

[Phillip]

There is a lot of evidence to suggest the ancient term thunderbolts [of the gods] was actually a reference to meteors. Yet, one gets the impression the electric universe people would say otherwise. In fact, some adherents seem to think meteors and impacts are a fiction and everything that looks like an impact imprint is instead evidence of an electrical discharge. The distinct difference between the two camps came across at two SIS meetings. At our last Cambridge conference David Talbot supplied us with a whole host of symbols he said represented plasma and electrical phenomena - even claiming massive electrical discharges between cosmic bodies had occurred in the recent past. On the other hand, at a meeting in Redhill Han Kloosterman provided s similar array of symbols and rock art that he attributed simply to catastrophic events. These would predominantly involve meteors, I am supposing. The mind block at the time came across to me as I was given the task of writing up the HK talk and there was an unwillingness to accept something contrary to the Shish Kebab. Most of what I wrote was never published. Not that I was bothered as the electric universe was dominant at the time and I was not antagonistic towards it.
Talbot's ideas were given birth in the pages of Kronos and I was a subscriber. However, I could never fathom out how humans could have witnessed some of the things being discussed by Talbot and Cardona. You can get a flavour of Talbot's thinking at https://www.maverickscience.com/wp-cont ... rbolts.pdf ... The thinking appears to be that cosmic rocks do not generate plasma waves or cannot induce electrical surges. You might ask - why not?
Nicholas Costa, in his book 'Adam to Apophis' clearly associated the disaster that struck the Assyrian army of Sennacherib with an electrical surge. He didn't think in terms of plasma but he did think in terms of meteor. Many years ago SIS published a letter saying something similar. Costa even had one in the time of Jehoram - a century earlier. The electric universe idea, it turns out, is not a lot different to the position of mainstream - and the models used by Mark Boslough to rubbish the idea of an airburst over Tall el-Hammam, potentially the site of Sodom.
Site destructions in the Levant, at the end of the MBIIB and MBIIC periods are usually associated with the conquest of Joshua in revisionist circles, Hence, they don't wish to have Sodom occurring at about the same time. You won't find a lot of mention of Tall el-Hammam in the travails and endless stream of ideas associated with revisionist chronology. They ignore the implications and the Biblical text where it describes the actual location of Sodom from a position in the Cisjordan. Mainstream are usually rather good at ignoring problematic data and articles. They too did not like the idea that the excavations had brought a Biblical narrative alive - and Sodom was not a myth. On this occasion they were a little more ingenious as their attack was led by Boslough, the go to expert on impacts and airburst events. Unfortunately, his model did not embrace plasma or electrical surges and following a retraction of the original Hammam excavation article, and its demise, by the journal Nature, the team were quickly out for the marks to set the record straight on Boslough's methodology. Unlike the SAFIRE project that fizzled out into a damp squib the Younger Dryas scientists are resistant to the constant stream of mainstream denial. They came up with the following link to completely demolish the reasons why Nature retracted the paper - and it involves plasma waves and electrical surges as part and feature of cosmic rocks exploding in the low atmosphere. See Https://cosmictusk.com/gunther-klectets ... ka-hammer/ ... Klectetschka is a Czech geophysicist and he claims the models used by Boslough and his pals are missing plasma and electrical pulses that inject even more power into the actual airbursts. Hence, Boslough claiming that the powerful proposed energy at Hammam, or Tunguska, was an impossibility and it could not therefore have been a space rock but some other explanation was necessary, has now been proved to be false. Plasma is able to inject not just electricity into the occasion but can increase the blast effect by magnitudes. And Klectetschka went straight to recent research at Tunguska to prove his point. Boslough had relied on old info from Russian scientists years ago and had not kept abreast of recent research where plasma was investigated as part of the process of the airburst event. See also https://cosmictusk.com/tall-el-hammam-j ... -boslough/ ... See also Gladyshova and Popov in 'Paleomagnetic Study of the Tunguska Catastrophe Epicentre' [2016] and Gladyshova 'Fragmentation of the Tunguska Cosmic Body' in Planetary and Space Science [2021].
It would seem that the electrical universe people and the Younger Dryas team responsible for the Hammam interpretation are both right, The insertion of plasma dynamics and electrical surges into the models makes both Hammam and Tunguska a much more powerful explosion than Boslough and pals imagined. This update is now within a new version of the retracted paper - see links below.
https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-docu ... .2025.0006 .. and https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-docu ... .2025.0003 ...
Gunther Klectetschka, 'Misunderstandings about the Tunguska airburst event; clarifying the physical record based on new evidence' [July, 2025].
The retracted paper is at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3 ... and https://cosmictusk.com/tall-hammam-goes-global/ ...

[peterfc]

Wikipedia says that, in its original usage, the word thunderbolt may have been a description of the consequences of a close approach between 2 cosmic bodies as suggested by Plato, in Timaeus. If this is correct a thunderbolt was what the ancients called an electric discharge between cosmic bodies, effectively, a scaled-up, by some orders of magnitude, lightning bolt. Lightning strikes can create, almost instantaneously, pits, craters and rills on Earth’s surface, so it is conceivable that a sufficiently scaled up thunderbolt could have electrically carved some of Earth’s highest mountains as proposed by Andrew Hall in his recent Thunderbolts Project, YouTube presentation, Discovering Mech Stems. Pliny, in his Natural History, says that thunderbolts proceeded from 3 superior stars; presumably Jupiter, Venus and Mars.

In mythology, Jupiter was a most notorious thrower of thunderbolts, despite the planet’s orbit currently being so distant that few can identify the planet in the night sky. This was probably because, in my updated Immanuel Velikovsky “Unstable Solar System” scenario, during the 3 generations of mankind that Earth was in a Jupiter orbit (see C & C Workshop, 2011:1, World Ages), Jupiter was at war with the Titans and was regularly throwing thunderbolts.
The capture of Earth and its moon in an orbit of Jupiter for some 60 to 70 current years must have seriously disturbed the orbits of the cosmic bodies already orbiting Jupiter; the regurgitated children of his father, according to Greeks mythology. This possibly included Mars, in addition to some quite large moons of Jupiter. In his paper, The Light of the Seven Days, (varchive.org), Velikovsky mentioned numerous Sanscrit texts that say 7 or even 12 suns shone just before the Deluge. As a change in the location of the equator in a Peter Warlow style “tilt” that saw flooding in Biblical lands would have reduced sea levels in Southern India, the Sanscrit Deluge marked the end of the Biblical Flood not the beginning. In the updated Unstable Solar System theory, the time of the 7 suns preceded and the time of the 12 suns followed the birth of Venus and the Gorgons. The fact that there were, in Greek mythology, 12 Titans supports the report about there once having been 12 suns.

My 2011, C & C Workshop paper, World Ages, suggested that Earth’s orbit of Jupiter took something over 50 days, so, assuming Earth’s orbit was initially quite ecliptic, it could have regularly come within thunderbolt striking distance of Jupiter. Earth’s highest mountains, many of which are geologically quite young, were the most likely targets of Jupiter’s thunderbolts during this highly disturbed period. The war with the Titans ended after the Sun, which had been steadily approaching for hundreds of years, confronted Jupiter resulting in the birth of Venus and the Gorgons and the capture of all the nearby cosmic bodies into the Sun’s orbit (see SIS Forum note, The Formation of the Solar System).
It is unlikely that Earth or the Moon suffered any thunderbolt strikes from Jupiter after Earth was captured in an orbit around the Sun, but reports tell of battles in the skies still being seen over 3,000 years later, in the Middle Ages. Aurora effects generated while Earth was in the magnetotail of Venus and Mars was in the magnetotail of Earth may account for many of the later reports about battles seen in the skies. For example, the Johann Carion Chronical for the years 1532 to 1550 AD, published in 1550, tells of dramatic aurora displays seen at modest latitudes in 1534, 1544 and in 1549. However, this 18 year chronical also tells of blazing stars, swords and dragons seen in the skies, of eclipses, 4 in 1544 alone, and on the 29th of March 1544, of such a fearsome thunderclap that the whole land trembled. Apparently, the same day, at around 2 pm, there was darkness as if night had come early, which suggests to me that Earth may have suffered both a thunderbolt strike and a Warlow style “tilt” that day.

Latitude data is sparse for the 1540’s and 1550’s, and not reliable. For example, the virtually the only latitude data in the 1554, Rumold Mercator map of Europe is in the North Atlantic section of the map which appears to show 2 latitude 60N lines and 2 locations for Iceland. It may be that there is American, Chinese or Japanese evidence of a 1544 “tilt” and a later, probably 1559, correcting “tilt”. However, if any such evidence had ever been found, it would have either been dismissed as nonsense or erroneous or deliberately erased.

It seems likely that thunderbolt strikes and plasma discharges were experienced quite regularly between Venus and Earth and between Earth and Mars in the 3,000 or more years during which Earth was shepherded into its current orbit. However, reports in the Bible and by Classic, Dark and Middle Age authors about what was seen and experienced were mostly misunderstood and incorrectly translated by Scientific Age readers who found what was written too scary to believe. Despite texts, charts and sea level evidence telling of changes in latitude, most Scientific Age readers of such data do not believe that Warlow style “tilts” could have been experienced and, consequentially, also dismiss the evidence as nonsense or erroneous.

One well known report, by Homer in the Iliad, that is particularly difficult to explain given the planets current orbits, actually tells us about a battle between Venus and Mars, the scars of which are clearly visible on the surface of Mars. Major electrical landscaping features can also be seen on Venus while the whole surface of the Moon is covered by electrical discharge scarring as is the surface of Earth (see Alan Hall’s Thunderbolt Project, YouTube presentations). The Solar System has unquestionably been unstable in the lifetime of mankind, as Velikovsky believed, and electrical discharges are the only realistic explanation for the electrical landscaping and scarring of the Solar System’s planets and moons. The massive charge difference between Jupiter and Earth could explain the many orders of scaling up of lighting-strikes necessary to achieve the mountain landscaping identified by Hall.

As the quite recent Tunguska airburst was probably caused by an incoming rock, it is not unreasonable for people to suggest that the Tall el-Hamman destruction and the many stories in the Bible, and elsewhere, about “cosmic happenings” could be attributed to meteors. However, recent worldwide electrical landscaping, recent ocean current reversals and even more recent changes in latitudes and sea levels, cannot be attributed to meteors.