4. Problems of the Revised Hypothesis
a. The Commonality of Planetary Explosions
It will now be
evident what the problem of the revised “multiple exploded planet
hypothesis” is. Simply put, it is that explosions of planets,
having been a rare occurrence in the original version of the
theory, the one that prevailed from Olbers to Van Flandern’s first
version, is now a disquietingly commonplace occurrence in the
revised theory: “The recent discovery of another belt of
asteroid-like objects orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune has forcibly
brought back to our attention the possibility that planetary
explosions may be relatively common events, as uncomfortable as
that thought is.”51
b. Mars
(1) And “the Flood”
As has been evident
throughout the discussion of Van Flandern’s exploded planet
hypothesis both in its original and in its revised forms, Mars
plays a crucial role, for the hypothesis is the only rational
contender for the strong evidence of a massive, sudden planetary
inundation by water that Mars exhibits. Indeed, as I have remarked
elsewhere, Mars alone of all the planets in the solar system has
the best geological evidence for the type of Flood described in the
Old Testament and in other ancient legends and traditions. Indeed,
the severe hemispherical disparity one encounters on Mars is
exactly explained by the hypothesis, for “one hemisphere would have
been heavily bombarded, and the other barely touched by the
explosion.”52
(2) Debris
Under such conditions
as these, one would expect not only that Mars’ atmosphere, magnetic
poles, but also its polar alignment would be severely effected.
More importantly, the explosion of a nearby planet, whether V or C,
would strew Mars with craters and debris of the event, at once
inundating it, and possibly stripping it, of water, atmosphere, and
whatever life might have existed there. And if, as we have
speculated, the original Planet V supported intelligent life, then
Mars may have been inundated with debris of a very different,
artificial, nature.
And this raises the
question of the so-called “Face” on Mars and the equally, if not
much more mysterious and apparently anomalous structures nearby in
the Cydonia region of Mars, namely, the so-called “Fort”, “Tholus”
and the various pyramidal and tetrahedral structures, including the
famous “D and M” five-sided Pyramid. By the nature of the case, Van
Flandern believes that these structures, if articificial, were
built by some civilization prior to the event at 3.2 million years
ago. 53
(3) Mars’ Excess Xenon 129
But there is an even
more anomalous feature about Mars that must be explained than some
anomalous formations and possible structures on the surface of
Mars. Mars, as it turns out, not only has an unusually thin
atmosphere for a planet of its mass - a consequence of the fact
that most of it was literally blown away in the explosion54 - but its content of
the isotope Xenon 129 is almost three times that on any other
planetary body. But Xenon 129 is a by-product of nuclear fission
and does not ordinarily arise from normal processes. 55 Mars’ proximity to
an exploding planet might explain such a phenomenon.
c. What Mechanism Can Explode a Planet?
But Van Flandern’s
mention of the anomalous Xenon 129 content of Mars’ atmosphere
raises the possibility of other explanations for its occurrence. As
I have already noted in my previous book The
Giza Death Star Deployed, Mars researcher Richard Hoagland
points out that the phenomenon of double-cratering and odd damage
patterns on the D and M pyramid might indicate a non-natural mechanism was at work on Mars: nuclear
war. And this highlights what is the most basic problem with the
Exploded Planet Hypothesis - in whatever version one encounters it
- and that is, what mechanism can explain why planets should
suddenly explode?
The problem is not a
small one, nor will it go away, for while the Exploded Planet
Hypothesis does explain a tremendous amount of data, it does not do
so well when it comes to explain why a planet should explode to
begin with. After all, while exploding planets may be a common
occurrence in the revised theory, they are not so common that they
have ever been observed in modern astronomical
history.
One mechanism for
exploding a planet, that favored by Zechariah Sitchin and many
other catastrophists, is that a large body entered the solar
system, and collided with the now missing planet, causing both to
explode and consume themselves. Van Flandern dispenses with this
possibility rather quickly before proceeding to outline his own
speculations:
Unless the exploded planet was a lot less massive than the evidence suggests, chemical or collisional processes do not generate enough energy to blow it apart. Nuclear processes are indicated by the meteoric evidence. It has been objected that planets are not hot enough even in their cores for nuclear reactions. Yet natural fission reactors have been known to operate even on the Earth’s surface in the geologic past, suggesting related possibilities.56
True enough, but one
must also mention that for a full order nuclear explosion to occur
by fissional processes, rather pure
uranium 235 or plutonium 239 must be assembled into a critical mass
rather quickly, and one simply would not be able to assemble
enough critical mass of any known
fissionable substance quickly enough to produce an explosion
large enough to explode a planet of
even modest size. There simply is no model for it.
Perhaps sensing this
difficulty, Van Flandern immediately goes on to suggest a more
viable mechanism:
But the most natural way to produce the isotopic anomalies observed in meteorites, and supply abundant energy, is by a matter-antimatter explosion. This speculative possibility might result from a magnetic separation and storage of the antimatter in a planet over billions of years before the explosion; or from some sort of chain-reaction high-energy antimatter generation process.57
But again, there are
problems with that scenario, for Van Flandern’s suggested
matter-antimatter separation and storage model suggests that such
“antimatter accumulation” is a natural event in massive planetary
bodies, and that in turn would not only suggest that exploding
planets are a rather commonplace occurrence, but also that large
accumulations of anti-matter can be stored and kept separate from
matter by natural causes! Yet, no exploding planets have been
observed in modern astronomical history. More importantly, it has
not been demonstrated that antimatter can even occur in the large amounts seemingly suggested by
Van Flandern’s speculative model, much less stored and maintained
separately by natural causes for a prolonged period of time.58 In the end, one is
left with the most significant problem of them all: planets just do
not suddenly and spontaneously explode. There is simply no good
model to explain such an event by natural causes.
And this leads to Van
Flandern’s last suggestion, the one that simultaneously is the most
radical and yet, the most plausible; the explosion of a planet
might result “from the intervention of intelligent beings. In my
opinion, the last possibility should not be dismissed out of
hand.”59 “Intervention by
intelligent beings” implies the existence of such beings in the
first place, and secondly, implies their knowledge of a physics
capable of blowing up a planet, and their possession of the
technological means of doing so. This is a consequently
breathtaking statement for someone of Van Flandern’s stature to
make! Van Flandern is gingerly and delicately implying that his
exploded planets might have been blown up in deliberate acts of
war. Yet, as will be seen in Part Two of this book, it is precisely
this model that the abundance of
ancient texts actually supports!
(1) The Relevance of the Modern Fictitious Scenario
Van Flandern’s
scenario of “intervention by intelligent beings” now highlights the
relevance of the fictitious scenario that began this chapter, for
clearly, one such motivation for an “intervention by intelligent
beings” would be precisely to protect their world from a
catastrophic collision with ...an asteroid. But unfortunately, the
possession of a technology sufficient to defend against such a
threat also inevitably implies the existence of a technology that
can be used for a similar purpose in war.
As Van Flandern has
pointed out in the above series of quotations, such collisions,
while catastrophic to the planet undergoing them, even to the point
of the near extinction of all life on it, are not really plausible explanations for the explosion
of the entire planet itself. Moreover, there is an even more
pressing problem with this “intervention” to destroy a wandering
planetary body like an asteroid, and that problem is highlighted by
the Exploded Planet Hypothesis itself: asteroids are the result of planetary explosions.
In other words, in order to defend against an asteroid, one must
first explode a planet to begin with. After all, this is how the
Exploded Planet Hypothesis began, as an explanation for the
existence of asteroids. And there’s the rub, for no good mechanism
exists for why a planet should suddenly and spontaneously explode,
barring “intervention by intelligent beings.
” and thus, inexorably, one is faced with the real cause of
the exploded and missing planet:
War.
(2) Rilles: Water? Or Something Else? The Problem of Peratt
But what type of war?
And what types of phsyics does
exploding a planet imply? What types of weapons might be constructed upon that physics?
Clearly, to explode a planet would require a truly vast amount of
energy. Van Flandern points the way forward in two unlikely
passages:
Recent examination of the global distribution of interstellar hydrogen “clouds” by G. Verschuur suggests that the majority of the observed ones actually are parts of filaments(as would result from a supernova explosion), are quite young, and lie within 100 parsecs of the Sun. This surprising result suggests a linkage with the planetary breakup in the solar system.60
Such filaments are
but one step away from the electrical plasma filaments that Swedish
Nobel laureate and plasma physicist Hannes Alfvén posited to exist
in huge inter-galactic electrical currents. Such enormous energies
imply, of course, energies not only sufficient to the task of at
least seriously scarring and searing planetary surface, but also a
deeper physics capable of blowing one up.
But is there any
evidence for this type of huge electrical discharge in the solar
system?
Van Flandern
indicates just such a class of evidence:
Mars displays evidence that there was enough water for a brief period to produce flowing rivers and channels, although that would be impossible today. Sinuous rilles on the Moon and Mars are almost certainly water-carved features, and relatively recent as well, judging from the lack of overlying craters. The assumption that they must be from lava flows is inconsistent in some cases, since the rilles don’t slope away from potential lava sources, and neither lava nor any other candidate substance is not known to carve sinuous features.61
As we shall see in
the next chapter, however, some of these Martian and Lunar rilles
point not to water as their origin, but precisely to gigantic
electrostatic discharges. They point to a physics sufficient to the
task of planetary scarring of large areas of a planet’s surface, to
a physics that is weaponizable, and most importantly, to human
observers of the events. And that
physics in turn points to an even deeper physics, one that might be capable of
exploding an entire planet.
In short, the rilles
point to plasmas and to “the problem of Peratt.”