Month: January 2018

Electric Earth, Humor January 15, 2018January 15, 2018

How Science Works

An article I read this morning made my fingers reach for the keyboard. It’s posted on the Independent, titled “Scientists Discover 280-Million-Year-Old Fossil Forest in Antarctica.” It is a good illustration of how science works to bury critical thinking and reinforce it’s rigid belief system.

The article claims a discovery of 280 million year old tree fossils in Antarctica. It’s not much of a discovery. Fossils of trees were discovered over a century ago by the earliest explorers of the continent. These modern scientists just found a new batch. It’s not that newsworthy, but there is is a mystery behind it, which makes it intriguing and a good subject for a fluffy science article.

There is no good explanation why forests grew in Antarctica in that time-frame, because according to ‘accepted theory’ of plate tectonics and continental movement, Antarctica was still the at the South Pole 280 million years ago.

The mystery is, how could forests grow where there is six months of near total darkness? The Antarctic gets just one day and one night a year.

Never mind the cold and ice – that can be explained away – can’t you guess? By none other than CO2 induced global warming! But the dark can’t be explained by dinosaur flatulence.

So, these scientists claim the trees had to survive half the year in darkness, and so went into some kind of arboreal hibernation. In the words of the lead scientist, “These trees could turn their growing cycles on and off like a light switch.”

This is a determination made from a fossil impression in rock. It’s conjecture, although it sounds perfectly plausible, based on belief in prior science that says the solar system looked essentially the same as it does today, and that Earth’s attitude in orbit was the same, and Antarctica was at the south pole.

These are all assumptions. Scientists base new assumptions on old assumptions with such confidence, they don’t even consider other alternatives. Since I don’t have any confidence in their foundational assumptions about the solar system, I don’t think this is very satisfactory.

Let’s just throw out prior scientific assumptions, and start fresh and see where it leads.

First, there is an assumption these fossils are of leaves that needed sunlight. There is no way to prove what fossil leaves survived on by looking at an impression in rock. What if these ancient trees lived on something else?

Maybe they lived on Dark Energy, soaking it from the cosmos, and perhaps, even expelling Dark Matter, like modern leaves expel oxygen. Now this is a hypothetical that could lead to some real answers for cosmologists, since they are desperate for a source for the dark stuff. Isn’t this biological hypothesis founded on a cosmological hypothesis as circularly valid as assuming trees turned themselves on-and-off because Earth’s orbit never changed?

Unfortunately, we don’t know of any trees anywhere that live on Dark Energy. We don’t know they don’t exist, but since we don’t know that Dark Energy exists either, we just can’t say. If fossils in Antarctica are the only data point to vaguely imply the possibility, it really isn’t a good hypothesis.

Let’s proceed in agreement with the researchers that these fossils are like trees today, and work with sunlight and CO2 instead of dark energy and dark matter. Could it be possible that the forests grew in normal sunlight? That would mean, somehow, that Antarctica wasn’t at the south pole.

This is an interesting possibility. It flies in the face of all the assumptions I don’t like, because I don’t see one shred of evidence the Solar System hasn’t changed. All the evidence suggest something weird was going on not that long ago.

Look at Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. They are all in absolute turmoil, storming and spewing electromagnetic energy. If the solar system hadn’t changed since the “late bombardment”, 2 billion years ago, all the planets should have quieted down into somnolence by now – like Pluto – their internal heat dissipated to cold dark space.

So are tree fossils evidence of a different polar alignment in the past? Possibly, but there are other possibilities, too. It’s possible Antarctica moved, or that crustal displacement took place, shifting the skin of the planet. If Albert Einstein took the possibility of crustal displacement seriously, and it is recorded that he did, shouldn’t we too?

You see what I mean. There are many possibilities.

It’s also possible Earth was once a satellite of a brown dwarf, orbiting inside a plasma envelope of a warm glowing Kronos, as recorded in myths of the golden age that preceded a great cataclysm. That environment would allow forests to grow at the poles in year around light, as well as the equator, all areas of Earth receiving the soft glow of a plasma sky.

This is my personal favorite, of course. It’s the primary theory in the Electric Universe community on Earth’s pre-catastrophic origins. It explains forests in Antarctica, as well as many other mysteries about our planet. In fact, if one looks at all the work by EU theorists, there is a whole body of evidence to support the theory.

There are many points of evidence for crustal displacement, too. Truly, none of us were around to see what was going on when trees grew in Antarctica, and that is really my only point. A priori acceptance of unproven theories to constrain new theories is bad science. That is how a house of cards is built.

As a Natural Scientist, I try to avoid prior assumptions. They play a part in providing context, but they can’t be used as foundational fact. What is needed is a physical model based on verifiable classical physics. The model I use is electricity.

If I can conceive of an electrical circuit that can produce the fossils of Antarctic forests, then I can can conceive of an explanation that is plausible. It doesn’t mean it’s true, but it’s physically plausible. And when I do this, everything seems to fall into place. Corroborating evidence emerges to either modify, or confirm the concept, until it becomes not only plausible, but likely.

If an electrical model can be applied to explain everything from cosmic filaments, galaxies and stars, to tree fossils in Antarctica, climate, and ancient mythology, what results is holistically cross-verified theory tied directly to conventional, applied physics, which is reproducible and verifiable. That’s the beauty of the Electric Universe.

Incremental, reductionist, uniformitarian, consensus science is a house of cards because its foundation is loaded with bad assumptions that are taken for granted to be true. The scientists in this research have made a perfectly rational conjecture that the forests knew how to hibernate, because Antarctica was at the South pole and only receives six months of light. Trees already do this to an extent as they loose leaves in winter. Nothing far fetched about it.

The problem is the assumption that the solar system was the same 280 million years ago, or whenever it was these trees grew, and that it was even necessary for the tree to hibernate in the first place. The planetary scientists are changing their story every week, as new evidence from space crushes their theories about the solar system one after another.

There are multiple theories on why Earth is still as hot as it is. What we don’t know about the other planets dwarfs the meager knowledge we have. We do not even understand comets, or asteroids. There is no reason to have confidence in the consensus solar model, yet terrestrial science does this without blinking an eye.

These scientists are basing their work on a crumbling paradigm, a house of cards already trembling. And yet they tout this unverifiable conjecture as a “discovery”. The science journalists and other science guys and gals, including teachers, will now quote this as fact, never questioning that there might be another answer. It’s a shame, because it gives false confidence in what we think we know, and limits everyone’s curiosity about things that we are a long way from understanding.

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Space News Video January 13, 2018February 1, 2018

Lightning Scarred Earth

This two part video looks at lightning scars in the Four Corners region. Lightning is becoming recognized as the premier cause of mountain erosion, having far more impact than water, wind, ice, or exfoliation, at least on some mountains around the world. Lightning can blast a house size boulder apart, toss rocks the size of buses around and pepper the ground with pock marks.

In the past, lightning was far more severe, when Earth Earth was in a different Solar environment. Scars on the land attest to a time when the atmosphere heavily ionized, turning it to a plasma maelstrom where lightning strafed the landscape like a machine gun, and grew to proportions that created electromagnetic blisters on the land so large that we mistake them for volcanoes.

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Electric Universe, Thunderblogs January 13, 2018

Lightning Scarred Earth, Part 2

Originally published by Thunderbolts.info

In Part 1 of Lightning Scarred Earth, Shiprock was presented as an example of a pinnacle created by lightning. Fulgarites are created when lightning strikes, and current penetrates the ground, leaving a hollow tube of glassy, fused material behind. Current from the lightning vaporizes and extracts material in it’s path, while it’s heat vitrifies the surrounding soil, leaving behind glassy tubes.

Based on it’s features, it’s proposed that Shiprock is a standing fulgarite, created by lightning so powerful and sustained that the material began to recombine in the current as it was pulled from the ground, leaving behind a pinnacle of fused material instead of a hollow tube. Once material recombines, it’s no longer charged and attracted to the lightning channel, so is left behind, it’s ionic makeup altered by the current and heat.

SR431 — Dark minette spills from the center of Shiprock, surrounded by a broken sheath of lighter, distinctly different rock.

The morphology of Shiprock displays this very well, with columns of fused rock, surrounding an inner core of minette – ionically altered material pulled from the ground by the flow of current. Surrounding the pinnacle are minette dykes radiating away in a star pattern.

Kayenta Lightning13 — Dykes radiate from Shiprock in a star pattern

Minette is high in potassium and low in silica content. It contains high volumes of orthoclase and biotite. Both are minerals with high metal content, such as potassium, iron and sodium.

Silica dioxide will readily exchange oxygen with metals, such as those found in the orthoclase and biotite, when sufficient heat is applied. The prevalence of potassium and other metals crystallized in minette, and its under-saturation of silica, is evidence of the reduction taking place as it was formed.

This suggests that the lightning forming it was positive lightning, which is the type of powerful lightning seen striking from the stratospheric anvil clouds in thunderstorms. Electrons and negative ions in the ground, pulled out by the positively charged lightning, left behind a concentration of positively charged material which was not attracted and drawn away. The dykes and inner core of the pinnacle show the path of the current being drawn to the lightning discharge.

shiprock7 — Delicate lichtenberg discharge surrounds Shiprock

Following the lightning strike that formed the pinnacle, the area was left with a net positive charge, which attracted a secondary ground discharge, or arc blast that emanated from a different discharge process. This secondary discharge will be explored more in the future, but it’s worth mentioning now because it left a magnificent Lichtenberg pattern across the ground, unique to the area immediately surrounding Shiprock.

The next series of images shows the evolution in magnitude of this type of formation. These are all examples from the four corners region in Northern Arizona.

First, when lightning similar in magnitude to what we see today strikes the ground, it sweeps surrounding surface sand to it, drawing it to the lightning channel and creating a shallow crater. Examples of this were shown in Part 1. where lightning created small craters with a pile of sand left behind in a small cone.

Again, these are not anthills, although they could easily be mistaken for them on cursory examination. There are no ants, no opening in the mound, and it’s dusted over the top with sand fused into pebbles. The pebbles rest in a thin layer over the top, like sprinkles on an ice cream cone. Beneath is powder fine sand.

The top layer was formed from sand pulled into the lightning channel and fused into pebbles by heat, then dropped back on top of the mound when the flame extinguished. They bear the same character as the minette material in Shiprock’s center and dyke formations. All of the mound material and surrounding sand measures high in pH.

The following images show buttes at various stages of growth. The first exhibits an up-welling of minette. The second and third images show the broken remains of the sheath, and the last image shows the dark minette partially surrounded by the lighter rock sheath.

Another type of lightning formed butte has a different morphology that appears to be created by negative cloud to ground lightning – the type of lightning that emanates from the belly of thunderstorms.

Because the Earth is generally a negatively charged body, at least in terms of ground charge, it forms a double layer at the interface with the atmosphere. When a thunderstorm forms, and the electric field strengthens, positively charged ions in the atmospheric zone of the double layer collect above the ground beneath the storm.

Before negative cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, it pulls this material into positive ionic streamers that reach up to connect with the electron avalanche produced by the cloud. When the streamer and avalanche leader connect, a circuit is completed and current discharges through the channel, electrons flowing to ground and positive ions flowing up to the clouds.

The magnetic field created by the current wraps tightly around the channel, compressing it to a narrow path in what is known as a ‘Z pinch’. ‘Z pinch’ has been demonstrated in the lab by simply passing current through an aluminum can, with the electrodes connected at the top and bottom. The resulting pinch crushes the can into an hourglass shape.

In the huge primordial storms that we theorize occurred in Earth’s past, such lightning and pinch effects resulted in huge amounts of positive ionic material being swept to the lightning channel with such extreme force it sometimes created supersonic winds.

Fulgamites formed by sustained, giant cloud-to-ground arcs display the effects of discharging current, accumulation of ionic dust, z-pinch and the supersonic winds and shock waves they produced. The images presented show the progression of such an event.

First, the strike forms a raised platform, with a shallow crater in the center where the lightning created an electrode spot. The rim of the crater is material swept inward by ionic winds and fused. There is a road cutting through the crater in the first image to give some perspective how large the feature is. These images are from Arizona, near Pastora Mountain.

A more sustained strike begins to accumulate neutralizing material on the spot, forming a flat-topped dome, like a pancake. As the material accumulates, the pancake grows to a mesa type structure, held together in a round form by the magnetic pinch.

In the next phase of growth, the mesa grows taller and the inflow winds begin to reach mach speeds, creating shock waves that mold the rim material into triangular standing wave forms. A detailed discussion of this shock wave and the triangular buttress formations they create is presented more fully in previous articles on Arc Blast.

Utah9 — Mt Hillers, Utah – Hard rock buttresses form a nearly perfect circle around the base from in-flowing supersonic winds.

Utah19 — Mt. Hillers, ringed by shock-formed buttresses, lies in a complex of lightning formed mountains. Less developed craters and domes can be seen behind it.

As neutralized material builds, the anode spot the lightning connects with is at the top of the mesa, and rises with it. The strength of the pinch narrows the top forming a cone, and new regions of windblown, fused and shock-shaped buttresses form rims outside the older rim.

SAM_0116 — Left to right, the conical head of a fulgamite and concentric rows of granite buttresses. The dark vegetation band below rocky buttresses shows consistent angle of dip created by wind blown deposition – Buster Mountain, southern Arizona

The difference between lightning formed pinnacles like Shiprock, and the broad mountain forms shown in these images, seems to be polarity in the lightning. This interpretation is preliminary, but it appears that positive lightning burrows into the ground to connect with negative ionic matter beneath the surface, whereas negative lightning attracts surface winds and dust to it.

Positive lightning raises a narrow pinnacle of negatively charged material that boils up from the ground, with dykes which display the current path through the subsurface. Not much material is drawn to it from the surroundings, except for the sheath of rock it forms around it.

Negative lightning connects with pools and streamers of positively charged matter at the surface, and pulls huge amounts of airborne dust to create a dome with hardened, buttressed rims.

In both cases, mountains can form around them due to ambient winds and blowing dust. Positive arc fulgamites can form monoclines along the dykes, if ambient, supersonic winds strike them to create a standing wave, where dust piles into long, linear ranges of triangular wave forms.

11111 — Monoclines form against fulgarite dykes – San Rafael Reef, Utah

kayenta-dikes-1 — Blue dots and lines denote fulgurites and dykes in Comb Ridge monocline, Arizona

SAM_0446 — Fulgurite (right pinnacle) and dykes walls behind Comb Ridge monocline.

The last images above, taken at Comb Ridge monocline in northern Arizona, shows where fulgamites and dykes are exposed in the monocline. These protrusions created a shock wave in mach speed ambient winds that formed a linear standing wave, against which the monocline was formed like a dune, as blowing dust accumulated. There are several monoclines on the Colorado Plateau that exhibit the same, or similar features.

Negative arc fulgamites create their own winds, bringing dust to pile against them from all directions, and if powerful enough, form standing shock waves that generate buttresses in a ring around the base.

SAM_0482 — Fulgamite peak in Utah, near Capitol Reef.

Fulgamite forms central peak in Utah Mountains, near Capitol Reef.

clean39 — Circular fulgamite features in Utah mountain range. Note the raised rims around the features built by inward flowing winds.

Pastora13 — Circular fulgamite features in and around Pastora Mt., Arizona.

The circular craters and mesas in the images were formed by lightning, while the mountain was expanded by wind borne dust accumulating around them. There are several examples of mountains with these features in the Four Corners region.

Mountains are a misunderstood feature of the planet. Geological concepts are based on rocks forming deep in Earth’s crust and being exposed by erosion and tectonic motions, entailing, of course, hundreds of millions of years. It’s a very complex process that has not, and cannot be witnessed, or confirmed by experiment.

Mountain formation by wind and electric discharge, however, can be witnessed in nature. Sand dunes are a prime example. Mountains can also be produced in laboratories. So can rock. It happens when slag is produced from welding, ore and metal processing, or from chemical reactions like cement. Atomic and molecular bonding is an electrical process – the exchange and sharing of electrons.

Electricity and wind is a far more plausible mechanism for mountain building than what is proposed by the consensus theories. Especially since the actions of wind and lightning that formed mountains on Earth can be seen in any thunderstorm. One only needs to extrapolate the forces and energies involved to what they would have been when Earth was in a much stronger electrical environment.

Amplify the electric field of a thunderstorm by orders of magnitude, and it will produce an ionized atmosphere, screaming with supersonic winds, ionized dust, and incredible discharges of lightning that dwarf what we experience today. For examples, we need only to look at our neighboring planets. These conditions exist on Jupiter, Saturn and Venus. Why would Earth be any different.

Thank you.

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Electric Earth January 13, 2018

Lightning Scarred Earth – Part 1

Originally Published in Thunderbolts. info

The blue-white arc of a lightning bolt stuns the senses. Blinding radiance, elemental beauty, awesome power and primordial danger flash into existence from thin air, and vanish before the mind catches-up. We stare, immobile, unthinking and awestruck.

In that moment, a channel of air the diameter of a quarter heats fifty thousand degrees, as trillions of electrons cascade to Earth. The volume of air blows-up, radiating energy across the spectrum, sending sonic booms across the sky.

Lightning also pummels the land, creating pressure waves exceeding seventy-thousand atmospheres – that’s one-million psi. It can create a layer of shocked quartz and vitrify surrounding rock into glass.

Lightning is an interaction between Earth and sky. It’s cause is an electric field between the electric storm above and the ground beneath our feet. ‘Ground’ is also a technical term, meaning the ambient voltage potential of the soil.

Earth is a negatively charged body in space, and current flows up from ground to atmosphere, normally in a drift of ions and electrons that is invisible. Storms reverse the current flow, causing electrons to avalanche back to Earth.

The Earth and sky are part of a circuit. Storms result from capacitance in the circuit. The atmosphere stores energy in the form of ionic charge, and releases it through lightning, among other effects.

The ground is one plate of the capacitor where positive charge collects. As negative charge builds in the cloud, it is repulsed from the ground below, and positive ions are drawn in.

The ground reaches up with plasma tendrils. They collect especially around tall structures, pooling densely at sharp projections, surrounding them with a halo of charge the cascading electrons target for connection.

When connection is made, the arc touches Earth, spreading current in horizontal arcs across the surface as much as twenty meters away. This is a death zone. If you are in it, you are part of a 200,000 amp circuit.

The horizontal arcing is a side flash – a scatter of arc tendrils that follow surface conduction across the ground, radially away from the point of impact. The ground potential, type and shape of surface influences the character of the side flash.

Dry sand acquires charge very easily. Lightning attracts charged particles, and will sweep sand to it leaving a display of the entire strike zone. Sand in the strike zone, where current surges across the surface, pulls inward leaving a shallow crater with a cone of sand in the center. It’s like grabbing a bedspread in the center, pulling it up and dropping it in a pile.

The following photos were taken near Kayenta, Arizona on desert plains to the south of Comb Ridge.

The form is like an anthill, but these are not anthills. Ants dig rock from below ground and pile it outside the hole. These are built the opposite. The sand is swept-up from the surroundings, leaving a pile at the center of a crater. Besides, these don’t have ants, or ant-holes.

SAM_0408 — Darkened, fused sand pebbles dust the surface of the mound of powder. No ants, no hole.

The mounds of sand are composed of fine, almost powder sand. But the tops of the mounds are dusted with pebbles. The pebbles are sand drawn into the lightning channel that fused and fell back to Earth when the flame extinguished, falling to cover the mound, like candy sprinkles on an ice cream cone.

Nothing grows inside the craters, or on the mounds. It’s as if the soil is sterilized. PH tests show the soil to be highly alkaline.

What meager growth there is are low, ground covering grasses and weeds around the perimeter of the craters.

The desert in this region of Northern Arizona is carpeted with lightning strikes that left crater and mound features like these. The land is on the Colorado Plateau, just south of Monument Valley. They form what some call fairy rings when seen from the air.

The next images show clusters of them. The craters vary in size from fifteen to thirty feet in diameter, or larger. The size of the central cone is proportionate to the size of the crater, ranging from about eight, to eighteen inches tall.

0016 — Fairy rings are lightning strikes that made shallow craters with central peaks. Nothing grows inside the strike zone. The darkest areas are covered in broken rock, except where lightning has excavated the craters.

The strikes especially cluster where black rock crusts over the sand. The lightning seems to have punched through, scattering rock and leaving the craters bare, where nothing grows.

Whether the lightning is attracted to the rock, or the rock was made with the lightning isn’t known, but the rock provides a clue. It appears the lightning came in a coherent event that peppered the land, punching through and shattering the rock. That, at least, is how it appears. It’s as if there were two events. One that torched and melted the surface of the land, creating the cap rock, and a subsequent one that shattered the rock with lightning.

What amazes is the number of them clustered in particular areas. They rarely overlap, spaced fairly even, but randomly apart. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them scarring the land just south of Comb Ridge.

There are regions around the world where features like these carpet the land for hundreds of square miles. They are seen in desert lands especially, since there is little undergrowth to obscure them. The next image is from Namibia. Here the features connect with filaments of stream beds. But note how they connect in linear arrays, and branch radially like little stars. They are electrical discharge patterns.

Each feature seems to be a shallow basin, or spring where water collects. Map resolution doesn’t allow better detail. These features are larger than the Arizona features. Many cover several acres.

Much of the country of Uzbekistan is carpeted with similar features, as the following images from a small portion of eastern Uzbekistan show.

The Uzbekistan features are larger and more numerous still. They also appear to be shallow basins where the geology is distinctly changed, and there appears to be a source of water. In the last image, there appears to be a home, or ranch with a livestock tank, well, or catchment at the center.

It makes sense that water is found where lightning has struck. Subsurface water is a source of ionization that intensifies charge density, and therefore the electric field, attracting lightning to it’s location. Standing surface water won’t do that because ions have no point to collect – they spread evenly over the surface of the water. But subterranean water is trapped in the earth, where ions collect and build concentration, locally intensifying the electric field. Pits, craters and rilles formed by lightning leave depressions over aquifers that are natural for springs and wells.

But what about larger features – bigger than pits and piles of sand. Can lightning make a mountain?

Volcanoes form mountains by extruding molten rock to the surface from hot pools of magma beneath the crust. This is conventional understanding, and it isn’t in dispute in the Electric Universe. After all, volcanoes can be witnessed doing this in real time. The resulting strato-volcanoes, cinder cones, lava flows, ash deposits and lahars are seen across the globe.

What creates magma chambers and causes them to erupt is not understood. Consensus science has a number of speculative theories based on conventional beliefs about the make-up and dynamics of the interior of the earth. It’s these theories EU has a problem with. EU theory proposes the mechanism for heating and erupting volcanoes is electrical discharge beneath Earth’s crust. But our theories are also speculative because there is no way to look inside the Earth to be sure.

One type of geologic feature attributed to volcanism can be challenged by EU Theory however. These are buttes believed by the consensus to be the ancient throats of volcanoes, where a magma plug froze in the throat, and later erosion exposed them leaving a hardened pinnacle.

280px-Shiprock.snodgrass3 — Shiprock – made by Star People

Archetypal is Shiprock, a tall butte that lies near Four Corners, where the U.S. States of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico meet. It lies in the heart of Navajo lands.

Some Navajo traditionalists argue Shiprock is the work of the ‘star people’. Could it be they know more about it than our consensus scientists do.

We can use this butte and the surrounding landscape to discuss how such features were actually formed by lightning in the distant past, when lightning was a thunderbolt of the Gods. But first, let’s look at some of the absurdities in consensus theory concerning its formation.

Shiprock does sit near a region of true volcanic activity. Northern Arizona has volcanoes along the Mogollon Rim that lie to the South and West of the four corners region. This is part of a super-volcanic complex much like Yellowstone.

Yet Shiprock itself, and a number of similar formations are well removed from those volcanic fields, standing alone on the high desert plains. They are attributed to an ancient volcanic complex called the Navajo volcanic field, but are not surrounded by lava flows, ash deposits, or any other features provably volcanic in origin.

In fact, for these to be considered the throats of ancient volcanoes, the consensus assumes it formed 2,500–3,000 feet below Earth’s surface, and became exposed after millions of years of erosion. In other words, 3,000 vertical feet of surrounding lands had to be completely eroded away, leaving just the butte poking out of the flat, sandstone desert floor.

Shiprock is 1,500 feet of broken rock, meaning 1,500 feet of surrounding plateau washed away, in addition to the 3000 feet of overburden, along with the lava fields, ash deposits and other traces of the volcanic field, without washing away the butte.

Let’s just say that it’s hard to conceive how wind and water could have washed across the land carrying away trillions of tons of other rock, but left this shard standing. It’s not made of kryptonite. It’s no harder that the surrounding sandstone. Exposed to millions of years of such abuse, it would have dissolved like a pop-sickle in an Arizona summer.

Nor is there evidence of how, or where all this material disappeared to. There is no deposit of silts, or remains of past river channels anywhere in the western hemisphere to provide evidence of this. How any river, or inland sea could have washed the land away without a trace, leaving these ‘volcanic plugs’ is a mystery that the consensus can only explain by invoking billions of years. It’s the only excuse they know, and they feel it’s safe as long as they ignore the Electric Universe.

Shiprock and its neighboring buttes are made of sandstone and a similar material called minette. Minette is chemically the same as the surrounding stone except it is highly potassic and apparently fused together by heat. The composition of the rock is not hard, highly compressed, or consolidated such that it could withstand the kind of flood waters required to wash away the surrounding land. Nor is it like any rock we can witness being produced by volcanoes today. A more plausible and responsible theory is that they were made the way the Navajo say it was made.

In Part 2 of Lightning Scarred Earth, we’ll look closer at Shiprock and other features caused by lightning, and their role in mountain building.