Comets or Contagions?

A Chinese textbook known as the Mawangdui Silk details twenty-nine different types of comets, dating back to 1500 BC, and the disasters that followed each one.  “Comets are vile stars,” wrote a Chinese official in 648 AD. “Every time they appear in the south, they wipe out the old and establish the new.  Fish grow sick, crops fail. Emperors and common people die, and men go to war. The people hate life and don’t want to speak of it.”

In Medieval Europe and even in colonial America, observers associated the appearance of comets with the onset of disease.

In the summer of 536 AD, a mysterious and dramatic cloud of dust appeared over the Mediterranean and for eighteen months darkened the sky as far east as China. According to the Byzantine historian Procopius, “During this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness. . . and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.”

Analysis of Greenland ice that was deposited between 533 and 540 AD shows high levels of tin, nickel and iron oxides, suggesting that a comet or fragment of a comet may have hit the Earth at that time. The impact likely triggered volcanic eruptions, which spewed more dust into the atmosphere. With the darkened sky, temperatures dropped, crops failed and famine descended on many parts of the world.

In 541 AD a mysterious illness began to appear on the outskirts of the Byzantine Empire. Victims suffered from delusions, nightmares and fevers; they had lymph node swellings in the groin, armpits and behind their ears. The plague, named after the reigning Emperor Justinian, arrived in Constantinople, the capital of the empire, in 542 AD. Procopius noted that bodies were left stacked in the open due to a lack of space for proper burial. He estimated that in the city at its peak, the plague was killing ten thousand people every day.

The current explanation for the correlation of comets and disease is that of “panspermia.”  We now know that outer space is populated by clouds of microorganisms, and the theory holds that comets are watery bodies—dirty snowballs—which rain new microscopic forms on the earth, to which humans and animals have no immunity.

However, recent evidence indicates little if any water on comets.  Rather, they are asteroids that have an elliptical orbit and become highly charged electrically as they approach the sun, an exchange that creates the comet’s bright coma and tail. Their surfaces exhibit the kind of features that happen with intense electrical arcing, like craters and cliffs; bright or shiny spots on otherwise barren rocky surfaces indicate areas that are electrically charged.  Comets contain mineral alloys requiring temperatures in the thousands of degrees, and they have sufficient energy to emit extreme ultraviolet light and even powerful x-rays.  Moreover, as comets approach the sun, they can provoke high-energy discharges and flare-ups of solar plasma, which reach out to the comet.

Thus, comets can create electrical disturbances in the atmosphere even more powerful than those created by man-made electrification—and this radiation includes demonstrably dangerous ionizing radiation. No wonder the ancients were afraid of comets!

The conventional view holds that the Plague of Justinian was a case of bubonic plague. Researchers analyzed the remains from graves of the period and detected DNA from the organism Yersinia pestis. Rats and other rodents carry Yersinia pestis, so the thinking goes, and pass it along to fleas. When rats die, the blood-sucking fleas leave them to prey on other rats, dogs or humans. The bacteria then enter human beings via fleabites. Researchers believe that during the time of Justinian, rats on merchant ships carried the microorganism to the other Mediterranean ports.

The classic sign of bubonic plague are buboes, badly swollen lymph nodes. These often appear in the groin region because most fleabites occur on the legs. Those infected will first experience fevers, chills and muscle pains before developing septicemia or pneumonia.

The plague reappeared at periodic intervals over the next three hundred years with the last recorded occurrence in 750 AD—possibly explained by still-orbiting cometary debris. It eventually claimed 25 percent of inhabitants in the Mediterranean region. Then the plague disappeared from Europe until the Black Death of the Fourteenth Century–also presaged by a comet.

“In France. . . was seen the terrible Comet called Negra. In December appeared over Avignon a Pillar of Fire. There were many great Earthquakes, Tempests, Thunders and Lightnings, and thousands of People were swallowed up; the Courses of Rivers were stopt; some Chasms of the Earth sent forth Blood. Terrible Showers of Hail, each stone weighing 1 Pound to 8; Abortions in all Countries; in Germany it rained Blood; in France Blood gushed out of Graves of the Dead, and stained the Rivers crimson; Comets, meteors, Fire-beams, coruscations in the Air, Mock-suns, the Heavens on Fire.” – A General Chronological History Of The Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors, & Comets by Thomas Short

According to textbooks, it was the same bubonic plague of Justinian’s time that caused the Black Death in Europe, 1347-1350.  However, some investigators have pointed out flaws in this theory.  Although researchers found evidence of Yersina pestis in dental pulp from a mass grave of the period in France, other teams of scientists were unable to find evidence of the pathogen in five other gravesites of the period from other parts of Europe.

Sociologist Susan Scott and biologist Christopher J. Duncan claim that a hemorrhagic fever, similar to the Ebola virus, caused the Black Death. Others blame anthrax or some now-extinct disease. They note that Medieval accounts don’t square with modern descriptions of the illness. Witnesses describe a disease that spread at great speed with very high mortality, unlike the plague, which moves slowly and has a death rate of about 60 percent.  Accounts describe boboes covering the entire body rather than limited to the groin area as in the case of plague. Symptom descriptions mention awful odors, splotches resembling bruises, and delirium and stupor–none of which happen with modern-day bubonic plague. Some critics have embraced the theory that a virus caused the disease, but this premise hardly provides a better explanation than bacteria to explain the disease’s rapid spread and high mortality.

Then there is the rat problem. No written documents from that time describe vast piles of dead rats required to explain the plague. The Black Death killed over half of Iceland’s population but rats didn’t reach Iceland until the nineteenth century. And the Black Death continued to kill people during the winter months in northern Europe despite the fact that the plague organism requires relatively warm temperatures to survive.

In his book New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection Professor Mike Baillie argues that a comet caused the pandemic. He points out that witnesses of the period describe a significant earthquake on January 25, 1348, with other earthquakes to follow. “There have been masses of dead fish, animals, and other things along the sea shore and in many places covered in dust,” wrote a contemporary observer. “And all these things seem to have come from the great corruption of the air and earth.” Other documents describe tidal waves, rains of fire, foul odors, strange colors in the sky, mists and even dragons, in addition to earthquakes.

Baillie believes that the atmospheric phenomena were caused by fragments from Comet Negra, which passed by earth in 1347. Some fragments descended and injected huge amounts of dust into the atmosphere. Tree ring analysis indicates that as the material descended from space, it injected large amounts of chemicals based on carbon and nitrogen into the stratosphere. According to Baillie, illness and death resulted from poisoned air and drinking water as the comet flew overhead. But the symptoms—especially bruise-like blotches on the skin and high fatality rate–are highly indicative of radiation poisoning. probably rendered even more deadly by dust and ammonia-like compounds in the atmosphere. Imagine a large comet passing near the earth, crackling with intense electrical arcing, pelting the earth with x-rays and casting off fragments that fall to the earth and spew up toxic clouds of dust, followed immediately by horrible death, sometimes wiping out whole towns. This is not the kind of catastrophe that we can blame on microbes.

Perhaps our solar system is calming down—mankind has not seen such violent celestial phenomena for centuries. But smaller electrical disturbances, ones that can’t be seen, are still likely to promote outbreak, albeit less disastrous. And if radiation poisoning—whether ionizing or non-ionizing—provokes disease, there are obvious co-factors. Poisons in air, water and food, toxins from insect bites, deadly fungi on grains during wet harvests, exposure to filth, malnutrition and starvation, even fear and despair—and add to that the growing electrical pollution of the Earth with the installation of 5G. We don’t need to resort to the notion of contagion to explain outbreaks of disease.

PS The next visible comet to pass the Earth will arrive in late May.

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