When a great disaster occurs, modern man is quick to write about it. The Titanic, World Wars, Jonestown Massacre, Vietnam War, Korean War, the Holocaust, the genocide of Africa, the assassination of a president or other head of state., the California Freeway collapse, even the Oklahoma bombing. All of these things were terrible events and should be remembered.


Definitions:
Comet. . . is a piece of a star that pluments through the skies. Many times it has a long tail that can be iridescent or fiery.
Meteor. . . can be the same piece of a star that enters our atmosphere. It can have a flaming tail.
Meteorite. . .the piece of a star that entered our atmosphere and lands on earth, sometimes as a fireball.
Natural disasters, however, are not usually remembered very long: the eruption of Mount St. Helena, the dry brush fires of California every year or so, the meteorite that fell in Russia in 1911. Animals return, plants reestablish themselves and new people settle again in the area. An older person might remember the event for a time, books and articles are there for the youngsters, but except for technical personnel, such as architects, geologists, or the like, the memory fades.

And so it is with astronomy. A star will flare silently in the night, a few meteorites streak across the sky, a fog covers the moon. Most people are asleep. Exhausted from their daily labors, they sleep with no inkling of stellar events. On rare occasions, there is a continuous display in the heavens that someone took notice of because of its beauty, and others are told. If these were very impressive events, they are recorded for posterity in lands where writing systems were used. In areas where there is no scribal ability, stories were told and these became myth or fable.

In Peru, there are several such star events that are recorded as myth, which were also illustrated in art. One is called the Rebellion of the Artifacts. Another is a tale about an errant star who was a "bad" person, taken to the vultures (a bird constellation) to be punished. (See Deneb or The Three Marias.) Since the latter is a star between two others in a ":cross" layout, there has been debate about which "cross" constellation it was. In Peru, the Southern Cross is the most prominent star formation. However, Cygnus, the Northern Cross is also visible.

X-1 was once a blazing blue star located between Deneb and Albireo. Aguila, a bird constellation is located immediately below. A star cannot be hidden, yet those who research areas without writing systems only try to piece together local information. They do not seem to remember that a star is a universal being and has no boundaries.

As it was, I, too, read the information available and was mesmerized by the available data. It was not until I read the quote from Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua (1613), that I realized that I was reading about the backlash of an exploding meteorite as it hit the Gulf waters in the North.

This is the same type information that turned up in Argentina without the myth attached to it. (See. The Argentinian discovery was a meteorite ground trail that actually was laid down from the northeast to the southwest.(p. 391).
The last seconds of this [low-impact ricocheting] meteorite near Rio Cuarto [Argentina] must have created the image of a looming fire-spurting god. (p. 392)
To the west in Peru, Salcamayhua wrote about a myth told him by the Inca:
In that time, they say. . . . of something like a yauirca or amaru that had emerged from the mountain of Pachatusan, a very fierce beast, half a league long and thick, and two and a half fathoms in width, with ears and fangs and whiskers, and it came by Yuncaypampa and Cinca and from there it entered the lake of Quibipay. Then two sacacas of fire came out of Asoncata, and [one] passed Pontina [mountain] of Arequipa; and the other came down to and passing Guamanca, where there are three or four very high mountains covered with snow. . . Those in which they say that there are animals with wings, and ears, and tails and four feet, and on top of their backs many spines like a fish; and from afar they say that it appeared to them [to be] all fire. ([1950]: 242 [1613])

The text describes the image of the fire-ravaging god, as was suspected in Argentina. An image, taken from National Geographic, actually shows us such a monster and finally identifies the decapitator god. But with the Argentinian information, it also implies that it was a low-impact fireball high enough to pass through the mountainous areas. This same decapitator "god" is seen in The Mississippi Gorget.

If one would attempt to recreate the same situation, one must take into account the curvature of the earth as the pieces of an exploding meteorite flew along its surface. The only reason that a meteorite would explode on contact with the earth is when it would enter cold water. It would then break into smaller pieces and) splatter like grease hitting a hot griddle.

The University of Texas StarDate program described such a meteorite. They quoted observers as seeing:"a giant millipede with yellow glowing legs on fire." Fishermen at sea saw the fireball explode into several large chunks. The Defense Department statellite claimed that the four large chunks, in turn exploded into even smaller pieces. For the seventh century fireball, the same momentum would then carry those errant pieces across the land masses. In this instance, there are recognizable records of fireballs in Peru, in Lake Texcoco of Mexico (as the ball of feathers (fire) which impregnated Coatlique) and in Argentina. The Argentinian fireball is dated about one thousand years ago, which we can, because of the dated monuments, interpolate as the seventh century AD.

China informed us that a great bird attempted to fill the Ocean with pebbles. Hawaii tells us about the star Tane (in the Northern Cross constellation) dropping stones into the water and their reaction to the waters of the Pacific as they bounced in and out of the ocean. This great ocean disturbance is also recorded by the Maori of New Zealand. (see La Creación del Mundo [Maya] in La Tienda<.i>)

But these tales are just myths. Records then, we have. Nevertheless, they can have no basis in fact in a scientific world. . . except that they do. They verify a stellar event that science has dated some 65 million years ago, even though monuments that record this event are dated between 600-700 AD. This agrees with the approximate date given by the University of Texas astronomy program StarDate. They state it ccurred approximately one thousand years ago. It can be then assumed that it occurred during the seventh century when the calendar was changed around the world. I believe that these mythic records are more real than supposed.

A computer version of such an impact has been portrayed in the movies recently but it left out the ricochet components of an astro-backlash as the meteorite hit the waters of the Gulf. Is it possible that all the information about this great disaster is available or are the pieces so scattered around the world that they cannot be deciphered?