By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, August 1, 2025

Your average person, school teacher, or Wikipedia editor will tell you that we’ve long known what killed the dinosaurs millions of years before humans came around: an asteroid smashing into what is now Mexico.

The reality is that many geologists and other scientists have seriously doubted that explanation since it was first proposed in 1980, and an intense debate has raged ever since, with many arguing that such an impact, or even a large number of such impacts, probably played at most a bit role in causing the Earth’s fifth mass extinction.

In so far as the argument is clear to your average person lacking any expertise in the matter (such as myself), it runs something like this. Volcanic activity causing gradual climate change is an accepted cause of other mass extinctions, and there is strong evidence for its major role in this so-called fifth mass extinction — specifically, evidence of tens of thousands of years of volcanic eruptions in what is now India. Various large meteor impacts have not been at times of any mass extinctions at all, and they do not have the power to cause one. Evidence suggests that the impact in Yucatán was also not at the time of a rapid mass extinction, but rather 200,000 years prior to a gradual trend. Had an asteroid impact created a dust cloud blocking out the sun (as many believe a nuclear war would do) not just the non-avian dinosaurs and other species lost in that epoch would have died, but so would many other species that in fact survived. To explain away the evidence that the Yucatán impact happened at the wrong time, supporters of the impact theory have concocted a tale of a tsunami mixing sediments around in an unheard of and unexplained manner.

The following dates may not seem relevant at first, but please bear with me:

In 1977, Exxon knew about and was already lying about climate change.Also in 1977, the original Star Wars movie was released.In 1978, a professor at Virginia Tech named Dewey McLean (and I say this begrudgingly as an alumnus of rival UVa) proposed that volcanic eruptions in what is now India had released greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide — causing global warming and the fifth mass extinction, and providing a warning, McLean argued, to humanity as it pursued an anthropogenic sixth mass extinction.In 1980, a former Manhattan Project physicist named Luis Alvarez (you can watch an actor portray him siding with the McCarthyites against Oppenheimer in the recent Oppenheimer movie) announced his asteroid impact theory.Also in 1980, Ronald Reagan was first elected president of the United States, which set military spending on a steep upward trajectory, including via the 1983 announcement of the Star Wars “missile defense” scam.In 1984, impact theorists proposed that there had been a companion star orbiting the sun, which came to be called the Nemesis or Death Star (unproven by any evidence and concocted to explain a phenomenon the existence of which lacks any evidence).

According to a fascinating new book by a leading opponent of the impact theory, The Last Extinction: The Real Science Behind the Death of the Dinosaurs by Gerta Keller, the debate over the death of the dinosaurs, from 1980 to today, has been extremely unpleasant, and all the blame lies with the proponents of the impact theory. They’ve lied, cheated, and bullied. And sexism toward Keller has been a significant part of it. I doubt this is the one story in human history that doesn’t have more than one side to it, and I haven’t read the other side. But Keller’s account comes across as credible. And there’s a larger problem here than which side of the debate — if either — is correct, namely: the impactors have persuaded the general public that there is not and never was any debate at all.

Here’s where I credit the Military Industrial Congressional “Intelligence” Media Academic Think Tank Complex. The Manhattan Project gave us not only nuclear weaponry, energy, waste, and radiation, forever chemicals, and of course the Cold War and a great deal of war mythology fundamental to U.S. foreign policy to this day, but also Luis Alvarez. Here I want to include an excerpt from Keller’s book:

“Support for the impact hypothesis at this time was strengthened by a growing interest among astronomers to find and catalog potentially dangerous near-Earth objects. The same month the impact hypothesis was announced, NASA’s Advisory Council sponsored a ‘New Directions Symposium’ that discussed ‘Project Spacewatch’ at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, which piggybacked on the impact hypothesis, its publicity, and the participation of Alvarez’s group. The ostensive purpose of Space-watch was to predict and prevent a calamitous Earth impact by blasting from the sky any threatening asteroid, meteorite, or comet. It may not be a coincidence that—threatened by budget cuts from the recently elected president, Ronald Reagan, (who had run on a platform of ending ‘big government,’)—NASA was drawn to scientific research that could both be justified as in the interest of national security and could also obtain, as one NASA official put it, ‘high scientific yields at low cost.’ According to a New York Times Magazine piece about a symposium on meteorites that was held at the New York’s Museum of Natural History in 1981, ‘meteorite research [has] increased dramatically in scope and excitement during the last few years,’ with NASA’s budget for meteorite studies having grown sixfold in the preceding eight years. This trend would continue throughout the 1980s, with universities and independent scientists pitching in to track the skies for potential planetary dangers and scouring the Earth for large craters. By the time the 1990s arrived, NASA was joined by the US Air Force in devoting significant government resources in efforts to find extraterrestrial objects that might visit destruction on humanity. . . .

“Despite a lack of evidence, it only took two years for the impact hypothesis to catapult to proven theory. You could date this change to April 28, 1982, when Luis Alvarez delivered a hotly anticipated lecture to the National Academy of Sciences. . . .

“Science magazine drove the media hype from the beginning. From 1980 to 1989, Science published sixteen pro-impact articles, which were further promoted by thirteen pro-news commentaries by staff writer Richard Kerr. During this time, no articles were published of any opposition hypothesis, including volcanism. So why the bias? It’s perhaps no coincidence that Science’s masthead was packed with Alvarez protegees and Berkeley connections. Deputy Editor Philip H. Abelson was one of Luis Alvarez’s collaborators on the atomic bomb. His successor, Donald E. Koshland, was another Berkeley product. Alvin Trivelpiece, the Executor Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which owns Science, was a retired former Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory where Alvarez had worked. Science magazine’s prestige and media clout made it imperative for other media outlets to keep up with pro-meteorite impact stories to sell newspapers and magazines. This avalanche of pro-impact publicity created an aura of inevitability surrounding the impact hypothesis. Yet opinion polls among dinosaur experts in 1985 revealed a mere 4 percent believed a comet or meteorite caused the mass extinction.”

Even the Nemesis / Death Star speculation made it big:

“[No theory] was more popular than the Nemesis idea which, seemingly overnight, transformed from an entertaining speculation into a theory. With its intriguing name and sci-fi overtones, it was an instant hit in the popular press. This hypothetical ‘death star’ even spawned a cover story in Time magazine and a lengthy autobiographical account by Richard Muller in the New York Times Sunday Magazine that was later abridged for the Reader’s Digest (and then later expanded for a 1988 book). The media frenzy plunged me into a dark gloomy mood as I reflected upon the press’s outsized role in promoting faulty science.”

So, the funding and the media coverage had quickly turned the crazy asteroid story into established fact, and the warning about global heating into nonexistence. The war machine had done its part to decide what people would think about the fifth mass extinction, and used that belief to advance the sixth.

And that, children, is where the Golden Dome comes from.

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