Proposal that a Tunguska-sized cosmic airburst destroyed the Middle Bronze Age city at Tall el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley around 1650 B.C., and that the event lies behind the destruction of Sodom in Genesis 19. Published by Ted E. Bunch, Malcolm LeCompte, Allen West, James Kennett, Christopher Moore, Phillip Silvia and colleagues in Scientific Reports in September 2021, it rested on shocked quartz, melted pottery and mudbrick, spherules, and elevated platinum, salt and diamond-like carbon in a single destruction layer.
What followed is the reason for the entry. The paper was corrected twice, carried an editorial expression of concern from 2023 after questions about image handling and about the interpretation of the mineralogy, and was retracted by the journal on 24 April 2025. Eleven of its authors are named in the retraction note as disagreeing with the retraction, nine did not respond to the editors, and the first author had died. A retraction is a statement about a paper, not a finding that no airburst occurred, and the archaeology of the cities of the plain remains unsettled.
The author list overlaps substantially with the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis group, which is the connection worth keeping: the same evidentiary style, the same markers, and the same pattern of independent replication failing. It touches The Wars of Gods and Men only obliquely. The airburst reading and Zecharia Sitchin’s nuclear reading are rival naturalistic and technological explanations of the same biblical passage, and neither is evidence for the other.
Connections
Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis · The Wars of Gods and Men · Zecharia Sitchin · Graham Hancock · Ancient Apocalypse