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“Fire from the Sky” Expedition Update ☄

Dear Friends and Supporters of Comet Research Group,

Thank each and every one of you for your support for and interest in our research. I am writing to update you with regard to the activities of the Comet Research Group and share our plans for the near and mid-term future. The update is being shared with the nearly one thousand supporters of our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, our 1000 friends on Facebook, and visitors to our website.

Despite falling short of our target fundraising goal, we consider the $35,000 raised between November 14 and January 14 an enormous success. We will be able to significantly subsidize two of our three planned #killercomet expeditions, and a third is proceeding as planned at our own expense.

The funded trips will be the “Ice Diamonds” and “Sunken Crater” expeditions. Planning and logistics are well underway for getting to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland in late June and returning with 200 gallons of melted ice water from Greenland Ice Cap. As for North America, the CRG is evaluating options for a crater hunt which may include a detour to North Dakota — so stay tuned there..

But first up – this week and the following week – is the “Fire from the Sky” Expedition to Tall el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley. CRG scientists Phil Silvia and Malcolm LeCompte will be collecting and sharing field data related to the hypothesis that an ancient catastrophe — recorded in the Bible as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah – was actually an airburst of a #killercomet. These two team members will be part of larger group excavating an ancient settlement at the foot of Mount Nebo directly across from Jericho on the east bank of the Jordan river.

Over the next two weeks I will be posting video and photo updates of the Jordan field work to the CRG Facebook page, along with direct dig reports from Director. If you are one of the crowdfund donors (thanks!), we encourage you to also bookmark the Facebook page which is open to the public.

Shortly after Drs. LeCompte and Silvia return, we will notify everyone of a date and time for the “Ask the Scientist” session, as promised in the campaign, and with exclusive access for some donors.

I am so pleased we are touch with all of you. Only months ago our “community” consisted of fifty or so scientists keeping in touch by email, as we researched an obscure and controversial subject. It was really kind of lonely.

But now, as a result of the crowdfunding effort, and its collateral social media, 2000 interested citizen scientists like you have joined us. But a plea for patience: Unlike everyone under 40, we are new to social media. Our communications might not have the social polish and frequency of other internet driven communities. So stick with us as we develop the cheap and easy methods to plug you in – and be confident our research, which you are assisting, is progressing smoothly in any case.

George Howard

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Comet Research Group Seeks Indiegogo Funding to Help Protect Cities around the World from Killer Comets

NASA forecasts that Planet Earth could possibly get hit by a skyscraper-sized asteroid named Bennu, resulting in the creation of a five-mile-wide crater. The Comet Research Group is looking for funding support to accurately assess the effects of such impacts, and provide information that may help avert similar situations in the near future.

Raleigh, United States 2nd November, 2016

It is extremely disturbing to know that Earth is directly in the path of about 500,000 asteroids and comets. Unfortunately, NASA and other space agencies don’t know the location of 498,000 of them! Yet, these killer comets are capable of causing explosions far worse than the world’s largest atomic bombs. Chelyabinsk, a small city in Russia, experienced such as incident in 2013 that seriously injured around fifteen hundred people. NASA warns that an asteroid named Bennu may hit Earth within a few decades. If so, the impact would be powerful enough to destroy any one of the world’s largest cities.

The Comet Research Group is a non-profit organization collaborating more than 60 scientists from sixteen countries all over the world. The discoveries made by the group members have been featured on the History Channel, National Geographic Channel, Discovery Channel, PBS’s NOVA, and many other television channels and programs. The group’s mission is to

  • Accurately assess the hidden effects of comet impacts on human history
  • Educate the international public about these effects
  • Provide governments with the necessary information to stop future comets from hitting Earth.

 

 

One of the upcoming projects from the Comet Research Group is the “Sunken Crater Expedition.” This is an initiative to explore a recently discovered offshore crater in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, just south of Quebec, Canada. According to some scientists, this crater was created 12,800 years ago by a massive comet swarm that pushed millions of mammoths into extinction. To figure out what actually happened at the site, the Comet Research Group plans to collect melted rocks, including tiny diamonds.

The Comet Research Group has just launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $139,500. All funds received from Indiegogo will be spent directly on research, including expenses for travel and for the laboratory research on the samples. In addition to the “Sunken Crater Expedition,” proceeds from the campaign will also support the Comet Research Group’s “Diamonds on Ice Expedition” to Greenland, “Fire from the Sky Expedition” to the Middle East, and the “Burned Badlands Expedition” to North Dakota.  

Unable to get government funding after repeated attempts, the Comment Research Group is appealing for mass support to combat the danger of killer comets. A group spokesperson recently warned, “The chilling news is that Earth is now in a centuries-long episode of increasing bombardments by the shattered remains of a giant comet, one that has hit us again and again for thousands of years. We need to be much better prepared, and you can help us.”

To find out more about this campaign, please visit http://bit.ly/killercomet

The website of the Comet Research Group is https://cometresearchgroup.org/

About the Comet Research Group: this is a non-profit corporation that collaborates with 63 scientists from 55 universities in 16 countries. Their discoveries have been featured on the History Channel, National Geographic Channel, Discovery Channel, PBS’s NOVA, and more than a dozen other TV programs. Their mission is to accurately assess the effects of comet impacts on human history, to educate the international public about these effects, and, ultimately, to provide world governments with the information they need to stop comets from hitting Earth in the future.

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Announcing the 2016 CRG Coloring Contest

The Comet Research Group is pleased to announce the launch of our 2016 coloring contest, which will coincide with our upcoming Indiegogo campaign. Visit cometresearchgroup.com/coloring-contest to download our coloring sheet featuring the “Attack of the Killer Comet”, and for instructions on how to enter. Or, you can draw and color your own killer comet-themed entry.

Children and adults alike are invited to participate. The contest will run through the end of November.

Learn More

Download and print the PDF, and learn how to enter

 

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Re-branding the Comet Research Group

The Comet Research Group (CRG) has evolved quite a lot over the last two decades, from our early days as an informal collaboration between scientists to our role today as part of an official non-profit and a global leader in comet impact study. Leagues of scientists, volunteers, and donors gave of their personal time and treasure to help us get here, and to all of them we say, “thank you, thank you, thank you!”. We would not and could not have done it without you.

This fall, CRG will evolve once more, as we launch our first-ever crowdfunding campaign to underwrite The Sunken Crater Expedition slated for early next year. This campaign will also seed support for two additional expeditions in the second half of 2017.

To prepare for this campaign and to facilitate our mission more broadly, we enlisted SkyBound Marketing to make the Comet Research Group and our work more accessible. Over four weeks SkyBound established a new logo and brand standard for CRG, created additional messaging to help us reach beyond our typical circle of scientists and data geeks, and built for us a new website and social media pages so that we can share our work more broadly and better facilitate public dialog about our findings.

Please take a look around the site. We hope you like what you see!

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