Retraction of Biblical Literalist Paper on Destruction of Sodom by Comet Infuriates Coauthors
Mark Boslough is a Research Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico, where he is funded by NASA to model impacts on Jupiter, asteroid deflection methods, and cosmic airbursts in Earth’s atmosphere. He has spent much of his career seeking validation or “ground truth” for his airburst models. He has participated in expeditions around the world to airburst locations including the glass-forming event in the Libyan Desert of Egypt, the 1908 Tunguska explosion, and the 2013 Chelyabinsk event. He received his PhD in Applied Physics (with studies in Geophysics) from Caltech in 1983, where he specialized in hypervelocity impact experiments. He has worked at all three DOE national laboratories, first as a student at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory performing shock temperature measurements, then at Sandia where he pioneered the use of hydrocodes to model cosmic airbursts for planetary risk assessment, and finally at Los Alamos where he continues his efforts to understand the physics of airbursts and quantify their contribution to impact risk.
On Sept. 20, 2021, I received an email from a colleague and impact expert who wrote, “I suspect you've seen the recent Nature paper about the airburst in the Jordan Valley. I wonder if we could talk about it?” It was the paper, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el‑Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” by Bunch et al., and the so-called Comet Research Group (CRG). It was actually published by Nature Scientific Reports, which is not Nature.
Many others were also tricked by the nature.com domain, and this confusion was exploited by one of the paper’s coauthors, George Howard, the group’s blogger and cofounder of the CRG that cosponsored the work. He tweeted that day, “This week's Monday night post is on today's Nature pub on our discovery of Sodom. Future posts on Gomorrah. And the Ark. Click the top right hamburger at the Cosmic Tusk and subscribe now for future Revelations, now that we're done with Genesis lol.”
He left ambiguous which “Nature pub” he was referencing, but he didn’t keep his readers guessing about the subject matter. To the authors who were promoting the paper, it was all about the biblical city of Sodom. As a political science major, wealthy businessman, and former GOP senate staffer, it was never clear what scientific contributions Howard had made to the CRG, other than blogging and promotion, that had qualified him to be a regular coauthor of their papers since 2007.
But this paper was different.
Even without any archaeology training, he described joining the excavation team, “The lengthy journal article has been under development since 2014 when I first traveled to Jordan to join the wonderful Trinity Southwest University at Tall el-Hammam.” He continued, “I spent five weeks in the beautiful Jordan Valley picking up rocks and tearing down mudbrick walls in February of 2014 and 2015 — indeed, the Tusk collected some of the study samples.” He included a photograph of himself in an Indiana Jones outfit, holding up one of his trophies.
They put out multiple press releases, blogs, and tweets on Sept. 20, 2021, the day it was published. All played up the Sodom connection. Howard’s Cosmic Tusk announcement didn’t talk about the science, other than to say that the paper had “extraordinary implications for science and faith” and that “The data also support significant portions of the Book of Genesis itself.” He described his conversion to belief. After growing up “cynically secular,” he was now “well prepared to believe there could be provable, objective truth behind the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.” He also included an embedded YouTube video of the Steven Collins (Chief Archaeologist & Director of the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project) leading a tour of the ruins and describing how he discovered Tall el-Hammam by using his faith in truth of the Bible.
The intense focus by the authors on Sodom and the biblical implications turned out to be a winning formula for boosting clicks and maxing out their paper’s Altmetric score. The CRG press release was titled, “Fire from the Sky destroyed Ancient City, possible source of the Biblical Story of Sodom,” and stated, “The flash of heat and devastation described in the new publication supports the story of the destruction of Sodom in Genesis 19:24-29.” The piece in the Conversation was titled, “A giant space rock demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city and everyone in it – possibly inspiring the Biblical story of Sodom,” and stated, “The Bible describes the devastation of an urban center near the Dead Sea – stones and fire fell from the sky, more than one city was destroyed, thick smoke rose from the fires and city inhabitants were killed.” (The Conversation has now replaced the original article with a retraction note.) One author’s institutional publication, the Current, carried the subtitle, “Researchers present evidence that a cosmic impact destroyed a biblical city in the Jordan Valley.” It had an entire section titled “Fire and Brimstone” which summarized the Bible story up to and including Lot’s wife’s fateful transformation into a pillar of salt and quoting the coauthor’s observation that “All the observations stated in Genesis are consistent with a cosmic airburst.”
Biblical archaeologists and pseudoarchaeologists have a long history of discovering the ruins of ancient mythical cities, including Atlantis. Graham Hancock has made a career out of such claims, and his Netflix pseudoarchaeology series “Ancient Apocalypse” was one of the top science documentaries of 2022, despite its misclassification as “science.”
There is an ongoing debate about the location of the lost city of Sodom, and those who use the Bible as a guide have come to different conclusions based on their personal interpretations of the words of Genesis. Steven Collins, of Trinity Southwest University (TSU) and Veritas International University (VIU), disagrees with his predecessors in the quest to find Sodom, such as creationist Ron Wyatt. But Collins used the Bible to add an extra twist that he could use as a media hook to his own version of Sodom (Tall el-Hammam, a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea) above all the others in the court of public opinion. Collins one-upped his rivals by claiming to have evidence at his Sodom that supported the fire and brimstone story of Genesis.
In 2002, Collins published a report in the Biblical Research Bulletin (The Academic Journal of Trinity Southwest University) called “Terms of Destruction for the Cities of the Plain” It’s available from TSU for $2.50 on a web page that states TSU’s mission, “to uphold the divine authority of the Bible as God’s only inspired representation of reality to humankind.” The first paragraph of Collins (2002) lays out his assumptions:
According to the Bible, the Cities of the Plain (Plain = Kikkar = Disk, i.e., Jordan Disk) and their immediate environs met a catastrophic end. The fire that consumed the area is described in such violent terms that most scholars consider the account of their destruction either to be fictional or the residual historical memory of a powerful geological phenomenon that most likely took place in the prehistoric past. The biblical explanation is divine retribution. While there has been much speculation regarding the nature of the event, a good portion of it has stretched the grammatical boundaries of the biblical text to the breaking point and beyond. Therefore, it is important to clarify the biblical indicators of destruction, including both what the Bible does and does not say about the destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and the Kikkar. This exercise is relevant not only to our understanding of the event itself as recorded in the Book of Genesis, but also to the archaeological investigation of any site purported to be one of the Cities of the Plain.
Collins went on to explain his hypothesis, and its consistency with the inspired representation of reality in Genesis 19:15,17.
The divine messenger informs Lot and his family that Sodom was about to be annihilated and that they must escape the city lest they “be swept away when the city is punished...Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!” The Hebrew term for “swept away” is sph, which almost invariably means “dramatic change or removal.” While sph does not necessarily imply that whatever is “swept away” will cease to exist entirely without any visible residue, it does generally indicate, relative to the scope of the target of sph, that a comprehensive, categorical removal or destruction of the target is in view. From this language, we can safely say that Sodom was about to become the object of some divine sph, the results of which would leave the city somewhere between a pile of rubble and non-existence (see anomalies).
Collins's Figure 1 was a schematic of his concept, with an explanation in the caption.
Regardless of the nature of the destruction that befell the Cities of the Plain, one thing is clear from the biblical text: the fiery blast came from above. Superheated air and/or some kind of impact, like that of a disintegrated comet fragment moving at a high rate of speed, could have obliterated virtually everything in its target area, perhaps leaving only the foundations of the largest structures.
There is nothing wrong with using the Bible to inspire lines of scientific inquiry, as long as the evidence is pursued and interpreted objectively, logically, and without bias. The evidence provided by nature is the final word for scientists. After all, Isaac Newton was similarly motivated and inspired by the Bible, but the truths he discovered have stood the test of time.
Nevertheless, critics of the science, evidence, and methodology in the Sodom paper were subjected to vilification and accusations by the authors. When scientific integrity researcher Elisabeth Bik discovered and announced evidence for inappropriate photoshopping of images, George Howard tweeted, “You sick and pitiful anti-science, anti-christian [sic] bigots. What happened to the importance of data and citizen science? Yep Trinity is small christian [sic] college that has managed to dig 16 seasons at TeHEP and discovered something....”
Scientists who are Christians may have to adjust their understanding of the meaning of the words in the Bible to be consistent with reality, but it is illogical for boosters of bad science to attack those of us who ask to see their evidence and calculations as “anti-Christian.” Unfortunately, the volunteers who helped excavate Tall el-Hammam were surely aware of the purpose of the dig. According to the excavation project’s GoFundMe page, it was to “help us prove the veracity of the Bible.”
According to Collins's 2013 book Discovering the City of Sodom he only had to wait 3 years before he found the smoking-gun evidence that his 2002 hypothesis was correct. Remarkably, according to Collins it was the very first item that his crew found, in their first season, in their first descent down a ladder into their first exploratory shaft into what they had immediately identified (based on the observation that it “still stinks”) as the “destruction layer,” which he had predicted, based on Genesis, without a single radiocarbon date. Collins wrote (calling himself “Dr. C”):
Dr. C could hardly contain his excitement. Except for the massive mudbrick ramparts surrounding the upper city already under excavation, this was the first time at the site that his hands had touched the Middle Bronze Age destruction from the time of Abraham and Lot.
It quickly got more exciting, as his assistant’s trowel made a “distinctive, bell-clear sound” when it struck something that she described as “probably pottery,” leading to an emotional roller coaster for Dr C.
She held it up toward Dr. C. His heart sank, and she could see it in his almost-blank stare. Glinting back at him was a greenish glass-like surface. “What's a sherd of glazed Islamic pottery doing all the way down here in a Middle Bronze Age context?” he wondered aloud. Glazing like this didn't exist in the Near East until after the seventh century CE, no less than 2,300 years later.
But then he examined it more closely, and the life returned to his eyes.
…he picked it up with the thumb and forefinger of his trowel hand and turned it over. Ordinary Bronze Age pottery on that side.
The striations left by fast wheeling, the composition of the clay, color, texture--everything Bronze Age. In fact, his trained eye and expertise in ancient Levantine ceramics told him that the curvature of the piece meant it came from the shoulder of a Middle Bronze 2 storage jar, one that could store forty or more gallons of olive oil, wine, or water. He'd examined such fragments and intact jars, called pithoi, hundreds of times. They were as common in and as characteristic of the second half of the Middle Bronze Age as eight-track tapes in the 1970s.
Collins continued his story.
Feeling lighter now than just a few moments before, he carefully noted the location of the sherd in situ, then passed it up top to be put into the pottery pail for that locus… he heard a shout from above. “Looks like trinitite, Dr. C!”
It was the voice of a volunteer excavator who had spent time at the site of the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb.
"Looks like what?" Dr. C called up. “Trinitite. It's what happened there in the first atomic explosion when the silica sand at ground zero melted from the heat of the blast.” Dr. C scrambled up the ladder. He'd never heard of trinitite, much less seen any. “Okay, in the sand. At Trinity Site, in southern New Mexico, I get that. But what melted the surface of this MB2 sherd?” Dr. C examined it closely in the better light. “This thing's been buried here for almost four thousand years.”
Collins immediately had an explanation.
“What's remarkable about this sherd is that the other side isn't melted,” Dr. C observed, turning it over and over in his hand. “So why is the outside melted and the inside isn't? And look. The surface melt on the outside face is really thin. Only a couple of millimeters. And see how the glass laps over the edge of the break just barely, maybe one millimeter? Seems like the heat that melted the surface didn't last very long. The melted surface clay was viscous only long enough to flow slightly over the edge of the break, then it stopped. So the surface got really hot, then cooled quickly. That's pretty obvious.”
The implication of what Dr. C had just said wasn't lost on anyone standing in the circle. They'd heard or read his theory about Tall el-Hammam being biblical Sodom.
“But why just this one piece? Why wouldn't this stuff be all over the place?”
“Well, we just cracked into the Middle Bronze Age to the tune of about two square meters, about a foot deep,” Dr. C said. “Who knows what else is down there across the upper tall? Right now it's an anomaly. But it is what it is. We'll have to get it analyzed back in the States.” G.K., the pottery and object registrar for the project, carefully stored the “clinker” after she'd properly logged it. Excavation photographer Mike Luddeni took a series of photos of it.
He identified this object by its registration number, “HO.5-6.UB.21W.7.367, giving the precise in situ location of the clinker: Hammam Object; Season 2005-2006; Area U, Field B; Square 21W; Locus 7; Accession Number 367.”
It does not appear that anything was written about this first season of the Tall el-Hammam excavation project (TeHEP) until publication of the 2009 report Tall al-Ḥammām: preliminary report on four seasons of excavation (2006–2009) Curiously, the authors make no mention whatsoever of this discovery or Collins’s fanciful interpretations, and there is only one paragraph in the entire report that describes the excavation of this area, field, square, and locus in the first season, although it did mention extensive military trenching (MT) disturbances.
Square UB.21W represents the lowest level on the upper tall. It was thought that this would give us a good opportunity to excavate through the IA material into an earlier stratum, if possible, because the MT at this point had already removed about 2+ m of in situ occupational debris. A 2 x 2m sounding was made to a depth of just over 3 m, and the results were instructive. An IA2 structure with a plastered stone wall and contiguously plastered mudbrick wall were encountered just below the surface (loci 3 and 4), giving us the corner of a room. The walls ran to a depth of nearly 2 m, and ended on a firmly packed layer of mixed debris (locus 6) from 20cm to 30cm thick. Inside the corner of the room to the full depth of the wall were layers of collapsed debris (loci 1, 2 and 5). The sequence revealed the collapse of what was probably a two-story structure: from top to bottom, earth and plaster, the remains of wood beams, and a thick matrix of ash, mudbricks and stone. There was no discernable floor at or near the base of the wall. The pottery was IA2a-b. Under the IA walls and locus 6 was a clean, clear interface with hard, yellowish mudbricks. The bricks were tightly laid and very solid (locus 7), with EBA and MBA pottery mixed.
According to this report, TeHEP Season 1 was 27 December 2005 to January 22, 2006. By extraordinary coincidence, I boarded my flight to Cairo on Jan. 31, 2006, for an expedition to the Libyan Desert and to shoot the documentary Tutankhamun’s Fireball, in which I first described my hypothesis for the formation of the mysterious yellow-green glass that was discovered by ancient Egyptians who carved it into a sacred scarab for King Tut. I brought back samples of the Libyan Desert Glass, as well as fulgurites (sand that is fused to glass by lightning strikes) which is common and easy to find in the Great Sand Sea.
I was completely unaware of Tall el-Hammam and as far as I know Collins had no knowledge of my work until that September, when my story about this experience, The Riddle of the Desert Glass, was featured in the Sandia Lab News and distributed to all my coworkers, and the documentary was broadcast in the US. My hypothesis later became one of Discover Magazine’s Top 100 Science stories of 2006.
Shortly after that, at a monthly employee council meeting, one of my coworkers told me that her husband was working on an archaeological excavation in Jordan, where they had found something that looked like trinitite. I was intrigued, and sent her a message that evening, “I want to know more about that dig in Jordan. I am especially interested in the ‘trinitite’ and any references you have to it.” I referred her to a geologist I knew who was studying fused soils, including fulgurites, in the middle east.
She responded a few days later, “The director (and technical contact, I think) for the Jordan dig referred to below is: Steven Collins, PhD, Dean, College of Archaeology and Biblical History, Trinity Southwest University. The dig is called ‘The Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project, Jordan” and is in cooperation with International Archeology Projects, Inc.” She included Collins's email and other contact information, but I have no recollection or record of having corresponded with him until 2021.
Three years later my geologist colleague got a message from one member of the excavation, who wrote,
During one of our many explorations of the surrounding archaeological sites we found a large chunk of desert glass, about 15 cm around and 4 cm thick with a projection of almost pure green class on one end. This was found just east of the village of Suwayma… So far in our research, we have found that there is a strange ‘occupational gap’ at tell el hammam [sic] and the surrounding area during the late bronze age, that we have no explanation for. Many sites beyond this area were seeminly [sic] not affected. Further, this destruction layer still intact on our lower site, is ‘missing’ the whole mudbrick superstructure which should be covering the foundations to a depth of at least 1 meter. This strange phenomena [sic] has been noted at other sites as well. Perhaps an airburst could explain these site anomalies.
In re-reading this correspondence, I was struck by the fact that there was no mention whatsoever of the melted pottery that had been presented as the “smoking gun” evidence by Bunch et al., and the “trinitite” didn’t even come from Tall el-Hammam. Had they not discovered the melted pottery yet, or did they just not think to mention it? They only mentioned what they called “trinitite” or “desert glass,” the latter of which suggested that they had only learned about it from the 2006 documentary. Scientists have always called it Libyan Desert Glass, but the British writers of the documentary script called it “desert glass” in deference to their Egyptian hosts, who do not refer to that part of the Sahara as the “Libyan Desert” but as the “Western Desert of Egypt.”
The melted pottery was highlighted in the press releases and promotional material associated with the 2021 Scientific Reports paper. Their CRG press release said, “The intense heat melted clay pottery, plaster inside the palace, and mudbricks in the walls.” The Conversation reported a “jumbled layer of charcoal, ash, melted mudbricks and melted pottery,” and described how “swords, spears, mudbricks and pottery began to melt”. It pointed out that no volcanos, earthquakes, or warfare “are capable of melting metal, mudbricks and pottery,” and described experiments using furnaces to show that “the bubbled pottery and mudbricks at Tall el-Hammam liquefied at temperatures above 2,700 F (1,500 C).” The Current stated, “In addition to the debris one would expect from destruction via warfare and earthquakes, they found pottery shards with outer surfaces melted into glass, ‘bubbled’ mudbrick and partially melted building material, all indications of an anomalously high-temperature event, much hotter than anything the technology of the time could produce.”
The reports and statements by the Tall el-Hammam excavation team have always been ambiguous about exactly when the melted pottery was discovered. Other than Collins's 2013 book, the very first mention of it was in 2015, ten years after the first season. Phillip Silvia, an author of the Bunch paper who did his PhD at TSU under Collins, described in his 2015 thesis an analysis of what he called "vitrified pottery." He wrote, “The original sample of vitrified pottery (see Figure 45) was examined in laboratories at New Mexico Tech in 2006 by N. Dunbar,” with a footnote that stated, “Hand-written notes from N. Dunbar on data sheets that were generated during the analysis.”
About a month after Bunch et al. was published, the Collins's 2013 version of the discovery of melted pottery at Tall el-Hammam was described by Eric Metaxas, a conservative radio host and 2020 election denier, in his book Is Atheism Dead? which is described in its blurb as “cheerfully and logically making his case, along the way presenting breathtaking—and sometimes astonishing—new evidence and arguments against the idea of a Creatorless universe.”
The retraction of Bunch et al. by Nature Scientific Reports has come as no surprise to the scientific community. It was apparently precipitated by the publication two days earlier of a comment I coauthored, Misunderstandings about the Tunguska event, shock wave physics, and airbursts have resulted in misinterpretations of evidence at Tall el-Hammam (Boslough & Bruno, 2025). The editors seemed only to need one more published straw to break the camel’s back, even though they had already been made aware of the well documented evidence for inappropriate manipulation of image data, misrepresentation of sources, apparent plagiarism, missing data, extraordinary claims with no supporting evidence, and misunderstandings that were well documented (PubPeer, Jaret & Harris 2022). Many of these same problems have been identified in other papers by the Comet Research Group (Holliday et al., 2023).
Scientific Reports had already retracted another preposterous paper along the same lines, led by a close colleague of the Bunch et al. authors. The Hopewell airburst event, 1699–1567 years ago (252–383 CE) (Tankersley et al., 2022) had been the subject of ridicule by archaeologists and impact experts. Those of us who were already critical of the Sodom paper derisively referred to Hopewell as the “Sodom of Ohio,” much to the annoyance of our archaeologist colleagues. It was retracted three weeks after the publication of the comment, Refuting the sensational claim of a Hopewell-ending cosmic airburst (Nolan et al., 2023).
The Sodom paper’s authors had known they had a winning clickbait formula immediately and did all they could to run up their Atmetric score (a published measure of online engagement) which they held up as evidence for the importance of their work to science, rather than how clickbait-worthy it was. The Sodom paper got far more attention than the Hopewell paper, even though the science was equally bad, apparently because it was connected to God’s wrath and was perceived as proving that the Bible was true.
After all their Sodom hype, it was amusing to read the comments by the paper’s authors, responding to questions about the relevance of the Bible by readers of the Conversation article. After using this connection to pump their Altmetric score with the Sodom connection, they backpedaled. Here are some selected quotes by Phillip Silvia:
“Sodom received only an anecdotal reference in the original paper. Media references to the paper have been placing the emphasis on Sodom and virtually ignoring the science contained within the paper.”
“This article is NOT about proving the Bible. We note only that there is a strong correlation between the description of the event in the Bible and the evidence that we have examined. Whether or not Tall el-Hammam is Biblical Sodom is irrelevant to the conclusions drawn from the analysis of the evidence.
“Once again… this paper is NOT about the destruction of Sodom.”
“The problem is, the person who posted this to The Conversation inserted Sodom into the title of what he posted, whereas Sodom received only anecdotal reference inside the original paper.”
“Every media post about the paper—including this posting on The Conversation—emphasizes Sodom instead of the science… Please…stick to the science and leave religion and personal opinion out of the conversation!”
Silvia’s boss is Steven Collins, who had accepted him into his unaccredited Trinity Southwest University Biblical Archaeology PhD program, despite his lack of a science degree, after he retired from his job as a Christian Fire/Police Chaplain for the City of Rio Rancho's Department of Public Safety. Collins seems to be a task master with a strict chain-of-command management philosophy. He initiated correspondence with me shortly after I posted critical comments about the Sodom paper on Twitter, in 2021. One exchange was illuminating.
Boslough: I suspect nobody has contacted you for samples to test because you are not a coauthor. The paper lists Phil Silvia as the author to contact for samples.
Collins: He totally works under my supervision. Relative to TaH, he doesn't sneeze without my permission. He does have access to samples in our lab, but under my control.
It stands to reason that Collins enforces the TSU and VIU biblical literalist mission statements that were guiding the project he hired Silvia to work on. VIU says, “Inerrancy simply cannot be rejected without grave consequences, both to the individual and to the Church … This inerrancy isn’t just in passages that speak about salvation, but also applies to all historical and scientific statements as well. It is not only accurate in matters related to faith and practice, but it is accurate and without error regarding any statement, period.”
Collins does not back away from the biblical constraints on scientific findings when he speaks publicly. He earnestly explained the fate of Lot’s wife in detail, in a 2024 Fox News Radio interview:
Lot’s wife was probably just on the very, very edge of the affected zone, and so she was not vaporized but she was simply buried, covered in a layer of super-heated brine and vaporized salt which coated the entire landscape in that area including her. And so that’s a reasonable explanation as to how somebody becomes a pillar of salt. Wrong place, wrong time. She stopped short. Didn’t go with the family. She insisted on turning back or looking back. And I think she stopped in the blast zone and was literally incinerated by coated with salt. So she wound up sort of a little pillar in the landscape.
The Sodom paper’s authors were notified by the journal editors of the decision to retract in advance, and two decided to break protocol and leak that information in angry public posts. One posted a video of Carl Sagan, explaining how absurdly wrong the claims of pseudoscientist Immanuel Velikovsky’s were, while also criticizing scientists who “attempted to suppress Velikovsky’s ideas.” Sagan was right to condemn attempts to ban Velikovsky’s books. But scientists who have exposed how absurdly wrong the Sodom paper is have never asked that it be banned. It’s still there on the Scientific Reports website, stamped “RETRACTED”, with an explanation of the reason.
The post on coauthor George Howard’s Cosmic Tusk blog was a bit more strident, describing the Sodom paper’s critics with artful terms such as “shadowy hatchetmen,” “serial pests,” and “mewling cretins.” Howard had a huge stake in the Sodom comet hypothesis, having been the first member of the Comet Research Group to join the excavation team, in 2014. In 2013, Collins appears to have retroactively defined the mysterious object they found eight years earlier as “melted pottery.” Their first season beginner’s luck had been difficult to repeat until Howard showed up to help after Collins's book had been published. The record suggests that they had no more trouble finding melted pottery after that.
Despite the group’s photoshopped images, patterns of missing and unavailable data, inconsistent and suspicious graphs, introduction of contaminants, and a fraud conviction by the principal founder and director of the Comet Research Group (corresponding author of their most controversial papers) there have still been no public accusations of fraud.
However, I just ran across a newly posted interview of an archaeologist regarding claims of the discovery of Sodom. Responding to a question about the discoverer, he didn’t hold back, calling him a “charlatan.” He went on to tell the interviewer, “He's a scammer. He's not an archaeologist… He made it up. It was totally ludicrous. These are natural geological deposits… he interpreted as the burned-out buildings of Sodom is just absolute nonsense. It's worse than myth and legend. It's just silly, silly stupid stuff that I can't believe anybody would accept but of course people are ignorant and gullible.”
The quotes above are taken from the 2025 video Is Tall el-Hammam Sodom? Steven Collins was responding to the interviewer’s question about one of his rivals, who has discovered a different “Sodom.” Forgive me for suggesting the possibility that Silvia and Collins are not qualified to overturn the well-established understanding of the physical effects of impacts and airbursts without making any attempt to educate themselves on the subject.