The Impact Record Is Incomplete. The Mythology Was Filling the Gaps All Along.

The conventional method for counting cosmic impact events relies on physical scars - craters, surface deformations, geological signatures left in the ground. Randall’s argument is that this methodology is fundamentally incomplete, because the most abundant category of impact events leaves no lasting impression on the surface at all. Events like Tunguska - atmospheric detonations or ocean impacts - can be as destructive as ground strikes while producing little or nothing that shows up in a crater count. The result is a systematic undercounting of how frequently this planet has been struck, and how severely those strikes have affected the civilizations living through them.

Marine geologists are now confronting this directly. Tsunami deposits are being identified at scales too large to be explained by undersea volcanic activity alone - pointing instead toward objects half a kilometer to a kilometer wide striking the ocean at approximately 20 miles per second. No crater. Just a wave. Randall’s takeaway is methodological - if you want to understand the true frequency of catastrophic impact events in the human timeline, you cannot rely on holes in the ground. You have to turn to the other record. Hundreds of accounts from cultures across the world, once you have the picture of what such an event would look and sound like, read unmistakably as eyewitness descriptions of exactly these phenomena. The mythology was never invention. It was documentation - preserved by the only recording technology available to the people who survived.