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Comet ISON Offers Doomsday Deja Vu
news.discovery.com
Sep 9, 2013 07:33 AM ET // by Ray Villard
We think a wayward comet is the leading culprit in the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But has a comet ever killed anyone? The Tunguska atomic bomb-sized blast in 1908 could have, if the comet had exploded over a city rather than desolate Siberia.
More recently, comet Hale-Bopp can be indirectly blamed for the 1997 mass suicide of 38 members of a New Age religious cult called Heavens Gate. UFO buffs, eager to call any blob of light seen in the heavens a visitor from space, said that a “Saturn-like” alien spaceship was hiding in the tail of the comet.
The Heavens Gate folks thought the UFO was coming to pick them up and take them to a higher plane of existence. Even if I believed that aliens were doing a bus stop at Earth, I wouldn’t think that dying got you to the front of the boarding line — unless Saint Peter is checking you in. What makes this tragedy even more absurd is just the idea that space aliens would “hide” near an object that lots of astronomers on Earth happened to be looking at.
This “spaceship” didn’t exist of course, but was a misinterpretation of a background star in an amateur astronomical photo. The photo was publicized on a conspiracy/UFO radio show. This was bolstered by claims of a so-called remote viewing expert who said he could “visualize” the spacecraft.
